The Mommy Miracle (6 page)

It was true. She knew it was. But she couldn't
feel
it. She looked down at the baby, smiled at her and learned by heart every crease in her little arms, every strand of her hair, but she couldn't
feel
her love.

Those swimmy blue eyes looked up at her, so serious and unsmiling and somehow so wise and
old
.

She'll see it. She'll feel it. She'll know.

She still wasn't smiling. Jodie tried to coax it out of her by showing her how. She stretched her lips, crinkled her eyes.
This is your mommy smiling at you, DJ.
But it didn't work. DJ didn't smile back, and Jodie knew why.

You couldn't tell lies with your own body. You couldn't fake love coming out of every pore of your skin. Lying here in her arms, DJ would soon know that this person, this mommy person who was supposed to have such a total skin-to-skin bond and connection, didn't yet love her in the right way, and she absolutely
must not
be allowed to know that.

Jodie broke into a sweat. “Can you take her, Dev?”

“Or I could give your arm some more support.”

“No, take her. I don't think more support would be enough.”

“Here…” he said, and sat down beside her again, twisting around so that his left arm cradled hers and his chest shored up her shoulder. His strength and warmth and clean male smell slammed into her, seeming far more
right
than the feel of a baby in her arms. More real. Stronger. Could he feel it, too? She thought so. His breathing had changed, growing shallower.

She felt weak and shaky and tingling with need, all at the same time. Her body was far better at remembering
familiar things than learning new ones, it seemed. Every cell and all her senses remembered last year so vividly. The way his touch and his laughter had set her alight, the way she'd felt strong and alive yet safe in his arms. The feel of his mouth making a hot trail from her neck to her breasts. The sureness in the way he caressed her, slipping his hand between her thighs, curving his palms over her butt.

Last year, he would have pressed his lips to her neck and teased her and set her on fire. She would have turned her face toward him and kissed him back, brushing her mouth against his and sliding it away, making him go after her and coax her lips into parting and drinking him in, and it would have lasted for minutes on end. She would have gloried in the feel of those hard muscles covered in satiny skin.

Their physical connection was magic and wonderful and made her dizzy.

Still.

But the new thing, the magic and wonder and dizziness of being a mother, her body couldn't learn. She couldn't even
fake
a smile now. No wonder DJ wasn't smiling back.

“I really think you need to take her now, Dev,” she said shakily.

Mom appeared in the doorway to the deck. She was wearing a flour-spattered apron, and was brushing her hands against it, as if dusting them off in readiness to be of help. She must have heard the note of panic in Jodie's voice, the panic that Dev had ignored.

“No, see?” he said quietly. “You're fine.”

“I—I think I'm not. I think I need a break. Can you please take her?”

He still wouldn't. Instead, he pressed his body more
tightly against her, curved his other arm over her shoulder to support her on the opposite side. Her back wasn't touching the bench at all now, it was only touching him, and she began to take calming breaths, giving in to his insistence and certainty.

Maybe she could do it, after all. Maybe with him here, loving his baby girl so much, the love would filter into Jodie as well, filter through her into DJ so that wise DJ wouldn't guess who it really came from. She could smell the mingled scents of both of them, Dev and DJ. Baby powder and milkiness and aftershave and warm male skin.

Mom stepped forward. “Dev, she says she's tired. Don't push it, please, until after we've talked to her doctors and therapists on Tuesday.”

“Does that make a difference?” He slid his hand around the bundle of baby.

“Well, yes, doesn't it? They may have very specific guidelines about how much she's allowed to do.”

“How much baby holding?”

“How much child care. How much of anything. She has a heap of exercises to get through every day. Just brushing her teeth…” She bent down, and Jodie could smell that, too—flour and vanilla and peaches. Mom must be making a pie.

She picked up the baby, cradling DJ's head against her shoulder. Dev loosened his supporting grip and she saw him rake his lower teeth across his top lip in a gesture of unspoken frustration. There were so many pairs of arms in this little baby's life, reaching out to her.

“Let's bring her bassinet inside,” Mom said. “It's getting too hot out here now. Maybe she could lie on her blanket on the lounge-room floor and have a kick. She
loves that. I'll get her baby gym, too. She was really hitting those rattles the other day.”

“Thank you, Mom,” Jodie said.

Just as had happened last night, Dev didn't say a word.

“I
s there anything more you want to talk about at this stage, Jodie?” asked Dr. Reuben on Tuesday morning.

Everyone waited for her response. Mom, Dad, Elin, Jodie's physical and occupational therapists, the neurologist and the obstetrician who'd delivered DJ nearly twelve weeks ago.

And Dev.

DJ herself was at home with Lisa. She and Elin were both schoolteachers, with the summer off, which Mom had pronounced to be a blessing. Jodie wasn't so sure. Dev seemed restless about the baby's absence, moving as if his empty arms needed filling, although Jodie herself had agreed there was no point in bringing the baby in for this meeting.

“No, I think I'm fine. For now,” she said brightly. “I mean, you've all said I can call, talk to anyone about anything at any time. You've said—” she turned to the
obstetrician, Dr. Forbes “—that my body recovered very well from the birth itself, and that there's no reason why I shouldn't conceive again in the future.”

She bit her lip. Why parrot this back to him, this reassurance about her future fertility, when she hadn't even begun to deal with the baby she already had? She couldn't think of the right things to say. She couldn't think of
anything
to say.

“You're doing very well indeed,” the man said.

He was older and a little distant, somehow exactly the kind of man you would expect to have delivered a baby you'd had no knowledge of until two days ago. The kind of man who would have looked after Jodie's physical well-being perfectly and professionally during and after the birth, but who would be rather glad that her emotional adjustment now was an issue for other professionals, such as Dr. Reuben, to deal with.

She felt stubborn and protective and private about it, suddenly. She didn't want professionals helping her to learn to love and take care of her baby, she wanted to do it, like a three-year-old, All By Herself.

Even though she'd already proved to herself that she didn't know where to start.

Trish and Lesley, the therapists, began to speak, stressing the importance of keeping her rehab on track in other areas. It couldn't all be about the baby. Jodie would have to put her own needs first. “It's what they say on airplanes,” Trish said. “First, fit your own oxygen mask, then assist your child. If you're not taking care of yourself, how are you going to look after a baby?”

They all seemed to feel that this was a huge risk, that Jodie's own therapy would be derailed by her tiring herself out with her child, attempting one hundred and ten percent.

“I have plenty of help,” she managed to say. “I think I'm going to be sensible about it. I know how much love DJ already has, even without me.”

Trish and Lesley seemed to approve. Then Trish repeated, “But is there anything more you need? Anything you want?”

Anything I want? Anything I need? I want to love my baby. I want to be the one who knows when she's hungry or tired or hurting. I want to be the one who can soothe her to sleep. I want her to know in her bones that I'm her mom, but she doesn't know it and I don't know how to teach her. She responds to Dev and Lisa and Elin and Mom but not to me, and I'm scared about that.

So scared, she couldn't begin to express it, especially not with all these eyes fixed on her face—the professional gaze of the therapist, the more personal ones belonging to Dev and Mom, trying to hide their concern but without success. Her whole life felt wrong and mixed-up, compared to last fall, before the accident. She remembered one of her last horseback rides, a trail ride through the woods belonging to Oakbank Stables with some intermediate riding students, the hooves of the horses soft on the carpets of newly fallen leaves.

That day, everything had seemed right with the world. The sweet secret of Dev and their plans to see each other that night. The fresh, peaty smell of the woods. The clink of stirrups and bridles in time to the rhythmic movements of the horses.

“I need to see my horses,” she said.

It wasn't what Trish or Lesley had expected. Dev and Mom, maybe, but even they didn't understand, she could tell. They thought she had her priorities all wrong. Horses, when she had so much work to do on her
body? Horses, when she had a baby to learn to love and care for?

Dad shifted in his seat, and made a gruff sound, but said nothing. He could take her side sometimes, but when he stayed silent, she never knew what he was keeping back. Approval? Or the reverse?

So she backpedalled, ashamed and guilty and scared. “Not yet, of course. I mean, I know that. It's not a priority. But when it happens, it'll do me a world of good, I know it.”

“We'll certainly work toward it,” Trish promised. “Hippotherapy is a definite possibility for you, given your background.” She looked at Dev and Mom, who both nodded. “But that's not what we're here to talk about today.”

Jodie understood that she'd gone off-topic, that her therapists and doctors were focused on her adjustment to the baby and the fact that she'd given birth. “I—I really can't think of anything else for now,” she told them lamely.

Dr. Reuben and Dr. Forbes both shifted in their seats just the way Dad had, busy schedules dictating that they make a move to the next patients on their lists.

“Thank you,” Jodie said to them, and everyone stood up.

Thank you
was incredibly useful, she'd begun to discover. You could make it mean so many different things. You could fob people off with it and they never guessed. She thanked Mom for the spreadsheet she'd printed out, even though they weren't sticking to it. She thanked Lisa for her words of experience regarding diaper rash, even though she—Jodie—hadn't done a diaper change yet. You could use it as a piece of very effective camouflage against revealing what you really felt.

The fear.

The doubt.

The distance.

The shame.

She said it again, just to make sure. “Thank you.” And everyone nodded and smiled and murmured and told her she was doing incredibly well.

 

For the next three weeks and more,
thank you
worked like a charm.

She said it to Dev when he picked her up and took her to the park with DJ and did all the carrying in the baby swing and the strapping in and out of the stroller so that Jodie barely needed to touch the baby—or Dev himself—at all. She said it to Mom and Lisa and Elin when one of them took her to rehab while another took care of DJ at home. She said it to Dad when he carried DJ in her car seat or filled her little plastic bath.

Maddy called from Cincinnati to suggest coming up with Lucy for a mommies-and-babies play date, and Jodie said that rehab didn't leave enough space in the schedule right now, but thank you for thinking of it, it was a great idea for sometime down the track. Trish said that Jodie could have the baby at rehab sometimes and they could work on some strategies for taking care of her safely within Jodie's current limitations. Again Jodie hid behind “thank you” and “down the track.”

If anyone noticed that she'd only actually held DJ in her arms twice since that first time on the deck, they didn't comment. DJ commented, in her own way. She didn't smile. If anyone noticed that both those smileless times Jodie had to fight an overwhelming feeling of distance and inadequacy and panic, they didn't comment on this, either.

Or not to her face, anyhow.

Three weeks and four days after her discharge from the hospital, a Wednesday, she caught them commenting behind her back. She'd been taking a nap—this napping business was getting old fast—after a tiring but encouraging day at rehab, when she heard the front door open and the voices of Dev, Lisa and Mom. Moving with the necessary slow precision across her bedroom rug and into the carpeted corridor, she was too quiet and they didn't hear her. She'd only been asleep half an hour, a shorter time than usual. They wouldn't expect her to surface for another hour.

It was the same old line, from Lisa. “I just don't think she's ready, that's all.”

“But what's going to make her ready, Lisa?” Dev's voice, low and intense, an emotional, threatening growl that did something to Jodie's insides every time she heard it. “Do you think I was ready, when DJ was newborn? I'd never held a baby in my life. Isn't it only doing it, doing the hands-on with no one to step in the moment you have the slightest episode of not coping, that makes you ready as a parent? You do it, you have to do it and you learn. You live it, you can't imagine life without it and the love kicks in.”

“The love?” This was Mom. “She loves DJ! Of course she does! You can't be seriously suggesting she doesn't love her own baby, Devlin!”

“I'm not sure that you're letting her love her, Barb.”

“That's not true!”

“I appreciate that she mustn't be overloaded, but do you ever let her feed DJ? Or hold her in the bath?”

“That's not the point!”

Jodie stood with her hands on the stair rail for support, hearing it all. She wanted to tell Dev that it wasn't
Mom's fault. She wanted to say, “Hey, I'm here! Let's discuss this face-to-face, not when you think I'm asleep because you think I can't handle it.”

But maybe they were right. She couldn't handle it. She wasn't handling it. The love hadn't kicked in.

“She's working too hard on her rehab, for one thing,” Lisa said. “You know what she's like. One of her riding instructors, when she was about twelve, said she had more guts than a slaughterhouse.”

“Oh, Lisa!” Barb wailed.

“Yeah, graphic image, but I'll never forget that and it's true. She's an incredibly brave person, and she's exhausting herself with work on her exercises.”

“Because she wants to be strong enough to take care of DJ,” Mom argued. “Which she isn't, right now. She's told me. She's afraid of letting her fall.”

“She's too tired to take care of DJ.” Lisa again. “She needs a break, just some time out. From everything.”

“I think you're right,” said Mom. “Time out. How can we do this?”

“Dev, leave the baby here and just take her out tonight, or something,” Lisa said. “Take her to dinner. Take the pressure off. You want her to take more of the load off your hands—”

“It's not about the load,” he interrupted. “Do you think that's what this is about? That I want to be able to hand DJ over to her and get the hell out? Shoot, that's the opposite of what I want!”

“I'm not saying that.” Lisa stopped, then added in an abrupt tone, “Well. I don't know. You're going back to New York, aren't you?”

“Look, that's a decision I can't make yet.”

“You had made it, I thought.”

“When we weren't certain she'd ever come out of
the coma. When she was so sick. Of course I wasn't going back to New York if I had a daughter to raise on my own. The situation's changed now, hasn't it? Everything's negotiable. All I know is, I'm not going to be shut out.”

“Okay, but I'm assuming—” She cut herself off again. “I don't want to pressure you about the status of your relationship when it's none of my business.”

Dad passed through the hall at that moment, and offered, “You got that right!” before he kept right on going, on his way out to mow the lawn.

“It is our business!” Mom said. “It's about DJ's future, and Jodie's well-being. Is there a relationship, Dev?”

“Of course there is. We're the parents of a child.”

“You know that's not what I mean.”

“Yes, I know it, but that's the only answer I can give you right now.”

“We're going around in circles.” Lisa gave a sigh that traveled all the way up the stairs to Jodie on the top landing.

“We are,” Dev said. “But taking her to dinner is a good idea, and I'm happy to do it.”

Lisa kicked into action at once. “I'll make a reservation. How far are you willing to drive? There's that gorgeous new French place in Fairfield—La Brasserie. If you cut across through the back roads, it's not too far.”

“And I'll run DJ's bath,” Mom said. “By the time Jodie wakes up, she can have the bathroom to herself to take a shower and get ready. It's still early. If you make the reservation for seven, Lisa. That way Jodie's not out too late.”

“Isn't La Brasserie a little too—?”

But they didn't let Dev finish. “Make it special,”
Lisa insisted. “Make it a milestone. A new start. She's off the walking frame. She's already so much stronger and better than she was a few weeks ago. She knows we're here for her. And she's always fought so hard to be independent and to achieve her goals. If she's not fighting us for more hands-on with DJ, it's because she doesn't feel it would be safe. When she's ready, I know my baby sister, she'll say so! She'll absolutely insist!”

Thank you, Lisa.

Was it true, though? It would have been true, before the accident, Jodie knew. Now, though… Would she absolutely insist?

“You're right,” Mom decreed. “She will.”

Jodie started carefully down the stairs. “Are you guys making plans for me?”

Mom looked up at her. “Oh, you're awake already?”

“Just now. It's great, isn't it? Down to one nap, most days, and it's getting shorter.”

“We're sending you and Dev out to dinner,” Lisa said. “DJ's staying here.”

“Can I help with her bath?” She caught the covert, meaningful looks Mom and Lisa exchanged that seemed to say, “See? Jodie's absolutely insisting.”

“Of course, honey,” Mom said.

But they didn't let her, not really. Dev went home to shower and change. Lisa made the restaurant reservation. “La Brasserie, Jodie, it's gorgeous. You wouldn't have been there, since it's new.” Mom ran the water, testing it expertly with her elbow to make sure it wasn't too hot.