Four Things Sadie Mulder Doesn't Remember About Her Father, 
and One She Almost Wishes She Didn't
by Amal Nahurriyeh 

Email:  amalnahurriyeh@gmail.com
Summary: She wants to know him.
Pairing: Gen (past MSR)
Rating: PG (sad things, vague sexual innuendo)
Warnings: Just for some angst.
Timeline/Spoilers: Spoilers for Machines of Freedom; set
post-12/21/2012, in the Mulder-less universe.

Author's Notes: Many thousands of thanks to idella, not just for betaing,
but for being as excited about this character as I am. It's nice to know
I'm not the only person who loves her.


1.

She remembers sitting on Grammy's lap. There is snow on the windowsill, 
a lot of snow, and pigeons walking back and forth. Uncle Bill is there, 
and Aunt Tara, and some other people, a balding man, a tall man, a woman 
with dark hair, a blond woman with glasses. She doesn't recognize them 
anymore, but she must have known them then, because she doesn't remember 
them like strangers. Grammy is stroking her hair, sitting in a chair, and 
the room has windows in all its walls, and the floor is white linoleum.

She sees Mama walking down the hall and towards the room they are
in. Grammy says quietly, "Now, Sadie, when Mama comes in, she's
going to be very sad. And that's alright, okay, honey?"

But Mama isn't sad. She's not anything. She opens the door and stands
there, and says, "Sadie, come with me."

"Dana, no," Grammy says. "She's too young. She doesn't need to see
this."

"Sadie, come with me," Mama says again, and doesn't look at Grammy.

So she slides off Grammy's lap and goes to Mama, who takes her hand
and leads her down the hallway, which she's never been down before.
Her shoes squeak on the linoleum.

There is a man in a white coat standing in front of a door at the end of
the hall. "Dr. Scully," he says. "I'm sorry, but this is against hospital
policy."

"Go away," Mama says, and walks past him. She closes the door to the
room, and leads her behind a curtain hanging in the middle of it. There is
a strange white bed with rails, and Daddy is in it, asleep. There are a lot
of machines around him, one with a bright jagged line jumping across it,
one with a big tube that leads into his mouth. 

Sadie stands next to Mama at the foot of the bed. "Is Daddy sick?" she
asks.

"Yes," Mama says. "Daddy's very sick." She puts down the rail on the
side of the bed, and lifts Sadie up. She lies down next to Daddy, who
smells funny and isn't wearing regular clothes. He doesn't hug her, which
she remembers thinking was strange; Daddy always hugged her. She
rests her head on his shoulder, puts her thumb in her mouth, and stares
at all the machines.

Mama goes around the room and starts pushing buttons on the
machines, and one by one, they turn off. Sadie looks out the window,
and watches the pigeons walking back and forth on the ledge, fluttering
off into the grey steel sky. "Baby, close your eyes for a minute," Mama
says, and so she does, and she feels something shift and pull in Daddy's
chest beneath her head. "There you go, you can open them again,"
Mama says. She's folding a washcloth and setting it down next to the
big tube, which hangs from the machine it is connected to. She looks
up. Daddy's face is still, and his lips are chapped. Mama puts down the
other railing of the bed, and climbs in on Daddy's other side. "Give your
daddy a kiss, okay, honey?" she says, in a strange voice Sadie's never
heard before.

Sadie crawls up Daddy's chest and kisses his bristly cheek. "Good girl,"
Mama says, and she squiggles back down and curls up on his chest
again. Mama is laying next to him, too. She leans up and runs her hand
along his face. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so, so sorry." And she
leans down and kisses his lips. She's crying, and Sadie realizes then that
she's never seen Mama cry before, not ever. Mama leans her forehead
against Daddy's face, and then lays down on his shoulder and cries.
They lay there, together with Daddy, and the room eventually gets
quieter. 

When Casey is nineteen, she will tell her therapist this story in a
basement office off Rosemont Avenue. "That's a lot for a little girl to
handle," her therapist, an older woman with a kind demeanor and a
relaxed attitude towards being on time, will say. "Are you angry with
your mother for exposing you to that?"

Casey will look out the window of the office at the daffodils growing in
the sidewalk planter. "I used to be," she will say. "But, no. I'm grateful."

2.

Sadie has learned to recognize the signs. She may only be nine, but
she's smart, really smart, the smartest girl in her grade, and probably in
all of St. Mary's. And she knows that there will be days when Mama
just won't get out of bed. When she was little, when she still slept with
Mama all the time, she'd wake up and play with her stuffed animals like
normal until Mama woke up. But on the bed days, Mama would tell her
to stay in bed, go downstairs for a few minutes, and come up with
breakfast, and then they'd stay there all day; sometimes she'd go to her
room to play for a little while, and then come back to Mama's room,
where Mama would read to her, or they'd watch TV, or she would play
with her animals (but Mama wouldn't want to play).

Now, she'll get up for school, and go to Mama's room, and Mama will
say, "Can you get your own breakfast, honey? Mrs. Sweeney's going to
drive you to school today." And when she comes home, Mama will still
be in bed. She'll get them a snack, and Mama will thank her; she'll do
her homework, and she'll read, and Mama will order pizza for dinner
and let her go pay the pizza man. And she'll sleep in Mama's bed that
night, and then, in the morning, Mama will get up and get dressed and it
would be like it never happened.

So when she notices that Mama didn't eat her dinner, and keeps staring
off into space and losing track of conversations, she knows that
tomorrow is going to be another bed day. After dinner, after her
homework, when she is supposed to be going to sleep, she closes her
bedroom door and gets out all her diaries. She'd been keeping one
since she was five, every night; Mama told her it was a very good idea,
and that someday she'd be glad she did. She goes through them, page
by page, with last year's math notebook next to her, making notes.
Mama comes up the stairs--later than usual, which is another sign--and
knocks on her door. "Lights out, Sadie," she says.

"OK, Mama," she says, and turns her light out for twenty minutes. Once
she is sure Mama was asleep, she turns it back on and started working
again. 

In the morning, she gets up and takes the notebook with her into
Mama's room. Mama pulls the covers off her head and looks at her.
"Sadie, why aren't you dressed?"

"I'm not going to school today," she says, and climbs into the bed. 

"You can't just not go to school because you don't feel like it."

"I haven't had any sick days at all this year yet. No tests, no big deal. I'll
call Mary Beth tonight for the homework, okay?"

Mama stares at the ceiling for a minute. "Fine," she says.

They sit in silence for a few minutes while Sadie examines her
notebook. No, she's sure. She takes a deep breath. "I think I figured it
out."

"Figured what out?"

Sadie stares at the page. "Something between May 26th and May 29th.
May 19th, but one year was May 20th. October 13th. Then there's a
bunch of them between Christmas and January 14th, but I can't pin
down anything specific." She glances up to see what Mama's thinking.

Mama has rolled on her side to look at her. Her hair is loose around her
face, streaming out of her braid. She swallows. "Well? What are your
hypotheses?"

Sadie smiles. She and Mama had played Experiment a lot when she
was little: will the stick catch on fire if we put it in the oven? How much
soda do you have to drink out of the bottle until it floats? Mama had
always made her commit to a hypothesis in advance of testing, and
would write it, in neat block letters, on the kitchen white board, so they
could refer to it afterward. She turns back to the page. "One of them's
his birthday. And one of them is the day he died. And I guess one of
them is your anniversary? But I don't know about the other ones. Or
which is which. There's not enough data."

Mama closes her eyes. Sadie waits. They never talked about him, not
really; pictures of him on the wall (most of them with her in them too),
occasional mentions, but no conversations. Sadie knows she had had a
father, but doesn't really know anything about him.

Finally Mama speaks. "It's hard. It's hard to talk about."

"Am I...am I close?"

"Yeah. Yeah, you're close." Mama rolls to her back and stares up at
the ceiling. Sadie waits, counting the cracks in the plaster on the walls.
"It's his birthday," Mama says softly, finally.

She resists the desire to write it down in her notebook: October 13,
Fox Mulder's Birthday. She can do that later. "What would you do for
his birthday?"

Mama sighs. "There were a lot of them. We didn't really have a
pattern."

"Well, one of them." She wants to know him. 

Mama stares at the ceiling for a long time, and then begins to talk.
"There was one year. 2002. We were--we had just left the FBI. We
weren't settled down then, we were traveling around. It was hard, really
hard. Um, we were in California, central California. I was feeling really
exhausted, and we'd been fighting, we'd been fighting about--" She
stops suddenly, presses the back of her hand over her mouth tightly,
and closes her eyes. Sadie is terrified Mama was going to run out of the
bed, run to the bathroom and go throw up or something, or just run
away, leave, and then they'd never talk about this again, and she'd
never find out anything about her father. She waits, until Mama pulls her
hand away. "I'm sorry. I can't tell you all of it now. Not all at once."

"It's OK," she says, and expects Mama to stop talking. 

But Mama takes a deep breath, and keeps going. "I don't think he
realized it was his birthday--we'd been on the road a while, and you
lose track of days like that. But I remembered. I suggested we go down
to the beach, that he could run, and so he went running--I wasn't in the
mood, but I sat on the beach. And we watched the sunset. Then we
went back to the motel room, and I told him I was going to go get
dinner while he showered. And I went and got takeout--I can't
remember what--and found a grocery store, and got him a cake. He
was nervous when I got back--he didn't like me being gone too long. I
hid the cake under some other groceries, so he wouldn't see it." She
smiles, then, a big, blinding smile that Sadie rarely gets to see; it's
impressive and strange to see Mama's face so happy. "And after dinner,
I snuck the cake out. And he was embarassed, and happy. And so we
ate the cake, the whole thing, which I still can't believe." She sighs.
"And that was your father's forty-first birthday." 

She wants to ask why they were on the road. She wants to ask what
they were fighting about. She wants to ask which of the wide variety of
haircuts she's identified from the pictures in boxes her mother had at the
time, which one her father had. She wants to know why she didn't buy
him a present, why the hotel didn't have room service, if her father liked
to run. But she can't ask, because her mother said she couldn't tell her
everything at once. So she'll save it up for next year. Or the next day.
There are going to be more, she's sure of that. So she conjures up the
best picture of them she can, her mother, hair shorter, redder than now,
a rounder face, and her father, clean-shaven, hair short enough to spike
up, smiling like he is in all the photos her mother ever took of him. On a
bed in a motel, eating supermarket cake, after a trip to the beach. She
smiles.

Mama is smiling too. "Do you want breakfast?" she asks after a while.

"I can make it," Sadie says, and climbs out of bed.

"Do you know how to work the coffee machine?" 

"No, but I know how to make the stuff from the jar."

Mama made a face. "I don't even know why I own that. Wait, how do
you know that?"

"It's got directions written right on it. I can read, you know," Sadie says,
and goes downstairs to make Pop-Tarts.

3.

It's Mother's Day, and they've made the semi-annual trip to Baltimore
to clean off Grammy's grave. Mama is planting petunias this time, and
the gravestone is radiating a pleasant warmth. Casey is totally
uninterested in plants, so Mama has relegated her to going to get water.
She walks back from the car with two half-empty, warm bottles of
spring water. "Here, we can just use these."

Mama takes off her gardening gloves and sets them down next to the
crumpled plastic that the plants came in. "They'll do. Did you bring the
trash bag?"

She holds out the plastic grocery bag. Together, they clean up the
gravesite, pack up the trowel and rake-thing and gloves, and Mama
waters the plants. She stands, crosses herself, and then pats the
gravestone. "See you later, Mom," she says, and walks back to the car.

They are coming up on Washington on 95; there's going to be some
traffic, and Mama is getting annoyed already. Casey's been thinking
about graveyards all morning, and so she decides to go for it. "Mom,
why don't we ever visit Dad's grave?"

Mama doesn't answer at first, and Casey fights down the instinct that
tells her she's in trouble. She's not, she should know this by now; Mama
just takes a long time to finish a thought when it's a hard one. "Do you
want to?"

Casey shrugs, as if it doesn't matter. "Maybe. I don't know. Is he
buried in Baltimore, too?"

"No. He's buried with his family," and Mama sounds angry when she
says that, so Casey figures maybe she better just shut up for a while.
They ride in silence until Mama speaks again. "What do you have at
school tomorrow?" she asks. 

Casey blinks. OK, that's a pretty serious change of topic, even for
Mama, so she assumes it's a relevant question. "Um, nothing much. A
verb sheet in Spanish class, but that's not a big deal." 

"Really not a big deal?" Mama shoots her a look.

"Such not a big deal." Casey rolls her eyes. "Estar, presente: estoy,
estás, está, estámos, estáis, están. Imperfecto: estaba, estabas, estaba,
estabamos, estabais, estaban--"

"I have the idea, thank you very much." Mama changes lanes and
speeds up. "OK, then. Let's go."

Casey forces herself not to gape like an idiot. That's it? Let's go? Had
aliens abducted her mother and replaced her with a clone? But she's not
going to argue, no way. It's an adventure or something.

They drive past Richmond in the late afternoon. Around six, they pull
off the road and get burgers, which they eat in the car, passing a
chocolate milkshake back and forth, Casey attempting to get her
mother to wear the cardboard crown for more than thirty seconds.
Sometime after it got dark, Casey nods off, unable to stay awake
through *Prairie Home Companion.* When she wakes up, they are in a
Walmart parking lot.

"Come on," Mama says. "We need clothes."

It is weird to argue with your mother which three-pack of underwear
you're going to get; yes, they're the same size, but Mama wears granny
panties, and Casey is wearing low-rise jeans, which means she needs
something that's not absurd. She buys a t-shirt that says *North
Carolina: The Tar Heel State* in Comic Sans, of all fonts, and Mama
rolls her eyes. "I thought hipster irony died ten years ago," she says.

"I'm bringing it back," Casey says. "Ooh, can we get potato chips?"

They end up with a two-pack of cards, a bag of barbecue soy crisps, a
four-pack of Jones cream soda, and the ugliest pajamas Casey has ever
owned, which Mama can't stop smiling at. The hotel they check into is
cheap, and Mama appears to know the way to it by heart, which is
weird, because she never remembers Mama going away when she was
little, sometime when she might have come here to visit. On the bed in
the room, they play blackjack, betting with the pennies from the bottom
of the glove compartment.

"Why is Dad buried in North Carolina? I thought his family was from
Massachusetts." Casey decides to hold at eighteen.

"That's where he was raised. His father was from North Carolina
originally. This is the Mulder family plot. Hit me." Casey deals her a
card, and her mother rearranges the cards in her hand. "I suppose there
are other Mulder generations buried there, but we never talked about it.
I'm staying."

"And his parents are buried here too? Eighteen." She put down her
cards.

"Ah, seventeen. Yes, his parents, and his sister. I think you're cheating."

"I do not cheat. You be nice or I'll play solitaire and not let you give me
advice."

"Oh, that would be so terrible." Mama lay down on the bed. "Mmph.
That was a lot of driving."

The crown is slipping down her forehead, and she adjusts it, and
reaches for the second deck of cards. "You could let me do some of it." 

"You could pass your permit test. Honestly, Casey, read the Virginia
state driver's manual once, and you'll do fine."

"I prefer to try to deduce the answers via common sense and logic. If
you can't do that, I think the answers are wrong." She shuffled the two
decks together and began laying out a hand of Spider. 

"It's not a real test, Casey. It's just to see if you can memorize a set of
mostly-arbitrary rules and follow them in context. There is no pure
theory of driving."

"Well, I'll develop one."

"No good theory ever came without practical experience of the subject
at hand. And you're not driving until you pass it." Mama sighed. "Don't
stay up too late, honey."

She played the hand, back and forth, until she won it, and then went to
sleep.

In the morning, they drank the bad coffee from the continental breakfast
and ate underripe bananas and flavorless oranges. Mama drives her to
a cemetary on a lonely strip of road, and finds the grave without having
to ask for directions or look it up. They get out, and there it is: Fox
Mulder, October 13, 1961 to January 2, 2013. Casey doesn't know
what to say. It's just a rock, and she feels incredibly stupid that this
shocks her, because of course it's just a rock. And it doesn't have
flowers or anything, doesn't look like anyone's tended it, not in years.
She licks her lips. When she looks up at Mama, she is staring, as if
waiting for Dad's zombie hand to come out of the ground looking for
them. It's invasive, to watch her mother like this, and she looks away. 

"Did we have a funeral?" she asks, after a minute.

"Not really," Mama said, and her voice is choked and quiet. "Your
father wasn't religious. And I was--I was too angry." She sniffs loudly,
and Casey knows she's crying, and doesn't look so as not to embarrass
her. "So it was just you, and me, and a few of our friends from the
project we were working on when he died." Casey wants to roll her
eyes at hearing the Stark Insurgency described as a project when she'd
written an essay on it for the AP American History test, but, well, that's
what it was to her mother, she supposes. "Grammy didn't even come. I
wouldn't let her. So we just put him in the ground and--our friends said
some things. I don't remember them now."

Casey tries to remember being here--January, it would have been
cold--but she doesn't have any memory of it, any more than she has any
real memories of her dad. She did a presentation on Dˇa de los Muertos
in Spanish class last month, mainly as an excuse to break into her
Babylon 5 DVDS, but now she suddenly wants to come back here in
November, with sugar skulls and candles and a picnic, to sit with her
dad's grave and wait for him to come. He liked weird shit, it might
work. Mama would never be into it, though. She glances over. Mama is
still crying. "I'm going to go see what kind of tree that is," Casey says,
gesturing towards a tree near the car. She wanders off, and waits
underneath the tree. Crab-apple, if anyone's interested. Mama kneels
down, and picks weeds off the grave, as she watches. Then she leans
down and kisses the stone, then presses her forehead to it, and Casey
swears she's seen her do that before, but can't remember where or
when. 

When Mama comes back, there is dirt under her nails. She doesn't
bother to scrape it out, and Casey keeps looking at her hands the
whole way home, wondering why she won't.

4. 

She's been eating six mangoes a day for the last three months, fresh
from the stand outside her hostel in Kandy, but something about coming
home in the middle of peach season makes her giddy. She drives with
the window down, half to smell the air, half because she hands the wrist
with the cigarette out it, because Mama will kill her if she stinks up the
car. As she pulls up to the gate she dials the code on her phone while
holding the steering wheel with her knee and flips the butt off onto the
gravel. She should hire someone to deal with those potholes. And the
steps are getting uneven. Casey is aware that she's not someone you
should trust with power tools, and Mama's too old to do heavy home
repairs any more. 

Mama is sitting in the kitchen with the paper and a pot of coffee. "How
were the Banners?"

"They're good. Everyone wants to know where I got the fab tan. I got
peaches from the farm stand on the way home." 

"Oh, good. Do you know when you have to head back to Connecticut
yet?"

Casey fishes out a peach, still warm from the sun on the passenger seat
of the car. "I got an email from Courtney while I was out. She wants to
meet with me in three weeks, so I guess I'll head back to campus a few
days before that." 

"Are you sure you can work well here? There's not much in the way of
technology or resources. I mean, UVA's really a drive."

She stands over the sink, and begins peeling the skin off the peach. This
is how peaches are perfect, when they're so ripe and soft the skin just
sloughs off. OK, she'll admit it, she missed America a little bit after
three months away. "Nah, I don't really need anything but my data. This
is like being cloistered, you know? No friends to bother me, no
meetings to go to, I can take long walks by the creek and kick things
when work doesn't break the way I want it to. I swear to God, Mom,
you should start renting rooms out to folks writing dissertations, you'd
make millions." She takes a bite, and peach juice drips down her wrists.
"Umm," she says, and licks it off.

She looks over at her mother. The look on her face is wistful and
dreamy. "What?" she says. "What are you thinking about?"

Mama shakes her head and comes back to her paper. "I was just
thinking. Your father must have taught you how to eat peaches. That's
how he used to do it."

She tries to remember standing over this sink--maybe on a chair, or
sitting on the counter--a big brown hand, hairy on the back, holding a
skinned peach for her to bite into. No, nothing. Anyway, Mama was
lying. "Nope. That's not what you were thinking."

"What?"

"I mean, I have no doubt that Dad taught me to each peaches like this.
But you were thinking something else." She takes another bite and
remembers the look. "I think you were thinking naked thoughts."

"What?"

She grins. "You looked like you were thinking about being naked, that's
all."

"How do you know what I look like when I think about being naked?"

"Well, not you specifically. But I've conducted a large-N survey of what
women look like when they're thinking about getting naked, and there
are certain generalizable features." She waggles her eyebrows.

Mama is blushing vaguely, but amused. "Honestly, Casey." 

"I'm just calling it like I see it. So, what about peaches? Or the sink? Or
peaches and the sink?"

Mama laughs, thinks for a moment, and puts the paper down. "Oh, it's
nothing. No, it's just--" And that's it, the wistful, naked look again. "I
was remembering when your father and I were first...." *Schtupping,*
Casey wants to supply, but decides that her mother could still try to
ground her, so maybe she should back off a little. "We were at his
apartment one morning. I was just getting over the flu. He went out
running, and he came back with a bag of peaches from the farmer's
market in downtown Arlington, because I'd said I wanted vitamin C. I
meant for him to pick up a half-gallon of orange juice or something
logical, and peaches don't even have that much vitamin C, but, well,
your father." She leaned back in her chair a little. "And he peeled them
for me, and fed me them in bed. And they were ripe like that. The
sheets were ruined. Peach juice stains horribly." 

Casey smiles. Yeah, she's pretty sure there was more story than that,
but best not to pry. "You two were just gross, you were so cute, you
know that?"

"Oh, I don't think anyone thought that at the time," Mama says, and
stands. She folds the paper. Casey leans back over the sink and takes
another bite of peach.

"Now, the sink, that's another story," Mama says slyly.

Casey coughs for a minute. "Jesus, Mom," she says. "I'm all for the
inappropriate overshare about your long-dead common-law husband,
but maybe try for when I'm not going to choke to death, okay?"

"Yes, dear," Mama says, and goes to her office. Casey finishes the
peach, and another. Then she takes her laptop to her dad's office,
where a stack of archival copies are waiting for her to code them.

5.

Her fingers are numb, so numb she can't light another cigarette, as she
sits on the step. Unseasonable cold snap, and also she's been waiting
on her mother's porch for an hour and a half.

Mama's car pulls up and stops. "Casey? Is everything OK?"

"Fine," she says. 

"Casey?" Mama knows something is wrong, and is still grasping for it.

"Let's go inside," she says. She's been trying all day but she doesn't
know how she's going to say any of this.

"I've got groceries," Mama says, and pops the trunk of the car.

Inside, Casey puts the groceries on the counter. Mama starts putting
away the perishables: a carton of milk, a little pint of cream for coffee, a
half-dozen eggs. She doesn't know what else to do, and she can feel
her fingers again which means she's starting to get angry, so she goes
over to her bag, unzips it, and pulls out the file. She drops it on the table
and goes to lean against the counter.

Mama stops, and even from where she's standing by the fridge, she
should be able to see that it says Cheyenne General Medical Center on
the front, should see the color-coded MU stickers in the corner.
"Where did you get that?" she asks.

"Funny thing. The history and linguistics departments share a mailroom.
You get to know the other students." She folds her arms across her
chest. "Were you going to tell me?"

"There's nothing to tell." Mama turns away from the table, and pulls two
cucumbers from her bag.

"Oh, bullshit, Mom." She paces over to the table and opens the file. Big
parts of it are blacked out with marker--she's not sure if that's a gesture
towards medical privacy or the government's doing--but she gets the
gist of it: massive frontal lobe trauma, sustained "via what partner (MD,
attending neurologist at hospital in VA) described as overstimulation
sustained during ongoing telepathic engagement with extraterrestrial
forces." 

"You knew he died because of the battle at Stark. You didn't need the
gory details." Mama puts a bag of pasta in the cabinet, her back still
turned. 

"This isn't a matter of not knowing what his intercranial pressure was,
Mom. And I'm not talking about whatever classified bullshit went on
down there." She closes the file and leans on the table. "This is that you
never told me what killed him!"

"I did tell you. Neurological trauma." She closes the cabinet.

"I thought something *fell on his head!"* Casey says, flinging her arms
wide. "I thought he died of something normal! I didn't think he had--" 

"What did he have?" Mama is braced on the counter, and her knuckles
are turning white.

Casey's never had to have a name for it--it was just *it.* "The mojo,"
she says firmly, blood rising to her face. It's like the day she came out to
her mother--only this is worse, much worse.

"It didn't matter."

"It would have to me."

"Why?" Mama turns around. She is crying, and Casey wants to stop,
but, no, she is not going to be stopped by her mother crying anymore.
"What possible impact would it have had on you?"

She doesn't have words to answer, so she reaches out with one hand
and flicks her wrist, like she was slapping someone. To her mother's
right, a shelffull of glasses slides, colliding with each other, crashing to
the counter and the floor.

Casey watchs them fall, and then stands with her hands on her hips. Her
mother looks at the pile of glass, and then, calmly, back at her.

She feels the adrenaline drain out of her. "I'll get a broom."

Kneeling on the floor with the dustpan, the hand broom, and a paper
bag, she listens to her mother turn the pages of the medical file on the
table. "I didn't want to remember it," her mother says eventually. "He'd
nearly died from it once before. Twice, really, depending on how you
count it. I didn't want to remember how bad it really was. And you
didn't show any signs of it, not that I ever saw. William did, but I think I
excused it by guessing it was a male-linked trait. Anyway, I don't know
if he developed it more strongly as he grew."

Not that he ever got the chance, she thinks. The death of the entire Van
de Kamp family in a mysterious farm explosion in December 2012 got
a quarter of a column in the Cheyenne paper; she had decided the day
she found it never to show it to her mother. She picks up the biggest
shards with her hands and starts dropping them into the bag. "It didn't
really happen until I hit puberty," she says. "I didn't let you know."

"Thank you, I think." 

She cuts her finger but doesn't stop. "What if someone else had been
there?" she asks. "Someone else who had it?"

"I don't know," Mama says. "The only other person we knew who had
similar abilities was in Mexico; he survived without permanent brain
damage, but he was younger. But your father wouldn't let me sedate
him. Maybe if Gibson had been in the room with us, but..." She shakes
her head. "Our communications were cut. Our targeting system was cut.
We didn't have any means of planning what was going to happen under
those conditions." She closes the file. "Casey, it was a long time ago.
I'm not sorry I didn't tell you more. It's the past. The details don't
matter. It's not like there's anything to be done about it." 

Casey drops the last of the glass into the bag. She licks her lips. "I have
a friend. Avner, you remember her?"

"From last Thanksgiving? The bioengineer?"

"Yeah. Her lab is working on this really interesting project. They think
they've worked out time travel." She folds the bag shut, leaving a small
trail of blood on the brown paper where she touches it. 

Her mother sucks in her breath. "Casey, no. You can't think about
that."

"What if I were there?" she says, and doesn't look up. "You said if that
other person--well, what about me? If he could do it, I could do it. And
I'm--younger. And healthy." 

"You can't fix the past, honey." 

She looks over at her mother at the table. Fixing the past is the human
condition, she wants to say, at least if your last name is Mulder. Instead,
she stands, and wipes the last of the glass dust off her hands on her
jeans. "Watch me," she says, and leaves.