The Brightest Sun

by Adrienne Benson

  “Perfect,” John said. He popped the last bite of bread in his mouth and wiped his hands on his shirt. “I’ll come along.”

  Adia didn’t try to make conversation as they walked, and John didn’t, either. Not really. Now and again he’d tell Adia some memory from his childhood, how he’d climb anthills and race to his friend Daniel’s house and try to beat his record every time—counting steps out loud to scare any animals out of the way and taking bigger and bigger leaps across the red earth. Adia didn’t answer, but she listened, and she tried to imagine this man as a boy—younger, even, than she was now.

  * * *

  At the top of the hill, though, Adia turned to John and smiled, “I love this tree,” she said. She ran her fingers across the pulpy wood. The baobab, the “tree of life,” was as porous as a grass stem. Its roots absorbed water in otherwise dry places from deep within the ground, and the fibrous wood held it tightly.

  “I love it, too,” John said. “It’s one of the biggest I’ve seen. When I was at boarding school I had dreams about this tree. And when I moved to Nairobi to start work I missed it. Every time I came back to visit I’d take a photograph. I must have a hundred now, all taken at different angles, different times of day. If I can find them, you can take the ones you want with you when you go back to school. It’ll help you remember, like it did me.”

  After his mother died, John felt inert. He’d expected the opposite—to finally feel free from all obligations, no family left, just him. He’d imagined himself moving back to the city, starting to meet women again, maybe even finding one to fall in love with. He felt maybe he was ready for marriage. But it didn’t happen like that, and instead when Ruthie died, he’d felt as if his insides were nothing but an empty hole. Hollow and static. He was pulled under waves of grief that rose and fell like the ocean, and couldn’t be predicted. On safari one day, with a family of Brits here on holiday, he’d felt strong, in control. But then he watched the little boy look up at his father with an expression that made John feel as if he were breaking into pieces.

  “I thought I’d leave here,” he said. Adia was still standing next to the tree, picking at the bark with a finger. “But right around that time was when your mother came, when I found you.”

  “When Grace died,” Adia said.

  “When Grace died,” John confirmed. “And that’s the kind of thing that makes life so damn confusing, doesn’t it? Because here’s this awful tragedy—your being hurt and losing your best friend, but me finding my daughter. The one I’d wanted ever since she was born.”

  Adia turned away from her inspection of the bark and faced John. “I wanted you, too. I imagined having a dad forever.”

  “And there you have it.” John smiled. “We wanted one another and we found each other. It doesn’t erase the fact that Grace is gone. Nothing will ever do that.”

  He patted the cool, stone bench next to him. “We have a lot to learn about each other, don’t we? I’ve had no practice being a dad, no role model, either.”

  He smiled, and put his wide, warm hand on Adia’s shoulder. “But we’ll work out how to be with one another.”

  Adia felt a tightness in her chest uncoil, just a little, and felt her back relax. Her stomach growled loudly, and John laughed. “I’m already failing! Any dad worth his salt would have made sure his daughter ate something before dragging her out on a walk and giving her a lecture!”

  It was almost dark when Leona’s car bumped back up the driveway. She’d stretched her errands out for as long as she could; she stopped and had tea at a bakery, browsed at a tiny shop that sold books and wondered how Adia and John were managing. She hadn’t told John she would be gone for so long or why she was really leaving. But she wanted to spend time alone, quiet. And she thought John and Adia would be able to talk more easily if she weren’t there. Now, as she pushed the car door shut and hoisted her bags out of the trunk, she wondered if it was a mistake to leave them alone together. Maybe they’d avoided each other all day, not talked at all. Worse, maybe they’d discovered that they had everything in common, maybe they wouldn’t want her back, wouldn’t need her at all.

  Leona piled her bags on the patio. She wasn’t ready to go inside just yet. Instead, she walked around the side of the house and partway up the hill. The gathering dark made it too dangerous to walk far alone. In the near distance she heard a hyena. There were animals out now; this was their time. She turned toward the house again, and saw that, through the darkness, the brightly lit windows shone.

  She had a sudden memory of her childhood home and how, sometimes, after school in the winter, she’d walk up the street from the bus stop and wish to see the windows in her house lit up, warm and welcoming and with someone there to take her in.

  She stopped and turned to look back up the hill, where the baobab was silhouetted against the sky. The sky folded itself around the enormous tree and grew darker and darker until Leona couldn’t see anything anymore. Not the branches, not the leaves, not the lonely headstones. Even the sky itself, for that moment, was invisible to her. It lifted itself like a lid, and air rushed in.

  Leona turned back to the house. In the light of the kitchen window, she saw John and Adia. They were sitting at the table. John had a box at his feet and what looked like photos, some framed, some not, spread across the table between them. Adia was holding one, large and in a gilded frame, and John was pointing at it. Leona imagined him telling his daughter the stories of these people, her family, and his. She only knew the saddest stories of John’s life, but surely he had happy ones, too. And if not, maybe it was because the happy moments in his life were still ahead, spreading out like the sky. Maybe the same would be true for her, too. She hugged herself against the chill air and began walking back down the path. She had come a long way, so had Adia, and Simi, and so had John. They all had. There were pieces of all their lives that were broken and ugly, but new ones were emerging. Adia had two mothers and a father now; Simi had more daughters than she’d ever dreamed she could have.

  Leona considered herself and her daughter and John, in that moment the three of them inconceivably together in the wide-open land they all loved so much. Things slipped into the places where they were supposed to fit, and despite her fears and her refusal, time and time again, to love, she was here. She was here and she could feel herself opening. It took courage to relearn everything, to let her darkest spaces crack open to the light. It took bravery.

  Leona smiled into the dark and quickened her pace. She let out a deep breath. She was ready to be brave.

  * * * * *

  Behind the Book:

  How Nostalgia Brought

  The Brightest Sun to Life

  ADRIENNE BENSON

  At the end of the movie version of Out of Africa, when Karen Blixen is leaving Kenya, she says, “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?”

  I always cry at that point, because I know exactly what she means. Clichés about Africa aside, the landscape in Kenya is arresting. It changes with the seasons and with the mood of the sky. My family left the US when I was four, and with only one brief stint back there, we’d been in Africa for a total of ten years by the time I returned to the US from Kenya at sixteen because of my dad’s job as an international aid worker with the US government. We’d lived in two other African countries—Zambia and Liberia—but Kenya was where I lived the longest (five years) and it was the place I felt most connected to. It was where I began the adolescent individuation from my parents, where I first claimed experiences for myself and where I began to see the very tender and tiny shoots of the adult I’d later become. All of this meant that Kenya, and her dramatic landscape, was the place lodged most firmly in my heart when I returned to the United States to begin a life in a “home” I didn’t really know.

&n
bsp; People like my characters Grace and Adia and me are Third Culture Kids (TCKs)—kids who spend significant portions of their formative years outside their parents’ countries. They are not immigrants—they are always expected to repatriate to their passport country. In the world of the TCK, goodbyes and leaving are not only par for the course, but are also something to be excited about. TCK culture swallows grief. Moving somewhere new is considered an adventure, not an end that should be mourned; grieving is discouraged. Well, as I learned, when grief is sublimated and memories age, nostalgia flourishes.

  In the way Adia was born of the special kind of loneliness expatriates can feel, The Brightest Sun was born of a nostalgic ache I’ve wrestled with for the thirty-one years since I left. The word nostalgia itself is a hybrid of the Greek words for homecoming and pain. As a writer, my therapy of choice for mental pain is to catch the things that hurt and put them on paper. I find it helps to clear the darker spaces inside me and empty the little throbs that collect in my mind like dust bunnies under the sofa. So when I heard Leona’s voice in my head, I knew that she was only the eye of a needle, and that the thread she’d pull through the story was one that would also empty me of the nostalgia I’d harbored like a phantom limb for so long. So I set her in that same stunning landscape I couldn’t forget, and I gave her a baby, Adia—a little TCK to watch growing up in between two cultures.

  I knew kids like Adia, clearly foreign but allowed to root for an entire childhood in a single setting. Even though they knew they’d have to leave, and that they’d still face the struggle to find place, they displayed a deeper sense of belonging than those of us who moved more frequently. Adia’s story isn’t mine, so once I’d conjured her, I saw a place for something more like my own story. That’s where Grace came in—her TCK experience is more closely aligned to mine. But you don’t have a TCK without a parent who chooses to uproot. Grace gave rise to her mother, Jane, who has pushed aside her own needs and given up a career in order to accompany her husband, a diplomat, to his various international postings. Further, you can’t have expatriates without a foreign nation for them to live in, one peopled with individuals who each have a deep and complex history and culture of their own. That’s Simi—the steady one who never chooses to be foreign, but instead grows foreign simply because of her inability to be what her community demands.

  The struggles the three women and two girls in The Brightest Sun face is really the struggle to define, and it’s a universal struggle: to define yourself as a mother or daughter, to define yourself in relation to where you live and to define your place in the world—literally and figuratively. It’s that struggle, ultimately, that I undertook and it’s that struggle that inspired the book.

  I’m not Karen Blixen. I know that Africa doesn’t have a song of me. I know that the deep nostalgia I feel for aspects of my childhood are not reflected back by the places I lived, or by shadows underneath the baobab trees, or by the delicate dawns when the grasses glitter with dew. Any trace of me in Kenya, or Liberia, or Zambia, or Cote d’Ivoire is long gone. But fusing those memories and nostalgia and imagination into this novel was part of my personal journey. I knew I needed to claim that space in between—the little sliver of Venn diagram where “American” and “other” meet. That’s my place. I knew I wanted to bring the life of that “in-between” expatriate child to the page, to set it down and introduce it to people who don’t know it. Those kids, and the adults they become, are my people, after all. And though Africa will never sing of me, I’m okay with that—my song isn’t purely an African one anyway, nor is it American. Instead, it’s the anthem of the sojourner, of all the placeless kids whose home is everywhere and nowhere. It’s the song of kids who dream foreign smells and foreign tongues and who, when the plane taking them away banks and turns, trace on the window the dark shapes of hills they may never see again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  People say writing is solitary. But writing a book for publication, and making that book into a real, tangible thing with a good story, believable characters, correct spelling and commas all in the right places takes a village. I’m lucky to have, somehow, been adopted into a literary village full of creative, smart, dedicated and kind professionals—people without whom this book wouldn’t exist.

  I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was seven, but it wasn’t until the summer I turned forty that I tried. That summer, I accidentally opened an envelope addressed to my houses’ previous owner—an inadvertent act that changed my life. The flyer was stamped with the George Washington University logo, and advertised the university-sponsored Jenny McKean Moore Community Workshop, a writing workshop led by actual, working writers. I applied, I got in and I was so nervous the first night I almost threw up.

  The Brightest Sun was born in that first JMM workshop, and honed in a second workshop I took three years later. It was born because of the encouragement my two instructors—the first real writers I’d ever met—generously gave me, and the faith they had in my ability. Their support sustained, astonished and inspired me. I also met and stayed in touch with another participant, Terri G. Scullen. Over the course of the next four years, Terri read draft after draft after draft of this book, and not only had the kindness to remain my friend, but also gave me invaluable ideas, helped me attack the story and cheered me on. Terri, an amazing writer herself, was this book’s most constant and most exuberant supporter.

  Writers need readers for those first drafts, readers with critical eyes who can see the good and help point out the bad. I was lucky. I found a group of smart women who called it like they saw it, were generous with their time, gave excellent feedback and always had good snacks—Lisa Burke, Justine Hedgepeth, Laura Kaiser and Heather Prichard, I owe you multiple margaritas. Sharon Samber, I owe you Scotch (and probably money). Carol Hawk, friend since third grade and hawk-eyed reader, for your patience and insights, I owe you, too.

  Finally, the pros that pulled me into the club I’d yearned for so long to join. Matt DiGangi of Bresnick Weil Literary Agency took a chance on me, made me feel like a professional, helped me keep the faith through the submission process, made me laugh and, ultimately, sold the book to the incredible (and possibly magical) editor Liz Stein of Park Row Books. Liz saw what the book should grow into and gently led my writing there. I am deeply grateful to her for the countless hours of work she put into this project. I’m also grateful to the rest of the team at Park Row for so professionally and seamlessly doing all the other hard work necessary to bring a book into the world—from copyediting to printing, from marketing and publicity to designing a cover so beautiful it made me gasp. This is a dream come true for me. A dream that took buy-in and faith from lots of other people and that is what stuns me the most—the willingness of so many others to help make this happen. I’m more grateful to all of you than you may ever know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adrienne Benson’s earliest memories include roasting green mangoes over bonfires in Lusaka, Zambia; climbing walls to steal guavas from the neighbors; and riding in the back of a VW van for weeks on end, watching her mom and dad navigate African border crossings and setting up campsites among thieving monkeys and vocal lions. A USAID worker’s daughter, she grew up traversing sub-Saharan Africa, finding homes in Zambia, Liberia, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire. At sixteen, she made the hardest border crossing of all—the one that brought her “home” to America—a country she barely knew. She’s been a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, lived in Ukraine and Albania, slept in more airports than she can count and is now happily ensconced in Washington, DC, with her three kids. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed; the Foreign Service Journal; Brain, Child; the Washington Post; the Huffington Post; ADDitude magazine; and several anthologies. The Brightest Sun is her first novel.

  ISBN-13: 9781488028090

  The Brightest Sun

  Copyright © 2018 by Adrienne Benson

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