The Brightest Sun

by Adrienne Benson

  He followed her outside in nothing but his jeans and his unlaced boots. The cool air made the hair on his arms prickle. He couldn’t stand to see the woman leave. He wanted to kiss her again. He told her he’d track her down and for the first time with a woman, he meant it.

  He told her that she’d be easy to find, even without a name she stuck out like snow in Tsavo.

  Now, as he hung up his phone and replayed what Daniel had told him, he remembered the look her face had taken on when they stood there. It stilled, her eyes shuttered themselves and she’d looked up at him and said firmly that he shouldn’t try to find her, that she wouldn’t want to see him if he came to the manyatta. He nursed the feeling of having been stung all the way up to Solai.

  So he didn’t try to find her. The rejection he’d felt that morning was the one thing he’d always tried to avoid in relationships. He was the one who rejected, not the other way around. But then, months after their nameless tryst, he found himself back at the Chabani bar. Matthew slid a beer to him and laughed. “Did you hear about the muzungu lady with the baby in Loita? A pure white Maasai baby!”

  And the blood in John’s veins ran cold for an instant, and then he felt his heart slow—he breathed easily. Something bloomed inside of him like a flower.

  He found her easily, just as he knew he would. It was curiosity that drove him there, and the easy excuse of needing to hire more moran to take a group of incoming tourists into the Nguruman forest. Part of him couldn’t imagine it would really be her, that it would really be his child. A gaggle of kids led him across the dusty paddock, and then he ducked through a tiny door frame into a smoke-filled inkajijik. Her face surprised him. He tried to stay calm, and he accepted with a grateful smile the hot cup of chai a Maasai woman handed him.

  But he was frightened. The woman on the rawhide platform barely resembled the woman from the bar. This woman’s hair was lank and unwashed; it hung behind her ears like eucalyptus bark. Her skin was sallow and sunken. She looked unwell, he thought with some alarm, and he wondered what he should do. He felt responsible for her condition.

  It was her eyes that frightened him the most. When he saw her first, they seemed blank, dead somehow. But as she registered his presence they shriveled and became as hard and brittle as glass. He stared into them, and asked the only thing he could think to ask, “Were you going to tell me?”

  Because there was no question that the baby was his. His body was alive with the vibrations of instinct. His nerves and veins and bones all shifted toward the tiny, red-faced thing wrapped in a kanga and lodged firmly next to the women in the bed.

  “It’s not your child.” She sounded cold. Her voice wasn’t just angry but also absolutely dismissive.

  It was a tone he recognized. It was the way his father spoke to him, and he felt himself instinctively turning away, as he’d learned to do. He felt physical pain in pulling the pieces of himself back into place, but he forced himself away, back out into the sunlight again.

  Before John was born, his mother was beautiful, lean and graceful with gentle eyes and a delicate smile. His father was tall and well built with a wide smile and blond curls like John’s own. There were photos in the house of these younger versions of his parents. Only Samuel noticed them, and only to dutifully pick them up every week, dust them carefully and put them down again. The people in the photos, the beautiful, happy, young people, were completely disconnected from the people John knew as his parents. His parents weren’t happy. He’d never known them happy. There were photos of John, too, a few at least. But only one of the brother he once had, and that photo was hidden away in a drawer. John found it once accidentally. He was tiny when Thomas died and never thought to wonder why the hidden photo wasn’t displayed.

  Often John wondered if being the child of desperately unhappy parents was worse than being the child of merely uncaring ones, or even of being the child of no parents at all. Being orphaned, John suspected, would be freeing. Orphans, he assumed, could breathe. Not him. His breath was squeezed out of him by the suffocating triangle he and his parents formed. He found space only away at school and in the expanse of his parents’ ruined farm where his playmate was Daniel, the houseman’s son, and he could spend the day pretending Daniel’s small concrete house was his, the chickens and the goats and the laundry on the line, too. He could pretend Daniel’s mother was his and that she loved him like a second son, a white son.

  Times he’d spent at home were regimented. He always woke up early and joined his mother for a silent cup of tea in the kitchen, the floor cold under his bare feet and the sky outside a deep gray. When he heard his father stirring—padding heavily down the hall to the bathroom, clearing his throat and coughing while he pissed, long and heavy, and never quite in the bowl, John glanced at his mother. Every day at that time he saw the softness of her sleepy features gel into something hard, the shell covering the body of an animal too soft for the world.

  “Bye, Mum,” John always whispered, and then he was out the door, running barefoot over the still-cool dust, leaping over the shadows of anthills. He ran fast so he’d hear nothing but his breath growing more and more ragged as he ran, hard, toward the flickering lights and the smell of wood fire in Samuel’s shamba, way, way back at the farthest edge of his parent’s land.

  When he was older, living in Nairobi and building his business, his father began to die. John dutifully returned to the farm to see him. Standing at his father’s bedside late one afternoon, John watched the old man struggle for breath under sweaty sheets and a veil of skin gone gray and thin as a curtain over his bones. John couldn’t think what to say. He merely listened to the wretched breathing, the sound of his father’s struggle against death.

  Samuel hired a couple of Kikuyu to dig the grave up on the hill under the enormous baobab, but John made a point of taking the shovel from one and jamming it into the earth himself, over and over again. He wanted to know how it felt to dig his father’s grave. He dug until his shoulders burned and his eyes stung with sweat. The Kikuyu stepped back and watched. After some time they laid the other shovels down and hunkered on their heels, whispering to themselves and smoking. John finally stood straight, leaned the shovel against the trunk of the baobab and wiped his face on the tail of his shirt. The earth was pulled open, a wound that wouldn’t heal, and next to the bleeding pile of red dirt was the tiny mound and miniature headstone that marked his brother’s grave. John swallowed a desire to kneel down on the little grave and whisper a warning. If the dead could commune with one another, Thomas should prepare for the imminent arrival of his violent grave-mate.

  At the funeral, his mother, Samuel’s family and a few local farmers stood with the priest at the top of the hill behind the house. The day was overcast, and under the spreading branches of the baobab it was chilly and damp. Nobody cried. The grave was refilled, flowers placed on top and headstone installed. Now there were two grave markers—father and child.

  When John was a boy, there were so many nights he lay awake in his bed and listened to the erratic thumping sounds of knuckles on flesh, punctuated by his mother’s soft weeping. Once, when he was a teenager, she told him that she tried hard to make herself soft, to allow her body to absorb the blows, to relax enough that it would be quiet. Her great concern was only that the beatings not disturb John.

  When John was thirteen, his maternal grandparents died, and his mother inherited a little stone house in the Nairobi suburb of Karen. At the time, she told him firmly that she would never sell it—she wanted him to have it when he was grown. The place stood empty for years, but John tried time and again to convince her to leave his father, move to the Karen house and let his father rot out here alone. The last time he tried to make her leave was during one of their early morning teas. It was a cold Christmas and the night before his father had flung the decorated tree into a wall, sending delicate antique ornaments smashing onto the floor.

  “Please, M
um,” he said, gripping her hands over the kitchen table. Neither he nor his mother had slept, and both were bleary and nervous from lack of rest.

  His mother jerked her hands from his. There was anguish in her eyes he’d never seen. She looked terrified, as if, this time, he were the one beating her.

  “I tried to get away once, John. It killed your brother. I’ll never leave that baby again, and he can’t come with us, can he?”

  Her voice was ripe with secrets, and John was afraid to ask her what she meant. She stopped talking, poured more tea and they never again discussed the idea of her leaving.

  After John finished school, he moved to Nairobi and started his photo-safari business, which earned him good money. He let a woman or two stay around for a while. There were two in particular he lingered over. Both had wanted to marry him; they dropped hints and introduced him to their parents and joked to their friends—with him in earshot—that he better not get used to the milk if he wasn’t planning to buy the damn cow. It wasn’t marriage that frightened him away from the women, ultimately. It was the expectation of children. His own mother was all he knew of motherhood, and he couldn’t, he wouldn’t turn a girl he loved into that. He considered it kinder to break their hearts than their spirits.

  And now. Now he’d gone and had a kid, anyway. And the image of the broken woman lying in the dark inkajijik with her glass-hard eyes and glass-hard voice haunted him. Had he poisoned her with the presence of his genes in her body? He didn’t consider looking for her after that day. He tried to put the fearful new-mother face and his own craving to see his baby out of his mind. He purposely avoided the area anywhere near that manyatta. Instead, he hired moran from much farther away. He thought of the baby and the woman less and less over the years. How long had it been, three years? He did the math in his head, Christ, how time had flown. The girl would be three. Not a baby, but a walking, talking person. He wondered what her name was, if she looked at all like him.

  Daniel’s phone call left John anxious and unable to sleep, so long before dawn the next day, he loaded his bag into the cab of his truck and left Nairobi. He stopped for lunch in Narok, gassed up the truck at the BP station on the main road and then drove to the Chabani. He needed a beer. He told himself he needed a beer, needed food, needed to stretch his legs. But somewhere inside him a tuning fork was resonating, softly but clearly. He didn’t want to admit he’d stopped here in the hope he’d catch a glimpse of a blonde-haired girl, a child with his face, maybe, one that might catch his eye and know—instinctually—just who he was.

  “Imekuwa ni muda mrefu, Mister John,” Matthew, the bartender, greeted John as he took a seat at the bar.

  “It has been a long time, my friend,” John answered. “Too long.”

  John wondered if Matthew knew why he was here, if he’d seen his daughter. He didn’t have to wait long. Matthew popped the cap on a Tusker, and placed it on the bar.

  “Your girl, my friend, she is looking like you.”

  John’s heart beat fast. He didn’t know if he was ready to see her, to face the nameless woman. But his blood streamed faster in his veins, and his heartbeat was so quick it was almost painful.

  “Matthew, are they still here? In Narok?”

  “No, Mister John. They were here for so long. Maybe two, maybe three weeks. Every day they would come here. They would sit just there.” Here, he indicated a booth tucked into a dark back corner.

  “Memsahib would drink tea all day long, and the child would play. The memsahib was looking for you. But now—” Matthew paused and popped open another beer “—they are gone. I haven’t seen them for days.”

  “Well,” John said, “I’m headed up to Solai to speak with my mother. Hope she’ll tell me where they’ve gone.”

  The stars were blooming in the sky when John finally saw the lights of his mother’s house on the horizon. He felt himself inadvertently slowing down, barely pushing the wheels of the truck through the ruts and pits in the road. For the last few years, every time he came here, there was a part of him that feared finding his mother’s body stiff and cold on the floor of her house. He knew, theoretically, that Samuel and Daniel checked in on her faithfully, kept her fed and the house clean. He sent money to them from Nairobi every month to cover the expenses and to pay them for their time, but in his heart he couldn’t believe they’d stay.

  The truck shuddered to a stop outside the house, and he pulled the key out of the ignition, then leaned back and closed his eyes. He used to regret his childhood. He used to wish he could pretend it all away and grow up normal in a family that smiled at one another, talked about things, a family that wasn’t marred by absence.

  He thought of his family like a photograph—all of them in a row, in outdated clothes with outdated haircuts and a big black scribbled-on space where Thomas would have been. A permanent deletion whose ink stained all of them, long beyond the quick moment that marked the moment the family was ruined.

  He opened his eyes and sighed, then pulled himself out of the truck and grabbed his duffel. The front door was open, and light spilled out through the screen. Moths and beetles buzzed and banged themselves against the door. He waved them away as he slid through the door, knowing most of them would find a way inside regardless. The edges of the screen were pulling out of the frame, and there was a large hole near the bottom. He sighed. Every time he came here, there was something to fix.

  “Mum?” he called.

  He was surprised not to see her in the hall, waiting, or asleep in the faded flowered chair in the living room. God, was this the time he’d find her body? His breath shortened, and he felt a chill climb through his veins.

  “Mum?” His voice was shrill, and he took a breath. “Mum!”

  She was nowhere. Her bed was made, the bathroom was dark and empty, the kitchen light was on, but there was no sign she’d been there, either.

  John banged out the screen door again, paying no attention to the large rhino beetle that flew past his ear and into the house.

  “Mum!” he called again.

  Maybe she’d gone to see Samuel. It was not unusual for her to walk back across the field, over the hill and to the houseman’s little compound. They’d all told her not to go at night, but they all knew her mind was failing, and whether or not she remembered the warnings was anybody’s guess.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, opening the door of the truck again. He’d drive there.

  His headlights bore down on the dusty ground, illuminating the sparse grasses and wizened acacia trees. Now and again tall crusts of chewed earth rose like towers—the anthills he used to leap on and crush underfoot, trying to destroy them before the ants could swarm his legs and bite.

  Just ahead of him now was the hill. The family burial ground with the two headstones—one small and one large. The truck bounced over a rut and the light of his headlights leaped up for an instant and shone on a tiny, ghostly figure—his mother, her white puff of hair and pale housedress. She was so small, hunched there on the stone bench under the massive baobab—she was just bones, really, bones and skin under her long flowered dress. When did she get so old?

  He stopped the truck but left the engine running and the lights on. He didn’t want to spend the time retrieving his gun, and the lights would help keep hyenas and snakes at bay.

  “Mum, you gave me a scare!” He walked up behind her and she turned to look at him, her face a tiny, white moon.

  “I killed you both,” she said.

  John knew his mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s or senility or some such thing that had slowly been erasing her mind. It was more than the incessant forgetfulness or the conversations she had with nobody but herself. Her mind was deteriorating; he had to face the fact that she was no longer able to care for herself enough to get by with only daily visits from Samuel. He could hardly bear to watch her speak this nonsense and act in ways that were both confusing
to him and pathetic.

  “You didn’t kill anyone, Mum. You’re having a spell.”

  “Do you remember your brother? No, he was too young.”

  “Don’t remember, really. And there aren’t any photos to remind me.”

  “I couldn’t bear to look at his face in a photo. I only kept one, but I hid it.”

  John was horrified then that his mother began to cry. Her face folded in upon itself, and tears slid down her cheeks. Had he ever seen her cry? Even when his father hit her, even on the most miserable days, she was a stone.

  “I never told you. I never told anyone. The only one who knew was your father. That’s why he punished me. I deserved it.”

  “Jesus, Mum, what are you saying?”

  “You are a father now. You know that, right?”

  Her brain seemed clear. Her eyes, even through her tears, were wide-open and lacked the clouds that usually marked her moments of confusion.

  “Don’t do what I did. I tried to run away and it killed Thomas. I still feel the bump...”

  Her breath heaved, and a cry rose like a night bird, a scream so deep inside her that he could almost see it pulling itself up through her body. She clenched her fingers into fists and pounded them on her knees.

  “Mum, shh! It’s okay...”

  He put his arm around her shoulders. He hadn’t touched her in so long, and her skin felt like paper, her bones like twigs. Her face was tipped up toward the stars, which, unhindered by any ambient light, spread out endlessly.

  She paused in her cry for a breath, and then she shook her head and said calmly—he would always remember how calmly she spoke the secret out loud. It was a voice he’d never heard her use, strong and clean and honed to a sharp edge by the force she used to get it out.