The Brightest Sun

by Adrienne Benson

  Leona picked up each pair of shoes one by one. She touched the soft fabric of the clothes and the delicate stitches in the knitted hats and sweaters. She never had clothes like this for her daughter. She had left all that behind when she moved to Kenya. Leona shoved the drawer shut and opened the next one. This one was empty except for a large photograph, framed in silver, turned facedown. Leona didn’t hesitate to pick it up, to turn it over, and when she did she saw two little boys. One about three, she guessed, and one younger, barely sitting up. They were dressed in the things the drawer held—the linen overalls, the tiny shoes. Leona could clearly see her daughter in one of the faces. That must be him, she thought, as a baby.

  Leona flipped the photograph back on its face and shut it in the drawer again. She remembered that she’d told Ruthie the truth, that it had escaped her mouth without her realizing it until it was too late. She wondered if Ruthie would even remember.

  * * *

  Ruthie lay still in her bed, listening to the air in the house around her. Strange how even the silence changed when someone else was in the house with her. She imagined she could hear the child breathing. The child. She pulled the thread of a vague memory in her brain, and like a magician’s multicolored scarf pulled from a hat, the thought loosened and broke free. Her grandchild.

  Ruthie sat up in bed and turned so her feet could find the floor. She had to see the child.

  She didn’t bother with the lights. She’d lived here long enough that she knew each divot in the concrete floor by heart. She padded down the hall and into the sitting room where the girl curled, fast asleep, in Martin’s chair. A line of mosquito bites studded the girl’s cheek. Should have made sure she had a net, Ruthie scolded herself. She grasped the edge of the blanket she’d directed Leona to cover the girl with last night, and tugged it back up to the child’s chin. She paused with her hands on the blanket and lifted a finger to stroke the girl’s cheek just above the reddened bumps. How soft it was, how curved. Ruthie quietly pulled a stool from the corner of the room and perched upon it. She watched the girl’s eyelids shiver with dreaming.

  Leona had said John was the father, and of course that was true. Of course. But deep down in Ruthie’s bones, she recognized the imprint of her other son on this girl’s face. The set of the eyes, the particular placement of the ears, the way the eyebrows swept gracefully up in the middle. She hadn’t been able to look at the one remaining photo of Thomas for years and years, and watching the sleeping girl was nearly as painful. Had he been this age? Ruthie wondered. She couldn’t remember; she wouldn’t let herself remember. She slid off the stool and went to the kitchen to heat water for tea. It was only after she filled the kettle and turned on the flame that she remembered she had no tea. Shame. She’d have to see if Samuel had some. She had to feed her guests, of course.

  So she left the kitchen to dress. She thought she could hurry to Samuel’s little house and be home before the girl woke, but as she crossed the sitting room she caught sight of two blue eyes, wide-open and peering around the room curiously.

  She didn’t want her granddaughter to be frightened, so she spoke in a whisper. She held out her hand and said, “The sun’s nearly up, girl. Come, I’ll show you where I watch it being born.” Without a word, the child slipped from under the blanket and stood up.

  * * *

  The sitting room was empty when Leona wandered through. She’d left her daughter curled on the chair last night fast asleep. Ruthie had given her a blanket to put over her and then shown Leona to bed. But the girl was gone, the blanket neatly folded, the chair vacant. Leona felt dread pour through her like a liquid spilling down her back.

  “Hello?” she called down the hall toward where she assumed the other bedrooms were. There was no answer. Leona just heard the hiss of the kettle and, in the kitchen, found the stove on, the flame from the burner so high it licked halfway up the sides of the kettle, almost to the handle. She turned the burner off and glanced up to where the large window looked out over the yellow savannah. In the distance, she saw two figures walking slowly up a small hill. Ruthie was bent at the waist, leaning toward Adia. Leona saw her daughter reach up and take the old woman’s hand. “Thank God,” Leona thought, as she looked around the kitchen for the teapot, the tea and something to eat.

  She found the teapot sitting on the windowsill, the cold dregs of last night’s brew in the bottom. The box of tea bags was empty, however, and when Leona began opening cupboards to look for more, she found almost nothing. The wrapper from the biscuit package they’d eaten last night was in one cupboard, next to a quarter bag of flour infested with black weevils. In another cupboard was a full set of cups made from delicate china, painted with the softest pale pink flowers. There was a matching teapot and sugar bowl, too, and a curved milk pitcher of china so fine, Leona thought she could see through it. But that was it. The other cupboards held a few rough pottery mugs—the ones they used last night, still dirty, Leona noticed, and a few plates and random pieces of cutlery. The fridge was nearly as bad. In the back were a couple of slices of bread in a bag and an empty jar of marmalade.

  Leona was starving. They’d left Narok yesterday just after a breakfast of ugali and chai, and stopped a few hours later in a tiny, unnamed town for mandazis and more tea. But then, apart from the weak tea and the biscuits they’d eaten here last night, they’d had nothing. Well, Leona thought, she’d simply fill up the water bottles and head out. It would only be a couple of hours until the next town, or at least a village, where they could ask for food.

  She couldn’t see Ruthie and her daughter anymore, but around the back of the house she found the path up the hill where she’d seen them last. The air was cool, and she heard a hoopoe in an acacia tree nearby calling its own name. God, she thought, how amazing it would be to live here, to have this empty space be the backyard, the hills in the distance your daily view, the sounds of the creatures all around you. Nobody, no people for miles.

  Leona walked up a long bare track that meandered from the house up a steadily rising hill through the grasses—someone had used this very path so many times that the foliage just here had stopped growing. Leona wondered whose feet had worn it down.

  At the top of the hill Leona saw her daughter and Ruthie. They were sitting on a stone bench under a spreading baobab larger than any Leona had ever seen. The tree’s broad branches were thick with green leaves, and the shadow it threw was dark and wide. When she neared them, they both turned, and for an instant Leona saw them in each other; the way Ruthie’s lips curved at the edges was in her daughter’s face, the way each of their necks rose, long and elegant, from their shoulders.

  Leona scooped her daughter up, and sat down on the bench in her place, the girl in her lap, facing Leona’s chest, small arms around Leona’s neck. There were headstones at her feet, Leona saw. That’s what Ruthie was showing the girl.

  “Who are they?” Leona asked Ruthie, tightening her hold on her daughter.

  “It’s her family,” Ruthie answered. Leona’s heart skipped. It was too late to pretend anymore. Ruthie had heard; she knew.

  “Where is John?” Leona asked again. In her imagination, she’d come here and found him, they’d talked it all through and he’d accepted, happily, his role as a father. On the drive up yesterday, Leona daydreamed a joyous reunion of father and daughter, of settling her daughter into a new home where John could raise her as Leona expected he’d been raised—in a family of happy ranchers, connected to the earth and each other. And then, Leona had imagined, she would be free again. Free to settle into academic life in Nairobi with nobody to worry about but herself. She wanted Ruthie to tell her John was coming back, that he lived in this beautiful place and they could wait for a while and then he’d be here.

  Ruthie tried to answer. She worked to make her mouth move in the way that would tell Leona what she needed to know. But instead she heard the sound of the snuffling animal, smelled the rott
en hyena breath on her face, saw the baby under the bush, unknowing, still loving her, his mother, still instinctively connected to her, still unaware of the ways a mother could betray her child.

  Her head filled with pictures she couldn’t organize, and among them was the one she dreaded the most, the split hairbreadth when she’d tried to run from Martin, and his breathing muscles, his stony face, his whiskey and his rock-hard fists. She’d run from the house that night; it wasn’t dark yet, but where did she think she would go? She couldn’t remember that, but she remembered how she’d flipped on the engine in the farm truck and revved it loudly. She remembered the hysteria she felt that night, the desperate need to fly away into another world, away from the desolate land and the sullen man she found herself with. She remembered that she left her children behind. She threw the truck in Reverse, hit the gas and only then looked back.

  It was little John’s face in the rearview mirror that she couldn’t forget. The O of his mouth, the fear in his eyes. For the shortest second, Ruthie thought his rapidly approaching figure was running after her because he didn’t want her to leave him behind, didn’t want her to leave. He’d only just started walking, was unsteady on his feet and slow. But Thomas was older. He’d darted out after her when the only thing she could hear was the whooshing of desperation in her ears, her need to escape.

  She didn’t see him running behind her to help John, she didn’t see him. She saw John’s eyes, those saucers of terror, before she felt the bump under the truck tire.

  Everything had changed the day Thomas died. It all had changed that day, like an earthquake that jarred everything out of position, and nothing ever went back right. She didn’t attempt escape again. Martin finally succumbed to cirrhosis, and although she tried her best, the farm was left to decay. John had moved to Nairobi by then, and one by one the servants and farmhands had drifted away to jobs that would pay.

  In her head Ruthie opened her mouth to tell Leona the truth.

  She heard herself say, “John is dead.”

  Leona felt it physically; the news hit her in the solar plexus. She winced at the pain and gasped. The door she’d counted on being opened slammed shut. John was the family she’d counted on for Adia, and the aunts and uncles and cousins she imagined him having. But there was none of that, just this doddering old woman. Adia couldn’t stay here. Leona wanted to ask how John had died and when, and whether he’d left behind other children or a wife, but she couldn’t form the words. Ruthie’s face was pinched and sad. Leona didn’t want to prolong the suffering of making the old woman remember. What did it matter, anyway?

  “What will you do?” Ruthie asked. She wanted to hold the girl’s hand again, walk with her down the hill and take her home.

  Leona shook her head slowly. She had no idea what to say. She had no idea what she’d do. “Go home, I guess,” she answered, and a blank page spread out in her mind. The ease of moving back to the manyatta tempted her. She could leave the girl there. Simi would be thrilled, would mother her better than she could herself. Then she could forget everything. But she knew she wouldn’t do that, and so the question went unanswered. Where would home be?

  “Home to America,” Ruthie stated. That was a good idea. It would be better for the child there, she expected.

  * * *

  They didn’t stay under the baobab much longer after that. Leona helped Ruthie walk back down the track through the grasses and reminded her not to leave the kettle on, the flame up too high. Leona was torn, she told herself over and over again as she fought the road back to Narok, about leaving such a fragile woman alone in such a wild place. But she couldn’t possibly stay. She was stung with disappointment and hemmed in by the hot breath of indecision. What now? She’d made a plan; she’d tried to execute it. Now there were too many new decisions to make, too many new things to consider.

  Ruthie had watched the dust die down on the road after Leona drove away with the girl and she was alone again. She stood by the window long after the car had disappeared and her hips began to ache with the strain of standing. She couldn’t decide if what she’d told Leona was what she’d really meant to say.

  Samuel came that evening with her groceries. He came nearly every day to check on her, and sometimes brought fresh food with him. He told her not to try to cook by herself; in her hands, the food ended up in the wrong places, burned or rotting, improperly stored or cooked. He would do it, he implored. And so he came that evening laden with bags from the market, and he placed the milk and eggs in the fridge and the biscuits and tea in the cupboard. He was sweeping ants off the counter when Ruthie thought to reach out and grasp him by the arm. He turned and looked at her, and she noticed the film over his eyes, the gray curls in his hair, his thin, old voice.

  “I’ve misled her, Samuel. The American woman.”

  “Madam, sit please,” Samuel whispered. “You are tired. There is nobody here, no American.”

  Ruthie knew he hadn’t seen Leona, hadn’t seen the little girl, her granddaughter. The house Samuel lived in with his family was beyond the hill, out of sight.

  “They were here, Samuel. My granddaughter and her mother. I’ve told them John is dead. He’s the girl’s father. She looks like our family, exactly like Thomas.” Ruthie took a deep breath.

  “But you must tell them I meant my Martin is dead, my Martin and my Thomas. They are the ones who’ve gone. John is the one she wanted, of course. John, in Nairobi. I don’t know why I said what I did. You must help me. You have to remember to tell her if she comes back, or to tell him. You must.”

  When the dark fell, Ruthie watched Samuel leave her house. He’d made her tea, fried an egg for her and laid it carefully on toast. The house felt more empty than usual. She wished they had stayed, her granddaughter and the American.

  That night, late, Ruthie watched from her bedroom window as the moon slid up the sky. It would be a bright night. The moon would illuminate the open land behind the house; it would keep hyenas in the shadows. It would spill on the gravestones under the baobab and shine down on the faces of her dead.

  She thought about Samuel telling his son to go into the market tomorrow to call John in Nairobi. She needed him to come. John would come. He was a good son; the one who lived.

  CHILDREN ARE THE BRIGHT MOON

  Leona drove without stopping. The dust from the road billowed thickly through the windows and covered Adia, who was stretched out and sleeping on the back seat. Leona glanced at her hands on the wheel. They looked like clay—as if she was a still, carved statue. She felt like one, too—still and cold and unable to think. She just drove. Even the potholes and the bumps and ruts in the road didn’t concern her. She let the car bounce and dip and bang, and she didn’t slow down until she saw the buildings of Nakuru town in the distance. She wished it wasn’t so close, and she regretted not driving more slowly. In Nakuru the road split—the southeastern route led up the edges of the Rift Valley escarpment to Nairobi, and the southern route led back to Narok and, beyond that, to the manyatta. Nakuru meant a decision.

  Leona lifted her foot off the accelerator and let the little car stop. It seemed so silent when the engine died. She watched the dust sink from the air around her, and then opened her door and stepped out of the car. Her legs felt rubbery and weak from the combination of sitting still for so long and the constant vibrations of the engine through her muscles. She shook one leg, and then the other, and then walked up the road a few steps. The sky was empty and clear, and Leona had the sensation she might be able to just walk into it. She could pull the blue around her like a blanket and sleep. The image made her smile. How long had it been since she last felt relaxed?

  “Mama?” Adia’s voice was small and sleepy through the space between them. Leona felt her heart seize up—just the tiniest bit—when she heard the voice. Were mothers supposed to feel that—what was it, disappointment?—when they heard their babies call to them? Simi had
always looked thrilled to see Adia. Leona thought hard, but couldn’t remember ever seeing Simi look tired or annoyed when Adia wanted her. “Yeyo.” Adia called Simi “mother.” Although Adia called Leona mama, when the girl said them, the two words for the same thing sounded different to Leona’s ears. When Adia said yeyo, the word was softer somehow, less foreign to Adia’s tiny lips.

  Leona walked back to the car and opened the back passenger door for her daughter to climb out. “Go pee if you have to,” she said, and then the choice was made without her even making it—the words just came out—so easily they surprised her when she heard them. “It’ll be another couple of hours driving until we see Simi.” Adia’s face, still sleepy and layered with the fine, red dust of the road, lit up as brightly as Leona had ever seen it. She couldn’t take the words back now. She settled behind the steering wheel again. Her legs still felt stiff, and her neck was sore, though Leona felt lightness in her chest she hadn’t felt before. There were solutions to every problem.

  They’d been gone just over two weeks. A tiny amount of time, but Leona thought the manyatta looked different. As they drove closer, the light began to darken in the sky, and the silhouettes of the squat, curved houses looked cold and shadowy. Leona knew that inside the huts fires were crackling and hot, sweet tea was boiling. But the image didn’t make her feel warm and secure as it had before. Instead, she thought of the dense smoke in the huts and the low chairs that made her knees ache when she lowered herself onto them.

  Adia, however, became more animated as the village drew closer and closer, and when Leona finally brought the car to a stop, Adia flew from the back seat like a bird and was off—just a tiny figure silhouetted against the darkening sky—and then disappeared into the enclosure.