The Mommy Miracle

by Lilian Darcy

  Thanks to Jodie, he’d stopped seeing a slow-paced backwater town and started seeing the beauty of the changing landscape in the fall. Instead of feeling the suffocation of routine, he’d felt the sinewy strength of family ties. He’d rediscovered the pleasure of a good laugh, of collecting the morning newspaper from the front yard while the grass was wet with dew, of hearing rain or birdsong outside his window instead of city noise.

  But it was just an interlude. They both knew it. He’d said it to her direct, because he didn’t want the risk of her getting hurt.

  Even after the accident, he’d at first only planned to stay until his leg was put back together and healed. Jodie had family here. She wouldn’t be on her own, whether she stayed in a coma state or made a full recovery. He didn’t belong at her bedside, keeping vigil, the way her parents and sisters had.

  But then…

  DJ went through another spasm of pain and stiffened and screamed harder in his arms. “Ah, sweetheart, ah, honey-girl, it’ll stop soon.” He rocked her and massaged her little gut with the pad of his thumb.

  How did this happen to me?

  And what would change, come Tuesday?

  Everything.

  “Everything, baby girl,” he murmured. Hell, he was so scared about it!

  The knock at his front door startled him a few minutes later, the brass rapper hitting the plate unevenly, a couple of strong, jerky taps and then a weaker one. With DJ still in his arms, her crying beginning to settle to a kind of shuddery grumble, he went to see who was there, and when he saw Jodie standing there, he knew he didn’t have until ten o’clock Tuesday anymore.

  Zero hour was now.

  The baby wasn’t Lucy.

  Jodie worked that out in around forty seconds, as she and Dev both stood frozen on either side of the threshold.

  The baby wasn’t Lucy, because Lucy belonged to Maddy and John, and had gone home with them to Cincinnati, and was smaller and newer than this little thing.

  This little thing clearly belonged to Dev, and explained exactly why his crooning and shushing and swaying on Mom and Dad’s back deck had been so effective earlier today. He’d had practice. Recent practice, and a lot of it.

  “You’d better come in,” he said heavily, after standing there in what appeared to be a frozen moment of shock. Jodie was pretty shocked herself. “I think she’s going to sleep,” he added. “You’re not catching her at the best time. I wish you could see her smiling, the way she’s been doing the past month.”

  “It’s a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I…uh…I call her DJ.”

  “DJ,” she echoed blankly. He called her DJ. But it wasn’t her name?

  “You look like you need to sit. Shoot, of course you need to sit.”

  “Yes. I do.” She hadn’t realized it herself until now, despite her shaky hand on the heavy door knocker, but, yes, her legs had turned pretty shaky, too, and the frame wasn’t giving enough support. She had no idea what was happening, here.

  Dev had a baby.

  He absolutely, one hundred percent had…a…baby.

  He had a cloth thrown over his shoulder to catch the spit-up, and a hand cradling the baby’s little diaperpadded butt as if it grew there, and a puffy rectangle of baby quilt in the middle of the floor, with a baby gym arched over it, like the one Maddy and John had brought to Mom and Dad’s today for Lucy, even though their three-week-old infant could hardly be expected to play with such a thing.

  This baby was definitely older. Dev had just mentioned she’d been smiling for the past month, and Jodie had enough nieces and nephews, thanks to all of Elin and Lisa’s kids, that she knew when smiling happened—six weeks or so. This baby, small though she was, had to be getting on for about ten weeks old.

  Do the math, Jodie, do the math. Nine months plus two and a half equals almost a year. When you were busy “getting the old crush out of your system,” last fall, the mother of Dev’s baby must already have been pregnant….

  But where was the mother now? Who was the mother?

  “Here. Sit here,” Dev said, after she’d made her way inside. It was a pretty house, but the décor was too frilly and fussy for a man like Dev, with lace and florals and porcelain knickknacks everywhere. His mother’s taste. “I’ll take the frame. Do you want coffee, or something?”

  “No. I— No, I’m fine.”

  “Look, it’s obvious we need to talk. Let me get you something.”

  “Is—? Who else is around?”

  “No one. My parents are in Florida. They have a condo there. I made them go.”

  “You made them?”

  “Don’t you sometimes feel…haven’t you felt, these past few weeks, as if sometimes there’s just too much family?”

  “Ohh, yeah!”

  That she could relate to.

  But the baby…

  DJ had fallen asleep on Dev’s shoulder. “Hang on a sec,” he muttered, and picked up a roomy piece of cloth that turned out to be a baby sling. He draped it across his shoulder, tucked the baby inside and stood there, still swaying gently. “If I put her down now, she’ll just wake up again,” he explained. “She needs to go a little deeper before it’s safe.”

  “You’re very good at it.”

  “Yeah…not really. I’m getting there. I have a who-o-ole heap of help.”

  A heavy silence fell, during which the obvious reference to DJ’s mother wasn’t made.

  Dev said nothing about her.

  Jodie didn’t want to ask.

  “She’s adorable,” she said instead, feeling woolly and wooden about it, wondering if she should be angry. Or hurt. Or just cheerful. Wow, you have a baby, congratulations. You said you didn’t want kids, but whoever the mom is obviously didn’t get the memo.

  Unless of course…

  Well, accidents happened. Baby-producing accidents, as well as ones that break legs in three places and put people into comas and necessitate the removal of spleens. Dev and some unknown woman had had a contraceptive “oops” roughly eleven months ago, and here was a baby, and her mom had probably just run to the store for diapers and milk. She and Jodie would meet each other any minute now.

  “I can’t take this in,” she blurted.

  “I don’t blame you. Jodie, this was all set up for Tuesday. Does your family know you’re here? They couldn’t!”

  “Oh, my family… Didn’t you just ask me if I felt there was too much family? Well, there is! I said I was going for a walk and I didn’t need company. I just told them around the block, and that if I wasn’t back in forty-five minutes, send a search party. Coming here was an impulse.”

  “I’d better call your folks.” He rocked the baby in his arms instinctively.

  “It hasn’t been forty-five minutes.”

  “You’re going to be here for a while.” He’d already picked up the phone and hit speed dial, as if the matter was urgent.

  He has my parents on speed dial, she registered. But she liked his directness, the decisive way he moved. It was reassuring, somehow. Dependable.

  He spoke a moment later. “Hi, Barb?” Barb was Mom. “Just letting you know, Jodie’s here…. Nope, not my idea… No choice, at this point… I can’t argue it now, you have to trust me…. Of course I will… No. Just me. Please… Yep, okay, talk soon.”

  “What was that about, Dev?” She tried to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate. The walk had tired her more than she wanted.

  “We’ve both said it. Too much family.”

  “Right.”

  “First, tell me why you came. I mean, what made you think—? What gave you the idea—?” He broke off and swore beneath his breath. “Just tell me what made you come.”

  His difficulty in finding the right words made her flounder a little, and struggle for words herself. “I wanted to ask you…or to thank you, too, for coming to see me in the hospital those times.”

  “Just that?” He sounded cautious, looked w
atchful, as if waiting for a heck of a lot more.

  “Well, and for—I don’t know if I’m even the reason for this, or even part of the reason, but…not going back to New York when you planned.”

  “Hell, of course I wasn’t going back to New York!”

  She looked at him blankly and he understood something—something that she didn’t understand at all, but she could see the dawn of realization in his face, while her body stopped belonging to her and belonged…somewhere else, to someone else.

  It was a familiar feeling. Just the accident and her slow recovery? Or something more?

  He was muttering under his breath. Curse words, some of them. And coaching. He was coaching himself. He sat down suddenly, in the armchair just across from the couch, with the sling-wrapped baby cradled in his arms, as if his legs had drained of their strength just like Jodie’s had.

  “Pretend I’ve just been in a coma for nearly nine months, Devlin,” she said slowly. “Tell me anything you think I might not know. Pretend my family has a habit of shielding me from the most pointless things. And from the serious things, too. And tell me even the things you think I already do know. What did you mean, set up for Tuesday? What did you mean, no choice at this point? And this might be totally off-topic, but how is there a baby? And where is her mom?”

  Chapter Three

  She doesn’t know. She doesn’t understand.

  The realization kept cycling through Dev’s head, paralyzing him. Hell, he hadn’t wanted it to happen like this! He’d been so scared of the moment, sometimes—scared about what it would mean for his own bond with his baby girl. What if Jodie wanted the baby all to herself? What if he was suddenly shut out? He wasn’t prepared to let that happen, but how tough would he be willing to get about custody and access, when Jodie’s recovery was still so far from complete? What would be best for DJ?

  He’d wanted to get the revelation over with, so that at least he would begin to know where he and DJ stood, but the timing had to be right. It had to be done in the right way.

  With all the talk, the questions, the arguments back and forth between pretty much every member of the Browne and Palmer families for weeks, the conjectures that maybe at some level she knew, and that some tiny thing might easily jog a memory, no one had considered that Jodie herself might be the one to determine when they broke the news.

  Devlin had wanted her told sooner, and his parents had been on his side. The Palmers had wanted to wait, insisting she wasn’t ready for such a massive revelation. The doctors, therapists and counselors wanted to respect the family’s wishes, but had been growing more insistent with each stage in Jodie’s improvement, after the setback of the serious infection she’d had just after DJ was born.

  This was part of the problem. It had all happened in stages. It wasn’t as if she’d just opened her eyes one day and said, “I’m back. Catch me up on what I’ve missed!”

  All through the coma there had been signs of lightening awareness, giving hope for an eventual return to consciousness, but it had been so gradual. First, she followed movement around the room with her eyes, but couldn’t speak. It seemed so strange that she could have her eyes open without real awareness, but apparently this was quite common, the doctors said.

  Then her level of consciousness changed from “coma” to “minimally conscious state.” She began to vocalize vague sounds, but had no words. She started to use words but not sentences. She began to move, but with no strength or control. For several days she cried a lot, asking repeatedly, “Where am I? What happened to me?”

  Once she’d understood and accepted the accident and the need for therapy, she’d become utterly determined to make a full recovery and had worked incredibly hard. Every day, over and over, in her hospital room, in the occupational therapy room, or the rehab gym, they all heard, “Don’t bother me with talking now, I’m working!”

  Barbara Palmer began to say, about the baby, “Not until she’s home,” and her therapists cautiously agreed that, emotionally, this might be the right way to go. Let her focus on one thing at a time. Don’t risk setting back her physical recovery with such a shock of news.

  How did you say it?

  How the hell was he going to say it now?

  You were five weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, it turns out, although we’re almost certain you didn’t know. You gave birth, a normal delivery, at thirty-three weeks of gestation, when your state was still defined as coma, just a week after you first opened your eyes. This is your beautiful, healthy baby girl.

  He said it.

  Somehow.

  Not anywhere near as fluently as it sounded in his head.

  “Sh-she’s yours…Jodie,” he finally said, stumbling over every word. Yours? No! He wasn’t going to sabotage his own involvement. “She’s ours,” he corrected quickly. “I didn’t know what to call her. I thought you’d want to decide. So she’s been DJ till now, because those are our two initials. Is that okay? Are you okay? This was supposed to happen on Tuesday, at your appointment, with your doctors and therapists and people on hand to answer all your questions. To—to help you deal with it.”

  The words sounded stupid to his own ears. Deal with it. Doctors and counselors could help someone deal with a cancer diagnosis, but this was in a whole different league.

  Her eyes were huge in her face. She couldn’t speak. She was slightly built, which made a stark show of her current shock and vulnerability. He remembered thinking her funny and gawky and oddly impressive when she was sixteen and he was eighteen, and dating her friend. Impressive because she looked as if a breath of wind would blow her away, but, boy, did she get on your case if you treated her that way.

  She’d been just the same in the hospital and during rehab, once she could speak and move. She’d insisted on her own strength and her own will, and proved with every step that she was as strong and determined as she claimed. She fought her family on it all the time, because she was seven years younger than her next sister and she’d had a serious brush with meningitis as a child, and the whole clan had babied her ever since.

  Well, for once she wasn’t fighting or insisting. She was too shocked. He’d half expected a protest or a denial. You’re messing with my head. It can’t be true. But she didn’t say anything like that. She believed him at once, which made him wonder if there was a tiny, elusive part of her brain, or a lacing of chemicals—hormones—in her body that had known the truth.

  Her conscious mind, though, and her sense of self, had been completely in the dark.

  “I have a thousand questions,” she blurted out.

  “Of course. Ask them. I’ll tell you everything as straight as I can.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Ask them?”

  “Do this.” She tried to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t carry her.

  “Sit,” he insisted. “You don’t have to say anything. Or do anything. Let me talk, if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  So he talked, keeping it a little impersonal because that felt safe, and leaving out a few things, because he couldn’t hit her with all of it at once.

  He told her about the signs of labor, the quick delivery they’d all been praying for, to ease the stress on her body. Told her DJ’s length and birth weight and head circumference. Told her proudly that the baby had Jodie’s own strength. Despite her premature birth, DJ had been stepped down from the NICU into the lower-level special-care unit within a couple of days, and had come home from the hospital in less than two weeks.

  “Home?” Jodie croaked.

  “Here. And your parents’ place. She spends a lot of time there.” More than he was happy with, to be honest, but he hadn’t wanted to fight them on that at a point when Jodie’s full recovery had still been very much in doubt, and when his own future wasn’t fully resolved. Would she ever be able to take care of a child? If she could, did that mean he’d go back to New York?

  “Why are you here? In Leighville?”

  She was aski
ng the wrong questions, wasn’t she? He took in a breath to suggest this to her, but then changed his mind.

  Ah, hell, there was no script for this! She should ask whatever she wanted to, in whatever order it came. And if she didn’t have an instant, overpowering need to hold DJ in her arms, he should be glad of the reprieve. He couldn’t stand the idea of losing his daughter, not even with generous custody and access, when the bond between them had grown so strong.

  “I’m still working at Dad’s law practice,” he explained, trying to stay practical and calm. “He’s in no hurry to get back into harness. I expect he’ll decide to retire. I’ll head back to New York… Well, that’s open-ended at the moment. All decisions on hold, I guess. My apartment is rented out. I have a conference coming up in Sweden in early October, followed by a couple of months consulting in London.”

  “You were supposed to be back in New York by last Christmas. Was it your dad’s health that changed your plans?”

  Shoot, didn’t she understand?

  “They found out you were pregnant before I even had the plates put in my leg.”

  “How?”

  “Blood tests, part of assessing your condition. When they told me…” Again, how to say it?

  “You knew you had no other choice,” she supplied for him.

  He couldn’t argue. Not the words, anyway. Maybe the edge of—what?—bitterness, or anger, in her tone. He hadn’t had any other choice. Not then. He wasn’t going to abandon his child before it was even born. He wasn’t going to deprive her of a father, when she might never have a mom. But it was different now. “I don’t want another choice,” he said. “This all needs time to work out, and that’s okay.”

  “You said you didn’t plan on ever having kids.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Over dinner. You had steak with pepper sauce. I had strawberry mousse cake for dessert.”

  “Shoot, you do remember!”

  “Yes. It’s like yesterday, that mousse cake.” The subtext of explain yourself, Dev was very clear. She wasn’t really talking about dessert.