The Mummy Miracle

“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 stay 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 attitudes 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.

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 diaper-padded 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 watchful, 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?