Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

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,