Читать книгу The Mummy Miracle - Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy - Страница 6

“I don’t think she’s ready yet.” The words floated up through Jodie’s open bedroom window from the back deck.

“Oh, I agree! She’s not!”

No one in the Palmer family ever thought Jodie was ready. She sat on her bed, struggling to raise her left arm high enough to push her hand through the strap on her summery, sparkly, brand-new tank top. The hand wouldn’t go, which meant she couldn’t start the long journey down the stairs to join the Fourth of July family barbecue as the—not her idea—guest of honor.

She pushed again, the feeble muscle refusing to obey the muddy signal from her brain. It was noon; time for everyone to start arriving. “So I guess they’re right. I’m not ready,” she muttered, but she knew this wasn’t what her sister Lisa’s comment had meant.

It had meant Not Ready, capital N, capital R, and during Jodie’s twenty-nine years had covered everything from her learning the shocking truth about the Easter Bunny at the age of seven, to going out on her first date at fifteen. She vaguely remembered from last summer, about a hundred years ago, that Elin had even questioned her readiness to see Orlando Bloom’s wedding photos in a magazine—and, admittedly, she had been a little envious of the bride.

What wasn’t she ready for this time?

It could be anything. Going back to work?

Well, yes, she knew she wouldn’t be doing that for a while, since she managed and taught at a riding barn for a living and spent hours in the saddle every week at Oakbank Stables.

Reading the police report on the accident scene? Might never be ready for that one. Fixing her own coffee? Wrong, sisters. She’d been practicing in rehab and, not to sound arrogant or anything, she was dynamite when it came to spooning the granules out of the jar.

“Guys?” she called out to her sisters. “Can I have some help up here?”

From down on the deck she heard an exclamation, voices, the scrape of chairs. Lisa and Elin both appeared half a minute later, flinging the bedroom door back on its hinges with a slam, wearing frightened looks to complement their red-white-and-blue patriotic earrings.

“It’s okay,” she told them. “You can put the defibrillator down and cancel the 911 call. I just can’t get my arm into this top, that’s all, and I know people will start arriving any second.”

“Maddy and John just drove up,” Lisa confirmed. “And Devlin was right behind them.”

“Devlin’s coming?” Jodie’s heart bumped sideways against her ribs. Dev. Every time she saw Dev …

There was an odd little silence. Possibly there was. It ended so quickly that she wasn’t even sure if it had happened.

“He’s been so great, hasn’t he?” Lisa said brightly. “How many times did he go in to see you, while you were in the hospital?”

“You tell me,” Jodie joked. “I was unconscious for most of them.”

“Do you remember anything from that time?” Elin asked, hesitant. At forty, she was the eldest of the four Palmer girls, and managed to be both the bossiest and the most nurturing at the same time. “The doctors said you might retain some memories, even from when you weren’t responsive.”

She and Lisa both stood there waiting for her reply, each almost holding their breath. Jodie fought a bad-tempered impulse to yell at them to stop the heck worrying about her so much!

Instead she said carefully, “I wouldn’t call them memories….”

“No …?” prompted Lisa.

“But let’s not talk about it now. Help me downstairs. I’m so slow. My brain sends the instructions but bits of my body don’t respond. I’m thrilled I managed to get into the jeans.”

Thirty-eight-year-old Lisa, sister number two, hugged Jodie suddenly with a warm, tight squeeze, and planted a smacking kiss on her cheek. Of the four Palmer girls, she and Jodie were physically the most alike, blonde and athletic, outdoorsy and lean. Lisa liked tennis and the beach and it had started to show in her tanned skin. She didn’t take care of it the way she should. Hugging her back, Jodie decided she’d have to give Lisa a sisterly lecture about that, soon, because Palmer overprotectiveness could cut both ways.

The slight, strange tension in the room seemed to have gone, chased by the hug. “Honey, forget slow, we’re just so happy you’re okay,” Lisa said. “Talking. Walking. Getting better every day. Home.”

“I know.” Jodie blinked back sudden tears as they let each other go. “Me, too.”

Devlin Browne was standing on the deck when she reached it, his dark hair showing reddish glints in the sun, his body tall and strong; there was no evidence of the accident that had injured the two of them in such different ways, nine months ago. He grinned at the sight of her, from behind his sunglasses. “Look at you!” She wished she could see the expression in his blue eyes. He ran his life with such quiet confidence and certainty. She loved that about him, wished right now that some of his qualities would rub off on her.

“Yeah,” she drawled in reply, “all the grace of a ballerina.”

With a walking frame for a dance partner. The doctors and therapists had promised that if she worked hard, she’d be rid of it soon. She planned to astonish them with her progress.

“Don’t knock it,” Dev said. “Compared to how you were even a week ago.”

“I know. I’m not knocking it, believe me.” She felt so self-conscious in his presence, so aware of the strong length of his body. Nine months and more since those three explosive nights of lovemaking, but to her they felt like yesterday. The way their bodies seemed to fit together so perfectly. The smell of him, warm and fresh and male. The words he’d whispered to her in the dark, naked and blunt and charged with sensual heat. Did he ever think about it?

Lisa helped her to sit down and took away the frame, while Elin handed her an ice-cold glass of tropical juice. The deck was dappled with sun and shade, and there was a breeze. It was a perfect day. Dev pulled up an Adirondack chair to sit beside her. He leaned against the wooden seat-back, casually stretched his arms. But his mood wasn’t as casual as he wanted her to think. His gaze seemed intently focused behind those concealing sunglasses, and she didn’t know if his sitting so close was significant.

Were they dating?

Could she ask?

Um, excuse me, Dev, I was in a coma for nearly eight months, and rehab since. Can you just catch me up on the current status of our relationship?

A thought struck her. That Not Ready comment of Lisa’s a few minutes ago …

Not Ready to hear that Dev had moved on to someone else?

But she didn’t have time to examine the cold pit that opened deep in her stomach at this idea. There shouldn’t be a pit! He’d been up front with her nine months ago. “I have nothing to offer, Jodie,” he’d said. “I’m only here until Dad is ready to go back to work. My career is in New York, it’s pretty full-on, no room for commitment, and I’m not looking for it. I really like being with you, but if you’re interested in something long-term, it’s not with me.”

How did a woman respond to something like that? She knew Dev had said it out of innate honesty and goodness of heart. He wasn’t the kind of man who promised what he couldn’t deliver, or tricked a woman into bed with sweet-talking lies. He called it how he saw it, and when he laid his cards on the table, he laid them straight.

Nine months ago he’d been all about the short term, about saying goodbye when it was over, with a big grin, warm wishes and no regrets for either of them, yet now he was sitting beside her, searching her face, examining the set of her shoulders as if he cared that she might not be coping.

Which she wasn’t, fully.

Everything was happening too fast. Dev stood up to greet Lisa’s husband. Mom and Dad came out from the kitchen, Dad in full male barbecue armor, with plastic apron and an impressive weaponry of implements. The front doorbell rang and Elin went to answer it.

And sister number three—Maddy—and her husband, John, were here, having at last managed to negotiate the trip from their car. They’d come around the side of the house and climbed the steps to the deck carrying two bulging diaper bags, some kind of squishy portable baby gym and a baby in a carrier.

Their baby. Their little girl. Tiny. Just a few weeks old. Jodie hadn’t even known Maddy was pregnant. She’d only been told about baby Lucy after she was born—another questionable instance of Not Ready—and hadn’t seen her yet, because Maddy and John lived in Cincinnati, two hours from Leighville, the Palmer family’s Southern Ohio hometown.

“Oh, she’s asleep!” Mom crooned. “Oh, what an angel! She already looks so much bigger than she did two weeks ago.”

“Can we put her somewhere quiet?” Maddy asked.

But it was too late. The baby began to waken, stretching her little body in the cramped space of the car carrier and letting out a keening cry.

“Oh, she needs a feed,” Maddy said. “Where shall I go?”

“Not here,” Dad said. He was a traditional man, with a passion for woodworking and gadgetry. In his world, feeding and diaper changes didn’t belong in the same space as a barbecue.

“You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was just to get here, all the gear we had to bring. John, can you set up some pillows for me in …? Oh, where!”

“My room,” Jodie said quickly. “There’s a heap of pillows, and fresh flowers, and a rocking chair.”

“Oops, I’m going to have to change her first….” But John had already gone to ready the room. Maddy held Lucy with the baby’s legs awkwardly dangling and her little face screwed up as she screamed, and looked around for the diaper bag. “She’s in a mess. Oh, I’m not good at any of this yet! Where’s the monitor? We’ll need it if she naps. I have no idea if she will. And when she cries like this … First baby at thirty-six, people do say it’s harder.”

“Here, don’t worry, it’s fine.” Of all people, it was Dev who stepped forward and took the crying baby. He cradled her against his shoulder and commenced a kind of rocking sway and a rhythmic soothing sound. “Shh-sh, shh-sh, it’s okay, Mommy’s coming in a minute, shh-sh, shh-sh.” Jodie felt a strange, unwanted tingling in her breasts and a familiar yearning in her heart. Why did he do this to her when she tried so hard to stay sensible? How could he possibly look so confident and so good, holding a poop-stained baby? Why was he still in Ohio, and not back in New York?

She had a vivid flashback, suddenly, to the first night they’d made love. Bed on the first date. You weren’t supposed to do that, if you were a female with a warm heart, but of course it hadn’t felt like the first date. She’d known Dev since she was sixteen, and she’d responded to him with half a lifetime of pent-up feeling—to his hands so right on her body, to his voice so familiar in her ear.

“Thank you, Dev!” Maddy unzipped the diaper bag and rummaged around inside. She didn’t seem surprised that Devlin had taken control, but Jodie was.

Not about the control, but about the thing he was in control of. If you were talking legal contracts or high finance or building plans, team sports, political wrangling, then, yes, Devlin Browne could take control in a heartbeat. Would always take control. But when it was a baby?

What did he know about babies?

He doesn’t even want kids.

The thought came out of nowhere, one of the memories from before the accident that her brain threw out apparently at random. “Did I have amnesia?” Jodie had asked at one point.

“Not like in the movies,” they—her doctors and therapists—had said. “But of course there are some gaps. Many of them you’ll eventually fill in. Some you never will.”

“Like the accident itself?”

“Yes, it’s quite probable you’ll never remember that.”

But she remembered that Dev didn’t want kids.

How did she remember that?

She searched her mind, watching him as he gently bounced the baby on his shoulder. He wore jeans and a gray polo shirt with black trim, filling the clothing with a body honed by running and wilderness sports. The fabric of the jeans pulled tightly across his thighs, and the sleeve-band of the polo shirt was tight, too. There was some impressive muscle mass there, and Jodie’s fingers remembered it, even while she was trying to remember the other thing—the thing about him not wanting kids.

If he didn’t want kids, how could he school all that male strength into the tender touch and soft rhythm needed to soothe a newborn baby? When Maddy was ready, he handed Lucy over to her, and casually warned, “Watch the wet patch on her back.”

But he didn’t want any of his own …

Okay, it was over dinner, she remembered. They’d been out together—and slept together, heaven help her—three times since his temporary return to Leighville. As far as Jodie’s family were concerned, she and Dev had only been dipping their toes in the waters of the great big dating lake.

To her, though, it immediately felt deeper. She’d had a major crush on him at sixteen when he’d briefly dated one of her good friends before he—Dev—had left for college in Chicago a couple of months later. Turned out the crush had never really gone away.

She couldn’t track back to how the subject of kids had come up that night. Maybe something to do with his restless lifestyle. He was based in New York these days, but his work in international law took him all over the world—three months in London, a summer in Prague. He’d only come home for a couple of months last fall to take over his father’s small-town legal practice on a temporary basis while Mac Browne had heart surgery.

Okay, so she might possibly have asked Dev, over their meal, if he ever intended to settle down.

He’d probably said no, he didn’t. The I-have-nothing-to-offer thing, again.

And then he’d definitely—twenty seconds or five minutes later—said that he didn’t want kids. Fatherhood didn’t fit with his plans.

Which was fine, she’d thought, because he was only in town for a short while, and she’d only gone into this dating thing so she could finally get a thirteen-year crush well and truly out of her system and then wave him goodbye. A big grin, and no regrets.

Or not.

If I sleep with him, he’ll break my heart when he leaves, she’d thought back then. And if I don’t sleep with him, he’ll still break my heart when he leaves….

But that was last October, and he was still here. The accident would explain part of it. October eighth, the two of them driving home after dark from date number four, a fall hike in Hocking Hills followed by dinner, when a driver in an oncoming car had lost control around a bend. Devlin had broken his leg in three places and had a permanent metal plate in there, but he didn’t even walk with a limp at this point, so shouldn’t he be safely back in New York or in a hotel room in Geneva by now?

Instead he was standing here on her parents’ summer deck sharing a joke with her dad, throwing up his head when he laughed, shirt fabric pulling across his broad shoulders when he raised a beer can to his lips, reminding her far too strongly that she hadn’t remotely gotten the crush out of her system last fall, or during the nine months of coma and rehab since.

He’d come to visit her in the hospital five times since she’d woken up, seen her at her most vulnerable, in tears and struggling to move and speak, fighting her own uncooperative body. He’d been so supportive, but cautious at the same time, never talking about anything too personal, and she had no idea what it all meant. Her brain still felt scrambled, tired, and life was a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing.

“Is she out here? How is she?” This was Jodie’s Aunt Stephanie, following Elin out to the deck. Seemed as if everyone had been invited today. Jodie began to feel overwhelmed and more than a little tired. She’d been discharged from the nearby rehab unit yesterday, and would still be attending day therapy sessions there for a while. She’d spent just one night, so far, in her own precious bed.

“Jodie …!” Aunt Stephanie said, and leaned down to hug her.

Dad put hot dogs and burgers and steaks onto the barbecue grill. Lisa brought out bowls of salad. Lisa’s husband, Chris, took a soccer ball onto the grass beyond the deck and began kicking it back and forth with a handful of kids. Everyone talked and laughed and caught up on family news.

Maddy came down with Lucy wide awake and contentedly milk-filled in her arms, and Jodie asked her on an impulse, “Can I have a hold? If you put a pillow under my left arm, so I don’t have to use any muscle?”

She felt a strange yearning and a rush of emotion that she didn’t remember feeling for her other nieces and nephews when they were newborn. Well, she’d only been in her early twenties then, not ready to think about babies. Lisa’s youngest was seven years old.

“Do you want to, honey?” Mom asked, in a slightly odd voice. “Hold her?”

“Yes, didn’t I just ask?”

“Quick, someone grab a pillow from the couch,” Mom ordered urgently, as if baby Lucy were a grenade with the pin pulled and would explode if Jodie didn’t have her nestled on a pillow in the next five seconds.

“John?” Maddy said, in the same tone.

“Coming right up.” He ran so fast for the pillow Jodie expected him to come back breathless.

Sheesh, she thought, I could probably ask for a metallic gold European sports car convertible with red leather seats right now, and there’d be one in the driveway by the end of the afternoon. You know, I should definitely go for that …

Maddy stuffed the pillow between the arm of the chair and Jodie’s elbow. “Now, just cradle her head here, Jodie. If you’re not sure about this …”

“C’mon, Maddy, lighten up. I’ve held babies before. I’ve been holding them for years.” Elin’s eldest two were in their midteens.

“Yeah, but this is my baby,” Maddy joked, in a slightly wobbly voice.

Okay, so it was a new-mother thing. Fair enough.

But there was that feeling in the air again, everyone seeming to hold their breath, everyone watching Jodie a little too closely. Mom, Lisa, Dev. Dev, especially, his body held so still he could have been made of bronze.

The accident. The coma. That was why.

When she was one hundred percent fit and well, would they finally stop?

“Shouldn’t be such a fuss, should it?” Dad muttered from behind the barrier of the barbecue grill. No one took any notice.

Jodie held the baby, smelled the sweet, milky smell of her breath, the nutty scent of her pink baby scalp covered in a swirl of downy dark hair, and the hint of lavender in her stretchy cotton dress, from the special baby laundry detergent. Oh, she was so sweet, just adorable, and if everyone was staring at the two of them, well, that was fine and normal. It was one of the rightest sights in the world, a person tenderly holding a newborn child.

“Oh, you sweet, precious thing,” she crooned. “Thank you for not crying for your auntie, little darling.”

She bent forward and planted a kiss on the silky hair, and took in those sweet scents again, close to tears. As she straightened again, she could smell onions frying, too, the aroma unusually intense and satisfying, as if she’d never smelled frying onions before. Sometimes her brain reacted this way, since coming out of the coma. It was as if all her senses had been reborn.

And then suddenly they hit overload, like little Lucy hitting overload when she was due for her nap.

“Can you have her, Maddy? My arms are getting tired.”

“You did great,” Maddy said, and too many people echoed the praise. Dev growled it half under his breath.

But maybe they were right. She felt wiped. Dev leaned toward her. “Are you okay?”

“Need some lunch.”

“Just that?”

“Well, tired …”

Baby Lucy yawned on her behalf, and Maddy murmured something about taking her upstairs.

“To Jodie’s room,” Mom said quickly. “Not in—”

“No, I know,” Maddy answered, already halfway inside.

“But I definitely need lunch,” Jodie admitted.

“Sit,” Dev ordered. “I’ll grab whatever you want.” There was a tiny beat of hesitation. “You did great with the baby.”

“So did you.”

“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.