by Lilian Darcy
Aching for him.
Aching for herself and what she was missing.
Aching for DJ, who had the best dad in the world.
The baby had a good night, Dev said. They ate breakfast out on the deck, just cereal and fruit and coffee. Since it would be kind of useful to have a toothbrush and more than one pair of pants, they drove half an hour to a major store and picked up a few essentials. Jodie would have bought more, but DJ began to signal that she thought shopping was way overrated, so the one extra pair of shorts and a strappy tank would have to do.
After lunch and naps for both mom and baby, Dev suggested exploring the trail through the woods, and that sounded safe. A family thing to do. A time when the dad carried the baby in that little front pouch.
“Time to break out the new shorts, you mean?” she said, so that he wouldn’t guess what she was thinking.
“Sounds like a plan.”
He left her alone to change. She was getting faster at it, but Ole Lefty still made some of the movements a challenge at times. In ten minutes or so, she met him back in the living area and they left the cabin, found the start of the marked trail leading into the woods and lost themselves in the cool greenery.
They walked slowly, because that was all she could do, but the pace didn’t matter. Side by side, Jodie could hold on to Dev when she needed to, and he seemed to have an instinct about that, turning a little whenever the terrain grew too uneven. There were simple wooden benches at intervals, really just two tree stumps with a plank nailed across the top, but they gave her the chance to sit and regroup, and meant that they could go farther.
There was a stream gurgling just out of sight, tantalizing them with its delicious sounds. There were cardinals and warblers, and they saw a greenish-brown salamander flick itself beneath a rock. The air had a fresh, peaty smell and it was so peaceful and quiet, just the sounds of water and leaves, their footfalls on the mushy earth, and Dev talking to DJ about the things they saw.
“See the cardinal? It’s red. Look at it flashing through the trees, baby girl.”
Jodie felt shut out of his ease with the baby, even though she was right by his side. How could he talk to her like that, so unselfconscious about it, when DJ couldn’t possibly understand? Red? Cardinal? How old would she have to be to learn colors and birds? She looked so happy there against his front in her pink outfit, with his voice so familiar in her ears.
I’m jealous….
Jodie felt the painful, complicated twist of it and hated herself. How could she ruin such a perfect afternoon with her own messed-up feelings? She’d thought a walk in the woods would be so safe, but instead she felt as if she’d walked into an ambush.
“She’s a little young for the nature talk, isn’t she, Dev?” The sour twist of shame and disappointment came out in her tone, despite her best efforts.
“I hate when I hear parents talking to kids as if they’re not really people,” he answered easily, as if he hadn’t heard the tone. He must have.
“But you coo at her.” Her throat was tight. She’d cooed at DJ, too, but it felt as if she were acting a role that she’d been cast in by mistake. Faking it. And badly. Like last night, when she hadn’t been able to answer a simple question about DJ’s age.
“I coo at her,” Dev said. “I talk to her, I sing to her, I even confess things to her, sometimes.”
“Confess things?” What did Dev have to confess? He had become the most amazing father in such a short time. He was doing everything right, the way he always did, without making a big deal out of it in any way.
He mimicked himself. “Man, honey, I’m not so keen on this diaper change stuff. I’m hoping you’ll potty train real early.”
She gave an upside-down laugh, disappointed. “Oh, that kind of confession.” She blinked fast, feeling the wash of tears.
“Why, what did you think?” He leaned a little, his shoulder giving a gentle, playful push against hers. He couldn’t have seen the tears. She’d blinked them away. He mimicked again. “DJ, don’t tell the cops, I wrapped the gun in a rag and buried it in the backyard under the red rose bush.”
But she couldn’t laugh about it. “Thank you for kidnapping me,” she said, her voice even tighter, unsteady now.
“We’re back to that?” He put his arm around her.
“I need this. I’m not getting it right yet. You’re being…so patient. But I need it so much.” She stopped and pressed her lips together. Could she tell him? A part of her wanted to hold it back. Because what would he think if he knew? But then the words just came. “I’m afraid I’ll never get it right.”
“Get it right?”
“The love. Loving her. Being her mom.” She was crying now. “It was a bad start. But that shouldn’t matter. Other mothers have bad starts. A difficult birth, or a baby in the NICU so they don’t get to hold her right away. I don’t know why it matters for me, what’s gone wrong, why I can’t feel it. Don’t tell me I need professional help. I have a ton of that with the rehab, and it’s great, Trish and Lesley are both amazing, but I don’t need any more of it. I just couldn’t bear to have a therapist teach me how to be a mom, no matter how sensitive and skilful and well-meant.”
“Hey… Hey…” He half turned her to him and she buried her face against his shoulder so he wouldn’t see just how much she was crying.
Oh, who was she kidding? He didn’t need to see. He could feel.
Her shoulders were shaking and she couldn’t make them stop. For a long time she just let herself cry about everything in the whole world. About the accident and Dev’s suffering that night and the birth. About the struggle with her body and brain. About Mom and Dad and Elin and Lisa and Maddy caring so much but understanding so little. About Dev putting his high-flying career in New York on hold, whether temporary or permanent, so he could be DJ’s dad.
Oh, and why not just throw in war and the environment and a few natural disasters at the same time, and cry about those, too? She couldn’t remember when she’d cried this hard.
Finally she spoke again. “I love her.” DJ made the third side of their triangle. She’d gone quiet now, against Dev’s chest. “I must. I do.” Those little legs had stopped jiggling. “But I can’t feel it. That’s the most awful thing, Dev, such a terrible thing.” Of course Dev talked to DJ like a grown-up, because those big, swimmy eyes of hers seemed to be taking in every horrible word Jodie spoke, every sobbing gasp of breath. “You must hate me right now.”
Both of you.
He said gently, “What, you think I didn’t guess from the beginning that you were having problems?”
“I—I— Mom and Elin and Lisa keep telling me it’s because of the rehab, because I get too tired.”
He made an impatient sound.
“But you don’t buy that idea….”
“Maybe they really think that,” he said. “Or maybe they’re in denial. Or maybe they want to go easy on you for the best reasons in the world.”
“That’s pretty pointless, when I can’t go easy on myself.”
“You have felt it, the love. You felt it on Thursday at Oakbank, when you had her sitting up in front of you.”
“I—I did. It was so wonderful. Such a relief. But it didn’t survive Mom and Lisa showing up, and yesterday I struggled so hard, and that’s crazy, for it to be so fragile.”
“So it’s fragile, for now. Dressing yourself was fragile a few weeks ago. Before that, talking was fragile. Your brain and body got stronger.”
“It’s not my brain. It’s my heart.”
“Don’t worry about your heart.”
“How can you say that, when for you it’s so easy.”
He gave a snort of laughter. “Easy?”
“It is easy. You change her and feed her and bathe her and carry her around and all the time you just love her without even trying.”
It was true.
So help them both, it was true.
Dev fought to find an answer, a reassurance that wouldn’t be
glib and wrong, but he couldn’t find one. Jodie was right. Against everything he would have predicted about himself a year ago, he found it so easy to love DJ, and he couldn’t just tell her mom how to do it, step-by-step, not when she was crying and crying like this, when the difficult words she spoke were just temporary lulls in the storm of sobbing and tears. He thought that the crying was vital and necessary, and it had been a long time coming, he guessed.
Tell her how to do it?
First, kiss her darling forehead and blow a raspberry on her tummy….
No. They were both out of their depth. Everything seemed like a platitude.
Relax. It will happen.
The only thing he could think of, the only thing that seemed to make sense at the moment, was to give love and reassurance to Jodie, and hope she’d be able to pass it on. Love worked that way, didn’t it? The more you gave, the more there was. DJ had taught him that, just as Jodie had taught him that adventures could happen in the tiniest sparkling moments. He was still thinking about that.
“So maybe you shouldn’t try, either,” he finally said. “Maybe you should let go, and forgive yourself, and have some trust.”
“Mmm.” She sniffed and he clapped a hand to the back pocket of his pants in search of the wad of clean tissues he kept in there for DJ’s needs. Jodie mopped at her face and he led her back to the last bench they’d passed, about fifty yards along the track, and they sat.
Just sat.
Shoulders pressed together, bodies like magnets, hearts in tune.
She needed this.
“I think you’ve always worked for what you wanted, haven’t you?” he said, after a while. “I remember when you were sixteen when we put on that play and you wanted to do the lighting. You didn’t know anything about theater lighting, but you promised you’d learn, and you did. You worked so hard at it. You’ve worked so hard at your riding, worked to gain the management skills so you could run the whole stable.”
“You remember the lighting?”
“I wanted a red spotlight for my big speech and you wouldn’t give me one because you thought it was melodramatic. You argued with the director—I’ve forgotten her name—until she saw your point.”
“And you’ve hated me for it ever since. I’m amazed you remember this.”
“Haven’t hated you. Got over my ego, discovered you were right and admired you for fighting. But I don’t think you can fight and work in that same way to learn love. Love just…happens.”
“How did it happen for you?”
“With DJ?”
“Yes. Tell me about it, Dev. You’ve told me about the birth and how much she weighed and how much oxygen she had to have and all of that. Tell me about you. Because you were there. And I wasn’t.”
So he told her. Because she was right, she wasn’t there, and of course he needed to tell her, and he should have realized it weeks ago. Just like her family, he’d protected her too much. While he spoke, DJ sat in her little pouch against his chest and listened to the sound of his voice coming through his shirt until she fell asleep.
“Well, after the first shock of the blood test showing you were pregnant, it was a while before anything happened,” he said. “They focused on getting you stable, and I was pretty busy with getting the plates in my leg. Then they did an ultrasound and I saw her. Saw the beating of her heart.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I’m so stupid, they gave me pictures and I put them away and there was too much else to think about and I haven’t shown them to you.”
“It’s okay. I’m picturing it now. I can see the real pictures later. I want to.”
“They did another ultrasound at twenty weeks and I was so scared they’d find something was wrong with her because of the accident, but everything was normal and we could see she was a girl.”
“So you knew she was a girl three months before she was born.”
“And you weren’t there to talk about names with me. And I didn’t want to give her a name you turned out to hate. So she has the two initials on her birth certificate. We’re allowed to change it officially later. The more I think about Dani Jane, the more I like it.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you. You gave her her name. That’s important. Maybe if—”
“You’re skipping ahead. Don’t. Please.”
“I am. Sorry. The next thing that happened was seeing her move, watching your tummy rippling and kicking up. It was…hard…amazing. But hard.”
“Hard, why?”
“For your mom and dad and sisters. They laid their hands on your stomach and felt her kick, while you weren’t moving at all and we didn’t know if you ever would.”
“Oh.”
“It was… Yeah, the doctors weren’t saying much about your recovery at that point. Some encouraging signs with your scans and tests, but a long way to go.”
“And did you, too?”
“Did I, what?”
“Put your hand on my stomach.”
“Once. It seemed— I wasn’t sure that I had the right to. But your mom wanted me to.”
They both sat and thought about this for a moment. Dev remembered it so vividly, but couldn’t put it into words. Jodie with her eyes closed, never moving, with those high-tech mechanical guardians around her, the monitors and alarms and tubing. The cool weave of the white hospital sheet. It had grown warm to his touch. He’d thought the baby had stopped moving for the moment and that he was going to miss out. He couldn’t feel anything. She was as still as her mom. But then…
A twitch. A flutter. And then an actual kick, two or three of them, hard little bumps against his hand.
And he believed that day, as they all did, that if the baby could move so vigorously then Jodie had to be functioning in there somewhere. She had to be making progress.
“Were Mom and Dad angry that I was pregnant?” she asked.
“Angry? Jodie, it was just about the only thing that got them through it. Something to hope for. A sign that your body was still working enough to grow a healthy new life. None of us ever once thought about the fact that it hadn’t been planned. It felt as if it was planned, by something greater than ourselves.”
“And what happened next?”
“Well, you opened your eyes.” Could she hear the scratch in his voice? Could she see him blinking too much? “That was pretty exciting. We’d been talking to you all along. We did tell you about the accident and the baby, but you don’t remember.”
“Not at all. Not even an inkling.”
“We stopped talking about the baby at some point, because the doctors thought it might be too confusing for you, too stressful, if you kind of half understood in the coma but couldn’t speak or react.”
“I don’t remember opening my eyes.”
“No, well, it didn’t last long, the first few times. That was hard for your mom. She expected too much, too quickly. She kind of nagged you about it and got very frustrated and upset and had to back off.”
“I can imagine.”
“Then DJ put on a growth spurt and they didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t move. They were afraid the blood supply would be compromised. They started talking about inducing labor early, but it happened on its own. Your mom was sitting with you and she could see the contractions, the tightening. You grimaced when they happened, and we all got pretty excited about that, too.”
“Were you there at the birth?”
“Yes, right there the whole time. It was a quick labor, only a few hours, I think I told you that. Dr. Forbes had me cut the cord. They had to get her stable, but within a few hours I was able to hold her. They had us skin-to-skin.”
“Skin—? Both of you? You and DJ? You mean you had your shirt off?”
“Yes, and she was just in a diaper. They do it a lot, now. It helps the baby’s breathing and heart rate. They’ve done studies. Preemie babies gain weight faster if they can have skin-to-skin contact with their mom or dad.”
She was quiet fo
r a little while, thinking about this, and then she asked, “Did I have her skin-to-skin with me?”
He had to clear his throat. “Yes, a couple of times, the first few days.”
“Oh. Oh, wow. I think— I think— No, for a moment I thought I could remember it. But no. I don’t think it’s a memory, I think it’s just— Why didn’t they keep doing it?”
“You got an infection and you were very sick for a while, and it wasn’t safe for DJ to be with you. She went home, and that was when you started to wake up, and you were so confused.”
“Confused… Maybe I remember that, a little. I didn’t like it.”
“You moaned a lot and seemed very distressed for several days. They didn’t know at that point if you had permanent brain damage, and they decided it would be best to keep the baby away.”
“Oh, I wish that hadn’t happened.”
“We just didn’t know at that point, you see, if you’d ever be able to take care of her, or even take in that she was yours. It’s been a miracle, really. It’s so amazing to see you now, walking in the woods, talking and laughing, when a few months ago… Don’t beat yourself up, Jodie. About anything. You’re amazing.”
You’re amazing….
Pull back, Dev. This is too strong. This isn’t what she needs, or what you need, either.
They both knew it. Jodie eased away from the shoulder-to-shoulder contact, pressing her lips together, visibly fighting to steady her breath. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve said that about five thousand times since I came home. But this is the biggest. Thank you. I needed to hear all of that. It’s hard. This dramatic life story that I don’t remember. But it helps. It will help, I think.”
She stood up and walked to the nearest tree. Her movement was unsteady and lopsided and Dev wanted to jump up and give her his arm but he held himself in place, tried to watch her without it being too obvious that he was concerned. They both needed some space.
She leaned on the tree, her good hand running up and down the smooth trunk, then pressed her forehead against it as if it could infuse her with strength. She was thinking about something, wrestling with it, trying to decide what to say. He could see it, didn’t know whether to prompt her.
