The Mummy Miracle

“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.