Forever And A Baby

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 open and white, like the others. Spare.

As Dru sat on the bed, too, Femi followed her in and sniffed at Oceania’s sweatpants and the huge sweater covering her belly. Oceania petted the sand-colored dog and bent for a kiss. Dru met her eyes. “Tell me if you want her to leave.”

The pregnant woman shook her head of dreadlocks, burnished by the sun.

“I want to ask you some things.” Dru wrote her first question. For the Baby: What are your plans?

Oceania’s script was small, upright, meticulous. I will keep my baby.

Do you have a place to go?

Yes. I can get there. No worries.

The rustling exchange of paper.

Wouldn’t you prefer to have your baby in the hospital? Don’t worry about the expense. They will cover you.

Oceania stared. She shook her head violently. Scrawled You said you would do it. Here!

Dru’s throat dried up. Almost four hundred births as primary attendant. Then…Omar. The Blades’ babies at sea and another birth, the birth from which she’d fled. Holding back the fullness in her throat. What she’d left behind. Maybe for the better. She wrote, I am a certified nurse-midwife with an MS in Nurse-Midwifery. Hand shaking, she added, I saw you at Gloucester Marine Railways with this man. And showed the photo.

Oceania was slow to take it. Short nails on those brown hands, on the fingers that gripped the pen. Hesitation. Who is he? Their hands touched, warm, as she thrust the pen back to Dru.

Oceania would lie about this. Dru saw it, felt it.

She wrote, My father.

Oceania’s lips opened, then closed. She wrote, and the dog’s ears twitched at the sound of pen on paper. Not the same person. Like, but not same. Tom Adams takes cod from Bedford, Nova Scotia. I’m from there. He’s family. I’m going back.