“Miss, you have a call,” the yawing night attendant said.
Years ago, when she first arrived, she’d given the Guest House phone number to her parents. For emergencies only, she said, and she assumed they’d never call, or that if they did, she wouldn’t even get the message. As Leona stumbled sleepily to the lobby, she realized this phone call was the first she’d ever received here.
Leona hadn’t heard her mother’s voice since she left the US. The familiarity—even after all this time, surprised her so much she almost didn’t hear her mother breaking the news.
“I wasn’t there,” her mother’s voice echoed over the phone, the time difference and bad phone service making her sound tinny and strange, like she was phoning from a distant planet.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was dying? You’ve been writing me letters—you’ve been in contact. You just decided to tell me now?” Leona asked, wondering if her voice sounded odd to this woman she hadn’t spoken to for almost four years; wondering if she should be crying. She didn’t feel like crying. She didn’t feel anything, except far away.
“He didn’t want to speculate if you’d come or not,” her mother answered, blunt to the core.
She added, in case it hadn’t been clear, “He thought you wouldn’t come anyway, and he didn’t want to spend his last days watching for you and hoping.”
Leona wondered how she was supposed to respond.
“In any case, nobody was there at the time of death. It was just after 2:00 a.m. He’d sent me home. Either he wanted to die alone, or he didn’t expect it to happen so fast. Who can say?”
Leona wondered how it would be to die alone. If, with your last intake of breath—knowing the darkness was closing in—you would yearn to reach out, to feel your hand touching someone else’s, to have your last sight be that of a human face, someone who knew you. She wondered if her father felt regret and wanted to make a deathbed apology. But maybe he’d just pushed the memory of what he used to do to her so far back in his brain that he couldn’t retrieve it anymore. She felt a flaring up of terrible joy when she realized that her absence at his deathbed meant she wasn’t there to forgive him. She couldn’t have stood looking in his eyes and seeing anything—remorse or, worse, lack of it.
“Anyway, we need to plan a funeral. He’s cremated, so there’s no real hurry. We want to schedule it when you can come. You and the girl. It’s time to come home, Lee.”
For a second Leona was stunned by the use of her childhood name. Nobody had called her that for so long. She felt her eyes fill with tears. That place wasn’t home. It never had been. She thought of the bed where her daughter was now, stretched out crossways, fast asleep. Adia’s skin was nut-brown and her hair a halo of knots and golden curls. She looked nothing like Leona. She wore only a pair of little boy’s underwear. A goatskin bracelet hugged her tiny wrist. Her small bare feet were thick with calluses and grime. Leona bought her a pair of rubber-tire shoes in the Narok market, but Adia hated wearing them, and when the left one went missing under suspicious circumstances, Leona didn’t bother replacing it.
In Leona’s memories, her childhood home was a cool, gray and silent place. It was a place of carpets and leather-bound books, meals around a table with the sound of scraping silver. She tried to picture barefoot Adia in her old school, following rules. She tried to see wild-haired Adia at her mother’s dinner table eating with antique forks and knives, drinking from a crystal glass. She couldn’t imagine it. She wondered if maybe where you were born informed your cells or if the air your mother breathed while you swam inside her contributed to your body, to your mind. Maybe the place in which a person was conceived set in motion that person’s own unique history. If so, Adia was a child of dust and the smell of wood fire and livestock. Leona could never make her leave this behind.
Now, she hung up the phone and went back to her room. She lay down in the hard Chabani Guest House bed with her daughter curled up next to her. She had a sensation of spinning away.
Leona didn’t sleep after the conversation with her mother. When Adia woke up just as the sun was breaking over the horizon, Leona’s head felt as heavy and unwieldy as a boulder. She desperately wanted to stay in bed with her eyes closed. She was exhausted and filled with spinning thoughts about her father, but she was also uncomfortable going to the bar now that Kamau had offered to drive her up to John’s farm. She didn’t want to see him, to have to brush off his offer of the drive or, worse yet, work up the courage to tell him the truth—that she was too scared to see John. But Adia had gotten used to their daily task, had befriended the bartender and the cooks and insisted, after breakfast, that they go about the day as they always did. Leona tried to rouse her brain and her body by showering in cold water, but she still felt slippery somehow, greasy both inside and out. She felt sad, too. And that was unexpected. She wondered if she’d miss her father, his presence on the planet, even though it had been so long since she’d seen him, and even though she recognized she didn’t feel tenderness toward him, nor love. But she saw she was fatherless now.
It rarely rained those days. The bottom of the Rift Valley was desolate and dry. It was the sound of wind through rough, yellow grasses and a constant film of dust on sweaty skin. That year, though, the drought was worse than usual. It had gone on too long. The previous two rainy seasons were sparse. The deep water tables never completely filled, and the Mara River and its tributaries lagged low and thick, the usual waterline nearly forgotten. A storm a week or so ago brought rain that fell hard. The children danced and laughed and drenched themselves in it. As she watched them, she thought it meant hope. But it was a one-off storm. Heavy and solid, but too hard, and it had washed away the topsoil and left little behind. Then it disappeared again, and the mud dried back to dust and the rivers—dangerous with flash floods for a few days—shrunk to trickles again. Another storm was expected, though. Soon, the people said. Leona assumed it was only wishful thinking, because the sky looked like it always did to her. The locals said they saw something different in it, a heaviness maybe, a slight deepening of color in the clouds that looked promising. People were waiting. All along the slogging rivers women waded deeper and deeper to wash their laundry, the gazelles and elephants coming closer and closer—their fear of humans mitigated by their desperate thirst.
When Leona finally got out of her shower and dressed and gathered the energy to take Adia back to the Chabani bar, she noticed there were more people standing in the streets than usual. It seemed more crowded somehow, more active. People called to each other from open shop doors and children buzzed past with intent.
“Maybe today’s the day it’ll rain,” Leona said, leaning down to take hold of Adia’s hand. “Maybe people are excited.”
Leona had never seen Adia scared, and it dawned on her suddenly that Adia was alone, too. Fatherless, like she was now or, she thought grimly, “father-lost” in Adia’s case. Nothing stood between the girl and the world but she herself, the reluctant mother. The enormity of that was more of a shock than her father’s death.
“Lee, he left you everything.”
The phone again, late at night. Her mother. By Leona’s watch it was 3:35 a.m. and the knocking at the door pulled her from a dark and murky sleep. She blinked her eyes and rubbed them.
“I can wire some money to you for the tickets. When are you coming? We have to move forward with arrangements.
“I’m sorry, Lee.” Her mother hummed through the phone, when Leona began to cry. She assumed Leona’s tears were ones she shared. “It must be hard to be so far away from family now. At this time.”
Her father’s service would be formal, everyone in black, and everyone speaking in hushed voices. The priest would stand in his bright white robes among the enormous flower arrangements. Leona remembered the smell of her grandmother’s service. She’d never forget the urns full of lilies and roses. She’d loved those flowers before that day, but the cloy
ing smell in the church made her so sick with their heavy perfume that she still couldn’t bear to be near them.
“I can’t come.” Leona couldn’t make her voice any louder than a whisper. She felt that if she said it quietly enough, she could imagine that she hadn’t said it at all. She could imagine away this conversation; this severing of ties. If she went there now those rainy skies would cling to her. She doubted she’d be able to escape and come back to Kenya; she’d get stuck. Adia would be foreign there, foreign and fatherless.
“Lee.” Her mother’s voice was hardening like mud left in the sun. “You will regret not coming. No matter what went on between the two of you. Please.”
When she hung up the phone and padded back to her room, she didn’t try to sleep. She knew she wouldn’t be able to. Instead, she walked over to the window. Her mother’s words shocked her. What her mother said meant that she knew. She knew the whole time Leona was being violated by her father. She knew and she’d never done a thing to stop it. Leona bit her lip so she wouldn’t scream and wake Adia. She wanted to open the window and scream and cry and shake the night with her anger and her hopelessness. She would never be able to punish him now. His death clipped her tongue, forced her silence.
The window was barred on the outside, so thieves and monkeys couldn’t get in. Glass louvers on the inside could be closed against rain or dust. Burgundy strips of cloth hung from a wooden rod, the limp fabric masquerading as curtains. Leona pulled the cloths aside and turned the rusty handle that opened the louvers wide. She needed air. Outside the wind stirred the branches on the flame tree and made the petals on the bougainvillea flutter. There was a moon, and it was bright and perfect, and it turned everything—the dry grasses, the walls of the buildings, the roofs and the cars out there—a mournful gray. It wasn’t silver, but instead the shades of a black-and-white film, color drained away but everything as visible and as lit as at midday. Leona felt a shift in the air and noticed a cold edge to the night. Yes, she thought, the rain is coming again. The rain would come and it would make the air wet and heavy and delicious for the plants and the people, but it would make the road to Solai impassable. Her little car wouldn’t be able to manage flooded roads or deep muddy ruts. It had to be now. Time was short.
She pulled her jeans off the dresser and slid herself into them. She wrapped her hair in a bandanna and went to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She packed the toiletries she’d purchased into a plastic bag and added Adia’s crayons and paper, and the few pieces of clothing she’d bought in Narok to replace what they’d left behind.
It would be light soon, and they would have to go immediately. Her shoulder bag sat on the chair next to the dresser and Leona retrieved it. As quietly as she could, she dumped the contents on the end of the bed and felt through it all, putting the things back in one by one. Her wallet, her keys, a hair clip, a small notebook. There wasn’t much. And then she felt the scrap of paper. It was folded over and over and she walked to the window to see it better in the moonlight. The line drawings didn’t look blue now, the crayon Kamau used may as well have been black, but there it was, the map he’d carefully drawn.
Leona put the map in her pocket and then sat on the bed, legs stretched out in front of her. When the moon went down again, when the sun came up, the lines on the map would be blue again. She’d be able to follow them. She’d hurry, before the rain came.
JUJU
Liberia sits on the curve of West Africa’s spine. Ocean currents fold and twist around the coast that stretches from the tropical jungles of Congo all the way up to the dry desert sands of Morocco. The year before, pushing opposite those ocean currents on a night flight from Washington, DC, Jane and Paul moved here. Monrovia was Paul’s second Foreign Service post.
Liberia was bright with a sun that pushed down on everything below it, a sun that burned in an instant, a sun that made Jane light-headed and even chilled her to the bone if she sat in it too long. Liberia was sweat that rolled down her back, tacked her shirt to her skin, filled up her ears and dripped into her eyes. Liberia was tropical storms that would suddenly bunch up the sky in huge, black clouds to crumple what had been a flat hot day into a driving rain, which, just as suddenly, would stop. Liberia was the constant taste of salty ocean air from the surf that roiled on the sand just on the other side of the garden wall, the incessant drone of the air-conditioner. It was the constant motion of living things: mold, centipedes, beetles and plants that grew up thick and green and so fast Jane could almost see them moving, fed by the sun and rain. It was sitting, day after day, waiting for Paul to come home. Liberia was mystery, too. It was black magic and juju and things that sounded like they could never be true, but which were, things as true as a finger on a trigger, things as true as blood.
She should have known. There were times early in their courtship when Paul and Jane barely saw one another. They started dating at the beginning of his Foreign Service career, when Jane was finishing her work with the Elephant Foundation—training her replacements, a husband and wife team, to take over where she and Muthega left off. When Paul’s new assignment came in—Washington, DC—Jane moved back with him. Jane’s father gave her away, and her stepmother was the matron of honor. Even Lance attended the wedding, sitting quietly the whole time, a dazed look on his face.
Jane remembered falling in love with Paul at a specific moment. She would always remember it. After Muthega’s murder, Paul was the one who helped her file the report; he was the one who helped her pack up her little house in Narok. It wasn’t those things, though, that made her love him. Instead, it happened the day he drove her to see Muthega’s family’s little house, tightly built with mud bricks and a shiny new tin roof. As they parked the car, Paul mentioned the nicer-than-average construction was probably thanks to Muthega’s western, nonprofit salary. The home’s tidy profile belied the tangle of dogs, undergrowth and runny-nosed children that wrestled for attention in front of it.
“Baba Muthega ni wapi?” Paul asked when an elderly woman shuffled out of the house to greet them. Jane was impressed at the way Swahili simply rolled off Paul’s tongue. She nervously poked at the dust with her shoe and shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other.
The inside of the house was murky and bare. An old man sat curled on a mat in the corner, and the woman invited Paul and Jane to sit on a pair of low stools under the tiny, empty window.
Jane toyed with the hot cup of chai the woman—Muthega’s mother, she assumed—handed her. Paul drained his cup of tea and began to speak.
Jane watched him talk, his language sure and fluent. She had learned enough Swahili to basically follow where he was in the narrative by noting the reactions of the old couple. They nodded and winced, whispered acknowledgments and wiped tears from their eyes.
“They know already, someone sent word last week.”
Paul knew Jane would be relieved that she wasn’t the one breaking the awful news.
“In fact, Muthega’s wife and children are in Narok now, gathering his things and applying for a scholarship for his eldest daughter to go to the school there. A better school than the one here in Solai. Apparently she’s smart—they want her to be educated.”
“Paul, tell them I have money. She doesn’t need a scholarship. There is money for them.”
“Money?”
“It’s money the foundation pays in...instances like this one. His back pay and some life insurance. Plus some I’m donating. I want his family to be okay... I know they relied on him.”
Paul turned to Muthega’s mother. “Yeye ana fedha kwa ajili yenu. Katika benki katika Narok.”
“Not in the bank, Paul. I have it...here.” Jane pulled her bag from her shoulder and rummaged through it, finally pulling forth a wad of dollar bills.
“Jane, that’s a lot,” Paul said quietly. “It’s more cash than Muthega would have been able to get for them in his whole life. Sure you want t
o do that?”
“It’s foundation policy,” she blustered, but the look on Paul’s face told her that he knew the bulk of the cash was her own.
Muthega’s mother reached past Paul and plucked the money from Jane’s hand, then turned and tossed it to the man lying prone on the mat.
They drove silently away from Muthega’s house.
“You know his murder had nothing to do with you, right?” Paul finally said. “He’s not the first to be murdered out here, and he won’t be the last.”
“I should have tried harder to get to know him,” Jane answered. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him, accused him... I should have been smarter. I was so...” She began weeping.
“It’s just unfair. And now his whole family has to suffer.”
Paul stopped the car then, and turned to face her. His face was serious. “Don’t carry that guilt. You can’t live in Africa—or anywhere in the developing world—if you feel guilty about what it is you have versus what it is the people around you have. You won’t make it.” His voice was almost angry. “This work, my work and yours, requires you to be tough. If you feel guilt for everything, you’ll burn out.”
Jane loved how Paul was voracious in his appetite for his work. He took every short-term assignment the State Department offered him, especially the ones nobody else wanted. He was a wonderful diplomat. He could talk to anyone. He could make anyone feel important, and he loved entertaining groups.
“Send me to the seventh circle of hell, and I’ll have the devil lapping from my palm in no time,” he’d say at events between swigs of beer. His bravery was attractive to Jane then. She didn’t mind that his travels left her to attend parties alone and, in fact, she loved telling their friends where he was. “Paul? Oh, he’s in Syria.”
Jane and Paul had barely returned from their honeymoon when Paul accepted an unaccompanied yearlong tour in Angola, then he went to Mozambique, where land mines still studded the earth, and Jane worried every day that went by without a call from him. They wrote each other letters. He had R & R in Spain and made enough money to fly Jane out to meet him and book four-star hotels and order expensive wines at dinner. In the spaces between these visits, Jane concentrated on her own fledgling career as a biology teacher in a private high school and on the friendships she was forging. She spent long weekends with her father and stepmother and took turns visiting Lance. Life didn’t change for her much, really. She preferred, in some regards, the way their new marriage was structured, and the long stretches of time she had to live alone. Her job was time-consuming, and often she graded tests into the night and felt relieved that there was nobody there to interrupt her. Marriage was a theoretical thing at that time in her life, a daydream. Even the ring on her finger didn’t seem real.
The Brightest Sun Page 9