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Forever And A Baby
Margot Early


DRU HAVERFORD FALL: Midwife. Pregnant. Widow.A MAN FROM THE PAST: Dru hasn't seen Ben Hall (a nephew of her dead husband's) in more than twenty years. But they share memories of a difficult and traumatic even in their childhood.PREGNANCY: Now, for reasons that run very deep, Dru wants a baby. Ben Hall becomes the father of her child–by artifical insemination.THE BABY: Dru loves her baby-to-be. And she's beginning to feel a very real connection with her baby's father. A passion unlike anything she'd experienced with her husband…A MARRIAGE: Ben wants to marry her–has always wanted to marry her. And he knows that Dru needs a marriage based not on memories or past promises but on forever…and a baby.









He wanted to thank her for being pregnant with their child


He wanted to thank her for loving that child so unconditionally. “I love you,” he said.

Dru watched his lips. Her legs shivered, her heart pounded. A prickling warmth needled her face and scalp. She hugged herself.

Ben stood closer, touched her cheeks.

“I love you,” he repeated, his body almost brushing hers, ready to catch her if she fell into another fearful trance—a memory of their past, in the desert. Ready to catch her whenever she fell, or at least help her up. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

Dru saw the man across from her, and on the thought that she’d never love another, her eyes filled.

She’d believed that about Omar, too. Her husband. Now dead.

But Ben Hall was this baby’s father—and would be her husband. Soon.


Dear Reader,

I’m happy to introduce the fourth book in my continuing Harlequin Superromance series, THE MIDWIVES. While the characters from You Were on My Mind, Talking About My Baby and There Is a Season enjoy the love they’ve found, we meet two new midwives, best friends Dru and Keziah.

Keziah attends home births on the island of Nantucket. But Dru, a certified nurse midwife, was torn from her vocation years ago by family notoriety and her marriage to a renowned financier. Just as it seems all her dreams will be lost, her husband’s death brings her a chance at love with childhood friend Ben Hall, and much more. Finally Dru has the chance to regain herself—and to bear a child of her own.

I hope you enjoy this story and that you’ll be eager to learn what happens between Keziah and Dru’s twin, Tristan, in The Story Father. And what happened between them in the past.

Thank you so much for reading my books.

Sincerely,

Margot Early




Books by Margot Early


HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

625—THE THIRD CHRISTMAS

668—THE KEEPER

694—WAITING FOR YOU

711—MR. FAMILY

724—NICK’S KIND OF WOMAN

743—THE TRUTH ABOUT COWBOYS

766—WHO’S AFRAID OF THE MISTLETOE

802—YOU WERE ON MY MIND (THE MIDWIVES)

855—TALKING ABOUT MY BABY (THE MIDWIVES)

878—THERE IS A SEASON (THE MIDWIVES)




Forever and a Baby

Margot Early





www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


The nature of this book, its landscapes and seascapes, its peoples and their backgrounds, dictated two things. One is that I would do extensive research; the second is that I would both take artistic license and make some mistakes (which are two different things, though they can look the same). The following people generously gave of their time:

Marina Alzugaray, MS, ARNP, CNM, Cathy Hartt, CNM, and Bill Dwelley, MS, LM, WEMT-I, thoroughly answered extensive questions about the art, science and business of midwifery.

David M. Good, M.D., P.C., thoughtfully addressed the mental health questions I asked. Without his help, this book would not have been written.

My sister Joan Early Farrell, Matt Hunder and James M. Early, my father, answered questions about fishing, boating and sailing. My family has always speedily assisted when I’ve needed help with my books.

Deb Kidwell, owner and breeder of the Azawakh of Kel Simoon, told me about these noble sighthounds and helped me name both of the heroine’s dogs, always increasing my appreciation for this beautiful and unusual breed.

Julie Elliott allowed me to use invaluable information for sections of the book having to do with belly dancing. Nearly all of my information on belly-dancing, including song translations, came from her rich and fascinating Web site, The Art of Middle Eastern Dance.

Finally, this book required the use of numerous reference texts. They include: Serpent of the Nile by Wendy Buonaventura, Return of the Tribal by Rufus C. Camphausen, The Hungry Ocean by Linda Greenlaw, Nantucket: Seasons on the Island by Cary Hazlegrove, The Ocean Almanac by Robert Hendrickson, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, Ethnic Dress by Frances Kennet, Sahara Unveiled by William Langewiesche, Veiled Sentiment and Writing Women’s Worlds by Lila Abu-Lughod, Nantucket Gardens and Houses by Taylor Lewis and Virginia Scott Heard, Lonely Planet Travel Guides, the mystery novels of Francine Mathews, Black Tents of Arabia by Carl R. Rasway, Dangerous Places and Come Back Alive by Robert Young Pelton, Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. Internet resources were too numerous to mention.




CONTENTS


PROLOGUE (#uf447a808-a69e-5d5a-831f-a9e0a477a037)

CHAPTER ONE (#u21e25a08-c2eb-5009-ae49-04912783deca)

CHAPTER TWO (#u5584af05-d20b-57ef-9407-89bb0ead0d47)

CHAPTER THREE (#ub9bb8076-f56e-5ba8-a90e-1af3ca04b8b2)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE


Orange Street

Nantucket Island

“WE NEVER KNOW OUR ANCESTORS because it’s their prerogative to lie to us.” Dru said this to me while standing beneath the oldest portraits her family owns, full-size likenesses of a thirty-nine-year-old whaling captain and the fourteen-year-old girl he brought back from Morocco. The girl wore long gossamer pants and a floor-length gown, with a belt of silver coins at her waist, coins everywhere but at her throat. There, an elaborate necklace of hammered silver. Cuffs of silver covered her wrists, and bangles of silver and dyed leather interrupted her forearms, while a crown dripping with more coins swirled round her head. From the crown fell hair as thick as Dru’s but hennaed red. Henna stained her skin, as well, in the intricate designs Dru called mehndi. The shade beneath, her own, was luminescent. The artist had not altered it. It was the color sand takes on in the shade. Weak coffee with a spoon of skim milk. Slavery had left Nantucket long before 1842. Nudar was Captain Haverford’s wife. I found her exquisite. They were my ancestors, too.

“Imagine it, Ben,” Dru said. “Imagine being forced into marriage with a man of a different color, a different culture, a different country, twenty-five years older than you—”

She stopped.

Her eyes fell. Her back to me, her thick black hair caught on the hood of her sweatshirt, she lifted a riqq, a small tambourine, from the seat of the grand piano. Like mehndi, this instrument had different names in different places. She played, and I heard the desert sing and smelled indigo on skin. The music stopped. “But perhaps she loved him.”

Perhaps she did.

Ancestors, as she said, can and do lie. Which alters things. Dru has said it this way. “Our family is large and interconnected. We have married cousins and stayed on this island. We like each other.”

Like the Bedouin, I thought when she said it. The Bedouin would say that it is good to marry cousins, just as one must know one’s lineage, or how can one have a name, the kind of name that comes from Allah? A name that names the person by naming the loved ones. There is a debt and a weight on this name, and there is a duty to it, a duty to one’s line.

I know this because I hadn’t stayed on Nantucket, nor had my father, Robert Hall. The desert is in my blood.

One must know one’s lineage.

Ancestors can and do lie. And they may omit…falls.

A fall can change the course of history. Not just the fall of Rome or a fall in the Dow Jones, but a human being falling down.

For instance, my grandmother’s fall, as told to me by the father who raised me, Robert Hall. Not an omission. Something he chose to tell.

In the year of her accident, 1947, Faith Hall was Nantucket’s only midwife. Dad was thirteen that year. His father, Ben, for whom I’m named, was a veteran of the recent war and a Nantucket scalloper. The family lived in a fishing shack in ’Sconset, the cottage my father never sold and where I sometimes came from Africa to hammer and saw and keep the building from the sea, while the Atlantic steals prime real estate by inches. On the day of my grandmother’s fall, it had rained, and my father came inside with muddy feet, and his mother scolded him to clean the floor, and he did. She went outside to empty dishwater in her garden, and mud from his feet had tracked the steps, as well. My father heard her body strike the shack’s flimsy siding. She had fallen head-first four feet and broken her neck. Even before the funeral, her mother came for the year-old baby, Dad’s little sister, to raise her in her dark home on India Street in town. The men—Dad and his adopted brother and their father—harvested scallops.

Dad told me of another fall, one that happened earlier, a plane falling from the sky over the desert and one crew member escaping, floating to the ground with his precious silk. The soldier had hiked, lost until he met a Bedouin boy paused in the shade of a camel. The camp of twelve families had been slaughtered by tanks. Bloating camel carcasses and dead salukis lay near the collapsed tents. The soldier covered his nose and mouth with his bomber jacket to keep from vomiting at the stench.

Nonetheless, the boy greeted my grandfather in a tribal dialect and rushed to a demolished tent. He made coffee, insisted that my grandfather sit against a camel saddle, and behaved as though the carnage did not exist. When his guest would drink no more, the child showed him his father’s body, and it was the body of the sheikh. Working till dusk, they buried each person, seventy-one bodies, in a shallow grave in the sand, placing stones at the head and feet, leaving any intact garments on the graves for the less fortunate. Next morning at dawn, they saddled the camel. The boy knew what they would need and took the little he could of his family’s wealth. Before he left the graves of his loved ones, he bowed against the sand and prayed.

He and the American soldier crossed the desert, walking northwest to the coast, milking the camel to quench their thirst. Many times, the boy spoke his name and the name of his father and grandfather and his great-grandfather and his tribe. It was his entire name, a proud name. My grandfather agreed to call him Omar and sent the eight-year-old Bedouin ahead of him to Nantucket Island to become his second son, although the name Omar means “first son.” When my grandfather came home from the war, it was the dark boy he lifted in his arms and held as he embraced the others. They became a family of five. My fisherman grandfather, my midwife grandmother, Robert, Omar, and, briefly, baby Mary Hall. Then, my grandmother fell.

When my father first told me these stories, I had played with dominoes but still didn’t understand the nature of falls. I’d learned that midwives helped women have babies, which meant they were like doctors or nurses—not partially your wife and partially mine, as the name implied. I never guessed the part these falls—a soldier falling from the sky, his wife falling on her head—had played in my existence. Or that other falls in my life would so shape my destiny.

That I could be one of the fallen.

There are many ways to fall.

WHEN I MET with my father’s brother, Omar Hall, in Nantucket in early March of the year of his death, I had not seen his wife, Dru, for two decades. At that time, I had not heard her remark about the lies ancestors tell. My father lay dead nine weeks and three days.

Omar—he never encouraged “uncle”—and I spoke in the garden behind his home, the Federal-Greek Revival on Orange Street. Spruce and pine, the ivy-draped fence, the waterfall of unawakened climbing roses, all edged the long garden with its terraces, its beds with the green tips of bulb leaves emerging, other blooms dormant around the wintered lawn. We had privacy, the kind you can buy. Or he could.

His man, Sergio, had led me through the house to the garden, where Omar himself had held back the two long-legged dogs, gazelle-chasing desert sighthounds, one sand-colored with white stockings and chest, the other blue brindle. I knew both. I’d brought them from Mali, for Omar’s wedding gift to Dru.

While the hounds galloped down the long, deep yard, leaping and floating in mesmerizing fairy bounds, Omar brought me a beer and glass, offered me food. I’ve accepted coffee from faces like his in desert tents and in mud and stone houses of powder-puff colors. In him, the Bedouins’ sacred respect for a guest was warmth, a face that lit up as though this was the Libyan Sahara. Instead of an island soggy as a whaler’s death.

This was his hospitality. Years earlier, Omar had bought a mansion on the shore near Broad Point, hoping all his family and extended family, distant cousins included, would come to live with him. When he asked one of those distant cousins to marry him, when he asked Dru, she came—the only one. He and Dru sold the mansion and bought this house, two doors from her childhood home, with a yard for their dogs.

Omar and I stretched out our legs, half-turned from his round iron table, mismatched with plastic chairs. I wore my grandfather’s World War II bomber jacket, which Omar had presented to me on a visit to Cambridge when I was a teenager and old enough to notice my own father’s lip curling over the gift. But then, Robert Hall had relaxed and said, Looks good on you, Ben. And you’re named for my father. It should be yours. So it was always his and mine, never Omar’s, never the Bedouin boy’s.

In his herringbone overcoat, Omar scooted his chair closer to the table. He blushed. His smile showed embarrassment and pleasure. “My wife has a mission this summer, Ben. She is to search for a man whose child she would like to bear and arrange a tryst with him, for the purpose of conceiving a child who will be ours.”

The paler dog, Femi, circled the brickwork haughtily, stepping like a cat.

Arrange a tryst…Purpose of conceiving…His words caused a wound. No, something more complex.

The financier’s eyes curved, wrinkles kind. “Good. You’re not surprised.”

“I’m a journalist. I’m surprised.”

He laughed.

I didn’t.

The encapsulated Omar Hall: Son of a Bedouin sheikh, brought to America after the death of his family, adopted by my grandparents, their own deaths five years apart. Establishment in investments, speculation in hedge funds, marriage to distant cousin Dru Haverford, not of the Haverfords, also cousins, but of quiet poverty, they said, and young and beautiful. A midwife. A serious mountain-biking accident—his—on their honeymoon. During his marriage, Omar had become a global philanthropist, dropping a hundred million here, a hundred million there, every year.

Dark olive skin like a fine grade of sandpaper folded over the rigid white collar of his shirt. His eyes were black as mine, eyes like my ancestor Nudar’s. “Tell me why you’re surprised,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

Talk? “You can start.”

“Do you know my age, Ben?”

“Sixty-six.” According to Fortune. I reached for my glass. Talk.

“Dru is thirty-one. What do you suppose our marriage is like?”

The beer went down. A breeze brought a taste of scallops and salt water and brine. Everything wet, the gray air soaked in the sea. The damp suffocated me. So much water. The dogs collapsed at a distance. I still saw an eleven-year-old Dru at a Nubian oasis, water slipping through her hands beneath her ghost eyes. She was the one who’d been seized by the jinn, and the women danced to placate the demon. The rest of us went on, in our own ways. I found a scorpion. Tristan found a tribe. Skye found an Australian backpacker.

“Every marriage is different,” I said. Even in the desert. The nomadic Bedouin, occasionally with an extra wife. The Tuareg and their brides. An anthropologist and a minister’s daughter. A lone American journalist in a hundred-and-thirty-degree sun…

Omar smiled. “You’re diplomatic and wise. Dru and I are happy.” A pause—because of dissembling or curiosity? A pause that made me wonder which. “How are you?”

“Well.”

Omar’s forehead formed crevasses. He looked the same on the cover of Money. Then the lines smoothed. “Death is hard.” Difficult silence. “I still remember your grandfather’s death. We should all have died that day. Mixed seas. Bob and I couldn’t find him. Can you imagine making the decision to bring in the catch and the boat? And on another day, to go out again?”

He and Dru shared this; her father had also died at sea. But I already knew what Omar told me. My grandfather’s assets were divided equally between his two sons, the absent Mary ignored. Omar sold the boat. My father kept the house. They both went to college. Omar studied finance, philosophy and religion, went into investments. Robert—Bob—became an anthropologist and left for the Sahara, later traveling with his wife and baby, looking always, I think, for the father he’d lost. The father who’d fallen from the sky into the desert and was never seen again. Not the veteran who adopted a Bedouin boy and gave him to his family. I wanted to know about Omar’s other father, the sheikh. More than his name, which had been enough for my father to find some of Omar’s relatives who had survived the war, for Omar to meet them. “You lost two fathers.” The words hollowed the air, like a prophecy.

“Yes.” Omar closed his eyes. “My father.” My only father, his voice said.

I forgave him. Almost. For things of which we’d never spoken. And that I fantasized we would.

“I remember very little. I dug myself into the sand. A tank passed over me.” He shook his head. “The next thing I knew, your grandfather and I were in Tripoli, with the possessions I’d salvaged. He was good to me. And your father was a good brother. Bob asked me things. He wanted to know everything. About the desert.”

The blue brindle, Ehder, brushed my leg. Did he know my scent or remember the border post where no one loved the Tuareg or their puppies? I petted him, dreaming Niger and the last days of my father, Robert Hall. He’d said, I’m dying. It won’t be long. Inshallah. White filled the crevices in his sun-beaten skin. His cataract-ridden eyes, blue, red-lined, had sunk deep. He lay in the hot shade of his tent. He’d rejected the mud walls of the house where he kept his research materials. Sand had begun to blow. Heaping outside. It could bury a tent or a village. He was bleeding from the rectum again. Diarrhea. Vomiting. He wouldn’t leave this place, and he told me he had cancer, had known for seventeen months. I was a sorry parent, he’d said. I’d said, You’re a great man. I love you. He’d said, Does a good son always lie? Is it the job of a child to make the parent great? I recited the Koran to him in the language in which I’d learned it. The men came to talk with him. Magicians came. I had brought morphine, and an American trekker had more. I sat with him five days, reciting the Koran until dehydration won and he lay with his lips gaping and eyes already shut.

I considered the nature of fraud. I had lived among the devout and among the Tuareg—refugees, caravan traders, pastoralists, the descendants of nomadic bandits, a people whose Arab name means “abandoned by God.” My father had chosen them, the traditional enemies of the Bedouin, had finally chosen their independent faith and untouchable spirit. He had fought the painful war for their mountain territory. Omar called himself an atheist. But the rest of my family played hard at their connection to the desert world. The women and their singing and dancing. My father in his pain had said, Inshallah. Allah willing. He had believed that our days are numbered by God, and that nothing can change that plan. He had worn an ancient silver cross, a bowed and beautiful thing. The proof missionaries gave that the Tuareg in their indigo robes had been Christian once. I’d asked Tanelher about it. She’d laughed, and I’d smiled, wishing I were of her tribe, a masked blue man of the desert. Instead of seen and vulnerable—to spirits and the scrutiny of a beautiful woman.

Who are these people, the Tuareg? A photographic negative of the Bedouin? another journalist once asked me. The Tuareg men mask themselves, while the women veil only against the elements. Descent is matrilineal, traditionally. They and the Bedouin have settled on opposite edges of the vast Sahara. But the analogy of a photographic negative fails, limited by its two dimensions. I know because I grew up wandering in the shadow of an anthropologist, and as a man I’ve tried to know—and rescue, in arrogance—the Tuareg and Bedouin and others.

Maybe I, too, seek the father I lost.

“Ben.” Omar leaned closer over the cold wrought-iron tabletop. Perhaps to take my mind off Dad. He blushed again, another blushing smile. “I want you to follow Dru. She’s…indifferent to her safety. And has some unwise notions of where to look for—our man. I want you to protect her. But don’t let her know.”

Dru. I’d forgotten this. Omar’s plan for a baby.

This Tribe

LONG AGO, a New Bedford whaling captain named Haverford left his town and settled on the island of Nantucket, where he married and had children who had children. From Nantucket’s harbor, he sailed his ship, and his descendants sailed their ships. One of these men was Tobias Haverford.

In the winter of 1840, a storm blew Tobias’s ship to the shores of Morocco, where he took on a passenger, a girl named Nudar. He brought her home to Nantucket and married her.

Nudar was a Muslim. That much is known. Her husband allowed her to practice her faith, and she kept many customs of her culture, as well. She passed these traditions to her daughter, who passed them to her daughter, and so on. Her son’s life was the sea. His descendants were Haverfords. His daughters, too, learned the ways of Nudar. In the privacy of their rooms, they sang and danced in a manner alien to Puritan New England. Their tambourines and single-string boxes and ululating zaghareets could be heard on the street. This eccentricity they passed to their daughters as well.

Being Americans, these women became dissatisfied with what was passed down and added to it with the dancing and singing of other cultures. By the year 2000, no one was certain where Nudar had really come from or who her people were.

But these are members of her tribe, by birth or marriage:

My grandmother, Faith Hall, who fell from the stoop, and her husband, Ben Hall, who fell from a plane. Their son, my father, Robert Hall, who died in the desert.

Their adopted son, Omar Hall, who fell. Who fell.

Their daughter, Mary Hall, who embraced the traditions of Nudar and other women who sing and dance in the ways called raqs sharqi, danse du ventre, Middle Eastern dance, Oriental dance. Belly dance.

Mary’s husband, Daniel Mayhew, her brother Omar’s attorney and an Islander.

Their daughter, Keziah Mayhew, a midwife who teaches Nudar’s dances to pregnant women. I always see Keziah not in the ethnic dresses she favors but in a Puritan bonnet and dress, the costume of a pilgrim, because she has the stare of a New England winter. People say our eyes are alike—and came from Nudar.

Keziah has a daughter, and her name is Nudar. She is eleven and blond for a Hall or a Mayhew. Like my grandfather and Dru’s father, Keziah’s man died at sea. Only Keziah knows his story.

There are Haverfords, too.

Wealthy Haverford descendants in California, in publishing. Many cousins. Their own papers carried the story, eight or nine years ago, of the death of heiress Skye Haverford Blade. Skye had married world-renowned marine explorer, David Blade, and borne his child, Christian. She died after falling from the bow of his ship. He remarried, and his wife Jean bore two children at sea. They are of our tribe.

Joanna Oliver left her Charleston home at eighteen and traveled to New York to become an actress. She was discovered, first by Andy Warhol, then, while dancing with the Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party, by Nantucket scalloper Turk Haverford. Joanna was the family’s most exotic bride since Nudar, even to her hair that was the color of bleached shells. She thawed even the frozen hearts of the Nantucket Lightship Basket Historical Association. Turk Haverford lost his ship on Georges Bank seventeen years ago. Four men died with him. I imagined the ways a ship can sink, how the keel or bow can rise. It’s possible he fell.

He left fourteen-year-old twins.

One, named Tristan, had once fallen into the wrong hands. He grew into a fisherman like his father, and his fisherman wife died at sea, falling on a line, impaled by a hook. Their daughter, Keri, survives.

Tristan’s twin is a woman named Dru, who once—or twice—fell in love. She can fall no farther.

She carries the egg and the sperm of this line.

Of the tribe of Haverford and the tribe of Nudar.




CHAPTER ONE


When our cousin Skye was fifteen, she told her father she would like to see the desert, and he paid for her and for the twins from Nantucket to come to the Sudan. Skye’s father had escorted them, to leave them in our care while he went elsewhere. It was in August, during the rains and also a several-year lull in the civil war, and my father and I met them in Khartoum with our Land Cruiser. In the air terminal, spotting me for the first time, Skye clasped her fingers around each side of my head and said, “Are you an urchin or a sheikh?” and kissed me, which women rarely did to me at my age, especially in the Sudan. I was twelve, and she was beautiful. I always remember her that way. And, often, myself as well.

—Ben, recollections of a fall

Nantucket Island

October 21

TRISTAN BROUGHT a pregnant woman to Omar Hall’s funeral.

The woman. That woman.

He had come from Gloucester, off a longliner, a swordboat, blond hair lighter, blue-green eyes bloodshot, the scent of the fish and diesel still about him, the carved-away symmetrical marks on each cheek disconcerting to anyone unused to disfigurement. But Dru was used to her twin. Fishermen were, by definition, often gone. They returned unannounced.

In the church vestibule, protected by security from the media and the condemnation of the world, Dru embraced him. Then she saw the woman. The blond dreadlocks and ring through her nose. Come from Gloucester. And pregnant.

Dru’s reaction wasn’t a midwife’s, perhaps because it was so long since she’d felt like a midwife. It wasn’t even that of a woman who wished she was carrying or had carried her dead husband’s child, anyone’s child. She thought, It’s her. It’s the woman I saw with that man in Gloucester.

Dru dismissed it. All imagination. All hope.

And the baby would not be Tristan’s. Not a chance. After his wife had died, he’d married the sea. Some of his time ashore belonged to his boat. But the rest he gave to his daughter, to Keri.

Dru kept his betrayal to herself, walked to her oak pew. From there, the casket accused her of her own crime. Not the crime the media proclaimed and nobody seemed able to forget. There had been no adultery. But would her guilt be greater if there had? She could no longer judge her brother or anyone else.

A minister spoke over the body of an irreligious man. This was Omar’s choice. She wanted to cremate him and scatter his ashes to the wind. No, she wanted him, wanted the charming protector who’d brought her such a lovely gift after graduation from Georgetown with her Master of Science in Nurse-Midwifery. Now so dusty. Omar had appeared more frequently in her life over the next two years. On one of her visits home from New Bedford, where she’d worked in the hospital and provided maternity services for low-income families, he’d hinted at his feelings. Afterward, he’d come to New Bedford often, flying her to Manhattan for dinner or theater. Comfortingly old-fashioned in his expectations but truly in love with her, desirous of her. So safe. Omar, I want you back.

He’d bought a plot in the cemetery. One. Expecting her to remarry. She cried. Other losses. Other deaths. Her father’s boat sunk. That woman Tristan brought…the man she was with… Wishful thinking. Omar would go to the earth, all of them taken by the water or the earth. Water deaths, for all who loved fishermen, were the worst.

After the funeral, the few family members she’d invited gathered at the cemetery for the graveside service. No children. No strangers. Outside the gate, Tristan said, “She can come, right? I need to stay with her.”

The dreadlock woman.

Pregnant…

Tristan’s ponytail blew in the October wind.

Dru resented the woman again. She wanted her twin to herself, wanted to walk alone with him on the beach, wanted to explain the truth. Explain those tabloid photos, the photos from Gloucester. Why a man, a cousin much too distant to be accorded the trust of a brother, had been touching her hair and her skin so that the aching of man and woman translated through newsprint. Tristan would have heard gossip, too; Gloucester was his world.

That vision from the Gloucester Marine Railways needled her. Again, she saw the gray-haired man—a ghost—and this woman, hugging, like a father wishing farewell to his daughter. Like my father. So much like her father and Tristan’s, who had never come home.

“She’s not welcome. This is private.”

A pause. His blue eyes said she’d changed. “I brought her for you. You can help with her birth.”

Presenting his companion like a gift. A birth to attend.

“I’m not a practicing midwife, I don’t do home births—” she didn’t do any births, now “—and I know nothing about her.” Except that no one in pregnancy should be exposed to unpleasantness. A burial.

Tristan’s eyes had slanted, his slim jaw set.

A stalemate with this tall twin who had never looked anything like her. He’d never looked like a Haverford, with the white-sand hair he tied in a knot for fishing, with his gaunt cheeks and sensuous mouth, and the vertical scars where flesh had been gouged away from the base of his lower eyelids to his jaw, three on each side, discolored shades of black and purple and blue. A face that seduced by hypnosis—you couldn’t look away.

Years ago, Omar had said, with resignation, You love Tristan best.

Dru couldn’t explain that she and Tristan were each other. She knew no words that meant twin, no words that explained.

But that pregnant woman—girl, college girl—was not coming to Omar’s graveside.

Tristan said, “I’ll have to miss it, too.”

“You’re excused.” She walked away, Louis Vuitton shoes sinking in the dry, pale-yellow grass. The fifth richest woman in the world. Wishing she was pregnant. By some reversal of fortune, with Omar’s child.

Outside the cemetery gate, photographers rustled dry leaves, cameras clicking and whirring, capturing the widow, framing the ebony casket hovering over the hole in the earth. Men in tailored suits, ambassadors from countries Omar had assisted, fund managers and financial gurus and the media had flocked to Nantucket. Inexplicably, the cameras made her feel lonely.

Those assembled at the grave were Islanders. Tristan wasn’t the only one missing, the only relative who should have been there. Omar wasn’t the only one Dru missed. She wanted another. And couldn’t help it.

Dru caught the gagging in her throat, swallowed it. Earlier, she’d noticed the conspiratorial look of a cousin from California who’d pretended consternation. But wouldn’t say aloud, Where’s Ben, for goodness’ sake? He’s as close to Omar as any of us. Other relatives murmuring to each other.

The wind blew October through her hair. The season of ghosts and regrets. She sent wordless messages to her twin, images of Gloucester. She pictured, carefully, another face, with black-brown eyes. Two Land Cruisers meeting in dust without horizon, a twenty-year-old image. Remember, Tristan?

How could he forget? As she’d said to Ben, how could any of them?

When the time came for her words, Dru unfolded the piece of paper she’d brought. Here, she could read with no press listening. She trusted the few at the grave.

There was Sergio, Omar’s personal assistant, who had served the Hall family for thirty-eight years.

And Keziah Mayhew, Dru’s dear friend since childhood, a fourth cousin twice removed, the midwife of Nantucket, fighting for her share of the island’s two hundred and thirty births a year. She and Dru had planned to practice together someday. They never had and never would.

And over Omar’s grave stood his sister, Keziah’s mother—Mary Hall Mayhew.

And Dru’s mother, Joanna.

That was all.

“I just wanted—” was that her voice? “—to say some things about Omar. I agreed with every word of Roger’s eulogy at the church.” The manager of The Caravan Fund had spoken about Omar. “But this is for family.” Pressing her lips tight, she ignored the glimpse of Tristan’s blond head somewhere on the perimeter, outside the gate. “I guess it’s for me.” She read, “Omar was a good man. I loved him—because he was good. We had no secrets. I did nothing against his wishes. He did nothing against mine. This is the truth. We loved each other deeply till the day he died.” A lie, a lie, isn’t it, Dru? Aren’t you lying? Your voice is shaking. Your face is so warm you feel it through the cold wind, that wind blowing Keziah’s long auburn hair.

They waited to see if she was done.

All she’d given was self-defense.

Security apprehended a photographer inside the fence. Dru looked toward the casket where Omar wasn’t, with the winds of Nantucket. Spontaneously she crumpled the paper. You all know who he was. As well as I did.

She would have liked to sing a Bedouin love song, to mourn him her own way. Mary would sing, too, for the death of her adopted brother, her last surviving brother. But Omar had disliked their singing and dancing, just as he’d been ambivalent toward Dru’s midwifery. This staid burial was what he’d requested.

Only one thing Dru had done differently. She had gone to the funeral home and dressed him. She’d needed to touch and know his cold, thick, unmoving limbs, the stone feel of his body. To kiss his face in death. So that it would not be the way it had been with her father, whose boat had never returned; she saw his ghost, his double, everywhere.

As in Gloucester. With Tristan’s pregnant friend.

When they’d all crossed the dry grass, left the grave site and the casket, exited the cemetery enfolded by security, Tristan and the young woman merged with them. Dru stopped, handed him the crumpled piece of paper. “I read that.” Cameras, their ceaseless motors winding, advancing shutters falling on her sorrow.

Tristan circled her shoulders with his arm, his free hand touching the pregnant woman, assuring her presence. Or assuring her of his. “Look, I’m sorry, Dru. She was in Conway’s Tavern. She needed help. Her name’s Oceania. She’s deaf. She reads lips some. I brought her here so you could help her with her birth. You are a midwife. You didn’t go to school for six years to pretend you’re not.”

She’d also attended workshops, earned continuing education units. She’d done everything to keep her certification current. Even attended two births.

Oceania. She must have renamed herself.

“She should go to a hospital. Or to Keziah.”

Tristan shook his head. “She’s afraid of hospitals. And she doesn’t want Keziah. I told her I was sure you’d do it. That you’re my twin and I know your heart like my own.”

He could be so manipulative. But precious to her.

Joanna, their mother, intervened. She winced over the girl—just college age—with her yellow dreadlocks and heavy belly. “Dru’s husband just died, Tristan. Not to mention…”

No one did mention The Scandal.

Except, of course, the press.

Tristan said, “A birth is just what you need.” Watching Dru. “It’s about time.”

Omar never stopped me from practicing.

His money, his position, their celebrity, had. No woman wanted a media circus at her birth.

Two girls braked their bicycles in the road. Security parted for family. Tristan’s ten-year-old daughter and Keziah’s eleven-year-old. Best friends, longing for horses of their own, collecting Breyer horses, reading horse books and L.M. Montgomery.

“Dad. Dad.” Keri’s bike crashed against the curb and she jumped into his arms, wrapping her legs against him, just as Dru and Tristan used to spring into the arms of their father, fighting for the first embrace of the scalloper captain ashore and losing to their mother.

He had been so decent.

Dru studied the dreadlock girl. Deaf. Going to have a baby. Dru tried to guess gestational age. The baby had dropped. Oceania’s face had that ripe, full-moon look. It comforted her to think like a midwife again.

Instead of the woman she had become.

Dru glanced to Keziah, a midwife unafraid of home births—or ship births, Dru reflected ruefully. Keziah was committed to doing things in whatever environment the mother chose. She strode behind Dru to one side, long hair, dark fire, whipping in October’s gray wind, disdain flaring her nostrils over Tristan’s bringing a stranger. Not seeing, yet, a pregnant woman in need. Keziah’s brown, almost black, witch-eyes drilled Tristan’s back, as though delivering a curse.

Dru asked Oceania, “How old are you?” She flashed up her own fingers, demonstrating.

Barely concealed annoyance. Ten fingers. Twice.

Tristan smiled for the stranger he’d brought. His straight teeth were discolored internally from rheumatic fever when he and Dru were eleven and in the Sudan, that awful time. Dru felt the heat and sand that was really dust, saw the wounds left where strips of flesh had been gouged in such deliberate pattern from his adolescent face. She saw him slipping in and out of consciousness with fever, fever from a strep infection, probably from his wounds. He hadn’t let her hold his hand, because now he was a man; the dark and festering scars said so, as did the private male wound for which Robert Hall surreptitiously took him to the blacksmith healer from a neighboring tribe. The blacksmiths, born in fire, keepers of fire, were magicians everywhere in the Sahara. The Rashaida, the Bedouin with whom they’d stayed, the group Robert Hall was studying, avoided blacksmiths, but Tristan had needed magic.

For months, Dru had lived with the women and children, in their section of the tent, by the hearth, and learned to spin goat’s hair and cotton. But when Tristan returned, she’d refused to leave him, had slept beside his cot in the tent Robert Hall had pitched for him. And when Tristan was lucid, she’d asked, Why didn’t you take me with you? Whatever you do to you, you do to me.

I’m a man. You’re a girl.

They were twelve. Just.

The Rashaida, Bedouin devout in their faith, had taught her to pray, differently than the Sunday-school teacher in Nantucket had. She forgot the “Our Father” and memorized the words and syllables of salaat, Muslim prayer. The Rashaida children learned no formal prayer until they were fifteen, but Dru had heard the moment-to-moment acknowledgment of the constant presence and power and greater plan of Allah. Their prayers made great sense in the desert. Where, sometimes, nothing else did.

Keziah made some sound, and Dru glanced behind her. Her friend raced to her on the brick sidewalk. Sandalwood and jasmine from her auburn hair filled Dru’s nostrils. Her look said, again, why she’d never asked about the photos in the tabloids, never said, My cousin Ben? for he was the son of Keziah’s uncle, her mother’s brother Robert Hall. Her look explained why she’d never said, The two of you are lovers? Or asked why Ben was missing from the funeral. Their friendship trusted without asking. Each trusted that the other was essentially good. Keziah rested her head against Dru’s.

“Thank you,” said Dru. There was no appropriate word for the situation. Guilt whispered in one ear; sin stank in one nostril. The other ear heard the white wing-beat of innocence, while the memory of chaste and tender blushes filled her senses. Every awkwardness had aroused her. And him, as well.

The truth lay hidden under cloak and veil and downcast lids, under his clothing and hers, in the deepest recesses of their beings, and it twisted through the ambiguity of her mourning like a thread of the wrong color.

She was relieved and sorry when Keziah turned to Oceania. “We’ll help you. You can teach us sign language.”

Tristan turned, tall and cold, like a judge at a witch trial. “I didn’t ask you.”

Hatred poured between them.

Dru ignored it, had never wanted to understand it. Instead, she replayed the last of the two births she’d attended during her marriage. Crammed in the tiny head of the converted minesweeper, her friends’ research vessel. Ship birth, home birth. The shower steaming into the room. She’d sat on the toilet seat, the newborn lying face-down on her legs and trying to cough, trying so hard, dear baby. Darling precious baby. Dru had felt no elation in victory, no faith inspired by the happy outcome, the only bearable outcome. Rather, a ball of sickness had formed in her stomach and transformed to anger—at herself, for agreeing to a birth in those conditions. Yes, there had been a third birth, one more birth since then, in Mali, with no hospital nearby. Again. But Dru had only observed, as a woman and honored guest, studying the technique of the traditional midwife, the important role of the mother’s mother and kin. During transition, she’d walked away, to return as the head emerged. She’d crouched nearby while the marabout, a holy woman, thrust a knife deep in the sand near the newborn’s head to protect her from evil spirits. Later, when mother and child were secluded, the marabout had given Dru an amulet made for her. Cowrie shells on leather. That was months ago…. When the baby project with Omar—without Omar—had begun.

Now, there was Oceania, and it was Tristan who’d asked Dru to attend the birth. I can’t.

I won’t.

But Keziah would be there. The hospital was close. And Oceania was the woman Dru had seen in Gloucester. With the man who could be…She will tell me. She can write the answer. She can tell me who he was, who was that man.

Her father’s ghost.

His double.

He’s alive. He can come home.

The daydream took her mind to a gentler place. Far from what she’d done with Ben, from the warmth in her heart made repulsive by grief. To a miracle that might be, a reunion with her father—instead of everything that was.

THE RECEPTION WAS AT OMAR’S—Dru’s—house on Orange Street, two doors from a more ornate Greek Revival where Dru’s mother, Joanna, lived with Tristan’s daughter, and sometimes Tristan. That home, the Tobias Haverford House, was number six on the Orange Street tour led by the historical society. Omar’s and Dru’s house was never toured, though for W and Town & Country, they had been photographed in the garden, the sighthounds at their feet.

The Azawakhs, Femi and Ehder, greeted the funeral guests. Mitch, Dru’s driver, kept the sand-colored bitch from lunging at strangers and the blue brindle from putting his forepaws on the shoulders of friends, Keziah in particular and Omar’s fund manager, Roger. Mitch introduced the brindle, putting the accent on the last syllable. “His name is Ehder. It’s a Tuareg word. It means Eagle.” And—less patient—”Femi.”

More people entered the Federal-Greek Revival than had the cemetery. A few more friends, family and servants. They stood on the original wide pine floor planks. The boards were washed to a light tan, flooding the rooms with their bareness, celebrating the modern Danish furniture that had been Omar’s passion. Previous owners had sold off the antiques, a story Dru had lived herself, after her father’s boat went down, as her mother struggled to keep their home. An oriental end table for groceries and electricity. Within two years, Joanna had been forced to sell the Tobias Haverford House. Dru had ransomed it back after her marriage, returning it to her mother.

Omar had been generous.

In their own house, he’d given her a spacious second-floor bedroom to use as she wished. Despite his unspoken censure, she’d created a studio. A Bose stereo system, a view of the harbor, luxurious Indian pillows, a Berber rug from Morocco and room to dance. In a sea chest, she collected instruments. The ‘ud, the qanun, like a zither, a nay—a reed flute—the darbukkah, the hand drum shaped like a vase, the rababah, played with a horsehair bow. The double naqqarat, kettledrums, in one corner. Silk and cotton wall-hangings, harem images. A precious miniature of her ancestor, Nudar, in a dark, possibly indigo, headdress and silver necklace.

You’re playing at things you know nothing about, Omar had said of her singing and dancing.

Tell me.

He’d become silent. And she’d imagined a little boy helping to bury the bodies of his loved ones, who’d been killed by tanks. There might have been limbs detached—her imagination saw the blood and the wounds. The trauma.

After that conversation, she had never once sung or danced while Omar was home, nor painted her skin with henna. But she had danced when he was gone, and she read even more assiduously of desert peoples and their traditions. She did this for two reasons. It was part of being a Haverford, this studying and collecting. The Nantucket museum held scores of treasures gathered from abroad by her seafaring ancestors. Tobias Haverford had brought home the dearest prize—his wife. But also, in the books she read, the academic domentaries she watched, Dru searched for Omar, for some key inside him she couldn’t reach, something to explain the contradictions. Something more fathomable than the indelible scars of war.

She had not found it. Now she was left with the freedom to dance whenever she liked, to spend her life dancing and singing.

She did not feel like dancing.

But at Omar’s wake, women gathered in her studio. Dru and her mother and Keziah and hers. The two little girls. The pregnant woman, Oceania, whom Dru had coaxed from her brother’s side, to gain her trust and learn her secrets. Two of the Haverfords, the wealthy branch of the family, from California, speaking ever so often of their—and her—dead cousin, Skye.

Someone hummed softly. Keziah picked up the mizwid, the smaller Algerian equivalent of bagpipes.

The deepest rituals of song and dance, to honor the stages of life.

Joanna took Oceania’s hand. “Come with me, darling.” Removing the pregnant woman from the grieving place.

Keziah’s mother, Mary Mayhew, followed them with her eyes. The door shut. “What’s she going to do? Where’s the father? It’s so hard to give up a baby.”

Or to raise one alone, Dru thought. As Keziah was doing. But she would choose Keziah’s path herself. In any circumstance she could imagine.

Mary shook her head heavily. “So hard to part with one’s child.” Shivering back tears, she embraced Dru. “Oh, darling, I shouldn’t be talking about babies.”

Mary had taught all of them, all the women, to sing and dance and paint their skin with henna. She had taught the spiritual traditions and beliefs behind these customs. Mary had learned from her grandmother, who had learned from her mother. In the 1920s, two Haverford women had traveled to North Africa, seeking their heritage; they were photographed in long skirts on camels in Egypt. The Haverfords clung to a strange past. Their tradition said women’s dance was for women, a ritual between them, part of their power. They hoarded long cotton or silk dresses from Egypt and Palestine with brilliantly embroidered bodices and elegant pleats falling from beneath the yoke, with lace collars. There were dances for all the seasons of life.

Dru caught Keziah’s tune. She knew the Arabic words, because Mary had taught her and Dru had studied the language as an undergraduate. Too, she still remembered bits of Rashaida dialect she’d picked up as a child during those strange desert months in the Sudan. Omar had never complimented her on being the perfect hostess to Arabic men with oil interests or others from the Arab world whom he’d wooed and won and sometimes robbed.

Omar would hate for her to mourn him this way.

It was her way, and each cry for him was also for her father, that almost unbearable loss when she was fourteen.

Down on her knees, angry at herself and at Omar, for the times she had thought unjustly, You have killed me, Omar. Who am I now? She sank into the rug. The numbing tide of the music took her, and she swayed. Her body knew one movement, her upper body forward and back, forth and away. Singing. Moaning.

Joanna slipped back into the room and sat on her heels beside her daughter. Dru loved the touch of her hand, the feel of each line. Joanna had slipped easily from the Velvet Underground to the Haverford ways. Now her daughter mourned with dance, and her mother remembered another, more difficult, loss. She hoped Dru would not have to grieve with the intensity she had when Turk’s boat failed to return, after the waiting, the waiting of a fisherman’s wife. But there were too many similarities.

The worst kind. Oh, my darling Dru.

Oh, sweet Turk. I never meant it.

Keri slipped to the floor with them.

Then one Haverford cousin in Calvin Klein stockings and Chanel.

The other in Armani.

They swayed back and forth and Dru saw Omar’s eyes and wept for the time they’d shared a bed. Too long ago. Months and seasons since they’d embarked on the plan for a baby. Why didn’t I say no? Why didn’t I insist on something different, Omar?

SERGIO OPENED THE DOOR, then pulled it wider. He smiled gently as Ben stepped in out of the biting wind. Sergio was whom he’d come to see, to ask a favor, to ask for clothing from a dead man’s closet. Ben explained why, as a nephew, as someone so close to Omar, and Sergio said, “I will send something to your home later today. It should cause no distress. Rather the contrary. You’re in ’Sconset?”

“Yes. Thanks.” How well-mannered these people were. His tribe and their servants.

The dogs were loose and found Ben. He petted Ehder, whose brown eyes begged for his heart, while Femi caught his shoelaces like a puppy. Ben listened to the ceiling and knew he would not see her.

Better that way.

Standing, he spotted a blond man in the hallway, hands on the top of a door frame, a man too big and rough for this home. He was smiling at a pregnant woman, the only woman. The others must be upstairs, ringing those tambourines, beating the drums, sawing on a one-string box. Knowing Tristan by his scars, Ben felt new amazement that once they’d all been small.

Tristan saw him.

Under the singing and playing and clapping, the people downstairs parted. Roger, the fund manager, squeezed Ben’s shoulder as Ben walked past, intent on Dru’s twin. On Tristan, bound to him as she was.

The pregnant woman pressed her back to the vast hearth, leaving the men to meet.

Tristan cocked a sideways smile. He tried a fragment of Bedouin greeting, shrugged and used profanity instead. His specialty back then. Something different and intentional now.

Ben wished him well.

They listened to the sounds from above.

Tristan was the tallest Haverford in memory and did not offer his hand.

Understandable. “What was your catch?”

“Thirty-four thousand pounds.” Tristan worked his mouth, thoughtful. “We leave again tomorrow. Last trip of the season. Then we’ll fish for lobster down here.” Georges Bank.

“Out of Gloucester?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m heading back real soon. After I kiss my mother, my sister and my little girl goodbye.”

“You still own a boat here?”

“Still paying for it.”

Upstairs, the instruments stopped, and a door opened.

Ben nodded and left, feeling Tristan’s eyes on his back.

Outside, he crossed the stretch of brick that had turned so slick in the rain last Wednesday night, or maybe the dogs had sighted something and tried to run, or maybe Omar had tripped. His bodyguard had said, He went flying. Hit a concrete step.

Tennis shoes pounded the walk, running. Long strides. A hand whirled him around. Discolored, glaring scars. Turquoise irises and sea-black pupils. “Do you love her? Are you in love?”

Time crept by.

If not for the car and the cameras, Tristan would have killed him. A certainty. Instead, a clicking and whirring caught the swordfish captain breathing hard and the tall, dark journalist distant and removed. Protecting his sources and his story. Unafraid.

The next day, the caretaker of the cemetery found a heavy stone at the head of Omar Hall’s grave and another at the foot. An Armani suit that had belonged to the deceased lay over the grave, upon the earth, that someone less fortunate might take it.

He had been buried as a Bedouin at last.

TROOPING DOWN the spiral stairs, wooden stairs, one of the Haverfords, Anne in Chanel, asked Dru, “Have you seen the Blades? Didn’t you deliver their babies?”

Natural curiosity. Skye had died, and her widower, David Blade, had remarried. Dru had attended the births of his daughters. At sea. A sea the shade of green in the amniotic fluid that had spilled from Rika’s bag of waters, had poured out as her head was born. “Yes.” Rage—or something like it—flushing her. She wouldn’t discuss Rika Blade’s birth.

Why did I agree to help Oceania? What kind of midwife am I to agree to a birth I don’t want to do?

“I guess deaths in this family always make me think of her. Skye.”

Too warm in the stairwell. Should turn down the heat. All the bodies.

“Didn’t you go to Africa with Skye? And stay with Ben and his father?” The name slipped in so casually, with no extra emphasis. Though everyone knew. About her and Ben. “Something happened. No one would ever say. How did Tristan get those scars?”

“He chose them. He should tell you. In the desert, things always happen. Many things happened.” And changed the course of Dru’s life, every choice she made with a man. “I miss Skye.” But her sick warmth intensified, and she pressed Anne’s hand and went away, hurried through the house and out to the garden to hide between the blue spruce and the pine, to crouch there in her heels, with her head in her hands, until Ehder, the blue brindle dog, came to kiss her, to sit nobly, knowing Omar was dead.

LATER THAT DAY, Tristan returned to Gloucester—and to sea.

Oceania and the paparazzi stayed.

Dru and Oceania ate dinner in the room where she’d listened to Omar philosophize through hundreds of perfectly prepared meals, where she’d helped entertain his guests. Afterward, Dru showed Oceania to her room. She brought a photograph, a writing tablet and pen. Oceania touched the nubby bedspread, old-fashioned and simple and fine. The room was open and white, like the others. Spare.

As Dru sat on the bed, too, Femi followed her in and sniffed at Oceania’s sweatpants and the huge sweater covering her belly. Oceania petted the sand-colored dog and bent for a kiss. Dru met her eyes. “Tell me if you want her to leave.”

The pregnant woman shook her head of dreadlocks, burnished by the sun.

“I want to ask you some things.” Dru wrote her first question. For the Baby: What are your plans?

Oceania’s script was small, upright, meticulous. I will keep my baby.

Do you have a place to go?

Yes. I can get there. No worries.

The rustling exchange of paper.

Wouldn’t you prefer to have your baby in the hospital? Don’t worry about the expense. They will cover you.

Oceania stared. She shook her head violently. Scrawled You said you would do it. Here!

Dru’s throat dried up. Almost four hundred births as primary attendant. Then…Omar. The Blades’ babies at sea and another birth, the birth from which she’d fled. Holding back the fullness in her throat. What she’d left behind. Maybe for the better. She wrote, I am a certified nurse-midwife with an MS in Nurse-Midwifery. Hand shaking, she added, I saw you at Gloucester Marine Railways with this man. And showed the photo.

Oceania was slow to take it. Short nails on those brown hands, on the fingers that gripped the pen. Hesitation. Who is he? Their hands touched, warm, as she thrust the pen back to Dru.

Oceania would lie about this. Dru saw it, felt it.

She wrote, My father.

Oceania’s lips opened, then closed. She wrote, and the dog’s ears twitched at the sound of pen on paper. Not the same person. Like, but not same. Tom Adams takes cod from Bedford, Nova Scotia. I’m from there. He’s family. I’m going back.

The bottom of the sheet.

The end of Dru’s questions.

Was it her imagination that Oceania had lied?

As Ehder, the blue dog, came in and sniffed the two women, Dru studied the photo. Wrote one last comment in a spot of white. I miss him. She ripped out the page and turned it over, furious now. His boat sank on Georges Bank, they think. In 1983. I was 14. I loved him. T. loved him. He taught us to maintain the boat. We helped with the catch. I want him back. She was wild, wanting Omar, too. Wanting someone else even more, despite everything the wanting made her feel. Those months that she’d traveled, searching for the right father for Omar’s child, were friendless months. Finally, she’d made one friend.

She wanted that friend now, more than she wanted her dead husband, whose wishes had confused her. Who had wished her to make love with another man, who had hit upon that method for them, for her and Omar, to have a child.

Oceania contemplated a tiny watercolor on the wall, a fisherman hauling in a net of squirming fish, no long lines or drift nets. With her tablet and photo, Dru stepped around to meet her eyes. “Good night.”

Outside the door, she trembled, nearly certain.

The man with Oceania had been her father.

THE CARETAKER CALLED before eight o’clock the next morning. Sergio told her gently about the grave, and she nodded, hugging herself, and retreated to her bedroom. Knowing Sergio must have given him the suit.

He was on island.

She stared from her windows, hoping not to see him.

Hating herself for hoping she would.

DANIEL MAYHEW, Keziah’s father, had handled most of Omar’s domestic legal affairs for twenty years. He was the executor of the will, and he phoned Dru in the morning two days after the funeral. “Would it be possible for you to come down to my office at, say, eleven?”

She blinked at her gray reflection in the gilded bedroom mirror. “You can’t come here?” Never, never, had they gone to Daniel’s office. Reasons for the change occurred to her. None made sense. Even if Omar had given everything he owned to charity, except for a box of tissues for her, why should…? There was no need for a dramatic reading of the will. Did people even do that anymore? Executors simply notified the beneficiaries. And Omar’s will was in a trust. No probate, no courts, no publicity.

“If another time would be better…” Daniel cleared his throat.

The police chief, who had liked Omar, had finally dispersed the paparazzi, escorting them off-island. Nantucket was quiet, its aim to still the passing of time. Its cobblestone streets and gaslight street lamps clung to a bygone civility. Paparazzi were unwelcome.

Still, Mitch should drive her. It was one thing she’d loved about being married to Omar. That she was always guarded. In some way. Even when she’d thought no one was there. Can’t think about it, can’t. Only think about Oceania and her baby. Not just get them the things they need. Must follow her when she leaves, can hire someone to do it, in case that man really is…

“I’ll be there.” Her voice dragged, and she heard in it not only the grief of a widow but the assurance of an heiress.

THE OFFICE WAS on Main Street, with a bicycle locked to a gaslight-style street lamp outside. As Mitch pulled the Mercedes to the curb, Dru rubbed Ehder’s silky fur and kissed his face. Femi next.

When Mitch came around to get her door, she took the dogs’ leads, braced their bodies to keep them from leaping out first.

Her driver smiled. “Want me to walk them?”

She’d planned to take them inside, a response to being asked to come to the office. But it really was rude. And presumptuous. What had happened to her? “Thank you.” Fingers wrapped around each dog’s collar, Dru stepped out, then let them follow. “Ehder, sit.” Lifting her hand, signalling him. “Sit. Femi.” She worked the dogs, ignoring her watch, before handing the leads to Mitch.

Ornate iron railings flanked the steps of the law office. She wore low heels and a dark gray suit designed for her. The silk lining slid against her thighs, smooth as the light makeup on her skin. Soon she’d return home and wear the face she wanted. At home, she’d make sure Oceania and the baby had everything they needed for the birth and afterward. Nice things. She would care for the mother, then lie in bed and gaze into her soul at what she’d done and decide how bad it was.

The door chime tinkled as she entered.

The receptionist had already reached Daniel’s walnut door. She knocked discreetly before opening it. “Mrs. Hall is here.”

He’s with someone.

Her stomach jumped. What now?

Daniel guided her inside and closed the door after her. And there they were. Three. Tabloids would give tens of thousands for this picture, as they had for photos of Dru Haverford Hall in Gloucester, leaning toward, submitting to, so obviously wanting this man.

Her husband’s nephew and her own cousin.

His presence could only be some retribution beyond her ken. Her heart began the stages of breaking. Exactly what she deserved. “Hi, Ben.”




CHAPTER TWO


From 1978 to 1981, my father and I lived in the Sudan, between the ‘Atbara and Gash rivers, with a group of Rashaida, nomadic Bedouins whose ancestors had crossed the Red Sea from Arabia in the nineteenth century. With our guests, our cousins, we set out in our Land Cruiser to rejoin them. The vehicle had no mirrors and no left rear window. Desert sand, which is dust, had collected several inches thick in parts of the back. The wind and rain came in and moulded a small desert. Skye had brought her own mirror—two—but she didn’t like the sand or wind or wearing long pants and long sleeves in the heat. “What do you mean this isn’t hot? Was that a joke?” As the sun fell on the primitive track leading southwest from Kassala, I saw the dust rise, as it does in the desert, back-lit by sun, like steam swirling off a hot pool. Minutes passed before we met the other vehicle, a faded green Land Rover, and stopped to converse with the Americans inside, one of whom took out an Egyptian-made assault rifle and aimed it at my father. “A fall cannot occur without potential energy.”

—Ben, recollections of an early fall

Gloucester, Massachusetts

One week earlier

October 16

SOMETIMES, WHEN SHE was waiting—for food or visa stamps or bureaucracy at border crossings—Dru counted days. She had left her husband in Nantucket to fly to New York, then Paris, and on to Bamako, Mali, 218 days earlier. Between that day and this, she and Omar had spent thirteen days and eight nights together.

She had decided to tell someone.

Everything.

Tristan. She could only tell her twin. She couldn’t tell Keziah. Keziah would have an opinion about what Dru had agreed to do for Omar, for both of them. Tristan might have an opinion, too, but it would be like hers, as though they owned the same head.

In their language, he might say, Surfside, which meant the apartment where they’d lived with their mother after the Tobias Haverford House was sold; Surfside meant better than a tent and worse than a boat. Here in Gloucester, Dru would jump on his back like a kid. Here, no one knew the person under the faded blue, almost gray, sweatshirt hood, behind gas station sunglasses, her brother’s cast-off chinos cinched at her waist with a canvas belt.

But the Sarah Lynnda wasn’t in port, nor her captain. Not for another week.

Dru would wait. Life had resigned her to watching the sea, knowing that fishing killed more men than any other job. A solemn fatalism prevailed.

Still, she loved Gloucester, the locals, the dingy Inner Harbor. She watched chain and gears haul a boat, an elderly dragger, up the railway and down through the brick archways to a subterranean pit. A cup of coffee warmed her hand, steamed in the air. A couple came from the docks. No. A man and his grown daughter, a white woman with dreadlocks. Pregnant and carrying in front, the baby already dropped.

Dru refused these thoughts, chose others. What would it be like never to comb her hair? She imagined charity auctions, benefit balls, state dinners…. Yes, yes. Her reverie broke. The man. She studied his face, the fall of his gray hair. His cowlick. Just a ghost, a doppelgänger.

But Dru walked closer, could not help it. Because of the cowlick. His hair riding up just that way on the right side of his forehead, his bangs drooping on the other side. She had to know that it was an illusion.

Not.

Not.

He hugged the young woman, who turned and flashed him a peace sign. They hurried off in opposite directions. He went toward the docks. Dru lost sight of him behind a truck.

She searched frantically. Was it him? Did I really see him?

But the man was gone.

She landed in the present, in the facts of her life that remained the same even under a bleak sky, beside a bar with a barn-red exterior. The fact that she must go home sometime. What to tell Omar. What to say to Omar. What to feel toward Omar. What to ask Omar. Dru pushed back her hood. The plan was over. She had scrapped it. It was no more.

No longer would she wander the world searching for the Appropriate Man. She’d made up that name for him. She couldn’t call him the perfect man or the right man. Omar was those. She’d wanted Omar’s baby. That’s all I have to tell him. Again.

When her father’s boat was lost, she’d learned the nature of expectations. A baby was not a right. Period.

She held her hand to her forehead. Did she value her marriage to a man who’d suggested she have sexual intercourse with someone else in order to conceive a child? It was because of that bicycle accident in Utah, that terrible fall. At first, she’d accepted Omar’s plan, knowing she should feel gratitude. She’d planned her quest. She’d gone. First to a place where she’d meet no one but the others on her guided tour. Seeking the notoriously inaccessible. Tumbuktu.

On the Niger riverboat, packed by class with desperate humans, Dru—desperate in her own way—had admitted that she hadn’t come to find a man but for other reasons. She’d come in search of the Tuareg. She believed Nudar had been one of those nomads. And while her group camped among the Tuaregs of the Niger, a woman went into labor. Dru knew no Tamashek, but enough French to say more than sage femme. Yet Rika’s birth at sea had returned. With anger. Why must Raisha, the Tuareg mother, have no option but childbirth in a skin tent? Dru touched the cowrie-shell fertility pendant that hung beneath her shirt. The marabout had said, You must see that you’re afraid. No, Dru wasn’t afraid to practice midwifery. But her reasons for giving it up—the paparazzi, such rude intrusiveness, the lack of privacy in the life of Dru Haverford Hall—would be incomprehensible to the marabout. Dru hadn’t dared say, My family fascinates Americans because we appear unlucky. And I fascinate them because my husband is richer than all the rich men in West Africa put together. She couldn’t hope to make a woman who’d never traveled further than Bamako understand. She hadn’t stopped practicing because of meconium in Rika’s bag of waters. Despite a master’s in nurse-midwifery and 400 births, her own family’s notoriety and Omar’s wealth were enough to keep Dru from midwifery.

From Timbuktu, she’d rushed home to find Omar absent. He couldn’t get away from Curaçao, must fly directly to Hong Kong.

Dru had left again, taking the dogs. To meet a series of men, a long line of men, and she’d ended up fiddling with her earrings or her hair or trying not to yawn. Then Key West and that bar…The carpenter she’d thought was cute reeked of Cuervo and they had nothing in common, and he kept talking about her body and how he liked her hips, how she wasn’t “a stick” and he liked a woman with some meat on her. Meat. She’d also worried that he was unintelligent, then hated herself for her prejudice. But she was selecting a father for her and Omar’s child!

Back to Nantucket—Omar for one awkward night, when she’d decided she knew what a condom felt like to a man because some invisible barrier had covered her senses, numbing her utterly. If you love me, she’d asked, how can you let me sleep with another man?

With reluctance. Because I love you.

He’d left in the morning on business. She’d said goodbye to the dogs and flown to Europe. A month in Paris, two in Scandinavia, sightseeing. Emotions absent. Back to Africa. Cairo and Aswan.

Morocco was ghastly, with all the Europeans in Arab dress. One man, a software CEO, had worn jeans and a canvas shirt, his hair in a ponytail. It was so close to completion, almost settled, and she couldn’t. Couldn’t begin to tell him the plan, couldn’t go to bed with him. He wasn’t her husband. That was the problem.

She didn’t want to do it.

She would tell Omar so. She was set to meet him in Nantucket soon—to stay—but first she needed this. To see Tristan. Have a beer and—

“Hi.”

She spun, the gears of the railway looming over her, high above. The cup fell, coffee running down the concrete.

“Sorry,” he said, folding the cup away in his pocket.

Him.

She had seen this man two months ago, at the camel market in Daraw, talking to a Rashaida sheikh. In Arabic. For Dru, in her circumstances, he’d been impossible to ignore. As now.

His hair was black, his build athletic. He wore a navy shell, thicker than a windbreaker. Brown eyes, almost black.

Nerves tingling, she backed away. Warm. Alert.

He stabbed his hands into his pockets. “I’m Ben Hall, your cousin.”

The Sudan stormed her senses, blasting memories.

“Omar asked me to look after you these past few months.” Sea-cold drowned the Sahara heat. A passing fisherman glanced at them, and she didn’t see. Look after her… He’d been following her? To watch her try to pick up a sperm donor?

And on the Niger…

No, it was impossible. Dru tossed her head back. “So where have you been?”

Whiskers coming through on his lean cheeks. “With you since New York, Paris, Bamako…” He closed his lips on Timbuktu. “We’ve been to Cape Hatteras and Key West and Greenwich—”

She held up her hand, stopping the recitation. Forget the problems of a woman traveling alone in Muslim countries. Greenwich had been a mistake, much too close to home. In her recklessness, she’d approached a lone and handsome man in the bar at the yacht club and said, I’m horny. I want to get laid. His mouth had tilted up on one side while he checked her out. Then he’d smiled tautly and edged away.

She’d realized she’d wanted him to, had said so with every word to the contrary.

Omar had provided a witness to her adventures, the one thing he’d promised not to do! She’d told him she couldn’t bear to have a bodyguard. Not for this.

She’d married him because she would have a bodyguard.

She’d married him for many reasons. And loved him because he was safe. And kept her safe.

Dru wasn’t going to ask Ben all he’d seen. “Well, your job is over, cousin.”

“You don’t remember me.”

“I do. How could anyone forget?” She shifted deliberately from the allusion to their past and what had happened in the Sudan. Everything that had happened. “My husband calls you ‘our young sheikh.”’

His mouth slanted.

Of course, that was an inherited title, wasn’t it?

“Maybe he thinks your father was a sheikh.” Flippant. Robert Hall was as unforgettable as the Sudan. And dead less than two years. “I’m sorry for your loss. Truly. And goodbye.”

He fell in step beside her. Faded jeans and running shoes. “I’ll stick close. Part of the job description.”

“I’ll bet talking to me wasn’t. It never is.” He was tall. Looking out for her. Maybe what bothered her was his face.

This unforgiving gray light had nothing to forgive in him.

A hot flush went through her, a stupid pheromone reaction.

She was scared. Scared.

The Sudan. The boy he’d been sometimes appeared in her dreams, although never in her nightmares of abduction.

And never as a man.

Comfort came because he was beside her. Comfort. But heat spread at the juncture of her legs. Flushing. Riding through her.

It was too stupid and too impossible. Forget it, Dru, she muttered, even as she calculated how distantly they were related, the same consanguinity of Keziah, too far to mention. He was handsome. He resembled Omar slightly—dark eyes, oak skin, black hair. But the jaw was different, the long rugged lines of his face, and the aloofness that could turn wholly present in a moment with the sorcery of an interviewer, a seeker of truth. He’s sexy. Why did Omar send someone so sexy?

Why had Omar sent Ben?

Brown eyes fixed on her, while wind whipped her hair in front of her and one cool drop, wetness, hit her wrist. Then another. Rain.

She turned, but his hand caught her arm, bringing her around. The warmth through her sweatshirt made her shiver. Pulling away, she saw that his chin was hard, his eyes piercing. He kissed her mouth.

Dru put her hands up and shoved.

Her palms had barely connected with his chest when she flew backward. He caught her. Other than that, he hadn’t moved at all.

“Don’t,” she said. She was glad of her shoes, trail shoes for running the dogs on gravel, because she ran through the moisture and the rain and the smell of fish, good and bad, and the smell of this centuries-old port. She ran, wondering if Omar had told Ben to try this as a last resort. Omar, who had avoided meetings with her, the days—and nights—they’d promised to spend together. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. Wouldn’t avoid her. Wouldn’t want her to choose Ben, his own nephew.

She ran behind buildings and found an alley and hurdled its fish scales and grease, sprinting until she reached the docks again. Alone, unseen, she wandered until dark, searching for the gray-haired man with the beak nose and her blue eyes and Tristan’s hollow cheeks and the cowlick on the right side. The man she believed, in the wetness rising from the sea, was her father. Her father, who had somehow never died.

EARLY IN HER MARRIAGE, Dru had fallen in love with anonymity. She liked to travel, to be on the move. She found a way to be unknown and close to the memories she loved, to her twin’s existence, to her father’s grave. To the ocean. In port cities, she bought boats with Omar’s money and registered them to her loved ones. Keziah’s Sunshine Daydream hailed from Portland, Maine. Her mother’s Hot Babe was berthed in Key West. Tristan’s trawler, Cup of Gold, in Gloucester. And so on. The boats floated but did not always run. They were low on conveniences. Floating hovels. They were refuge. Her hostels and hotels.

When darkness came, she returned to the thirty-foot trawler. Somewhere, Ben Hall, journalist and trained observer, must be watching. But not for a story. She knew better, knew the quality of her family’s ties. Still—I don’t want to be followed. Why hadn’t she ordered him to stop?

Because he was Omar’s employee.

Below deck in the trawler Cup of Gold, she cooked the simplest of meals, ate and wished for a phone. She’d have to walk to the pay phone to call Omar. 53 telephone conversations. 311 calls.

She washed dishes.

Yes, she must walk, in the dark, to call her husband.

312.

She worked up to it as she dressed. A thick sweater, Nantucket wool. A wool cap that had been her father’s, moth holes mended with her own hands. Her wet trail shoes, in case she had to run. Water licked the boat. Dru hugged herself and slipped out of the cabin into the wet cold and the silver-lit night. Security lights. Snow air.

“It occurred to me a few times that I should give you some pointers.”

Dru banged her shoulder on the door frame. She locked the cabin door behind her. She liked him no better as a shadow. “Do you need some pointers? Let’s see, in Arabic, it’s ‘Ma’assalama.’ In Tamashek, it’s ‘Harsad.’ In English, we say goodbye.”

He shifted on the aft seat. “Let me start over.”

“You could leave. That would be a start. Of the end.”

“I had an idea that if you were set on this plan Omar told me about, I could—”

“Procure? Is that the word you’re looking for?” What was it about harbors that made everything echo?

He cleared his throat. “Help. Was the word.”

In the milk-black light, misty and heavy, Dru raked his jaw with her eyes. I want my husband. I want to have Omar’s baby, and it’s impossible, and maybe he’s become indifferent to me because of this, our infertility. I’m not going to discuss it with Ben Hall. She must get to a phone and hear Omar’s voice, his love for her. She must go home. Maybe before the Sarah Lynnda docked with thousands of pounds of swordfish in her hold.

Dru bundled her heavy sweater about her.

“Want to share a bottle of wine?”

Beside him in a paper bag. Big enough for glasses, too. The sea rolled beneath them, lifting the boats and the dock, everything singing. “Why?”

“Because, through the medium of conversation, you may find me irresistible.”

Wood and floatation bending and straining, stays pinging masts. A fish jumped nearby, invisible.

“I find my husband irresistible. And you are one of his employees.” She had never spoken to anyone this way. Family, no less. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

“You know, twenty years ago, in a Rashaida camp, besides failing to conceal your—”

“Shut up. We were children. And, yes, I had a crush on you.”

“Betrothed is the word. Ignoring our interesting child marriage, of course.”

“What marriage?” She snorted. “And the engagement was conditional at best. The bride price you offered was paltry. An intentional insult.” But her eyes steamed. Children bickering in the aftermath of trauma. Their innocence blocking out what they’d seen and heard. She closed her eyes.

“When Haamda told our fortunes before—”

She cut him off. “Who? I don’t remember.” He was courteous not to take her bride-price remark further, not to follow it up with an allusion to Omar’s wealth. Especially tonight when Dru wore her watch—but not her rings. She would put them on when she returned from the phone. “For your information, I won’t be looking for any more men or meeting them. Except my brother, if he comes in soon.”

She listened to the harbor.

He watched her. “That leaves me.”

Him? She moved closer, so he could hear her, and sat on a wet aluminum chest. “No. My husband has hired you, perhaps as a last resort. He probably finds you trustworthy, sufficiently intelligent and adequately attractive. Also, you live a reckless life in dangerous locations and are likely to die prematurely, not that anyone wishes it. You resemble him faintly, even with no blood relationship, and we’ll probably never see much of you. The fact that you’re family is another plus.” She paused, not looking at him. “Our family has a genetic predisposition for dissembling. Even, I imagine, the journalists. Especially them.”

Dru met his gaze. Poets recorded these echoes of the eyes.

“If you’ll give me your keys and direct me to a corkscrew, I’ll open the wine. Don’t make me drink it alone.”

She stretched out a leg to dig in the pockets of her jeans. The hand that took the keys from hers was a strong, lean shadow. His movement past was athletic darkness, muscle unseen.

Dru shivered. No thoughts. Nothing to think about. Just some wine after dinner with a man who obviously wasn’t much of a drinker, living as he did in North Africa and the Middle East, sometimes crossing down to Mali or Niger for a story. As much a nomad as his father, Robert Hall.

He brought the bottle and glasses to the deck. “It’s warmer below.”

“And cleaner up here.”

It was a merlot, poured by those strong, lean hands. Smooth, olive brown, she saw. The wine was good.

She didn’t thank him.

“Omar,” he said, “never suggested that I should make love with you.”

Her toes were cold, and she wiggled them in her wool socks and running shoes. Omar seldom used that expression, found other ways to speak of intimacy. She missed Omar deliberately, missed his intelligence. She remembered their first year together, how he’d begun to explain finance to her, explained it in philosophical terms all his own. The tutelage had never ceased. He understood the sciences—and human nature. His were the genes she wanted to reproduce.

But no chance. His fall had stolen the chance of their conceiving together. It had happened on their honeymoon, while bicycling in Utah’s canyonlands on their honeymoon, both of them impressed by how fit he was at sixty-one. They hadn’t known that the fall had rendered him sterile, although they’d wondered. And discovered this year.

Omar’s line had ended.

She said, “Don’t you think that men perceive children as the means to continue their line, while women are more involved in being pregnant and giving birth and nursing and having and raising a child?”

“In love, you mean?”

Lightly deflecting the slur on his gender.

He drifted from her briefly. “And, given your plan, how could Omar be thinking of his line?”

She studied him, sensing an undercurrent. He stared over the stern and the dock at the water, and she studied his profile. A nose that reminded her of his first cousin, Keziah. Black hair. Lean face. Was it his chin that made her think of Omar? He’d gotten a great spill of dark beauty from their mutual ancestor, Nudar, and the Cape Verde sailor her daughter had married.

He’s handsome. He’s very handsome.

Anger curled inside her, stalking her, and pounced. It ran with the wine in her veins. The missed rendezvous with Omar. His near-insistence that she keep looking. The anger shredded her hesitation and doubt, and she turned off her internal calculator, lost the numbers of days since she’d left Nantucket and the other tabulated days with their uncertain meanings. Her line, a matrilineal line. Nudar’s line. Ben Hall was part of that.

“Recommend yourself to me.” No more surreptitiously studying strange men or offering herself in a way meant to bring rejection. On the deck of a defunct trawler, in an old sweater and torn chinos, she became Cleopatra, Mata Hari, Scheherazade, Isis, every powerful woman and goddess of myth and legend and history. She owned her power to seduce, to invite a proposition, to reject it if she chose. To accept what was worthy.

She asked, “Why do you want to do this?”

Ben straightened a little, suddenly farther away. He brought his glass to his lips. Drank half. Held the glass. “I would enjoy it. I think you would, too.”

She winced, felt the expression on her face, the drawing back of her shoulders. “That’s the best you can do?”

He refilled her glass, and she heard the wine fall in. “I’ve known Omar my whole life,” he said. “In some ways—” unsteady “—I’m in his debt. And you want a baby.” He paused. Stopped. Murmured, “Hard to talk about.” A brief silence. “In February, I was in the Aïr Mountains with a Tuareg family I know. The boys are teenagers. They go into the mines and come out covered with uranium dust.”

“Instead of indigo.” She drank wine, and the rich velvet in her mouth and throat nourished the legend inside her, invoking her as a tribal queen who would choose the finest of the young men to continue her line. He’d be ritually sacrificed at the end of the year, and she could choose another…Her fancy drifted away, back to the Tuareg who wore uranium dust instead of indigo.

Ben might not have heard her comment, or maybe he thought it too obvious to mention. The Tuareg were the blue men of the desert, the nomads of the southern Sahara, whose wealth was their robes. No water for soaking huge garments, so they pounded the indigo dye into the cloth until it shimmered, rich purple-blue, and their garments stained their skin as well. Some of them were light as the Berbers. Some black. The women danced the guedra; some called it a trance dance, others a love dance.

She and Keziah had wondered if Nudar could have been one of them, living in Algeria back then, captured by another tribe, sold in Morocco….

“I’d lived there for a year, working,” he said. Quiet. “Two men employed by Omar came to find me. But the government doesn’t like westerners near the mines. I received a message from Agadez, the nearest town. Omar’s men wanted to know could I meet them? I hesitated. Might not be allowed to return. But what Omar wanted had to be important. I went. Met his men at their camp. ‘Omar asks you to please come to him.’ I came to Nantucket, and Omar told me about your plan—”

“His plan.”

“Your mutual plan. He asked me to look out for you.”

She heard the unspoken. This silliness had taken him from where he preferred to be, from an injustice and a tragedy that must be observed and told and, if possible, stopped. The teenage boys should be building their herds—but the Tuareg herds she’d seen were scanty, a few goats. She said, “What qualifies you? To look after me?”

Even in the dark, his embarrassment was there. In silence.

She read his mind, his memory. No. He had been just a boy then, in the Sudan. Surely he didn’t imagine he could have done anything to stop what had happened. Though…

She tried to lose interest and instead pictured him in the desert, not as a boy but a man. She drank more wine and saw him with a press pass, entering countries on journalist’s visas, speaking with foreign soldiers, photographing a revolt. A smile, her mouth misbehaving. “You still haven’t recommended yourself to me.”

“In my spare time, when I’m not interviewing courteous but dangerous men or taking notes on the screams of prisoners undergoing torture, I perform the duties of leading my family of three women and twenty-nine children and teenagers, some of whom have married each other and given me grandchildren. The tents of my family are working laboratories. While I’m away from home, carrying salt across the Sahara in camel caravans, my wives and daughters remain behind in their tents, sewing patches for the hole in the ozone layer. As we cross the desert, pausing only to pray and eat, my sons and I study the problem of cold fusion. I own nineteen camels, six tents and four Humvees. Finally, from living a life of devotion, I have discovered how to make a woman have an orgasm during every sexual encounter.”

“I’m sorry he brought you here for this. It was trivial.” Her father popped into her mind. She’d seen him earlier. Been sure of it. The incident that afternoon seemed far away.

“Babies are never trivial.”

“So I’d better get pregnant and have one, considering that you went to all this trouble?”

“You misunderstand me.”

“Where does sleeping with another man’s wife fit into your piety and devotion?”

His teeth scraped his bottom lip. He reached for his wine-glass and lifted it. “To your keen insight.”

“A heretic?” she murmured.

He gazed at the water, where it faded to black and vanished.

Dru dropped the topic. She loathed being asked about her religious beliefs—or discussing them. But she knew the world in which he moved. Faith was assumed in dress and actions, sometimes ordained by law. She asked another question for the second time, a different way. “What’s in this for you?”

“You really don’t remember our marriage in the Sudan. With the Rashaida.”

“What are you talking about? No, I don’t remember.” She rolled her eyes. “And there’s plenty I do remember. Do I have to ask again?”

What was in it for him.

“Fulfillment of desire.”

“For a one-night stand.” She didn’t know how he’d gotten closer, their knees almost touching.

“For things you can’t imagine.” His black lashes hid his eyes.

She reached for the bottle, but he roused himself and poured. Sipping, she examined the label. A twenty-five dollar bottle of wine. “You want to sleep with Omar’s wife. That must be it.”

“I want you to have my baby.”

Of all the lies, this was the greatest. “It wouldn’t be. Let’s get that out of the way. This is the end of your contact with me, Omar and the baby. This is a one-night stand. For all intents and purposes, I’m using birth control. Nothing will happen. Except sex.”

“Is this your time?”

“Let me paint another picture. I am the queen of a matriarchal society. You will briefly enjoy a position as my consort.”

“Many positions.”

She rolled her eyes again. “Then,” she finished, “you go. Forever. You still haven’t said what’s in this for you.”

“I’m trying to help. Omar is a second father to me.” He paused, expressionless. The wine made her see Ben looking for himself in her eyes. “Omar wants a child,” he said. “He wants you to have a child. I’m a sperm donor.”

“You took two hundred and eighteen days to volunteer.” She hadn’t meant to speak in numbers, had meant to erase them.

He had to notice.

Black eyes like Omar’s, like Nudar’s. Horsetail lashes, long, thick and black. He wasn’t drunk and she was. His eyes spoke. “Sometime I will tell you about those 218 days.”

Her shoulders trembled. The fabric of their pants touched. She wondered who he was inside. She wanted badly to know. And that was dangerous.

He’d abandoned his wine.

“What did you think?” she asked. “What did you think when he told you his plan?”

His head swiveled. Saw her. “That he has more faith in twelve billion dollars than I would.” Faith that money would hold her.

“He has faith in our love.”

No comment.

So be it. If Omar wanted something…She couldn’t guess. But he had decided on this plan in love; she’d agreed for the same reason.

“I would like,” she said, “to see inside your mind. I remember when you could hit an upright twig at thirty yards with a slingshot. In the desert.”

“You remember a lot.” He gazed at her for too long, as though he understood things she didn’t. “What do you think is in my mind?”

She didn’t know. “Maybe…you’re hardened. Maybe…you go to look at difficult things, as you’ve said, and you’re silent and moved but you write what you feel. I read the piece in Harper’s. It wasn’t just journalism or essay-writing. Philosophy, too.”

“And what’s in your mind?”

She stared at the cabin, feeling the lock on her mouth, on the expression of her heart and her body. “It is the mind of Omar Hall’s wife. Hedge funds and hedgerows—on Orange Street, that is.”

“You’re a gardener?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Her throat ached. She was freezing and didn’t care. The wine was good. But it didn’t let them communicate, didn’t let her speak with his soul as she wanted. She would never criticize Omar. You couldn’t know when you were seeing your loved ones for the last time.

Or when you would see them again. She remembered the face of the boy in the Sudan, the eyes in the tent.

He emptied the bottle into her glass. The boat rocked, sang with the others to the sigh of the dock. “You saw the birth of Raisha’s child.”

The Tuareg mother in Mali. She didn’t ask him where he’d been, how he had followed them over the desert, across the Niger, along the river with the nomads, to Timbuktu. Or if he’d seen her flee the tent, drenched in sweat. For 204 days, she’d been in solitary confinement with the truth. Many truths.

“I want to know you.” He paused. “I think we can be friends.”

Her stomach hummed with heat, blood flushing her, seeping, pounding, while her skin reached for the hot quivering vibration. She smelled saltwater, fish, diesel and the scent of a man, carried on his garments. He moved closer on the aluminum locker. Closer.

“Tuareg is an Arabic name,” he said. “The nobles call themselves variations of Imighagh, from their verb iobarch, which means to be free, to be pure, to be independent. All those things.”

She breathed them in. All those things her counted days had come to be about. Tears gathered in her head and hid themselves, exerting pressure she ignored, except to think, I must be a midwife. I can’t be a midwife. I must be free. I’ll never be free. “Do you think Nudar was Tuareg?”

“I doubt it. I want to show you part of how they court. Ideally this would occur in your home, with your parents sleeping nearby. We mustn’t wake them.”

“Can we wake Omar?”

His nose neared hers. “It’s this.”

Her arms on his shoulders, his around her. He didn’t kiss her, and she wanted it. His scent infused her, carried through the damp air. She breathed him; he breathed her. No! No! She wasn’t a woman who did this, who would ever think of doing this. She would walk away from any man who made her consider doing this.

Because this was the moment of choosing whether or not to commit adultery, with her husband’s blessing.

Backing out of the tent, then away from the desert sun, she drank more wine. Wiped her brow under her hat. The wool itched her skin.

He wanted to be friends. It was the only way this could work. More, and she’d be unhappy when she returned to Omar, dissatisfied with him. Less, and she could not trust. She spoke to a friend. “I’m not sure I want to do this. I’m not sure I can.”

He took her empty glass from her. “Breakfast? I’ll shop. And cook.”

Why not? The trawler was private.

Dru tried to read her watch, from Cartier’s, a wedding gift from Omar. Eight-thirty. “I need to phone Omar.” Shaking. Shaking so hard. And not at the prospect of walking to the phone. “You’re family. It might not be…what he wants.”

He showed no reaction. They stood, still shadowed by the canopy. The skin at his throat was dark. Some black chest hairs, where Omar was hairless. “You might think,” he said, “of what you want.”

She released a cable to step down to the dock. But looked back first.

His eyes waited. He knew she might be afraid of the dark. Or, indelibly, of abduction. He would let nothing harm her. With a careless stroke of his gaze, he slayed her fear. His footsteps beside her on the dock were lazy, companionable, the angels of comfort. His warmth reached her through three hundred cubic inches of cold mist.

She could read the blueprint of a kind man.

Briefly, sweeping her hand over a wet and splintered railing, she wished he was cruel. Because she wanted to accept what he offered. And that was reckless.

She stumbled over chewing gum and cigarette butts. Her fears gathered and pressing on her, chanting in the key of doom that she should not. She should not. Dru walked through the chorus, losing his scent somewhere, until she saw the light above the telephone.

She dialed, followed the recorded prompts to enter her card number. Where was Ben? Even under the security lights, she couldn’t find him. He must be near, would not have left her. Privacy. In the cold, under the skeletons and monsters of steel, under a dry-docked leviathan, Dru listened to the phone in Nantucket ring. He won’t be home. Again.

Sergio answered. Then Omar was on the phone.

She felt half-warmth at the sound of his voice. And flatness, distance. Had part of her gone on leave from their marriage? She asked, “Do you really want me to do this?”

His soft laughter reminded her of nights of talk, Omar discussing the stars and the sight of snow on quahog shells and the antiquity of sharks and the intelligence of apes, then slipping past her to philosophy and quantum theory and the history of money and its future and the connections between all these things. “Aren’t you really asking if I don’t want you to do it?” His accent was all Massachusetts. Nantucket. Some people even called him an Islander.

Dru didn’t. She was.

She said, “I’ve met Ben.” Her heart pounded. Was Omar afraid, too? Did he know, had he known all along that she would find Ben attractive? Had he—“Did you ask him to be the donor? Did you plan it, Omar?”

“I asked Ben not to let you see him. But if you want him…”

“You know who I want.”

“That is a gift in my life. In many cultures, love is considered a sickness, something to be avoided. Marrying for love is frowned upon, because love, particularly sexual love, is unstable, and marriage must endure. So, go forth, Dru, if you want to bear a child. If you develop feelings for the man with whom you conceive this child, even for…my nephew, Ben, they will go away when you return to me. The Chinese cure for lovesickness includes a steady regimen of sex with a person other than the desired object.”

“I don’t want to be lovesick. And he’s a family member.”

“It’s nothing. Choose who you want.”

Her fingers grew stiff, icy, around the receiver. “I guess this is how you create a fortune. Taking this kind of risk.”

His voice roughened, a sign of life to her. “I’m sixty-six years old, and you want to make love with my handsome young nephew. This, Dru, is the gamble of my life.”

She could tell him she loved him, promise to always love him and say good night. She should. She was cold. But if she let him go…would it ever be the same? “Is that why you’re doing it? For the risk?”

“I want a baby. With you. And you have been a midwife and aren’t now because of my circumstances, and I won’t be responsible for your never bearing a child of your own.”

Her sigh echoed under the railways. “You aren’t responsible. We could adopt.”

“I want to raise a child who is part of you, Dru.”

“Are you sure you didn’t ask him to do it? As a last resort, if no one else would have me?”

A moment. “The possibility that no one would want you has never crossed my mind. I’m going to Curaçao for a few days. I’ll be hard to reach. If you need anything, please ask Sergio.”

“I love you.” She said it almost desperately.

“And I you. Good night, Dru.”

Not my love, not dearest. He was telling her, Go. Go do it.

“Omar?”

“Yes.”

“Our marriage is a pearl. I feel as though I’ll mar it if I do this thing.”

“A marriage shouldn’t be so frail.”

Really. He was guiltless as a conqueror. “Omar, is our marriage monogamous?”

“Finance is my mistress, Dru. Give me this gift. A child. And, Dru, it’s good to enjoy it.”

She hung up. Heard the water beyond the mist.

“What did he say?”

She jumped.

He leaned against a steel piling, needing a shave, his long lean face ending at that cleft chin.

Her cheeks hardened to thin sheets of ice. “Were you listening?”

“With limited success.”

She strode past him, toward the docks. He followed, his footfalls silent. Without looking, she knew he was there and said, “You think nothing of sleeping with married women?”

“You would be my first. You’re very traditional.”

Was she? “I’m an Islander. I suppose you’re not,” she said. “Traditional.”

No reply.

She walked. Heard her own breath. Never his. The moon appeared through clouds, a paler, more genuine sister of the security light. The dock creaked beneath her feet.

Such a frightening sound, behind and around her—her own breath.

At the trawler, he caught her forearm.

Warmth. Hard grip. Sliding to her hand.

Their fingers touched in darkness. He pulled her to him, close enough to smell, then her breasts against his chest. Omar was broad, with a different kind of power. She touched these new shoulders. Each hand fumbled, jerking slightly, removed from her will. She shouldn’t touch him.

“Is it because you live in the desert?” She tilted back her head. “Have you not had a woman in so long?”

He watched her, reading her.

“Just tell me,” she said. “Have you been traveling with some Oxford scholar or married the daughter of a chief?”

“No chief has offered me a daughter.” He dropped his eyes, raised them. “As to the former—no.”

“You’re a virgin?”

The certainty of his hands denied it. He kissed her forehead.

Omar wants this. Wants me to do this. And Ben wants to help—for Omar.

His lips pressed between her eyebrows and touched the bridge of her nose. They nuzzled like animals, and she felt that stirring beneath his jeans. Strong and warm. His mouth touched hers, gently biting her lower lip.

For Omar?

Ben Hall didn’t need to give his sperm to her and Omar. His wanting money was unlikely. Omar trusted him, and she’d never known a man so cautious with his trust.

Her body settled against that form under his jeans. Wanting. She should ovulate in a day, maybe two.

The deck was damp, the cabin door dewy. She unlocked it, opened it. She should say just the right thing, in just the right tone. But she wished she could tell him she was scared to death.

The sole bowed and bent beneath her weight. The utilitarian table, flipped up and out of the way. Nothing like a stateroom, just slim berths throughout and a wider berth forward of the galley. “That’s it,” she said, under a bare bulb.

The light made them naked, even in their clothes, everything so unreal, especially the stranger touching her lip.

“It doesn’t have to be good,” she said. “For me.”

“Doesn’t your orgasm increase the chance of conception?” Throwing aside his shell. Unbuttoning his plaid wool shirt. T-shirt underneath.

Her legs turned watery. She switched off the light. The boat was dark, except for the geometric patches of blue-gray from the dock lights and the portholes.

“It’s unnecessary.” Squeaking words. “I’m fertile; I’ll ovulate soon. And I’m really not interested in your patented techniques learned on the women of Africa.”

Ghostly blue and black dyed his face. The tilting of his lips was less than a smile. He nudged her toward the narrow berth. A bulkhead beside it had separated, a cheap panel peeling down like banana skin. All smelled damp and old. Only the mattress was new.

“You don’t have any diseases, do you?”

A faint shake of his head. He watched her. “You like me?”

Dru swallowed. “Enough.” She discarded her sweater. “I don’t want you to make love to me. Just sex. I wish I had a turkey baster with me. Why not artificial insemination?”

The hard mattress brought her too close to him.

“I wish I knew,” she said, “what’s in it for you.”

His lips tracked her jaw. His hand held her side, fingers spreading, guiding her down. “I can wait till you figure that out.” His nose near hers.

“It’s so appealing to be wanted as a one-night stand.”

“This is not a one-night stand. You’re coming back to the Sahara with me. My first three wives will be jealous and cruel to you, but you won’t be spending much time with them, anyhow. You and I will make love all day.”

His kiss warmed her lips, parting them. Their legs twined, the teeth of two combs fitting together. His skin swallowed her voice. “We weren’t going to do it…like that.” The words collided, falling on each other, never quite standing up, defeated by coursing blood, mating rites.

He said, “It’s the only way I know.”

Making love.

He was full of lies.

Dru searched her memory. Did Omar ever press his mouth to her as he spoke? Had they ever spoken this way? She was wild at his smell. At hard limbs. At a man her age. Her ears filled with shrieking winds, the sound of desire. It was evil, so cruel, to want anyone but her husband, the only man she’d ever known.

Evil to think, even for a second, It’s never been like this.

Hot shivering.

Permission. Omar had given it.

She sat up, shaking rapidly, jerking in blurred time. Her body had not been hers. Almost. It was now. Mine. Dru despised Omar, then imagined, then believed, she knew what he wanted—for her to know this about herself, to come to the point of refusing his Trojan horse. “Sorry. I can’t.” She scrambled her vibrating, quivering body over Ben’s and put her feet on the floor. Yes. The sole. Standing. Swaying. The hollow tinkling of water on the hull amplified. Unable to speak for trembling. “I w-won’t m-m-make l-l-l-love to anyone b-b-but m-m-my husband.”

He was half up. His powerful body eased out of the berth. She followed his face, but he never rose. He dropped to the warped and peeled linoleum, kneeling, stretching himself toward her on the sole like an unwashed man praying in the desert, not for the end of a sandstorm or for nightfall or shade or a drink of water or five times a day for God, but for goodness.

She had learned posture at the age of four and then how to keep her weight low and her head high, how to put grace in every gesture of her hands, every turn of her head. She had learned the dances of the Berbers and their nomadic relations, the Tuareg, of the Bedouins, of the Indians and Egyptians. There were dances for women and dances for men, dances for weddings, pregnancy and birth, sickness and death.

His dark head was bowed, and she recalled the advice of the Chinese, their remedy for lovesickness. For Omar, she must go home and dance the guedra, not the trance dance but the love dance. And then make love with him.

She did not thank Ben Hall. She said, “You should go.”

Slowly, he rose.

“I’m sorry this happened,” she said.

He nodded, lips tight. Briefly, he spoke in Arabic. He called her sister. He told her he loved her.

He told her goodbye as the Arabs do.

Which was to wish her peace.

THE KNOCKING INTERRUPTED her drowsing. She opened her eyes to light from a day she knew, without looking at the portholes beside her, was gray.

“Dru?”

The pants she’d worn the night before were heaped against the locker. She dragged them on and let her long T-shirt do as a top. Climbed from her berth and crossed the decrepit linoleum in her bare feet. To open the cabin door further and let him in.

She squinted at the object he held up.

And swallowed. “Where did you get that?”

“The hospital. The supermarket doesn’t get their turkey basters for a few weeks.” His cheeks darkened. “I told a nurse that it’s…a home project.”

If he’d blushed like that, no wonder the nurse had parted with the Tomcat catheter.

He murmured, “So…Sabah il-kheyr.” Good morning. “Let’s make a baby.”




CHAPTER THREE


Skye said she wasn’t going anywhere at gunpoint. One of the men, who were mercenaries, yanked my father from our vehicle; my father clutched his arm and chest, crying out, moaning, eyes rolling back. “He’s sick!” I said. They shrugged as he fell, threatening to shoot me when I tried to go to him. I opened my door anyhow, because of the things my father had taught me about the nature of men. The gunman yanked me back into the vehicle by the throat. While I choked and coughed and he started the car, another held a Makarov to Dru’s head. But before we left, the third man turned the green Land Rover and drove over my father’s body.

—Ben, recollections of a fall

Nantucket

One week later

October 23

The office of Daniel Mayhew, Attorney At Law

THE WORDS WERE THERE on the pertinent pages, and Daniel had given each of them a copy to read. After she’d entered the office and Ben had stood, she’d told Daniel that of course they knew each other. Good to see you, to Ben. She couldn’t say his name again.

Now she studied black text on white paper, blurred in the photocopy machine, but not enough to misread “my natural son, the son of my loins, Ben Omar Hall.” And the mention of “other issue…or my wife, Dru-Nudar Haverford Hall, if pregnant at the time of my death…”

She felt Ben’s presence as she felt the sun through the clustered window panes, paneling the maple floor and walnut furniture with light. His knees, in jeans, jutted into the slanting edge of one section, brightly lit. The rest of him was in shadow, beyond the edge of her vision unless she twisted her chair. It couldn’t matter. Daniel would repeat nothing he saw.

Ben waited, eyes on the attorney.

She could pretend, too, pretend it was no surprise. Even though she wanted to demand, Did you know? Did you know you were his son?

Omar had known. Wasn’t that bad enough?

“Tell me if I’m right, Daniel.” Her courtesy was lost, smashed by surprise. “I understand the provisions for Sergio and others. This is what I want clarified. I will receive, in any case, one hundred thousand dollars a year and the Orange Street House. But whatever is in the attic vault, which I never knew existed, and everything else that Omar didn’t give away—we’re talking about a lot—will go to…” It took a long time, seconds, to decide what to call him. She broke her indecision with a sigh. “…Ben, unless I’m pregnant right now. Since he—Omar—and I have had no child up to this point.”

“Yes.”

Her face must look like a strawberry. Daniel knew as well as everyone else, everyone who had seen the tabloids, about her and Ben. Ben would also receive the contents of a safe deposit box and some other things she’d never known her husband owned. Did we need the cloak and dagger, Omar? She held down some high terror that couldn’t come from grief. “How soon must pregnancy be determined?” Her breath sounded coarse, unladylike, heaving like a horse. A tear hung in one eye. Not about money. Oh, maybe that, too. Who cares what they think?

She hated for Ben to see.

She took a handkerchief from her purse. It bore her monogram. Sometimes she’d used Omar’s. Still did, at home. She wiped off her invalidated grief. I want some answers.

“Because of the size of the estate—” Daniel’s eyes rested on her, apologizing “—as soon as an accurate result can be obtained.”

“And if I’m pregnant, he and I split the estate?”

“Correct. And the unknown contents of the vault become yours.”

The provisions were more complex than that. If she relinquished her rights. If he did. A web engineered to manipulate. Or so it seemed.

Beside her, Ben hadn’t moved. Hands on the chair arms. Eyes on Daniel. His face frozen.

Had he known he was adopted—Omar’s natural son? If he did…

Dru choked away her fears. Nothing real but this room. The will. “I suppose I’ll need a test in a medical facility?”

“Promptly.”

She could count. A test might be accurate seven days after conception. Nine to eleven, much better. But they couldn’t have succeeded, even with Ben’s tenacious effort and repeated donations. Her face heated again as she remembered things said, the emotions of an intimacy without touch, without invasion of each other’s sexual privacy, yet throbbing and slippery and quiet with the hunger for friendship. She’d never been closer to a man—brother or lover.

And, all the time, he was Omar’s son.

Who on earth was his mother?

Trouble silenced her curiosity. This new development would reach the papers. The world would watch to see…

If she was pregnant.

She said, “I relinquish my share in that portion of the trust.”

Keziah’s father chuckled sympathetically. “I would advise you strongly against that. But in any case, it’s not that simple. If you’re pregnant, then Ben—” his nephew, too, son of his wife’s brother, one of her brothers “—will receive a smaller portion of the estate in any case.”

Why had Omar done this to her? Confusion pressed in her skull. “Well, I might get a test.” She shrugged. Pretending. Muddled. “It seems unlikely, though.”

Nobody said aloud that she hadn’t been in the same room with Omar for seven weeks before his death. The papers would say it for them.

Had Ben known?

Her molars ground against each other.

She smiled at Daniel and rose. “Well, I have other things going on today.” Folding her copy of the document. Mitch would tag along while she shopped for things for Oceania. At home, they would write more notes. Do you want to tell me about the baby’s father? I want to help however I can. Early that morning, Dru had begun looking into what a deaf mother would need. A father for her child, she’d thought with a half-sob, like any other mom.

A shadow behind her took away the window’s light. “Uncle Dan, is there a room where Dru and I could visit?”

The attorney’s mouth, Keziah’s mouth, opened to get a word out. The word became a drawn-out sound. “Aaaaaahhh. Yes. Yes.” Looking around. “Yes, that’s possible. Ahhhh. Of course. You may use my office. I’ll be in a meeting till one. But, ah, I must caution both of you, absolutely, to surrender no rights regarding this estate. You are both, ah, grieving. This is not the time for rash legal decision-making or, between the two of you, discussion of the estate.”

Dru felt it was the perfect time. “Of course.” She leaned forward and kissed Daniel’s cheek. “Thank you for all your help and compassion. And your good advice.”

Walking past her, Ben saw the attorney out and shut the door.

His scent spilled into her. His woolly sweater, a Harvard cardigan that might be from the fifties and must have been Robert Hall’s, smelled of dry leaves. Dru wondered who had sewn the moth holes with such skill.




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