The Mommy Miracle

by Lilian Darcy

  He wanted to tell both women, “You have ruined the best moment Jodie has had since the accident.” Even better than last night, because it was right, while last night, in hindsight, probably wasn’t. He wanted to say, “You have set her back weeks with DJ. Maybe even months.”

  And there would be no second chances on those months. They would be the months when DJ would learn to laugh and sit up and look at picture books and maybe even crawl. They would be the months when her sounds would start to mean something to her, and when she would start to distinguish between the faces that looked at her with love and the ones that didn’t.

  If Jodie lost that little spark of love and rightness that had ignited in her today, when the two of them had sat on Bess together… If it didn’t fan into a bright, life-long flame because Barb and frigging Lisa had come along and put it out…

  Freaking hell, he would find that hard to forgive.

  Chapter Nine

  Maybe a real mother, a good mother, wouldn’t have done it. Maybe it was the last thing a normal, good mother would have done, asking to have her tiny baby up there with her in the saddle.

  Jodie thought about it all day, through the drive home with DJ and Dev, through the tense lunch of chicken salad rolls that her mother made for the two of them after DJ had had her bottle and Dev had gone.

  She and Dev had barely spoken to each other in the car, so different from the mood last night when he’d revealed so much and she’d felt so much care. “Are you angry?” she’d asked him.

  “Of course I am. Not with you.”

  She’d wanted him to say more, but he hadn’t and she hadn’t felt able to push. Angry with Mom and Lisa for interrupting? Angry with them for being right? Angry with himself? He drove less smoothly than usual, those strong hands sliding around the steering wheel, foot stabbing at the brake, eyes unreadable behind his sunglasses.

  The powerful body language made her intensely aware of him, the way she’d been up on Bess, with their fingers twined together and his head so close to her thigh. She had to fight not to steal sideways glances the whole time, and itched to touch him, too, to place her hand on his shoulder or his thigh, in an attempt to connect. It wasn’t a very obedient hand, though, Ole Lefty. It tended to crab into a tight claw, or twist its fingers at the wrong time. Even if she had dared to touch him, the touch would have turned out all wrong.

  He wasn’t just angry, but absent. Somewhere else. His thoughts ticked furiously—she could almost hear them—but she didn’t know what they were about. They’d almost reached home when she ventured to say, “I guess we’ll wait a bit before we try this again.”

  “Mmm?” Her words had pulled him back from a faraway place, it seemed.

  “Before we go back to Oakbank,” she explained.

  “Look, I don’t want to create a rift between you and your family.”

  “I know. I hate being at odds. They care about me. And they care about DJ.”

  “Yeah, Oakbank…” He was still deep in his thoughts. Oakbank apparently fit someplace in there, but she didn’t know where.

  “Well, here we are….” she told him. Unnecessarily, as he was already turning into the driveway.

  And now lunch with Mom, and DJ’s spreadsheet-dictated schedule, and a quiet afternoon, when Jodie had half hoped to be at Oakbank most of the day, watching the day campers and group lessons, visiting her favorite horses in their stalls. The whole morning had left a sour taste, far more so than what had happened between her and Dev last night, and she questioned everything about it.

  Lisa called in that evening, saying, “I’m sorry,” before she’d even entered the house, and they sat in the kitchen together and drank glasses of iced tea. Mom had DJ out on the porch swing at the front of the house, and Jodie could hear the sound of lullaby singing.

  “I think I came on too strong this morning,” Lisa said. “I know I did. I was just so scared, that’s all, when I saw you there, and with the baby.”

  “I was perfectly safe, Lise. I had Dev and Katrina right by me. Bess has been a fully trained hippotherapy horse for ten years, and she is incredibly well looked after so she doesn’t get tired and sour. She is wise and perceptive and calm as a pond. I would trust her with my life.”

  “We’re just a little worried about your priorities, that’s all.”

  “I want to get as strong as I can. I want to put the accident behind me and start being normal again. And riding has always been so much a part of normal for me.”

  “I just question—” Lisa stopped, huffed out a breath. “Look, I’ll just put it out there. How often are you going to blow off your rehab to go to Oakbank?”

  “Don’t say it that way. I didn’t blow it off. Dev called Trish and she thought it was a great idea, as long as I was careful.”

  “We’re just concerned. We care about you.”

  “I know. Just don’t smother me, okay? I hate it.”

  “Is she fussing tonight? Is that why she’s out on the porch swing with Mom?”

  “Um, I think she’s fine.”

  Mom had kept DJ to herself all afternoon, telling Jodie that she needed to rest “after that whole mess this morning.” And it was true that she’d felt extra tired, emotional and not as capable as she wanted to be. She’d spent too much time trying to recapture the morning’s wonderful, heart-melting sense of certainty about DJ and her own role, but she couldn’t. Was it because the mood had been bruised so abruptly? Or was it her own fault?

  She didn’t want the baby to pick up on all her self-questioning. Horses had such an uncanny instinct about human emotions that they were practically psychic, so why shouldn’t babies be the same? It meant something that DJ hadn’t yet smiled at her. It hurt her and scared her and she didn’t want to make things any worse. So she stayed away, and DJ seemed to have a contented, peaceful afternoon.

  Dev hadn’t called. The spreadsheet said he was supposed to have DJ overnight today, but the spreadsheet hadn’t seen what had happened at Oakbank this morning, so it was even more out of the loop than usual.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry,” Lisa said again, repeating it and explaining her motives until this, too, felt like a form of smothering.

  Mom came into the kitchen with DJ propped on her hip. She rubbed at the small of her back with her free hand as if it were aching, and every pore of her skin looked tired.

  “Mom, give her to me,” Jodie said, too concerned about that aching back and tired skin to remember her own fears and doubts until after the words were spoken.

  Mom shook her head. “It’s fine.”

  “Are you sure?” But, so help her, she felt relieved.

  “She’ll be ready to go down as soon as she’s had her bottle, I think. Dev hasn’t called, and he’s usually here earlier than this. Is he coming, I wonder? Well, I’m not going to call him. If he wants her, he needs to say so, and if she’s down for the night and he shows up, I’m not disturbing her.”

  “We’re all tired,” Lisa announced, as if it solved every thing.

  Dev arrived at the Palmers’ twenty minutes too late.

  “She’s down,” Barb told him at the front door. “She went down at seven. Why didn’t you call?”

  “Because it was already settled that I was having her tonight.” He tried to sound patient and pleasant about it, but knew he wasn’t succeeding. He gentled his tone further, but still couldn’t keep the frustration at bay. “Was she that tired you couldn’t have kept her up? It’s not like she’s asleep at the exact same minute every night.”

  “You’re usually here by six.”

  “I was…caught up.” He’d had a crazy afternoon, getting back to the office to encounter an unexpected crisis with a longtime client of his father’s, and then a long call from New York about the international legal case he was supposed to be working on in London in the fall.

  The call pulled him back into his work, reminded him how much he enjoyed it. For the first time since DJ was born, he almost forgot her existence, and then he re
membered with a flood of conflicting emotion…all that love, all that uncertainty.

  He’d spent hours on the phone and at the computer, dealing with the client’s problems and the London case while at the same time trying to put a plan in place that he had no intention of sharing with Barbara at this stage. He just might share it with Jodie’s dad, Bill, because occasionally the quiet man gave an inkling that he was more on the ball about Jodie’s needs than he let on.

  He’d grabbed coffee and a sandwich on the run, had twice been about to send a text to Barb or Jodie to tell them he was running late, but then something else had come up and the text never happened. In the back of his mind, because of Barb’s own spreadsheet, he hadn’t thought it mattered that much. Now, she’d used a poor excuse yet again to keep DJ under her own roof.

  If this was so that Jodie could spend more time with the baby, then he wouldn’t have a problem with it, but that wasn’t happening. None of the Palmer women seemed to have any thought that Jodie needed help, not with baby-care but with bonding. They were in a state of massive denial, and if he didn’t take drastic action soon, then his relationship with the entire family would descend into open conflict.

  He couldn’t let it happen, because if they or Jodie somehow managed to shut him out of DJ’s life… His scalp tightened with dread at the very thought.

  “You’re not going to wake her?” Barb asked, telegraphing her disapproval very clearly.

  “No, I won’t wake her. Is Bill around, though?”

  “In the basement. Shall I call him?”

  “No, I’ll go down.”

  Ignoring Barb’s visible curiosity about why he might be seeking out her husband, Dev found him at his workshop bench, planing a curved piece of oak with an old-fashioned handheld plane. Dev couldn’t work out what the piece of oak was for, and said so.

  “It’s the main,” answered Bill.

  “The main what?”

  Bill chuckled. “No, m-a-n-e. I’m making a rocking horse. For DJ.”

  “Oh. Oh, wow.”

  They both stood there in a manly silence for several moments, while Dev took in the other pieces of the rocking horse. He began to see how it would all fit together. It was going to be a beautiful piece of workmanship. “I’m not good at the fussy stuff,” Bill said eventually.

  “This doesn’t look fussy at all. It looks…like a piece of art. Incredible.”

  “I mean the fussy stuff with diapers and bottles.”

  “Right. You must have done your share.”

  “When I had to.” He chuckled again. “But I like to be involved in my own way. Things like this.”

  “She’ll love it.”

  “Her first Christmas, I thought. She’ll be able to sit on it by then, with help.”

  “It’s going to be really wonderful.”

  “Going to paint it like Jodie’s Irish, dapple gray.” He fell silent again, and his laconic manner transmitted itself to Dev, who couldn’t find a way to say what he wanted to say. He wasn’t even quite sure what he was trying for. In the end it was Bill who helped him out. “I love my wife and my girls,” he said, “but it’s not going right, is it?”

  “No…”

  “With DJ, I mean, and Jodie.”

  “No, I don’t think it is.”

  “Right now, she’s everybody’s baby, the way Jodie was when she was little, especially after she was ill. She fought it. The horses were the best thing that ever happened to her, although Barb still can’t see it. I don’t want to watch Jodie hanging back with DJ, not knowing where she fits, not trusting herself with the baby. My wife and my daughters are trying to help, but they’re doing it wrong. You can see it, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  There was another silence. Bill picked up his plane. “Should we get involved?”

  “I think we have to.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Dev said.

  “And…score!” Trish said.

  “Yay, it went in the tub.” Jodie clumsily clapped her hands. “That’s three times, now.”

  “Wow, Jodie!” Elin said. She’d dropped in as she occasionally did, to play cheerleader to Jodie’s efforts.

  Trish moved to retrieve the tennis ball from the big pink plastic bucket, which was about three feet in diameter, six feet away and hard to miss. But the close proximity hadn’t stopped Jodie from missing it with the ball about nine times before her first hit. “I’ll get it,” she said quickly.

  “Sure?”

  “You and Elin keep scrambling up, and it’s good for me to do it, right? Makes the whole exercise more complex and useful.” She stood up, walked over, bent down, put in an intense mental effort and got her fingers to close around the ball. Back in her seat, she threw it again—let go, crazy fingers!—and there came another rubbery plop as it landed in the bottom of the tub. “Yeah, all right!”

  “You’re getting much better at this,” Trish said.

  “Wanna move the tub farther away?” Jodie asked.

  “Not today. Practice a little more on your own, if you want, before we break for lunch. I need to go check on Alice.” Trish gestured across to another rehab patient working on a puzzle on the far side of the room.

  “Of course I want,” Jodie said, and went once again to pick up the ball—before Elin could do it for her.

  She threw it, let go at the wrong time and missed by a mile.

  She went to retrieve the ball from under the occupational therapy unit craft table—before Elin could do it for her—but someone else had gotten there first.

  Dev.

  He had a fabric baby pouch strapped over his shoulders, with DJ cradled against his chest.

  She went hot and flustered at the sight of them, since Mom’s spreadsheet hadn’t breathed a word to suggest they were coming. Dev looked somehow formidable today, despite the softening accessory of a baby dressed head-to-toe in pink, right down to a tiny bucket-shaped pink sun hat. His jaw was set, and there was an electricity of intent humming inside him. It flustered her even more, as soon as she picked up on it. “Hi,” she said, and asked—before Elin could do it for her—“What are you doing here?”

  “It’s all okayed with Trish and Lesley.”

  “It is? What is?” She looked in Trish’s direction and received a smile and a thumbs-up in reply.

  “Yes, Dev,” said Elin, who hadn’t been looking at Trish. “What are we talking about?”

  “Um, Elin, if you don’t mind this is between me and Jodie.”

  “Well, it isn’t, really.” She frowned at him. “If you recall our talk the other night.”

  “Talk?” Jodie came in. “What talk?”

  They ignored her. “This has nothing to do with what we talked about the other night,” Dev said to Elin. “I’ve already agreed you were right about that. So would you mind please—?”

  “Butting out? You’re telling me to butt out? Mom told me what happened yesterday at Oakbank.”

  “I told you, too, Elin,” Jodie said. “I told you it was great.”

  Again, they ignored her, glaring at each other, then Dev very deliberately turned in her direction. “I’m a little early, Jodie, because DJ woke up earlier than usual and it seemed best to show up now, before she gets fussy. Ready to go?”

  “If you tell me where.”

  “Can’t do that.” He picked up her purse.

  “Devlin!” Elin said.

  “I am not dealing with you right now, Elin. I am not justifying myself to you, or to Lisa, or to your mom. Talk to Trish about it, if you want, but I need to get going before DJ falls apart. Jodie?”

  He began to walk toward the door, his stride so long and assured and angry that Jodie had this dizzy, illogical panic that she would never see DJ again if she didn’t follow him, so of course she did.

  It was as if he had a gun pressed to DJ’s head. Or to her own. It was a hostage situation or a kidnapping, he was that cool and controlled and ruthless
about it. Elin seemed rooted to the spot. Trish was watching carefully from the far side of the room. When Elin took a pace forward, she called her quickly, and Elin went over to her, chin defiantly raised but ready to listen. A moment later they were in a very female huddle, with Elin nodding and frowning, and Trish persuasively arguing…something.

  In a summery skirt and white lacy top, Jodie wasn’t dressed for a kidnapping. In fresh blue jeans and a designer polo shirt, neither was Dev. Where was the no-brand jacket and pulled-down baseball cap? The baggy clothing where he could hide the gun? “Dev, you have to explain.”

  “When we’re in the car.”

  “Okay. I mean, I’m pretty hungry, so if it’s lunch…”

  It couldn’t be lunch. You didn’t kidnap someone to take them to lunch.

  “Lunch is included.”

  “Good.” She managed a skipping step to keep up with him, and almost fell.

  He stopped. “Sorry, I’m going too fast.”

  “A little. Some people might say it’s me going too slow.”

  He kind of gathered her against him, running his arm beneath hers and around her back, reaching up to settle her uncooperative left hand on his shoulder. Her whole body began to blur. That was how it felt. Blurry and fuzzy and soft. Happy. Her mind was racing but her body was happy, where it belonged.

  His hip pressed into her side and DJ in the front carrier was right there with her little leg flapping against Jodie’s stomach. Her hat was about to fall off. Jodie made an ineffective reaching movement with her right hand, and Dev saw what was happening and flipped the darling little pink-flowered bucket back into place.

  “Let’s not go slow, if we can help it,” Dev said, in the corridor, and she could feel the vibration of his voice against her ribs. “Elin’s probably sending out an APB, as we speak.”

  “So I’m right.” She’d gone breathless, could he hear? “You are kidnapping me?”