Alice Horton was in the ER when the nurse waved her over. “Yes, dear, what can I do for you?”
The newly minted nurse knew this was the wife of the Chief of Staff, and if the stuttering hadn’t have given away that she made the girl terribly nervous, the wide-eyed look on her face would have. “Th-the fifth floor is paging you, Mrs. Ho—Horton.”
“Oh, she said with interest, “do you know what for?”
“She didn’t tell me,” the girl said. “I’m sorry, I’ll call back right away! Or, I mean, I can call down to you, I’m going there now to fin—finish out my shift!”
“No, I—“ she started, then turned sweet eyes on the girl. “That’s alright, dear. I’ll just head on up, myself.” She felt sorry for the young nurse and wanted to try to ease some of her nerves, so she invited the young girl to walk with her. “You know, you remind me so much of my granddaughter.” It was the thick dark hair and doe eyes that had made Alice see so much Julie in her when she’d first spotted the new nurse this morning. This explained to the young woman why she had been sweetly smiling at her all day, but it did nothing for her nerves. Which is why when the menacing guy with the patch approached Mrs. Horton with such intensity that her attention was completely diverted away that it was like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. The nurse wasted no time busying herself at the nurse’s station hoping to blend in with the walls.
“Mrs. Horton,” Steve said with the strangest look of relief on his face. Not just relief, something else was there, too.
“Steven! What a surprise to see you, I hope you’re not sick.”
“No, I’m not—“
“Oh, I’m glad to hear that. If you’ll just excuse me, I was paged a minute ago.”
“Yeah, that was me,” Steve said as he started to bob back and forth on his feet.
“You? Well, I— If not you, then who? Not your mother I hope.”
“No, Mrs. Horton, look,” he said fixing her with a piercing stare that stopped Alice cold. “I’m in something serious here, and you’ve gotta help me. Kayla’s sick.” Steve saw her eyes flicker with worry, and he took her hands in his in an effort to communicate just how badly he needed her help. “Real sick. I don’t know who else to go to.”
Alice was stunned. Not just with this news, but at the delivery of it; something seriously was not right. “Well I heard she was ill, but do you know what’s wrong with her?” she asked, looking around for the admitting team, which strangely seemed not to be there, then looked back at Steve. “She’s gonna be alright isn’t she?”
“Not if you don’t help me, she won’t be, no,” he replied his eyes dark with worry.
Alice was taken aback. “Steven, what are you talking about? Which doctor is in with her?”
“No one, I didn’t bring her here.”
Alice took a beat to process that. “I don’t understand. Why not?” she asked in utter confusion. “She’s sick, this is the best place in the world for her!”
“No, it’s not,” Steve said, his desperation no longer idling just below the surface. He had to make her understand. “It’s too open, anybody could get to her here, she could die here.” Alice’s mouth hung agape. “Now you have to trust me. Please,” Steve begged her, more with his eyes than his voice as he squeezed her hands. “I’m begging you, please!”
Alice Horton was a fantastic judge of character, and ever since he had risked his life to save her from Simon Hopkins she knew two things to be true of Steve’s character. He usually thought of himself last even when the people he was putting before himself weren’t paying him a bit of attention, and he was deeply in love with Kayla Brady. For these reasons alone, she’d decided on the spot to help him. But she was also terribly curious; something about him was off, and she had to know what it was.
“Steven. I am not going to pretend that I understand what is going on, and maybe I’m not supposed to, but—well, something more is troubling you, I can see it in – that eye of yours. Now what’s happened?”
Steve had no answer for this. This is not how it went the first time, she didn’t ask him any questions. He dropped her hands and reached up to adjust his patch. “Mrs. Horton, I don’t know what you mean.” He struggled to control his desperation and took a deep breath. “Kayla really doesn’t have a lot of time to—“
“Alright,” she put up her hands yielding to him; she didn’t want to push, but she was sure something was odd here. “What do you want me to do?”
Steve’s eye softened with relief. Alice caught that relief and got a very strange feeling. She got a sense that that eye had a wisdom that she’d never seen before in him. A wisdom that only comes with years of seeing through it and living. In that moment, Alice sensed the difference in the man standing before her, and what’s more, Steve could tell that she had noticed … something.
“There!” she pointed to him, “there it is again!”
Steve was alarmed. It was like Alice could see right through him, into his thoughts, back through the jumps. He looked anywhere but her eyes and went on the offensive. “Are you gonna help me or do I have to save her life all on my own, here!”
“Steven, calm down. Come with me into the lounge here, and let’s talk.”
He felt an immediate panic that he was about to have to do some explaining that would land him back in the institution, a place he never wanted to revisit. He needed Kayla. He needed her to help him come up with the same kind of evasive answers that they both had given Marcus on their last jump. I should have gone to Marcus. “There’s no time, here, Kayla’s gonna die!”
Alice took Steve’s hand in her own, just as he’d done moments ago, and looked him square in the face. “Young man, if you want my help, then you’re just going to have to trust me. Now, I – We are going to take five minutes and talk.”
Steve was helpless but to follow her into the lounge. He had no idea what he was going to do, and all he could think about was Kayla suffering alone in that bed with no one there to be with her. The clock was also ticking in his head. He tried to calculate how long it was before he got the meds in her the first time, and he knew he was ahead of schedule. But he still didn’t have them in his hands and Gabrielle still hadn’t shown up yet.
Now Alice poured Steve a cup of coffee and handed it to him with kind but no less determined eyes. “Decaf. I don’t think caffeine is going to do you any good right now.”
“No, look, Mrs. Horton, thanks, but I really don’t have time to—“
“Drink.” Steve rolled his eye and took a sip of the bitter liquid, enjoying the feeling of it as it rolled down his throat. Then he felt guilty that he was sitting here having a nice cup of coffee with Alice Horton while his wife suffered the effects of atropine poisoning alone.
“Steven,” she said, “something about you is—why, it’s different. I can’t put my finger on it, but I can see that you are troubled. Tell me what it is, maybe I can help.”
“You can help me by helping Kayla,” he pleaded, “that’s all I need right now. And I need it soon or she’s gonna die, Mrs. Horton. She can’t die here. I don’t know what would … how I’d … we’ve got to get home.”
“Home? To Jack?”
“No!” Steve was beyond frustrated, he didn’t know how to appease her, she just was so damned inquisitive, why couldn’t she just leave well enough alone! He remembered how she loved a mystery and showed up at his apartment in her version of cloak-and-dagger-wear with her big glasses and hooded coat. He smiled at the memory.
“Now, what’s so funny?” she asked.
“Nothin’, I’m just … remembering something”
“About Kayla I’ll bet,” she said with a knowing smile.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “about Kayla.
Alice put a hand warmly on his arm and squeezed. It was a surprisingly firm grip through the thick leather that covered it, and Steve felt oddly better with this small gesture of support, almost comforted. It came with a giant wave of homesickness, but he found some solace in this woman who cared enough about him to try to not just help him, but to understand whatever it was that was troubling him. And suddenly the enormous urge to confide in her hit him hard. He wanted to badly to tell her what was happening to he and Kayla, remove this burden and let someone understand the weight he carried to the point where it was lighter.
But he couldn’t. Perhaps if this was some other jump he could have tried, but the plain fact of the matter was that Kayla did not have time. He had to get back to her with the meds and had to do it right now, before they jumped, before she … died. He didn’t even know what would happen to his Kayla’s consciousness if a body she jumped into died. He was terrified by the thought and shook it away. But he did feel like he could tell Alice Horton. That if he really needed to, he could go to her and explain, and that she wouldn’t run for the men with white coats when he was done. For now, however, he simply had to get her convinced. It was so much easier last time. He had no idea how she could tell that he was different, but apparently the Steve he was today was not acting like the Steve that was supposed to be in this body.
“Look, Kayla and I have been through a terrible ordeal to be together. There are things you don’t know that I can’t tell you. Things about her marriage to Jack and what I did to make that happen that I’m paying for. Now, I’m trying to fix them. But someone in the Deveraux house is trying to kill her.”
“Kill her?” Who?!”
Sure, what the hell. “Senator Deveraux. Now, I can’t go to the police, and I think you can figure out why. Who’s gonna believe me, huh?” he asked tapping his patch. “Now, I got her outta there, and she’s safe right now, but she won’t live without the medication I came for, it’s called physostigmine.” Alice’s face changed from soft and supportive to suddenly wary. “Here, I’ll write it down for you.”
“Now hold on,” Alice said with dawning realization. “You want me to get you medication without authorization?”
“Look, I know it’s a lot to ask.”
“No it’s not. You risked your life to save me from Dr. Hopkins. I think I can bend some rules to pay that back. Besides, I know you love Kayla. And she’ll die without my help?”
“That’s right.”
Then consider it done.
Steve put down the coffee and hugged her. “Thank you, Mrs. H.” He pulled back and wrote down the name of the antidote. “How quickly can you get this to me?”
“Well, it helps to be the wife of the boss you know.”
Steve smiled again and wondered if that young lab tech ever got his promotion. “Yeah, I know.”
“Stay right here, I’ll bring them to you.”
“Listen,” he warned her, “we’ve got to stay away from anyone in the Deveraux family, and especially their personal physician,” he mocked, “… I forget his name … I think it’s Jergensen. And I need enough for two weeks, that’s how long it’s gonna take her to recover, ok? Can you do that?”
The specificity of his knowledge did not go unnoticed by Alice, but she chose to just take him at face value right now. Harper Deveraux always rubbed her the wrong way, and somehow hearing that he was behind Kayla’s illness didn’t surprise her.
“Ok, just wait here,” Alice said, then she left the lounge and disappeared into her task like a fairy godmother at the ball.
Steve now paced alone in the small room, looking through the window every minute or so to see if Gabrielle had shown up. This was a bad place for him to be, because there was nothing he could do but let the people he’d gone to for help go ahead and help him. He wasn’t good at relying on other people then, and while he’d certainly mellowed with age, he really wasn’t that much better at it now, either. He felt like going to the meds closet and just breaking the door down like the Hulk on a rampage. He’d be doing something, and it would feel good to finally expend his pent-up energy.
Can we die here?
Steve couldn’t help his mind from wandering to this question. This was the first jump where one of them was in serious danger. Twenty years ago, things could easily have gone the other way for Kayla. If she hadn’t have dropped her pills in the limo on the way to her honeymoon … if she hadn’t have written him that letter that Melissa had given him at his sister’s wedding in Greece … if he hadn’t have gotten her out of that house in time … if he hadn’t have gotten her out of the hospital before Jack and his father had found her. So many ifs, but ultimately, she lived. Now there were no guarantees. What if their bodies did die here, what would happen to them? Would their rightful consciousness die here, too, in the wrong timeline, or would it jump somewhere else?
“None of it’s gonna stick, dude, remember that, it all just resets to what it’s supposed to be as soon as we leave,” he tried to reason with himself. But something was stuck and wouldn’t let him accept it. What if Kayla was right and that they just didn’t notice what changed? “Nah, man,” Steve laughed mirthlessly, “I’m not gonna let her die just because none of it matters. How do I know that if you die here that it won’t be all of you, huh?” Now he just wanted to jump. He wanted to get them out of there, and he was almost willing to take the chance of doing it separately just to get them out of this mess. And the more he paced that empty room alone with his thoughts, the more he questioned what they thought about changing the timeline. He was insane with worry, and it was affecting what he thought he knew. Maybe we’re making changes, after all. “NO! I rearranged his fucking face!” Steve yelled to the empty room. “I felt when I ripped his lip open!”
“If he bleeds on my carpet you’re getting the cleaning bill.”
Steve whirled around to see Gabrielle standing with her hand on her hip holding out the house key with the other.
Steve moved his patch to ensure it was in place, then traced the strap along his brow line and took a deep breath.
“Gabrielle,” he sighed heavily. “Sorry, I, uh …”
“Rough day?”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that.”
“Mm-hmm. Well, listen, I think the less I know the better.” Steve nodded. “Are you going to take it after all that, or did I drag myself down here for nothing?”
Steve pulled himself together and grabbed the key from her a little too forcefully. “Sorry,” he said, “I’m … Sorry.”
Steve looked as strange to her as he sounded on the phone. “Are you ok?” She couldn’t help it.
“Yeah,” he grinned, “don’t worry about me, baby. And I promise to get all that blood right out of your high-quality plush.”
Gabrielle wasn’t quite buying it, but she really didn’t want to invest in whatever he was dealing with, so she just nodded and smiled back at the fake one she knew he was giving her. “Alright, well good luck.” She turned to go, and Steve grabbed her arm and swung her around.
“You’re saving someone’s life doing this for me. Thank you.”
Gabrielle smiled then turned and walked out the door. A few moments later, Alice walked back in. Steve wasted no time on pleasantries.
“Did you get it?”
“Now, listen,” she replied, “I’ve done some research, and the dosage is one of these every day.”
“Right, I remember.”
“You do?”
“I mean I know. I know, I really should go.”
Alice fixed him with a stern look. “Atropine?” Steve nodded. No point in lying to her now. “I really should be calling the police.”
“I’m not goin’ round with you on this again, if you don’t trust me, then I’ll just get them somewhere else!” He didn’t yell at her, but he was done being calm.
Alice looked at him with severity as she reached into her pinstriper uniform and handed him two bottles of physostigmine. “Alright, go. Hurry.”
Steve’s heart soared as his hands wrapped around the life-saving bottles. “You’re a beautiful person Mrs. Horton,” Steve said as he embraced her and kissed her cheek.
“And so are you, Steve Johnson. Now go.”
Steve turned on his heel and started out the door, but not before he spotted Jack, Harper, and that quack doctor through the window.
“Shit!”
“What is it?” Alice asked.
“Jack and his daddy are right outside the door,” Steve whispered. “Mrs. Horton, I’ve gotta get outta here or I’m gonna lose it!”
“Alright, I’ll get rid of them. As soon as you get a chance, you get to Kayla. Take care of her.”
With that Alice left the lounge and “noticed” the three men standing there. “Why Senator Deveraux. And Jack,” she said pleasantly. “What can I do for you?”
“We’re looking for my wife,” Jack said, his worry apparent. “She’s disappeared, and we were hoping that she’d have shown up here.”
“Well, I— good heavens, that’s terrible, have you checked with the receptionist downstairs?”
“Yes,” Harper said, “she said she wasn’t in the ER but that since she’s a nurse that she might be being seen by a doctor up here already.”
“Well, that may be, but I’m not aware of her being here. Perhaps they took her down to the lab for some tests.”
“Jack,” Harper urged, “I think we should go to the lab right now and look for her.”
“Yes, of course! Oh …” she trailed off. “Well, visitors aren’t allowed in the lab, but I think in your case, we would make an exception, Senator Deveraux. Now, may I take you to the lab personally?”
“Yes, thank you Mrs. Horton,” they both said with gratitude.
“Oh, don’t mention it,” she replied. “I’d do anything for Kayla,” she said more loudly for Steve’s ears. Then Steve watched her lead them away so he could make his escape. Steve dashed out of the lounge and right into the opening elevator doors as if on cue. Soon he was back on the road to Gabrielle’s house where Kayla lay waiting for him in her own personal poison-induced hell.