Arcadia missing scene, thnx Nora Ephron ily

33. “I missed something, didn’t I?”

“Hey Dana,” he says, leaning on the doorframe, the same way he’s been saying Hey Laura all week, and before she can stop herself she tells him, “Oh, go to hell.”

He looks stung, suddenly self-conscious of his pose. “Um. What?”

Scully turns away from the towels she’d been folding on the bed. She looks silly, so fluffily pajamaed as she is. Armored in terrycloth. Perhaps she had asked him to turn down the air conditioner, though. Perhaps she had asked him yesterday, too.

She looks guilty at having snapped. And nervous.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, holding her elbows. “I don’t feel well.”

He nods. He knows his way around a sick Scully, sensitive and ornery like a cat. “Alright. Can I get you get anything? Come sit—”

But when he steps closer, she moves away, into the armchair in the corner.

“I think I’d just like to be alone, Mulder.” She looks out the window, at one house like theirs after another after another.

“Alright,” he repeats, backing off. “Alright.”

Tonight at dinner he had joked as if she didn’t understand him, as if even now, six years on, she could not be trusted. As if the real Scully, underneath her Laura suit, found him embarrassingly New Age. (If she only knew who could have possibly convinced him of such a thing—ha ha.)

A window goes dark down the block and Scully imagines it is the bedroom of a little girl, and her parents still linger in the doorway, bidding her sweet dreams.

“Scully?”

She looks at Mulder, half in and half out of the room, with her temple propped on her knee.

“Did I miss something?”

I turned thirty-five today, she thinks. My daughter died twenty-five miles from here. The houses at Miramar were all the same, like this. Diana calls you Fox.

She shrugs.

“The bathtub in there’s got jets,” he offers, nodding toward the master bathroom. Yesterday he’d found, inside it, a smaller, separate room for the toilet: Scully! You’ve gotta see this! A private office!

He is terrible at impersonal.

She smiles a sad smile, just a little one.

“You should give it a whirl,” he winks. He’s trying. And then, “You’re mad I called you Dana?”

She shakes her head. Later he will remember this moment with others in which she was disarmingly honest. With others in which suddenly she was small and human, realer than she was in his head, where she loomed as large as her importance to him and as infinitely strong as his impression of her.

“I like when you call me Dana.”

He mulls this over.

“I’m just having a hard time being Laura, I guess,” she elaborates, chewing the inside of her cheek and avoiding his eyes.

“Well,” he slouches, getting a little more comfortable. “I can understand that. It’s not so easy, being married to me.”

She tries to chuckle, raise her eyebrows so as to say Oh, can you, but very suddenly she is crying with great big breaths that wrack her shoulders. “It’s just hard to be alone,” she sobs, for at the very least he is her best friend—was her best friend—very recently. “I’m sorry.” After all, it is all very personal. She wipes her nose. “It’s just hard to be alone.”

He’s materialized by her chair, crouching. Opening his arms.

She rolls her eyes. “Mulder, I’m fine.”

He narrows his, peering intently. “You have a little, uh—” He wipes a green flake out of her hairline. “Avocado mint mask, here.”

She lifts an eyebrow.

“I read the bottle.”

“Snooping through my things, hm?”

And perhaps she isn’t a strong woman, flirting with him like that. But in five years she will be forty, and he is so close, and she will never be his real wife.