The Brightest Sun

It suited Leona to be emotionally removed from the commotion around her and to have the freedom to be on the outside looking in. Here, nobody expected any more than that from her. Back home, when another person did something Leona didn’t comprehend, something that hurt or confused her, she felt a terrible sense of bewilderment, of sinking beneath the surface into a place where she couldn’t breathe—the fear of not understanding what she felt she should have understood. Here, that panicked sense was gone. She didn’t want to cross that line, to feel confused and misunderstood without a reason again.

Leona knew that in Maasailand, babies weren’t recognized until they were three months old. Children are loved, but utilized, and the utility is treacherous. She’d seen babies die of disease before they took their first steps; she’d observed death rites for teenagers bitten by snakes, toddlers who fell into cooking fires and the bleeding body of a seven-year-old fatally mauled by a hyena while tending goats outside the village. It was prudent, Leona thought, to hold your children at arm’s length when you lived the hard life of the Maasai. Anything could happen, after all. Life out here was fragile; you had to be tough. This is what she told herself when her baby was born. These were the thoughts in her head. She convinced herself it was good to keep distance between herself and the baby. She wrapped her leaky breasts tightly with a kanga and let another nursing mother in the village feed the baby. She let Simi take the baby to her house to sleep, and she let Simi carry the baby on her back during the walks to the river. This was the line that she drew between herself and her child.

Simi loved the baby. With no children of her own, she was free to adopt a baby who couldn’t, for whatever reason, be cared for by its own mother. Leona knew that Simi was more of a mother to her child than she was. She also knew Simi’s place in the village, as a childless wife, was precarious. She said yes when Simi asked to make it official; she consented to an adoption ceremony—the laiboni slaughtered a ram and both women ate the fat. That was the traditional process. Leona knew, in her own head, that her daughter would never really be Maasai, that she was, by her inherited DNA, privy to the perks of being American, but she felt better in an unexpected way. Her child had two parents now.

The Maasai elders gave the baby her first, sacred, name. The name only used by the parents, nobody else. Nalangu, they whispered to Leona, which meant “from a different tribe.” And that’s what the little pale baby looked like. A different tribe, an alien being that Leona observed; who she watched learn to roll over on a rawhide blanket, who she watched nursing from another woman’s breast, who took her first steps in the red dust and dried dung of the manyatta. Leona watched the baby grow in the same way she watched all the babies of the village grow. She allowed her baby to go to Simi for comfort, and not come to her. She spoke to the baby in English, but she spoke to all the kids in English—their parents wanted them to learn. She convinced herself that nothing was different, that the nine months of her pregnancy never really happened and the terror she had felt through it all was just a bad dream.

At night, though, Leona often woke up sweating and terrified, her nightmares alive in her mind. She dreamed of her baby disappearing into a puff of smoke, or being carried away in the mouth of a lion, the wide tawny shoulders heaving as it leaped over the thorny fence, the shaggy blond mane curling slightly over the cold, yellow, animal eyes. Those nights she’d sit bolt upright and reach over to check for her baby’s presence. The baby was never there. When she was awake, Leona hated the version of herself she saw in the nightmares; it wasn’t the smoke or the lion that caused the frantic heart beating and the suffocating breath, but instead it was the vision of herself, just standing there watching, calmly stirring the chai in her dented enamel cup with her metal spoon, in concentric circles, over and over again, while her child vanished before her eyes. What kind of mother did nothing but watch?

Leona found peace and freedom in concentrating on her work. It was important, not just to her, but to the community. When a Maasai member of parliament gave a speech in Narok, Leona pulled him aside afterward and told him of her work, of her idea to convince the government to allow grazing privileges, at least during droughts. He’d been trying to forward a similar idea and asked Leona to send him her research. This forced Leona to focus more fully on her observations of specifics; current grazing patterns versus the ones the elders had known, old ways of dealing with drought versus the new ones. Leona began to visit other manyattas in the area, gathering observations and stories from the largest sampling she could. Those trips away from her baby didn’t upset either one of them. Nalangu was perfectly content with Simi and her wet nurse; Leona was perfectly content not being a mother.

When Nalangu was one, it came time for her to be given a real name—one that could be said aloud, a name that she would keep. Leona allowed Simi to choose that name, and when the girl’s hair was washed with milk and water, and then shaved, Leona watched, notebook and pen in hand. The new name Simi selected was Adia, gift. Like all the kids in the manyatta, she was the child of everyone—free to eat and sleep with any of the mothers, and so Leona’s connection to Adia remained the same as her connection to all the babies around her; affectionate but removed, seen through a telescope, detailed but remote.

Since Maasai fathers played only a tiny role in the lives of their children, Adia’s lack of one was barely a detail worth considering. By the time Adia turned three, Leona didn’t think much about the girl’s father. She’d succeeded in keeping him away. Leona was relieved, frankly, to let it go.

It was easy for Leona to concentrate on her work with all the mothers available to her daughter. And, because of that, it was easy for the days to slip into months, and even years. Occasionally, Leona drove to Nairobi to meet with her government contact. She provided him with the information she’d gathered, and he began taking it to the halls of parliament. Leona liked her trips to Nairobi. She was beginning to crave a city again, the intellectual stimulation of others like her. And she was finally making a name for herself. Other local anthropologists sought her out; she was becoming known in her field. And she rarely thought of Adia. She knew her daughter was safe in the manyatta under the watchful eyes of Simi and the other women.

During one trip to Nairobi, she was introduced to the head of the anthropology department at the University of Nairobi. He’d requested a meeting, and after they talked awhile, he offered her a position on his staff. Leona was thrilled. Now that she had evidence to support her theory that imposed grazing borders were disproportionately damaging to Maasai communities, she could take that to the lecture halls. She could talk to students about the way their own society was changing, and maybe help inspire a new generation of people committed to the work of helping nomadic people.

Leona thought of her daughter and considered her choices. She could mother the girl alone in Nairobi without the benefit of the village women. She thought back to the nightmares she’d had early on and how casually her nightmare self watched as the baby vanished. What an unsuitable mother she was. It occurred to her that she could leave Adia in the manyatta and come to Nairobi by herself. The manyatta was Adia’s home, after all, and she had Simi.

Leona harbored a smoky vision of Adia as a teenager, bent over books in a real high school. That vision, she understood, would require her involvement as a mother. But that was a distant problem. Adia was too young for school, and she’d be safe and happy in the manyatta, at least for a while. She was barely three—far too young for Leona to have to worry about educating her.

The thought niggled at her mind and made her heart beat fast in her chest. She told the department head she needed time to think, to tie up a few loose ends in her research, but she knew her decision was made. The whole drive back to Loita she imagined the way it would feel to teach, to make more contacts in the higher realms of Kenyan government. She could feel excitement in her blood. She could do this; she could use her work, her skills, to help the people she’d come to love so much she’d practically given them her firstborn child.

She stopped for gas a few hours’ drive from the manyatta, and, on a whim, decided not to wait. Leona liked to be resolute after making a decision. While the attendant washed the windshield, Leona asked to use the phone. The connection was fuzzy and unclear, but the department head understood. She accepted the position. She’d move to Nairobi soon. The new semester was only a few weeks away, and as she drove the final miles to the place she’d called home for over four years, Leona listed the things she’d need in her new life: a place to live in the city, clothes to wear for teaching (her old, torn jeans and cotton blouses wouldn’t do); a bank account; an office with a decent computer. These thoughts distracted her as she rolled to a stop outside the manyatta enclosure. She registered the presence of more people than usual milling around but didn’t think about why they might be there. Her mind was full of other thoughts. In her inkajijik, Leona looked around. She’d probably leave most everything here. Simi could use it, and Adia. Absently, Leona reached for a small pile of mail someone—Simi probably—left on her bed. The mail came from Nairobi via Narok, and then to a shop that doubled as a post office nearer the manyatta. Usually, when she received mail, the shopkeeper would send his son to deliver it to her directly. This mail must have come while she was away.

When Leona wrote to her parents, she selected her words carefully. She didn’t keep Adia a secret, but she didn’t write much about her, either. In the letters, she explained only that the father was not present and that the baby—a girl—was happy and safe. As Adia grew, the letters Leona received from her parents became insistent. They’d started a bank account for the girl; they’d rewritten their will. Her father, in particular, couldn’t imagine life in the manyatta. He couldn’t stomach the idea of his only grandchild—a little girl, for that matter—growing up in the dirt, as he said, without the civility of nearby doctors and things like electricity and running water. Leona forced herself to open all of the letters and to read them. But each time a fat, white envelope—half covered with stamps—appeared in the manyatta, she felt her breath quicken and saw sparks of light behind her eyes. She felt she was sinking. She wondered why she’d bothered to tell them about Adia in the first place.

When she read the letters they wrote to her, the pain of her childhood came back like the feeling of a phantom limb, or the flashes of her remembered nightmares. But something surprised Leona, too. Underneath the anger she had for her parents, and the resentment, she fought an unexpected jealousy. The idea of her parents showing concern for Adia when they had never shown much for her was a notion that cut her. She planned to never let them meet her child. She planned to never go back to the wet silence of those Oregon skies or to the dead feeling of being alone in a house with only the ticking of clocks and the hum of the refrigerator to remind her she was alive.

“And who is the father?” this most recent letter asked. “You must know. If nothing else, a girl deserves a father.” It was this that forced a crack in Leona’s long-held conviction about keeping a distance from the white Kenyan. The cruel joke that her own father—simultaneously brutal and absent—should imply that his granddaughter needed something he’d never given Leona sent a shiver up into a hidden spot in her brain. She pushed the thought away and tried to bury it. She told herself that Simi and the village were all Adia needed, at least for now. And yet the thought grew in her mind.

Her father, her parents, made Leona what she was—silent and isolated. During the torturous moments when the worry couldn’t be pushed away, Leona wondered if she was giving her own daughter the same relationship her parents had given her—disconnected and cool. She hated the idea of that, and the guilt it filled her with, but she didn’t know how to be different. Knowing she’d fail was why she’d never wanted to be anyone’s mother in the first place. She was torn. When she watched Adia with the Maasai children, laughing and playing games, never alone and never silent, she was happy. Adia always had Simi. Leona told herself that Adia’s childhood was better than her own. Adia would grow up with age-mates and friends, and the constant activity and watchful eyes of the entire village. It helped Leona to realize that, if her daughter grew up here, she would be nothing like she herself was. Leona tried to convince herself that giving her child a community, a feeling of belonging somewhere, was far more important than giving Adia herself as a mother.

This most recent letter, the one Leona read now after accepting the position at the university, was no different from the others. Leona crumpled it into the tiniest ball she could, tossed it in the fire pit, and went to find Simi.

As she stepped through her doorway and into the light, she noticed again the number of people in the manyatta. There was the laiboni, the spiritual leader, surrounded by the young moran, warriors, in the central area between the small houses. Newly initiated warriors crowded the manyatta. Their faces and their long braids were slicked with a mixture of bright red dirt and sheep fat. It made Leona feel light-headed when she realized that in the faces of these brand-new men—most only thirteen or fourteen—she recognized the rounded faces of little boys she’d first met four years ago. Now they were men. She’d been here for so long. She hadn’t considered how it would hurt to leave them all behind. To leave Simi. The thought made her feel dizzy, and she wandered over to sit with the elders in the shade of a scraggly acacia tree.

“What’s happening?” she asked one wizened woman.

“Emurata,” the woman answered.

When Leona first came to the manyatta, she forced herself to watch everything, all the rituals and ceremonies. Her work was to observe, without emotion, the daily life and events that reflected the beliefs of the people she wrote about. Her least favorite ritual was the girls’ coming-of-age rite, the emurata. She found it impossible not to wince at the cutting of the flesh, and she found herself unable to keep from feeling a harsh judgment against the entire idea. Her resolve to observe everything without critique was tested every time she was audience to an emurata. After watching three of them, she convinced herself she had all the information she needed about the practice and stopped going to the ceremonies at all.

The ceremony had started and the moran began to dance. They stood in a circle, impossibly tall and impossibly thin, backs as straight as the spears they held. When they began their singing, they chanted uh-uh-uh-uuuu-huh and the straight-bodied jumping made their braids slap against their backs and the iron of their spear tips glisten in the sun—Leona knew the circumcision was about to start. She stood up and walked past the dancing moran. She wanted to be outside the village, far enough away so that the wind in the acacia trees would fill her ears instead of the sound of the rites.

Vaguely, as she made her way through the crowd, she glanced around for Adia. It was rare that she was alone with the girl, but she wanted that now. It occurred to her she would miss the daily interaction—as unsubstantial as it was—with her daughter. A tingle of worry nibbled at her from somewhere deep and hidden. Her parents’ letter, the guilt it made her feel, pressed into her mind. She wanted to hurry, but she was caught between the desire to leave and the unfamiliar feeling of maternal responsibility leaking through her. Where was Adia?

Leona could tell the instant the knife met flesh by the sound of the deep-throated cry of the girl that rose from the squat dung-and-wattle structure and hovered in the air. An image flashed into Leona’s mind of Adia, sprawled and bleeding. It couldn’t be her, Leona knew. At three, Adia was far too young, but the image of her daughter being cut, now or years from now, set Leona’s heart pounding. Someday Adia would be thirteen. Someday, if Leona did leave her here, Adia would think of the cutting as normal, as necessary. This would be her world. Maybe her father was right. The idea of giving him credit for parenting advice made Leona sick, but she couldn’t ignore it. This was her daughter, after all. And then some tiny, unwelcome shoot of a poison plant took root in her mind—a thought she didn’t want to think. As much as she hated them, there was a part of Leona that desperately wanted her parents’ approval. They were happy to have a grandchild. It was the first thing Leona had done to inspire their pride.

Leona’s head throbbed, and she felt a trickle of sweat beading down her back. Her heart was beating too fast now, she wanted to sit down, to be able to breathe slowly and pull her thoughts back to where she could contain them, control them.

Then the girl screamed again. Of course she screamed. Of course she writhed against the knife. And Leona, alert and wild with panic, bounded across the dusty paddock.

The quick absence of light when she bent into the ceremonial inkajijik made her stop and rub her eyes, but when she opened them, through the haze of smoke, she saw her small blonde daughter sitting ramrod straight in a gaggle of little girl age-mates, watching intently as the bleeding almost-woman curled in pain under the glinting blade. Leona’s eyes watered, the wood smoke thick in the air. Through the tears, she thought she could see blood in the dust, little bands of soft flesh left behind.

In one fluid movement, Leona leaned over the embers in the fire pit and pulled her daughter up and out into the light, hissing through the smoke that choked in her throat as she dragged Adia, “You can’t watch this. This is not for you... Not for you. Not for us.”

Through her panic, Leona didn’t see Simi approach, concerned, and when Adia turned away from Leona to pull herself toward the other woman, who grasped the girl’s other arm, Leona responded by pulling harder. Flickers of her life as a child popped in her mind. It wasn’t all bad. There was the summer camp she loved, the elderly neighbor lady who bought all her Girl Scout cookies one year after Leona admitted to being too shy to go door-to-door, the ice-cream truck in the summer, the smell of the Christmas tree in December and the Thanksgiving dinners they shared with friends who always brought Leona little presents. Was she stealing that life from Adia?

“You are not Maasai,” Leona hissed. She saw Simi then, and their gazes held, both women clutching the girl who stood, sobbing, in the dust between them.

“I adopted her,” Simi said.

Leona remembered the ram, and the fat she had eaten and the relief it brought her to know she wasn’t solely responsible for the baby. Simi had helped her. Surely, though, she hadn’t meant forever? Surely Simi knew that Leona didn’t really have to obey the traditions of a culture that wasn’t her own?

“You are her second mother,” Leona said, watching Simi’s face carefully—there was nothing but alarm in her eyes. Adia twisted, trying to release herself, but instead stumbled.

“I am her first,” Leona continued. “She has a family in America.” She thought of the letter, of her parents’ concern that Adia be educated, be allowed to live like an American. Leona wished there wasn’t a minuscule part of her that didn’t agree with them. She hated that, on some level, she knew they were right.

Adia jerked backward and fell. Leona kept her grip, but Simi, in an instinctual moment, leaned forward to break Adia’s fall. In that second, Leona pulled Adia out of Simi’s reach.

“Simi, she can’t be a Maasai. I can’t let that cutting happen to her.”

Then her own daughter’s voice, thick and raw, hysterical, rose above the manyatta like the call of an exotic bird, out of place, far from home. Whether she was screaming from the pain of Leona’s tight grip around her upper arm, from the humiliation of being dragged out of the ceremony or from fear of the sudden and uncontrolled presence of a mother she hardly knew, Leona didn’t know. She didn’t care. Leona pulled Adia up and held her up against her hip. She knew that she had to get Adia away from here quickly, while the conviction was strong. She stumbled as fast as she could to where her car was parked.

“This is not your real life, Adia,” Leona said over and over again. “You are not Maasai. You are like me. You are like me.”

Leona’s car was dented and rusted to the point of being colorless. Now, she pulled the back door open, grateful it was unlocked—her shaking hands could never have managed a key—pushed Adia into the back seat and clicked the child’s seat belt firmly. She didn’t say goodbye to the people she’d lived with for so long, she didn’t let Adia say goodbye. She was frantic to leave, driven by the thought that if she didn’t go now, her own fear would force her to change her mind again and leave Adia behind. Simi was screaming frantically on her knees in the dust, other women gathering by her, and one began running toward the car. Leona slammed the driver’s-side door shut so violently that the window slid down into the door frame, off its track, rendering it useless. She managed to fit the key into the ignition and start the car. She popped the brake and hit the gas pedal. Adia screamed and screamed, crying out for Simi as the car bumped wildly on the lumpy, dusty road. She banged on the window with her small fist and kicked the back of Leona’s seat.

Leona felt like a kidnapper.

It was getting dark when the lights of Narok emerged on the horizon. Leona hated driving at night. There were too many hazards—broken-down trucks in the road you couldn’t see until it was too late to avoid them, elephants wandering, antelope shocked into stillness right in front of you by the flash of your headlights. Leona knew of too many car accidents to take it lightly, and when she reached the cluster of buildings that made up the Narok town, she shuddered the Renault to a stop in front of the Chabani Guest House. She hadn’t been here since the night of Adia’s conception. She felt a flutter of nerves. What if he was here? What would she say? But the lobby was empty, and when the attendant showed Leona to the nicest room—one of only three with an en suite bath and more than one light to read by—the hall was empty, too.

That night, Leona avoided the bar. Instead, she walked a teary-eyed Adia to a café down the street. Adia, over and over again, asked for Simi, for her mother.

“I want to stay with my mother,” she said once. “Not with you.”

Leona lied and told the girl they’d go back home soon. She ordered Adia french fries, grilled meat and ice cream. The novelty of the ice cream worked. This is a vacation, she told her daughter. Back in the hotel, Adia consented to a shower and laughed at the feeling of water pouring over her head and down her back. When she climbed into bed, wet hair slicked against her neck, looking as small and pale as a grub, she asked Leona what the sheets were for? The pillow?

Her own daughter had never slept on a mattress. The thought shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it shocked her. Leona flicked off the light and lay in the dark. She remembered her own childhood home, her father distant and silent, with hard, hard hands. She remembered what it felt like when she was a child and a stranger in her own life. She thought of the man who gave her Adia, a gift that terrified her into numbness for so long. The girl lay in the bed beside her, so close Leona could feel the rise and fall of her breathing, the tiny lungs; the warm air she expelled.

When Leona finally fell asleep, she fell asleep with Adia’s soft hair under her chin and her arm wrapped around Adia’s shoulders. There wasn’t a nightmare that night. Leona’s sleep was calm. She dreamed about the sky, clear and calm and infinite. It was the kind of sky she remembered from one long ago summer when she was a child, and the darkness hadn’t bloomed inside her, and the endless rain hadn’t come.

When Leona woke up it was barely light. A centipede trailed along the polished floor and Leona watched it disappear and reappear through the shadows. She absently smoothed back Adia’s hair with her palm. They were in Narok now. The white Kenyan came here, Leona knew. He lived nearby. If they waited long enough, asked the right people the right questions, they could find him. Leona was sure of that. She felt a twinge inside of her somewhere, a place so deep she’d almost forgotten, silent and still but, finally, shivering with potential. The sky was getting lighter outside the window and there were squares of light on the wall opposite the bed. Leona twisted her back so she was facing her baby. She traced her finger along the small nose that looked like hers, the ears that reminded Leona of her own mother’s. Then she recognized the feeling that was so tiny and so deep down between her bones. Hope was a seed inside of her.

A WOMAN LIKE A WILDERNESS (#u6bc1c600-0171-5272-bc10-cf3339fdf132)