Chapter 39: Home Again
Will had a lot of time to think on the plane ride back to Salem.
Joy sat beside him, but she was completely engrossed in reading a medical journal. She had spent over a week away from the hospital and was itching to return to her all-important intern year. Sometimes, half-consciously, she scanned the written page with her left hand and mimed an intricate procedure with her right.
Will liked Joy's hands. They were surgeon's hands, so good at so many things…
The twins, more exhausted than any pair of thirteen-year-olds had a right to be, were fast asleep in front of Will and Joy. Even asleep, though, the sight of them gave Will a burst of energy. Looking at Allie and Johnny always made him feel that way, but somehow it was a perpetual surprise. The twins were strong and smart and determined and brave. They were ready to take on the world; Allie, especially, already had.
And if the twins could face everything life threw at them head on, Will could certainly do the same. He kissed Joy on the cheek. She turned her head, surprised and questioning, but Will waved her back to her work.
In front of the twins, Sami and Lucas were talking quietly. At first, Will just watched them: the way Sami playfully tightened Lucas' seatbelt, her fingers lingering just a second too long on his waist; the way Lucas leaned past Sami to look out the window at clouds and ocean, whispering in her ear as he did.
Then Will strained to hear snatches of conversation. The topics seemed to be mundane—Will's work, the twins' school, the clients at Titan—but the looks, the touches, the earnest undertones made Will ache inside. His parents fit. They had always had a way of being hooked together that Will couldn't put into words. It wasn't about having a shared history or shared children. It just was.
Simultaneously, Lucas and Sami's heads snapped back and they looked at Will. Sami gestured at him to come forward. Will shook his head no. Lucas rolled his eyes and unfastened his seatbelt. He strode past the sleeping twins and crouched in the aisle beside Will. A flight attendant eyed them all suspiciously.
"Switch seats with me," Lucas told Will.
"I don't think we're supposed to," Will muttered lamely.
"What we're not supposed to do is be slow about it. Come on, post haste. You know you're going to do it sooner or later."
"Later," said Will, and he turned his head toward Joy and closed his eyes.
"You forced me into it," said Lucas with mock-sadness. "I'm just going to have to sing until you get up and give me this seat."
Will opened one eye. This sounded dangerous.
"All right," said Lucas. "If that's how you want it. This goes out to all young couples in love." He drew a deep breath. "When a man loves a woman—"
Sami flushed scarlet and covered her face with her hands. "Lucas!" she hissed. "Will, just give him what he wants."
Will decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He jumped from his seat and deposited himself next to his mother. "I only did this because he was going to wake up Johnny and Allie and they need their sleep," Will informed Sami.
Sami glanced back to reassure herself that the twins were undisturbed. They were. "I always knew you'd be a great big brother," Sami told Will.
Will shrugged. "I never really got a chance until recently."
"And that's what I wanted to talk to you about. Well, sort of." She silently evaluated Will in the way that had always made him feel comforted as a child. "Your dad told me that you didn't like the idea of us… of your dad and me getting together again. I wanted to talk to you about why you feel that way."
"No."
"No? Will—"
"I don't mean, no, I won't talk about it. I mean, no, I don't feel that way anymore. I changed my mind. I was watching you and Dad just now and I was thinking about how you're together, hooked together. Always."
Sami smiled. "I could feel you staring at us, but I didn't know you were thinking nice things."
Embarrassed, Will took advantage up the pilot's announcement that they were now free to turn on electronic devices to avert his eyes by pulling out his phone and checking his messages. He couldn't help laughing when he saw them, and he passed the phone to Sami so she could read them, too.
From: Belle
Next time you talk to your cousin Abby, you should remind her that she doesn't know Philip well enough to go off on "business trips" with him.
From: Abby
Welcome back to Salem. I'm not actually in Salem, but I can't wait to see you and your family when you get back. Love you always—you don't even know how much having you in my life has improved my life.
From: Chelsea
You owe me $5 from when you bet me Abby would go through with pressing charges against Philip for the whole kidnapping thing. Don't worry, I'll put it toward a wedding present. Welcome home!
From: Shawn
If Belle sent you a message, ignore it. If Chelsea sent you a message, ignore it. Love you.
From: Belle
Please ignore my previous message. Love you.
From: Philip
Sorry I couldn't be in Salem when you got back. Business; can't wait to get your dad back in the office. Surprise for you in your kitchen, though. Did you see your Uncle Jack in London? How crazy is he?
Will watched with pleasure as Sami bemusedly read through the messages. When she finished, their eyes met and they broke into unified laughter.
"Sometimes," Sami said after a moment, "I look at you or the twins and it feels like I've been gone forever. But then I look at something like this and seems like all I did was blink, and nothing changed."
"I know what you mean. I mean, I wasn't the one who was gone… except, in some ways I was. A few months ago I was sitting by myself in the cafeteria at work reading a letter Dad sent me from prison. And Dr. Wesley interrupted me to tell me he wanted me to mentor Joy, and that really pissed me off. But I went from being alone in my empty house to having you and Dad and the twins back, to having Joy, to being… whole in a way that I wasn't."
Sami blinked back tears. "I can't say I'm sorry often enough, Will."
"I'm not looking to have you say you're sorry. Especially not for this. You and Dad left me, but you left me with other good people. Uncle Austin and Aunt Carrie were great when everything first happened. And when I came back to Salem Grandma Marlena and Grandpa Bill couldn't do enough for me with school, and there was this whole huge Brady-Horton clan swooping down on me…" He gestured again at the list of messages on his phone. "Pulling me into their lives, trying to be in mine. If I wouldn't completely let go, if I got myself a house but didn't find anyone to share it, that was my decision."
"About your house. Your Dad and the twins and I have sort of taken over. We need to talk about what happens next. We'll look for our own place—"
"No!" snapped Will, before he could even think about it. "The house I bought is perfect for the twins. It's the right distance from their school and the city, but it's far enough out that they have a yard, and the neighborhood is full of kids their age. If anyone moves out, it should be me. I could live in the building Joy does. It would make more sense. And if Joy and I ever wanted to… well, to have a family of our own, maybe we'd… well, not that we're anywhere close to anything like that."
Sami beamed. "I love that Joy at least has you thinking about marriage and babies. But we won't talk about that now."
"Good. Because for now… for now I'd like to spend a little more time with my family, now that you're back."
"I want that, too."
"That house, I don't think I knew it at the time, but I chose it for all of us. If you find somewhere better, that's one thing. Just don't be in any rush to leave and take the twins because you think I'm living this stylish single life and I want you out of my hair. It didn't— I didn't work when my whole family was taken away. I could fake it, get through school, have a job, have friends, but this huge part of me was missing. If I'd thought that all of you were out there happy somewhere, that would have been different. But I knew Dad was just surviving day to day in a cell that's smaller than my kitchen. I knew you were in a coma and I was afraid—I thought the you I knew was gone and if you woke up you'd want—and I thought there was a chance the twins might be dea—you know what, never mind. No hurry for anyone to change anything if you don't want to, that's all," he finished in a rushed, flustered way.
"Okay," said Sami quietly, pretending not to notice how agitated Will had become.
Will looked back at the phone. "Philip and Abby," he forced himself to chuckle.
"We might have to fly back to London to keep your Uncle Jack from strangling your Uncle Philip."
"No, we won't. You know Uncle Jack will come here."
"Probably." Sami scrolled through the messages again, giggling especially at Chelsea's. "You bet against Philip and Abby, huh? I don't blame you. I'd have lost to Chelsea, too."
"Do you remember after you came back from your honeymoon in New Orleans?" Will asked suddenly. "Remember going through the pictures from the wedding, laughing because—"
"Because the pictures Maggie took had Kate's head cut off!" Sami completed. "Yeah. We'll have more times like that. And this."
A wicked grin spread across Will's face. "Can you imagine what Grandma Kate will say when she finds out you've moved in with us and you and Dad are back together?"
They looked at each other and said in unison, "Oh my God!"
"Then she'll pass out."
"She might throw up."
"We'll have a bucket ready."
"And I'll have to have the camera ready! We'll invite her over for breakfast tomorrow so I won't miss getting it."
"Tomorrow?" Sami sighed dramatically. "Oh, well, I guess we have to do it sometime. But first thing in the morning?"
"If we wait, she'll show up without being invited."
"If we don't wait, she might show up without being invited. I swear one summer she barged into my apartment every single morning. She'd always blame it on having cookies she wanted to send you at camp or whatever, but of course she wanted to see if your father was there and get him away from me if he was."
Sami hadn't noticed that he voice had gotten louder as she basked in the memory, which had somehow become a happy one, until a sleepy voice from behind her asked "What are you talking about?"
Sami and Will turned to see Johnny and Allie both eying them with suspicion.
"Nothing. Go back to sleep," Sami told them.
Allie and Johnny exchanged a look which clearly communicated that such a thing was most certainly not going to happen.
"All right," Sami began. "Once upon a time there was an evil queen named Kate."
From behind the twins, Lucas cleared his throat.
Sami rolled her eyes. "All right. There was a woman named Kate who loved her son and was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very interested in every little thing he did…."
They were still telling stories when the plane touched down in Salem.
"… And that's when I said 'you locked me in a port-a-potty, for God's sake, and then you started throwing knives at my mother!'" Lucas concluded as the five of them entered Will's house. Will had said goodbye to Joy at the airport.
The twins, especially Johnny, laughed uproariously. To a young boy, even one who spoke with a proper English accent and made casual references to fifteenth century Dutch painters, nothing was funnier than a story that revolved around a port-a-potty.
Johnny and Allie's homework—topped by the essay entitled The Case of the Purloined Sirloin—still lay where they had left it on the kitchen table. Everything was just as they had left it when they had abruptly abandoned the house.
No, there was one small difference. A sign reading "look inside me" was hanging on the refrigerator.
"Philip did say there was a surprise in the kitchen," Will remembered.
Allie, who was closest to the refrigerator, grinned and opened the door with a flourish. The food they had left behind a fortnight before, which would have spoiled by now, had vanished. In its place were fresh, unopened groceries and row upon row of carefully labeled, fully prepared meals.
"Well, that makes things easier," said Sami as moved closer for a better look.
Will draped his arm around his mother. "And since this will be your first night here, you can choose what we're eating tonight." The other nodded in agreement.
Sami smiled devilishly and passed her hand over the carefully labeled containers. "I don't think I want any of this," she said. "I think I should make you all French toast."
"No, no, no!" Lucas exclaimed quickly.
"Why not, Lucas? Is there something wrong with me wanting to cook for my family?"
"Yes," said Will, and Sami glared at him. "I mean," Will corrected, "you need to save your strength for when Grandma Kate comes over in the morning.
"That's very thoughtful, Will," Lucas agreed. He glanced at Sami. "You should listen to him. He's a doctor, you know."
"Are you implying that my French toast might not be healthy?"
"I just think that the best way to welcome you home would be for me to do the cooking," Lucas tried. He pointed at Allie. "Allie-baba, see if there's a loaf of bread in the breadbox. If there's not, get one out of the freezer. Johnny, set up the griddle. Will, get a bowl out of the cabinet behind you. Sami, sit there and look pretty."
Sami crossed her arms and dropped into a seat at the kitchen table.
"One little mistake and you never let me forget it," she grumbled.
Lucas leaned close to Sami and whispered in her ear. "I know you won't make the same mistakes again. Neither will I."
Sami's breath caught in her throat. "I won't, Lucas. I love you."
"I love you, too— hey!" Lucas broke off as a stick of butter hit him in the head.
"You throw like a girl," Johnny told Allie as he stomped across the room to collect the butter. He had apparently been the intended recipient.
"Would've been fine if Dad hadn't moved," Allie muttered.
"As long as it wasn't salt," Lucas told her.
"What does that even mean?" Allie wanted to know.
Lucas grinned. "Well, many, many years ago when your mother and I were young and in love—"
"Another story?" asked Johnny.
"You liked the port-a-potty one, you'll love this one," Lucas assured him.
"How many of these stories do you have?"
"That's not something you can count," Sami broke in. "That's like putting a number on how much I love you all, how much you all mean to me."
The five of them looked at each other for a long moment.
"Anyway," said Sami. "I wanted to show your father how happy he made me, so I decided to make him French toast. And, really, this could have happened to anyone…"
Will, already knowing this tale well, let his mother's voice wash over him without hearing the words. It couldn't have happened to anyone; none of the things that had happened to his family could have happened to another family. But their warm kitchen was still full of laughter on a February evening. And that was enough.
The End