Part 18-New Year

In the year 2020, the last thing Will would have expected was that he would voluntarily board a plane bound for London with Joy Wesley as his only travel companion. That would have been the embodiment of his conception of hell.

But two weeks into the year 2021, that was exactly what he did.

"I haven't been here since Chloe sang here five years ago," Joy told him as they circled high above Heathrow, waiting for their turn to land. "It's one of my favorite cities, though. But I guess everyone loves London."

"I don't," Will told her with more viciousness than he intended. Joy looked more than a little taken aback.

"Sorry," she said hastily. "I guess with your mom and brother and sister—"

Will waved the apology off. "It's not London's fault."

"How long since you've been here?"

"Two and a half years." He looked at Joy thoughtfully. She had brought the medical procedure that might actually help Sami to his attention; she had agreed to fly to London with him and help bring Sami back to Salem. She would be a necessary connection to the best neurosurgeons in the world.

He was going to have to tell her something he hadn't mentioned aloud since he'd drunkenly blurted the whole thing out to Abby and Chelsea two hours after it happened.

(Abby and Chelsea had made veiled references to the incident when they inscribed a copy of their novel, Correspondence on Bad Ideas, to him at their signing the next day. He had almost shredded or burned the book many times, but his failure to follow through had resulted in probing questions and unsubtle hints from both Lucas and Allie. He'd pretended not to know what they were talking about.)

"The doctors had a disagreement about how to treat my mom, so I came here to check on her," Will began. "She was having these… periods where she'd be semi-conscious for a few minutes more often then. Some of the doctors thought that she was lucid and others disagreed. I thought I was in a better position to judge, you know?"

Joy nodded.

"The first few times I went into her room, there was nothing. She was just a shell lying there, letting the machines do everything. Then I came in when she was awake. She looked at me, and she squeezed my hand, and I knew she knew who I was." Will's voice broke, and when Joy laced her fingers through his, he returned the contact gratefully. "Then her lips moved, and I was sure she was going to say that she loved me, or that she was sorry, or where I could find the twins, or even just say my name. But all she said—all she said was EJ. She left my dad for him. She left me for him. She gave Allie and Johnny to him. She destroyed our family for this man who raped her and tried to kill her kids. And when she got to talk to me for the only time in ten years, what did she do? She called for him. I already knew where her priorities were, but… anyway, it wasn't like we were going to bring him to her even if we could. The doctors agreed to carry on with what they were doing, and I went out and had six beers in about an hour. Then my cousin—Abby, I think you've met her—called me and ended up dragging me out of the pub before I did anything stupider."

Joy's fingers were still tangled among Will's, and she pulled them closer together. "I'm glad she was there, then."

Suddenly, Will's face was an inch from Joy's. He pulled his lips away from hers just in time.

Allie's cell phone buzzed with the text message that Will's flight had landed safely in London. It was odd to think of Will, who was part of her new life in Salem, being so close to her old life. It was even odder to think that when he returned, he might bring their mother with him.

Ciara elbowed Allie in the ribs. "Put that away. Claire's next."

Allie dropped the phone back into her bookbag and stared straight ahead at the high diving board and the turquoise-colored pool. It was the fifth swim meet of the season, and half a dozen Hortons and Bradys had turned out to watch Claire's performance.

As usual, Uncle Shawn, Uncle Philip, and Aunt Belle looked sick to their stomachs. They all wished that Claire would find a different hobby even as they acknowledged that she was genuinely talented.

Tyler and Johnny, in agreement for once, looked bored. Neither of them really wanted to be here, but Aunt Belle hadn't given them a choice.

"Now diving for Salem, Claire Brady!" the public address system announced importantly.

Claire, graceful and poised as always, walked backward along the diving board until she reached the edge.

"Wish she'd at least walk forwards and then turn around," Uncle Shawn muttered under his breath.

"She's got too much style to do that," Uncle Philip returned. "Not that I don't agree," he added hastily when Uncle Shawn glowered at him.

Claire bounced once on the board before springing high in the air and twisting upside down.

Allie had seen Claire dive often enough that she knew the timing was wrong a split second before Claire's head slammed into the board with a sickening crack. She was obviously unconscious before she hit the water.

Both Uncle Shawn and Uncle Philip vaulted out of the bleachers and into the pool, but Claire's coach had gotten there first. Her blood ran down his chest as he climbed from the water with her in his arms.

"Baby? Claire-bear?" Belle asked anxiously, but Claire was in no condition to respond. In the distance, Allie could make out a siren, and almost before the first drops of Claire's blood had sunk to the bottom of the pool, a stretcher and an ambulance were there to take Claire and her parents and uncle to the hospital.

Ciara, who Allie had never before seen at a loss for words, pressed herself tightly against Allie and shook uncontrollably. Tyler, who wasn't a take-charge sort at the best of times, stared numbly at the place where his sister and parents had been moments before.

Allie knew that she was supposed to do something, anything, to help Ciara and Tyler, but her throat was closing up and she couldn't catch her breath. Blackness closed in on the corners of her vision and she found herself unable to think of anything but being in her mother's arms.

"Not about you," she tried to tell herself, but her chest got even tighter and her breathing even more shallow.

Then something hauled her to her feet, taking a clinging Ciara up as well. To her shock, she realized that Johnny had her by the collar of her blouse and Tyler by his arm. "Move," Johnny commanded, herding the three of them like they were sheep and he was the local border collie. "Down. Don't slip. It's wet."

Allie found herself forced through a gasping, gossiping crowd to the lobby and then to the street.

"Give me your mobile," Johnny told Allie.

Allie blankly offered him her backpack; Johnny extracted her cell phone and rapidly dialed one set of numbers, then another. Allie wanted to ask Johnny what he was doing, but it seemed more important to hug Ciara and try to help her stop crying.

Presently, Johnny rummaged through Allie's things until he found her wallet and transferred her few crumpled dollar bills to his pocket. "Get Ciara's money," he commanded Allie.

Allie glared at Johnny. She knew that he resented the adults' decision not to give him any money at all—although his sister and cousins had been ordered to pay for anything he wanted or needed at school—but taking advantage of Claire's accident to rob his cousins was not the way to deal with his anger.

"We need to pay the cab driver," Johnny explained when Allie didn't follow his directions. "He's going to see a bunch of teenagers and want the fare up front."

"How do you know a cab is even coming?" Allie wanted to know, but she unzipped the inner pocket of Ciara's purse where she knew her cousin kept her money.

"I just called one." He returned Allie's phone in exchange for Ciara's forty dollars. "Good, that's enough."

The cab screeched to a halt beside them, and Johnny waved the money at the driver before pushing Tyler, then Ciara, then Allie into the backseat. He sat up front with the driver. "University Hospital, emergency department. You keep the change if you get us there in ten minutes."

"You got it," the driver promised, and the cab jumped ahead almost before Johnny had closed his door.

Johnny expected his charges to be collected by their parents as soon as he marched them into the emergency room waiting area. Instead, though, the four of them came upon the end of what must have been a fight for the ages. He regretted that he had missed what must have been a good show.

Shawn and Belle stood together, both glowering at Philip, who looked at them with the deepest disgust and disdain.

"I wasn't the one who threw her off a cruise ship into the ocean when she was a baby," Philip said. "That's probably when she decided she liked diving."

Belle slapped Philip hard across the face, and then she and Shawn stomped off to talk to a passing nurse while Philip stormed to the other side of the room to talk to Chelsea and Abby.

"Sit down," Johnny told Ciara, Tyler, and Allie. He pointed at a row of empty chairs. "They don't know anything yet. They wouldn't be fighting if they did."

The other three seemed to take Johnny's conclusion at face value. It was strange; neither Tyler nor Ciara could stand the sight of Johnny, but now they were all too willing to obey his every command, as if they were just that grateful to have someone, anyone, in charge.

He would have told them to jump off a bridge, just to see if they would do it, but that would have made Allie angry. He did hate to upset Allie.

Instead, he followed the signs to the hospital gift shop and purchased a box of tissues and three bottles of water. When he returned, he forced the tissues into Allie's hand so she'd stop drying Ciara's eyes with the same sodden mess she'd been using since before they'd left the school. The water he dumped on the empty chair beside Tyler.

Reluctantly, Johnny slumped into the seat next to Allie. Even in this miserable town called Salem, there were a million places he would rather be, but he knew Allie would never leave her precious Claire and Ciara when Claire was so badly hurt and Ciara so deeply unhappy. And he couldn't very well leave Allie when she was miserable; that would only bond her more deeply to their kidnappers.

But it was only after Chelsea dragged Ciara away and Belle did the same with Tyler that Johnny said anything to Allie.

"Want to take a walk?"

She shook her head. "I want to be here as soon as anyone knows anything."

"Are you feeling all right?"

"You don't have to care about Claire, but I do," Allie scowled.

"That's not what I meant. I meant physically. You looked like you were about to go catatonic when Claire hit her head. You were starting to hyperventilate. You didn't get moving until Ciara started up with the blubbering."

"It was weird," Allie admitted. "It was… it was the most overwhelming sense of déjà vu."

"You've never seen anyone hit her head on a diving board before. You'd never been to a swim meet before they brought you here."

"I know that." Allie twisted her long hair around one hand with annoyance. "I was thinking about my mom."

"Oh." But Johnny couldn't leave it at that. "You know Father didn't really hit her over the head, right? Whatever happened to her, it isn't his fault. He would never do that to you. Or to me."

Allie's eyes darkened, and Johnny felt a flash of hate. These people had thoroughly poisoned Allie against the man who had raised her for the first thirteen years of her life. He had felt the tiniest bit sorry for them—Claire's accident was one thing that they hadn't planned as part of their elaborate hoax to make Allie and Johnny turn their backs on the DiMera name—but that sympathy evaporated now.

"Please," Allie whispered.

"Please what?"

But rather than answer, Allie threw herself into Johnny's arms like she hadn't done since the day he'd gotten off the plane in Salem.

"He—I didn't—like her—the sink—the counter—" she managed, but Johnny could make no sense of that, and from the unfocused expression in Allie's eyes, he wasn't sure that she made sense of it either.

He snapped his fingers in Allie's face in the hope that that would bring her back from wherever she'd gone, but Allie only flinched and shook harder.

"Her head—the blood."

"Claire will be all right," said Johnny, even though he had no idea if that was true. Allie couldn't handle any other answer right now.

Allie looked at him blankly. "Who's Claire?"

TBC