LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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