Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

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.