Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

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