by Lilian Darcy
He’d probably said no, he didn’t. The I-have-nothing-to-offer thing, again.
And then he’d definitely—twenty seconds or five minutes later—said that he didn’t want kids. Fatherhood didn’t fit with his plans.
Which was fine, she’d thought, because he was only in town for a short while, and she’d only gone into this dating thing so she could finally get a thirteen-year crush well and truly out of her system and then wave him goodbye. A big grin, and no regrets.
Or not.
If I sleep with him, he’ll break my heart when he leaves, she’d thought back then. And if I don’t sleep with him, he’ll still break my heart when he leaves….
But that was last October, and he was still here. The accident would explain part of it. October eighth, the two of them driving home after dark from date number four, a fall hike in Hocking Hills followed by dinner, when a driver in an oncoming car had lost control around a bend. Devlin had broken his leg in three places and had a permanent metal plate in there, but he didn’t even walk with a limp at this point, so shouldn’t he be safely back in New York or in a hotel room in Geneva by now?
Instead he was standing here on her parents’ summer deck sharing a joke with her dad, throwing up his head when he laughed, shirt fabric pulling across his broad shoulders when he raised a beer can to his lips, reminding her far too strongly that she hadn’t remotely gotten the crush out of her system last fall, or during the nine months of coma and rehab since.
He’d come to visit her in the hospital five times since she’d woken up, seen her at her most vulnerable, in tears and struggling to move and speak, fighting her own uncooperative body. He’d been so supportive, but cautious at the same time, never talking about anything too personal, and she had no idea what it all meant. Her brain still felt scrambled, tired, and life was a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing.
“Is she out here? How is she?” This was Jodie’s Aunt Stephanie, following Elin out to the deck. Seemed as if everyone had been invited today. Jodie began to feel overwhelmed and more than a little tired. She’d been discharged from the nearby rehab unit yesterday, and would still be attending day therapy sessions there for a while. She’d spent just one night, so far, in her own precious bed.
“Jodie…!” Aunt Stephanie said, and leaned down to hug her.
Dad put hot dogs and burgers and steaks onto the barbecue grill. Lisa brought out bowls of salad. Lisa’s husband, Chris, took a soccer ball onto the grass beyond the deck and began kicking it back and forth with a handful of kids. Everyone talked and laughed and caught up on family news.
Maddy came down with Lucy wide awake and contentedly milk-filled in her arms, and Jodie asked her on an impulse, “Can I have a hold? If you put a pillow under my left arm, so I don’t have to use any muscle?”
She felt a strange yearning and a rush of emotion that she didn’t remember feeling for her other nieces and nephews when they were newborn. Well, she’d only been in her early twenties then, not ready to think about babies. Lisa’s youngest was seven years old.
“Do you want to, honey?” Mom asked, in a slightly odd voice. “Hold her?”
“Yes, didn’t I just ask?”
“Quick, someone grab a pillow from the couch,” Mom ordered urgently, as if baby Lucy were a grenade with the pin pulled and would explode if Jodie didn’t have her nestled on a pillow in the next five seconds.
“John?” Maddy said, in the same tone.
“Coming right up.” He ran so fast for the pillow Jodie expected him to come back breathless.
Sheesh, she thought, I could probably ask for a metallic gold European sports car convertible with red leather seats right now, and there’d be one in the driveway by the end of the afternoon. You know, I should definitely go for that…
Maddy stuffed the pillow between the arm of the chair and Jodie’s elbow. “Now, just cradle her head here, Jodie. If you’re not sure about this…”
“C’mon, Maddy, lighten up. I’ve held babies before. I’ve been holding them for years.” Elin’s eldest two were in their midteens.
“Yeah, but this is my baby,” Maddy joked, in a slightly wobbly voice.
Okay, so it was a new-mother thing. Fair enough.
But there was that feeling in the air again, everyone seeming to hold their breath, everyone watching Jodie a little too closely. Mom, Lisa, Dev. Dev, especially, his body held so still he could have been made of bronze.
The accident. The coma. That was why.
When she was one hundred percent fit and well, would they finally stop?
“Shouldn’t be such a fuss, should it?” Dad muttered from behind the barrier of the barbecue grill. No one took any notice.
Jodie held the baby, smelled the sweet, milky smell of her breath, the nutty scent of her pink baby scalp covered in a swirl of downy dark hair, and the hint of lavender in her stretchy cotton dress, from the special baby laundry detergent. Oh, she was so sweet, just adorable, and if everyone was staring at the two of them, well, that was fine and normal. It was one of the rightest sights in the world, a person tenderly holding a newborn child.
“Oh, you sweet, precious thing,” she crooned. “Thank you for not crying for your auntie, little darling.”
She bent forward and planted a kiss on the silky hair, and took in those sweet scents again, close to tears. As she straightened again, she could smell onions frying, too, the aroma unusually intense and satisfying, as if she’d never smelled frying onions before. Sometimes her brain reacted this way, since coming out of the coma. It was as if all her senses had been reborn.
And then suddenly they hit overload, like little Lucy hitting overload when she was due for her nap.
“Can you have her, Maddy? My arms are getting tired.”
“You did great,” Maddy said, and too many people echoed the praise. Dev growled it half under his breath.
But maybe they were right. She felt wiped. Dev leaned toward her. “Are you okay?”
“Need some lunch.”
“Just that?”
“Well, tired…”
Baby Lucy yawned on her behalf, and Maddy murmured something about taking her upstairs.
“To Jodie’s room,” Mom said quickly. “Not in—”
“No, I know,” Maddy answered, already halfway inside.
“But I definitely need lunch,” Jodie admitted.
“Sit,” Dev ordered. “I’ll grab whatever you want.” There was a tiny beat of hesitation. “You did great with the baby.”
“So did you.”
“Uh, yeah.” A quick breath. “Hot dog with everything?”
“Please!” She managed the hot dog, covered in bright red ketchup and heaped with those delicious onions, managed replies to various questions from family members, and to a comment on the kids’ soccer game from Dev, managed probably another half hour of sitting there—Maddy had come back downstairs with the baby monitor in her hand—and then she just couldn’t hold it together, couldn’t pretend anymore, guest of honor or not, and Dev said, “You need to rest. Right now.”
Mom didn’t quite get it. “Oh, but Devlin, it’s her party! We’ve barely started!”
“Take a look at her.”
Jodie tried to say, “I’m fine,” but it came out on a croak.
“You’re right, Devlin,” Mom said. “Jodie, let’s take you upstairs.”
“But Lucy’s asleep on her bed,” Maddy said.
“Couch is okay,” Jodie replied. “Nice to hear everyone talking.” She joked, “I mean, it is my party.”
“Here,” said Dev, the way he’d said it to Maddy over an hour ago, about baby Lucy. He helped her up and she leaned on him, and he smelled to her baby-new nose like pine woods and warm grain and sizzling steak. He didn’t pass her the walking frame, just said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you,” and she found that he did. He was so much better than the frame, so much more solid and warm, with his chest shoring up her shoulder and his chin grazing her hair. Her heart wanted to s
tay this close to him for hours, but the rest of her body wouldn’t cooperate.
They reached the couch and he plumped up the silk-covered cushions, grabbed the unfinished hand-stitched quilt top her mother was working on, tucked it around her like a three-hundred thread-count cotton sheet and ordered, “Rest.”
“I will.”
“I’ll leave your frame here within reach, if you need to get up.”
“Thank you, Dev.” She’d already closed her eyes, so she wasn’t sure that he’d touched her. She thought he had, with the brush of his fingertips over her hair, but maybe it was just a drift of air from his movement. She didn’t want to open her eyes to find out, or to discover he’d gone. Touch or air, she could feel it to her bones.
He must have gone. She hadn’t heard his footsteps on the carpet, but now there was that sense of quiet.
Sleepy quiet.
In the kitchen, making coffee and cutting cake, Elin said, in a voice that wasn’t nearly as soft as she thought, “I don’t think she was ready for this many people so soon.”
“It’s just family,” answered Lisa.
“It’s a big family,” Maddy pointed out.
“Mom wanted a celebration for her coming home.” Lisa again.
“We should have waited a week or two for that.” Elin.
“But by then…” Maddy.
“I know. I know.” Elin sighed.
Jodie shut all of it out, the way she’d learned to shut out the noise and the interruptions in the hospital and rehab unit, and drifted into sleep. When she woke up again, her sisters were still in the kitchen.
No, she amended to herself, in the kitchen again.
They were cleaning up this time, and the way they were talking made it clear that most people had gone, including Maddy, Lucy and John. She must have slept for a couple of hours, and the house had grown hotter with windows and deck doors open. Was Dev still here? She could hear the vigorous, metallic sound of Dad cleaning off the barbecue out on the deck, and Elin and Chris’s kids still playing in the yard, but no Dev.
She felt refreshed but stiff-limbed. Here was the walking frame within reach, just as Dev had promised. She twisted to a sitting position, inched forward on the couch and pulled herself up, automatically comparing her strength to yesterday, and a week ago, and a week before that.
Better.
I’m getting better.
Her therapists had told her it would come with work and so far today she hadn’t done any work, just a few range of motion exercises for her hands and arms this morning.
Time for a walk.
She called out to her sisters in the kitchen, to tell them what she was doing, and Elin appeared. “You’re sure?”
“I’m supposed to, now, as much as I feel like. I’ll only go around the block.”
“Need company?”
“No!” It came out a little more sharply than she’d intended.
The Not Ready stuff drove her crazy. It had been driving her crazy for years.
Not ready to go for a walk on her own, in her own street, at three-thirty in the afternoon on the Fourth of July? Come on!
She’d once said to her three big sisters, long ago, “I’m littler ’n you now, but watch out ’cause I’m getting bigger!” and somehow she was still insisting on that message, twenty-something years later, even though, thanks to a serious childhood illness at the age of five that had apparently scared the pants off of the entire family permanently, she never had caught up to them size-wise and was the smallest and shortest at size 4 and five foot three. But she didn’t need the level of protectiveness they and her mother gave her. Why couldn’t they see it?
Dad seemed to have an inkling, but he rarely interfered. She remembered just a handful of times. “Let her have horse-riding lessons, Barbara, for heck’s sake!” he’d said to Mom when Jodie was seven. “It’ll make her stronger.” And then ten years later, “If she wants to work with horses as a career, then she should. She should follow her heart.”
“No, thanks,” she repeated to Elin more gently, because anger wasn’t the way to go. “Send out a search party if I’m not back in forty-five minutes or so, okay? And I have my phone. You think anyone in Leighville is going to look the other way if they find someone collapsed on the sidewalk in front of their house?”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure, Elin. You can help me down the front steps, is all.”
It felt so good, once Elin had gone back inside. To be on her own, but not alone in a hospital rehab bed. To be out in the warm, fresh day, with no one watching over her, or telling her, “Yes! You can do it!” with far too much encouragement and enthusiasm, every time she put one step in front of another.
I could walk for miles!
No, okay, not miles, let’s be realistic, here.
But maybe more than just around the block. She had the frame for support. It would be slow going, concentration still required for every step, and the afternoon heat had grown sticky, but she’d never been a quitter. There’d be a garden wall or park bench to sit on if she was tired. There were all those neighbors looking out for her, knowing about the accident and that she had just come home.
She could walk to Dev’s.
Or rather, Dev’s parents’. He’d mentioned today that he was living there for the time being, just a throwaway line that she hadn’t thought about at the time because she’d been fighting the sense of fatigue and overload, but now it came back to her.
And it didn’t make sense.
Why was Dev living at his parents’ place, even as a temporary thing? Jodie was living with hers because of the accident, but that was different. Why was he still here in Leighville at all, when she had such a strong memory from nine months ago, of his insistence that he planned to return to New York as soon as he could?
It had something to do with her, with the accident, she was sure of it, and if her family had somehow roped him into the whole let’s-protect-Jodie-till-she-can’t-breathe-on-her-own scenario, then damn it, he had to be stopped. He had to be told.
I don’t need it, Devlin. I don’t want it. Not from you or from anyone else.
She was definitely walking to Dev’s, and they were going to talk.
Chapter Two
“Shh-sh,” Dev crooned, bouncing the baby gently against his shoulder. “Shh-sh.”
It did no good. His rhythmic sway and soothing sounds had had more success with baby Lucy today than they were having now with his own child, in his own house. He’d heard her screaming as he came up the front path, and the sitter had met him at the door, looking harassed and more than ready to go home.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Browne, she just won’t settle.”
He’d taken the baby, paid the sitter, tried everything he knew in the hour since, but DJ was still crying. He knew from experience—over two months of it, since she’d come home from the hospital—that she would settle eventually, that it wasn’t anything serious or horrible, just colic, but it wasn’t fun to hear her crying and to feel so helpless.
Dev didn’t do helpless.
He’d sent his parents off to their vacation condo in Florida three weeks ago with a sigh of relief. Both the Brownes and the Palmers were acting way too protective of everyone involved, since his and Jodie’s accident nine months ago. He often suspected that the Palmers would take DJ from him completely, if they could. Maybe he should take them up on that, relinquish custody and go back to New York.
But his heart rebelled at this idea, the way it often rebelled at the suffocating level of Palmer helpfulness. Jodie’s mother and her two sisters here in Leighville seized on his need for babysitting too eagerly, he felt, trading on their combined experience of child-raising and his own helplessness. His parents had been taking a hand at it, too, but seemed suspicious that he was somehow being exploited, that Jodie had trapped him into this situation.
Which was ridiculous, since she didn’t even know about it.
Today, despite his misgivings about the attitud
es of both Palmers and Brownes, he could have done with some family help, but it wasn’t possible, the way things stood. He was supposed to keep the baby safely away from the Palmer house.
Keep her away until Tuesday, the day after tomorrow, when Jodie had her appointment with doctors and therapists and counselors.
Zero hour.
His stomach kicked.
How did you prepare for something like that? He and the Palmers had been politely fighting about it for several weeks. The Palmers thought she still wasn’t ready, while Dev couldn’t handle the covering up, the distortions, the silence, even though he often dreaded what might happen once Jodie knew.
Doctor-patient ethics had become more of a concern with every step forward in Jodie’s difficult recovery. There was an insistence now that she had the right to be told, and that she was strong enough, so the moment of revelation had been fixed for ten o’clock Tuesday morning.
What would she want? Where would he fit? Would she understand how much he loved this baby girl, this surprise package in both their lives? He felt an increasing need to know how it would all pan out—he hated uncertainty, and not knowing where he stood—but there was a lot to get through first. For a start, how did you say it?
Jodie, you need to know at this point that while you were in the coma state…
DJ wailed and shuddered in his ear, but maybe it was easing now. Was she too hot? Dev preferred open windows and the chance of a breeze to the shut-in feeling of an air-conditioned cocoon, but what would be best for the baby? He rocked her a little harder and she seemed to relax into his shoulder, her sweet, milky breath soft on his neck.
He loved her more than he’d imagined possible, and he had no idea what this was going to mean, once Jodie was told.
“Stop crying, sweetheart. That’s right. Settle down, it’s okay. Is your tummy still hurting? Not so much now, hey? Not so much…”
How did this happen to me?
Nine months ago he’d been enjoying a hot fling, ground rules fully in place, with a warm, funny and surprisingly gutsy woman, who’d turned his temporary return to Southern Ohio from an act of duty into an unexpected pleasure.
