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
