The Brightest Sun

by Adrienne Benson

  They sat together at the kitchen table and ate the omelets and toast in silence. Afterward, Adia said she wanted to go to sleep. John led her down the hall to a little guest room and showed her where the bathroom was.

  “I hope you sleep well,” he told her. “Tomorrow, or sometime when you’re ready... I look forward to beginning to get to know you.”

  Leona washed the dishes and wiped the table of crumbs. She was surprised at herself—she didn’t usually like doing domestic chores, but here, in this house, with the wide-open savannah outside the window and no sound but the tinny chatter on the radio she felt relaxed.

  When the last dish was washed and placed in the drainer by the sink, Leona stepped out the kitchen door. She remembered, years ago, walking up this path to the baobab, watching Ruthie and Adia holding hands and walking together in the distance. Now Leona walked alone up the hill to the tree. The breeze was cool and just strong enough to make the grasses whistle. She crossed the crest of the hill where the headstones were casting their evening shadows.

  “I think we need another drink.” Leona started when she heard John’s voice behind her.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, “but there’s been a lion around here in the evenings.” Leona saw he had a rifle under one arm and a bottle in one hand.

  “Guns and drinks,” she said. “That’s a combo.”

  Underneath the baobab, the bench was cold and the light dim and green, like being under water. When they weren’t speaking, the silence fell thickly around them.

  “We’ll have to share,” John said, and twisted the bottle’s top. “Scotch.”

  * * *

  He opened the bottle and handed it to Leona. They sat side by side on the bench, and the cool of the concrete seeped through John’s pant legs. It was always chilly here, and the light was always murky. Leona nudged his shoulder with hers and passed him the bottle. He registered, again, the fact that their shoulders were almost the same height and that he could see her eye to eye with no effort. He liked that about her.

  They drank quietly, watching the leaves above them turn blacker as the evening collected around them. After a while Leona stopped shuddering after each taste, and he stopped being shy about gulping it down. The bottle was more than halfway finished before they spoke.

  “So these are your dead,” Leona finally said.

  She stretched one leg in front of her and, with her foot pointed, tapped the larger gravestone with the tip of her shoe. John knew the alcohol was working its magic on her brain and her tongue. She smiled a little at the three gravestones at their feet.

  “There’s a tiny one and two big ones. It’s so sad to have a tiny one.”

  John cleared his throat. Again, he found himself speaking words he’d never uttered aloud before.

  “The largest is my not-so-dearly-departed father, the newest is my mother, and the smallest my older brother, died in early childhood. I hardly remember him.”

  He thought about biting back the rest of the story, but he kept going, piercing through the shell of secrets that marked his life.

  “My mother killed him, actually. I only recently found out. It was an accident. Ran him over in a truck.”

  The alcohol stirred the horrible absurdity in his brain. It wasn’t funny. Nothing about his childhood was funny. It was one fucking nightmare after another, he thought. But he felt a laugh in his chest. It was all so awful.

  “Oh, God. It’s not funny, is it?”

  Leona watched his face closely. She looked so kind then, so young and open. He wondered if she’d looked that kind when he first met her. She hadn’t the last time he saw her. Not even close. He’d never told anyone about his childhood before. Not even the women who’d wanted to marry him. But this woman was different; this was the woman who had his child. And now he wanted nothing more than to drain the sickness from himself, to pull it all out from the darkness and fling it into the world. He didn’t want it anymore.

  “She hit Thomas—that’s what my brother was called—because she was frantic to leave my father. He was a terrible, mean drunk. She was so desperate to leave that she was going to leave the two of us, Thomas and me, behind.”

  He took a final swig from the bottle and then hurled it as hard as he could. It shattered on the largest of the three headstones. He felt Leona wince beside him.

  “It was, needless to say, an unhappy childhood.”

  He glanced at Leona and saw that her eyes were steady and serious. She wasn’t recoiling in horror, as he thought she might. She smiled gently at him, and her teeth were brilliant white, even in the gathering dark, and perfectly straight. American teeth, he thought. She reached out and touched John’s hand.

  Her hand on his brought him back to where they were. It sparked a yearning in him that made him feel lonelier than he’d ever felt. The women he’d been with lately, the shiny, doll-like tourists, they were only scratching an itch. He didn’t know them, and they seemed more interested in him as a novelty. He’d been in Solai for years now, and apart from the groups of tourists he met at the airport and took on safaris, he hardy saw anyone else. Not anyone he hadn’t grown up with, anyway. He’d pushed his need for touch, and for understanding, behind him in service to his mother.

  “Yes, and we’re drunk, girlie. But not to worry...this place has seen more drunks than it can count.”

  He paused and then continued. It felt important to tell his story, to get it all out. He wanted Leona to know him, the dark parts, the sad parts that had never before seen light.

  “Before my dad was put in the dirt here, when I was still a kid, I used to come up here all the time. I’d curse my dead brother for being the one who got away. I wanted to be the dead one. I wanted to be the one who didn’t have to see my dad breaking my mother’s bones, or see how my mother let it happen time and again. I didn’t want to think that my mother was the kind of person who’d have left me if she could—I was just a baby—with that bastard. I thought he was the lucky one—lucky dead Thomas.

  “Then my father died. I dug his grave myself. I wanted to put him in the ground. It made me happy to know he was dead.”

  John thought of his father’s slow death, how relieved he’d been when his father was buried in the ground, unable to hurt anyone anymore.

  “I was happy my dad died, too.” Leona’s voice was clear and free of guilt. “He was a bastard, too. In a different way.” She didn’t elaborate. This was a subject still too uncomfortable to talk about. She didn’t talk about it. Not at all. But she wanted to give this to John. A gift of understanding.

  Talking to Leona was easy this time. John saw what he’d recognized in her all those years ago—they were both broken people. Broken in ways they could understand in the other. They could see the pieces of each other lying deep on the other side of the walls they’d put up. As in a foreign country where the language is utterly incomprehensible to those who’d never heard it before—they shared an understanding none of the other people in their lives did. They were the sole inhabitants of this land, speakers of a unique tongue. They could see each other’s failings and potential. It was inevitable.

  John felt like talking. He felt like the words he was sharing, finally, would find a home, a place to settle and then blink out, like ash. They weren’t hard and permanent. They could escape into the night sky and never bother him again.

  It was late when they walked back to the house. Leona stood outside Adia’s door for a moment and then opened it slowly, wanting to check in on her. She assumed Adia was already asleep—wrung out and exhausted by tears and terror. Leona doubted she’d have come in if she’d known Adia was awake; she felt she wasn’t qualified to guide her daughter. For so long Leona prided herself on keeping her own grief contained, boxed up and reserved. All her emotions were controlled, most of the time, anyway. She crept across the dark room to Adia’s bed. She sat on the edge of the m
attress and then lay down next to her girl. She was so close she could feel the Maasai bracelets on Adia’s wrists, feel the bones just under her skin and even feel the pulse of blood through her daughter’s veins.

  “Adia,” she whispered into the dark. “I love you.”

  Leona was surprised when Adia rolled over and burrowed her face into her mother’s arm. She wasn’t asleep after all, and Leona felt embarrassment. She wasn’t sure she’d ever said those words to her daughter. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt them as keenly as she did now. At this moment, she would have lived through all of it again for the chance to be a different kind of mother.

  Leona squeezed her eyes shut tightly and saw lights shooting across the insides of her eyelids. The silence that had infected her since childhood was a habit now, ingrained in her blood, written in her DNA, embedded in her flesh. She didn’t want her daughter to live this way. She wanted Adia to find comfort in connections, to feel, always, the warmth of sharing time and space, and her deepest self, with others. To make that happen, Leona realized, she had to let her own silence leak out. She had to break herself open so her daughter could see inside.

  That night, Leona lay in the same bed she’d slept in before. She didn’t sleep well. Her mind spun with images of John. She was surprised at how she remembered his smell. He smelled like dry dust and sun and sweat, a heady combination. Her head filled with memories of the first time they met, of the sensation of his arm brushing against hers while they cooked earlier that evening. She turned over and over in her head the secrets he’d told her under the baobab. She rarely found herself physically drawn to men, but John was different. The whole time they’d sat together under that tree earlier, she’d wanted to touch his skin, to feel his warmth on her fingers.

  PART III

  MOFFAT’S WIFE

  Death in Kenya—in all of Africa, really—is common. After years on the continent, Jane knew that. Livestock is trotted to the butcher and, without preamble, right on the sidewalk in front of the shop, the animal’s neck is slit and then the carcass is hung upside down to bleed out. Shopping in the open markets means walking on blood-slick ground through rows and rows of skinless heads and headless bodies lined up on tables, flies laconically licking from the dead beasts’ empty, staring eyes.

  Just after their arrival in Nairobi, Jane was out in the suburbs with another embassy wife. The other wife told Jane about a shop she loved and how she had to show Jane the traditionally dyed fabrics you could buy there. The other woman was driving and she drove much faster than Jane normally did. Suddenly a dark shadow flashed in front of the car and Jane heard a thud.

  “Christ,” the other woman muttered, “damn dog came out of nowhere.”

  Jane turned and saw the bloody spot on the road where the dead dog lay, his fur burst open like a too-ripe fruit.

  Jane wasn’t naive. By the time Grace died, she had been in Africa long enough to know that animals weren’t the only living things that blinked out of the world so easily. Humans died constantly, too. They died of disease, of hunger, of age, of a million different things. They died in matatu accidents and on airplanes. They died at the hands of other people like all those men she’d secretly watched on the beach in Liberia. Life, especially here, Jane knew theoretically, was fleeting and fragile. But she never thought that it would happen to her.

  The days and weeks after Grace died were blurred. Jane didn’t remember those days when the ghosts came to her—was that her own stepmother? Her father? Was that shadow Jane’s oldest friend? Who had told them the news? She couldn’t imagine dialing a phone, let alone speaking the terrible words aloud. They slid their palms down Jane’s cheeks, smoothed her hair, asked if she was hungry—how could Jane be hungry when her baby was dead? How could her body need food or water or sleep? Jane couldn’t imagine wanting anything ever again. She was dead, too. The weeks turned to months; they went to the States for R & R and returned. Nairobi wasn’t home, but Jane didn’t care. Home didn’t exist for her anymore.

  After they had Grace cremated, Paul wanted to take the remains to America. That way, he said, she’d be at home.

  “We can visit her grave,” he’d said.

  Jane couldn’t eat, wasn’t sleeping, barely speaking. She wanted to disappear. But she was firm in this: home was no set place for any of them anymore. They’d been nomads for too long. Grace would stay with them.

  During the long afternoons when the sun slanted through the flame tree at the edge of the garden, illuminating the dust in the air, Jane often found her heart racing and her breath choked in her throat. The anxiety came almost daily, but still it surprised her. The tingle in her limbs rushed up from her fingers to her shoulders, her toes to her thighs, and blossomed into popping flashes of light behind her eyes. She’d struggle up from her chair, clasping the edges of the table for support and for the feeling of hardness under her fingers. Gripping the table seemed to draw her back to earth, back to reality, and then, as suddenly as it came, the panic disappeared. She’d sit back down, arrange her legs under the chair, take a sip of lukewarm tea and stroke the edges of the saucer.

  Worse than the attacks that found her in the afternoon, though, were the dark breaths of despair that crept up on her while she slept curled like a leaf around her husband in the middle of the night. They gripped her out of nowhere, her dreams tossed up into the darkness, and she’d wake strangled for breath. She still couldn’t believe that Grace was gone. Jane supposed it was better to have the anxiety wake her from her sleep than the other possibility—the times right after Grace died when Jane would be asleep and then wake up feeling calm, happy even, because she’d forgotten. The crash of memory, when she realized again, was devastating. This was better, marginally. But the nights she woke up like this were so dark, so long. She hated hearing Paul’s even breathing in those moments, so content and relaxed he was. She hated how he slipped into sleep so easily.

  When she was asleep, she could escape reality, but upon waking it crumpled her like paper. It was a physical pain she lived with constantly, a feeling of bone-deep agony.

  “Let’s go to Nakuru,” Paul said one evening at dinner. “Have a safari, see the lake again.” A distraction from the grief, he’d said.

  It was a year since Grace had died, and her ashes were the one thing Jane would take if there were a fire. People always used to ask that question. It was even one of the choices for the application essay for her college. She’d answered it but couldn’t remember what she said. The days of having to think—really think—what the choice might be were over. Now her answer was ready-made, always at the tip of her tongue. She’d leave everything else behind, even Paul, and take only her daughter.

  She’d hated the lake when she was there with the girls. But maybe it would help, she thought, to see if the lake looked healthier now, if somehow it had changed for the better. Maybe it would help to see the birds again. The lonely way they floated above the eggs they’d lost reminded Jane of herself.

  * * *

  Paul stood behind Jane at the edge of the soupy water. She heard him clear his throat and shift his boots in the dirt. Jane had hated him every day since Grace died. Hated the way he tried to comfort her and how he wouldn’t lay blame. Jane wanted to be punished. She should never have ignored her instincts. She’d been right all along—the world was a dangerous and terrible place and anything could happen. She cursed herself daily for letting down her guard, but Paul refused to hurt her.

  “I want to be alone a minute,” Jane said, and she heard that her voice was shriller than she’d intended, anger always too close to her surface.

  Paul didn’t answer, but he shifted away. Jane could hear the change in the air behind her and felt his absence. She hadn’t wanted to leave their home to come here. Not even for the day, as Paul had planned. She was a snail ripped from her shell, too soft and exposed. Jane hated Paul for finding it easier than she did to get on the Rif
t Valley road and drive away, to trade the comfort of grief for the distraction of this wild, desolate place.

  There was a flat rock nearby and Jane sat down on it. It was warm beneath her. She felt like lying across it and letting it absorb her so she’d disappear. But as brackish as it was, the water beckoned. Jane unlaced her boots and pulled them off. She peeled her socks from her feet and rolled her pants up to the knee. The mud under her toes was slimy and colder than she’d expected. Jane shuffled her feet carefully, half expecting to feel the smooth roundness of eggs underneath, and not wanting to crush them. The living birds clucked and cawed nervously as she edged closer to them.

  A flash of pink caught Jane’s eye and she looked up. A lone bird near the edge of the lake had raised it wings. It stood still for a moment, and then began running, its spindly legs and the knuckles of its knees carrying it fast across the shallow water. Then a split second of stillness and it seemed to hang in the air, its long legs now gracefully stretched behind it. And it was off, wings silent in the sky and powerful. In seconds the escaped bird was nothing but a dark spot, too high, too far to see anymore. Jane wondered if that bird had left anything behind.

  She turned to catch Paul’s eye. She hoped he’d seen the bird in flight. It was beautiful. He grinned back at Jane from the shore. He’d seen it. Jane waded a little farther into the murky water. Paul was the kind of bird who’d have the courage to fly away. He knew how to spread his wings and hang, silent, in the air. Jane wondered if he’d leave her behind, preserved but empty. There were times, in the months after Grace’s accident, when she wished he’d leave. She’d been a ghost, and like a ghost, she’d wanted to be invisible, to nurture her pain alone, to let it cover her like mist so she could disappear into it.

  Now, in this place, the water licked Jane’s calves. She felt nothing but the physical sensation of the sun on her shoulders, the slight wind that flicked a hair across her cheek. She took off her hat and tipped her head back. The sky was white and flat. There was no rain there, just high, thin clouds and somewhere, somewhere far enough away that it could look only forward not back, was the flamingo she’d watched leave.