Part 19-A Memory
Allie's small body burned with fever.
The insides of her bones ached so that she wanted to cry, but she was too tired and sore and hot to cry.
She was a big girl, three years old, but she wanted Mommy to make her better.
But Mommy wasn't even looking at her. She was looking at EJ, and she was angry. She was always angry at EJ.
"She needs a hospital, EJ!" Sami snapped. "Her fever is 104."
EJ lounged casually against the doorway. "I'll call my personal physician in if you'd like—perhaps I will anyway, 104 is rather high—but you aren't leaving this house and neither is Allie."
"I don't want some crazy doctor on the DiMera payroll touching her! If he's anything like Dr. Rolf, he'll probably put a brain chip in her head while he's pretending to break her fever."
"For pity's sake, Samantha, I'm getting rather tired of your groundless accusations."
"Says the man who refuses to let me or my children leave the house."
His face hardened. "You tried to take my son, and the girl I love as a daughter, away from me. I can't allow that to happen again, and you need to understand that your actions have consequences."
Sami growled low in her throat. "I wish to God that Johnny weren't your son, and Allie will never be your daughter."
"That's rather selfish of you, to deny your daughter a father. I'm all she has. Her deadbeat biological father isn't providing for her from jail, is he?"
Allie managed to summon the strength to cry. Her head hurt, and the yelling was making it worse. She couldn't remember the words that would remind Mommy to take care of her. But she could remember how to cry.
Sami's tone changed instantly. "Allie, sweetheart, you'll feel better soon." She swept Allie into her arms, and Allie took some comfort from this. Mommy was all-powerful.
Sami shoved past EJ, managing to elbow him in the ribs even as she held Allie close. She stripped off Allie's sweat-soaked nightgown and deposited her in the bathtub. With one hand, she began to rub a cool washcloth over Allie's body; with the other, she rummaged through the medicine cabinet. Eventually, she began flinging the medicine cabinet's contents to the floor. "Where's the baby aspirin?" she demanded.
EJ was leaning against the door jamb, watching Sami and Allie. "I think you left it in Gianni's room last week when he had whatever it is that Allie has now."
"Don't call Johnny that," Sami grumbled, but she left the room in search of the aspirin.
EJ stayed very still for a few seconds, and then sidled into the space Sami had left. He stared down at Allie as she stood in the tub. "You look so much like your mother," he said in an odd voice. Then he picked up the washcloth Sami had left behind and resumed sponging Allie's body—her shoulders and arms, her neck and chest, down her stomach to her hips and between her thighs.
"So like your mother. Too much like your mother," he crooned again, just as Sami returned to the room with a plastic bottle of pills in her hand.
"Get away from her!" Sami snarled. She rushed to throw herself between EJ and Allie. "You don't ever touch my daughter, ever, especially not like that!"
"Not like what? I was cleaning her up, the same thing you were doing."
"I don't want a sex offender putting his hands all over my daughter—and don't think I didn't see where your hand was!"
"She's a three-year-old child. You can't possibly think—"
"I think that you raped me, and here you are with my stark naked daughter telling her how much she looks like me!"
"Stop making groundless accusations, Samantha," said EJ, his voice suddenly quiet and dangerous. He reached toward Allie, obviously intent on continuing his ministrations.
"I said no!"
"And I said yes!"
EJ grabbed Sami by her shoulders and lifted her off her feet.
"Damn it, EJ!" Sami's fists pounded on EJ's arms, but to no avail. "Let go of me."
"Fine. As you wish." EJ dropped Sami just outside the bathroom door and made to turn back to Allie.
Sami struggled and clawed at EJ. He attempted to shrug her off; when that wasn't effective, he turned around hard and thrust her away with both hands.
Sami stumbled backwards but managed to reach for EJ one more time. He shoved her back harder, and this time her head connected with the marble counter that held the sinks.
After the stomach-turning thud, Sami didn't move any more.
Allie finally found her voice. "Mommy?" she asked softly.
Her question was drowned out by EJ's cries.
"Samantha? Samantha? Please, I didn't mean it, I love you."
He shook her lifeless body, but she didn't respond. His whole body trembled as he picked Allie up and deposited her back in her damp, sweaty bed.
Allie never saw her mother any more. After a while, she had a hard time remembering that she had ever had a mother.
The first thing Lucas heard when he entered the emergency room's waiting area was Johnny's voice. For once, Johnny seemed unnerved and fearful rather than cool and calculating.
"Allie?" Johnny demanded. "Allie, say something."
After what seemed like an eternity, Allie's eyes focused properly. The words tumbled over each other. "I remember what happened to Mom. She pushed him to get him away from me, and he pushed her back, and her head bounced off the counter, the marble counter with two sinks in it."
"That's not true, Allie. These people have brainwashed—"
"Johnny!" Lucas managed to reach the twins by a circuitous route around clusters of chairs and people. He held a bottle of water to Allie's lips, and Allie sipped it gratefully.
"Daddy," Allie whispered. "Daddy, what happened was my fault."
"Shh, shh." Lucas stroked Allie's hair. "Nothing was your fault."
"We agree on that, at least," Johnny muttered.
Allie locked eyes with Johnny, not seeming to be aware that Lucas was even there. "It was my fault. They were fighting over me."
"They fought over everything. It was how they expressed their love."
Allie shook her head. "She didn't love him."
Johnny nodded in Lucas' direction. "Of course that's what he told you."
"It's what I remember. It was before I ever met him."
Johnny sighed. "These are planted memories. They tell you something so many times that you start to think it must be true, and you want it to be true because you want to please them—"
"Why would I want it to be my fault that my mother is as good as dead? How would that make them like me better, when they like me because I look like her?"
"Allie—" Lucas tried to interrupt, but Allie and Johnny were still locked in some sort of private combat he couldn't penetrate.
"What you want is to tell them, 'you're right, EJ DiMera is evil and I never cared about him and everything's his fault. Boy, are you all smart!' Then they'll be happy and they'll like you even more, but the thing is, Allie, they don't. They don't know you. You're a thing they use to punish my father. They want to punish Father because he won. He won your mother."
"She's both of our mother." Unnoticed by either twin, Lucas winced when Allie didn't bother to correct Johnny's statement about his paternity.
Johnny shrugged. "Either way, Father won and they can't take that. So they make up stories—he must have raped her, he must have stolen her children, he must have hit her over the head and dumped her in an institution. None of that's true."
Allie glared. "I heard her. I saw it."
"You believe he'd rape her? I suppose you saw that, too?"
"I believe that because it's what he tried to do to me," said Allie quietly.
Johnny jumped to his feet. "Stop lying!"
"Stop deluding yourself! EJ DiMera is a terrible person who does terrible things, including pretending to be your father so he'd have a hold over our mother!"
"I get that you're bitter that he isn't your real father, didn't ever pretend to be—"
"Oh my God—"
"But you can't go around pretending he tried to rape you. That's the worst thing you can make up—"
Johnny didn't get to finish his sentence, because Shawn had thrown him over his shoulder and carried him out to the parking lot.
Lucas lifted Allie to her feet. "Let's go home," he said. The words were innocuous, but speaking them hurt. "They'll call when there's news about Claire. This isn't helping anyone."
"No. I need…"
He flinched. If Allie needed something, he should have figured it out before she did. He was in over his head. Someone professional—someone better—should have been handling this. "You need what? Do you want to see if Dr. Medy's available?"
Allie shook her head. "No." Then she put her hand in Lucas' and led him out the door.
They passed Shawn on their way across the parking lot. Lucas gave his cousin a consoling pat on the shoulder which Shawn acknowledged with a pained, sympathetic glance. Shawn's sympathy made Lucas feel even more guilty. Shawn's daughter was fighting for her life, and Shawn had had to interrupt his vigil to help Lucas with Allie and Johnny.
"Into the car," Lucas ordered both Allie and Johnny. The part of him that was Allie's father didn't like to ask her to sit beside someone who had just accused her of lying about the most traumatic events of her life. But the part of him that was Johnny's father screamed that he would lose Johnny forever if he turned his back on him now.
To his surprise, Johnny and Allie both obeyed. They opened the back doors of the car with eerie precision; they slumped into their seats with parallel exhaustion. As he watched them in the rearview mirror, Lucas realized that he would have found it funny had the situation not been so serious. Allie and Johnny's twin-ness had never been more evident. It was a wonder that EJ had ever been able to convince them—or anyone else—that they weren't twins.
"We're going to Philip's house first," Lucas told them, even though he doubted that they were listening. "Johnny, you have five minutes to get everything you'll need for the next week. Not six minutes, not five minutes and ten seconds. I'm going to be staring at the clock. Anything that doesn't come now doesn't come until the situation with Claire is cleared up."
Johnny gave no sign that he had heard or understood. Lucas didn't care. He wasn't in the mood for Johnny's snide remarks or his stubborn refusal to accept the admittedly drastic changes in his life.
But then, doing battle with Johnny might have kept his mind off of the doubts that had led him to allow Johnny to stay at the Kiriakis Mansion almost three weeks after Nick's DNA test had established that Johnny was his son.
He had told himself that he was waiting for formal paperwork, waiting until he and Will had a chance to move their exercise room to the basement to make a bedroom for Johnny, waiting until a decision had been made about Sami's future, waiting until Johnny had gotten over the shock of learning that EJ was not his father.
Really, he had been putting off the day that he had to be a fulltime parent to both Allie and Johnny. Shawn, Philip, and Belle were able to triple-team Johnny when they had to. Lucas didn't have that luxury. He was about to be on his own with two virtual strangers: a thirteen year old girl who had been the victim of a sexual assault and a thirteen year old boy who had been raised in the image of the sociopath who did the assaulting.
Lucas had barely been able to handle Will, and Will had been practically perfect in every way while raising himself and his parents simultaneously.
He looked again at the twins in the rearview mirror. Allie caught his eye, and for a fraction of a second he saw Sami, and Belle, and Billie, and Kate, and Julie, and Abby, and Alice. He saw everyone he'd ever loved, but mostly he saw a girl who liked Indian food and sparkly stickers.
She wasn't a stranger at all, and neither was Johnny.
He would do this, even without Sami.
TBC