The Mommy Miracle (4 page)

“Let's take it slow. It's okay.”

“Thanks. Yes.”

She heard a car in the driveway, and footsteps and the voices of Elin and Mom. Dev lunged for the door before they could knock. He held it open and stood with the width of his body shielding the room from their view.

Mom said, “Is she still here?”

“Yes, but why are
you
here, Barb? I asked you very clearly to—”

“I'm sorry, we just couldn't— I'm sorry.” This was Elin, clearly reading his anger. “We have a right to be involved in this, too, don't we? DJ is ours, too. We all care so much.”

“You'd better come in.”

“Thank you,” said Mom, in a crisp voice.

“I really think it's best, Devlin.” This was Elin, in a softer tone.

“We are as involved in all of this as you are.” Mom again.

They dropped at once to sit on either side of Jodie on the couch, their voices running over her along with their hands, all of it a jumble that she heard at two steps removed, like recorded voices or lines from a half-remembered play.
Honey, are you okay? Obviously you know. Obviously there's so much to talk through. That's why we wanted to wait until you were ready. What has Dev said, so far?

“You barely gave me time to say anything,” he said.

“Listen, it's not as if any of us have had any experience with a situation like this, Devlin,” Elin said.

“Shh…keep your voice down, can you?”

“Sorry…sorry.” Elin glanced over at the baby and looked surprised. “You have her in the car carrier?”

“She seems to sleep better in there, during the day.”

“Well, then, I guess…”
But I never did that with my babies,
was the implication.

“She's fine. She wouldn't sleep so peacefully if she was uncomfortable there.”

“If you say so.”

Both Devlin and Elin were holding it together with difficulty, and Mom looked trapped and unhappy, her mouth open as if she wanted to speak, although no words came.

Jodie slumped against the back of the couch. She'd started to shake. Could they feel it? She felt more tired than she'd ever felt in her life, and her lips had gone dry. She closed her eyes, willing this chaos of family and tension and questioning to…just…stop.

“Should we take her? Jodie, are you ready to go home?”

She opened her eyes. “Yes, take her.”

I mean, who is she? How can she even exist?

“I—I don't know what I want to do,” she blurted. “I think I need some space. Another nap.” Her own bed seemed like the safest haven in the world.

There was a small silence, while Elin and Mom and Devlin all looked at each other, shrugged and raised eyebrows and gestured—body language that was beyond Jodie's ability to interpret right now.

“I guess that's an option,” Dev said slowly to Elin and Mom. “For you to take her and Jodie to stay here.”

“That's not—”
What I meant.
But the rest of it wouldn't come, and the first bit had come almost on a whisper, and they were too busy making plans to hear her.

“She should transfer to the car without waking,” Dev said. “I have a couple of bottles made up in the fridge.”

“We have bottles. We have diapers, clothes, everything. You know that. She's due for her bath.”

“I'll drop Jodie home when she's ready. She's right. We need to talk. Have some space.”

They'd worked it all out between the three of them, while Jodie was still struggling to lift an arm to brush a strand of damp hair from her eyes. She was staying here with Dev to talk. The baby was going back with Mom and Elin. Going back before she, the mother, had even touched her.

She wanted to argue the plan, but the words wouldn't come, so in the end she let it happen, and when the baby carrier was buckled into the car and Mom and Elin had driven away, she felt so relieved, and so ashamed of the relief, and so horribly, horribly tired. “I can't—” she said to Dev.

“I know you can't talk yet. Sleep first.”

“Two naps a day. I'm like—” She stopped.

A baby.

My baby.

“Just rest.”

“Why aren't you in New York? Tell me why. In simple words. Because it seems to me that you didn't have to still be here. Obviously DJ is being taken care of. Obviously she's loved. Obviously I have the support. So why?”

He looked at her steadily, with some of the anger he'd clearly felt toward Elin and Mom still simmering below the surface. He seemed to be thinking hard before he chose his words.

“Because she's my daughter.” The last two words came out with a simmering intensity. “Because we're
a family. You and me and DJ. Three of us. That's not negotiable. Three of us, not two.”

“A family…” Jodie echoed foolishly, tasting the word and not feeling sure of how it felt in her mouth.

“Not a regular family, for sure.”

“No…”

“But DJ needs a family of some kind….” He paused for a moment, and she filled in the words he didn't say, in her head.
And not necessarily a whole cluster of over-involved grandparents and aunts.
“I'm right here in the picture and I'm not going to go away. And we have a heck of a lot to do and talk and think about, to decide how that's going to work.”

J
odie woke to the smell of something delicious coming from Dev's kitchen. The daylight had begun to fade, which meant she must have slept a good three hours this time. She felt disoriented and not in full possession of either her body or her brain. It was just the way she'd felt coming out of the coma. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane—eerily quiet, with a sense of danger all around.

She gave herself a couple of minutes to regroup, then sat up and eventually stood, steadier on her feet than she would have expected. As before, Dev had left her walking frame within reach, and the quiet, considerate nature of this small gesture almost brought her to tears.

She could hear him in the kitchen, chopping something on a wooden board. The delicious aroma announced itself as beef sizzled in a pan. She'd had a crush on him thirteen years ago, she'd slept with him
three times, and she'd had no idea until now that he could cook. It didn't surprise her, though. When Devlin Browne put his mind to something…

He heard her—the rubbery tap of the frame on the floor—as she reached the kitchen doorway, and he turned. “Hi. Better?”

“Think so. It's crazy. To need all that sleep.”

“Your brain is still healing.”

“So I've been told.”

“I'm making brain food. A beef-and-vegetable stir-fry, full of iron and vitamins.”

“It smells great.”

“Ready in a couple of minutes. Sit down.” He nodded at the wooden kitchen table, then moved to pull out a chair for her.

“No, don't,” she said quickly, taking one hand off the frame to reach for the chair herself. “I'm fine. I hate—”
my family hovering over me
“—too much help.”

“Duly noted.” He turned back to the stove, tossed in slivers of onion and red bell pepper, sticks of carrot and celery, lengths of green bean. The pan hissed and made a cloud of aromatic steam, filling the silence made by their lack of conversation.

He seemed to understand instinctively that she didn't want to talk yet—or not about anything important, anyway—and to her surprise the interlude of silence between them felt easy and right. She didn't have that uncomfortable itch to break the quiet with a rush of words that people often experience in the company of someone new.

Not that Dev was new.

But this felt new.

Untested.

Three of us. We're a family,
he'd said.

Anything but the usual kind.

She watched him. Just couldn't help it. The way his neat, jeans-clad butt moved as he tossed the contents of the pan. The way his elbow stuck out and his shoulder lifted. He added the cooked meat and leaned back a little as another cloud of hissing steam came up. There was rice in a steamer on the countertop, and a jug of orange juice clinking with a thick layer of cubed ice.

Nine months ago, he hadn't wanted a serious relationship, but now it was as if she'd simply blinked and woken up to find herself here, in his kitchen, and the mother of his child.

Connected.

Yet not.

Are we dating?

She felt they needed to talk about it—for
hours
surely—but had no idea what to say, what to suggest. He was the one who'd had time to think. The surge of chemistry she'd felt earlier at the family barbecue couldn't compete with her shock and disorientation. It hummed in the background of her awareness, but she didn't know what to do with it, just wished it would go away.

“Is there a schedule?” she blurted out.

“A schedule?”

“Of who takes care of—of DJ.”

DJ. That's my baby's name. Well, it's not her name. It's what we're calling her in the interim.

A crazy litany of baby names began to scroll in her head, the ones she'd vaguely thought, over the years, that she liked. Caroline, Amanda, Genevieve, Laura, Jessica, Megan, Anna… The idea that it might be up to her to make a decision, replace temporary DJ with something different and permanent that would belong
to the baby her whole life, was daunting. A huge, confusing responsibility that she didn't feel equipped to handle.

“Your family has her when I'm at work,” Devlin answered. “Mainly your mom. She's set up Elin's room for a nursery.”

“That's why Lucy had to sleep in my room today.” An image flashed in her head of her sister's old room with the door firmly closed. Even if she had seen inside, she would have assumed it had been set up for Maddy's baby girl.

“But Elin and Lisa have her sometimes, too. And then I pick her up on my way home.”

“The night shift.”

“That's right. I expect she'll spend more nights at your parents' place now.”
Now that you're home,
he meant.

“That's why you look tired.” A rush of tenderness and guilt ran through her. Those creases around his eyes, and she hadn't been here to help. Crazy to feel that it was her fault, and yet at some level she did. What kind of a mother slept through her whole pregnancy and didn't even waken to give birth? What kind of a mother had an eleven-week-old baby that she'd never touched and held?

He made a wry face. “Yeah, she's not exactly sleeping through. Your sisters have been great with that. They've stayed over here three or four times to give me a good night. Your whole family has been—” He stopped, as if the word he'd originally intended to say was wrong. “Amazing. They have. I was a little short with them before, and I shouldn't have been. The boundaries—the roles—are complicated.”

“It's okay. I know how you feel. Just be thankful they're not trying to cut up your food.”

He laughed and she smiled at him and then her breath caught, and the question she'd been asking in her head even before she'd found out about DJ came blurting out, “Are we dating, Dev?”

He went still. She just knew he was going to say no. It was there in his body language so clearly, and she wondered why on earth she'd thought it necessary to ask. Well. She hadn't thought. Her brain didn't seem to control either her body or her words anymore.

Eventually answered in a slow, careful way, “That's a question, isn't it?”

“I mean, I'm not suggesting you have a thing for unconscious women.” The humor didn't work. It was too dark for a moment like this. It didn't evaporate the tension, as intended. She apologized. Seemed as if she might be doing a lot of that. “I'm sorry. I was just—”

“It's okay. Lightening the mood. You had a right to ask. I talked about making a family, just now.”

“When you came to see me in the hospital, I didn't know why you were there. Because I didn't know about DJ. And last fall we…”

“I know.” He was still so uncomfortable. They both were.

“I don't think we're dating,” she said, before he could say it. “It would be crazy. It's not what we need. It would just be a complication. We have enough of those.”

He nodded, and looked relieved. “You're right. I guess that's what I've felt. First things first. Take care of DJ. Take care of you. Take all of it slow. You're not strong enough to do much with a baby right now. We want to find a way to share her and love her. There's no hostility or conflict. I want to keep it that way. We
have
to keep it that way. I want as much involvement as I can have.”

“But she'll be with me most of the time.” Was it a question, or a statement? She didn't even know.

“Once you know her,” he said. “Once you can take care of her. You're her mother and most of the time the baby stays with the mom. I'm accepting that.”

But am I?

She saw herself stranded with baby DJ in her parents' house for weeks at a stretch with barely a break. She imagined the winter days closing in, keeping her and the baby inside the house, when normally even in the cold weather she loved to be outdoors.

These weren't the pictures she wanted to have of herself and her baby, but they were the ones that came. She heard herself wrangling and bickering with Mom about when to introduce solid food and whether to dress her in pink.

Dress her in pink…

She tried to picture it, and couldn't. At all. With a stab of horror she realized,
I don't remember what she looks like.
All she had were two vague images of a little face distorted with crying and then peaceful in sleep. Would she recognize her, beyond the familiarity of Dev's arms, or Mom's? Could she pull her own daughter out of a lineup?

Another bizarre image came to her. Police station. One-way glass. “Now, Ms, Palmer, look carefully at the numbered cribs. Do you see your baby here? It's very important that you make a correct identification.”

But she couldn't…

“Dinner's up,” Dev said. “I think we're— I'm glad we said this.”

She tried to stand, to go over to the bench and help
him dish out the food, but her feet caught and she almost fell. He was there just in time.

“He-e-ey. Who-o-oa.” He caught her and folded his arms around her. “You didn't have to get up. I'm bringing it to you.”

She felt his breath fanning her hair and his chin resting on her shoulder, and could have stayed like this forever. She loved the way they fit together despite their mismatched size. She loved the smell of him, the strength of him, the honor and humor and decisiveness and brains. She loved the fact that he could hug her like this so soon after they'd agreed—the only thing they
could
agree on, in this situation—that they weren't dating anymore.

It was just a hug, and yet if she just turned her face up, she was sure he would kiss her. The chemistry was still there, a deep pool of it, secret and still, magical and unspoken.

She wanted him to kiss her.

Desperately.

Just kiss me, Dev, so I don't have to think. Just kiss me, so I know that part is okay, even if everything else isn't.

I don't care what we decided.

I don't care about sensible.

Kiss me and say, “Let's get married, and I'll take care of whatever you need,” so that we can play by the rules and be a normal mommy and daddy and then maybe I'll feel as if I belong in my own life, instead of being just a visitor.

“This is the most insane situation,” he muttered. “I don't know what to tell you. Just take your time. That's all. We all need to give this time.”

Kiss me. Say it.

Shoot!

This neediness, this wasn't
her! Jodie Palmer, don't you remember who you are? You've been fighting your whole life to show how strong you are, and now you're clinging to Dev as if he has all the answers and so you can just go with the flow?

The familiar stubbornness kicked in. Maybe a little off-center, but at least it was there, and the feeling came as a huge relief. She pulled out of his arms and crisply said, “Thanks. You're right. We'll give it time. We'll work it out. Thank you. Mmm, that smells good!”

He steered her the few steps back to her seat then turned toward the stove, blinking as if he'd opened his eyes in bright light, and she was so happy that she'd held herself together. What if she had clung to him and expressed all that neediness?

He spooned rice into wide bowls and added a ladle of the hearty stir-fry, then placed the bowls on the table, and as they began to eat—it tasted so good!—she found something she wanted to ask him that didn't have the sense of dependency and need she so wanted to fight in herself. “The other driver, Dev. I—I haven't felt ready to ask until now. And you know my family wouldn't bring it up without direct questions.”

“No, they wouldn't. We've had a couple of discussions about that, too.”

“I bet you have!” She folded her mouth into an upside-down smile. “Who was it? Were they injured, too? He? She?”

“He.”

“What happened?”

Dev put down his fork. “He wasn't badly hurt. You don't need to know anything about him.”

“You don't sound too sympathetic. What went wrong?”

“He was driving over the limit.”

“Speed or alcohol?”

“Both.”

“Ah, okay. All bases covered, then. A fine upstanding citizen.” She gave another twisted smile.

He shrugged and opened his palms. “Exactly.”

“And where is he now?”

“Tried and convicted. All you need to know.”

“It happened and it's over, and now we just live our lives. That's it, isn't it?”

“Is that what you really think?”

She paused with the fork halfway to her mouth. Most of the food fell off. She was still a little wobbly with her silverware control. “Yes. Don't you?”

“Yes, I do. I was a little concerned that you might feel differently.”

“That I'd want a vendetta? Or that I'd brood and feel bitter?”

“Many people would.” He was leaning toward her over the table, studying her the way he'd studied her several times today. She knew why. How was this going to work? How would baby DJ connect or divide them? What did they both want? Could they manage to keep this free of conflict and misunderstanding and hurt? Everything came back to that. Everything they said to each other gave a potential clue.

“Well, not me,” she told him. “I just like to get back on the horse.”

“Mmm,” was all he said.

But she could see something in his face. Relief and approval. It was something they shared, this attitude to the accident and how to process it, and that was a plus.
In life, you have to play the hand you're dealt. She believed this, and so did he. You can't waste energy in “if only” and regret. You can't go looking for bitterness and revenge.

Especially when she had other things to think about.

Like a baby she didn't know she'd had.

Like a baby she wouldn't recognize in the street.