"Let's not start this again," Logan said. "If it makes you happy, we'll send him a medal when we get home."
"I would prefer instead that we emulate his kindness."
"I thought you said that wouldn't mean as much because we're mutants," Rogue pointed out.
"It still means something," Kurt said. Jean felt sorry for him, but remained silent. Philosophical differences were always impossible to argue, and at the moment, she was content with merely watching the world go by, savoring the warmth of her husband, soft and small at her side.
And then, unexpectedly, she felt a strange tickling sensation in her brain. Like fingers, scraping the surface of her mind, looking for openings. Startling, to say the least The prelude to an invasion, maybe. For some reason, she did not feel afraid.
"We've got company again," she said, and tapped her forehead. The tickling stopped. Everyone, even Logan, looked at her in concern.
"Are we being tracked?" Scott asked.
"I wish I knew. It's impossible to tell. All it felt like was someone brushing past my brain. I don't think anything more was done."
"I hope not," Scott said. "We're dealing with a lot of unknowns here, not the least of which is whether we'll be able to make it home."
"We're moving in the right direction, aren't we?"
Logan said. "What more do you want? Just give it one step at a time."
One step. Easy enough. Jean knew how to be stubborn. It seemed to be a mutant power all its own, one shared by all the X-Men. It was a wonder Charles ever got them listening to anything at all, and probably explained the occasional soap opera atmosphere of the Mansion.
They drove in silence until they reached town. Or rather, the one lone gas station perched on the edge of the freeway. Sunset had come and gone, but the darkening sky, pricked with the first stars of evening, still bled prairie purple with a blush of gold.
Their driver pulled off the freeway and turned into the gas station. He parked beside one of the pumps and got out. So did they.
"Not much around here," said the man, unscrewing the gas cap.
"We'll make do," Scott said. "Thank you for taking us this far. We can help pay for the gas."
"Nah," he said, quiet. "Wasn't out of my way." He paused for a moment, and then added, "You all looking for work?"
The question surprised Jean. She did not know how to answer, and for a moment, the rest of the X-Men shared her confusion. They looked at each other.
"It's not a hard question," said the man. "And you certainly don't have to say yes."
"We're trying to get home," Scott said. "Back to New York. It's an emergency."
"You all have the same emergency?"
"We're family," Jean said, irritated by his subtle skepticism.
"Fair enough." He started pumping gas. "Even if you don't want work, you're all welcome to stay at my place tonight. Just me and the dog."
Scott said, "I think we might intrude."
"And I think you'll be spending a cold night on the prairie if you don't take me up. That's your choice, though. You might get a ride, but I doubt it."
"Is there a reason you're so keen on having us at your home?" Logan asked.
"Every man has a reason for the things he does," he said.
Scott looked at them, and Jean saw her own feelings mirrored on his face. Yes, they needed a place to stay- even better, a way to keep moving—but this was just... odd. Even Kurt, for all his talk about compassion, seemed reserved.
You're jaded. Maybe, but for a good reason.
"Thank you for your offer," Scott said. "Really. What we need, though, is transportation."
The pump clicked. The man removed it and screwed the cap back on. His movements were careful, deliberate.
"I might be able to help you with that, too. That is, if you'll help me with something. Shouldn't take long. Just a couple of hours."
"It's not illegal, is it?" Rogue asked.
He smiled. "No. Just a little something that needs more hands than I got."
"That why you pulled over?" Logan asked.
"Maybe. What do you say?"
Scott hesitated, and then, slow, stuck out his hand. The man looked at it for a moment, smiled again, and shook.
"Okay," he said. "Let's go home."
He said his name was James and that his dog was called Dog, and that they had been alone for a week. The wife was dead, gone from a heart attack because there was no hospital close enough to help. In this part of the country, he said, you lived on your own and you died on your own, and that was the way of it, the price for solitude and minding your own business.
His house was very small and old and white, with real wood siding that had seen better days and some pots filled with red geraniums that desperately needed water. The house and the nearby barn were the only structures for miles, and so they had some warning, even in the waning light.
The yard was dusty. Jean sneezed twice and wiped her eyes. Her body ached as she uncurled from the hard seat of the truck cab.
"Come on in," said James. He walked right into the unlocked house, and Jean was the first to follow him. The interior was dark, but pleasantly decorated with an elegant spare hand that believed in the quality of old hardwood, white walls, and the occasional splash of color. Jean thought there might only be four rooms: the kitchen, the living room, a closed door that was probably a bedroom, and beyond that another closed door. A bathroom,
maybe. She hoped it was a bathroom. She needed one.
"Are you hungry?" James asked. "There's not much here, but you're welcome to it."
"That's all right," Scott said. "Perhaps you'd like to tell us about the work you need done?"
James nodded. "I suppose now is good. I've been . . . putting it off. From doing it myself, you see. Too difficult, even though it shouldn't be. You're all young, though. Younger than me. I appreciate this."
He walked to the first door on Jean's left and opened it. Inside, on the bed, she saw a body. Jean did not know what shocked her more: that the body was dead, a corpse, or that it was not quite human.
"Whoa," Logan breathed.
James entered and sat on the edge of the bed. He touched a wrinkled limb, one of many, folded like thick ribbons on the still narrow chest.
"This is Milly," he said into the breathless quiet. "My wife."
Jean walked to the end of the bed, and felt her friends follow. Except for Logan's outburst, they all remained quiet, respectful of the reverence in the old man's face.
"Wasn't she beautiful?" he asked, and laid his hand on Dog, who nudged close between his legs.
Milly did have a lovely face; Jean thought she must have been a true beauty in her youth. The rest of her body, though, was nothing more than a series of tentacles attached to a slender torso that had no discernible arms or legs.
"She must have been resourceful," Jean said, gende, unsure exactly what to say, what was appropriate under such unusual circumstances.
"Oh, yes. She had to be." James smiled. "We were together almost forty years. Sweet baby."
He finally looked at them and his eyes were bright and wet "I don't want Milly at the local cemetery. They never understood her, anyway. She was just a sideshow. So I want her here, where she was happy. Where we can be together. That's the job I have for you. I need help digging the grave."
"Of course," Jean said, gazing down upon that still face, the deformed body. "Anything."
"I got some shovels in the barn. I'll show you the place. The ground is real hard, which is part of the reason I kept waiting."
He took them to the barn. Outside was dark and cool, the sky heavy with stars. There were no floodlights, nothing to see by, but James led them with an unerring sense of direction and the barn, thankfully, did have a light. It was clear that livestock had been kept there in the past, but now the floor and stalls were clean and dry, and held only the faintest scent of animal.
The shovels were by the door. Three of them, plus two pickaxes.
"Th
e perfect number of people," James said. "I got lucky."
"There wasn't anyone you could ask for help?" Logan shouldered a pickax.
"None I wanted to ask," James said. "Milly and I were pretty much alone out here. She had no family, and mine gave me up when I married her. We never had children. Milly just wasn't built that way. It would have been nice, though."
He led them to a small tree that grew behind the house. Jean could barely see it in the darkness. She touched the leaves and found them smooth and cool.
"Lilac," James said. "Her favorite scent. She waited all year for this thing to bloom."
And then he pointed at the ground and they began to dig.
He was right: the ground was hard. They rotated jobs; Jean and Kurt worked with the pickaxes first, breaking up the ground, and then the others went in with the shovels, hacking and scooping, steel ringing as it occasionally hit rock. James sat on the side and watched. Every now and then he left to bring water, and when one of them had to rest he took up the slack and worked until the weary could start again.
"What did you all do before you found the road?" James asked.
Scott stopped chipping at the earth. "I suppose you could say we were in the profession of helping people."
"Or not," Logan added, with a smile. "Some people need to be helped in ... different ways."
James smiled. "Milly and I knew people like that, but they left us alone after a while. Got tired of it, I guess. Or maybe they grew up."
"Some never do," Jean said.
"I suppose. There were others, like her, who also treated us impolite. I took her to the city, to places where they had all kinds. I thought it would be better for us there. Less lonely for her, anyway. But Milly was too unique, even for them. I think that hurt her more than just about anything, so we came back here and never left."
"That's not right," Rogue said.
"That's the way it is. Those other kind, like Milly, they look different and they got different skills, but they're human where it counts. They're human in all the ways that make us mean and hard, loving and kind. Why else do you think this world has so much conflict? It's because when we look at people like Milly, or heck, all those hero folks on TV, we know we're looking at ourselves, and we know all the dirty things we'd do if we had that kind of power. Now Milly, she just looked different. She could also do miracles with sweet potatoes, but I think that was another gift entirely on its own."
Jean laughed, and James said, "Good. I'm glad someone can smile when I talk about her. She was a sweet woman. She deserves smiles."
It took them until midnight to dig the grave. James went into the house and spent a long time there. Jean and the others lay in the grass, stargazing while they waited for him.
After a time, they heard a whistle. James stood at the back door. He had a suit on, and a nice hat.
"She's ready," he said. "Maybe you could help me carry her."
James had wrapped Milly in a white sheet. She looked smaller, bundled tight, and Jean picked her up before anyone could offer help. Milly was heavier than she looked, but Jean bit back any complaints and carried her from the house to the grave. There, it took some effort to lower her into the ground. Everyone got on their stomachs and grabbed a sheet corner. Careful, slow, they let her down, deep into the earth.
And then they stood, and listened to James say his last words to his beloved wife.
They did not discuss the promised transportation. It seemed inappropriate. James told them to go into the house and get something to eat, to clean up if they wanted because there were plenty of clean towels and a lot of soap. James did not go back in with them. He sat on the ground at the foot of Milly's grave, staring at the fresh- turned pile of dirt. Dog stayed with him.
"That poor man," Rogue said, slumped at the kitchen table. A wet towel lay over her shoulders. She sipped coffee.
Jean sat beside her, also drinking coffee. She had taken her shower first, and it was good to be clean— though rather startling to see herself naked. Logan, the last of them to bathe, was still in the bathroom.
Jean thought of James, sitting alone in the dark at the grave of his wife. She thought of him and Milly, living their lives in isolation because the only place they could find true acceptance was here, with each other. Perhaps that was enough for them. James, certainly, did not seem to have many regrets. Jean, on the other hand, tried to imagine herself in their shoes and could not. People consumed her life and that was fine, because despite her gift, she did not like to be alone.
"I'm going to go check on James," she said. "Maybe he'll want something to eat."
The night air felt colder than she remembered, though digging deep holes in the hard earth tended to distort one's perception of temperature. She stumbled along in the dark, and knew she was getting close when she heart Dog whine.
She tripped, and even as she fell to the ground she recalled the sensation of her foot catching something soft, and no, that could not be true, she hit the ground hard and did not stop moving, just rolled and got to her hands and knees, crawling to the soft lump she had missed seeing in the darkness, and she called his name but he was quiet, and she felt his neck and for a moment there was nothing, but then she moved her fingers and felt a pulse, sweet, and she called his name again and James finally stirred, whispering, "I was trying to die. Now is a good time when I have someone to bury me right."
Jean lay on her stomach, breathless. "Do you want to die?"
"No," he said. "I feel like I should, I loved her so. But I don't want to die."
"Then don't try," Jean said, and watched him hold something up in his hands. "It's too dark, James. What is that?"
He gave it to her. It was a syringe. "An air bubble kills you quick. Goes right to your heart."
"Death is a bad way to fix something that's broken," Jean said, her own heart pounding.
"I know." He took a deep breath, still staring at the stars. "I've seen the way you look at that girl. Mindy is her name? You love her?"
"We're married," Jean said. "We ... grew up together."
James smiled, slow and bitter. "Milly and I were the same. She never did look quite like the others, but it wasn't until her teens that she made the full change. It was real hard on her. Hard on me, too, I guess."
"But you made it," Jean whispered.
"Sure did. She wouldn't want this. Me, thinking about dying. I can't help it, though. I'm alone out here, and those people in town ... even if one of them did find me, they wouldn't bury me here at her side. They would take me away to the cemetery. Heck, I don't even know what to do about Dog." He looked at Jean so very solemn she wanted to cry. "Be careful, son, when you get older. Take care of the people you love. Find some good friends. The kind who will watch over you after you've gone. You don't want to end up like me."
"Was it such a bad life?" she whispered, trying to imagine James and Milly, both alive and full of love in that little four-room house.
"No," he breathed. "I wouldn't trade it for anything."
17
Early the next morning, James drove them to Bismarck, a fairly sizable town in the middle of North Dakota. He bought them breakfast at a truck stop. He tried to pay them money for their night's work, but Scott refused. It did not seem right to take anything for burying a man's wife.
"I was going to give you my car," James said. "I didn't think I would have much need for it after you took care of my Milly."
Because I was going to have you bury me, too.
James did not have to say it. They all knew the truth; James had given Jean permission to tell them.
Scott borrowed some paper and a pen from the waitress. "Here's our address in New York, and this is the phone number we can be reached at. It's, uh, not working right now, but it should be up and running in a couple of weeks. If you ever need anything—anything—contact us and we'll be there for you. You can even come live with us if you want. You might like it."
James examined the address, reading off the list
of names that were not the ones Scott and the X-Men had given him, and then he said, "Xavier's School for Gifted
Youngsters? That sounds familiar to me, for some reason."
"It's a good school," Jean said. "We teach there."
James studied them. "I thought you were homeless."
"It's complicated," Scott said. He thought James would press him for more, but after a moment's quiet contemplation, he smiled.
"Fair enough," he said, and asked for the check.
They walked him back to his truck. Dog poked his head out the passenger window and Scott scratched his neck.
"I'm sorry I can't do more for you folks," James said. "Especially after all you did for me. I just... I just can't stay away from Milly for that long. Long enough to drive you home, anyway."
"We understand," Jean said. 'You take care."
James climbed into the truck. He looked tired. Dog leaned up against him.
"Sure is going to be strange," he said softly, and Scott could only imagine he meant home, that empty little house that still bore his wife's touch. James started the engine, put the car in gear, and waved good-bye as he drove away. Scott watched him go, and could not muster a shadow of disappointment or frustration that another stone had been thrown in their path.
X-Men: Dark Mirror Page 19