A tiny car dribbles along a dental floss highway, a tear sliding down the face of the vast world. The mouth of night yawns wide and swallows it whole. Inside, the passengers are crushed into an almost unbearable intimacy, windows up to accomodate the air conditioning, doors locked, radios off, brains buzzing,
buzzing, buzzing,
the sticky darkness squeezing against them like the hot embrace of a child.
Skinner is driving the car. It's the same as his personal vehicle, a late model Crown Victoria, so he doesn't have to worry much about familiarizing himself with new controls. His face is a mask of shadows, with all the expressiveness of a cat. Scully sits beside him, a glowing green outline in the reflection of the dashboard lights, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.
The thing is-- He snaps at the thought like a dog at a fly. The thing is…Snap!
"After we talk to the Van Dykes, let's call it a night," he says, speaking in a normal voice that's not quite loud enough to drown out his thoughts. "You must be tired."
She turns to him briefly; he doesn't have to look around to feel it, like someone running a flashlight beam over the side of his face. "I'm okay," she says. "I'm just sort of numb."
THE THING IS
if she'd drawn the sheet up over herself, if her eyes had gone soft and startled, if her cheeks had flushed pink and she'd turned away, then he'd have ducked his head and lowered his eyes and backed out of the room, muttering, Sorry, sorry
--Instead of swinging her legs over the side of the bed and getting up in the same motion, moving towards him with anxious eyes ruined by crying, blazing blue green in the sunshine from the open door behind him, her face a choir of light, her mouth swollen, moving towards him and saying, "Have you heard anything?"
No. He hadn't heard anything. The sky might have fallen in the past hour and he wouldn't have heard the shatter of breaking clouds because he had been too busy calling her room over and over, finally using his master key to get in, almost shaking English out of the maid to find out her bed hadn't been made up, hadn't been slept in, no, the maid hadn't seen her, no, the cashier at the only place open for breakfast hadn't seen her, no, the concierge hadn't seen her leaving the hotel--
Finally some Scully-homing device clicked on and he went to Mulder's room and there she was, lost in the big white shirt, her cross gleaming faintly at her thoat, one button too many loose there, the hem of the shirt pulling up when she took a step forward.
He didn't hug her in his overwhelming relief to see her. He didn't back out of the room, embarrassed. He stood like a rock and let the wave of her break against him, felt his heart sway a little before settling down, and said, "You'd better get dressed. Our first meeting is in twenty minutes."
If he had never had a single sexual thought about her--and proudly, he could admit to having that whole situation under control--then how could the rest of the day not be filled with that image of her waking up almost naked in Mulder's bed, looking up at him as she walked across the room?
Not surprisingly, he had dozed off after dinner later in the day, and dreamed of her. In the dream, she was giving him a big heartshaped box of Valentine's Day candy, and when he opened it, he saw that his hand was moving oddly, slightly out of sequence, and realized it wasn't his hand at all. The hand belonged to Mulder, but -- was he Mulder, then?-- he felt himself moving the fingers, opening the box, tearing away the paper. Inside he saw dozens of luscious chocolates, all stamped with the same three words: Like A Brother Then he heard someone laughing, not sarcastically, but with genuine amusement. Mulder?
"I see a light," Scully says.
Skinner sees it too, now that he's looking for it; a cluster of land stars that symbolize a township in the suburbs. Surrounded by an ocean of sand, how small, how faint they seem. Rich, rich, rich, to live out here, to afford the basic luxury of water; all a man's wealth always comes back to the simplest needs.
The family greets them somberly. There is a tall blond athletic father with silver at his temples, wearing a sports shirt and cargo shorts and thongs that slap across the tiles in the foyer. There are the two sons and their two friends, and a small girl who clings to the hem of her mother's shorts. The mother looks to Skinner like Heidi grown up, round faced, freckly, her hair in ash blond braids. She is plump, and her chin is cleft, and all three children are stamped with the cleft, too. The boys are gangling around, standing so the adults can sit on the sofa and chairs, not sure where to put their hands or feet, like people trying not to look posed before a camera.
Scully gives the little girl a smile. The girl grins back and hides her face against her mother's stomach. Those are the only smiles in the room. This house is full of suffering; the air itself is grieving for the loss of the golden child, for John Van Dyke, beloved son, snatched from his safe bed in the night. The rooms are well lit, but darkness prevails, like a brilliant afternoon in an orchard, when all the shadows under the trees are black as midnight.
Skinner would like to watch Scully with the little girl. His eyes linger too long on Scully's face, and she looks at him as they are being seated in the living room, and he looks away quickly, his eyes coming into full contact with the eyes of Brittany Van Dyke, four years old and full of some secret wisdom all her own.
Surprisingly, it is difficult to look away.
Susan Van Dyke, who Skinner is desperately hoping he will not accidentally call "Heidi," says in a voice rough with the throatburn of recent wails, "We're convinced John is still alive."
"John went up there," Brittany announces.
Her mother, seated on the sofa now, pulls her backwards between her knees and strokes the soft blonde baby hair back, brushing it with her fingers.
"Hush, honey," she says tenderly.
The child twists around to look up at her in surprise. "John did go up there, didn't he?"
Skinner is watching the child. Scully says, "But no note, no phone call…could the kidnaper have made a mistake? Could he have taken John, thinking he was another of the other boys here that night?"
The little girl pulls away from her mother as if to go to an open coloring book on the coffee table, but veers around it instead and approaches Skinner. She stops a few feet from him, looking up with sober blue eyes. Skinner ignores her as best he can.
"None of the other families were contacted," Mr. Van Dyke says. "Jason and Todd were the only ones here that night, and their parents would have notified us at once if someone had called them."
Scully says something. Skinner can't follow it because at the same time, the little girl speaks to him. "There was that man and that lady."
Skinner looks at her, trying not to look frightening, but knowing that little children rarely approach him on their own. He's too big, for one thing, and they just seem to shrink away, which is fine with him.
"They all went up there," she says, pointing at the ceiling.
Skinner looks up before he can stop himself. Scully is quiet, they are all quiet. Scully takes a breath to speak but the little girl holds out her hand to Skinner. "They went --" It's more like "dey wen" but he can understand her perfectly; "They went up there."
Scully looks quickly at the mother. "Did your daughter see anyone that night, Mrs. Van Dyke?"
"She sees people all the time," Chris Van Dyke, one of the sons, says, and the boys all laugh. Even the father lets a half smile struggle to his pained mouth. "She's an imaginative child," he says.
Scully shoots Skinner such a look he actually reaches his hand out. The child seizes it, and Skinner is startled and discomfited by the smallness of the fist gripping two of his fingers.
"Brittany, get over here right now," the mother says, in an I-mean-it voice, but the little girl holds on fiercely. "They are too up there," she says defiantly.
The father's eyes change, reddening, though he doesn't actually weep, nor does his voice break when he says, "We're a Christian family, Mr. Skinner. Brittany thinks John is in heaven."
The boys, too masculine in their teens to hold hands, shift around so that they are standing closer together. Mr. Van Dyke reaches out and pats the leg of the son nearest him.
Skinner and the child are looking at each other. Her cheeks are still rounded with the fat of sucking pads, and her nose wouldn't show up at all in a caricature drawing. But her eyes say something to him, her look tells him something. Skinner gets to his feet. If asked, he wouldn't be able to say why, but he does, bending over so that the contact with the little girl isn't lost.
Scully's eyelashes flutter in surprise, but she goes along as if it's all part of procedure, rising and moving aside to let them pass by. Skinner says to the child, "Can you show me?"
The mother and father start to protest, then of one accord the family gets up, and follows dutifully as the little girl seems to drag Skinner to the stairs and up them. Rich oak curved wood, plush carpet that sinks under his weight. A hallway paneled in real wood, too, with pictures of unnamed Swedes on the wall. The little girl's room, a bright splash of color, bedspead in a crayon design, white wicker headboard and canopy, pink and blue and yellow. A poster of the Backstreet Boys over the bed, between posters displaying giant pandas in brilliant green forests.
The girl stops in the center of the room and points at the ceiling. "John went up there," she says.
Her mother kneels in front of her. "You didn't say anything about this before, Brittany. Are you telling the truth?"
"It was that lady," the girl says. "John went there when she came here."
"A lady came here?" Scully asks."She came here for John?"
The child cranes her neck to look up at Skinner , her small face contorting in an effort to imitate his expression. "That lady up there," she says, pointing at the ceiling.
Skinner feels a twist in his gut, a feeling he has never experienced before, someone pushing him, something in his brain shouting at him. If only he could...
He looks down at the child with his fierce scowl mirrored on her face and says to no one in particular, "Do you have a ladder that will reach to your roof?"
The parents look at each other blankly, but Chris Van Dyke says, "In the garage, sir. I'll get it."
Ten minutes later, Skinner is climbing the aluminum steps to the pitched and gabled roof. The lower part, over the living room, is too steep to walk on, so he climbs to the front gable and straddles it. His Magnum flashlight slices through the dark across the angles and gutters and dips that seem to veer off into nothingness.
The beam of his flashlight pauses in mid arc. Something white is sticking up from behind one of the gables that would be over the little girl's room. Skinner inches along, the tiles cold against his inner thighs, and leans forward almost on his chest to peer forward.
The white thing flutters. No, it doesn't flutter. It...squirms.
What the--?
Skinner sits bolt upright. He sees it clearly now; it's a sock. It's a--
"Shit!" he snaps, forgetting everything else, and gets to his feet, clambering hastily across the rippled tiles. "Scully!" he shouts. "Get an ambulance!"
