With Fortune and Men's Eyes
Summary: Mrs. Mulder tries to get her son to come out of his tree house.
Timeline: 19 months after Samantha’s disappearance.
Rating: PG
Notes: according to XF wikia, Mrs. Mulder's name is Elizabeth. Therefore, this is her name in this story. 'Teena' IMO is a society nickname.
My immortal soul now belongs to amyhit for going wayyyy above and beyond what is sanely expected of any beta. Damn, woman, my jaw is still on that floor.
A mothership of thanks to chinapatterns, hummingfly67 and samincittagazze for encouragements and making my English speaking good. And many thanks also to wendelah1 for medical input.
More notes at the end.
~~~~
“'When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.’ Ah, but your mummy will still love you.” -- CSM (quoting Shakespeare) --
~~~~
June 4th, 1975
“Tell your son that if he doesn’t come down, I will set fire to the damn thing myself,” Bill Mulder states, helping himself to another glass of bourbon. The crystal decanter he keeps in the conservatory is half-full. This must be a good day. Why he still bothers pouring his bottles into flasks, she has no idea.
“My son? Are you giving up on him, as well?” Elizabeth doesn’t even try to hide the venom in her voice. Her fingers snap the wilted stem of an orchid.
She watches him shrug, his back to her. “You chose,” he reminds her.
“It wasn’t a choice, ” she hisses.
Another shrug, and she wants to hit him. She wants to bring the godamn decanter down between his shoulder blades. She can no longer stand the weary monotone of his voice. Nothing she says seems to affect him these days, and God knows she’s given it her best shot. She’s sharpened her insults into dagger points, increasingly cruel, increasingly spiteful; but he just stares past her with vacant eyes and shrugs; as if, in the grand scheme of things, her grief was insignificant - a necessary price for - what exactly?
Oh, yes, the Fate of Mankind.
She had laughed in his face when he first used those words last year. He’d turned angry then, had grabbed her arm and squeezed it painfully, her napkin fluttering down onto the bright motley Kilim he’d brought back from Iran for their fifth wedding anniversary.
“What do you think happened to the Beckman twins?”
The Beckman twins had drowned. Both of them. Freak accident on a wooden bridge.
And that was how her nightmare had begun. With the low golden sunlight playing hide and seek between the red maple leaves on a late autumn afternoon - the air fragrant with newly mowed grass. This was the day her world had shifted and slid off its axis; the day she had realized there was a horrifying bill to foot for the wealth and status her husband’s career had given them.
“My husband works for the State Department. I could tell you what he does but then I would have to kill you.” It was a joke she liked to tell.
“Oh Teena, how thrilling, darling!” her Hamptons friends would squeal, their perfectly manicured, neurotic hands playing with the natural pearls at their throats. Obviously, Bill’s position was managing to make up for his lack of pedigree. This was America after all, and her secretive husband - really quite handsome in his dark suits and even darker shades - was handing her the dream on a silver platter.
She just never thought that platter would one day hold her daughter’s head.
Oblivious Salome who had always wanted a house on Martha’s Vineyard. Bill had given it to her. He’d put in a request and it was all arranged. All it had taken was a phone call.
“The children will love it here,” he’d said, holding her against him as they contemplated the wilderness that would become their garden. He was smiling into the crook of her neck, his hands stroking the slight bump on her belly that heralded their second child.
Samanth-
She needs to get out.
She exits the conservatory barefoot, the sleeves of her linen tunic catching slightly on the long stem of a potted fern as she crosses the threshold. Her throat is tight, jagged inside, metallic. Unsaid words pierce the delicate flesh of her larynx. Her feet hit the wooden deck, then the grass. Soon she’s standing at the bottom of the tree house at the far end of the expanse of land she calls a garden and Bill calls a backyard.
“Fox!” she calls.
She knows he’s up there. This place has become his refuge. He can hardly stand being indoors with them, not since -
He disappears up into that wretched tree every chance he gets. She can’t blame him. The atmosphere inside the house has grown toxic. The united parental front of the first few months collapsed quickly under its own weight. Bill and she rapidly stopped pretending they didn’t hate each other for what they had done.
Pick a child, any child.
She hated him, oh God, she hated him so for making her choose. And he hated her for making the wrong choice. Oh, he never said a thing, not directly, not in so many words, but he didn’t need to. Disappointment had shifted the lines of his face like winds carving a sand dune.
Samantha had always been her father’s sweetheart.
Even though she looked nothing like him.
Elizabeth digs her toes in the grass, catches the rope and wood ladder with one hand and calls her son again.
“Fox! I know you’re up there.”
She hears shuffling inside.
“I’m not going,” her son informs her, voice undulating with the onset of puberty.
“We’ve made an appointment; it would be rude not to keep it.”
“I don’t care.”
Elizabeth lifts her foot onto the first rung of the rope ladder, trying to gauge if it can take her weight. Satisfied by the result, she starts climbing up. She hauls herself through the square opening and into the small shelter.
“Mom!” Fox shouts at her with all the outrage a thirteen year old can muster. “You can’t come in here!”
Elizabeth crouches under the low ceiling and looks around her. The walls of the tree house are covered with various drawings and unreadable notes scribbled in her son’s sloppy handwriting. She’s been despairing of ever improving his penmanship.
“What’s all this?” she asks him.
Fox sits with his back against the far wall, a stubborn crease in his brow. “I’m looking for clues,” he replies.
“Oh, honey...” She crawls to his side and draws him to her. After a perfunctory mumbled protest, he settles down, resting his warm neck against her shoulder. Since becoming an only child he no longer shies away from her motherly displays of affection. She wonders if he’s indulging her, or if he genuinely needs her for comfort.
“I will find her, mom,” he tells her firmly.
“Fox…” she strokes the unruly locks on top of his head. He needs a haircut. “You need to put this out of your mind. The police couldn’t find her. I know it’s terribly hard, sweetheart, but we all need to go on with our lives the best we can.”
“NO!” He pulls himself away, glaring at her with fierce determination. “They came in like they knew the house, mom. They were like Special Forces or something, like soldiers. I know what I saw.”
Elizabeth shakes her head sadly. “I don’t have any answers for you, honey.” How easily the lies flow off her tongue.
Her son’s defiance ebbs as suddenly as it swelled. “I know you don’t, mom.” He leans back into her arms, shifting closer and - like an eggshell of memory breaking - she remembers the space he occupied in her arms as a baby when he would snuggle up against her like a tiny creature burrowing in its nest, so confident of being safe and loved.
She drops a soft kiss on the crown of his head. How she treasures his innocence at this precise moment. His blind faith rips her heart to shreds. He will be such a good, compassionate man, she thinks, if only he can be convinced to put these horrid events behind him.
Bill used to be a good man too.
They are both staring at the one eyed Raggedy Ann doll gathering dust in the corner. “I wish I had been nicer to her,” her son whispers. “I always told her she was in the way; I made her mad so she would leave me alone.” He picks at a hangnail on his thumb, making it bleed a little. “I guess I got my wish, huh?”
Elizabeth closes her hand over his. “You mustn’t talk like that Foxtrot, none of this is your fault.”
He squirms in her arms, making a face. “Mom, you promised!”
“You’re right. I did.” She hugs him tighter, regardless of his squirming, glad for the opportunity to change the subject. “Count your blessing you didn’t end up called Tango or Zebra,” she teases.
“Dad and his stupid bets...” her son grumbles, but there’s a hint of fondness in his voice.
The boy still loves his father. She hopes he never finds out the truth.
“Did he ever tell you what the bet was about?” Fox asks, playing with the engagement ring at her finger, turning the stone this way and that to make it catch the light.
Elizabeth shakes her head, “He always insisted it was classified. All he’d say is that it was very important to him to keep his word. You know your father.”
Her son frowns and lets go of the ring. “How come I just got ‘Fox’ on my birth certificate then? Why’d he skip the rest of it?”
“I threatened to call our next child after his mother.”
“Perpetua? Oh, that’s mean, mom.”
“Desperate measures.” She pats his shoulder and moves to stand up. “Come on, your father is waiting for you.”
Fox shifts to a kneeling position on the rough planks of the tree house. His pig-headed look is back. “I’m not sick. I don’t need to see a doctor.”
“It’s just a vaccination jab, honey.” She returns to the opening in the floor.
“Then why aren’t the other kids at school getting it?”
He never lets anything go, she thinks. From the moment he could speak, her son had always questioned everything. It makes him an interesting but exhausting child. “Fox, enough. Stop arguing for once and do as your father asks.”
He holds her gaze, all flared nostrils and pinched lips and she is reminded that he is newly a teenager. Obedience no longer comes naturally to him.
She catches his defiant, sylvan eyes. “Please, do it for me?” she asks in a softer voice. She doesn’t wait for his answer, climbs down the ladder and walks back to the house.
She knows him, her darling boy.
~~~~
That evening Bill comes back alone. Whiffs of cut grass, wet leaves and warm, damp air blow around him as he shuts the door.
Panic goes off inside her like a trip mine. “Where is he?”
Bill takes his hat off and shakes his raincoat before hanging it on the rack in the hallway.
“Bill, where is our son?” she insists.
“They’re keeping him overnight for observation.”
Is her husband’s casualness forced, or is she just imagining things? “Why? I thought it was just a smallpox jab?”
Her husband shrugs, “They just want to make sure he doesn’t have an allergic reaction, that’s all.” He kicks his shoes off and heads for the living room, wiping his damp face with a large blue handkerchief. “It’s like a monsoon out there,” he complains. She can smell his sweat under his after-shave as he walks past her.
“Is he….” Elizabeth crushes her cigarette in the silver ashtray on the coffee table. Anxiety gnaws at her stomach but she manages to keep the hysteria out of her voice. “How long do they need to keep him for?” she asks Bill’s back.
Her husband leans over to grab the newspaper he left on his armchair. “Stop worrying; he’ll be back tomorrow morning.” He sits down, stretches his legs. “What’s for dinner?” he asks, leafing through the pages.
The pressure around her heart lets go a little. Still, Bill won’t meet her eyes and she finds it unsettling. His gaze used to be so direct, so open... before.
She heads for the kitchen without a word, ghosts of conversations past circling inside her head.
~~~~
November 25th, 1973
“Oh God! Are you saying that I have to - to give up….” she shakes her head, denying. “No. No, this is crazy! Why are you telling me this, Bill?
This would be one of the last times her husband would ever truly hold her gaze. “Because I couldn’t live with myself if I kept something like this from you.” He reaches out for her hand across the kitchen table. Her elbow knocks a can opener to the floor. “There are so many things I can’t tell you, Elizabeth, but… you’re my wife. I owe you as much truth as I can give you.”
She remembers this day so clearly: The cleanness of the house with all the chores done, her pride at the labels she’d made for her slightly overcooked plum jam, a duck with peaches roasting in the oven.
She pulls her hand away and stands up. “This is not happening, it- I can’t, Bill. I just can’t.”
“Damn it, Liz, you have to. I have no idea what the right choice is, but you’re their mother, you -”
“How can there be a right choice?” she shouts at him. “How can you do this to us, to our family?”
Bill springs to his feet, ignoring the chair clattering behind him. “I'm not doing it! It's not just me! These orders are coming down from very high. Too goddamn high for me to question!”
“But there must be something you can do! Tell them you want nothing to do with this. Quit.”
He looks at her with such condescending pity. She wants to punch him.
“It’s too late. This isn’t the kind of job you quit, my love.” The silence following his words rattles her ribcage like a gunshot in an oil drum. She stops pacing and sits back down heavily.
Bill picks up his chair and imitates her. “They will both die if we don’t choose,” he says.
“Don’t ask me this. Please, Bill, I....”
Her husband covers his eyes with both hands - so that he doesn’t have to look at her, she supposes.
“Elizabeth, I can’t bear this weight alone,” he pleads.
There are times, and this is one of them, when life slows down around you like a neap tide. They sit in silence for a long time. The only sound in the kitchen, the dripping faucet he keeps promising he can fix. Tears run freely down her face and she doesn’t bother to wipe them off.
“Fox is older,” Bill says eventually.
“NO!”
Her husband catches her hand over the table before she can bolt. The pressure of her wedding and engagement rings against her skin as he squeezes her fingers makes her want to throw up.
“Samantha?” he asks, voice thin as a worn thread.
White noise, so much white noise inside.
Samantha.
~~~~~
June 4th, 1975
Had she really said it out loud? Or did she just nod?
This is the one thing she can’t remember.
She rummages in the freezer, looking for something easy to prepare. She does not feel like making dinner tonight. Her fingers follow the rounded edge of a pizza crust. This will have to do. Not that Bill ever complains about the cooking.
She removes the pizza base from the freezer, opens and shuts a couple of cupboards in search of anything that could qualify as toppings. A Methuselahian jar of capers is vaguely considered and promptly dismissed.
She wants to concentrate on the meal she’s preparing. She wants to worry about whether or not she’s got peppers or mushrooms in the crisper. She doesn’t want to think any more about that day and the ones that followed.
Elizabeth pours tomato sauce slowly over the base and evens it out with a wooden spoon. Unwanted thoughts coil like tentacles inside her head, squeezing, squeezing, forcing the buried feelings out.
Not enough pain.
That’s what it had boiled down too in the end: not enough pain, not enough sorrow over the loss of her daughter, not enough bone crushing guilt.
She should have been catatonic with grief after Samantha was taken. She should have felt like a part of herself had been ripped away. She shouldn’t have been able to get out of bed for days, she should have gotten drunk, night after night, after night. She should have picked extravagant fights with her husband, she should have screamed her lungs out and broken things, burnt all his shirts with the iron and driven his vintage Bugatti into a tree. She should have gone to Boston and slept with disreputable men. Hell! She could even have knocked on Charles’ hotel room door one more time.
Yes, she should have circled round and round, down a drain of self-destruction and despair and rage.
But instead, the day after, she got out of bed, took a shower, got dressed and went downstairs to make breakfast. She poured coffee and glasses of orange juice, slid pancakes on plates, opened cereal boxes and grilled toast. Nothing got eaten of course, but it didn’t matter. She was functioning, even if everything felt a little distant, a little remote, she could still interact with the world around her. She could still be the wife who looked after the house, the hostess who smiled politely to her guests and thanked them with dignity for their concerns, the mother who comforted her distraught son.
Day after day she went through the motions, waiting for the moment where she would collapse in a sobbing heap on her newly waxed hardwood floor.
It never happened.
She did try to tell herself that she was only being strong for her remaining child, but deep down, she knew the ugly truth: she simply didn’t love her little girl enough to crash and burn.
The first months after Samantha was born had overwhelmed her utterly - an endless procession of anxious days and nights during which all she’d truly wanted had been to be left alone. She’d barely slept, even when the baby did. She had felt clumsy and on edge, plagued with a sense of dread that had left her little peace. Samantha had been an easy, unfussy baby, and yet, Elizabeth had found it difficult to bond with her. Where was the attachment, the all-encompassing love she had experienced the minute she’d first held Fox? In her darkest hours she’d even resented the little girl for existing. A single question had kept driving her to distraction: was Bill the father?
He had to be.
Three months after the birth they’d hired a nanny, and Elizabeth had hated the relief she’d experienced whenever she handed her child to that woman.
Things got better as Samantha grew older, even though she always had to make a conscious effort to be as affectionate with her daughter as she was with her son.
Of course, she never breathed a word of it to anyone. 'There are things a woman keeps to herself', her mother would have said.
~~~
Elizabeth sets down the knife she’s taken from the drawer and stares at the uncut mushrooms in her hand. Something between a sigh and a sob catches in her throat.
It should have been harder.
It should have been harder to choose.
In the end it wasn’t grief that eroded her like a weathered coastline, but wave after wave of self-loathing.
~~~~
June 5th, 1975
Elizabeth wakes up at dawn. She no longer sleeps well.
She takes her coffee into the sun room. She finds it hard to concentrate on the newspaper's headlines and fusses with the hairpins holding her French twist in place. To keep herself busy, she waters her orchids with the fertilizer Bill got from one of his colleagues. It doesn't take long enough, so she heads for her kitchen and start sorting out her fridge. She does her best not to check her watch too often.
A black Sedan drops her son home around 10am.
She runs to him, the pristine white gravel on their driveway crushing under her Lacoste tennis shoes. “Fox, honey,” she clutches him so tightly, he probably can’t breathe. “How are you feeling?”
“Sleepy,” he mumbles against her shoulder. His movements are sluggish. She ushers him up to his bedroom, helping him a couple of times when he stumbles on the stairs.
She doesn’t like it.
Bill was called to work a few hours earlier. He said he could well be gone a week. How convenient.
She helps her son lie down. He’s muttering something, but she’s too preoccupied by his condition to make sense of it. His forehead is slightly warm. There is a Band-Aid on his upper arm, and a needle mark in the crook of his elbow.
“The light,” Fox mumbles, eyelids fluttering. “The white light...Sam....”
She absorbs this somehow without reaction. “Get some rest, sweetheart,” she tells him softly. Her eyes fall on the picture by the bedside: Samantha grins at her happily from the monkey bars. Dear God, her children. What have they done to them?
Elizabeth pulls a blanket over her son and hurries out of the room. She makes it to the end of the hall before letting herself drop onto the steps of their mahogany staircase, wishing she could cry.
She recognizes this unyielding sense of impending doom that spreads through her veins like hoarfrost. After all, she already lived through one doomsday. She knows what it feels like.
Over the years there have been conversations she’s done her best to ignore - not entirely successfully - it appears, as some of the pieces finally fall into place. She remembers drunken nonsense overheard during summer barbecues and Thanksgiving dinners. She recalls hushed words behind parlour doors; words like ‘containment’, words like ‘control’.
And suddenly she knows.
Quite suddenly, and with perfect clarity, she knows her marriage is over.
Elizabeth, whom everybody, apart from her husband, calls Teena, stumbles down the stairs and out into the backyard. She runs to the tree house and begins to climb. The rope ladder is slick with rain and smells like wet hay. She ignores the splinter that knicks her palm as she pulls herself up.
She already knows what she’s going to find before she reaches the top and hauls herself into the small, dusty shelter.
All the walls of the tree house are now bare.
THE END.
****
Story Timeline:
October 13, 1973
Bill Mulder finds out he must give up a child.
November 27, 1973
Samantha disappears.
****
More notes:
"I couldn't choose. It was your father's choice, and I hated him for it.” I always had issues with this apparent confession from Elizabeth ‘Teena’ Mulder in ‘Paper Clip’. Things just don’t add up. If it was Bill’s choice, to have Samantha abducted why did he need to tell his civilian wife at all? Why not leave her in the dark? Why would he risk having his wife hate him? And what made Bill reconsider and take Samantha when Fox had obviously been the first choice?
And while I have doubts about the accuracy of Mulder’s flashbacks in ‘Demons’ since Moose’s brain was pretty much scrambled by horse tranquilisers and that hole drilled in his brain, I did use a line of dialogue from this episode, when Mrs Mulder confronts her husband about his job.
This story follows the following hypothesis: if you tell yourself something false for long enough to give yourself good conscience, you will end up believing it’s the truth. I think Mrs. Mulder convinced herself over the years that everything had been Bill’s fault and obliterated the role she played in the disappearance of her daughter.
The title comes from The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati. CSM quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29.
My story takes place about a year and a half after Samantha’s abduction because I figured it would take about a year for the Mulders to ‘officially’ give up on their daughter’s search.
Voila.