The Mommy Miracle (10 page)

“Lisa called, and I told her you were coming here, and she wanted to take a look. I decided the errands could wait.”

“Honey,” Lisa said to her sister, “Mom's right, don't you think?”

She was already reaching up, standing on Bess's other side. Dev would have had to fight her for the baby, snatch the little body from Jodie's front with a rough movement, to keep her under his own control. He didn't do it.

“Never mind yourself,” Lisa went on, “although that's bad enough. But to put a fifteen-week-old preemie baby on horseback?” She had DJ safely in her arms in a couple of seconds, and began to stroke her silky little head, kiss and hug DJ against her sun-darkened collarbone. She loved her baby niece, no doubt about that. She seemed genuinely shaken by the idea that DJ had been all the way up there on scary Bess's back.

“She liked it,” Jodie said.

“Liked it? How could you? Project that onto her? I mean, seriously!”

“We could tell. It was clear.”

“You are
projecting,
Jodie. I'm actually pretty angry about this! After we've been so careful, so worried—”

“Lisa, I promise you—”

“Honey, Lisa doesn't mean to sound so—” Barb began, cutting in.

Lisa shook her head back and forth. “Yes. Okay. I'm sorry. Not angry. Just questioning your judgment, okay? And your priorities. Sure, I mean, I guess it sounds great.” She mimicked, “‘Wow, I was back in the saddle four weeks after I came home from the hospital. My daughter started riding when she was less than four months old.' But it shouldn't be about your ego, should it?”

“It's not about my ego.” Jodie's voice had grown strained and tense. The happy grin had gone. And the tears. She was frowning, dry-lipped. “Is that what you think?”

“It's what I thought when you tried to give my Izzy riding lessons when she was three years old. You wanted to turn her into a superstar in a few months, winning ribbons in show-riding competitions and heaven knew what else.”

Dev felt his tension level climb as the argument grew more heated. He knew about siblings. He had an older brother in California, a criminal defense attorney, who could still push his buttons when they met up at family gatherings.
Just keep DJ out of it,
he wanted to say, but managed to press his mouth shut.

“That was ten years ago,” Jodie was saying, “and I was only just starting out instructing. Izzy didn't like it and so we let it go.”

“After she almost fell.”

“She didn't
almost
. I had the pony by the bridle and he settled down in about five seconds. I had no idea you were still upset about that, after so long. And it was never about winning ribbons.”

“I'm not still upset. I'm not.” Lisa shook her head frantically again. “Just seeing you there with DJ reminded me, makes me question what it's really about. Photos for the Oakbank website?” She gestured behind her.

“Photos?” Jodie and Dev both looked where she was pointing, over at the bleachers nearest the office, and discovered Anna there with a camera.

Anna began to walk toward them, her movement a little graceless and awkward as if in apology for the tension she sensed in the air. “I'm sorry, did I do the wrong thing? I didn't want to interrupt and get you to pose, but you looked so great, I just couldn't resist grabbing the camera.”

“Great?” Barb exclaimed.

“I didn't know Anna had the camera,” Jodie said tightly, then turned to her friend and spoke in a bright tone. “But it's fine. Did you get some? I'd love to see them.”

“So they're not for the website?” Lisa persisted.

Dev answered her. “Of course they're not for the damned website! And if they were…”

Had they not seen how Jodie had looked relaxed and happy and
herself
for the first damned time since she'd woken up, how she'd held DJ like a mother for the first damned time since she'd learned the truth about her pregnancy? Had they not even taken a moment to notice any of that before barging in? Would it be such a terrible thing to have a picture of Jodie and her baby girl on the Oakbank website, when she loved the place so much?

“I'm tired,” Jodie suddenly announced. “My legs are starting to shake. I think I'd better call it quits for today.”

“For today?” Barb wailed.

“Yes, I want to keep doing this. Get better at it. Move on from Bess to Snowy, and see how I go.”

“You can't mean you're going to try to ride again the way you used to?”

“You said you hadn't sold Irish.”

“Because I knew you'd want to see him. Not
ride
him. You'll never ride him, Jodie.”

There was a sharp, painful silence. Dev could have shoved his daughter's grandmother facefirst into the sawdust floor, he was so angry with her. Nobody yet knew whether Jodie's recovery would be complete enough to allow her to ride the way she used to. How could Barb preempt the worst-case scenario like that? How could she shatter Jodie's hopes?

Jodie's jaw set hard and stubborn at her mother's words. “Then DJ will ride him instead. He's only nine years old. She can start on him when she's ten. She'll be a strong rider by then, and he'll be mellow as a lamb at nineteen.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lisa muttered.

“You got that right,” Dev said, his own jaw painfully tight.

It was ridiculous that they'd come. Insane that they were creating conflict out of something that had been so joyful until five minutes ago. Ridiculous and insane and just plain insensitive.

He managed not to say any of this out loud. But he pulled DJ out of Lisa's arms. “I think she needs a diaper change.”

“Kat, can you get us back to the mounting block?” Jodie asked in a strained voice.

“Sure, of course. You okay to get that far?”

“I'm fine. As long as Dev has DJ.”

“I have her.” He turned his back on Lisa and Barb, not certain which of them owned the greater share of his anger. He'd thought of Lisa as an ally, until now. Out of all of the Palmer women, she was the one who was least inclined to underestimate Jodie or overprotect her, the one who might understand that Jodie's bonding with DJ was incomplete and that they might need to try some pretty imaginative strategies to get things on track.

Like putting the two of them up on a horse.

But now he felt betrayed. She was the one who'd gotten Barb's blood up this morning. So Lisa had “wanted to take a look”? Wanted to sabotage the whole event, more like. He didn't doubt that her motives were good. Pristine and pure. She loved her baby sister. Maybe that
long-ago episode with Izzy and the riding lessons really did still scare her, even if at heart she knew it wasn't Jodie's fault. The whole family loved her. But boy could love be blind sometimes!

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.

M
aybe 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 remembered 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—?”