Tengo la llave de tu corazón
They haven’t spent a night apart in more than two years. Even when they weren’t sleeping together, each knew where to find the other”but now Logan is away, and Storm is starting to feel the pinch. And that’s weird. She was always the independent one. Scott and Jean were always on top of each other, always so clingy and concerned about each other’s whereabouts, and annoying about it too. They were two people who’d never lived apart, never lived alone, never had to pay for a meal, never had to go shoe shopping by themselves or get the oil changed without someone to talk to. Storm swore she was different.
But then she met Logan. Who failed to go away when he should have. And then they started this ridiculous fucking life together, and every month she waited for him to pull up stakes and move on, but he seemed to want to stay put. And that’s how they ended up like this.
So when she gets a phone call from Logan late in the evening, she’s been waiting for it. She picks it up right away. He tells her that they’ve arrived in Cleveland and have found a hotel close to the clinic. The next morning they’ll go for Rogue’s tests. They’ve also had dinner, he says”as much dinner as Rogue could force down, anyway. She’s been throwing up, he says. Now she’s in the shower.
Five hundred miles away, Storm can hear the sadness in his voice, the anxiety. She wishes she were there with him. She decides, for once, to just say that. “I wish I could be there with you.”
“I wish you could, too.”
It’s been a weird day at the mansion”nothing too extraordinary, just a little strained. She found out that two middle-school boys, Jason and Hernan, had been keeping a cat upstairs in their room. They’d been raiding the cupboards to feed it cans of tuna, but other than that they’d been flying well below the radar. They had a litter box that they cleaned frequently, and the cat seemed well groomed and taken care of. She almost wonders if she shouldn’t just let them keep it, but that’s not feasible. Then other kids will want cats, and some kids are allergic.
Everyone seemed to know about the cat besides her and Logan. Even Remy seemed to know. When she told him about it, he just smiled.
Now she tells Logan.
“You know, I thought something smelled a little like cat piss. Christ.”
“Well, we’re not keeping it,” she says. “I’m holding off putting an ad on craigslist and trying to call people I know to see if someone will take it.”
“Can’t you just set it loose outside? It’s a cat. I’m sure it’ll find its way. Maybe it’ll kill the mice in the annex.”
She rubs her forehead and tries to ignore her own nervousness as it deepens in the pit of her stomach. “I’ve thought about it. But Jason and Hernan”you should have seen their faces. I promised that I’d find the cat a good home.” She remembered how Jason had puffed up his chest to keep from crying. Apparently the cat had been sleeping with him each night in his bed. “The whole thing made me feel like crap, actually,” she confesses. “I hate being the wicked headmistress who takes away children’s pets.”
He laughs a little. “If you’re a wicked headmistress, then I’m the goddamn drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket.” He pauses. “Storm? Is everything alright?”
She needs to bring the call to a close as quickly as possible before the tone of her voice betrays her. Logan’s picked a great time to get his intuition back. “Fine. I just want to know what the doctor has to say about Rogue. Promise me you’ll take a lot of notes?”
He says he will. He tells her that Rogue’s nearly finished in the shower. Then he tells her to get a good night’s sleep.
When she finishes the phone call, she walks the hallways, checking to make sure that everyone’s lights are out and everyone’s in bed. It seems that everyone is okay. (She hopes everything will be okay.) She makes her way down to the kitchen. Remy and Sadie are there having a little confab. She’s sitting on the bench and he’s stirring a cup of cocoa on the other side of the counter. “And I’ve never fallen while ice skating,” she’s saying.
“I have,” he says.
She steps into the kitchen. “Sadie, what are you doing out of bed?”
Remy turns to look at her and mouths “nightmare.”
“I had a bad dream,” she says quietly, looking downward at the table. She looks like she might cry.
“And that’s all it was, sweetie,” Remy says, setting the plastic cup of cocoa in front of her. “Just a bad dream.”
“A wolf was chasing me,” she says.
“There are no wolves in New York,” he says. “At least not anymore.” He glances at Storm.
“Sadie,” Storm says, “why don’t you take your cocoa upstairs and drink it there? You can sit on the window seat before going back to bed.” Sadie’s too old to be coddled about bad dreams, she thinks. She needs to learn to just shake it off.
“Okay,” she says. She slides from the bench and then pads into the hallway.
Remy’s wiping off the counter and putting the milk away.
She watches him. She says, “I need you to cover for me tomorrow morning. I’m going to be out all day. I have a personal errand in the city. Kitty’s coming to supervise my class, but I need you to make sure that things run smoothly in the morning. Can you do that?”
“Sure.” He closes the refrigerator door and then turns to look at her. He spreads his hands over the counter. “Is everything okay, chere?”
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll be back in the evening.”
He stands there for a second, hands still on the counter, and then nods. “Alright. But is everything . . . okay?”
“Great,” she says and turns to walk out of the kitchen and leaves him there beneath the lights.
###
That night she awakes every two hours until her alarm finally goes off at 5:30. She showers and puts on dark jeans and a comfortable button-down shirt and running shoes. She rarely dresses this casually around the mansion”and never to go to the city”but she needs to be comfortable. And her things aren’t fitting as well as they usually do. She ignores how sick she feels”how shaky and awful”and checks to make sure that she has everything”purse, wallet, appointment card, money. She reaches for her coat.
Outside it’s dark and cold, the sun only just thinking about coming up. She walks around to get her car from the garage when she sees Remy leaning against a pillar just outside of the door. He’s smoking a cigarette. Jesus, he’s up early. Then she wonders if he’d ever gone to bed. He has a hat on, a pair of gloves. When he sees her, he drops the cigarette.
“Aren’t you cold?” she says, turning to look back at him.
He shrugs and looks down at his shoes. “I’m okay.”
She walks back to stand near him so that they can talk. “Just make sure everything goes well until Kitty gets here. Can you do that?”
His hands are in his pockets. He nods slightly, eyes still cast downward. Then he looks up. Reaches over and grabs her upper arm. “Please don’t go,” he says.
She just stands there.
“Don’t do this.”
She slowly tries to pull her arm away from him, but he seems to want to hold on. “Remy.” She tries to think of something to say. “I really have to go. I can’t be late.”
He lets go of her arm and brings the heel of his hand to his forehead. “I just can’t wrap my mind around this, Storm.” He glances back at her. “At least let me drive you. Jesus Christ. I can’t stand the thought of you all alone in this.”
“I need to be alone.”
Without even realizing it, they’ve slipped into French. He speaks in dialect and she does not, but they understand each other. They always have.
She exhales and draws closer to him so that she’s standing right next to him. “I don’t have to tell you how complicated this all is.”
“You love each other,” he says. “That’s all that matters.”
He always wants to simplify everything. That’s the way he’s always been. It’s something about him that drove Scott and Jean crazy”he wasn’t detail-oriented the way they were. He was a big picture person. But sometimes details matter, and Remy often got sloppy.
Telling Remy LeBeau about the baby”and about the fact that she probably wasn’t going to keep it”was not a good idea. But she had to tell someone, and he was there, and he’d sensed that something was up.
He’s always been so sensitive. Logan should have been the one to notice, but Rogue’s sudden illness distracted him.
Getting pregnant was an accident, and though she likes children and always has and understands their importance, she knows that the issue is far more complicated than her likes and secret desires. There’s the school to think about. Her commitment to the kids she already has, the kids who have only her and nothing else. They need her. She’s barely able to keep the school running as it is, and it’s important that this place stays open.
But beyond that, there’s Logan. Logan, who fronts, who protects. But who needs very much to be protected.
Remy just studies her.
She knows she doesn’t need to explain, but she does anyway. “His mutation”. The mutant gene is always passed down on the father’s side, and so there’s the question of whether or not the child will inherit his abilities. But that’s not the half of it. There’s a chance the child won’t inherit his abilities”or will inherit just one aspect of them or something different altogether”and will grow old, surpassing Logan in physical age and dying while Logan remains young. Just as she will grow old and die while he remains young.
“It’s a gift,” Remy says, and leaves it at that.
She crosses her arms. “There have been stories.” She shakes her head in an attempt to shake away her tears. “Stories that hospitals are injecting babies of registered mutants with the cure the day that they’re born. I just can’t, Remy. I just can’t. I can’t take that chance.”
“All hearsay,” he says. “And we wouldn’t let it happen even if it were true.”
“It’s just a bad time,” she says. “A bad time out there. And we have the other children to look out for. They need us, you know.”
But these are all excuses. The real reason lurks.
He walks with her to the car and opens the door for her. “I’ll be here when you get back, Storm. You have any trouble”anything”you call me.” He makes her promise. Then he closes the car door and touches the window with his gloved hand. She doesn’t look back at him as she pulls out of the driveway.
###
She and Logan hooked up for the first time on a warm spring day that smelled like geraniums and fresh mulch. It was a Saturday, some ten months after Alcatraz. They both worked Saturdays”school was never out”but on this day she was taking it easy. Bobby and Kitty, just weeks shy of their graduation, had taken the kids to a horse show, and the few stragglers were occupying themselves with board games and basketball. She slipped out of the mansion. She was wearing jeans that day as well. The weather was beautiful and it seemed, for the first time in a long time, that things were going to be okay.
The winter had been tough. So many adjustments had to be made. Without Scott or the professor, the school had seemed skeletal and centerless during the long cold months. She’d always known that the professor’s abilities had provided a pacifying atmosphere, and that his knowledge of what everyone was doing at any given time definitely prevented most discipline problems, but she wasn’t prepared for the loneliness. For the dark winter, the empty study. Cerebro went unused. Kids’ emotional problems went unchecked. She and Logan both got short and irritable with one another. They argued about disciplinary action when two teenagers were caught in various stages of undress in the broom closet. “Give me a break, Storm,” he said, rolling his eyes when she told him she was suspending them for three days. “These kids are people too. Tell me that shit never went on when you were a student here.”
“I know that it happens all the time, Logan,” she said. “Don’t accuse me of being naïve. But once you condone it or look the other way, it’s a different matter altogether.”
Then there was the matter of hiring new people to take the physics, composition, literature, Spanish, and science classes Scott and the professor had left behind. It was tough finding accredited teachers who were mutants or mutant-friendly and who didn’t mind living in the middle of nowhere with kids who could see through walls and read minds and teleport from one room to the next. She hired mostly adjuncts. She wondered how the hell the school had once run so effortlessly.
She and Logan seemed to disagree about everything at that point. If she wanted to train the kids for an hour in the danger room, he advocated for two hours. Overnight he’d gone from a guy who crept around the mansion and helped the professor with oddball projects to the go-to person. A total workaholic. No, she was a workaholic”Logan was a maniac. He walked the halls at night as a makeshift security guard, got everyone going in the morning, supervised gym class and coached basketball, oversaw the art lab, and scheduled various field trips. And then there were the expense reports, the food and supplies purchases, and the inventory. When did he find time to do this? She had no idea. She knew he was putting time and activities between him and Alcatraz”between himself and the death of Jean.
(She’s asked him about what had happened with Jean at Alcatraz, but he was silent about the subject. She knew only what she’d seen and what she could conclude. She’d found him clutching Jean, crying over her body, the puncture wounds in her abdomen. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it. He said he never wanted to talk about it, and she never asked about it again.)
But he was really good about other things. Like when the tadpoles died. The youngest kids”the fourth- and fifth- and sixth-graders”had been working on a science project with a tank-full of tadpoles, charting their development and waiting until they turned into frogs. Jean had always been really fond of this. Every spring she’d take the kids and their newly developed frogs to a nearby watershed and get everyone to release them back into their natural habitat. A real tradition. They always had a little picnic afterwards.
Then, one early spring weekend, someone shut the door to the science lab and it got unusually warm outside. And stuffy inside, too, because the heat was still on. No one thought about the tadpoles. And then there was a lightening storm and the power went out, and the pump on the tank died for several hours and didn’t come back on when the power was restored. When the kids walked into the lab on Monday morning, the whole place smelled like dead fish.
There were tears, of course. Lots of kids who needed to be comforted. Logan didn’t even blink when he walked into the room and saw everyone crying, and Storm knew that he hated crying”couldn’t handle it, didn’t see the need for it, didn’t understand it at all. But he just reassured everyone. He told them he’d get new tadpoles”they were a dime a dozen this time of year, really. Then he removed the tank from the room.
“What did you do with the dead tadpoles?” she asked him later, after dinner.
“The toilet in the boys’ bathroom is a pretty nice place for a frog funeral as it turns out.”
On this particular Saturday when the kids were out with Bobby and Kitty or otherwise occupied, Storm found Logan on the edge of campus spray painting a fence. This was the other thing he did”he kept on top of the grounds and the landscaping. His weekend work. He seemed to really enjoy it.
He was singing. “You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far 'cause you know it don’t matter anyway . . .”
He heard her approach”he must have”but he didn’t stop singing. “You can rely on the old man’s money, you can rely on the old man’s money . . .”
She stepped out from behind the fence. He glanced over at her and quieted down. “Don’t let me interrupt,” she said.
“I was finished,” he said.
“I never would have pegged you for a Hall and Oates fan.”
He stopped spraying and glanced over at her. “What would you peg me for?”
She thought. “Springsteen maybe. Early Elton John.”
He put the can on the ground and turned to face her. He did a half-shrug. “Billie Holiday,” he said. “Now let me play this game with you. Hmm, based on your age I’m guessing early Michael Jackson.”
She tried to hide her smile. She looked away.
“Damn, I hit it right on the nose, didn’t I?” He turned around. She figured he’d go back to spray painting, but instead he surprised her by lowering himself onto the grass, his legs crossed in front of him. She sat down as well, facing him. “I thought you were Rogue. She always sneaks out here to keep me company. If she’s around.”
“Ah,” Storm said. She didn’t like to talk about Rogue if she could help it. The whole cure thing was still too fresh.
“The kids are still out?” he asked. She nodded. “Good,” he said. He gave her a rare smile.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, “that you did a great job with that Sheldon thing. You averted what could have been a disaster.”
“Yeah,” he said, thoughtful for a second. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. I hope they don’t figure that out.”
“He has a crush on you,” she said. “He so wants to please you.” She smiled. “I caught him drawing a picture of you in history class. Claws and everything.”
Logan looked up at her. “I’ve never shown the kids my claws.”
“Yeah, well, word gets around. No secrets here.”
Sheldon had been a bit of a problem since he arrived at the mansion the year before. He was twelve and the resident fat kid. For this he got teased. He also got teased because of his mutation: he could eat and digest pretty much anything. Cardboard, wood, bricks, textiles, you name it. He usually didn’t go around eating these things, much to his credit, but he ate a lot of food. And so he was heavy. The jokes pretty much wrote themselves.
Two sixth-grade girls in particular, Swathi and Rebecca, had been the primary teasers. They started a rumor that Sheldon drank a bottle of nail polish remover, ate the plastic bottle, and then threw it up on the hamster. (Sheldon, by the way, does not throw up. Ever.) They even made up a song and sang it several times a day”in the bathroom, on the way to the kitchen, in the rec room. Storm had caught them and given them a lecture. Still, it got worse. Eventually Sheldon just had enough. He ate Swathi’s curling iron and Rebecca’s biome project”a shoebox diorama of a deciduous forest complete with spongy little trees and plastic animals and shiny cellophane paper streams.
Swathi and Rebecca went nuts. They flipped. They declared all-out war on Sheldon. They were marshaling the troops”getting ready to soak his sheets and delete his hard drive and fill his shoes with shaving cream and all this nasty shit when Logan got wind of it. (He must have overheard them chattering.) He took Sheldon, Swathi, and Rebecca out of class and sat them all down in the professor’s study. Storm was in the adjoining room but she didn’t come in. She let Logan handle it. She knew he wanted her to take over, to do the whole headmistress thing”be the disciplinarian”but she wasn’t budging. Logan had never wanted to be a teacher, but he’d ended up one anyway. He needed to step up.
First, he meted out punishment. Detentions for all of them. He told Sheldon that he needed to help Rebecca redo her biome project. So far so good. Then he did the feelings thing”asked each of them how they’d feel if someone did this to them. And made them articulate it. Okay, a little predictable, but fair enough.
Then he started to spin things differently. Talked about mutant kids growing up on the outside who had no one, who had to go to public schools and deal with ridicule from all sides”parents, classmates, teachers, garbage men, et cetera. How did they think that felt? Silence. Then he asked them why normal human beings should bother treating them with respect when they couldn’t even respect each other. When they couldn’t even treat themselves with respect. “I’m not looking for a love-in here. I’m not telling you to be best friends. I’m telling you to have some dignity. If you don’t, you give the whole world permission to treat you however they want. There are people out there who hate you simply because you are alive. You’re old enough to understand this by now. I don’t have to sugarcoat it for you.”
Silence. Then, finally, Swathi sniffled and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “We’re sorry, Mr. Logan.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Then he seemed to remember himself”to remember what he was supposed to be doing “Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He stood up and walked to the door and opened it. The kids filed back to class.
Now Sheldon was a little bit in love with Logan, and Logan was helping him perfect his free-throw and giving him advice about what shoes were good for playing basketball.
“I wonder what the future holds for him,” Storm said as she sat on the grass.
“He’s going to be okay,” Logan said. “In the next few years his balls will drop and he’ll discover girls and it’ll give him an incentive to work off the weight. He’ll be one of those people who won’t even remember that he was a fat kid.” Logan leaned back on his hands. “He ate a biome, though.” He laughed.
She laughed too. They both just looked at each other and laughed. Then they stopped laughing. Just looked at each other. (Finally.) Logan scooted around so that he was sitting next to her. Then, he reached over and brushed her hair out of her eyes. She leaned toward him and they kissed. Almost chaste, but not quite. Very sweet. She was surprised that there was no awkwardness”only because these moments always engender a lot of awkwardness. They finished kissing and stood up and walked back towards the mansion hand-in-hand. When they rounded the corner and were in full view of the windows, they separated.
That night they ate a small informal dinner with the kids who hadn’t gone to the horse show. After dinner she sat at a table in the rec room and tutored a kid who had stayed behind because his French grade was dipping below average. She went through some conjugations with him and caught Logan looking at her from across the room. He was sitting in the chair with the TV on, but his eyes were focused on her. The nature of his gaze was hard to pin down. It wasn’t desirous or possessive or even curious. It was mostly thoughtful. Like he was just thinking about her. She looked over at him and smiled.
So that night he showed up at her bedroom door. She opened the door to find him leaning against the frame. “Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Sure,” she said, opening the door wide to let him in. He came in and shut the door behind him. And they were kissing again”this time not so chaste”and their clothes fell away, and they found the bed, and that was that. It was kind of furious and quick, over before they really had the chance to think about it. Not rough, not exactly. Quiet and straightforward. Afterwards he told her he should probably go back to his own bed”the kids were around, after all”and kissed her goodnight.
The next day she wasn’t exactly regretful. But she felt that she should have been. In fact, she was surprised that she didn’t have more remorse. She hadn’t slept with a coworker or teammate in a long time”and had been burned enough to know that these things didn’t turn out well”but with Logan it felt a little different. Maybe it felt different because there was no one else around to judge them. They were two consenting adults who could do whatever the fuck they wanted, no mind reading meddlers to gimp things up.
So, Sunday morning. It was always a busy morning. They had to make various travel arrangements for the kids who had religious obligations. Storm got up early and showered and dressed and went to get coffee. She was surprised to find Logan sitting on the stairs looking like he hadn’t slept. “Good morning,” she said.
He looked up at her. “Hey,” he said, more quietly.
“Are you”?”
He stood up and glanced around him. Took a good listen. No one was there. “About last night,” he began. The three words that strike terror into most people’s hearts.
“No worries,” she said, shrugging. “It was fun but we probably shouldn’t do it again.” She studied his face for any kind of reaction but she couldn’t pick up on anything. No resentment or insecurity or relief.
Then he shook his head and smiled. Then, got serious. “Okay. Sounds like a plan.”
She nodded and moved past him. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
And he was. And so was she. They were both fine for a while. Until later that week when she stumbled across him in the kitchen. He was changing the water filter and his hair was slightly messy and his shirt was hanging open and he just looked so, well, good. This is what she would have told Jean”he just looked so damn good. God, she longed for Jean during moments like this. She loved to describe sex, going into explicit details”where it happened, how long it took, what was said, what exact techniques were used, who came first and how many times, all that good stuff. Jean just used to laugh. She wasn’t prudish”Storm got the impression that Jean actually enjoyed these monologues”but about her sex life with Scott she was somewhat tightlipped. Storm suspected that they were either completely boring or both closeted freaks.
So when it happened the third time they stopped apologizing to each other. Just learned to go with it. And about a month in, he got attached. Not that she didn’t”she did. She’d just been trying to hide that piece of herself from him.
“It’s hard,” he told her one night after they’d made love. He was propped up on his elbow and reaching over to touch her hair. “It’s hard to get close to people. I mean, long term.”
She nodded at him. She knew he meant his mutation.
And then he said something heartbreaking: “I don’t know who I am.” He flopped onto his back.
She rolled over so that she was pressed against him. “You know who you are.” Ran her fingers along his ribcage. “I know who you are. Your past isn’t what defines you.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he said, but without any trace of resentment. He looked at the ceiling. “When you don’t know what’s missing, you could spend all your life trying to find it. Stryker.” He closed his eyes. “When we were at Alkali Lake, he said something to me. He said we’d worked together. That I’d always been an animal.”
She leaned her head against his chest. “Bullshit,” she whispered.
He ran his fingers through her hair. “I guess I’ll never know.”
“I know,” she said, turning to look at him. “I know, and I’m telling you that it’s bullshit. I just wish that you would know.”
He grabbed her hand and closed his eyes. She wanted him to fall asleep. She wished he would just spend the night for once. She wanted to wake up next to him, and the conjugal visit thing made her feel like they were sneaking around. He told her that he couldn’t trust himself not to hurt her in his sleep. So he slipped off to his own room.
But he left his cell phone behind. She didn’t think anything of it until the next morning when she was getting ready for work. She picked it up and flipped it open. Scrolled through his contacts. (He had only a few contacts.) Felt guilty for a minute. But she somehow knew that he wouldn’t mind. She wasn’t snooping or anything. She found the name she was looking for and pressed send.
The phone rang. Then: “Mon ami, last night I was watching these two guys absolutely shred each other in a bar fight and I thought of you. So how the fuck are you? They still have your balls in a vice up in Westchester?”
She pulled the phone from her ear for a second and stared at it. Then she brought it back. “It’s Storm,” she said.
“Storm!” Remy exclaimed. “How are you?” Then: “Why are you calling from Logan’s phone?”
This was a good question. Better question: Why was she calling? At all? “I just thought I’d say hi.”
Long, awkward pause. She decided to fill it. “We haven’t heard from you in a while. Is everything okay?”
“Better than okay, chere. I got a fresh start this year.” He paused and lowered his voice. “Awfully sorry about all that shit that went down last year. The professor. Summers.” He cleared his throat. “Alcatraz.”
“I was surprised you never called,” she said.
He let out what sounded like a big sigh. “Didn’t even know about it until afterwards. Rehab.”
“What was it this time? Cocaine?”
“At least it wasn’t meth.”
She shook her head. “Jesus Christ, Remy.”
“But I’m great now. Done with that.” He made a noise that sounded like a quick laugh. “I go to meetin’s and everything. I don’t think there’s anymore I can do. And the IRS finally caught up with me. Froze every goddamn last asset. But I came up from nothing once before. I’ll just do it again. Ain’t never gone hungry.”
She paced in the small room next to the bed. “So what are you doing?”
“Private consulting. I live in Baton Rouge now. Dull as fuck, but it keeps me out of trouble.”
Suddenly she was aware that she had a huge headache. She didn’t know why she had made this call. It was a bad idea. Remy was a fucking catastrophe. It would have been depressing if he hadn’t been so hilarious about it, so devil-may-care. Among the X-Men there had always been a lot of blame tossed around, a lot of self-blame, and a lot of guilt. Too many arguments. Scott and Jean blamed themselves for letting Remy get too involved in undercover life all those years ago. The professor had warned them all along that it was a bad idea. The only one who seemed not to care was Remy. He just moved on.
“You saw Hank was named ambassador?” she said.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said. “I knew Old Blue had it in him.”
“You should come up to stay here sometime,” she said. “You know, I want to give you some of Scott’s things. Some things he wanted you to have.”
There was silence. Then: “Oh yeah. Sure.”
She moved to look out the window. In the vapory morning three kids were sitting on the basketball court playing cards. It was summer now and many of the students had gone home or someplace else. The ones who stayed were the runaways and the castaways. The very troubled. Still, fewer kids meant less work. More time to spend with Logan. More time to think about things. Like whatever had happened to Remy LeBeau.
“Near the end of his life,” she said, “Scott was a different person. But he was still very fond of you. Talked about you all the time. I just thought you should know that.”
He waited a beat. “Thanks, Storm. Means a lot.”
“Come up to see us,” she said. “You’re always welcome here.”
Now they were just saying things. The morning was unfolding before them, a bright summer morning, and they were talking on the phone, just niceties. She wondered why he was up so early. Wondered if he’d even gone to bed. (Wondered if the coke rehab thing wasn’t just bullshit.) With Remy, everything was always uncertain, but nothing was ever intentionally dangerous.
###
Storm lied when she told Remy she couldn’t be late. Her appointment is for the early afternoon; she’ll have plenty of time to spare. She leaves the car and takes a commuter train into the city. (She knows that when this is done she won’t be able to navigate traffic on the way home.) Then finds a café where she can sit and think for a while. Steel herself. She’s been there for four hours and all she’s had is a bottle of water. She’s surprised that the staff hasn’t kicked her out for loitering; perhaps they sense that her quiet devastation is about to break open. Even in a city as unfriendly as New York, people seem to sense the energy of those around them.
Storm also lied to herself. She’d been lying to herself all year. She lied when she believed that she was strong enough to lose her people again. She saw what happened to Scott and Jean, after all.
She needs to see Logan through this Rogue thing and then send him on his way. He’ll never know. Remy won’t say anything. Remy is a lot of things, but he’s not indiscreet. You can trust him with your secrets. Always. Even if he can’t trust you.
She’s trying hard not to think about Logan, about the last two years and how fast the time has gone by, how normal the days have been”the summer days by the pond, the afternoons in the danger room. The morning they made the baby could have been any morning except that it wasn’t”she was so sick in love with him by that time that she was careless. She let herself believe that things would always be okay, that they’d be together for a long time, that neither of them would ever get hurt.
But she’s not thinking of Logan. She’s thinking of Scott.
Scott had disappeared up at Alkali Lake, and his body was never recovered. But he’d disappeared before that. After Jean’s death, he was different. They were all different, but Scott was a strange kind of shattered. Even when he went back to work”even when he taught the kids and worked on his car and ran through the occasional simulation”he wasn’t really there anymore. There was something about him that was hollowed and dark, the loss clinging to him like a pinned shirt.
And she could do nothing about it. She had given up. And she had no right to do this. Scott, after all, had never given up on her.
During college they shared an apartment together, a small place in the city that they couldn’t really afford. He slept there during the day and went to see Jean at night. She spent most of her days in the library”trying to concentrate, trying to get things done”and came home to sleep. They didn’t see each other that much that year. Storm thought this was normal”they were growing up and moving on.
Jean and Scott were technically over. “Technically” meant that they didn’t go out on dates together or call themselves a couple but still slept with each other at least twice a week (twice that Storm knew about, anyway”she suspected that was a conservative estimate). They’d broken up a couple of years ago because Jean wanted to see other people. Then they’d gotten back together over the summer. Then they’d broken up again. Now they were just friends. Who happened to fuck a lot.
So when afternoon, when she returned to the apartment to find Scott, she was surprised to find him on the sofa, shoes off, sitting cross-legged and looking very serious. Scott usually looked serious”even though he wasn’t”but on this day she could tell that something was up.
“Hey,” she said.
He studied her through his glasses. “Where were you, Ororo?”
She spun on her heels and headed for the refrigerator. “What are you talking about?” she said, but she knew.
He got up from the sofa and made his way across the room, socks shuffling against the carpet. “I dropped by your anthropology class. You weren’t there.”
“I had a doctor’s appointment.” She took a gallon of juice from the refrigerator. Thought about getting annoyed. It wasn’t like Scott to take such an interest in her whereabouts”usually he was so wrapped up in Jean.
He nodded. “I went to your Tudors and Stuarts class yesterday. You weren’t there, either.”
She looked up. “What the fuck, Scott. If you want to ask me something,” she said, dropping the gallon on the counter, “then just ask it.”
“Where do you go?”
That was a good question. On Monday she had just ridden the subway around the city. But on Tuesday and Wednesday, she had gone to the top floor of the library and looked out over the city and into the skyscrapers. There were too many buildings around to really see the sky, and she hadn’t seen the sky in a while”the great big African sky with its green-blue tint and its bright orange dawn. People in North America didn’t know dawn.
“Around,” she said.
“You’re thinking of dropping out,” he said.
“I’m weighing my options.”
Scott slumped against the counter. “Ororo.”
“What?” She stared at him. Then she turned away. “College just isn’t for me. It’s just not a good idea.”
“How could you say that?”
She wandered into the other room.
“What are you going to do?”
“Get a job. Don’t worry, I’ll still work with you guys.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. Look”” Scott said. He ran a hand through his hair. “How long has it been since you’ve been to class?”
She swallowed. “Three weeks.” She sat down on the sofa.
Scott didn’t say anything. He just came over and sat next to her. “Give me the contact information for your professors. I’ll call them.”
“Scott””
“We’ll get Jean to get one of her doctor friends to write you up a little note saying that you’ve been indisposed.”
She closed her eyes and sat back. “It’s my choice, Scott.”
“You are not dropping out of college,” he said. “Ororo, you are not dropping out of college because of that Morlock girl.”
Her eyes flew open. Her stomach tightened.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “We’ve been through this.”
She said nothing.
“I don’t know why you won’t talk to the professor about it.”
Inside, she felt something shift. Quake open. “He doesn’t understand.”
“I think he does. But if you feel that way, you can always talk to me.” He drew closer to her.
Two months before, she and Scott and Jean had out. They hadn’t been on duty (back then, they weren’t yet “on duty” all the time), but had instead been revving up for an average night on the town, a casual thing, just a few drinks before the weekend. They’d been standing in line to get in some place (nowhere special), when Jean whirled around. Ororo just caught the glint in her eyes, the stillness of her face. And when a strange-looking figure”a girl”came toward the line of people, a gun in her hand leveled at the crowd, shouting something about Morlocks, about the massacre that had taken place ten years before, someone screamed, and what happened, happened, and couldn’t have happened any other way.
What she had done? She would do it again. She would do it over and over again if it meant protecting Scott and Jean.
Now she looked up at Scott. “I just want to go home. I just have these fantasies about going home. All the time.”
Her hands were in her lap. He reached out and pressed his against hers. “I know.”
“I just want someone to talk to. I want”my parents.” She took a deep breath.
“You know I know,” he said. And he knew so much. And they just sat there for a while, and neither of them said anything, and she remembered what Scott had once told her”years ago”about how he’d escaped from some mutant experimentation facility, and how he’d done just about anything to get out. But now he was just there with her. And the weakness passed, and with it the long moments of uncertainty. And she did what he always did: she put away unpleasantness. Went forward into her life. He called her professors, and she was able to make up the missed work.
So then it was: years and years later, after Alkali Lake. She was angry with him at first”angry with how he’d retreated from life. She’d go into the room he shared with Jean and just yell at him, cajole. Try to get his ass moving. Say things like, “You’re not the only one who lost somebody. Jean was my best friend.”
God, she missed him. They’d been close. Logan had accused her and the professor of enabling, but he didn’t know. (She forgave Logan for that, but it took a while.)
One Friday evening she wandered up to Scott’s room and knocked on the door. He opened. They chatted for a minute, they talked. He invited her in. They were very civil, very amicable. This was how it went anymore. Scott had bad days and less bad days”but he seemed to be done grieving. His mind was a someplace else. His mind was back before Alkali Lake, maybe back before Liberty Island. Maybe back to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when they were young and strong and didn’t know what it was to lose.
Scott’s bed was unmade, of course, and his clothes and books were scattered around the room. He had a stack of novels on the table, and she remembered something about the fact that the professor had promised that he could start to take over the literature classes. But that was before Jean died. Years and years before, he had given Jean a book, a fancy first edition of a Garcia Márquez novel, and in the inside cover he had written tienes la llave de mi corazón.
His room smelled like carbon dioxide and just plain living. Like it hadn’t been aired out or cleaned in a while. But he invited her in anyway. She pushed a stack of papers aside so that she could sit on the chair, and he sat at the end of his bed. They talked. They talked about ho-hum, inconsequential things”the NBA playoffs, for example. What had been happening around the mansion. She told him that Logan had taken apart a scooter to show something to the mechanics class and he hadn’t been able to put it back together. She could tell that Scott was rolling his eyes behind his glasses. “He’s such an asshole.”
“He’s not an asshole. He’s actually trying.”
“Yeah.” Scott rubbed his knuckles together. Cracked them. Then he said, “I’m going to pick up where I left off next week.”
“Oh,” she said, feigning pleasant surprise. They’d had this discussion before. “You’ll have to fight for gym class. Logan’s really getting into it. He’s teaching self defense and survival techniques. Like how to survive in the tundra or the desert or the backwoods of New Jersey.”
“I bet he is.” Scott was quiet for a minute. “Ororo, we’ve been through a lot, haven’t we?”
It was an absurd statement. He seemed to realize its ridiculousness as soon as he said it. He shook his head and smiled to himself.
“I don’t know what happened to us, all of us,” he said. “My fault. My team. I take full responsibility for it. It was pride.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“But I’m learning to live with that. I’m learning to live with those choices.”
“Scott,” she said. Alarmed. “It wasn’t your fault! It wasn’t your fault. None of this. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
He stood up. “Monday. I’ll come down and just get this over with. If you want to give me their essays this weekend, I’ll take a look at them.”
She knew that was a promise he wouldn’t make good on. But she said she’d bring them by anyway.
He was dying. She knew it was coming”death was all over him.
She left his room and stumbled down the stairs. Found her coat in the closet and tried to ignore the fact that she was gasping for air. She had to go. She had to get out of the mansion right now and head for a drive through the hills. She felt dark and suffocated. The place was too small for her”it was a mansion, but it might as well have been a closet. She threw her coat on and closed the door and started to head for the garage. She could feel a nor’easter coming on because she was going to cause it.
Logan appeared in the hallway. Right in front her. He stepped out from the doorway of the den and blocked her path. “Where are you going?”
“Get out of my way.” She tried to push past him but he didn’t move.
He reached out and grabbed her by the arms. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” Held on too tightly. He was too strong for her. He looked over her shoulder. There were kids down at the end of the hallway near the rec room, talking and chatting together. He pulled her forward and then pushed her into the den and closed the door.
“You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“I need to go,” she said, her words catching in her throat. “You”you don’t understand”Logan”” She was starting to cry but it was an awful kind of crying, the kind of crying that could turn ugly fast, and especially for her. The kind of crying that she needed to be alone and out in the middle of nowhere to do.
He held her arms tightly and looked down at her. “Calm down,” he said. “Storm.” He caught her eyes. “Breathe.” He softened his voice and relaxed his grip. “It’s okay. Just calm down.” (Remy had done this with her once, and he was better at it. He’d found her locked in a cell during a mission and about to cause a monsoon. But Logan”Logan was okay. He was good.) He let go of her arms.
She closed her eyes and leaned back. Tried to concentrate so that she could breathe normally. Then she slid down against the wall until she was sitting on the floor. She brought both of her knees up and set her hands on them. Felt her heart slow to a more normal rate. Logan knelt next to her. He grabbed her hands and squeezed.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s going to pass. Just breathe.”
There was a knock on the door. “Storm? Logan? Is everything alright?” The professor’s voice. Jesus, she couldn’t have a moment without him knowing about it. (And later, she’d regret those ungenerous thoughts.)
Logan got up and answered the door. The professor was in the doorway in his wheelchair. He studied her. She wondered how she looked to him”if she looked like a person who had finally broken.
“It’s fine,” Logan said, and a little curtly. “Everything’s just fine, Professor.”
She looked up at the professor. Then leaned her head back against the wall and looked away. She closed her eyes and heard him leave. Logan shut the door and came back and sat next to her, leaning against the wall.
“In Japan they have a word for this,” he said.
“What?”
“I can’t remember.”
She thought he’d get up then and go back to see what the kids were doing, but he didn’t. He watched over her. They sat there for an hour, and neither of them said anything.
She’s thinking of this moment as she sits alone in the café, her water bottle empty, her stomach empty. And that’s when she feels it: something touching her deep inside. No, ridiculous, it’s too early. But then she knows: she’s not strong enough to do this and never has been. She knew this even before she came to the city, and this is why she has spent four hours sitting in a café looking at an empty bottle of water. She doesn’t know why or how, but she knows she can’t go forward. It’s selfishness, maybe”she should, by all means, put this baby out of the picture and go forward. Focus on the school. Rebuild the team. Spare herself”and Logan”of he inevitable loss and heartbreak, the question of mutation, the fear that they could pass a law tomorrow and take it away from them. This child deserves more than she can give. A stronger woman would do this. But she can’t. She feels sick. She takes the appointment card from her pocket and rips it up and stuffs it into the empty water bottle. Then gets up and throws the bottle in the trash and goes outside. It’s drizzling, this awful frozen rain shit, and she wonders if she caused that.
Outside, she throws up in a trashcan on the side of the street. Touches her abdomen. She’s in love.
She wanders around Central Park for a few hours. She doesn’t want to go home yet. She’s tired, and she just can’t deal with daily hustle today, with the students and the piled-up work and the phone call she needs to make to Emma Frost. She wonders how Remy is holding down the fort, if he’s had a Texas Hold ’em tournament yet. Probably not. He’s good enough to save that until the evening.
It’s starting to get a little later. It’s still drizzling. She takes out her phone, figuring she’ll call him, or call Logan”she needs to tell him, but not until he gets back”when she notices that she’s received a voicemail. Someone had called her before and she hadn’t felt the phone vibrate.
It’s Logan. When she hears his voice, hears the anxiety and worry, her heart sinks. “Storm, I need you to call me when you get this. It’s important. The doctors”they want to do a biopsy. Please. Call me.”
She stops right there in the middle of a bike path and does just that.
“Storm,” he says when he picks up.
“Logan, what’s happening?”
He starts talking. His voice is low and quiet. He says that the doctors did a CT scan and found something. A mass. They’ve scheduled a biopsy for the next day and they’re going to have to put Rogue under.
“Logan,” she says. She takes a breath. “I’m going to fly out. Tonight. I’ll find a flight and be there late.”
Silence. Then: “Where are you?”
His damn dog ears. “I’m in the city,” she confesses. “I had to come down here for something. But I’m going home, I’m going to pack a bag, and then I’m going to get Remy to drive me back down to the airport. I’ll call you when I know the specifics.” There’s another silence, but she doesn’t wait for him to fill it. “Logan, it’s going to be okay.” She believes this now. She has to.
###
When she gets back to the mansion, she finds Remy in the rec room on the sofa”along with every kid at the Institute. All of them crammed into one room. But they’re not playing poker. Instead they’re all sitting together on the furniture and on the floor watching American Idol. Sadie’s on one side of him and Hernan is on the other. The other kids are packed onto the sofa or into the chairs and shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor. The room is full and warm. Even Warren’s there”sitting at the table, his eyes fixed on the TV. And it’s nothing special”just some guy botching Stevie Wonder”but they’re all watching like it’s the last show on earth. She wonders if Remy hasn’t hypnotized them. They should be doing their homework. She makes a mental note to describe the scene to Logan when she gets a chance.
She pauses in the doorway. He looks over his shoulder at her. His brow creases. His expression changes from bland amusement to concern. He gets up, leaving the kids on the sofa, and joins her in the hallway. They walk up the steps together.
“I need you to drive me to the airport,” she says. (Why did she choose to tell him this first? Maybe because the future”the six and a half months from now future”isn’t as pressing as what’s happening with Rogue. Or maybe she just hasn’t gotten that far yet in her own mind.)
“What’s goin’ on?”
She waits until she’s in her room to tell him. She goes into the closet and gets a suitcase. Some clothes. She doesn’t bother to take things off the hangers.
He shakes his head and crosses his arms in front of him as she talks about the biopsy. “That poor child,” he says. “I was hoping they’d be home tomorrow. I was hopin’ it was nothing.”
“Yeah.” She changes her shoes.
“Whatever this is, it ain’t good, is it, chere.”
She shoves some socks into her suitcase.
“You want some help with that?” he says.
"No, I just have to be at the airport by ten. That’s the last flight out.” She zips her suitcase.
Arms still crossed in front of him, he looks at her. Studies her. “You okay? You look tired. All done in.”
She puts her hands on her hips and stares at her suitcase. She’s exhausted.
“You want a cup of coffee? Tea? I’ll make you some café con leche to go.”
She continues to stare at her suitcase. “No, no caffeine. I can’t. I’m going to have a baby.”
She feels him smile. He moves over to where she’s standing and puts an arm around her shoulders. Kisses the top of her head. He pulls away. “I’ll make you a sandwich then.” He turns back to walk down the hallway.
Remy tells Warren to watch the kids. Then he pulls the car around and loads her suitcase into the trunk. When she gets into the passenger’s side, she looks up and sees that the headlights are illuminating the courtyard. There’s a colony of snowmen, some of them huge and elaborate, some of them wearing hats and scarves.
Remy gets into the driver’s side and points at the snowmen. “Bobby came by today.” He puts the car in drive. “He’s crazy about that other little girl, Kitty.”
“I know,” she says.
“Says he’s gonna marry her.” He looks over at her and widens his eyes. “Seems pretty serious about it, too.”
Great. Another thing to worry about. “They’re so young,” she says.
He laughs. “You don’t have to tell me, chere. I tried to talk some sense into that boy. But some folks just have to figure things out for themselves.”
The pull out of the driveway. Kitty and Bobby remind her of another couple, but she’d rather not talk about that. She doesn’t want them to come back to teach at the mansion”they’re both too talented, too bright, too promising. Too much life in front of them. They should go get jobs and buy houses, not join a team whose members tend to die before they reach forty. She knows she shouldn’t touch this, but she wonders what would have happened if Jean had continued her work as a geneticist at NYU rather than pulling back to go full time at the mansion. Scott was always going to be an X-Man”it was what he was born to do”but Jean could have done so many other things.
“Bobby dated Rogue,” she says. “Around the time when everything happened. Did you know that?”
He looks straight ahead. His long legs are bent at an uncomfortable-looking angle underneath the steering wheel. “Yeah, she mentioned it.”
“It was around the time she took the cure.” She glances over at Remy. “I think she took it to be with him.”
He shakes his head. “Nah. If it wasn’t him it woulda been some other guy. Or some other reason. And there wasn’t nothin’ no one could have done to prevent her from doin’ that, either.”
“Tell that to Logan. He really beats himself up about the fact that he let her leave that day.”
Remy takes one hand off the steering wheel but doesn’t glance over at Storm. “Those kids are like us.”
She knows what he means: they’re just going to keep getting mixed up in each other’s lives.
She turns to him and says what she wanted to say five months before. “The hurricane.”
He looks at her out of the corner of his eye but stays focused on the road.
“It was category five. It was completely beyond anything I could have dealt with. If I’d known in advance”when it was still category two or three”I could have maybe done something. I’m sorry.”
He’s very quiet for a moment. She doubts he’s breathing. “I know, chere. Ain’t your fault. No one’s fault.”
There’s a long silent moment, awkward. She shouldn’t have said anything. Then he says, “I’m thinkin’ I’ll try to quit smoking, again. Not doing the patch again, though. Or the gum. Not gonna do anything. Just go cold turkey.”
“You should see a doctor. You could get a prescription for something.”
“Yeah.” He laughs. “Another drug is the last thing I need.”
You must login () to review.
