style="font-size:15px;"> 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. Just.
The Rashaida, Bedouin devout in their faith, had taught her to pray, differently than the Sunday-school teacher in Nantucket had. She forgot the “Our Father” and memorized the words and syllables of salaat, Muslim prayer. The Rashaida children learned no formal prayer until they were fifteen, but Dru had heard the moment-to-moment acknowledgment of the constant presence and power and greater plan of Allah. Their prayers made great sense in the desert. Where, sometimes, nothing else did.
Keziah made some sound, and Dru glanced behind her. Her friend raced to her on the brick sidewalk. Sandalwood and jasmine from her auburn hair filled Dru’s nostrils. Her look said, again, why she’d never asked about the photos in the tabloids, never said, My cousin Ben? for he was the son of Keziah’s uncle, her mother’s brother Robert Hall. Her look explained why she’d never said, The two of you are lovers? Or asked why Ben was missing from the funeral. Their friendship trusted without asking. Each trusted that the other was essentially good. Keziah rested her head against Dru’s.
“Thank you,” said Dru. There was no appropriate word for the situation. Guilt whispered in one ear; sin stank in one nostril. The other ear heard the white wing-beat of innocence, while the memory of chaste and tender blushes filled her senses. Every awkwardness had aroused her. And him, as well.
The truth lay hidden under cloak and veil and downcast lids, under his clothing and hers, in the deepest recesses of their beings, and it twisted through the ambiguity of her mourning like a thread of the wrong color.
She was relieved and sorry when Keziah turned to Oceania. “We’ll help you. You can teach us sign language.”
Tristan turned, tall and cold, like a judge at a witch trial. “I didn’t ask you.”
Hatred poured between them.
Dru ignored it, had never wanted to understand it. Instead, she replayed the last of the two births she’d attended during her marriage. Crammed in the tiny head of the converted minesweeper, her friends’ research vessel. Ship birth, home birth. The shower steaming into the room. She’d sat on the toilet seat, the newborn lying face-down on her legs and trying to cough, trying so hard, dear baby. Darling precious baby. Dru had felt no elation in victory, no faith inspired by the happy outcome, the only bearable outcome. Rather, a ball of sickness had formed in her stomach and transformed to anger—at herself, for agreeing to a birth in those conditions. Yes, there had been a third birth, one more birth since then, in Mali, with no hospital nearby. Again. But Dru had only observed, as a woman and honored guest, studying the technique of the traditional midwife, the important role of the mother’s mother and kin. During transition, she’d walked away, to return as the head emerged. She’d crouched nearby while the marabout, a holy woman, thrust a knife deep in the sand near the newborn’s head to protect her from evil spirits. Later, when mother and child were secluded, the marabout had given Dru an amulet made for her. Cowrie shells on leather. That was months ago…. When the baby project with Omar—without Omar—had begun.
Now, there was Oceania, and it was Tristan who’d asked Dru to attend the birth. I can’t.
I won’t.
But Keziah would be there. The hospital was close. And Oceania was the woman Dru had seen in Gloucester. With the man who could be…She will tell me. She can write the answer. She can tell me who he was, who was that man.
Her father’s ghost.
His double.
He’s alive. He can come home.
The daydream took her mind to a gentler place. Far from what she’d done with Ben, from the warmth in her heart made repulsive by grief. To a miracle that might be, a reunion with her father—instead of everything that was.
THE RECEPTION WAS AT OMAR’S—Dru’s—house on Orange Street, two doors from a more ornate Greek Revival where Dru’s mother, Joanna, lived with Tristan’s daughter, and sometimes Tristan. That home, the Tobias Haverford House, was number six on the Orange
