Home, Home
where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day
1. The woman stepped outside, waving her cell phone around, saying something about reception. She shrugged with a harried grin: technology, what’re you gonna do! Mulder assumed it was some kind of real estate agent trick, leaving them alone in the house. She’d inspect her nails for three or four minutes while they went back and forth. What do you think, well, what do you think?
They’d been eyeing each other, he and Scully, as they walked around the slightly ramshackle house. A fixer upper, the boards of the porch soft under their feet, dark patches on the hardwood floors, cloudy windows that made you blink with no results. They’d been eyeing each other, edging glances, biting their lips to keep from grinning. We are allowed, he kept telling himself. We are allowed to smile about baseboards and kitchen cabinets and weatherproofing. We are allowed.
Having an address again. Having a bed that was theirs, that hadn’t been slept on by hundreds of other people, sheets that didn’t smell like industrial strength bleach. Ice that didn’t come from hollow, rattling machines. A refrigerator instead of an Igloo cooler. No more settling up bills, no more rent checks. A lock and a key.
“So? What do you think?” Scully had wandered off and he found her upstairs in the master bedroom, opening and closing the closet door.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Mulder. Those books didn’t help at all.” She’d done her research, library books piled up on the slippery quilt of their latest motel room, and she seemed flummoxed that studying hadn’t proved helpful. Mulder had told her they’d wing it, but didn’t gloat now.
“Well, that door seems to open and close properly.”
“Yes. I have done a thorough inspection and this door is excellent. It opens--” She opened it. “And closes.” She closed it firmly.
“Your investigational skills are serving us well.” He paused, slipped a hand into hers, swinging it lightly. “We’re buying a house.” A reminder.They had acted, so far, like they were doing nothing out of the ordinary. Oh, sure, buying a house, we’ve done that dozens of times.
Her eyes widened and she chewed her bottom lip and she grinned.
“We’re buying a house. Mulder.”
“Yes?”
“We’re buying a house.”
Technically she was buying a house, since it was mutually agreed that having his name on any legally binding document was a bad, bad idea. Still. They were buying a house.
Their earthly possessions were few. Sure, there were some things in storage, somewhere in D.C. To be sent for or retrieved, another mission for Scully to carry out alone. But what they had with them? It fit in the trunk of the car, in a few ugly bags. (Scully had always liked her matching luggage so much, appreciated quiet details like patterned lining and hidden zippers.) Clothes, toiletries, pictures and paperwork and notes rubberbanded together in several black journals, a yellowing copy of “Moby Dick” snagged at a flea market for a quarter. Mulder had sketched a miniature Big Blue on the title page with a golf pencil. A speech bubble above the cryptid’s head read: I’M REAL!
Neither of them had ever been excessively concerned with acquiring things, but it was amazing, in the course of a normal life, how much you collected without even trying. Their old lives seemed stuffed to the gills, unwieldy.
They made an emergency shopping trip: bath towels, pillows, toilet paper and three cheap lamps, one of which sat next to them on the floor of their bedroom. They lay on two sleeping bags zipped together, looking up at the bare walls, heads on their caseless pillows, dreaming of paint chips.
In the middle of the night.
“It’s okay, isn’t it? We’re okay? Because I don’t think I can--”
A hesitation. Then.
“Yes.”
“Mulder?”
“Yes. We’re going to be okay.”
“Don’t lie to me, Mulder. Please.” A small voice.
He turned over, zipped the bag up a little more, pressed his head to hers.
“We’re okay.”
2. It was hard, at first. She could barely remember having a job without him. His lost years didn’t count, she’d rubbed at those until they were erased, blew the pink shavings away. There were files and reports, evidence that she’d come to work every day, every single day, but she’d zombied through those every single days and her signature scrawled on countless carbons couldn’t convince her otherwise.
For years, though, she had spent more time with him every day than with anyone else, herself included. She found herself looking to the side, expecting him there. Her phantom limb.
She had gone too long without him, too. Those lost years. Feeling that same amputee pinprick and knowing there was nothing she could do about it. She would’ve gnawed off an appendage to get him back. A trade. Had she?
And so she wondered if she was being too cavalier, jumping too easily at the chance to work. She loved to work. But without him? Traitor! (We have to eat, don’t we? Money doesn’t grow on trees.) But maybe: she should be there with him, always. Was she wasting his return? Though certainly that couldn’t be healthy, staring at him, latching onto him, locking him away. Could it? If that lifestyle got a stamp of approval, if she read an article in JAMA championing codependent relationships, she would gladly have shed her white coat and her j-o-b to spend her days holed up with Mulder, tangled in the sheets, peeking under rocks, looking to the skies.
She ducked into bathrooms at lunchtime to listen to him munch on a sandwich and tell her about something he’d read. “Heuvelmans Lake, Scully. Can you believe it? The frogs are back.”
It was late September, a Friday. And she was going out of her mind. The Indian summer was slipping into window-rattling winds in the evening, blowing the sticky heat away with the edge of winter. Layers were the order of the day, a trench coat, a cardigan, sloughed off by noon.
The day had been long. She suspected some kind of phenomenon in which minutes were gained, rather than lost. Note to self. Her head slipped buzzily away in meetings, she covertly tilted her wrist in her lap to check the time.
The damn gate stuck in a clump of grass (of course it did) and she quietly cursed it as she threw her hip into the metal, shoving it open. She dutifully accelerated forward, got out again, closed it. A satisfying thunk of the latch. Mulder’s moat.
She tossed her coat in the vague direction of the couch and dropped her bag to the floor. Her idea of wantonness was being a sloppy, careless housekeeper.
Mulder was folding laundry in the bedroom, a picture of sweet domesticity. She wanted to eat him alive.
“Hi,” he said, his eyes crinkling. “The afternoon kind of got away from me. We’re going to have to forage for dinner.”
When she came up for air, he was pinned to a pile of towels on the bed and she’d managed to disengage one of his arms from his shirt.
“I should do laundry more often.” He pulled his shirt all the way off and tossed it to the floor, stretching.
“I missed you,” she said, slipping her tongue into his mouth again, pressing herself to him. His hands, so light on the backs of her thighs. Why was she still wearing pants?
“I didn’t think the day would ever end. I felt like I might never see you again.” Her mouth hot, the flats of her teeth pressed against his neck, tongue on his pulse. So unlike her, this frank neediness. This honest wanting. It made him a little weak.
They settled in the middle of the bed, facing each other, Mulder on his right side, Scully on her left. She had her arms flung around him and he was lightly xylophoning her ribs with his fingertips.
“What’s going on?” he whispered. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
She tucked her head under his chin. “Nothing.”
“Ah.”
"Nothing.”
“Did I say anything?”
“Stop reading my mind. It’s rude.”
He reached between them and started unbuttoning her cardigan.
“So. I told you,” she said slowly into his bare chest, “I missed you.”
He rubbed circles on her back in response. Waiting. He was getting better at this whole being patient thing. At listening, at letting her silences bleed into words instead of jumping in and trampling all over her thoughts.
“I just--I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting you to be there. I walk up stairs and I expect to feel your hand on my back. I--it’s silly.”
He ran a finger over the ridges of her spine.
“I talk to you during the day. Out loud. Not on purpose, but I can’t really figure things out anymore unless I have a philosophical argument about it first.”
She laughed, kissed the hollow dip of his sternum. “We’re a couple of crazy people.”
“Mm. Well, good thing we found each other.”
“Good thing.”
3. They sent exactly one Christmas card, to Scully’s mother. It wasn’t as if their address book was bursting at the seams, and it didn’t seem the wisest idea, anyway, mass mailings. Merry Christmas, Here We Are!
Beneath the printed greeting, she’d written “Love, Dana and.” There was a blank, white expanse after that. Her hand was refusing to write his first name. But she didn’t like the lopsidedness of “Dana and Mulder.” That seemed silly, asymmetrical. And she certainly couldn’t sign a card to her own mother using her last name. Who did that? She was chewing on her pen, decisions, decisions (what about “You Know Who”? what about “That Guy”?), when he leaned over the back of her chair, zipping up his fuzzy brown coat.
“What are you doing?”
“Christmas card.”
“For?”
“My mom.”
“Here.”
He made a gimme-gimme motion with his hand and took the card and pen from her. Scrawled “Fox” behind the “and.” (It was what her mother called him, after all.) Gave it back to her. Kissed her on the jaw.
“I’m going to get milk. You need anything?”
He came back with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, a red and green tree stand in a box, and some candy canes. There were eleven in the package and one in his mouth.
4. After a few years, they didn’t have the kinds of dreams they used to have.
For the most part.
Occasionally those old dreams slipped in, acrid and oily, raw throated screams, sleeping hands reaching for guns, for each other, for a little boy who looked like Mulder in the old pictures he’d saved from his mother’s basement. They woke crying dry tears and held each other for long minutes. How had they lived, how had they slept, when this was what had greeted them every time their eyelids slid shut? How had they lived so far away from each other all those dark years, treading water alone in the night? They ached for their younger selves, wanted to send notes, tell them things would be okay.
For the most part. Okay.
But now, now, in the bluish light of the morning, they would turn to each other, scrunching a pillow, propping an elbow, and say:
“It was a giant moose, and he was talking in a high pitched voice. Like he’d sucked helium. And he was in the kitchen sink. It wasn’t actually the kitchen sink, but in the dream I knew that’s what it was.” “A moose wouldn’t fit in the actual kitchen sink.” “I know that.”
“I’d made corn on the cob, a huge basket of it, and you were wearing a tutu.” “I bet you’d like that.” “Now that you mention it.” “I’ll think about it.”
Mulder snored sometimes and Scully talked in her sleep.
“Your dreams are so boring,” he said. “Don’t you ever have any sexy dreams?” He winked at her, licked his lips.
“You pick: you want actual sex or sexy dreams? Because I don’t think you’re getting both.”
He fake cried and buried his face in her hair, slung a leg over her hip.
“But what if I want both?”
“So greedy,” she murmured into the top of his head.
“I want it all,” he said and licked her neck.
5. “I have a green thumb, Scully."
It was spring and twilight smelled like cool dirt and sweet grass, the window above the sink cracked open just enough to make their toes cold against the kitchen floor. They did the dishes, Mulder washing and Scully drying. A dishwasher was an extravagance and tempted the fickle fates of plumbing.
It was spring and Mulder wanted to start a garden.
Scully grabbed his hand, drying it off with her dishtowel, and inspected his allegedly green thumb.
“It’s not ripe yet,” he said haughtily as he pulled it away and dipped a blue plate into the suds.
“You already bought the seeds, didn’t you?”
He ran a rag over the dish and then stuck it under the clear tap.
“Ye of little faith. Maybe I should get some overalls.”
As in all things, he was thorough. Edges marked off, lines hoed, strings holding up stakes, silos of chicken wire around the dusty tomato plants. “Squirrels are afoot,” he said. “Yeah, something’s afoot,” she replied.
She slathered herself in sunscreen, only caring a little about how greasy her face got. She closed the bathroom door to do it, because Mulder would want to help if she didn’t. While enthusiastic about application, he had a tendency to fixate on certain patches of skin and she ended up pinking in random splotches.
In a creaky lawn chair, she read and watched him work.
She dozed in the May Sunday sun, the back of her neck sticky against the prickly, fraying straps of the chair.
It could’ve been minutes, could’ve been hours, when he finished. He swiped her glass of sun tea and sat down in front of her, leaning his head back, waking her up. She closed her unread book and raked her fingers through his wet hair. He shivered, goose bumps. He tilted his head against her thigh and looped his arms around her legs.
“Mulder, your hands are dirty.”
He ran them up and down her shins, slicking the sheen of sweat and sunscreen with the dust, streaking her legs brown.
“Get up.”
“I like it here.” He turned his head and nipped at the salty edge of her knee. She tasted like baseball practice.
“Get up. You’re not going inside like that.”
The hose was coiled on the side of the house, bottle green and waiting to strike. She unwound it and turned it on, the water trickling out, warm at first, then cooler. She held it to her mouth for a taste. It was as she remembered from childhood, earthy and a little sweet.
He stood still as she rinsed off his hands, then his arms, then his legs and feet. The ground was turning into a mud pie and he wiggled his toes in it. He took the hose from her and sprayed her legs, sluicing the water off with the edge of his hand. She tilted her face up at him, squinting in the sun. He held the hose over her head and water ran in rivulets down her knotted hair, dotting her tank top. He took a drink and kissed her, the water still running. His lips were cold.
“Look.” He gasped and whispered, clutching her back to him, pointing out a squirrel nervously dancing at the property line. Chin on her shoulder. “He’s returning to the scene of the crime.”
The hose, meanwhile, bubbled up and soaked her shirt as she lost herself in the wonder of letting Mulder be her tour guide to the fantastic.
“Recidivist offenders are often bold,” she replied. He nodded.
Mulder’s head thrown back on the couch, muscles taut. The sides of Scully’s knees pressing into his hips. Damp shirts on the floor, late afternoon light gritty and glary through the front window. It made her squint, pupils dilating as she looked down at him below her in the dim room.
“Oh, Scully,” he said.
“I know,” she said, awed. “Still.”
His hands running up her cool sides, the sound of a bird’s muffled wings, skin on skin. Cultivating a garden. Tending to it.
When she got home from work, a rare late shift, Mulder was conked out on the couch, Letterman flickering blue across his face. In the kitchen, she found his first harvest spread out across the table.
Three tomatoes, roughly the size of tennis balls, velvety green stems still attached.
Four green peppers, lumpy as melted wax.
A handful of spindly carrots, the tips of which were nearly translucent.
They’d have salads tomorrow. Next to the carrots was a stack of pages with a post-it stuck on top: “READ ME!” A new article, a new pseudonym.
She made a cup of tea and went back to the living room, where Mulder was quietly breathing and Richard Simmons was shimmying around Letterman’s desk. “No court would convict me,” Dave was saying. Richard smoothed an oiled limb and gave his best wounded deer look to the camera.
She sat down with a pencil and wrote notes to Mulder in the margins. The old dance.
6. Scully had seen something in the shed. A possum, she thought, all beady eyes and quivering body and that thick, ratty tail.
She didn’t make a sound, just calmly turned and headed back to the house, where she collected Mulder and a pair of flashlights and a broom, which Mulder was now wielding as they made their approach.
“Are you sure I don’t need something more than this? I mean, do you want me to sweep him out of there or what?”
They had guns stashed in the house, but Scully mostly liked to pretend they weren’t there. When she thought of them, she felt like a desperado, waiting for her hideout to be shot up. Not if, only when. She wanted them to be the sort of people who used household items as weapons against wildlife.
“Just the broom. We can nudge it.”
“Oh. Nudge it. Scully, maybe we should just accept that it has squatter’s rights. Cede the shed to him and move on.”
“Ready?” She looked back at him, the twin beams of their flashlights playing against the corrugated side of the shed.
7. It happened in slow motion, he later said, as he recounted it to Scully. If it happened in slow motion, why didn’t you stop it? He found himself feeling belated sympathy for everyone she’d ever interrogated over the years, regardless of their guilt.
He was only trying to make some French toast. For her! That was what really stung. So what if he’d been careless pulling the plate out of the cabinet? It was his damn house and his damn plate, he really shouldn’t have to stake out the cabinet and take safety precautions before taking one plate out. One plate! Should he?
Start from the beginning. The very beginning? She was in the shower. He was reading the sports section when he was struck by a very potent desire to be the best kind of man he could be. (Laughter is not helpful here, Scully, he said later. You’re the best kind of man you can be, she said to him repeatedly for approximately the next two weeks.) He cracked an egg and whisked it with milk, dipped two slices of bread, sizzled them into the skillet.
He was getting a plate out of the cabinet, thinking about clever ways to garnish the dish, when it caught on the lid of a small, expensive glass bottle. A glass bottle which knocked solidly into the cross bar of the cabinet and rolled out, nicking the counter loudly on its way down to the floor, where it landed next to Mulder’s left foot, cracking softly open like a hard boiled egg, spilling cinnamon.
Shit.
He heard his name come tentatively from upstairs but ignored it. Maybe he should have yelled “I’m fine!” in a friendly voice. Moments later, Scully padded into the kitchen wearing black pants and a black bra and damp hair. He quickly mourned the loss of a Mulder who believed he would never be disappointed to see a vision like this.
He decided to cut her off at the pass. In retrospect, well, perhaps the best thing to say hadn’t been, “Who the hell puts cinnamon in the same cabinet as the plates?”
In the approximately three seconds it took her to narrow her eyes, he realized that she had been willing to help him scrape up the clumps of overpriced cinnamon and move on with her day. I am an idiot, he thought to himself.
“Not everyone can be a tall drink of water like you, Mulder.” Was she mocking him? He felt oafish, which he supposed was the point. “I got sick of dragging a chair over.”
“You could’ve asked me. I could’ve reached it for you.” He was standing there like a doofus, unsure of what to do with his hands, which suddenly felt huge, like he was wearing a pair of foam fingers from the ballpark. She was her usual deft, industrious self, swiping paper towels under the tap, crouching down to clean up the mess he’d made.
She huffed, rolled her eyes, and started chucking hunks of glass past him, into the trashcan. She was an embarrassingly good shot in every way.
“Okay. So I’m guessing that means you couldn’t have asked me? Watch out!” He dodged a shard.
“Mulder, could you come and reach the cinnamon for me with your big, long, strong arms?” she sing-songed insipidly.
“Oh, plllllease. God, because asking me for help is the end of the world. I forgot. You could’ve at least told me you were storing a breakable object in the direct path of the plates. Am I going to get beaned with some bay leaves next time I reach for a glass?”
She finished with the mess, balling the paper towels in her fist.
“You went to Oxford, Mulder, I didn’t think I needed to make a sign for the cabinet explaining it.”
He snapped off the burner peevishly, showed her the charred remains of her breakfast.
“French toast. For you.” And dumped it in the trash.
8. The cicadas hummed their tightly wound symphony in the trees. Inside, the quiet crack and swish of Baseball Tonight.
“Do you miss your old couch?”
Her head was in his lap, a book open against her stomach. His bare feet were propped on the table and she flung an arm down his leg. He thought about it.
“No.”
“Really? I do.” She tilted her head up to look at him. “You know, the first time I saw it, I thought it was the most ridiculous couch I’d ever seen. Who buys a black leather couch? Were you trying to seem dangerous?”
“Did it work?”
They’d gotten better at talking about their old life, the little things that inhabited it. Little things that were no longer fraught with such meaning. It didn’t feel like a tightrope act to mention six, seven, eight years earlier.
“When did your hair get so long, you hippie?” He finger combed through it, shaking out the tangles. He sometimes woke up with it slung across his lips, soapy sweet.
“You should talk.” She reached up and rubbed at his sandpapery chin.
Her hair used to be all sharp angles, glossy strands whipping past her mouth, cornering over her moody eyes.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” He tugged at an end, twisted it around his finger.
9. A sushi-rolled bale of hay in the middle of a field, a turkey-shaped piece of warping plywood lashed to the front.
He looked manically happy, this plywood turkey, despite the red and black bull’s-eye wobbling on his distended belly. TRKEY SHOOT. KC GRNDS. EV SUN IN OCT N NOV! Rural route sign painters tended to be sloppy, loose with their punctuation, and seemed to operate in a close to vowelless code.
They’d passed it on a post office run. It held court on the slope of a barbed-wire ringed field, next to the two-lane highway.
“Turkey shoot!” Mulder had shouted, taking a hand off the wheel to point.
“Man hunted by FBI dies in car accident; cause: excitement over turkey shoot,” Scully headlined.
She told him that their FBI-approved marksmanship skills would brand them as turkey shoot ringers.
“Oh, why’d you have to say that, Scully? Now all I want to be is a turkey shoot ringer!” He sighed dolefully.
She assured him that, should they ever find themselves in dire straits again, they could travel the country being just that: a pair of turkey shoot ringers with a trunk full of Butterballs on ice.
10. They weren’t regulars anywhere, couldn’t risk becoming familiar faces. But they weren’t shut-ins. I’d rather die having had a decent slice of pizza now and then, Mulder would say. She’d purse her lips, casual mentions of death being what they were, and he’d wax poetic about slices he had loved and lost.
Mulder wore slouchy layers, let his hair go shaggy, sometimes grew a beard in the coldest months. He found a cardboard punch-out pair of glasses-nose-mustache in an old Mad magazine that was tucked between some Scientific Americans and a cache of stolen files in the bottom of a stowed-away box. He walked into the bedroom wearing them with only studied indifference and his boxers. Scully looked up briefly from her laptop, didn’t even stop tapping at the keys, just sighed and returned to her work. But then they went missing and she appeared at the kitchen table the next morning, disguised.
Scully couldn’t bear the thought of dyeing her hair anymore, was absolutely done with tacky bathroom sink rinses that left purplish splatters on the tile. She wore hats sometimes, at least when it seemed like wearing a hat would be less noticeable than long red hair.
She tugged on a fuzzy black cap that made her hair go static. Mulder moved his gloved hands back and forth around her head, making the sticky strands expand and collapse until she swatted his hand away and made him get in the car.
The restaurant was a hole in the wall. Maroon booths shoved into brick alcoves, dimly lit, busy enough that they could blend in, but not so busy that they felt jostled or exposed.
The pasta was mediocre, the wine was pretty good, they ate too much bread.
“It’s a bottomless bread basket, Scully. It’s like something you’d trade your magic beans for.”
“Maybe you’d trade your magic beans.”
“You wouldn’t? But it’s a basket that never runs out of bread!”
In the parking lot, their breath huffed icily in the night air. Downy bits of snow twirled around them. They bumped into each other as they walked, and Scully stuck out her tongue to catch a flake.
Mulder spoke quickly, like he was afraid the words would melt with the early snow if he didn’t get them out. He was balancing the squeaky to-go boxes in one hand and trying to unlock the door with the other. Across the top of the car, she looked at him through her eyelashes, bouncing on her toes to keep warm.
“I didn’t think I deserved this.”
“What?”
He looked down, fumbling with the keyring. Bashful.
“This. My life has turned out to be infinitely better than I could’ve hoped. Than I had a right to hope.”
She stilled as he met her eye and she clutched at the door handle. Warmth spreading across her chest like she’d done a shot of particularly potent liquor.
“Better than you could’ve hoped?” She took a breath. “Even with-- Even with everything?”
He popped the key in the lock.
“You have no idea.”
Tears pricked at her eyes and she pretended it was the cold.
“Let’s go home.”
(with a thank you to j&j.)
[pre-iwtb, those six years, vignettes, msr, what's the opposite of angst?]
1. The woman stepped outside, waving her cell phone around, saying something about reception. She shrugged with a harried grin: technology, what’re you gonna do! Mulder assumed it was some kind of real estate agent trick, leaving them alone in the house. She’d inspect her nails for three or four minutes while they went back and forth. What do you think, well, what do you think?
They’d been eyeing each other, he and Scully, as they walked around the slightly ramshackle house. A fixer upper, the boards of the porch soft under their feet, dark patches on the hardwood floors, cloudy windows that made you blink with no results. They’d been eyeing each other, edging glances, biting their lips to keep from grinning. We are allowed, he kept telling himself. We are allowed to smile about baseboards and kitchen cabinets and weatherproofing. We are allowed.
Having an address again. Having a bed that was theirs, that hadn’t been slept on by hundreds of other people, sheets that didn’t smell like industrial strength bleach. Ice that didn’t come from hollow, rattling machines. A refrigerator instead of an Igloo cooler. No more settling up bills, no more rent checks. A lock and a key.
“So? What do you think?” Scully had wandered off and he found her upstairs in the master bedroom, opening and closing the closet door.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Mulder. Those books didn’t help at all.” She’d done her research, library books piled up on the slippery quilt of their latest motel room, and she seemed flummoxed that studying hadn’t proved helpful. Mulder had told her they’d wing it, but didn’t gloat now.
“Well, that door seems to open and close properly.”
“Yes. I have done a thorough inspection and this door is excellent. It opens--” She opened it. “And closes.” She closed it firmly.
“Your investigational skills are serving us well.” He paused, slipped a hand into hers, swinging it lightly. “We’re buying a house.” A reminder.They had acted, so far, like they were doing nothing out of the ordinary. Oh, sure, buying a house, we’ve done that dozens of times.
Her eyes widened and she chewed her bottom lip and she grinned.
“We’re buying a house. Mulder.”
“Yes?”
“We’re buying a house.”
Technically she was buying a house, since it was mutually agreed that having his name on any legally binding document was a bad, bad idea. Still. They were buying a house.
Their earthly possessions were few. Sure, there were some things in storage, somewhere in D.C. To be sent for or retrieved, another mission for Scully to carry out alone. But what they had with them? It fit in the trunk of the car, in a few ugly bags. (Scully had always liked her matching luggage so much, appreciated quiet details like patterned lining and hidden zippers.) Clothes, toiletries, pictures and paperwork and notes rubberbanded together in several black journals, a yellowing copy of “Moby Dick” snagged at a flea market for a quarter. Mulder had sketched a miniature Big Blue on the title page with a golf pencil. A speech bubble above the cryptid’s head read: I’M REAL!
Neither of them had ever been excessively concerned with acquiring things, but it was amazing, in the course of a normal life, how much you collected without even trying. Their old lives seemed stuffed to the gills, unwieldy.
They made an emergency shopping trip: bath towels, pillows, toilet paper and three cheap lamps, one of which sat next to them on the floor of their bedroom. They lay on two sleeping bags zipped together, looking up at the bare walls, heads on their caseless pillows, dreaming of paint chips.
In the middle of the night.
“It’s okay, isn’t it? We’re okay? Because I don’t think I can--”
A hesitation. Then.
“Yes.”
“Mulder?”
“Yes. We’re going to be okay.”
“Don’t lie to me, Mulder. Please.” A small voice.
He turned over, zipped the bag up a little more, pressed his head to hers.
“We’re okay.”
2. It was hard, at first. She could barely remember having a job without him. His lost years didn’t count, she’d rubbed at those until they were erased, blew the pink shavings away. There were files and reports, evidence that she’d come to work every day, every single day, but she’d zombied through those every single days and her signature scrawled on countless carbons couldn’t convince her otherwise.
For years, though, she had spent more time with him every day than with anyone else, herself included. She found herself looking to the side, expecting him there. Her phantom limb.
She had gone too long without him, too. Those lost years. Feeling that same amputee pinprick and knowing there was nothing she could do about it. She would’ve gnawed off an appendage to get him back. A trade. Had she?
And so she wondered if she was being too cavalier, jumping too easily at the chance to work. She loved to work. But without him? Traitor! (We have to eat, don’t we? Money doesn’t grow on trees.) But maybe: she should be there with him, always. Was she wasting his return? Though certainly that couldn’t be healthy, staring at him, latching onto him, locking him away. Could it? If that lifestyle got a stamp of approval, if she read an article in JAMA championing codependent relationships, she would gladly have shed her white coat and her j-o-b to spend her days holed up with Mulder, tangled in the sheets, peeking under rocks, looking to the skies.
She ducked into bathrooms at lunchtime to listen to him munch on a sandwich and tell her about something he’d read. “Heuvelmans Lake, Scully. Can you believe it? The frogs are back.”
It was late September, a Friday. And she was going out of her mind. The Indian summer was slipping into window-rattling winds in the evening, blowing the sticky heat away with the edge of winter. Layers were the order of the day, a trench coat, a cardigan, sloughed off by noon.
The day had been long. She suspected some kind of phenomenon in which minutes were gained, rather than lost. Note to self. Her head slipped buzzily away in meetings, she covertly tilted her wrist in her lap to check the time.
The damn gate stuck in a clump of grass (of course it did) and she quietly cursed it as she threw her hip into the metal, shoving it open. She dutifully accelerated forward, got out again, closed it. A satisfying thunk of the latch. Mulder’s moat.
She tossed her coat in the vague direction of the couch and dropped her bag to the floor. Her idea of wantonness was being a sloppy, careless housekeeper.
Mulder was folding laundry in the bedroom, a picture of sweet domesticity. She wanted to eat him alive.
“Hi,” he said, his eyes crinkling. “The afternoon kind of got away from me. We’re going to have to forage for dinner.”
When she came up for air, he was pinned to a pile of towels on the bed and she’d managed to disengage one of his arms from his shirt.
“I should do laundry more often.” He pulled his shirt all the way off and tossed it to the floor, stretching.
“I missed you,” she said, slipping her tongue into his mouth again, pressing herself to him. His hands, so light on the backs of her thighs. Why was she still wearing pants?
“I didn’t think the day would ever end. I felt like I might never see you again.” Her mouth hot, the flats of her teeth pressed against his neck, tongue on his pulse. So unlike her, this frank neediness. This honest wanting. It made him a little weak.
They settled in the middle of the bed, facing each other, Mulder on his right side, Scully on her left. She had her arms flung around him and he was lightly xylophoning her ribs with his fingertips.
“What’s going on?” he whispered. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
She tucked her head under his chin. “Nothing.”
“Ah.”
"Nothing.”
“Did I say anything?”
“Stop reading my mind. It’s rude.”
He reached between them and started unbuttoning her cardigan.
“So. I told you,” she said slowly into his bare chest, “I missed you.”
He rubbed circles on her back in response. Waiting. He was getting better at this whole being patient thing. At listening, at letting her silences bleed into words instead of jumping in and trampling all over her thoughts.
“I just--I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting you to be there. I walk up stairs and I expect to feel your hand on my back. I--it’s silly.”
He ran a finger over the ridges of her spine.
“I talk to you during the day. Out loud. Not on purpose, but I can’t really figure things out anymore unless I have a philosophical argument about it first.”
She laughed, kissed the hollow dip of his sternum. “We’re a couple of crazy people.”
“Mm. Well, good thing we found each other.”
“Good thing.”
3. They sent exactly one Christmas card, to Scully’s mother. It wasn’t as if their address book was bursting at the seams, and it didn’t seem the wisest idea, anyway, mass mailings. Merry Christmas, Here We Are!
Beneath the printed greeting, she’d written “Love, Dana and.” There was a blank, white expanse after that. Her hand was refusing to write his first name. But she didn’t like the lopsidedness of “Dana and Mulder.” That seemed silly, asymmetrical. And she certainly couldn’t sign a card to her own mother using her last name. Who did that? She was chewing on her pen, decisions, decisions (what about “You Know Who”? what about “That Guy”?), when he leaned over the back of her chair, zipping up his fuzzy brown coat.
“What are you doing?”
“Christmas card.”
“For?”
“My mom.”
“Here.”
He made a gimme-gimme motion with his hand and took the card and pen from her. Scrawled “Fox” behind the “and.” (It was what her mother called him, after all.) Gave it back to her. Kissed her on the jaw.
“I’m going to get milk. You need anything?”
He came back with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, a red and green tree stand in a box, and some candy canes. There were eleven in the package and one in his mouth.
4. After a few years, they didn’t have the kinds of dreams they used to have.
For the most part.
Occasionally those old dreams slipped in, acrid and oily, raw throated screams, sleeping hands reaching for guns, for each other, for a little boy who looked like Mulder in the old pictures he’d saved from his mother’s basement. They woke crying dry tears and held each other for long minutes. How had they lived, how had they slept, when this was what had greeted them every time their eyelids slid shut? How had they lived so far away from each other all those dark years, treading water alone in the night? They ached for their younger selves, wanted to send notes, tell them things would be okay.
For the most part. Okay.
But now, now, in the bluish light of the morning, they would turn to each other, scrunching a pillow, propping an elbow, and say:
“It was a giant moose, and he was talking in a high pitched voice. Like he’d sucked helium. And he was in the kitchen sink. It wasn’t actually the kitchen sink, but in the dream I knew that’s what it was.” “A moose wouldn’t fit in the actual kitchen sink.” “I know that.”
“I’d made corn on the cob, a huge basket of it, and you were wearing a tutu.” “I bet you’d like that.” “Now that you mention it.” “I’ll think about it.”
Mulder snored sometimes and Scully talked in her sleep.
“Your dreams are so boring,” he said. “Don’t you ever have any sexy dreams?” He winked at her, licked his lips.
“You pick: you want actual sex or sexy dreams? Because I don’t think you’re getting both.”
He fake cried and buried his face in her hair, slung a leg over her hip.
“But what if I want both?”
“So greedy,” she murmured into the top of his head.
“I want it all,” he said and licked her neck.
5. “I have a green thumb, Scully."
It was spring and twilight smelled like cool dirt and sweet grass, the window above the sink cracked open just enough to make their toes cold against the kitchen floor. They did the dishes, Mulder washing and Scully drying. A dishwasher was an extravagance and tempted the fickle fates of plumbing.
It was spring and Mulder wanted to start a garden.
Scully grabbed his hand, drying it off with her dishtowel, and inspected his allegedly green thumb.
“It’s not ripe yet,” he said haughtily as he pulled it away and dipped a blue plate into the suds.
“You already bought the seeds, didn’t you?”
He ran a rag over the dish and then stuck it under the clear tap.
“Ye of little faith. Maybe I should get some overalls.”
As in all things, he was thorough. Edges marked off, lines hoed, strings holding up stakes, silos of chicken wire around the dusty tomato plants. “Squirrels are afoot,” he said. “Yeah, something’s afoot,” she replied.
She slathered herself in sunscreen, only caring a little about how greasy her face got. She closed the bathroom door to do it, because Mulder would want to help if she didn’t. While enthusiastic about application, he had a tendency to fixate on certain patches of skin and she ended up pinking in random splotches.
In a creaky lawn chair, she read and watched him work.
She dozed in the May Sunday sun, the back of her neck sticky against the prickly, fraying straps of the chair.
It could’ve been minutes, could’ve been hours, when he finished. He swiped her glass of sun tea and sat down in front of her, leaning his head back, waking her up. She closed her unread book and raked her fingers through his wet hair. He shivered, goose bumps. He tilted his head against her thigh and looped his arms around her legs.
“Mulder, your hands are dirty.”
He ran them up and down her shins, slicking the sheen of sweat and sunscreen with the dust, streaking her legs brown.
“Get up.”
“I like it here.” He turned his head and nipped at the salty edge of her knee. She tasted like baseball practice.
“Get up. You’re not going inside like that.”
The hose was coiled on the side of the house, bottle green and waiting to strike. She unwound it and turned it on, the water trickling out, warm at first, then cooler. She held it to her mouth for a taste. It was as she remembered from childhood, earthy and a little sweet.
He stood still as she rinsed off his hands, then his arms, then his legs and feet. The ground was turning into a mud pie and he wiggled his toes in it. He took the hose from her and sprayed her legs, sluicing the water off with the edge of his hand. She tilted her face up at him, squinting in the sun. He held the hose over her head and water ran in rivulets down her knotted hair, dotting her tank top. He took a drink and kissed her, the water still running. His lips were cold.
“Look.” He gasped and whispered, clutching her back to him, pointing out a squirrel nervously dancing at the property line. Chin on her shoulder. “He’s returning to the scene of the crime.”
The hose, meanwhile, bubbled up and soaked her shirt as she lost herself in the wonder of letting Mulder be her tour guide to the fantastic.
“Recidivist offenders are often bold,” she replied. He nodded.
Mulder’s head thrown back on the couch, muscles taut. The sides of Scully’s knees pressing into his hips. Damp shirts on the floor, late afternoon light gritty and glary through the front window. It made her squint, pupils dilating as she looked down at him below her in the dim room.
“Oh, Scully,” he said.
“I know,” she said, awed. “Still.”
His hands running up her cool sides, the sound of a bird’s muffled wings, skin on skin. Cultivating a garden. Tending to it.
When she got home from work, a rare late shift, Mulder was conked out on the couch, Letterman flickering blue across his face. In the kitchen, she found his first harvest spread out across the table.
Three tomatoes, roughly the size of tennis balls, velvety green stems still attached.
Four green peppers, lumpy as melted wax.
A handful of spindly carrots, the tips of which were nearly translucent.
They’d have salads tomorrow. Next to the carrots was a stack of pages with a post-it stuck on top: “READ ME!” A new article, a new pseudonym.
She made a cup of tea and went back to the living room, where Mulder was quietly breathing and Richard Simmons was shimmying around Letterman’s desk. “No court would convict me,” Dave was saying. Richard smoothed an oiled limb and gave his best wounded deer look to the camera.
She sat down with a pencil and wrote notes to Mulder in the margins. The old dance.
6. Scully had seen something in the shed. A possum, she thought, all beady eyes and quivering body and that thick, ratty tail.
She didn’t make a sound, just calmly turned and headed back to the house, where she collected Mulder and a pair of flashlights and a broom, which Mulder was now wielding as they made their approach.
“Are you sure I don’t need something more than this? I mean, do you want me to sweep him out of there or what?”
They had guns stashed in the house, but Scully mostly liked to pretend they weren’t there. When she thought of them, she felt like a desperado, waiting for her hideout to be shot up. Not if, only when. She wanted them to be the sort of people who used household items as weapons against wildlife.
“Just the broom. We can nudge it.”
“Oh. Nudge it. Scully, maybe we should just accept that it has squatter’s rights. Cede the shed to him and move on.”
“Ready?” She looked back at him, the twin beams of their flashlights playing against the corrugated side of the shed.
7. It happened in slow motion, he later said, as he recounted it to Scully. If it happened in slow motion, why didn’t you stop it? He found himself feeling belated sympathy for everyone she’d ever interrogated over the years, regardless of their guilt.
He was only trying to make some French toast. For her! That was what really stung. So what if he’d been careless pulling the plate out of the cabinet? It was his damn house and his damn plate, he really shouldn’t have to stake out the cabinet and take safety precautions before taking one plate out. One plate! Should he?
Start from the beginning. The very beginning? She was in the shower. He was reading the sports section when he was struck by a very potent desire to be the best kind of man he could be. (Laughter is not helpful here, Scully, he said later. You’re the best kind of man you can be, she said to him repeatedly for approximately the next two weeks.) He cracked an egg and whisked it with milk, dipped two slices of bread, sizzled them into the skillet.
He was getting a plate out of the cabinet, thinking about clever ways to garnish the dish, when it caught on the lid of a small, expensive glass bottle. A glass bottle which knocked solidly into the cross bar of the cabinet and rolled out, nicking the counter loudly on its way down to the floor, where it landed next to Mulder’s left foot, cracking softly open like a hard boiled egg, spilling cinnamon.
Shit.
He heard his name come tentatively from upstairs but ignored it. Maybe he should have yelled “I’m fine!” in a friendly voice. Moments later, Scully padded into the kitchen wearing black pants and a black bra and damp hair. He quickly mourned the loss of a Mulder who believed he would never be disappointed to see a vision like this.
He decided to cut her off at the pass. In retrospect, well, perhaps the best thing to say hadn’t been, “Who the hell puts cinnamon in the same cabinet as the plates?”
In the approximately three seconds it took her to narrow her eyes, he realized that she had been willing to help him scrape up the clumps of overpriced cinnamon and move on with her day. I am an idiot, he thought to himself.
“Not everyone can be a tall drink of water like you, Mulder.” Was she mocking him? He felt oafish, which he supposed was the point. “I got sick of dragging a chair over.”
“You could’ve asked me. I could’ve reached it for you.” He was standing there like a doofus, unsure of what to do with his hands, which suddenly felt huge, like he was wearing a pair of foam fingers from the ballpark. She was her usual deft, industrious self, swiping paper towels under the tap, crouching down to clean up the mess he’d made.
She huffed, rolled her eyes, and started chucking hunks of glass past him, into the trashcan. She was an embarrassingly good shot in every way.
“Okay. So I’m guessing that means you couldn’t have asked me? Watch out!” He dodged a shard.
“Mulder, could you come and reach the cinnamon for me with your big, long, strong arms?” she sing-songed insipidly.
“Oh, plllllease. God, because asking me for help is the end of the world. I forgot. You could’ve at least told me you were storing a breakable object in the direct path of the plates. Am I going to get beaned with some bay leaves next time I reach for a glass?”
She finished with the mess, balling the paper towels in her fist.
“You went to Oxford, Mulder, I didn’t think I needed to make a sign for the cabinet explaining it.”
He snapped off the burner peevishly, showed her the charred remains of her breakfast.
“French toast. For you.” And dumped it in the trash.
8. The cicadas hummed their tightly wound symphony in the trees. Inside, the quiet crack and swish of Baseball Tonight.
“Do you miss your old couch?”
Her head was in his lap, a book open against her stomach. His bare feet were propped on the table and she flung an arm down his leg. He thought about it.
“No.”
“Really? I do.” She tilted her head up to look at him. “You know, the first time I saw it, I thought it was the most ridiculous couch I’d ever seen. Who buys a black leather couch? Were you trying to seem dangerous?”
“Did it work?”
They’d gotten better at talking about their old life, the little things that inhabited it. Little things that were no longer fraught with such meaning. It didn’t feel like a tightrope act to mention six, seven, eight years earlier.
“When did your hair get so long, you hippie?” He finger combed through it, shaking out the tangles. He sometimes woke up with it slung across his lips, soapy sweet.
“You should talk.” She reached up and rubbed at his sandpapery chin.
Her hair used to be all sharp angles, glossy strands whipping past her mouth, cornering over her moody eyes.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” He tugged at an end, twisted it around his finger.
9. A sushi-rolled bale of hay in the middle of a field, a turkey-shaped piece of warping plywood lashed to the front.
He looked manically happy, this plywood turkey, despite the red and black bull’s-eye wobbling on his distended belly. TRKEY SHOOT. KC GRNDS. EV SUN IN OCT N NOV! Rural route sign painters tended to be sloppy, loose with their punctuation, and seemed to operate in a close to vowelless code.
They’d passed it on a post office run. It held court on the slope of a barbed-wire ringed field, next to the two-lane highway.
“Turkey shoot!” Mulder had shouted, taking a hand off the wheel to point.
“Man hunted by FBI dies in car accident; cause: excitement over turkey shoot,” Scully headlined.
She told him that their FBI-approved marksmanship skills would brand them as turkey shoot ringers.
“Oh, why’d you have to say that, Scully? Now all I want to be is a turkey shoot ringer!” He sighed dolefully.
She assured him that, should they ever find themselves in dire straits again, they could travel the country being just that: a pair of turkey shoot ringers with a trunk full of Butterballs on ice.
10. They weren’t regulars anywhere, couldn’t risk becoming familiar faces. But they weren’t shut-ins. I’d rather die having had a decent slice of pizza now and then, Mulder would say. She’d purse her lips, casual mentions of death being what they were, and he’d wax poetic about slices he had loved and lost.
Mulder wore slouchy layers, let his hair go shaggy, sometimes grew a beard in the coldest months. He found a cardboard punch-out pair of glasses-nose-mustache in an old Mad magazine that was tucked between some Scientific Americans and a cache of stolen files in the bottom of a stowed-away box. He walked into the bedroom wearing them with only studied indifference and his boxers. Scully looked up briefly from her laptop, didn’t even stop tapping at the keys, just sighed and returned to her work. But then they went missing and she appeared at the kitchen table the next morning, disguised.
Scully couldn’t bear the thought of dyeing her hair anymore, was absolutely done with tacky bathroom sink rinses that left purplish splatters on the tile. She wore hats sometimes, at least when it seemed like wearing a hat would be less noticeable than long red hair.
She tugged on a fuzzy black cap that made her hair go static. Mulder moved his gloved hands back and forth around her head, making the sticky strands expand and collapse until she swatted his hand away and made him get in the car.
The restaurant was a hole in the wall. Maroon booths shoved into brick alcoves, dimly lit, busy enough that they could blend in, but not so busy that they felt jostled or exposed.
The pasta was mediocre, the wine was pretty good, they ate too much bread.
“It’s a bottomless bread basket, Scully. It’s like something you’d trade your magic beans for.”
“Maybe you’d trade your magic beans.”
“You wouldn’t? But it’s a basket that never runs out of bread!”
In the parking lot, their breath huffed icily in the night air. Downy bits of snow twirled around them. They bumped into each other as they walked, and Scully stuck out her tongue to catch a flake.
Mulder spoke quickly, like he was afraid the words would melt with the early snow if he didn’t get them out. He was balancing the squeaky to-go boxes in one hand and trying to unlock the door with the other. Across the top of the car, she looked at him through her eyelashes, bouncing on her toes to keep warm.
“I didn’t think I deserved this.”
“What?”
He looked down, fumbling with the keyring. Bashful.
“This. My life has turned out to be infinitely better than I could’ve hoped. Than I had a right to hope.”
She stilled as he met her eye and she clutched at the door handle. Warmth spreading across her chest like she’d done a shot of particularly potent liquor.
“Better than you could’ve hoped?” She took a breath. “Even with-- Even with everything?”
He popped the key in the lock.
“You have no idea.”
Tears pricked at her eyes and she pretended it was the cold.
“Let’s go home.”
(with a thank you to j&j.)
[pre-iwtb, those six years, vignettes, msr, what's the opposite of angst?]