Meditations on a Life Gone By

By syntax6
syn_tax6@yahoo.com


Date: 16 Jan 2006
Category: V, A
Raging: G

Summary: A late night cup of a coffee and a conversation.

Hunger drove Maggie Scully down to the hospital cafeteria in
the middle of the night.  Her neglected stomach had churned
for hours before finally letting out a desperate howl and
clawing her apart at the middle.  

The fluorescent lights lit the drab, beige room, which was
shaped like a bowling alley with its tables and chairs lined
up into neat rows. Maggie ordered a bowl of beef vegetable
soup and a black coffee, which sat steaming in front of her.

It did not seem fair to eat when her daughter could not.

The cellophane-covered crackers kept slipping through her
fingers, the paper refusing to tear.  She picked up a butter
knife and taught the Saltines a vicious lesson, crumbs
scattering across the plastic tabletop as the wrapper
shredded.

It was turning cold outside as fall set in, good soup
weather, but bad for a funeral.  They had buried her father
in the winter, and she still remembered watching from the car
as the cemetery staff hacked at the frozen ground with their
shovels.  "It's like the earth doesn't want him," her mother
had said, tucking young Maggie against her warm wool coat.

But the earth had yielded in the end, giving up a hole just
big enough to swallow her father.

She chewed the soup without tasting it.  The faster she ate,
the sooner she could return to Dana's bedside.  She wasn't
really seeing, either, so he was fully in her field of view
before she realized he was there -- too late to pretend she
didn't notice.

"Mrs. Scully?"  Fox Mulder looked like death itself, with his
pale, drawn face and his great black coat.  He held a paper
cup of coffee in his hand.  "The charge nurse said you were
probably down here.  May I join you?"

She said yes because it would be impolite to refuse him.

"I just came from upstairs," he said.  "She's sleeping."

"It's nearly two in the morning."  This was true, but the
time hardly mattered to Dana now; she slept more and more
thanks to the drugs meant to deaden the pain.

"Yeah, I was hoping to get here earlier but I just couldn't
get away."

She met his eyes for the first time.  "Dana wanted to see
you."

This got to him, she could see, and he looked at his coffee.  
"She said so?"

"She didn't have to."  Her daughter had spent most of the
evening twisted in bed so that she could see the door.  Every
time it opened, she'd held her breath, expectant, but Mulder
had never come through.

Dana never had the chance to tell him what she'd told her
mother that morning -- if the treatment failed, which it was
likely to do, she wanted to go home.  No more hospital.  No
more tests or therapies.  This was her baby's final wish,
that she would be strong enough to go home to die.

Maggie blinked back sudden tears, thinking on it.  She
considered telling Mulder herself and forcing him to live
with the knowledge along with her.

Bill Junior was already angry that Mulder came and went from
the hospital like a fairy while the rest of the family kept
watch.  "He comes in here for five minutes, makes her cry and
then leaves again."

If Bill were in charge, he'd rub Mulder's nose in it like you
would a dog that had soiled the rug.  Look here, he'd say, at
what you've done.

Mulder rotated his coffee cup in his hands. "I know my
methods may seem... unorthodox, but I promise I am doing
everything in my power to help Scully."

Scully, Maggie thought.  She might have skipped naming her
children altogether for the good it had done her.  Scully had
been her husband and the family she was marrying into; his
friends would come over to drink, smoke and play cards, and
she'd hear that name echoing through the house -- "Scully,
you're a bum cheater, is what you are!" -- as Bill won
another hand.

Then her two boys joined up and they became "Scully" too.  
Her youngest daughter had taken a different route but she'd
ended up in the same spot, working for a government that
didn't give a damn what your momma named you.

"We're all just trying the best we can, I guess," she said to
Mulder, giving him a tight smile.  And Agent Mulder's best
was chasing ghosts.  Maybe Dana would be easier for him to
deal with when she was gone and he could look for her among
the stars.

It would be her third family funeral inside of four years.  
She had lost Bill and Melissa so quickly, with no real chance
to say good-bye.  Dana had been sick for months but this was
no easier.  She had to watch her daughter fade away in front
of her eyes and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

"You just can't be ready for it."

"Excuse me?"

Her head jerked up.  She hadn't realized she'd spoken aloud.  
"It surprises you, what you miss," she told him.

"When Bill died, the house got so quiet.  He used to get up
first every morning and make the coffee.  I'd wake up to that
smell and know I'd find him downstairs with his mug and the
morning paper.  He'd read me different bits while I fixed the
eggs and we'd talk about what was going on in the world.  Now
I have an automatic coffee maker and a radio instead."

"Mrs. Scully..."

"Melissa, God, that about ripped my heart out.  She'd been in
and out of our lives for years so you'd think that might have
made it easier to bear somehow but it wasn't."

"Of course not."

Maggie had buried a part of herself with Melissa, the part
that used to pick up frilly, impractical clothes at the flea
market because her daughter liked to play princess.  The part
that preferred beads to BB guns and would rather make snow
angels than snow forts.  The serious, pragmatic side of the
Scully children came from the military and from Bill.  
Melissa's whimsy was an echo of Maggie's own childhood, a
place that lived only in her memory now that Missy was gone.

Now days, when Maggie read about women who knit sweaters for
penguins or some other such silly story in the news, she
didn't bother to clip the paper; there was no one to whom she
could send it.

Her youngest daughter had no time or inclination to entertain
such fluff.

"Dana spent the first six weeks of her life in a hospital,
did she ever tell you that?"

Mulder shook his head slowly.

"She was born over a month early.  We teased her about it
later, telling her she was just so impatient she couldn't
wait to get into the world, but it was a scary thing at the
time.  She weighed barely four pounds and her lungs weren't
fully developed -- she was so pink and tiny.  They had her in
an incubator, hooked up to all these monitors, and no one
could assure me she would live. Bill fought me, but I had her
baptized right there in the neonatal intensive care ward.  I
wanted to make sure she went to heaven.  He thought I was
giving up, that I was saying it was okay for God to take
her."

She looked at Mulder, at his shuttered face, and saw he
thought the same thing.

"I was just trying to protect her."

"So am I."

Right.  He got the easy part.  Clinging to relentless
optimism and heading out the door every chance he got while
she sat in the hot, airless room and watched her daughter
die.

"You do what you have to do," Mulder told her, resting his
big hands on the table.

Maggie stared at his fingers until they blurred before her,
until she saw him years ago standing with Dana's headstone
between them.  She had wanted to give her daughter the only
thing she had left in her power; she'd wanted to give her
peace.

Mulder stood up without saying anything and crushed his paper
cup in one hand.  He turned to go but then faced her again.  
"My sister's been gone so long that sometimes it's like she
never existed, but then I'll catch someone out of the corner
of my eye and I'll think it's her, like she could just show
up one day on the street."

He took a breath.

"The thing is, when I see her, she's still eight years old.  
I'm looking at children when she would turn thirty-two next
month."

He ducked his head and tapped his fingers lightly on the
table near her soup bowl.  "Tell Dana I stopped by, okay?"

She could barely find her voice.  "Okay."

She watched the back of his coat as he walked away, until he
melted into the shadowed hall like a vanishing spirit.  After
she finished the rest of the cooled soup, she got a refill on
her coffee and took it back up to Dana's room.

She opened the door quietly, tiptoeing inside the way she had
done when Dana was just a baby, home for the first time.  
Those first awful nights when she couldn't sleep, creeping up
to the cradle and resting her hand on her daughter.

Keep breathing, baby girl.

####

Notes: I still find it odd that Maggie Scully was picking out
her daughter's headstone after just 3 months -- or even 6
weeks, depending on which timeline you believe.  I also find
it hard to believe that Maggie harbors lots of warm fuzzy
feelings about Mulder.  Every time she sees him, a member of
her family is suffering or dead.

There are lots of scenes that don't make it into my longer
stories.  This is one of them. *g*

Thanks as ever to Amanda for the beta!

Feedback always welcome at syn_tax6@yahoo.com