The Brightest Sun

by Adrienne Benson

  Leona felt her whole body shaking. She felt both cold and as if she needed big drafts of fresh air in her lungs.

  * * *

  Adia fell asleep fast, her dreaming mind full of ocean currents, pulling and pushing away from a wide shoreline. When she woke suddenly, she blinked into the dark and felt her body was a long piece of seagrass, waving in the depths of some dark body of water.

  The voices came from behind the closed door leading to her grandmother’s room. Adia couldn’t hear words, just the rise and fall of quick, angry speech. She lay still for a moment, wondering if it would stop. When it didn’t, she slid out of bed and crept to the door. She learned a lot of things by creeping up to doors lately, she thought. She pressed her ear lightly against the wood, holding her body stiff, not getting too comfortable, ready to spring back to her bed if she heard footsteps on the other side.

  “No, you listen to me...” her grandmother hissed. “You can’t keep everyone from her. Not me, not him.”

  Then her mother’s voice. “I wasn’t keeping her from him. From you, maybe, but not from him. I thought he was dead! I looked for him. I wanted to give her to him. But he was dead. This is as big a shock for me as it will be for her.”

  “But maybe this is the best way for her to meet him. Casually, not some big to-do.”

  “Jesus, Mom, I’m not sending Adia on safari to meet her dad. How would that work?” She mimicked a young girl’s voice and said, “Thanks for a great experience, and by the way, I’m your kid!”

  Adia’s body stiffened with the word, the feeling of waving, dizzy, underwater rushed over her again. Dad. She said dad. At the sound of footsteps, Adia pulled herself away from the door. She leaped back under her sheet and pinched her eyes closed. She heard her mother rustle in the bathroom, turn on the light, flush the toilet. Then Adia heard her mother’s bed creak, and the room was dark again and quiet. Adia was so used to being alone with her mother’s silence that the idea of trying to pierce through it had never occurred to Adia. But that small word lingered in her brain—dad.

  The idea of a father felt electric, and it kept Adia awake for hours. She stared up at the ceiling and watched the shadows bend and curve. When she was certain her mother was long asleep, she pulled the brochures from her side table, and slipped them under her pillow. When she finally fell asleep, the shoreline stretched out in her mind, infinite and pale against the dark waves swirling and churning with deadly riptides. Drift, the water whispered to her in her dream, drift. And the shoreline grew farther and farther away.

  Adia woke. Her hair was tangled over her face and her skin felt warm and clammy. Her breath was hard and fast with fright, and in the dark she could barely see the last remnant of her dreaming self, almost invisible now in the vast sea, sliding out, alone, beyond the horizon line.

  NAKURU

  The first time they met, Grace didn’t know what to think of Adia. She was strange, that was obvious. The only seat left in class on Grace’s first day—already two months into the school year—was next to Adia, who looked totally different from the other kids, from all the kids Grace had ever known. She had long messy blonde hair and wore a lot of jewelry—beads and beads sewn onto leather bracelets and necklaces. She must have had six or seven around each wrist and around her neck, too. Grace had never before seen a white girl with so many beads. The other kids all looked up at Grace when the teacher introduced her, but the blonde girl just stared out the window and twirled a clumpy strand of hair around her finger. When Grace sat down, she noticed the other girl’s fingernails were dirty and cracked in places, and that she chewed on the skin around them, so her fingers were covered in tiny cuts, bleeding a little. “I’m Adia,” the blonde said when she caught Grace staring at her beaded wrists. “My Maasai family named me.”

  At lunch that first day, Grace sat at an empty table toward the back. First, she was alone, but then she saw the strange girl coming toward her. “I usually sit here,” the beaded girl said. “I don’t mind if you sit here, too, though.” Grace hesitated—she understood already that Adia was an outcast in the school hierarchy and that by sitting with her Grace might be painted with that brush, too. She’d never been anything other than popular in her schools before. But now she didn’t care. She was tired of all of this, the moving, the new houses, always being the new kid. She couldn’t be bothered to get up and sit somewhere else. So what if the other kids thought she was weird?

  Grace didn’t talk much at that lunch. Instead, she listened to Adia. Adia talked as if she’d been holding words inside her like air in a balloon that popped. She couldn’t hold back. Grace was annoyed at first. She wanted to be alone. But as Adia talked, she became more and more intrigued with her story. Finally, she stopped eating altogether and just listened. Adia was practically Maasai. She and her mom spent holidays in the manyatta. Adia had learned to herd the goats and start a fire using only sticks and her own breath. She’d learned how to grasp a goat by its feet and flip it onto its back so a man could slit its throat. She learned to drink the nourishing fresh cow blood the Maasai way—by piercing the skin of the cow’s neck with a sharp spear, and then, after drinking her fill, pinching the skin back together so the cow could walk away with just a trickle running down its neck and the feeling of a bee sting. Both her parents were white; Adia said her dad was a Kenyan cowboy from a long line of white Kenyans. But Adia, as she said herself, was Maasai. By the time the bell rang for class to start again, Grace knew that Adia was the most interesting person she’d ever met and made up her mind to be her best friend.

  * * *

  Evenings in Nairobi were cool, mostly because of the altitude, and Jane often brought a cup of tea out to the balcony after dinner, wrapping up in an old gray throw and watching the bats leave their upside-down beds in the banana trees and go flitting around above her while the stars blinked awake. The rare occasions when Grace joined Jane made Jane want to cry with pleasure. Tonight Grace lay in the chaise next to Jane’s and stretched her hand toward Jane.

  “Can I share that blanket?” Grace asked, and Jane would have given Grace her own skin if she thought it would draw Grace closer again. Jane handed Grace the blanket and felt for her fingers as she took it. Jane wanted to touch her daughter, to trigger a desire in Grace to make her want to climb over next to Jane and huddle together under these foreign stars. But Grace just leaned back and curled up with the throw piled on top of her.

  “Adia says people like us try too hard to make America wherever we go. And it’s true, right?”

  Jane was cold without the weight of the blanket on her, and the bats suddenly sounded like mice scratching the sky for food. Jane didn’t like Adia. She didn’t like the furtive way Adia glanced out from under her slack bangs or the awful clothes she wore.

  “I know you’re still new at school, and it takes time to settle in, but is Adia the only friend you have so far? She isn’t like any of the girls you knew in Rabat. I mean...she seems, I don’t know, so different from you. Like she needs to run a comb through that hair, and what’s with the jewelry?”

  Jane wanted Grace to giggle with her. She would have before. Jane knew her Gracie—Grace and Jane were the same. But Grace didn’t giggle.

  “I like her, Mom. She’s different and cool, and she’s nice. And I don’t care about her hair and neither should you.” Then she got up, tossed the blanket back on her mother and went inside.

  * * *

  A few days later, Jane offered Nakuru as her olive branch.

  “Let’s go for the day, Grace,” Jane said. “I’ll drive. We’ll let your dad sleep in.”

  And then Jane added, “Bring your new friend. We’ll pick her up on the way out of town. A girls’ road trip.”

  Grace’s face brightened, and Jane thought, who is she? But Grace never wanted to be alone with Jane anymore. Adia was the only hope Jane had of spending time with her daughter.

  When Jane and
Grace picked Adia up on the way out of town, it was early morning, and the girl sat in the half dark, hunched on her heels at the end of her driveway.

  “Where’s your mom?” Jane asked before Grace could even say hello.

  “She’s asleep,” Adia said. “She hardly ever gets up before nine.” Adia reached down and grabbed the straps of a lumpy, green, canvas backpack.

  “My Maasai mom is meeting me at Nakuru. I have stuff to give her.” She opened the back door of the car, tossed her bag in and climbed after it, snapping the door shut behind her.

  “Doesn’t your mom want to meet me?” Jane asked, ignoring her instinct to add, “Your American mom? I was looking forward to meeting her.” Jane was stunned by a mother who would sleep in and let her thirteen-year-old daughter wait in the dark for a stranger to pick her up to take her away for the day. Feral, Jane thought, she’s like a feral child. Adia’s pants were dirty at the cuffs, and her T-shirt was stained and at least one size too small. Her ropey hair was shoved up into a large, leather hat that looked like it had seen more than a few dust storms. Jane watched Adia settle into the back seat next to Grace who, with her clean, brown ponytail, jeans and white sneakers, looked like a different species compared to Adia. When the girls threw their arms around each other, Jane shuddered.

  They drove out of town quietly. The girls were still sleepy, curled up with their heads tipped against opposite windows. The sun was just crawling up the lower third of the sky when the road rose and suddenly seemed to drop out below them. Jane turned off onto the shoulder and they all got out to stretch their legs. The road wound steeply down and down and down, switchbacking all the way—hundreds of feet—into a huge great bowl in the earth.

  “You guys never saw the Rift Valley before?” Adia asked, sensing Jane’s and Grace’s awe. Jane didn’t correct her. Even Grace didn’t know she’d once lived on the valley floor. She was vague about that period of her life—she didn’t like to think about it much anymore. Adia waved proprietarily toward the horizon. “My Maasai family live out there.” Jane looked over at Adia, and she saw the sun on Adia’s darkly tanned arms and her dusty clothes. In this context, she looked of this place. Her clothes and hat and hair and jewelry made her look like a sliver of the savannah below them sprung into human form. For an instant, Jane wondered if she would have come to look like that if she’d stayed. If she’d met someone else here to marry and Grace had that man as a father, would she look like that, too? The road was rough and deeply pocked, and sometimes the edge just fell away. Jane gripped the wheel tightly and slowed to a crawl. But now and then Jane glanced up into the rearview mirror to watch the girls. Grace had closed her eyes again and leaned her head back against the headrest.

  Adia directed Jane to a small road that seemed to lead to and from nowhere. “They’ll be coming up this road,” she said. “If you park here, we’ll see them.” They were close to the lake. Jane imagined she could smell the brackish water, the scent of feathers and guano. She was anxious to get there, to show Grace what she expected would be a magical sight and to tell her daughter how long she had waited to see it. But when they reached that spot in the road and Adia told Jane to stop, Jane was in equal parts stunned and awed. She saw Grace gaze at Adia with admiration as Adia hopped out of the car and used the front bumper to climb on the hood of the car, her lumpy rucksack next to her.

  Jane leaned against the driver’s-side door, drinking lukewarm water from her Nalgene bottle, and Grace lay across the back seat, her bare feet sticking out the window and her forearm slung over her eyes.

  * * *

  The Maasai women finally appeared through a break in the dust. It was like they unzipped a tent flap and stepped out—suddenly there they were. There were four of them, all with shaved heads and bare feet. All wrapped in loosely draped cotton cloths tied at the shoulders and wearing masses of the same beaded jewelry Adia wore. One of the women had an indolent toddler tied to her back.

  “There they are,” Adia said as she hopped off her perch. Then she strode up the road toward the women.

  When they were close enough, Adia took off her hat and bent her head to each woman and they touched her hair, murmuring smoky, low words like a humming. Adia spoke to them in their language and untied the baby from the woman’s back and held it like a mother would as she chatted—the baby perched naked on her hip, Adia’s tan arm looking pale and angular against the baby’s curved, brown bottom. Grace climbed out of the car and watched Adia with the gathering of women.

  “Hey, Grace, bring me the pack.” Adia glanced over her shoulder as if she’d just remembered that Grace and Jane were there.

  Jane watched as Grace knelt in the dust, tugging open the straps and pulling things from the pack to hand up eagerly to the Maasai women, greedy for their attention. There was sugar, tea, tins of milk powder, OMO detergent and what looked like a large tub of Crisco. The women murmured and nodded, and one by one all the goods Grace brought out were tucked away in the folds of their wraps. Adia handed the baby back to its mother, who tied the girl deftly to her back again. Grace stepped back and watched as Adia and the women grasped each other’s hands and said their goodbyes. Adia stood, her hand shading her eyes, and watched as the little band of women disappeared up the road, back through the curtain of dust.

  * * *

  Jane shut the car windows and flipped on the air-conditioning. She heard Grace’s quiet voice say, “Are those the women you told me about? Your Maasai mother and the other wives?”

  “Yeah,” Adia answered, and her voice didn’t sound strong anymore, but sad. “Simi is the one I told you about. She’s my Maasai mom. I lived with them until I was six. Now I just spend summer vacations with them. Sometimes long weekends or when my mom is traveling. I wish she traveled more.”

  Jane thought of Grace’s relatives—her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins on Paul’s side, and silent Uncle Lance on hers. Grace had never met Lance and only saw her other relatives for a couple of weeks every other summer. Grace barely knew her American family, and unlike Adia, she had no other tribe. Jane thought that she and Paul never stayed long enough anywhere for Grace to make those kinds of connections. In a way, Jane and Paul had stolen something from their daughter that they could never give back. They flew away from everything. Grace had no one besides her parents, no place but where they were, and that was always temporary.

  * * *

  It wasn’t like Jane pictured. Her imagination had it all wrong. Or maybe it was just too late. The drought had been too long, people said. It was entrenched all over Kenya now. People were hungry. Livestock was dying. Shambas, the family gardens people depended on, were nothing but rocks and dust, and when rain did fall, it fell too quickly and too hard to be absorbed into the bare soil. There were no grasses to hold on to the water, help it seep into the earth, so it spilled away, leaving nothing but volcanic rock and limestone—the earth’s underbelly that could grow nothing of substance.

  When Jane and Grace and Adia finally reached it, Lake Nakuru was shallow and dank, and it spread out at their feet like spilled paint swirled into browns and dark greens and grays. It seemed the flamingos were dying in great, pink waves. It was beyond what Jane imagined from the articles she’d read. The bodies of the dead lay half-submerged in the fetid water, their exposed backs baked by the sun, their lifeless necks, long as flower stems, drifting slightly in the gentle, shallow currents, their unseeing eyes watching over those forgotten eggs below them. The ones still alive were desultory and disappointing. They fitted themselves exactly in the drying shallows above the ancestor eggs. The earth was changing under their feet, water turning to mud, mud turning to dry land. But these birds stayed anyway, rooted to their home.

  The dust that muted their pink feathers saddened Jane; the plastic water bottle she saw bobbing in the muddy edge; the cigarette butts half-buried in the slimy green algae that lined the shore. Jane had the sudden memory of her father stand
ing near the jungle gym at the park so many years ago and telling Jane about acknowledging the moment they realized that Lance was gone. Things disappeared. Moments died, maybe her father was right to move on. Now Jane wanted to wave her arms and shout at the dreary flamingos left behind, to see them take to the air like the ones already gone, to imagine a new place for themselves. This wasn’t what Jane had expected; it was not what she wanted to happen.

  A group of European tourists climbed out of a zebra-painted pop-top minibus. They littered themselves along the path, red-faced and cameras clicking. They looked alien to this landscape. Fleshy, pale, breathing hard, like grubs plucked from under rocks, blinking into the sunlight. Jane wondered if she looked like them in the eyes of those Maasai women, or if Grace did with her shiny hair and fresh clothes?

  “Comme c’est beau!” a woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat said to herself, breathing deeply in satisfaction, clasping her manicured fingers. Jane wondered just what the woman was looking at. Nothing here looked beautiful to her.

  Jane lifted her hand for an instant, wiped the dust off her forehead, and when she glanced back, Grace had stretched out flat, barely visible beside Adia. Adia, who hunkered, bored and blank as a shell, picking at her fingernails, her hat throwing her face into shadow, the skin on her arms as dark and dry as the dust at their feet. Adia—the only one who belonged to this earth. Jane felt a stab of resentment. She was happy that her daughter was feeling better and gave credit for that to Adia. But what did her daughter see in this girl? She was like nobody Grace had known before. She wished she could understand what her daughter saw in this strange girl.