Part 8
Sami and Allie had never had a chance to get far from the campground; despite the fact that Sami half-dragged Allie, their return trip took only a few minutes.
The campground was mostly deserted. Everyone else was still off looking for birch bark and brown mushrooms, Sami supposed. If only my twins wanted something that easy to find—I shouldn't have complained about the worms or mentioned Sydney!
A counselor spotted them slogging toward their tent and hastily rushed to their side. "Is Allie all right?" she asked Sami.
I don't know! Sami's mind screamed, but she wasn't about to say that aloud. She had spent most of Will's childhood listening to the rest of Salem shaking their heads at the sad situation of a sweet boy having a disgrace for a mother. She had no desire for a repeat performance.
"She's just overtired. She didn't sleep much last night," Sami hedged. It wasn't as if the counselor would be able to help if she knew the truth; Lucas was probably the only person in the entire group who spoke Cantonese. "I think we're just going to forfeit the scavenger hunt and lie down."
"All right. Feel better, Allie." Allie made a gesture something like a nod, which Sami thought was progress. "Let me know if you need anything, Ms. Brady."
"Thank you."
Sami had just managed to get Allie stretched out atop Lucas' sleeping bag—maybe his scent would comfort Allie as it had once comforted Sami—when she sensed rather than heard someone coming toward her. She drew up the tent flap just in time to see Lucas running toward her carrying—
"Oh God, Johnny!"
Typical twins. If one of them was going to have a crisis, of course the other wasn't going to be left out. When Sami and Eric had been Allie and Johnny's age, John had called it the anything you can do, I can do better syndrome.
She sprang forward to meet them. "Lucas, what happened?" She imagined snake bites, tiger claws, poisonous mushrooms mistaken for safe ones, trees easily climbed but not so easily descended…
"I don't know, Sami." He was as frantic as she had ever seen him. Lucas had always told her that she could be the cautious parent; he would be the laid back one who didn't sweat the small stuff. Even when Will had shot EJ, Lucas had calmly responded with a plan that had worked well for many years. "He was fine—absolutely fine!—and then his eye—it just came out."
Sami brushed Johnny's wild curls away from his face.
Even years after the surgery that had removed Johnny's eye, she still felt a temporary thrill of horror each time she saw him without his prosthetic. Not my child! Who hurt my child? I'll kill you!
But, as always, the horror abated. Johnny was safe; the cancer was gone. He felt no pain, and his prosthetic had never been a problem except when he decided to remove it to "gross out" his classmates. She had grounded Johnny more for eye-related stunts than for everything else he had ever done combined.
"You're grounded, Johnny," she told him firmly as she stomped back toward the tent for the first aid kit. "Just put him down, Lucas," she called over her shoulder.
Lucas followed her into the tent, still cradling Johnny in his arms. "We have to get to a hospital," he said, but he didn't sound so frantic as he had a moment before. "What if something chipped off and is floating around in his brain?"
Sami burst out laughing, then felt guilty and struggled to control herself. She shouldn't laugh at Lucas for being a concerned father.
"There's nothing inside to chip off. Where's the eye?"
"My right pocket," Lucas said. He made no move to reach for it. Sami realized, with a rush of affection, that Lucas must still be too frightened to put Johnny down. Whatever else she had done wrong in her life, she had chosen the right father for her oldest three children.
Gently, Sami reached into Lucas' pocket to remove the prosthetic. Even in the midst of this miniature crisis, she relished the intimacy of the small gesture.
The false eye—as she had suspected—was completely intact.
"Lucas?"
"Yeah?"
She kissed him on the cheek. His skin still felt good beneath her lips. "Our son has punked you. And, I repeat, is grounded."
"Punked me? I don't think he's even conscious, Sami!"
"Put him down," Sami directed. She pointed at her own rumpled sleeping bag.
Lucas hesitated.
"Lucas, you know I am the queen of freaking out. Do you think there's even the slightest chance that I would be this calm if I wasn't sure everything was OK?"
"You do have a point," agreed Lucas, but he still looked so shaken that Sami didn't even pretend to take offense. When Lucas had laid Johnny out on the sleeping bag, Sami gently tugged up Johnny's shirt.
"Sami, it's his eye, not his—"
Sami tickled Johnny's exposed stomach. Within seconds, the tent was filled with the sounds of Johnny's raucous laughter.
"You see?" Sami said. "Not a bad acting job," she told Johnny. "But what are you?"
"Grounded," Johnny replied through his chuckles.
"He does this," Sami told Lucas. "Freaks out the kids in his class. Or his teachers. Or his baby-sitter. He loves an audience, you know that. He's not supposed to pop it in and out too much—it gets dirty, and there's always the chance it will break. I have the cleaning solution right here, though."
She upended the first aid kit. The blue bottle of cleaning solution tumbled out, as did something Sami hadn't seen since she'd been Johnny's age.
"Is this a walkie-talkie? They still make those?" She passed it to Lucas, who turned it over in his hand.
"It's on," Lucas pointed out. Now that his heart had stopped pounding, he was able to glare properly at Johnny, who had crawled across the tent and curled up beside Allie. Lucas had barely noticed his daughter until that moment.
He squatted in front of the twins. "How do you suppose a walkie-talkie got turned on and left at the bottom of a first aid kit?" he asked.
There was no answer.
Lucas focused on Allie. Allie was sneaky, no doubt about it, but she hadn't made a fool of him within the past ten minutes. "What's going on, Allie?" he asked.
"Sap waak dou mei jau jat pit." Nothing's going on.
"Oh," Sami broke in. "Allie is refusing to speak English." She bit her lower lip; Lucas felt a wave of nostalgia at the realization that she still did that. He now associated the gesture almost completely with Allie. "She was really upset before, she was crying. Maybe she can't remember how to speak English?"
Lucas shook his head. "I asked her what was going on, and she said sap waak dou mei jau jat pit. That's an idiom. It basically meaning 'nothing's happening.' She understood the question." He tossed the walkie-talkie from one hand to the other. "But since Allie seems to prefer Cantonese, I'll teach you some, Sami." He kissed his ex-wife on the cheek, mirroring the action she'd taken when she'd realized Johnny had put one over on him. "Repeat after me: Johnny zeoi jau jau gwai."
"Johnny zeoi jau jau gwai," Sami mimicked.
"And why doesn't Allie tell us what that means?" Lucas suggested.
Allie was silent. Johnny poked her. "They said my name," he half-whined. "What does it mean?"
Allie sighed. "It means 'Johnny isn't the only one who's grounded.'"
"Excellent," said Lucas with no small amount of sarcasm. He exited the tent still playing with the walkie-talkie; moments later he returned, carrying its mate. "This was in Allie's pillow," he told Sami.
"What a shock," said Sami drily as she helped Johnny reinsert his false eye. "Tell me, Lucas, did Johnny agree to come live with you before the incident with his eye?"
"He did," Lucas confirmed.
"And Allie agreed to live with me. Because neither one of them were surprised, because they heard our conversation last night and decided to call our bluff. And then they thought they'd demonstrate just how difficult they could be—"
"So we'd realize that we'd have to get remarried because that was the only way we could handle the terrible twins," Lucas picked up smoothly. He looked both twins hard in the face. "But that is not ever going to happen. I'm sorry. The world is full of children whose parents aren't together, and they all survive. Your mother's parents were divorced when she wasn't much older than you. My parents never even got married."
"You have two parents who love you and will always take care of you. That's the best case scenario. When parents who shouldn't be married stay together for the sake of the children… it never works out. The fighting and the unhappiness aren't good for anyone."
"So were you unhappy when you were married?" asked Allie slyly.
"I can honestly tell you that we were all unhappy," Sami told her.
"Were you unhappy because of something Dad did, or because you both knew you'd have to get divorced so EJ would stop hurt everyone? Because it doesn't count as unhappy if—unless you really divorced Dad because you wanted to be with someone who tried to cut Johnny and me into little pieces before we were born."
Lucas mumbled an oath under his breath; Sami appreciated the sentiment. She hadn't planned on telling the twins that part of their history. Not ever.
She also hadn't planned on Allie being quite so attuned to subtleties. She was used to Johnny and his short attention span, and Sydney with her lack of interest in most emotional topics.
"All right," Sami tried again. "At the time, I didn't want to divorce your father. But we have very different lives now. That's what we were trying to show you when we asked you to change homes. Neither one of you wants to start a new school or make new friends. One of you would have to do that if we were all going to live together."
"I would do it if I had to," said Allie.
"So would I," agreed Johnny. "I could live in Hong Kong. I could learn martial arts."
"Don't make it like you're staying apart for us," Allie finished. "We're twins, and we haven't lived in the same place since we were four years old. That's not normal. That's a decision you made because you wanted to see each other as little as possible—so you split us up instead of sharing. Because you were afraid that if you were in the same room you'd get back together, and you're both too stubborn to admit it."
"That's not how it happened."
"Except it is."
"Don't speak to your mother that way," Lucas injected.
"I'm not allowed to speak Cantonese. I'm not allowed to say things that are true. What am I allowed to say?"
"You can say whatever you like, as long as you say it respectfully. That means no speaking Cantonese to someone who can't understand it, and no backtalk when we're trying to have a serious, adult conversation with you."
"How is it backtalk to—fine. If Mom loves me so much, why is this trip the first time she's been in the same room with me for years? A trip she didn't plan? Either she doesn't love me, she's fine with the replacement daughter she has, or she was avoiding you. Which is it?"
"Your mother loves you just as much as she loves Sydney and your brothers. And she wasn't avoiding me. We—"
"Skype doesn't count."
"No interrupting—"
"Then stop lying—"
"Allie—"
"And you, back me up!"
"I agree with everything Allie said."
"Johnny, you remember when Rafe left and EJ died and—"
"Excuse me?"
A young counselor lifted the flap of the tent. Lucas, Sami, Johnny, and Allie all turned toward her angrily.
"We'll try to keep it down. Please leave us alone," said Lucas tersely.
"I'm sorry," said the counselor. "But—"
"You heard him. Please leave," said Sami.
"Ms. Brady, Mr. Horton, we've received a message that there's a problem with your son—Will?"
TBC
