“Eat up, baby!” Jane said in a voice as happy as she could make it, because Grace’s sadness shocked her. Jane wanted to push her own optimism into her daughter, make Grace’s eyes light up again.
Grace cried herself to sleep some nights. She never let Jane see it. She pretended to be asleep if Jane poked her head into the bedroom, and she never cried when Jane was with her in the car, or even at dinner when Paul and Jane chatted about their days. They both tried to draw Grace into their conversation, but Grace only nodded quietly, barely speaking. Jane told Paul to let it go, that she’d come around. Jane thought she would. It was unlike Grace to hold a grudge, to be so withdrawn.
It was curious, too, that Grace’s emotional absence changed the dynamic between the three of them. Without her as the central force for each parent to focus on, Jane and Paul were thrown back together in a strange way. For the first time in years they mostly talked to each other at meals. After dinner, when Jane and Grace would have worked on homework or watched a DVD together, Grace disappeared into her room. She didn’t want help; she didn’t want to snuggle with her mother on the couch and watch a movie. Instead, Jane and Paul circled each other warily in the evenings, trying to decide how to be alone with one another. After a while, they began talking to each other more, pouring glasses of wine and sharing the space more comfortably. It was nice, Jane thought one evening, to have this back. She hadn’t missed it at all when it floated away from their marriage, when a distance neither of them understood or knew how to clip back had blossomed between them. Grace did it for them. When she ducked out of her place at the center, the two ends grew closer.
It didn’t mean Jane didn’t worry. She did. Constantly. She researched early symptoms of schizophrenia and kept Grace as close as she possibly could. She met with Grace’s teacher to share her concerns, considered going to the school nurse. She didn’t do that, though, because one day when she picked Grace up from school Grace had a smile on her face. She didn’t want to talk much, and she was still sullen every night at dinner, but when Jane went out to the balcony after dinner to watch the sky darken, Grace came out and sat with her. It didn’t last long. Something she said upset Grace, who then flounced back to her room. But the nugget of information Grace gave her that night made Jane want to shout with relief. A friend. Grace had finally made a friend at school.
RIPTIDE
The unraveling started with an early morning phone call. It was Thursday, a school day, and Adia was awake. She never slept in. Her life in the manyatta had trained her from birth to wake by dawn, and even though she and her mother lived in Nairobi now, that habit didn’t change. The house was perfectly still. Adia could tell it was almost dawn because the stars were fewer; most had already flicked themselves back to wherever they lived when the sun came up. Adia always woke up early. Her mother didn’t, though, and Adia knew to creep around the house silently so as not to wake her. This morning, just as Adia stepped up from her bed, the phone rang. Adia startled. Their phone never rang much—sometimes Leona’s colleagues called, but their manyatta family, the ones Adia would love to talk on the phone with during the weeks she was here in Nairobi—didn’t use phones. This early in the morning, the sound was both unexpected and harsh. Adia tiptoed out of her room and up the hallway toward her mother’s bedroom, and by the time she reached the door, the phone was clattering to the floor. Her mother’s voice through the door was harsh and annoyed.
“Hello? Hello? Who is this?”
Adia couldn’t imagine who would call this early, and she leaned close to her mother’s door to listen. There was a long pause. Adia wondered if her mother had fallen back asleep.
“What? Here? Mother...no.”
Adia startled again. Her mother was calling someone else “mother.” This was a revelation. At thirteen, Adia knew, of course, that everybody had a theoretical mother and father, but she’d never, not once, heard her mom talking about family. Adia assumed that she and her mother had that in common—without a father of her own, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine her mother with no parents at all.
Through the closed door, Adia heard the phone slam back into the cradle and her mother whisper-shout, “Shit!”
Then the creaking of the bedsprings sent Adia racing, as quietly as she could, back to her own bed. She didn’t want her mother to know she’d been listening.
Usually, Adia dressed herself for school and had breakfast alone. Gakaki, the houseman, always set a cup of hot tea, a boiled egg and a piece of buttered toast in front of her, and she’d eat while he sat on his haunches on the stoop outside the kitchen door slurping his own tea and smoking a cigarette.
This morning was different. Adia slid on a pair of jeans, which, she noticed, were feeling tight in the butt and ended an inch or so above her ankles. Adia didn’t care about how her clothes looked, but she hated the feeling of being constrained. Too-tight jeans and T-shirts that tugged awkwardly made her feel conscious of herself, made her feel like she was a dog on a leash. Today would be more uncomfortable than usual. She pulled on her favorite hat—leather with a wide brim that her mother had worn for years and then passed on to her. Her boots were by the front door; she would put those on at the last possible second before running out of the house to catch the bus. She hated shoes and wore them only because her school didn’t allow bare feet.
When Adia walked into the kitchen, her mother was already at the table. She held a large teacup and breathed the steam into her open mouth slowly, evenly. She didn’t acknowledge Adia. Gakaki sidled in quietly; he knew, too, that Adia’s mother would be grumpy this early and that he should do what he could to be unobtrusive. He gently set Adia’s plate on the table and then her tea, and then he stuck his tongue out at her and crossed his eyes, and Adia had to push her palm over her mouth, hard, to keep from giggling.
“We’ll be having a visitor next week.”
Adia glanced at her mother, who now had her eyes open and was sipping her tea through pursed lips. She winced a little when the hot liquid hit her tongue. Gakaki always boiled the tea just a little too long.
“Your grandmother—my mother. She wants to get to know you.”
Adia paused with her fork halfway between her plate and her mouth. There were so many things she wanted to talk about, to ask her mother. But through the sudden chaos in her brain, only one question slipped out.
“Wait, what?”
Even though she heard her mother address the phone caller as “mother,” she still couldn’t quite believe she’d heard correctly. “I have a grandmother?” The thought that there was family in America never occurred to her. Her curiosity had only one focus—her father. This new information was a revelation.
At school that day Adia was distracted. She wondered how long her grandmother had known about her. From birth? If it was that long, why hadn’t she come sooner? The idea of a family—people connected to her outside of the tiny, cool orbit she and her mother made—excited Adia. She quivered with the possibilities.
The school cafeteria was nothing but a small canteen that sold sodas and chips, attached to a large, open-sided rondaval filled with picnic tables and benches. Most of the other kids at her school had parents who were diplomats, and their lunch boxes were full of imported cheeses, peanut butter and cookies and chips not available to people without embassy commissary privileges. Adia unwrapped her sandwich without thinking. Usually she was careful about her lunch and how she ate. She never knew what might end up in her lunch bag. Once Gakaki packed her a little plastic container of scrambled eggs. That day, she hunched low over it, because she didn’t want the other kids to see. It was such a weird thing to have for lunch. He’d also forgotten to pack a fork, but she was so hungry she picked the pieces up with her fingers. She propped a book up on the table and pretended to read, but the book somehow tipped off her desk and when she reached out to grab it, her eggs spilled out of the container and onto the table. The girl sitting next to
her shouted, “Gah! That’s what was smelly! Adia’s eating eggs!”
The other kids laughed and made retching noises, and one of the teachers on lunch duty peered over the top of his glasses and told her to make sure she cleaned it all up. Adia spent the next five minutes wiping egg into her palm, making sure she retrieved every bit. The rest of the afternoon her stomach grumbled. After that day, she tried to skip lunch entirely, ignoring her hunger pangs and trying to get by on just an orange or banana. She ate bigger breakfasts and drank a lot of water to keep herself full.
Today’s lunch was a chapati, leftover from dinner the night before, rolled around a hunk of cheese. The chapati was torn and the cheese poked out the end a little. Adia sized it up and weighed her chances of eating without attracting notice. At least it didn’t smell. Maybe nobody would notice. She was hungry.
“Is that a penis?” a boy nearby whispered. The kids who heard erupted into laughter.
“Adia’s eating a penis!”
This time, the teacher didn’t look up at all. Adia shoved the mess back into her lunch bag and opened her book. She didn’t read it, though. She couldn’t concentrate on the words at all. Instead, she tried to will the red flush from her cheeks by thinking about her grandmother. Her grandmother wanted to meet her. Her grandmother had wanted to meet her since she was a baby; her mother told her that this morning. Her grandmother would love her.
Adia didn’t question the basic facts of her life. She didn’t wonder why she and her mother lived in Nairobi or why she went to the international school with the sons and daughters of diplomats and development workers rather than a local school with kids more like the ones at home in the manyatta. She never wondered at the notion that her father was long dead, or if there were surviving family members of his that she could meet. She accepted those things without question. She accepted that she lived here with her American mother, but that she also had a Maasai mother in Loita. She accepted the things her mother told her about her father—he was a descendent of colonial Kenya, a “Kenya Cowboy”; he’d grown up in Maasailand like her. And he died when Adia was small.
She sometimes wondered if not having a father was the thing that made her different from the kids at her school. They were not like her. They came and went as their parents transferred into and out of Nairobi like migratory birds. She was a chicken that never went anywhere. Adia had plodded through the school since kindergarten—she was one of the few students who’d been there that long—but it didn’t matter. She still never knew any of her classmates for more than a year or two before they disappeared forever. She was the silent, invisible ghost always left behind.
After a while she realized that her clothes and her food and her lifestyle made her too different for them to be friends with her, anyway. The other kids dressed in clothes brought from Europe or America. They talked about movies and TV shows they watched back home. They had mothers who brought cake or cupcakes to class for birthdays. They referred longingly to places far away from here, places they called home. Adia didn’t have any of those things. Her clothes were from the market or made by tailors from cloth her mother bought on Biashara Street. Her mother never came for birthdays or awards ceremonies or even for parent-teacher conferences.
Leona let Adia skip school the day her grandmother arrived. They drove together to the airport. Waiting in the meeting area, Adia watched the people come through the door from customs. There were so many. She had never seen a photo of her grandmother, so she had no idea who to look for. Instead, she alternated watching her mother’s face and watching the crowds of people dragging suitcases behind them. Her mother’s face was calm until, suddenly, it wasn’t. Adia watched her mother’s mouth curve into a forced smile and saw the natural light cloud in her mother’s eyes. She was here! When Adia turned to see who her mother was looking at, she was stunned. This was not the person she imagined. The tall woman striding toward them with her own stiff smile pasted on her own stiff face was exactly the opposite of who Adia imagined was her mother’s mother.
Her grandmother Joan arrived in a flurry of suitcases and a flapping safari jacket covered in pockets. She was tall and thin with perfectly white hair that started at her chin on one side and went all the way around to the other side without getting higher or lower. The ends were all exactly the same length. Adia wondered if she used a ruler when she cut it.
“Hello, dear!” Joan said as she stuck her face forward to give Leona a kiss. Adia noticed that the kiss never actually met Leona’s cheek.
“Hi, Mom,” Leona answered. And then she pulled Adia by the arm in between herself and Joan. Adia felt like a shield.
“Mom, this is Adia,” Leona said.
“Well, there she is! Aren’t you a tomboy!” Joan said. Adia couldn’t tell if being a tomboy was good or bad in her grandmother’s eyes. Joan leaned over to kiss Adia’s cheek and, once again, Adia noticed that the kiss never made contact.
Her grandmother smelled like flowers and the pockets of her jacket were filled with hard candies and tissues. She had hands so pale that Adia could see bones and blue veins through them, and one of her fingers had a sparkly ring the size of a Band-Aid on it.
The best thing about her grandmother’s coming was that the morning after she arrived, they all left for Mombasa. They didn’t take the train, like Adia and her mother did when they went. Adia was relieved. The train was slow and hot, and mosquitoes billowed through the windows and feasted on them all night long. Adia didn’t like the close feeling of breathing in the little four-person compartment they always had to share with two strangers.
Her grandmother bought tickets for them to fly to Mombasa on a little plane, and the lurch in Adia’s belly when they sped down the runway and up, up, up into the air was exhilaration and fear and intense joy and it tickled her inside all over. But even better was the hotel. Usually Adia and her mother stayed in a little thatched hut near the water. The huts were plain but had a place to cook and take a shower and electricity and running water. Adia loved them because it felt like playing house and she could race between the ocean and the little porch all day.
The hotel Joan booked for the three of them was more beautiful than any place Adia had even seen. The hallways were large and open, filled with enormous chairs covered in cushions, and everywhere were potted palm trees and ceiling fans that made the palm leaves flutter. The hotel employees all wore bright white uniforms and perfectly white sneakers and moved quickly but so silently Adia imagined they were not really touching the glassy polished floor at all.
A bellhop pushed their luggage on a wheeled cart. Adia’s grandmother’s suitcases were clean and unscuffed and made of fabric that had pink flowers all over it. Adia wished the suitcase she and her mother shared was made of that fabric, but instead theirs was brown and lumpy and had a zipper held closed with a twisted paper clip. Grandmother Joan was not like her own mother, Adia thought. She was more like the embassy moms she saw at school sometimes. The bellhop, even, was more elegant than her mother, and his air of sophistication was alluring to Adia.
“When I grow up, I want to work here,” Adia said, imagining the luxury of spending all day in that beautiful place.
Her grandmother stopped in her tracks and tipped her head back and laughed a laugh that was like silver bracelets clinking together in her mouth.
“Leona, darling, did you hear that? Your daughter aspires to be a maid in an African hotel!”
Adia smiled, but inside she felt shaky. She didn’t understand the joke her grandmother found funny. Adia watched her mother turn and glance at Adia, and then at her own mother.
“She can do whatever damn well makes her happy, Mother.”
Joan pursed her lips and shook her head so that the chin-length hair moved ever so slightly across the back of her neck.
“Leona, darling, lighten up! Of course we want our girl to be happy, but she’s an American girl...with options!”
> Joan turned to Adia and placed her hand on Adia’s arm. Her fingers were soft and a little squishy, like the banana slugs that took over the garden when it rained, only with long bright red nails pointing out from the ends.
“You’ll see,” Grandmother Joan whispered to Adia. “When you get home, you’ll see. There is a world of things a girl like you could do.” Adia wondered what her grandmother meant. She had two homes—one in Nairobi with Leona and one in Loita with Simi.
The bellhop halted, and they all stopped in a little cluster behind him. He fumbled with a large key, and then rolled the cart into a room that would easily fit, in Adia’s estimation, the entire inkajijik. She thought if she stood with her back against one wall, she couldn’t even throw a ball hard enough to hit the opposite one. There were two big double beds and a shiny, glinting bathroom behind a tall, heavy door. The bellhop crossed the enormous room and pulled open a set of drapes that exposed sliding doors and a balcony. Adia gasped. The ocean stretched out brilliant and blue as far as she could see. It looked so close. She wondered if she could jump off the balcony and splash right into the waves.
“Well, I’m connected...” Joan said, opening a door Adia had thought was a closet, but instead led to a different room, equally big, with two more beds. Joan fumbled in her purse for a handful of bills and pressed them into the bellhop’s hand.
“Just leave the pink suitcases in there, dear.”
Joan looked at Adia and said, “They only work for tips, darling. You don’t need to do that. You have options. When you’re home, you’ll see.”
Leona turned from where she’d been examining pamphlets on the desk and leaned in close. She poked a finger toward Adia’s face and said coldly, “Goddammit, Mother, she is home. Nairobi is her home. She’s only ever lived here in Kenya. This is what she knows, and it’s a perfectly wonderful place to call home, by the way.”
The Brightest Sun Page 18