Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

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