TITLE: 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

AUTHOR: Marigold 

EMAIL: marigoldbalcony@gmail.com

SUMMARY: He never, ever calls her Scully.

RATING:  PG-13

CLASSIFICTION: VA, perhaps some R

SPOILERS: Through "The Truth"

DISCLAIMER: These characters do not belong to me and no 
copyright infringement is intended on my part. Apologies to 
Paul Simon for the title and to Christopher Guest for 
stealing a line from "Best in Show."



He smells like Ivory soap and bay rum aftershave. He has 
big, strong arms that hold her tight when the night gets 
too close. He wears clean gray tee shirts and plaid boxers 
to bed. He's a basketball fan and yells at the TV when his 
team scores. He reads magazines on the couch with his 
glasses on. He cheerfully eats her stir-fries and salads 
but he'd much rather be eating a big, greasy pizza. He 
sleeps with his gun in the bedside table, just in case. He 
wants to hold her hand in public. He blushes a little after 
he's kissed her.

He never, ever calls her Scully.

He doesn't call her Dana, either.



Sometimes when she's on her way to work she has to remind 
herself that her name isn't Dana, her name is Cynthia. She 
practices it at red lights. "My name is Cynthia," she says 
with a grimace. "Cynthia Ellingson." She hasn't been Dana 
Scully in a long time.



Four years of college, four years of medical school, two 
years of residency and she's a waitress. She's service with 
a smile, can I take your order sir, is there anything else 
I can get you. She's all efficiency during her shift, white 
shirt and black tie, gliding between the tables with trays 
of osso bucco and tiramisu. In the break room, she counts 
out her tip money and stuffs it in her pocket. She doesn't 
have to think when she's out on the floor, filling water 
glasses and recommending the special of the day.



She doesn't always recognize herself in the mirror. Cynthia 
is too thin, bordering on gaunt; she doesn't eat enough and 
probably drinks too much. She has long, dark brown hair 
pulled back into a ponytail. She wears glasses and red 
lipstick. On her days off she wears jeans and sweaters, 
tennis shoes. Cynthia doesn't own any suits or high heels.  



She wonders if he's looking for her. She mostly hopes that 
he's not. He's spent his whole life having to look for 
somebody.



After a few weeks of working at the restaurant, she'd 
gotten into the habit of going for a drink at Freddy's 
Lounge across the street. Sometimes it was with a whole 
gang from the restaurant, sometimes alone. She'd order just 
one gin and tonic, sometimes two, and ask for extra limes. 
Soon enough, the bartender knew to put the extra limes in 
without her asking. He was a big man. Solid, safe-looking.  
One night he told her that his name was Mike. She liked the 
name for its simplicity.  Mike. A name without any history 
attached to it.

He'd been a fireman until he hurt his back during a four-
alarm fire at a warehouse. Now he tends bar three nights a 
week, collects disability checks, walks his dog and reads a 
lot.  He'd been married a long time ago, but his wife had 
left him for another man. His eyes were as blue as her own, 
surrounded by inky lashes. He had a dimple in his cheek. 
She liked his gruff voice, his Providence accent sounding 
like a combination of Boston and Brooklyn to her ears.

They got drunk together that night after he got off work, 
passing a pint of Wild Turkey back and forth while sitting 
on his front stoop in the August evening heat. She touched 
his hand, feeling the calluses hard into the skin. He 
kissed her at half past three.



Her apartment is a small studio in an old brick building. 
She has done very little to make it a home. It came 
furnished with beige carpeting, a brown and beige sofa bed, 
a brown armchair. Her clothes don't even take up two 
drawers of the scarred laminate dresser. The kitchen smells 
of nothing but bananas going brown and stale coffee. The 
refrigerator holds water, wine, a jar of Dijon mustard and 
cream for coffee. She considers a Christmas tree, something 
small to put in the window, and decides it's not worth the 
bother.

Mike rarely comes over to her place. The bed isn't 
comfortable and her secondhand TV doesn't have cable.



She practices selective amnesia when she can get away with 
it. It's no use thinking about it.  Her mother used to tell 
her, "You made your bed, now lie in it."  



A rainy New England morning, Dunkin' Donuts in bed, and he 
strokes her arm, her eyebrows, her breasts. He touches her 
belly. "What happened here?" he asks. The puckered memento 
of gunfire.

"It was a long time ago," she says.

"Someone got you good, didn't they?"

"They did." Poor, stupid Agent Ritter. She wonders where he 
is now.

His finger traces the stretch marks on her belly, the 
telltale silvery striations. "And this?"

"It was a long time ago," she says.

Instead of asking her anything else, he kisses her, long 
and slow. Mike is good at not asking too many questions. 
She likes that about him.



She has two photographs, hidden in one of the suitcases in 
the closet. She doesn't look at them much, but she likes 
knowing they're there, just in case.

The baby is laughing, holding his arms out to his mother. 
His eyes are crinkling at some private joke she's since 
forgotten.

And Mulder, oh Mulder, a picture from a faraway crime scene 
in a western state, his trench coat flapping in the wind, 
hair blowing across his forehead. He's looking at something 
beyond the horizon. That's Mulder, always searching.



It was a short note, the one she left on the kitchen 
counter between the coffee cups from that morning and the 
box of shredded wheat.

I'm fine, I'm safe, nothing terrible has happened, but I 
can't be here right now.

And she got in the car and drove. A thousand times she 
considered turning right back around but she kept her foot 
firmly on the gas pedal. The car pointed her east until she 
reached Providence. She chose the city purely based its 
name. According to the dictionary, it meant "the foreseeing 
care and guidance of God or nature over the creatures of 
the earth." She thought she could use a little of that.



Mike goes to Mass with her some Sundays. He's the product 
of twelve years of Catholic school, the oldest of seven in 
an Irish-Italian family. They talk about the nuns and their 
dreaded rulers, about guitar masses in the 70's, awful 
polyester uniforms and spaghetti dinners in church 
basements. Every Sunday his family gathers for dinner 
together at his parents' house. She's made a thousand 
excuses for why she can't come and he's stopped asking. 
It's one thing to lie to Mike, but his whole family is 
quite another.  She doesn't want them to get used to her. 
Any minute, she could be gone.

She wonders if their pictures are still hanging in post 
offices.



He calls her his angel, his princess. She laughs and pushes 
him away. She's not used to pet names.

He never says he loves her. She's glad of that.  

The first time they had sex, everything was so different, 
the way he moved against her, the sounds he made when he 
came, that she almost broke down and cried.  



From time to time, late at night after she's one glass of 
wine too many, she calls their old phone number, with the 
Caller ID blocked. She holds her breath, waiting for the 
message to say the line has been disconnected. Instead, the 
phone picks up on the third ring; the voice mail message is 
her own voice. "Mark and Claire can't come to the phone 
right now. Please leave us a message at the tone." She 
always hangs up before the beep. Mulder never answers.



She tells him stories that aren't far from the truth. 
Cynthia was a military brat, grew up all over the country. 
She has two brothers.  Her father is dead and she doesn't 
talk to her mother much, although she loves her very much. 
For a long time she was a nurse but the stress got to her 
and now she's taking a break and trying to figure out what 
she wants to do next. She was married for a while, but it 
didn't work out. They loved each other but there was just 
too much baggage. So she moved to Providence for a fresh 
start.



Occasionally she misses the thrill of the chase, the 
exhilaration of a new case, the fun of arguing about it 
with Mulder late night at some diner in Arkansas over pie 
and weak coffee. She misses motel rooms and boarding 
passes. She misses "Joy to the World" in a cold Florida 
forest. She misses the way he'd unbutton her blouse with 
deft fingers, his smile spreading across his face.


It got so quiet in the end. There didn't seem to be 
anything left to say. 

One morning she woke up and found she was in Spokane.  It 
was the fourth city in two years, third set of ID. Her name 
was Claire Beaumont then. Her hair was pale blonde, falling 
to her shoulders. It didn't suit her.

So much lay thick and heavy between them.  The never talked 
about it, never said his name. William. They could not talk 
about him for hours.

The silence built up to a scream in her head, the two of 
them lying oceans apart in a double bed, pretending to 
sleep.

At the end of the note, she wrote, I love you and I always 
will.  

She's sure she wasn't lying about that.



They're at the supermarket, a crowded Saturday just before 
Christmas.  Little Drummer Boy plays over the speakers and 
there's fake holly everywhere. People keep crashing into 
her, their shopping carts piled high with holiday 
delicacies.

She turns her head to see a baby sitting in the cart. Round 
blue eyes and a bow-shaped mouth. Flaxen hair just 
beginning to curl.

She wants to reach out and touch the baby's soft head, feel 
the feathery hairs under her fingers.

The baby gives her a toothless grin, drool hanging off his 
chin in a thin thread.

William is four now. He's probably in preschool. He walks 
and talks and laughs. At night another woman reads him his 
bedtime stories. She wonders if he likes "Goodnight Moon" 
and if he's old enough for "Where the Wild Things Are" yet. 
She had a stack of books for him.  "Curious George," "A 
Snowy Day," "The Cat in the Hat."

The baby's father returns to her cart with a turkey. "How 
old is he?" she asks him.

"He's nine months old," the father says, smiling, brushing 
something invisible from his son's cheek.

"Cynthia," she hears a voice say from the meat counter.

Oh. Nine months. Just like William was.  

She clears her throat and tells the man his son is 
beautiful.

"Cynthia!" she hears again, louder this time. "Cyn!"

She whips her head around to the sound of Mike's voice. 
He's holding up a pork tenderloin for her approval.

For a minute, she'd forgotten all about Cynthia.



Alone at night when Mike is working, or out with friends or 
just spending the evening at his own place, she can be Dana 
again, sometimes even Scully. She reads medical journals to 
keep her brain in tune. She scrubs her tiny apartment from 
top to bottom. She makes tea and pretends to be interested 
in public television. She lights scented candles because 
her apartment smells dusty and unloved.

The trouble is, sometimes Dana remembers. Scully definitely 
remembers everything. She's so methodical.

Dana wants to weep for her baby. She wants her mother's 
soft arms around her. She wants Mulder. She wants to be on 
a boring stakeout with him, the radio humming classic rock, 
Mulder crunching on sunflower seeds and telling her some 
tall tale about Himalayan snow monsters. Or in bed with 
him, back at his Alexandria apartment, listening to his 
sleep breathing and the bubbling of the aquarium in the 
living room, feeling like nothing can come and hurt them in 
this particular moment.

Scully tells her she's made a terrible mistake, which makes 
her laugh since she's made so many mistakes, how can you 
pick just one out of the bunch of them?



On a Sunday morning she walks along the Providence River as 
the sun comes up. It's too early even for Mass, and Mike is 
still snoring in his bed. It's cold January and she burrows 
her gloved hands deep in the pockets of her coat.

Slow down and pay attention, she says to herself. It's a 
lesson she learned a long time ago.

For a long time, she's been running, not just from the 
proverbial long arm of the law, but from herself. From 
Mulder. From the painful truths they share.

She stops and watches the frozen river. Not long after she 
arrived, she walked down to the river one night to find it 
magically set afire, seemingly all of Providence crowding 
the banks to watch the flames reflected on the river water.

No matter which way you twist it, she's still Dana Scully.  
Cynthia Ellingson doesn't exist. She's a name on a driver's 
license, a fake birth certificate, a Social Security number 
that belongs to a child that died too young. She's only 
paper.

Her breath comes out in white puffs as she continues along 
the river. She wants coffee and a hot bath, but she needs 
to finish thinking first.

Cynthia wasn't a pathologist, she wasn't a Special Agent 
with the FBI, she didn't have a partner named Fox Mulder. 
She wasn't abducted. She didn't have cancer.  She didn't 
lose a little girl named Emily before she really knew her. 
She didn't shoot and kill a man. She didn't have a baby boy 
named William. She never loved her partner and he never 
loved her.  Cynthia isn't a fugitive.

But Dana Scully lived that life and she can no longer run 
from her history, whatever that means.

Her mother also used to say, "It's time to face the music."

Maybe they're ready to start talking.

She's ready to stop running. She wonders if Mulder is, too.



When she gets home, she makes a pot of coffee and rubs her 
toes to warm them. She picks up the phone and dials the old 
number, her stomach lurching as she listens to it ring. 
This time she is sure she'll get the disconnect message.  
It's been nine months; surely he's moved on to a new 
identity, a new town.

He picks up on the second ring, his voice froggy from 
sleep. "Hello?" he says.

She holds her breath.

"Hello, who is this?" The voice has become more alert now 
and she imagines she can hear Mulder's heartbeat.  

"Is it you?" he says, his voice rising on the word "you." 
"Is it--" 

She hangs up the phone, hands shaking. It takes her a long 
time to catch her breath.



The church is old, with faded stained glass windows. It has 
witnessed thousands upon thousands of baptisms, funerals, 
weddings and confessions. She's been going to Mass on a 
semi-regular basis since she arrived in Providence, but 
mostly as a spectator, simply letting the music and the 
words wash over her. 

This morning she kneels in a pew at the back of the church 
and bows her head. She humbly asks her God for his 
forgiveness and the strength for what lies ahead. 

At the end of the service, Father Daulton says, "Mass is 
ended. You may go in peace" She blinks away tears, hoping 
he's right.



It doesn't take long to pack. Everything she owns fits 
easily into two suitcases. Before she shuts the door for 
the last time, she wipes the place clean of fingerprints. 
She gets a money order for the next month's rent and mails 
it to the landlord. Then she drives over to Mike's house. 
His car isn't in the driveway; he's at his parents' 
already.

All Mike wants is a nice woman to watch basketball with, a 
woman who will come to dinner at his family's house and 
bring a cake, a woman who likes sex first thing in the 
morning, a woman to laugh at his terrible jokes. She wishes 
she could still be that woman.

The letter she slides under the front door is longer than 
the one she left for Mulder.  She feels she owes him 
something of an explanation. She tells him that she's tired 
of running away from her life.  Finally, she can tell him 
the truth.  



She gets in the car and drives. She keeps her foot firmly 
on the gas pedal. The car points her west.


END