Chorus (Standing) by suspect affiliations - - - - - - - For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given. - - - - - - - My phone rings as we pull up to the dock. Charlie's flight has been delayed -- bad weather in Wisconsin, a snowstorm over the Upper Midwest. He's not sure whether to camp out at the airport or go back to the conference. Go back, I tell him. We're all already here. Who knows when the flights will start up again. Better not to waste your time. My little brother sighs into a pay phone from a concourse in Madison and relents. "My itinerant children," my mother says when I tell her the news, sitting next to me in the car with pursed lips and a forward stare. Her itinerant children are usually a point of pride (we are so independent, we Scullys), but now if ever we should be together and instead Bill is sailing somewhere around Yemen, Melissa is communing with cosmic vibrations out West, and Charlie, even Charlie, has all the vagaries of nature in the wintertime working against him, an artifact of bad timing that he should even be in Wisconsin right now. Michael and Megan, the children of my father's younger brother James, are visible on the dock with their families. Skip, the old dockmaster who became, in these recent years, my father's close friend, is holding an urn; what the urn holds is all that remains of a life once so vibrant, whose end is yet unreal. "Nothing lasts forever, Starbuck, nothing in this world." The Captain used to tell me that, as far back as I can remember. "The only eternal things are God and the sea." "Is that why you go to the sea? Because it's eternal, like God, but you can touch it?" I was seven years old when I asked him that question and his face had lit up, cracked into a smile, delighted by my youthful theology. "Yes, I think that's exactly right," my father had replied, hoisting me onto his lap in our kitchen in Pearl Harbor. "The sea is the closest thing to God we can touch here on Earth." Eventually I went to college, became a scientist, learned that one day the sun will explode and envelop the Earth and even the eternal sea will cease to exist. Maybe that's why I stopped believing in God. Michael's young sons are jostling each other but the adults are a solemn tableau in the light drizzle, waiting only for my mother and me now. I turn off the car and my chin drops, just for a moment, and then we open the doors and step onto the pavement, towards the ocean and impossible goodbyes, with shoulders back and heads held high. - - - - - - - She didn't get Mulder's message until nearly an hour after he left it; the stores had been a crush of noise and people and amidst the holiday melee she hadn't noticed her phone ring, not until she got to the car and deposited a dozen nicely-wrapped packages into the backseat, ready for hand-delivery tomorrow morning to family members. The heat was on full-blast, attempting to ward off the chill that can't help but set into a car in the winter. She sat for a long moment of uncertainty, hating that she had nothing better to do this Christmas Eve but once again follow her impossible partner, wanting to shed so many obligations and ignore this holiday and her family and her job and her life, if only briefly. She shivered and stabbed at the radio. The classical station was faint beneath the whoosh of warm air from the vents and she turned it up: Handel's "Messiah", the Hallelujah chorus. Her grandmother had taught her to stand to this at the San Francisco Symphony on Christmas Eve, 1968. Thirty years ago today, in a box with Margaret Scully and Bill and Missy (so hard to control, those two) and Charlie, her little brother only two years old but fascinated by all the sounds, so much brilliant noise. The memory of a five-year-old Melissa was particularly acute now, and suddenly even the most ridiculous of Mulder's adventures seemed more bearable than facing her family under a Christmas tree full of children, and none of them hers. - - - - - - - Routines between us are different now. For so many years, we passed time in the car in comfortable silence or else with Mulder holding forth, expounding on this or that piece of absurdity in his velvet voice, hypnotizing me as surely as the miles melted away beneath us. Now, though, Mulder does not want to speak. He lives life in an interrogative mood, and I am the only person there to ask. His queries are random, though often scientific: what's the difference between special and general relativity? What are the different stages of a standard immune response to a virus? What is an amino acid, anyway? Twenty minutes later I am explaining tertiary and quaternary structure, protein folding, dry and scientific where Mulder's lunatic storytelling had been lush and persuasive. I stop talking suddenly, and his next question does not even need to be uttered. "I must be boring you," I say finally, but he shakes his head, eyes not leaving the road. "Not at all." He cuts his gaze toward me and offers a bare hint of a smile. "You're a good professor." I snort but can't help smiling myself. "My mother's great unrealized dream for me. Well, after she figured out I had zero musical ability whatsoever." "Teaching at Quantico didn't satisfy her?" I turn towards Mulder, my bent paranoiac love, and grin in spite of my words. "It was hardly as respectable as what she grew up with, so, no, I don't think it did." My mother had been happy when I went back to teaching, after William was born; it was, at the very least, a step towards giving my son a semblance of the childhood she had known, academic and genteel, played out on quads and in faculty clubs. "Maybe it's just because you forgot to join the priesthood first." I laugh out loud, or I almost do, an airy chuffing sound that is as carefree as either of us has been in months. Mulder smiles at the noise and I entwine my fingers in his, our hands together atop the gearshift. "You would like the Jesuits," I say. "They're rabble-rousers. The whole order even got excommunicated once." "My kinda guys." Deadpan, as ever. "Mmm." I tilt my head back, lean it against the window, stare out at the expanse of sunlit Utah, another state I'm sure I'll grow to loathe within the next seventy-two hours. "Charlie got all her talent, but I guess I got my grandma's taste for rebels." Mulder turns his hand into mine and squeezes, gently, and doesn't let go. - - - - - - - Bill was silent on the way back from the Sims', but his resentment was audible and she thought she could discern its tone. Why would Missy contact you?, he was thinking. Damnit, Dana, can't you let me have my first goddamn child without making this trip all about you? A question that has haunted him for a lifetime: why does Dana always have to be the special one? If Missy were to come from beyond the grave to reach out to a family member she would have always guessed it would be Bill, the two of them womb-mates and thick as thieves for so many years, troublesome and rule-breaking where their two younger siblings were diligent and compliant. Bill was the only obedient one left in the family now but his discipline has come with a price, made him rigid and self-righteous where he was once rebellious and real. Missy could have already tried communicating with her twin; Dana doubted she would get through to him now. Bill's anger towards her was old news anyway, and born of a simple calculus. Dana had always been his little sister but Missy was his partner in a secret language, a secret world, and he will never, ever forgive Dana her death. If a Scully had to be shot that day, in that apartment, Bill would prefer it had been the one Krycek had been aiming for. She was trapped in a car with a big brother who wished she were dead, in a city where the past lay in wait, and if she owed her family anything it was to put up with it for just a few days more. She turned on the radio, desperate for distraction, and because it was almost Christmas Handel's "Messiah" filled the car at a low volume. Moments passed in the music. "We got a package from Charlie," Bill said, finally; he, too, can't help but think of their younger brother at this song. "How's he doing?" She already knew -- she talked to Charlie two days ago -- but asking was a way to make Bill feel better. "Pretty good, I guess. Doing a big concert at the cathedral on Christmas Day with some famous guy, I forget his name." Wynton Marsalis, she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth closed and they arrived back on the base. She was relieved to be out of the city proper, that risky place, and resolved not to bring up Melissa again during this holiday season. - - - - - - - It occurs me to, as I follow this Russian nobody into his tattoo shop, that I am not far from where we used to visit Uncle Jimmy, and in a moment of neural synchronicity I realize that fifty years ago this neighborhood must have been predominantly Irish, that a young Ahab plied these very streets with newspapers and penny savers to help support his ailing mother and his younger brother, dreaming of the day he might escape to the boundless ocean. My father's young life had been difficult, and he never liked to talk about it much. What I knew about it came more from Uncle Jimmy, gregarious where his older brother was reserved, but when I was a teenager those stories eventually stopped too; Sergeant James Scully, one of Philly's finest boys in blue, felled by the old Irish curse that had so damaged my grandmother before I was even born. Too much whiskey, too little liver, and I never got to learn, as an adult, where my father really came from. James's widow is in a nursing home not far from here, I remember. It has been ages since I've seen Aunt Ginny, or even Michael and Megan. I recall the feel of that fading rose petal between my fingertips and think, if tomorrow I die of cancer, what will my family remember of me? Most of the tattoos are uninteresting, biker pap, but then one draws my eye: a snake eating its own tail, consumed by its own self-destruction. I can't help but feel a certain kinship. The attractive man who was earlier arguing with a comrade says something to me and I snap back into myself; who is this Dana Scully who would consider getting inked? The ghost of Ahab is at my back in the working-class Philadelphia that was, once upon a time, the only world he inhabited, and I realize too late that the attractive man is flirting with me. I'm visiting my aunt in the neighborhood, I tell him, because I really should. Bill would do it if he were in town, the only dutiful child left, and maybe Aunt Ginny can tell me what dying feels like. Snow starts to fall and I type up a report for the Philadelphia office, change my flight to tomorrow afternoon so that I can go to the nursing home in the morning. The phone rings in the room because Mulder knew I wouldn't answer his call on my cell, and I hate him for circumventing the space I need. Fuck it, I decide, as he tells me vaguely that he's someplace important -- probably Graceland or something equally stupid but he can't even bear to reveal that much. First there was Ahab and now there is Mulder, these men that I adore, both of them expecting too much and offering too little. Ed Jerse's card sits on my laptop, an easy escape from it all, and I give him a call. - - - - - - - We are in Eastern Colorado, and Mulder is interrogating me about Newtonian mechanics. Centripetal force provoked this latest inquisition, propelling sunglasses along the dashboard and piquing Mulder's curiosity, and I am racking my brain to recall equations I haven't used since my freshman year of college. I tell him so -- "Mulder, I haven't thought of this stuff since I was at Berkeley" -- and it gives him pause, or at least redirection. "Why did you transfer from there, anyway?" I shrug, avoiding his gaze; I am driving now so it is easy enough to do, but he keeps waiting for an answer. "It was... a bad year," I say finally, tactfully. "Family stuff. I got deflowered and then dumped. Charlie left." I shrug again and there is a long silence. Mulder is, I am sure, preoccupied with the "deflowered" part of that revelation. "Melissa and Bill were both out East anyway," I add. "After my grandma died, even my mom was ready to leave the Bay Area behind." Mulder shakes his head. "I still can't picture your mom growing up in San Francisco." "Well, as my grandmother always liked to point out, it was a fine city of nice Irish Catholics before all the hippies showed up." By the time we finally lived near her, in the last year of her life, she couldn't contain her bitterness at all the changes; she had been widowed, deserted by her children -- a diaspora to Seattle and Colorado and Hawaii and LA and wherever my mom happened to be -- and left behind, too, by the only city she'd ever called home. My father had, in deference to his wife, requested a transfer to Alameda for years so we could be near her, and the Navy complied eventually, after Japan and Annapolis, Hawaii and Norfolk and San Diego and Guam. By the time we were separated by only the Bay Bridge Bill was already at the Naval Academy and Missy had followed him (of course) to the Maryland Institute College of Art and for my grandmother, beset by Alzheimer's and abandonment, it was too little, too late. My mother decided to blame the Navy for it all, as though her proximity could have prevented amyloid plaques and the relentless press of time. In my memory it is the angriest I ever knew her; Ahab wanted desperately for Charlie to join the Navy Brass but my mother shouted that she wouldn't lose another son to the service and brought home applications to conservatory programs, the sorts of schools her own mother had attended. Charlie packed a suitcase and his trumpet and bought a train ticket, and for the next several years nobody could say the word "jazz" without my mom tearing up. I had been flirting with activism then, anti-nuclear proliferation sorts of things. It bothered my father righteously but once Charlie was gone I couldn't get the same joy out of pissing off my parents, and Maryland just seemed like a place where things could go back to normal. A bad year, indeed. "I can drive, if you need a break," Mulder offers, more from boredom than generosity, I know. "I'm fine," I say, and I mean it. Beneath my dyed-brown hair and sunglasses I feel like myself on this road, racking up miles like my whole family did when I was young. There is something exhilarating and free about this perpetual motion machine that we both inhabit, and as long as I focus on going forward I don't have to contemplate everything that we've left behind. - - - - - - - OCT 7 - 94 It was a quiet, alphanumeric fuck-you, and she understood it readily. Bill didn't even need to watch her reaction to be sure she had gotten the message. She should have known; her mother had probably surmised it, would have been much more worried for those few months if she hadn't. Missy could cut off ties with everyone but Bill, disappear to all the family except the brother that was older than she by four minutes. Bill had probably told her that Dana was missing. Bill had probably talked her into going back when Dana returned. The DNA tests couldn't lie and so she began to rattle off other possibilities, ways to reconcile those damn PCRs, but Bill doesn't believe her for a second and she knew that Melissa would never have lied to him, either. Her brother could be a total jerk but could also sometimes be right, and this time he was both. - - - - - - - We are in South Dakota when Mulder asks for the impossible. It has been over two years on the road now, twenty-seven months of cheap motels and hair dye and covert communications with Doggett and Reyes and Skinner. They tell us that colonization seems to have stalled, although they can't say why, but Mulder is still wanted by the FBI; we have laid bare between us all that we can afford and I know Mulder wonders when I will tire of this life, when I will take John up on his offer -- a house from an old friend of his, a survivalist, out in rural Virginia. They are reasonably sure, though not absolutely certain, that Mulder would be safe there, and then we could finally stop, press pause on the madness that is our constant motion. I refuse to bury Mulder again, and reasonably sure is not enough for me. He gives no indication of his thoughts, the days indistinct from all those before them, and I am sitting on the bed in my satin pajamas, cuffs and collar growing frayed. He is standing, in boxers and a gray t-shirt, hands on his hips, lips pursed and unable to look me in the eye. Scully, he says, and I continue to rub lotion into my dry knuckles. Scully, he says, I think we should try to have another kid. I stop and turn, staring at him, and he says nothing else but meets my gaze. My mouth opens and then closes, unable to form words. There is no way I can say no; William was Mulder's son and I gave him up, a decision he never got to make, and somehow Mulder has found a way to forgive me or at least to move forward but if I deny him now we might never recover. There is also no way I can say yes; a child to Mulder means showing up and making Mr. Potato Head faces, cutting me with harsh truths, disappearing for wild adventures and leaving me in a hospital waiting room to make the difficult decisions and absorb the emotional fallout, alone. If we settled in the house in Virginia we might have to have this discussion, but I thought if we kept running we could avoid it forever. He keeps looking at me, so goddamn expectant, and I can't say anything at all and so instead I just burst into tears, unable to process the magnitude of what he has demanded. Mulder's reaction is delayed but eventually concern floods his gaze and he sits on the bed and covers my lotion-slick hand with his own. Scully, he says, his voice gravel. Scully, can we talk about this? I can't stop crying, can't stop shaking; all I want is for him to comfort me, to take back his words, but he refuses and we fall asleep on separate sides of the bed, not touching for the first time in ages. When we wake up the next morning, we just keep driving. - - - - - - - If opening presents was torturous then the drive to the cathedral was worse still, without the distraction of shiny packages to at least make it bearable. Scully sat in the back, with her mother; she would have preferred to take her rental car, to escape quickly after Mass to the police station, but Maggie had declared that they would all ride together and it didn't seem worth it to fight. Tara, always conscientious, began to sing -- "Silent Night" -- and Maggie and Bill joined in too. Bill had a decent voice but never the patience for music, and when their mother had tried to involve him in various church choirs, to tame his natural belligerence, he had found the whole experience far too sissy for his liking. He preferred football or wrestling and he and Missy would sneak out of practice together, vocal aptitude no match for their ability to defy authority. It was a different era then, Scully thought, before the Navy beat it all out of Bill and he finally stopped disappointing their parents. "Dana, come on, join in!" The cajoling came from Tara (friendly, pretty, musical, good taste, conventional enough, Catholic -- sometimes Melissa used to joke that Tara had been created for the precise purpose of fulfilling Bill and Maggie Scully's ideal daughter-in-law), as though if only Dana could get herself to sing then everything else would just melt away. "It's okay, Tara," said Bill, eyeing his little sister in the rearview mirror. "Singing is one area where Dana not joining in is definitely okay." Scully met his gaze and saw a smile on his face; she wondered briefly if Emily had inherited any musical ability or if her genetic gifts were atonal, the DNA that ran through Ahab and his Starbuck. Bill's smile flickered in the mirror and she realized that her mother and Tara were both looking at her, awaiting a response, expectant. She smiled then, let out a brief chuckle, and the mood of the entire car deflated. Bill flicked on a blinker to exit the freeway and Tara kept a hand on her abdomen, humming the Hallelujah chorus as they pulled up to church. - - - - - - - I finally snap in August of 2005; me and Kanye West both. We are skirting through the Oklahoma panhandle when news of the hurricane first breaks, getting gas at another generic "travel stop" decorated with a flat-screen television above the cash register. I freeze halfway through paying and Mulder has to finish the transaction and then draw me out of the way, his hand on my shoulders, but he has enough sense to let me keep watching. After nearly ten minutes of the same few images shown in hypnotic repetition Mulder leans in close. His hand is still at my back, slowly stroking up and down. "Scully." We never say each other's names in public, and his breath is warm against my ear. I tear my gaze away from the screen and meet his eyes. "We can watch back at the motel." I nod, just barely, sighing, and with that indrawn breath I remember how to walk. In the bedroom I flip immediately to CNN, open my laptop and hop online, but there is no news from John Doggett in the special encrypted account we use to communicate. We are like FEMA, not set up for emergencies. August churns into September and still there is no news. Mulder reminds me to shower, to eat, and we fall asleep with the television on each night, the desperate pleas I send to Doggett so far useless -- apparently my mother is entertaining the same kind of vigil that I am, and there is simply no word yet to be had. Skinner, I am told, is questing for answers but the whole situation is a mess beyond imagining. "I always thought Kurtzweil was full of shit," Mulder says, watching still more footage of people stranded on rooftops and listening to some talking heads debate the meaning of the phrase "heckuva job." Four days after the storm landed I am watching National Guardsmen escort people into buses outside the Superdome. The footage is aerial, too far to make out a face, but then they cut to a reporter on the ground. "Although conditions here were terrible, we are hearing some hopeful stories," says the reporter, a young blonde woman, in that canned human interest way that reporters have. "New Orleans is a city that loves its music, and I'm hearing reports that several musicians brought their instruments with them here into the Superdome and played together when times got really tough. Is that right, sir?" The camera zooms out and there, next to this insipid blonde, is a wide, older black man, a saxophone around his neck, and next to him, tall, skinny, and pale, next to him is my little brother, his bright red beard even scragglier than usual, trumpet case in hand. For the first time in days, breathing is easy. "Hey." It is soft, and accompanied by a hand on my shoulder; I have forgotten that Mulder is in the room too. I turn towards him, smiling, and he brushes his thumb against my cheek, wiping away tears I did not realize were falling. I put my head to his shoulder and he draws me closer, kissing my temple. CNN cuts back to their newsroom. Charlie didn't say a word, but that hardly matters. Mulder's fingers play against my collarbone, staccato and gentle. "Let's move to Virginia," I say, finally defeated or maybe just coming back into myself, for the first time in years. Mulder tilts my head up and presses his lips to mine. "Yes," he breathes against my mouth; we fall against the bed and against each other and even though I couldn't give him another child we have another chance now to be a family, we two, together. - - - - - - - The cathedral wasn't much different than she remembered it, eight years ago when a med school friend got married here -- she had gone with her friend Zach, she remembered, because to show up with Daniel would have been scandalous. Reflexively she scanned the pews to see if he was there now but of course he had never been Catholic, nor did he seem likely to convert. The instinct provided a momentary distraction and she wondered again if Melissa ever told Bill about the affair, about why their little sister was really joining the FBI. They never had any secrets, those two, but then if Bill had known he would surely have lectured her about it by now. Once upon a time she had been naive enough to think she would settle here in San Diego, marry her professor, raise a family with a man twenty years her senior. Melissa, visiting from LA -- acting her latest pursuit, after she dropped out of art school -- Melissa, usually so flighty, had been Dana's voice of reason, had talked her down from schoolgirl dreams and back into a dim and complicated reality. She had really thought that Emily was Missy's daughter; to be a mother is a fate she hadn't fully imagined, and Emily's birthdate could only fill her with rage. The bishop gave a homily about the piety of Mary, accepting the child Jesus, submitting herself to the will of God. God, Scully thought, at least had the decency to ask his chosen vessel first. It's a fine line between submission and rape, and Scully felt, with a dizzying certainty, that she was standing on the wrong side of that divide. Were there other young women, two thousand years ago in Nazareth, approached by God first? Did the girls who rejected his offer simply get cut from the Bible, irrelevant unless their wombs were filled? The congregation stood, reciting the creed in powerful harmony, but she muttered "excuse me" and pushed past her brother and her sister-in-law, desperate for escape, and standing outside the church she pulled out her phone and called the one person who could help to make sense of this now. - - - - - - - My mother is clearly disappointed in me, and I can't quite figure out why. Yes, it is frustrating for me to be over forty and struggling to find a residency, but given the past few years I thought she would be happy enough with my effort. I've settled on pediatrics, I tell her -- not elaborating on the subtext, that this is my reconciliation with a childless future -- and her frown only deepens. Finally, I can't take it any more. "Mom, what?" I know parental judgment well but this time, I think, I have not earned it. "Dana, I just... you say you've tried contacting old friends from med school, but have you even thought about your own family?" I have no idea what she is talking about. She sets down her cup of tea and gives me a very pointed look. "You should call your cousin Alex," she says. "I'm sure he could set you up with something in no time." I do feel a little silly for not having remembered Alex, two years younger than I, Uncle Joe and Aunt Kitty's youngest. When we were stationed at Pearl Harbor I used to love going into Honolulu to see them, to play with my cousins at their breezy beachfront house and listen to the silly, folksy songs Uncle Joe would invent on his violin for us. "Is he still at UVA?" My mother has tried to fill me in on family news but I am still backlogged from so many years away, and before that so many years preoccupied. My mom takes a long sip of her tea. "He's still based in Charlottesville," she says, "but he's with a group of Catholic hospitals now. They do work in the very rural areas, like out where you are." "That's wonderful." For him, for the rural areas, potentially for me too. "Mm-hmm. Joe and Kitty came to see him last year and came up for a day to visit. We had a lovely time." I nod along; I haven't seen any of my aunts and uncles in longer than I care to think of. "Give him a call, Dana." I pledge to do exactly that and my mother shows me pictures, Charlie and his teenage stepsons back in the Big Easy, at a Habitat for Humanity site with Harry Connick Jr; Bill and Tara and Matthew and the three-year-old niece I have yet to meet, Melissa, all of them stationed now in Greece. Tara sent me that from Mykonos, my mother says, gesturing towards a beautiful blue-and-white platter. She has such good taste. And isn't little Melissa just darling? - - - - - - - His hand was at her back but she didn't even notice it. He talked like he had found something, another microchip from the Pentagon's back alleys perhaps, but she was not interested even if it were true. She remembered the slow death of her grandfather, when she was nine years old. A sudden stroke in the middle of the lecture hall and the dashing ex-Jesuit spent eight months on life support, eyes vacant even when his wife would read to him selections from his beloved Kierkegaard. She had been so very young then but resolved that that should never be her future; as soon as she could she wrote her own living will and although her daughter never had that chance, Scully could not let her suffer. She would not treat this child like an experiment any longer. I'd like to be alone, she told him, because an experiment is viewed from a distance but a child, a child is held, and she could not let him witness this naked need. He looked at her but then left, slow and unwilling but still not challenging her this once, and for that she was grateful. Scully opened the glass door of the quarantine and lay down on the bed, drawing the warm body of her daughter close and waiting for it to grow cold. - - - - - - - The snow is falling when I pull up our long driveway, the end of fifty hours on call. Residency was built for those younger than I, but I am grateful to have it, glad that Alex ran interference and got me a spot in a hospital only forty minutes away. The options are not plentiful this remote, but despite Charlie's insistence that nobody would notice him in the disarray of post-Katrina New Orleans, I cannot risk Mulder in a more populous area. I open the door and am assailed by the smell of freshly cut pine. It is December 24th and Mulder has always had an odd sentimental streak; I should have anticipated as much. The fire is lit, the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies is playing on the radio, and Mulder is wrapping a garish red foil garland around the Charlie Brown tree that he has, apparently, claimed as our own. "Where did this come from?" I ask, and he jumps from the corner to stand in front of me. "Bet you never thought you'd be sleeping with a lumberjack, huh, Scully?" Of all the men I've ever been with, Mulder is almost certainly the least likely to ever be called "lumberjack." Well, except maybe Ethan. "This came from our property?" "Yep. Took me three hours to cut it down and get it in the house. Lumberjacking is not as easy as it looks." I can't help but grin, casting my coat and purse to the sofa, and I notice that his left hand is wrapped in gauze. "Mulder," I say with a yawn, too tired to play doctor anymore. "What did you do to yourself?" I reach for his arm but he waves me off, flexing his fingers and moving back towards the tree. "I'm a man of danger, Scully," he tells me, and I can't argue with that. Being confined to this house and its yard has assuredly not been good for his mental health, and I know it is little projects like this that keep him from losing his shit altogether. He's started talking a big game, home renovation and a garden and raising our own chickens, and although I have no faith in it ever happening it's at least something for him to think about. Mulder resumes hanging ornaments, and garish does not even begin to cover it. "Mulder, where did you get all this?" He affixes a miniature shotgun to a branch. This is a new level of demented, even for him. "There's a lot of crap in our attic, Scully." He picks up what appears to be a ball of tinfoil and throws it my way. "Happy holidays, from Georgie." George Earle, Doggett's survivalist friend. On our first day here we found a root cellar full of semi-automatic weapons and Mulder made a crack about "Mr & Mrs Smith"; day two brought us ten thousand dollars shoved behind the toilet where, presumably, the IRS could never find it. Cancer had claimed George three years ago, the house willed to John and now signed over to me, and we were the first people to open its doors since his death. Tchaikovsky finishes in a romantic flourish and it is on to that other great holiday standard, Handel's "Messiah." I look at the wad of foil in my hand. A twist-tie is run through the top as a hanger and scotch-taped to it are pictures cut from a magazine, an attractive brunette holding a dead squirrel on one side and on the other, a pickup truck. It is somehow both revolting and touching all at once and I move toward the tree, pick a branch where the foil will catch the light just right. Mulder stands behind me as I hang it, putting a hand to my back and massaging my shoulders. I am exhausted and lean into his touch. "Our first Christmas at the homestead," he murmurs, and I manage to crack a smile. "Just don't start fantasizing about me running around with dead squirrels," I say, and he laughs into my hair then kisses my neck, and we sink to the crappy carpet and make love in front of the Christmas tree and the fire, the Hallelujah chorus playing in the background. "You're supposed to stand to this part," I murmur, Mulder looming and golden above me, and for just a moment he pauses and cocks an eyebrow. "We could stand, if you'd prefer," he says, rich with innuendo, and I laugh and pull his mouth to mine, skin against skin all the warmth we need as the snow falls outside. Afterwards the radio moves on to duller carols but I have my ear pressed to Mulder's slick chest, his hair starting to gray, the steady and subsiding drumbeat of his heart fading from sex into sleep all the accompaniment I need. Midnight creeps steadily upon us and Christmas Day dawns; I can't sleep in spite of my exhaustion and my head is filled with all the things we are missing, but I know too that I would not trade this fragile wonder for any of them. - - - - - - - My mother's reaction is not necessarily what I expect. She hugs me, excited, smiling. "Fox is the father?" she asks, but it is hardly a question, and I nod and can't quite share her joy. "Well, Dana," says, patting my arm, "Father McCue would be glad to do the ceremony. I mean, he married your father and I, and I was already showing." It is the most blase she has ever been on the subject of her shotgun wedding; I did the math myself when I was in the sixth grade, when it could still shock me, but it's not something she's ever really admitted to me before. Her gaze falls to my abdomen, as though she can't believe it. "You know, twins run in our family." I can't even fathom the thought. "Mom, Mulder and I aren't going to get married." "Oh, Dana." She rolls her eyes, her voice full of kids-today exasperation. "Just because your brother Charlie --" I wish my motives were as simple as those of my iconoclastic little brother. If Mulder were still here I would be telling my mother the same thing, but at least the explanation would be legible to the world at large. "No, Mom," I interrupt. "It's not that." I have no idea how to say this, how to articulate it to anyone else when I can't even grasp it myself. "Dana, what?" Worry has overtaken joy now, just as it did in me. "Mulder is gone," I finally choke out. "Gone?" Her voice, her expression, are full of consternation, and I have to elaborate even though I can't explain any of it. "Gone... like I was gone," is the best I can come up with, but it gets the point across well enough. She says my name again but instead of chiding it is maternal and soft, pure comfort, and she pulls me into a hug that I want to last forever. My grandmother stares at me from across the living room, the portrait taken shortly before she married. Mary Kelley, of the Telegraph Hill Kelleys; she was a child of wealth and privilege, on track to become a concert pianist, but instead she fell in love with a Jesuit priest and taught music out of the home, raising six children while her husband lectured on philosophy and mentored young men like Father McCue, deferring her dreams and etching her aspirations into her offspring. Margaret McNamara, her oldest daughter, was also destined for great things, and when she was sent nine hours from home to the San Diego College for Women (a Sacred Heart institution -- Mary Kelley McNamara trusted only the finest calibre of Catholic orders) it was with the world at her feet, a choral scholarship and a strict edict against dating sailors, soldiers, and other forms of working-class riffraff. Her senior year the arms enveloping me now got talked into Fleet Week parties anyway, and there she fell in love with a young first officer, newly minted from Annapolis, who had no good family to recommend him, nothing but his thoughtfulness and discipline, neither of which seemed quite good enough when Margaret McNamara became pregnant a year and a half later without a ring on her finger. Bill and Melissa were always impatient. Charles McCue had met my grandfather at the University of San Francisco and earned his collar shortly thereafter, and he was young and liberal enough to do his mentor a favor and marry my parents without any questions. On my mother's wedding day my grandmother cried; she had known, she told her daughter, the scandal of loving the wrong man, and she had only hoped her daughters would avoid the same fate. Society is not so rigid now as it once was, but Mulder is clearly, for so many reasons, the wrong man. My mother and my grandmother before her wanted so many grand things for their children, but the only hope I carry for my own is that he might know his father. If we can achieve that much, it will be more than enough. - - - - - - - She was standing by the bed when he came into the room again, clutching at a small hand as it disappeared beneath a blue-gray sheet. He approached her slowly, fists deep in his pockets, and at her side he simply stood there, an inanimate twosome amidst the medical scurry. After long moments she turned into him, forehead resting against his shoulder. He raised a hand to her hair, stroking it, and she pulled away and asked him to take her home. He steered her with an open palm at her lower back, and it was this gentle pressure that forced her, finally, to break contact with her daughter. Mulder has become expert in waiting out my death vigils, she thought. Her brother's house was empty and she escaped to the nursery to sleep, dreamless and brief. She awoke and took a long shower, blowing out her hair and applying makeup as if these things mattered anymore. Mulder was waiting on the sofa downstairs, spinning her cell phone in his hands. "You've been here the whole time?" she asked, and he nodded, observant, cautious. Scully moved to the couch, sat on the opposite end, and Mulder leaned towards her, holding the phone as some kind of burnt offering. "I didn't want to wake you," he said in a rush and she nodded, took the phone into her grasp. "Did anyone call?" she said finally, the words sticking in her throat. "Your mother." Scully looked up and met his gaze, wide-eyed and attentive. He said nothing more and she raised an eyebrow. "Your nephew was born just about an hour ago," he finally admitted, forehead creasing as he spoke, and the concern in his dark eyes nearly undid her. She looked down, chin dropping to her chest, for a long moment. Mulder leaned in further still, and somehow she found a way to form words. "I have to go back to the hospital," she said, more breath than speech. "Are you sure?" His tone was so goddamn gentle and of course she wasn't sure, of course she'd just as soon open her veins like Roberta Sim than go back to the fucking hospital at this moment, but losing herself in the rote obligations of family joy seemed a better alternative than staying here with Mulder, her lone tie to the truth in this mad world -- but he had betrayed her now too, and though she hadn't had the time to get angry about his omission she was not yet unbruised by it. She stood, grabbing the keys from the coffee table before he could object. "I'm fine," she said, walking out of the house without offering him an opportunity for rebuttal. - - - - - - - Mulder is a free man now, unwanted by the FBI, but it is still disconcerting to hear a knock on the door. Skinner and Doggett like to call before they arrive, and my mother seemed content, after her first visit ended with a shrieking discovery of George's taxidermied raccoons in the downstairs bathroom, to never swing by again, so I have no idea who to expect. Mulder lopes into the living room, sidearm in hand, and we approach the door with raised eyebrows, opening it cautiously. "You can put the guns down, you know." We should not have been so shocked to see Gibson -- John mentions him regularly -- but I forget that he is now old enough to drive and to vote and to visit us independently. Mulder reacts immediately, smiling a huge smile and drawing him into a hug, and as usual I hang back, hesitant. Gibson and Mulder developed such a bond, the year we were apart, and I don't know that he feels so comfortable with me -- but of course he can read all my thoughts and so once he steps away from Mulder it is to throw his arms around me, breaking my paralysis. "How's life with John?" asks Mulder, putting his hand on Gibson's shoulder and steering him towards the couch. We all sit down and Gibson shrugs. "It's fine. He spends most of his time with Walter, anyways." There's a pause. "I try not to read him too much. He thinks about his son a lot." Another shrug. "I know that's why he took me in, but... it's been pretty cool." He stares at Mulder. "You look a lot better without the beard, by the way." "Thanks, buddy," says Mulder, laughing and punching him lightly in the arm, but I'm confused. "How...?" Gibson looks at me then, a little sheepish but still unapologetic. "It's easy to sneak around when you know what everyone is thinking," is his explanation, and I should be angrier about this but having someone else to talk to, even occasionally, is probably what kept Mulder sane these last couple years. I give Mulder a stern glance; he's still smiling but his eyes beg me to understand, and so I just sigh and look away. "Where are you guys going?" Gibson asks, gesturing at the half-packed suitcase on the floor next to a pile of clean laundry. I drag my eyes back to Mulder's face and raise an eyebrow. "That," he says, with conspiratorial relish, "is a surprise." "I have been promised that it's warm," I add, but it is unnecessary. Our mystery destination is in Mulder's mind and Gibson nods approvingly and offers him a high-five and a muttered "niiice." My mouth can't help but quirk into a smile at their easy rhythms, and it flits through my mind to wonder what Mulder would be like with William. The room stills for a moment, and then Gibson says "That's, uh, that's actually why I'm here." I assume he's still talking to Mulder until he turns to me. "What?" Gibson searches my face and doesn't speak right away. "I found your son." I blink and pull away. "Monica and I did, I mean. John and Walter don't know anything about it." I am too shocked to say anything so I don't; after a long pause Mulder finally breaks the silence, with a half-whispered "How?" This much I can figure out and I speak before Gibson has the chance to answer. "Reyes helped me forge all the paperwork," I say, and what I think but do not say is that I will never trust her again. Gibson takes my hand. "It wasn't --" He stares at the floor. "It wasn't like that," he says finally. "It was just me. I asked her some questions and read her mind. And then she figured out what I was up to." I can't breathe. Why, I think; why? "I wanted to see if he was like me," says Gibson, in a small voice. His words punch me in the stomach because of course he is, or at least he was; and as difficult and dangerous as the last ten years have been I have at least faced them as an adult, with Mulder at my side, but Gibson has been adrift and manipulated and on the run for most of his adolescence, exactly the sort of future I was trying to avoid for William when I gave him up. "Is he?" Mulder says finally. "I don't know." Gibson looks up again, but I can't meet his gaze. "Monica caught up with me at the Casper airport. She said I should talk to you guys first." Casper. Our son is in Wyoming. "Are you... are you asking for our permission?" says Mulder, very slowly, and Gibson nods. We had driven through Wyoming in our years on the road. We could have passed him by on the street and not even known. How could we have known? "Scully," Mulder bleats, a lilt in his voice like a question. "We need to talk." I shake my head, just barely, not moving. We are all doomed by our parents' mistakes, to repeat them or correct them or atone for them; my brother Charlie had drawn a line in sand, become his own man, but Mulder and I were still haunted by ghosts we could never quite beat back. Doggett had only taken in Gibson to fill the hole of Luke; so many lost sons between us all, memories we will chase to the ends of the earth, and our incomprehensible daughters disappear into the unquiet ether, grieved and unavenged. My atonement, for so many years, has been to Mulder, waiting for me now once again. I don't know how to say yes and I don't know how to say no but this time it doesn't matter. I get up from the couch, abrupt, and survey the line of his shoulders, biting my lip and drumming my fingers in nervous habit. "It's your call," I say, meeting his eyes with a steel gaze and striding upstairs before he can protest. Whatever he decides, I will find a way to live with it. I owe him that much. I pack toiletries and a new bathing suit, the anticipation of tomorrow's departure stilled somewhat, but no matter what he tells Gibson we have earned our moment in the sun, Mulder and me. He is finally free, unhunted if not unhaunted, and though we may never know the reasons why the aliens decided against colonization it is evident that they have, and that is enough for me. Years ago in a motel room in Roswell Mulder told me that there was hope. I think I have discovered that hope lives in the forward march of time, the Earth hurtling towards its eventual demise -- in 2012 or in billions of years or at any point between now and then -- and in the meantime we have entered an age of Barack Obama and Twitter and Lady Gaga and escaped destruction unknowingly, somehow, a work of God or of chance but a miracle nonetheless. Headlights bounce down our driveway, the thrum of an engine announcing Gibson's departure. I don't hear Mulder come upstairs so I walk down and he is standing at the doorframe, leaning against it, letting the cold air waft into the house as he stares out into the great black night. I put my head to his back and run my hands down his arms, swallowing my questions. "I told him not to contact him," Mulder finally chokes out, his voice thick. "But, um, to keep... to keep an eye out. Let us know if he needs anything." I close my eyes against the folds of Mulder's sweater. I love his back, muscular and smooth, though it too is starting to soften with age. "William has a life," Mulder says, low and full of tears. "He'll find us if he wants to." I nod into his trapezius. Mulder shakes against me but I know what this decision feels like and don't let go. This little life we have built together may be nothing like either of us ever expected, but I have made my peace with it. - - - - - - - Matthew Scully was quiet for the service, brief and sparsely attended. Her family might not have understood any of it, may have resented her absence and preoccupation, but she was glad that still they came. It was a small crowd, just them, the social worker, the family that lived two doors down from the Sims', their young daughter Emily's playmate, and of course Mulder. The little girl became more rambunctious as the Mass wore on, getting shushed by her mother, and at the end of it all her curiosity became too much. The priest walked back to the vestry and her mother was collecting her in her arms and the girl cried out, "But Mommy, where did Emily GO?!", and her incomprehension mirrored Scully's own. The family -- mother, father, little girl -- left in an apologetic hurry. Mulder disappeared somewhere and Scully's gaze followed the family for a long time, lingering at the door after they were gone, and then she realized her transparency and looked away. Her mother reached a hand to her shoulder. I'll get a ride back with Mulder, she said, unsure where he had gone but certain he would come back. She bid farewell to the rest of them, Bill's usual resentment subdued by the strange combination of loss and joy that had marked these last days, and the small church was empty but for her. Mulder returned, his footfalls loud and reassuring in the echoing white space. She stood next to him, dressed for mourning and tucked into herself, and he tried to make sense of it all; his words weren't answers but they did soothe, and she appreciated his effort. There is evidence of what they did, she said, stepping forward. Had Emily lived she would have loved her, without question, but in death she could separate the little girl with Melissa's face from a piece of damning evidence against a conspiracy of medical rape, or at least she could try. She lifted the top of the casket and was greeted by sand and a glittering cross, and even this decision had been taken away from her now. Where did Emily go, indeed. She held the cross in the light and shut her eyes against a chain of unrequited sacrifice: her grandmother and her mother, her sister, and now this little girl, deferential to forces beyond anyone's control and all, in one way or another, surrendered to the passage of time. She lowered the lid and closed her daughter's coffin, beautiful and empty. - - - - - - - My mother had been imprinted with a certain bourgeois taste at a young age, volunteering at art museums and organizing architectural tours when other Navy wives were getting together to watch "All in the Family." My father didn't share her good breeding but he was a thoughtful and literary man, one who valued order and beauty; the Navy gave him the former and his wife filled his life with the latter. I am surprised, then, that she is memorializing him like this, with pop music and an old man stooped over a dock. "This is exactly how he wanted it. Just the family." Her tone is not gentle and I want to say, Mom, the family isn't even here, but it doesn't seem worth fighting so I bite back the words. My mother loses herself in musical memory but I am absorbed by Michael and Megan, the lingering ghost of their father. Uncle Jimmy was four years younger than Ahab and my father had been the default man of the house; he settled for the regulated escape of the Navy but for his whip-smart little brother he dreamed of scholarships to the University of Pennsylvania and a comfortable life as a doctor, affluent and respected. Instead of following Ahab's proscribed life path, my uncle graduated from high school and joined the Philadelphia police. They reconciled and remained close as they grew older but I don't know that my father ever forgave him, really, and now I have relived all those same mistakes. "I know that you and Dad were" -- I struggle to find the right word -- "disappointed that I chose the path I'm on instead of medicine, but I need to know..." My mom looks at me, strangely unsympathetic. I have wrenched her from a much more pleasant place and I will probably never tell her the full story of why I left medicine behind. "Was he at all proud of me?" She softens then and says something that I think she must mean to be reassuring: "He was your father." I don't know exactly what that means, not as an answer to what I had asked at least, so I purse my lips and turn back to the water, where Skip is standing in farewell. The song ends and Skip trudges back towards us, slowly, and we all move back to the parking lot and exchange hugs, disperse back to our regular lives. It is not far from here to my mother's house, and then onwards to Raleigh with Mulder. "How long will you be gone?" my mother asks at a red light. "I'm not sure." It is not what she wants to hear so she turns on the radio to fill the air. She has raised me well, and it is tuned to the classical station. "I know Christmas is over," the announcer is saying, in the particular tone perfected by therapists and classical music deejays, "but I can't put this one aside just yet. Here's one more listen, until next year." Handel's "Messiah" swells from the speakers as we pull up to my mother's house. She does not get out of the car right away but instead turns up the music and wipes away her tears, squaring her shoulders and unbuckling her seat belt. "Call me when you get in," she instructs me, opening the door and stepping out to the driveway. I nod and watch her go into the house, all alone now, and I turn and speed south on the I-95 towards DC, letting the music play. - - - - - - - END - - - - - - - NOTES: First up, thanks to the fabulous (and remarkably speedy!) Amanda for talking me out of Al Gore, and for managing my semicolon addiction. She is a spectacular beta -- no maybe about it. (See what I did there?) This was a pretty quick (though intense) effort, so I don't have much to add, except to say that, while the backstory presented for the Scully family is not necessarily based on anything presented in the show, it is not contradicted by anything either. After seeing "I Want to Believe" I had kind of a loose impulse to write another fic, but it never went anywhere. Reading Amal Nahurriyeh's excellent "Machines of Freedom" rekindled that loose impulse to write something that extended into this new canon and linked it back to the series, but it wasn't until last week, watching "Post-Modern Prometheus," that I got really fired up. PMP deals with a lot of the same issues of genetic manipulation and medical rape that are presented in "Christmas Carol" and "Emily," but in PMP we're made to sympathize with the perpetrator -- he looks funny! He likes Cher! -- and my feminist hackles, duly raised, continued to go up as I progressed through Season 5 on DVD. The whole Emily storyline is effed up, y'all. I wrote a very long paragraph here that I just deleted, because it got all ranty and nitpicky and academic, but the gist is: this story is, essentially, my reconciliation of the Emily story to the William story. It's always felt to me that Emily got short shrift once William was born. And... I'll stop there before I get super long-winded again. I guess I could say more about this than I thought, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions ;) http://www.wonderhorse.net/authorspgs/suspectA/suspectA.htm Email: no_romo@yahoo.com - - - - - - -