A series by November

Chapter 50: A Picture Kept

"Don’t call me daughter
Not fair to
A picture kept will remind me…"
--Pearl Jam

Rogue didn’t go back to school the day after that. Or the day after that. She asked Logan to call Dr. Pileggi and explain. At his request she called Rogue’s history prof and got him to postpone her test for a week.

She didn’t venture much from her bed. For the first few days he let it go, and was sweet and attentive, coming back between his classes to hold her, to wait on her. On the third day he became alarmed, started pacing. He was so angry at her father that he could scarcely contain it. She sensed his distress and asked him to lay beside her. She pressed her forehead to his and explained that she would be okay, that this was her way of coping.

Maggie came in and said "what’s wrong, Momma?"

"C’mere, sug. Come snuggle." Maggie climbed into bed next to Marie.

Marie had promised herself she would never bullshit Maggie, or sugarcoat the way things were. She explained the situation to her as calmly and simply as possible. "I pulled off the hood and it was my daddy. He was one of the ones trying to kill Cody and Kayla and that makes me really sad. This is how I cope when I’m really sad, just like when you’re really sad you yell or throw your dolls. So I’m gonna just chill out for a day or two and I’ll be good as new."

Maggie hugged her fiercely.

"Oh, kid, you have no idea how much good that does me. I love you Bluie."

Logan took her to school. She returned with a sun-catcher made of wax paper. Marie smiled and hung it from the window. She stared at its riotous color and thought about her father. She was still shuffling cards in her head. The FoH card didn’t match the card with her picture. A man who would cast one mutant girl out and murder another, and he had used up five of ten haircuts needed to get a free one.

On the second day she called out to Xavier. ~Professor, can I talk to you?~

~Rogue, where are you?~

~Home. It’s not an emergency. Just when you get a minute.~

~I’m on my way.~

Several minutes later he was in Rogue’s doorway. She was sitting on her bed with her legs pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around them.

"What’s on your mind, Rogue?"

"Just a puzzle I can’t figure out. If I don’t make sense of it it’ll drive me crazy." She pulled out the wallet. All the cards and her photo and the garage key were stacked inside it. She pulled them out and dealt them out onto the bed.

"This is a picture of me, from third grade. It was in his wallet behind his FoH membership card. I don’t get it. An organ donor card, a Kiwanis International membership card. Garage key. He was halfway toward getting a free haircut. A picture of my mother, from before I was born. Blockbuster card. NRA card. Visa. Master card. Debit card. Social security card, which you shouldn’t carry with you in the first place. Library card. My uncle’s business card. For his taxidermy shop. Carter killed him. That’s fine, he was a child molester. That I can deal with."

Anyone else, Logan included, would have been alarmed by her hard analytical tone. But he just listened.

"I keep dealing out all these cards like I’m playing solitaire, hoping I’ll turn over one that makes it all make sense. But it doesn’t."

Xavier nodded and let her talk.

"When I was little my favorite thing in the world was to go pick pumpkins. I would pick out the biggest, best one, and he would always carry it to the car, no matter how heavy it was. That evening, we would open the top, scoop out all the slimy insides, Momma would bake the seeds with some salt and we’d eat them. He would let me draw the face, in any silly way I wanted, not always a scary face. I’d draw it on with magic marker and whatever I drew, he would cut it. One year I drew three eyes and two mouths, and he cut it. How could someone who cut whatever I drew try to burn a little girl to death?"

Xavier could tell that she had already done her crying. Now she was left with the intellectual aftermath and she was dealing with it almost clinically. This was normal.

"You have a premise that things always make sense, Rogue. And people don’t always make sense. Erik told me a story once about his great aunt who was a Nazi sympathizer until the very day they came to take her to Bergen-Belsen. She was Jewish. It used to bug the hell out of him."

"I remember," she said.

"So you know how that plagued him too. I can’t shuffle your cards like a tarot and make them make sense. They never will. All I can say is that fear and ignorance make people do stupid things, strange things, bizarre and irrational things. If you try to reconcile them it will drive you mad. There comes a point when you just have to accept that it doesn’t make sense. Like two friends who agree to disagree."

"It would be so much easier if I could look back and say ‘yeah, I remember he did this and this and this, and now I realize how fucked up it is.’ It would be so easy to think yeah, he was rotten from the start. Comforting, even. But all I can think about is those damn pumpkins."

"It’s a loss, Rogue, a loss as deep and profound as a death. You felt it when they cast you out of their house and it’s just been ripped open again. You will grieve for the man you thought he was and for the man he really is. You’ll grieve for the little girl drawing on pumpkins. And you’ll move on."

"What about the anger? I keep reliving it again. Wishing I’d told Scott to take him out. He doesn’t deserve to live. He was gonna kill them both. Kill them like a coward in his white sheet."

"And you could have let him die, in his sleep, like a coward, without confronting him. But you said ‘Leave him alive. So he will know.’ What did you mean when you said that?"

"I’m not sure."

"Aren’t you?"

"I meant that if we killed him… we wouldn’t have really made a difference. Which is stupid because he was holding a torch too. The thought that was going through my head at the moment was that I wanted to confront him. I wanted to show him everything I’ve become and how much he’s hurt me and how wrong he was.

"I don’t think I told you this story but this summer Logan and Maggie and I were on the beach, this crowded public beach. And Logan was sleeping, and I was just sitting there, and building this huge sand castle with Maggie. And this guy walks by and glances at Maggie and says ‘mutie freak.’"

"Oh god."

"That’s what I said. And Logan… leapt over these people and had his hand around the guy’s neck in two seconds flat. And tells him to apologize to Maggie. And then I get up, and I’m in Rambo mode, and I ask him how he’d like it if he was only three years old and his parents left him. And I told him that Maggie was the sweetest child on God’s green earth and that he was going to apologize to her. I was really in his face, too. And Logan’s like ‘you better listen to her man, she’s got a mean right hook.’ Then Logan threw him down on the sand. He had sand in his teeth and up his nose. And he was looking up at Maggie, and she was just sitting there, dumbfounded. All pigtails and ...just a little baby. Everyone was staring, watching this unfold. And this guy - he was just a young kid, but he ate his words and said he was sorry. And Maggie just said ‘it’s okay.’ Just like that. And I could see it in his eyes. Something changed. He got up and we let him walk away. And everyone around us - they were clapping. They were smiling at us. Old and young and black and white. They were proud of us for being humane, for defending our own, maybe for appealing to his reason. I was a bit startled by all that approval. We actually met some friends that way. One of them, Ray, is gonna work with Jean on a paper. One of them, Cassandra, has become a good friend. She said ‘You guys handled that so well.’ And I think, there were a lot of people there and I don’t know how they all felt about mutants, but if there was just one of them who was on the fence about it, maybe we could have made a difference."

"Now you understand where I’m coming from as a pacifist."

"But I’m not. Killers should be killed, 'nuff said. But I think there’s something to be said for taking the high road. Appealing to the best in people. I got some hate mail this summer and I just responded with a polite rebuttal, ‘no we aren’t Satan’s scourge, thankyouverymuch,’ and I invited them to tour the school."

"Rogue, we’re more alike than you think." Xavier smiled.

"I just - I dunno. I’m all mixed up in my head."

"Actually I think you’re seeing things very clearly. Your father is the mixed up one."

.

Rakim stopped by later that afternoon. "Hey Marie. I heard about what happened. I’m here for you, a’ight."

So she showed him the wallet and the cards, shuffled them for him. He was perplexed too. But in doing the same shuffle yet again she became more and more accepting of the cards as they were.