Scully slept deeply in Tammy Williams' girlhood bed. She'd taken
her Tylenol-3 before going to sleep, and the dopey, sluggish
feeling insinuated itself into her dreams.
She dreamt she was standing in Skinner's office, trying to
present a complicated scientific argument about alien viruses
while drunk. She slurred her speech and kept dropping her laser
pointer so that it rolled under AD Kersh's chair. Worse, her
extended family had dropped by and a crowd of them sat at the
back of the room, looking horrified.
Scully steadied herself by holding onto her AV cart and did her
best to reconstruct a line of reasoning that had seemed so cogent
the night before. All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep,
but there were reports to give, her reputation to preserve, if
possible. She avoided her mother's eyes, with their look of
scalding hurt.
Aiming her laser pointer at the blurry slide image on Skinner's
wall, she said, "So this . . . this right here, is analogous to
human RNA, and it, you know, transcribes backwards into DNA, but
with three base pairs instead of two." She looked up woozily and
discovered that the slide did not show a strand of alien RNA, but
instead an entire human chromosome. Mortified, she said, "Wait -
- this is the wrong image. Hang on." She pushed the slide
advance button but the carousel rotated backward. A picture of
Bethesda Naval Hospital appeared on the wall.
"Are you telling us an alien virus built *that?*" asked Nickerson
from the Budget Department. The bureaucrats sitting around the
conference table all chuckled. Skinner touched his fingertips to
his forehead and looked pained.
"No -- no, of course not. I've just got the wrong slide on the--
" She tried turning the carousel by hand, but only managed to
pop it off its stand and send it crashing to the floor. Scully
grabbed for it and lost her laser pointer. The little metal
cylinder bounced on the carpet and rolled. //Please don't let it
stop at Kersh's feet . . .// It did.
He scooped it from the carpet and held it out to her. "I believe
this belongs to you, Agent Scully?" His voice was soft as a
bullet clip sliding into place.
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry . . . I'm a little disorganized." Her
words were a slurred mess.
"I can see that," Kersh said.
Her baby nephew cheeped in the corner. Scully looked up at her
parents, seated beneath Skinner's picture of the Attorney
General. Her father wouldn't look at her. As she watched, he
unclipped the orange visitor pass from the jacket of his Naval
uniform and let it drop into his lap. Her mother held his arm,
whether seeking to give or receive comfort Scully wasn't sure.
Margaret Scully's look was like an accusation, but one filled
with sorrow and pity that her daughter had come to this.
Scully moaned and stirred under the covers, becoming dimly aware
of the throbbing of her injured hands. Trying to wake herself
was like dragging her body out of quicksand. At last she opened
her eyes, dry and swollen from the dusty pillow. The room was in
the half-shadow of late afternoon. Her sleepy gaze took in her
jacket and gun, laid over a chair, the black canvas case
containing her laptop that rested on top of the dresser. Symbols
of authority and trustworthiness, assuring her that she was not
the bumbling wretch of her dream. But even as she regained full
consciousness, the bone-deep feeling of shame would not leave
her.
She examined the emotion like a wound. Where had it come from?
Why did it feel so deep? Irv Stuckey's words came back to her:
//"I know you tried and failed to get custody of a child who died
in 1998."//
No. She wasn't going to let him make that her fault. Emily had
gotten the best mothering Scully was capable of, the best care
medical science could offer. She sat up and felt the room wobble
around her. The dust must have irritated her sinuses and caused
drainage to back up into her ear canals. She rooted around in
her purse, looking for the meclizine HCl she sometimes took for
motion sickness. After several dizzy, nauseated seconds of
frustration, she dumped the bag out on the floor. The Chapstick-
shaped container of meclizine bounced out amid a hail of extra
batteries, charge card receipts, and trial-size toiletry items.
The little heap formed a sad sort of autobiography on the rug.
Scully dry-swallowed a motion-sickness tablet and leaned back
against the wall.
Lord, she really did feel drunk -- bad drunk, up at 5 a.m. after
a night of too-sweet wine drunk. A dirty, shameful feeling. She
recalled that she'd contaminated the scene of Kristie's death
last night while trying to aid two phantom children. No doubt
the Troopers who'd searched the woods had some things to say
about her today. Yet humiliating as that was, she'd been acting
in good faith. Looking foolish was not a cause for true shame.
This was something deeper, worse. She remembered Emily's case
worker, Susan Chambliss, explaining the reason behind her custody
recommendation. //"You're a single woman who's never been married
or had a long-term relationship. You're in a high stress, time
intensive, and dangerous occupation . . ."// Chambliss' smile
had been compassionate, but the hard, distant look in her eyes
suggested suspicion, both of Scully's motives and her abilities.
Under that sweetly rejecting gaze, Scully saw herself as
Chambliss must have seen her: a self-obsessed career woman who
wanted to use a vulnerable little girl to fill some gaping
emotional need of her own. Not quite a monster, but a threat.
Inside, Scully was still protesting that it wasn't true. She had
survived her own near-fatal illness and had become stronger for
it. She'd had something to offer Emily that more "suitable"
parents didn't -- empathy from personal experience. She'd
willingly entered that dark tunnel again, relived the experience
"through the eyes of a child," as Chambliss had put it, in order
to give Emily everything she could.
Some self-punishing inner voice whispered, //And look at how it
ended -- a little white coffin in St. Mary's, full of sand.//
Scully got up, nausea or no nausea. She'd be damned if she'd
lie around and let Irv Stuckey's words go to work on her again.
She'd cried most of the way to Edgartown, where she'd forced
herself to calm down so she could shop for essentials like a
normal person.
She'd finally found an open pharmacy and "Oscar's Dry Goods
Store," which was much less quaint than it sounded and
outrageously expensive. Since it was just about the only open
store in town, it could afford to be. One wall was largely
devoted to the sort of items that campers might need at the last
minute, and Scully had picked out a pair of khaki fishing pants
and a navy polo shirt with an embroidered lighthouse and the
words, "Edgartown, MA" on the left breast. The outfit was too
expensive and would make her feel like a tour guide, but it would
have to do.
She pulled her new clothes out of their plastic bag and set
herself to clipping tags and getting dressed. The pant legs were
too long and she had to roll them up. Terrific. The teenage
camp counselor look. Well, maybe Mulder would get off on it --
you never knew.
He claimed to find her sexy when she woke up in the morning,
despite the fact her hair was usually wild as a burning bush
and she tended to sit half-conscious among the tangled sheets
for a while, blinking in the lamplight like a lost subterranean
creature. She had no idea what he saw in her then. Certainly
not something out of "Some Girls Do: Part III."
She slid her feet into her blood-spattered orthopedic sneakers
without having much of an idea where she was going. Out. Away
from the cops who probably thought she was nuts and the Islanders
who knew too much about Mulder, and about her by association.
She attached her holster to the elastic waistband of her pants
and thought about how Mulder must have felt in the days when this
house was his refuge from public opinion. The poor kid
practically couldn't leave his front porch without running into
people who knew everything there was to know about him, or who
thought they did, anyway. Talk about a way to raise a paranoid.
That idea led back to Irv's accusation about the cat, and then
once again to Emily. //He's a hateful little man. He has an
evil mind, and most of what he says isn't true.// But some of it
was true. Even Irv's lies were maybe just a little bit true.
Just enough to hurt.
Scully threw her coat on. Her cell phone had dropped out of her
pocket and lay on the rug under the chair. She looked at it and
hesitated. Mulder was worried about her, and the two of them had
been out of contact for hours. Actually, she'd had the phone
turned off for much of the day. She told herself she ought to
call him, or at least take the phone with her.
Ought to, but wouldn't. Scully wanted to be alone, without
having to answer questions, without having to grit her teeth and
listen to advice. At this point, even, "How did your day go?"
would make her want to scream. She left the phone where it was,
hoping he'd understand. After all, he knew what it was like to
ache inside and to have other people's eyes following him, just
watching and knowing.
By the front door she ran into Davis and Tihkoosue -- almost
literally. Tihkoosue pushed the door in just as she was reaching
for the knob. "Uh -- sorry, Dr. Scully," he said, his dark eyes
widening in surprise. He glanced down at her hands with their
bandages of clean white gauze. "How are you doing?"
Scully stepped back to allow him and Davis into the room. "I'm
fine, thank you," she said, giving him a smile she hoped was
briskly professional. From the expression on his face, she
gathered she looked ghastly. "I wanted to tell you, I appreciate
the work you and your men did last night." Better to bring the
fiasco of the search up first. Tap dancing around the subject
would only be worse.
"Sure -- no problem," Tihkoosue said. "I just wish we'd been
able to be more, you know, productive."
He didn't say what would have been more productive, like
sharpening pencils or alphabetizing his cereal cupboard, but the
conversation ground to a miserable halt. Davis broke the silence
by saying, "We had a break in the case today. Your partner may
have helped us catch our man."
"He did?" Scully asked.
Davis looked like a batter who'd expected a fastball and got
pitched a turnip.
"I mean -- he did. That's good," Scully said.
It was too late. The detective's expression had shifted to the
almost-neutral look of veiled speculation. "That surprises you?"
he asked. She wondered if he'd start an office pool betting on
when the nice young men in the clean white coats would finally
come to get her.
A hot, prickling feeling spread over her face and neck. "No.
Mulder's very good at what he does. It's just --" It was just
that she'd so given herself over to the idea that Kristie's
ordeal, like her own, had been at the hands of something more
than human. "It's just that was fast, that's all. Even for
him."
"Oh," Davis said. She figured he'd put his money on two weeks or
less.
Tihkoosue cleared his throat and said, "So, uh, you're not going
out again, are you, doctor?"
They thought she was too big a dimwit to be allowed out alone.
Scully tried to get mad instead of feeling embarrassed. There
was dignity in anger. She gave them a chilly smile and said,
"I'm sure you have work to do. Don't let me keep you." Her tone
was curt enough, but she was pretty sure every blood vessel in
her face was telegraphing how ridiculous she felt.
She put her hand to her head as she walked out onto the snow-
dusted porch. Tihkoosue's voice was still audible as she
descended the steps. "What was all that about?" he asked.
"I dunno," Davis answered. "At first I thought *he* was nuts,
and then--" His words were muffled as he pulled the door shut.
Scully headed for the field behind the house and the woods
beyond, where there would be no people, no questions, no curious
eyes. As she tromped over the frozen grass, she passed garden
furnishings she'd missed the night before: bare rose trellises; a
bench-swing; a low, thorny thicket that was probably a descendant
of the raspberry bushes Mulder had gotten into as a child.
If Leigh's version of events was truer than Irv's, Mulder's
childhood had been fairly happy until his family all but
disintegrated when he was twelve. By then he'd have been old
enough to understand the extent of his loss, but too young to
have any power to change things. She told herself she pitied
him.
But as she left the garden for the wide-open field, she began to
realize that pity was not what she was feeling at all. Out under
the inverted blue bowl of a winter sky, no ready help within
shouting distance, she was envious of Fox Mulder. She envied him
the space he'd always had around him -- physical space to
explore, his adventurous spirit unhindered by his would-be
protectors, and the emotional space he'd succeeded in setting up
between himself and the expectations of others. If Mulder wanted
to spend Christmas Day getting drunk and watching Three Stooges
movies, no one was going to stop him. She was sure he never,
ever had nightmares about being embarrassed in front of his boss.
By contrast, Scully's sense of self had been formed by a trinity
of great institutions: her family, the Catholic Church, and the
U.S. Navy. She was still half-convinced they owned proprietary
rights to her self-respect, and if she ever broke ranks she would
become someone awful. Actually, upon occasion she really had
become someone awful, as when she'd spent more than a year trying
to live down to Daniel Waterston's expectations. It was
difficult -- the emotional equivalent of foot-binding -- but
she'd almost succeeded. Most of her love affairs had been like
that, like spending so many months wearing too-tight shoes,
hoping she'd shrink into them. Really, she only felt whole and
sane when she was alone.
She met no one as she followed the shallow trough of a bike path
that skirted the edge of the woods. Leigh had told her it was
the longer, less difficult way to reach the little graveyard
Mulder had found her in last night. In her current mood, the
isolation of the clearing with its leaning headstones was what
she wanted.
She nearly passed the graveyard before she noticed it. The crime
scene tape had been taken down, depriving her of a landmark.
What caught her eye was the tallest of the headstones, a flat,
narrow rectangle of slate that leaned sideways as if the earth
had partially swallowed it. Once she knew where to look, the
other headstones, mostly broken, became distinguishable from the
weeds and juniper canes around them.
Last night's snow had obliterated all signs of the officers who'd
tracked back and forth between the crime scene and the road. If
she hadn't known better, she'd have assumed she was the first
visitor in a hundred years. As she walked over to the tall
headstone, the only sounds were her feet crunching the ice-coated
snow and the soft "pee-whit" of a nuthatch.
Snow covered the top of the stone and adhered to its face, but
Scully resisted the temptation to brush it off. Somehow, the
idea of imposing her sense of order on the place felt
disrespectful. She crouched down and found the worn inscription
was still readable. Across the top the name "Cartwright" was
carved in heavy block letters. An entire family was listed
below, both with and without dates: Ezra, 1785; Wife, 1797;
Thomas; John, 1772; Serena, 1774; Mary, 1780; and an eroded word
at the bottom that might simply have been "child."
How degrading, she thought, to spend eternity labeled simply as
"Wife," -- or "child," for that matter. Worse, Mrs. Cartwright
had survived her husband by twelve years. Had Ezra and his
children waited that long for a tombstone, or was it carved
sometime beforehand, already bearing the word "Wife" and lacking
only a date? How had Mrs. Cartwright felt while looking at her
one-word epitaph, knowing that her identity would melt away with
her flesh? Poor "child" had neither a name nor a date. The
thought of that little spirit enduring centuries of well-meaning
prayers essentially addressed to "occupant" was dismally lonely.
Scully remembered the gray-eyed child from the night before, her
hair tangled, her clothes soaked in blood. //"Stay,"// she'd
said. And Scully had wanted to stay. After all, they had so
much in common. One was exiled to the world of anonymous souls
by fate, the other by choice.
Susan Chambliss' words came back to her: //"You're a single woman
who's never been married or had a long-term relationship . . ."//
Scully bent and pressed her fingertips into the snow, seeking the
shock of ice crystals against her skin, an assurance she was
still part of this world.
//Emily . . .// Scully had pushed away the people who wanted to
love her, choosing to seek independence and the illusion of self-
sufficiency instead. And when she'd finally met someone she
was willing to give up that freedom for, she'd been found
unworthy. What if she *had* loved Emily in a self-serving,
shortsighted way? Chambliss had called her medical decisions
into question. Perhaps she'd pursued treatment too aggressively,
or not aggressively enough.
Scully shied from her worst fear as from meeting a corpse in the
dark, but now it confronted her. What if she'd made some weak,
selfish decision that caused Emily to die?
//"It's always a wild night in winter, and some say you can hear
the voices of those dead babies crying in the wind,"// Irv had
said.
The iodine smell of the San Diego PICU came back to her. In her
mind, she heard the rushing sound of the self-contained air
recirculation system that kept the quarantine area under negative
pressure. Emily lay in the room's only bed, a child unconscious
and bathed in sweat, but solid and warm and real.
Now, gone.
Scully repeated the words she'd whispered behind her paper mask,
"I'm so sorry."
//"I know you tried and failed to get custody of a child who died
in 1998. . . . "//
The feel of Emily's cheek beneath her fingers, so soft, but hot
as an oven door, was the most real thing she could recall. It
felt more real than this snow-covered graveyard, more real than
the weight of her body pressing down upon the balls of her feet.
"Forgive me, Emily."
//"Last night when you were out ruining your real clothes, did
you hear her calling you?"//
The shame of her nightmare pierced her. It was as if Susan
Chambliss' unspoken accusation had been transformed into a
scarlet letter and sewn onto Scully's clothing. The letter would
be "M" for murderer. God knew she'd never meant to hurt her
little daughter, biological, adopted, or both. She'd never meant
to hurt her parents by being difficult and distant. Her
decisions had all seemed inevitable at the time. Maybe that was
every damned soul's excuse as it stood trembling before the gates
of Hell.
In a voice hoarse from tears and fatigue, she prayed, "Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner . . ."
She resisted the urge to move, to find somewhere less grim in
which to pray. Everything considered, it felt only fitting that
she seek solace in the same environment she'd chosen to spend her
career in: alone among the dead.
*****
her Tylenol-3 before going to sleep, and the dopey, sluggish
feeling insinuated itself into her dreams.
She dreamt she was standing in Skinner's office, trying to
present a complicated scientific argument about alien viruses
while drunk. She slurred her speech and kept dropping her laser
pointer so that it rolled under AD Kersh's chair. Worse, her
extended family had dropped by and a crowd of them sat at the
back of the room, looking horrified.
Scully steadied herself by holding onto her AV cart and did her
best to reconstruct a line of reasoning that had seemed so cogent
the night before. All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep,
but there were reports to give, her reputation to preserve, if
possible. She avoided her mother's eyes, with their look of
scalding hurt.
Aiming her laser pointer at the blurry slide image on Skinner's
wall, she said, "So this . . . this right here, is analogous to
human RNA, and it, you know, transcribes backwards into DNA, but
with three base pairs instead of two." She looked up woozily and
discovered that the slide did not show a strand of alien RNA, but
instead an entire human chromosome. Mortified, she said, "Wait -
- this is the wrong image. Hang on." She pushed the slide
advance button but the carousel rotated backward. A picture of
Bethesda Naval Hospital appeared on the wall.
"Are you telling us an alien virus built *that?*" asked Nickerson
from the Budget Department. The bureaucrats sitting around the
conference table all chuckled. Skinner touched his fingertips to
his forehead and looked pained.
"No -- no, of course not. I've just got the wrong slide on the--
" She tried turning the carousel by hand, but only managed to
pop it off its stand and send it crashing to the floor. Scully
grabbed for it and lost her laser pointer. The little metal
cylinder bounced on the carpet and rolled. //Please don't let it
stop at Kersh's feet . . .// It did.
He scooped it from the carpet and held it out to her. "I believe
this belongs to you, Agent Scully?" His voice was soft as a
bullet clip sliding into place.
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry . . . I'm a little disorganized." Her
words were a slurred mess.
"I can see that," Kersh said.
Her baby nephew cheeped in the corner. Scully looked up at her
parents, seated beneath Skinner's picture of the Attorney
General. Her father wouldn't look at her. As she watched, he
unclipped the orange visitor pass from the jacket of his Naval
uniform and let it drop into his lap. Her mother held his arm,
whether seeking to give or receive comfort Scully wasn't sure.
Margaret Scully's look was like an accusation, but one filled
with sorrow and pity that her daughter had come to this.
Scully moaned and stirred under the covers, becoming dimly aware
of the throbbing of her injured hands. Trying to wake herself
was like dragging her body out of quicksand. At last she opened
her eyes, dry and swollen from the dusty pillow. The room was in
the half-shadow of late afternoon. Her sleepy gaze took in her
jacket and gun, laid over a chair, the black canvas case
containing her laptop that rested on top of the dresser. Symbols
of authority and trustworthiness, assuring her that she was not
the bumbling wretch of her dream. But even as she regained full
consciousness, the bone-deep feeling of shame would not leave
her.
She examined the emotion like a wound. Where had it come from?
Why did it feel so deep? Irv Stuckey's words came back to her:
//"I know you tried and failed to get custody of a child who died
in 1998."//
No. She wasn't going to let him make that her fault. Emily had
gotten the best mothering Scully was capable of, the best care
medical science could offer. She sat up and felt the room wobble
around her. The dust must have irritated her sinuses and caused
drainage to back up into her ear canals. She rooted around in
her purse, looking for the meclizine HCl she sometimes took for
motion sickness. After several dizzy, nauseated seconds of
frustration, she dumped the bag out on the floor. The Chapstick-
shaped container of meclizine bounced out amid a hail of extra
batteries, charge card receipts, and trial-size toiletry items.
The little heap formed a sad sort of autobiography on the rug.
Scully dry-swallowed a motion-sickness tablet and leaned back
against the wall.
Lord, she really did feel drunk -- bad drunk, up at 5 a.m. after
a night of too-sweet wine drunk. A dirty, shameful feeling. She
recalled that she'd contaminated the scene of Kristie's death
last night while trying to aid two phantom children. No doubt
the Troopers who'd searched the woods had some things to say
about her today. Yet humiliating as that was, she'd been acting
in good faith. Looking foolish was not a cause for true shame.
This was something deeper, worse. She remembered Emily's case
worker, Susan Chambliss, explaining the reason behind her custody
recommendation. //"You're a single woman who's never been married
or had a long-term relationship. You're in a high stress, time
intensive, and dangerous occupation . . ."// Chambliss' smile
had been compassionate, but the hard, distant look in her eyes
suggested suspicion, both of Scully's motives and her abilities.
Under that sweetly rejecting gaze, Scully saw herself as
Chambliss must have seen her: a self-obsessed career woman who
wanted to use a vulnerable little girl to fill some gaping
emotional need of her own. Not quite a monster, but a threat.
Inside, Scully was still protesting that it wasn't true. She had
survived her own near-fatal illness and had become stronger for
it. She'd had something to offer Emily that more "suitable"
parents didn't -- empathy from personal experience. She'd
willingly entered that dark tunnel again, relived the experience
"through the eyes of a child," as Chambliss had put it, in order
to give Emily everything she could.
Some self-punishing inner voice whispered, //And look at how it
ended -- a little white coffin in St. Mary's, full of sand.//
Scully got up, nausea or no nausea. She'd be damned if she'd
lie around and let Irv Stuckey's words go to work on her again.
She'd cried most of the way to Edgartown, where she'd forced
herself to calm down so she could shop for essentials like a
normal person.
She'd finally found an open pharmacy and "Oscar's Dry Goods
Store," which was much less quaint than it sounded and
outrageously expensive. Since it was just about the only open
store in town, it could afford to be. One wall was largely
devoted to the sort of items that campers might need at the last
minute, and Scully had picked out a pair of khaki fishing pants
and a navy polo shirt with an embroidered lighthouse and the
words, "Edgartown, MA" on the left breast. The outfit was too
expensive and would make her feel like a tour guide, but it would
have to do.
She pulled her new clothes out of their plastic bag and set
herself to clipping tags and getting dressed. The pant legs were
too long and she had to roll them up. Terrific. The teenage
camp counselor look. Well, maybe Mulder would get off on it --
you never knew.
He claimed to find her sexy when she woke up in the morning,
despite the fact her hair was usually wild as a burning bush
and she tended to sit half-conscious among the tangled sheets
for a while, blinking in the lamplight like a lost subterranean
creature. She had no idea what he saw in her then. Certainly
not something out of "Some Girls Do: Part III."
She slid her feet into her blood-spattered orthopedic sneakers
without having much of an idea where she was going. Out. Away
from the cops who probably thought she was nuts and the Islanders
who knew too much about Mulder, and about her by association.
She attached her holster to the elastic waistband of her pants
and thought about how Mulder must have felt in the days when this
house was his refuge from public opinion. The poor kid
practically couldn't leave his front porch without running into
people who knew everything there was to know about him, or who
thought they did, anyway. Talk about a way to raise a paranoid.
That idea led back to Irv's accusation about the cat, and then
once again to Emily. //He's a hateful little man. He has an
evil mind, and most of what he says isn't true.// But some of it
was true. Even Irv's lies were maybe just a little bit true.
Just enough to hurt.
Scully threw her coat on. Her cell phone had dropped out of her
pocket and lay on the rug under the chair. She looked at it and
hesitated. Mulder was worried about her, and the two of them had
been out of contact for hours. Actually, she'd had the phone
turned off for much of the day. She told herself she ought to
call him, or at least take the phone with her.
Ought to, but wouldn't. Scully wanted to be alone, without
having to answer questions, without having to grit her teeth and
listen to advice. At this point, even, "How did your day go?"
would make her want to scream. She left the phone where it was,
hoping he'd understand. After all, he knew what it was like to
ache inside and to have other people's eyes following him, just
watching and knowing.
By the front door she ran into Davis and Tihkoosue -- almost
literally. Tihkoosue pushed the door in just as she was reaching
for the knob. "Uh -- sorry, Dr. Scully," he said, his dark eyes
widening in surprise. He glanced down at her hands with their
bandages of clean white gauze. "How are you doing?"
Scully stepped back to allow him and Davis into the room. "I'm
fine, thank you," she said, giving him a smile she hoped was
briskly professional. From the expression on his face, she
gathered she looked ghastly. "I wanted to tell you, I appreciate
the work you and your men did last night." Better to bring the
fiasco of the search up first. Tap dancing around the subject
would only be worse.
"Sure -- no problem," Tihkoosue said. "I just wish we'd been
able to be more, you know, productive."
He didn't say what would have been more productive, like
sharpening pencils or alphabetizing his cereal cupboard, but the
conversation ground to a miserable halt. Davis broke the silence
by saying, "We had a break in the case today. Your partner may
have helped us catch our man."
"He did?" Scully asked.
Davis looked like a batter who'd expected a fastball and got
pitched a turnip.
"I mean -- he did. That's good," Scully said.
It was too late. The detective's expression had shifted to the
almost-neutral look of veiled speculation. "That surprises you?"
he asked. She wondered if he'd start an office pool betting on
when the nice young men in the clean white coats would finally
come to get her.
A hot, prickling feeling spread over her face and neck. "No.
Mulder's very good at what he does. It's just --" It was just
that she'd so given herself over to the idea that Kristie's
ordeal, like her own, had been at the hands of something more
than human. "It's just that was fast, that's all. Even for
him."
"Oh," Davis said. She figured he'd put his money on two weeks or
less.
Tihkoosue cleared his throat and said, "So, uh, you're not going
out again, are you, doctor?"
They thought she was too big a dimwit to be allowed out alone.
Scully tried to get mad instead of feeling embarrassed. There
was dignity in anger. She gave them a chilly smile and said,
"I'm sure you have work to do. Don't let me keep you." Her tone
was curt enough, but she was pretty sure every blood vessel in
her face was telegraphing how ridiculous she felt.
She put her hand to her head as she walked out onto the snow-
dusted porch. Tihkoosue's voice was still audible as she
descended the steps. "What was all that about?" he asked.
"I dunno," Davis answered. "At first I thought *he* was nuts,
and then--" His words were muffled as he pulled the door shut.
Scully headed for the field behind the house and the woods
beyond, where there would be no people, no questions, no curious
eyes. As she tromped over the frozen grass, she passed garden
furnishings she'd missed the night before: bare rose trellises; a
bench-swing; a low, thorny thicket that was probably a descendant
of the raspberry bushes Mulder had gotten into as a child.
If Leigh's version of events was truer than Irv's, Mulder's
childhood had been fairly happy until his family all but
disintegrated when he was twelve. By then he'd have been old
enough to understand the extent of his loss, but too young to
have any power to change things. She told herself she pitied
him.
But as she left the garden for the wide-open field, she began to
realize that pity was not what she was feeling at all. Out under
the inverted blue bowl of a winter sky, no ready help within
shouting distance, she was envious of Fox Mulder. She envied him
the space he'd always had around him -- physical space to
explore, his adventurous spirit unhindered by his would-be
protectors, and the emotional space he'd succeeded in setting up
between himself and the expectations of others. If Mulder wanted
to spend Christmas Day getting drunk and watching Three Stooges
movies, no one was going to stop him. She was sure he never,
ever had nightmares about being embarrassed in front of his boss.
By contrast, Scully's sense of self had been formed by a trinity
of great institutions: her family, the Catholic Church, and the
U.S. Navy. She was still half-convinced they owned proprietary
rights to her self-respect, and if she ever broke ranks she would
become someone awful. Actually, upon occasion she really had
become someone awful, as when she'd spent more than a year trying
to live down to Daniel Waterston's expectations. It was
difficult -- the emotional equivalent of foot-binding -- but
she'd almost succeeded. Most of her love affairs had been like
that, like spending so many months wearing too-tight shoes,
hoping she'd shrink into them. Really, she only felt whole and
sane when she was alone.
She met no one as she followed the shallow trough of a bike path
that skirted the edge of the woods. Leigh had told her it was
the longer, less difficult way to reach the little graveyard
Mulder had found her in last night. In her current mood, the
isolation of the clearing with its leaning headstones was what
she wanted.
She nearly passed the graveyard before she noticed it. The crime
scene tape had been taken down, depriving her of a landmark.
What caught her eye was the tallest of the headstones, a flat,
narrow rectangle of slate that leaned sideways as if the earth
had partially swallowed it. Once she knew where to look, the
other headstones, mostly broken, became distinguishable from the
weeds and juniper canes around them.
Last night's snow had obliterated all signs of the officers who'd
tracked back and forth between the crime scene and the road. If
she hadn't known better, she'd have assumed she was the first
visitor in a hundred years. As she walked over to the tall
headstone, the only sounds were her feet crunching the ice-coated
snow and the soft "pee-whit" of a nuthatch.
Snow covered the top of the stone and adhered to its face, but
Scully resisted the temptation to brush it off. Somehow, the
idea of imposing her sense of order on the place felt
disrespectful. She crouched down and found the worn inscription
was still readable. Across the top the name "Cartwright" was
carved in heavy block letters. An entire family was listed
below, both with and without dates: Ezra, 1785; Wife, 1797;
Thomas; John, 1772; Serena, 1774; Mary, 1780; and an eroded word
at the bottom that might simply have been "child."
How degrading, she thought, to spend eternity labeled simply as
"Wife," -- or "child," for that matter. Worse, Mrs. Cartwright
had survived her husband by twelve years. Had Ezra and his
children waited that long for a tombstone, or was it carved
sometime beforehand, already bearing the word "Wife" and lacking
only a date? How had Mrs. Cartwright felt while looking at her
one-word epitaph, knowing that her identity would melt away with
her flesh? Poor "child" had neither a name nor a date. The
thought of that little spirit enduring centuries of well-meaning
prayers essentially addressed to "occupant" was dismally lonely.
Scully remembered the gray-eyed child from the night before, her
hair tangled, her clothes soaked in blood. //"Stay,"// she'd
said. And Scully had wanted to stay. After all, they had so
much in common. One was exiled to the world of anonymous souls
by fate, the other by choice.
Susan Chambliss' words came back to her: //"You're a single woman
who's never been married or had a long-term relationship . . ."//
Scully bent and pressed her fingertips into the snow, seeking the
shock of ice crystals against her skin, an assurance she was
still part of this world.
//Emily . . .// Scully had pushed away the people who wanted to
love her, choosing to seek independence and the illusion of self-
sufficiency instead. And when she'd finally met someone she
was willing to give up that freedom for, she'd been found
unworthy. What if she *had* loved Emily in a self-serving,
shortsighted way? Chambliss had called her medical decisions
into question. Perhaps she'd pursued treatment too aggressively,
or not aggressively enough.
Scully shied from her worst fear as from meeting a corpse in the
dark, but now it confronted her. What if she'd made some weak,
selfish decision that caused Emily to die?
//"It's always a wild night in winter, and some say you can hear
the voices of those dead babies crying in the wind,"// Irv had
said.
The iodine smell of the San Diego PICU came back to her. In her
mind, she heard the rushing sound of the self-contained air
recirculation system that kept the quarantine area under negative
pressure. Emily lay in the room's only bed, a child unconscious
and bathed in sweat, but solid and warm and real.
Now, gone.
Scully repeated the words she'd whispered behind her paper mask,
"I'm so sorry."
//"I know you tried and failed to get custody of a child who died
in 1998. . . . "//
The feel of Emily's cheek beneath her fingers, so soft, but hot
as an oven door, was the most real thing she could recall. It
felt more real than this snow-covered graveyard, more real than
the weight of her body pressing down upon the balls of her feet.
"Forgive me, Emily."
//"Last night when you were out ruining your real clothes, did
you hear her calling you?"//
The shame of her nightmare pierced her. It was as if Susan
Chambliss' unspoken accusation had been transformed into a
scarlet letter and sewn onto Scully's clothing. The letter would
be "M" for murderer. God knew she'd never meant to hurt her
little daughter, biological, adopted, or both. She'd never meant
to hurt her parents by being difficult and distant. Her
decisions had all seemed inevitable at the time. Maybe that was
every damned soul's excuse as it stood trembling before the gates
of Hell.
In a voice hoarse from tears and fatigue, she prayed, "Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner . . ."
She resisted the urge to move, to find somewhere less grim in
which to pray. Everything considered, it felt only fitting that
she seek solace in the same environment she'd chosen to spend her
career in: alone among the dead.
*****