Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

      “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