Simi loved being a mother. Her place in the village was cemented. Loiyan didn’t tease her anymore, and her husband no longer looked worried when he came to her at night. Simi was part of things now—safely protected from the wilderness of a life without a child.
Simi didn’t choose Nalangu’s name, but it sounded like the hand of fate reaching out to give Simi what she’d wanted for so long. Until now, she’d felt like a member of a different tribe herself. Now she and this new person were together, they had each other and that would allow them both to be included. Simi knew Leona watched Simi and the baby together with a sense of relief. Leona’s skin grew pink again, and the hollowness in her eyes filled out. She seemed happy. By the time Nalangu turned one, and it was time to give her a proper name, Simi didn’t ask Leona what she thought. The mother could decide this one, and Simi chose Adia, “gift,” because that was what this child was.
* * *
Later, Simi wondered why the clouds came that particular day, and what it was she’d done to deserve renewed punishment. She was a good person, a good mother to Adia. She took all the necessary steps to ensure that N’gai—God—was satisfied with her. Leona had been going to other manyattas often lately. She also traveled to Nairobi. Simi could sense that her friend’s attachment to the village was waning. Simi was ashamed that the notion of Leona leaving brought her relief. There were times she wondered if her baby would feel more like hers if Leona were gone. The link they had—Leona and Adia—simply through the color of their skin, was too obvious. People outside the village, people who didn’t know, assumed the wrong connection. When Leona was gone, it would be easier.
It was a day like any other, hot and clear and dusty. They needed rain, but they always needed rain. It was a special day, too. The emurata was a glad day for the village, and the moran were gathering. There was no way Simi could have known that Leona’s mothering urge, so long dead, would choose this day to rear its head and strike.
It was past noon, and the sun was flat and hot and stared down at the village with its burning face when suddenly Simi heard Adia’s scream. She recognized her girl’s voice like her own and, with her heart pounding in her chest, she leaped up from where she’d been sitting with some other women and raced across the village. She expected to see a snake or a leopard or some terrible creature hurting her daughter. Instead, she saw Leona dragging her baby—her baby—from the emurata hut. Leona’s face, usually blank, was a riot of clouds like the darkest of rainy seasons. Her eyes were glassy—those of a cursed woman—and they lit upon Adia like flames. Leona’s English was fast and rough and too angry for Simi to grasp completely, but her intention was clear. She was taking Adia away.
Instinctively, like any mother would, Simi reached out to pull her daughter back from the abyss. Adia shouted her name, “Yeyo! Mother!” She clutched at Simi’s hand.
Adia screamed, “Tung’wayeni!” at Leona, “Don’t touch me!”
And the girl tried to wrest her arm from Leona’s grip. Simi saw the terror in her daughter’s eyes and tried to make Leona look at her—she tried to get the American to calm down, to speak in a way Simi could understand.
But when she did, her words echoed Simi’s darkest fear. “Adia, you are my daughter!” Leona said in a cold and measured voice—finally speaking so that Simi could take it in.
“You are mine. You are mine.”
Adia stumbled, and Simi’s muscles fell slack with shock, and her grip released from Adia’s arm. Then the girl was gone. Simi fell to the ground. The other women gathered around her, but she couldn’t answer their questions.
Simi watched her daughter’s anguished face through a screen of dust and then through the smudged window of Leona’s car as it pulled away. As the car grew smaller and smaller, Simi gathered her energy and drew herself up from the ground. She chased after the car, kicking up dust and cutting her feet on the sharp stones. She followed Leona’s car until she couldn’t anymore, and then she fell to earth like a rock. She looked up once to see the tiny car far in the distance, and then, like all the white people she’d seen before, they disappeared.
When the dust died away and the earth beneath her grew cold, Simi lifted her head. The evening was coming, and she could hear the sounds of the village far behind her. The emurata was finished, and the children were bringing the goats and cattle back from their grazing. Something—she couldn’t name the motivation, because every cell inside her wanted to die—forced her to stand and shuffle back through the enclosure and into her house. It was dangerous to be outside the manyatta at night. She could be attacked by a leopard, a lion, and eaten. It was the smallest part of her that pushed her to avoid that by retreating to her home. She bent to enter and fell into her bed. The fire needed tending, but she couldn’t make herself care. Simi’s longing for her daughter came in painful waves that made her feel as if her body was burning on the inside. How could this be real? She was desperate to relive that last moment when she held Adia’s arm and watched as the terrified girl was pulled from her grasp. How could she have let it happen? How could a mother let her child—her only child—be taken? God was right not to bless her body with her own children—she was not fit to be a mother.
Over the next few days, Simi was broken. She could only lie in her bed. The other women—even Loiyan—came into her hut to see how she was. They kept watch, boiled chai in the suferia, and tried, constantly, to make Simi open her mouth to drink, to swallow, to take the small sustenance that the sugar and tea and milk might give her. The women whispered to each other as they watched her. Simi didn’t speak. She couldn’t open her mouth, not to answer the women and not to drink the tea; she could hardly open her eyes.
She remembered the time after Adia’s birth, and how Leona had sunk into herself, barely speaking, barely eating. A thought crossed her mind that this was Adia’s mark—that her mothers were destined to share a kind of darkness. And then she remembered that Adia had been pulled away from her; she was nobody’s mother—not anymore. It was that thought that made her stomach heave, and she leaned over and retched. Because she hadn’t eaten for days, it was nothing but bitter, sticky foam she coughed out. She watched as it disappeared, slowly absorbed into the dirt of the floor. The women in her hut tsked and sucked their teeth.
Late that night, Simi woke up. Her hut was empty. The other women had gone home. That was a relief. Her stomach growled. Her mouth still didn’t want food, but her belly called for it. She stretched her weak legs and slid off the bed. Even though she’d barely sipped water in the last few days, she had a desperate need to urinate. The cattle in the manyatta enclosure lowed softly and shook their great heads as Simi slipped past them. There were fewer than there used to be, Simi noted. The drought was bad again. It seemed the pattern was changing—a year of good rains and hope, followed by several years of dry land and dry skies, starving animals and hungry people. It struck Simi just then that nothing was certain. Not ever. Not even the continuation of the life she’d always lived. More and more Maasai men were abandoning cattle herding and moving to Nairobi to seek work. There were manyattas where no men lived at all, only women and children, all the husbands and sons having left for new opportunities. Everything was changing.
Simi squatted down and felt the relief of emptying her bladder. It felt good to be outside, to breathe the cool night air and look up at the stars. It was a clear night, not one cloud to tease her with the possibility of rain, but none to obscure the universe above her, either. The moon was new. It was a curved edge, as sharp and clean as a scythe. The Maasai myth said that the sun and the moon were married. Olapa, the moon, was short-tempered and, during a fight one day, she wounded her husband. To cover his wound, he began shining more brightly than anything else. To punish his wife, he struck out one of her eyes. Now, Simi thought, as she slowly stood up, her body weak from lack of food, the sun was punishing all of them by shining too hard, never allowing rain clouds to form.
; The moon, the wounded wife, was lucky, Simi thought. She’d only had an eye taken. Simi remembered her mother always said nobody could take an education from her. That was true, but her mother never told her that everything else could be taken; a body part, grazing grasses for the cattle, a way of life and a daughter.
WATER IN A DRY PLACE
Nairobi lay in the highlands, but Narok was on the floor of the Rift Valley, and when Jane’s plane cruised over the valley’s edge and the land fell away in a great crack, she stared out the window and searched for her first glimpse of the elephants. Kenya was red. The terrain was rusty and volcanic—the dust made from layers and layers of ancient lava, dried to a crust and ground down by time. The earth looked like gaunt stretches of skin seen through a magnifying glass—gray-brown and pocked, with the scabby outcroppings of rock and the dried blood of the barely damp riverbeds.
Kenya was new to Jane. Africa was new. Her flight from Washington had come in for its bumpy landing at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi less than twenty-four hours ago, and now she was about to touch down in her new home. Her eyes were raw with fatigue, and her skin felt dry and grimy. She pressed her face to the tiny plane window and tried not to blink. She didn’t want to miss any of this first introduction to her new home. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see. She’d been told that the drought was severe, that all of eastern Africa was drying out, dying. The rivers were low and water was precious.
Jane traced her interest in elephants back to a day at the National Zoo. She was six, and her brother, Lance, was four months old. Her mother had Lance strapped in a front pack, snuggled against her chest. This made her walk slowly under the weight of the baby. Jane wanted to hurry, to run from one animal to another, taking everything in at once. She knew if Lance weren’t there, they would have been able to walk faster, and it made her angry with the baby. Her mother led Jane over the zoo’s winding pathways, and when they reached the elephant enclosure, she let Jane step up onto the lowest rung of the metal fence. The elephants had just been fed, and they rooted through the bales of hay and grasses with their trunks. They waved their enormous ears gently, like the tails of the tropical fish her father kept in the tank in his study. Jane heard her mother sigh with pleasure. The gentle motion of the animal’s trunks up and down between hay and tiny mouth, and the rolling motion of their jaws, gave them a delicacy that made Jane laugh and clap her hands. Jane’s mother wrapped her arm around Jane’s shoulders, and her breath was warm and sweet in Jane’s ear. Jane could feel her mother’s joy at the sight of them.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked. “They’re very maternal creatures. I read that somewhere.” She leaned down and kissed the top of Jane’s head. “Very maternal, just like I am.”
Jane’s mother was sick for a long time before she died. Jane was ten when the diagnosis came, Lance was four. At first nothing changed. There were doctor’s appointments and days when her mother was too tired to cook dinner so her father brought home McDonald’s instead. But mostly it was the same as it always had been, and Jane began to believe it would always be this way. On the tired days, Jane would come home after school and curl up on the couch next to her mother and do homework. Lance would lie on the carpet watching TV and eating Cheerios one by one from a plastic bowl. But by the time Jane was twelve, there were more and more tired days. She turned thinner than any grown-up Jane had ever seen, and she was always cold. She began coughing and spitting up blood into a bright green bandanna she kept shoved up the sleeve of the nubby brown sweater she always wore. The sounds of the wet coughs scared Jane, and she found herself avoiding her mother; instead of sitting next to her on the couch, Jane spent the hours between school and dinner in her bedroom. Once she heard her mother calling her in that thin, weak, dying voice. When Jane came down the stairs, her mother was standing at the bottom of the flight, clutching the newel post to steady herself.
“I understand it’s hard to watch me, Jane,” her mother said. “And I know you love me and if you need this time alone, take it. But we have to talk about Lance. You’re his sister. That gives you some responsibility.” Jane didn’t hear what her mother said next, because she’d already turned and raced back up the steps. She slammed her door as loudly as she could, and after that, she always pretended she couldn’t hear when her mother called.
There was an open casket at the funeral. Jane’s father left Lance with a babysitter and wanted to leave Jane home, too, but she begged and cried and finally he relented. Her mother’s body was ravaged by disease, but someone had put foundation on her face, blush on her cheeks. Jane thought she looked beautiful, and that she would like the blush and the rosy color of the lipstick they’d put on her. But it struck Jane that just under the powders and the creams her mother’s face was gone. That is, it was intact and Jane could see it all—eyes, lips and the familiar way her mother’s ears curved and the diamond studs in her lobes that she wore every day. But they didn’t add up to her anymore. Her mother was an empty shell—like the ones cicadas left behind in late summer, only this one resembled the person Jane loved most in the world. The unfairness of that moment, the trickery, made Jane burst into sobs so loud and incessant her grandmother had to lead her away.
The house was quiet after her mother died. Jane hated it. She missed the singular sounds of her mother’s movement, the way she slowly climbed the stairs and shuffled along the hallways in her slippers. Jane even missed the ugly sounds of the coughing. Most of all, though, she missed how it felt before she hated herself. She replayed all those recent afternoons when she’d avoided the sounds her mother’s sickness made, and instead closed her bedroom door. She would do anything to have those afternoons back. She didn’t bother with homework, but she did take up her old place on the couch—napping there after school and then, again, after dinner. Sleep was the only way she could turn off her mind.
Her father must have noticed that Jane didn’t do anything except sleep, and one evening, a few months after the funeral, he looked at her across the dinner table and he said, “Life goes on. She’d want us to be happy.” As far as Jane could remember, that was the last they’d spoken of the grief they all stumbled through alone.
Lance grew silent. Far quieter than a boy his age should be. He spent hours draped in an armchair in the family room, watching TV. He barely spoke to Jane.
Her father started smoking and spent evenings in his study, watching his fish and blowing rings of smoke up toward the ceiling. “You shouldn’t be near all this smoke,” he’d say when Jane was lonely after dinner and wanted to be near him. “I’ll come and find you later, tuck you in. We can talk then.” But he rarely remembered, and Jane eventually stopped trying. She felt like a shadow, visible, but of no substance, and it frightened her. It felt like fading away. Some days she thought she might just disappear.
Two years later her father was married again, and the only thing Jane had left of her mother was a pile of photos and some ugly antique furniture that traced the maternal line back for generations. Her father’s new wife was kind to Jane and Lance, but she hated to “wallow,” as she said, in the memories of their life before, of Jane’s father’s other wife.
When her father remarried, Jane and Lance lost their mother all over again, in Jane’s mind; by picking a new wife, he erased her mother further. The new wife moved into their house, opened the windows, banished the fish tank and aired out the smoky study in favor of a guest room and a small, barking dog. Soon, all the photos that included Jane’s mother were gone, piled into boxes in the attic with her books and the antique furniture Jane would inherit when she grew up and had a house of her own.
It was true that her father was happier, and his new wife was kind and funny and cooked dinners every night so they could sit around the table “like a family should.” Lance watched TV less, and smiled more, and all of this made Jane grateful. But she couldn’t push past the notion that this woman was an intruder in their house, in their li
ves, and that this new family they had formed was just a weak facsimile of what it should have been.
Jane was in graduate school before Lance began showing signs of his own sickness. Her master’s program in conservation biology was difficult. Jane struggled with math—the tricks of statistics and probability eluded her. She had to work hard, and this gave her a ready excuse to ignore her father’s calls, to listen to, but not return, his messages saying that Lance was seeing things that weren’t there and talking to empty corners. One message sounded as if her father were about to cry—a depth of emotion Jane hadn’t even seen from him after her mom died. That was the message saying that Lance was sent home from college because of a violent outburst and was under psychiatric care.
She’d never mentioned the conversation her mother tried to have about Lance, the one where Jane was supposed to agree to be a good big sister. And now she never would—being a responsible sister to a normal little boy was one thing, but Lance was an adult man now, with psychological issues. The calls and the urgency in her father’s voice made Jane increasingly desperate to flee.
Within days of arguing her thesis, Jane applied to the Elephant Foundation. Her adviser knew the foundation’s director, and Jane was hired. She went home for the first time in months to tell her dad. Lance was at home at the time, but Jane remembered the message her father left her, telling her they might have to put Lance in a home, right before her thesis was due, and how she’d listened to it once and then deleted it. Now she saw that her father’s face was pinched. He looked older than he should. At dinner one night, when his new wife was in the kitchen, filling plates with dessert, Jane told him she was leaving, soon, for Kenya.
The Brightest Sun Page 6