"Is everything all right, Agent Doggett?"
Doggett didn't appear to hear her. He was standing by the car, deep in thought, keys in his hand, ready to open the door, but frozen in mid-movement. He was looking at the keys as if he had forgotten what to do with them.
"Agent Doggett, would you like me to drive?"
She waited for a few seconds for him to answer, and then gently touched his shoulder to catch his attention.
He turned around quickly, startled by her touch and stared at her as if a stranger.
She smiled faintly and took a step back.
"I said, would you like me to drive?"
He continued to stare at her blankly for a few seconds, then gave her the keys without a word, walked around the car and sat on the passenger seat. Scully couldn't help smiling as she opened the door and slid behind the steering wheel. How many times had she argued with Mulder about who would get to drive, and how many times had she herself ended up on the passenger seat.
She looked at Doggett and her smile died away. For a fraction of a second she had expected to see Mulder sitting next to her, making a show of being offended.
She missed those arguments. She missed the long drives across the country with Mulder, missed his stupid sense of humor, missed his stupid theories. Hell, she even missed those damned sunflower seeds. She missed Mulder.
"Let's head home, Agent Doggett," she said with a forced smile as she started the car. Doggett didn't answer or even look at her, staring out the window as if she didn't even exist.
For the first few miles she tried to strike up a conversation with him, talking about mundane things such as weather and the food at the FBI cafeteria, but as he kept replying in one word sentences when bothering to answer at all, she finally gave up.
It wasn't as if she hadn't been in the same situation with Mulder. She couldn't even count the times when they had driven back to D.C. in complete silence, both refusing to say a word or even acknowledge each other's existence. The difference was that with Mulder the silent treatment had never been entirely serious. There had always been a sense of pretense, an unspoken knowledge that it was all just a game. Mulder had never been able to stay quiet long.
Doggett, on the other hand, could probably stay quiet until the end of the world.
In the few months that she had known him, Scully often marked how there was almost a religious quality to everything he did, as if his entire life was one great ritual where everything had its time and place. There was nothing superfluous in Doggett. He believed in himself and in everything he did with a religious conviction. Everything he did had a reason. There was no room for uncertainties in the world of John Doggett.
From the corner of her eye she saw him reach to the back seat for the file on Billy Underwood. She knew that he had memorized the files by heart before they had even arrived in Dexter, and that there would be nothing in the folder that could even begin to explain what had happened to Billy. She knew that he was only reading to avoid talking to her.
Except that even though she was certain Doggett was only trying to annoy her, punishing her for the fact that there had been no resolution for the Underwood case that he could accept, she couldn't help feeling that something was wrong. It was not the silence and the refusal to notice her - those she could easily credit to an attempt to unnerve her - but rather the lack of presence, the uncharacteristically faraway look in his eyes.
She was gradually starting to trust and perhaps even like Doggett, but she wasn't even pretending to understand him. Mars and Venus indeed. Not that she believed for one second that he had actually read the book. It just didn't seem like the kind of thing he'd read. He was an ex-cop, an ex-marine, an FBI agent, an assistant director in waiting. He wouldn't have time for reading books about relationships. Besides, according to his files he was divorced. If he had read the book, it hadn't done him any good. The thought gave her odd pleasure.
Scully glanced at Doggett again. He had put down the folder and was now holding only the picture of Billy Underwood, looking at it as if he had never seen it before.
"Are you sure you're all right, Agent Doggett?" she tried one last time, but he didn't answer or in any way acknowledge her presence, his eyes still fixed on the picture as if finding its company preferable to hers.
The years she had spent with Mulder had taught Scully more about the male psyche than she cared to know, but there was a limit even to her patience. At the next rest stop she pulled over, parked the car as far from the other cars as possible, and shut down the engine.
"Why did you stop?" Doggett asked, reluctantly taking his eyes off the picture for the first time in minutes, looking out the window instead.
"I don't like being lied to, Agent Doggett. I have seen your records. You never worked in the child abduction task force. So what is it with you and this case?"
For the first time since they had left Dexter, Doggett turned to look at her, his steel blue eyes colder than usual.
"You've been checking up on me."
"I have, Agent Doggett. I don't trust just anyone, I've learned that the hard way. You said you wanted me to trust you? Fine, but in that case you better start trusting me too. Why did you lie to me?"
He turned to look out the window again, and for a moment she thought he was simply going to ignore her until she gave up.
"My son, Luke, he was taken eight years ago."
She felt her heart miss a beat as the pieces fell together. How could she not have seen it. The anger, the despair, the obsession. She should have recognized it. The years she had watched Mulder go through the same emotions over and over whenever a case had even the slightest connection to Samantha's disappearance.
"How...," she said hoarsely, not really wanting to hear the answer. The psychic woman had said Doggett had lost someone close to him, and there had been no mention of children in his file. Luke was dead, and she didn't really want to know how. There were already far too many dead children in her life.
"He was seven when it happened. Barbara, my wife - ex-wife - was looking after him. He was riding his bike around the block, and then suddenly... he was gone. The police searced for him three days but..."
He sighed and took a picture out his wallet, giving it to her. It was a school photo of a smiling little boy, not unlike Billy Underwood. She noticed the obvious resemblance the boy had to Doggett, but moreover she noticed how worn and faded the picture was. She could imagine him taking the picture out every day, to watch it, to keep the memories alive, and she was reminded of the small photograph she carried in her own wallet. She gave the picture back to Doggett and realized that there were tears in his eyes.
"On the morning of the fourth day some jogger found his body on a field."
"My God..." she whispered and put her hand on her abdomen, the words not a curse, but a prayer that the child she was carrying would not suffer the same fate as Luke. The same fate as Samantha. The same fate as Emily.
She wanted to say something to comfort Doggett, but the words stuck to her throat because as much as she felt sorry for him, she could not stop thinking about Emily and a life that could have been.
"I had a daughter. Emily."
She had not meant to say it aloud. Emily was something she did not talk about. A daydream of a child, a memory faded and worn like the picture she carried in her wallet. She had loved the girl so much it hurt, and yet she had known her for only a little while. She could only imagine the pain Doggett lived with.
"I know. I read you file. I'm sorry."
She wasn't sure if he was sorry about what had happened to Emily, or about the the fact that he had read her file.
"Things like this shouldn't happen, Dana. If there were any fairness in the world, things like this shouldn't happen."
His voice was quiet and gentle, and he was holding the picture of Luke as if it was the greatest treasure on earth.
"I think about him every day. What he might be doing. What he would look like. He'd be in his teens now."
Still unable to find the words to express her feelings, she reached to take his hand. It was an automatic gesture, just as much an attempt to draw strength from him as comfort him. She pulled her hand back just as automatically when there was suddenly a sound of laughter nearby. She looked outside, at the sunny afternoon tableau of the rest stop where children were playing and families were setting up picnic tables. Two laughing children, a boy and a girl, ran past the car playing tag, or perhaps just running for the sake of running.
The scene seemed surreally unreal to her, a plastic imitation of reality with it's impossibly perfect stepford wives playing house with their doll families. She tried imagine herself out there among the mothers with their tupperware containers full of sandwiches, fried chicken and potato salad. Tried to imagine what her life would be like if she had said "yes" to Ethan all those years ago, if she had left Mulder and the X-Files when she still could.
She had once told Mulder how she yearned for a normal life, the kind of life she only saw as an outsider while driving through neighbourhoods and suburbias on her way from one crimescene to an other. Mulder had not understood her, but she knew that Doggett would. He knew the life outside the car. He had lived that life. He had lived that normal life in some suburbia somewhere with his wife and son. He had had it all - the house, the family, the picket fence, the whole american dream - and he had lost it. If she were to tell him how much she wanted to just stop driving and start living he would understand, and that made her even more sad, because since that discussion with Mulder she had come to understand herself that there was no room for normal life in the X-Files. She, Mulder, and now Doggett were all doomed to watch life through car windows as they drove past it.
"We'd better get going if we want to get home tonight."
She turned to look at Doggett and saw that he had put away the picture of Luke, and had returned Billy Underwood's file to the back seat. His voice was hard and precise again, professional, without even a suggestion of the pain that had seemed to saturate his whole being just moments earlier. Gone was the grief-stricken father of Luke, and instead she was once again looking at Agent John Doggett, the soldier, the cop, the FBI-agent.
"Do you want me to drive?" he asked.
She smiled and started the car.
"No, I'll drive."