Adia watched as her grandmother’s face turned pale. Joan said nothing, but she turned and disappeared into the other room, closing the door firmly, but quietly, behind her. Leona went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. Adia could hear her cursing under her breath as she peed. Adia’s stomach was twisted into an unfamiliar knot. It made her think of the giant centipedes that curled into black shiny balls if you poked them. That was how they protected themselves, but her stomach didn’t feel protected. It hurt. She wanted to smack her mother for being so rude to Grandmother Joan. How dare she push away the only family Adia had. Adia glanced at each of the closed doors, each with someone she loved behind it. She didn’t open either—she wanted air. On the balcony, she leaned over the railing and watched people in bathing suits below. She wasn’t used to hearing people argue. She wasn’t used to seeing her mom angry, and she wondered why, from the moment Joan came into their house, the air around the two women felt stiff, like cardboard. It scared her that Joan might leave again.
Later in the pool, underneath the surface of the water, it was quiet. The space around her body felt soft and exactly the right temperature to match her own—there was no border between her skin and the water. Only when she pushed her feet hard on the bottom of the pool and thrust herself upward to break the surface and breathe in gasps of air did she feel her own skin again, the breeze chilly and sharp against it. Those moments of breath and air were as short as she could make them. Push up, break the surface, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, hold it in and down again, back through the water to the quiet, perfect space below.
In the brief seconds Adia was in the air, she could hear her mother’s and grandmother’s voices alternately scratching and pounding like the surf from the ocean just beyond the pool patio. Their voices made Adia’s heart beat faster in her chest and it hurt. She could tell her mother was angry. Her words were quick and short and spiky, and her face hard and dark.
“I want to take Adia out into the bush,” Joan said. “I want to see where she grew up, where you lived.”
“Mom, you’d hate it out there. Dust and heat and no dry martinis.”
“I don’t mean I’m going to take her to live in a village somewhere. I mean on safari. There are safaris you can book. Nice ones with hot showers and sheets and, yes, even cocktails.” Joan pulled her sunglasses up and squinted into the light. “There were brochures in the lobby. Some look quite nice.”
Adia was at the far side of the pool, standing with her hand outstretched across the surface of the water. She was making tiny splashes with her palm. Then she disappeared below. Once, when Adia popped out of the water, she stayed up a little longer than it took to catch her breath. It was quiet, and she heard her grandmother say, “Lee, we have to talk about why you’re so angry with me. I came to you. I came all this way to see you and to meet my granddaughter. I thought my making this effort, even after so long, would begin to bridge the gap. I want to bridge that gap. I’m old, and I don’t want to die without repairing our relationship. Can you give me that?”
* * *
Leona’s bathing suit was faded and stretched out. She’d been picking gently at the little fabric pills that clustered on the suit where it stretched across her chest. Her mother’s words made the skin on her arms and legs bead with goose bumps. She felt exposed and pulled the large hotel towel around her. She pretended to watch Adia bobbing up and down in the water. This conversation was the opening to the dark tunnel of her past. Her breath quickened and the words she’d practiced in her head, over and over again through the years, scuttled away like sand crabs. She searched for a way to say what she wanted in a measured way, but all she found in her mouth was anger. It stirred and frothed, a rabid dog in her throat.
“You knew,” she rasped. She never imagined that she would ever have this conversation with her mother. She’d fantasized about it but never thought the reality of it was possible. Now it felt like she wasn’t thinking about anything at all, but that the words were pushing themselves out of her by their own power.
“You let my father do those things to me. I tried to tell you and you ignored me. You let him ruin me. I wanted to die. I wanted to cut myself into pieces. You destroyed my childhood. I watched you do nothing to help, and then I finally escaped. I escaped halfway across the world and made a life for myself without any help from you. Now you’re here? Now you want to talk? Well, guess what? Fuck you!”
Joan’s mouth was an open black hole in her face, and the sunglasses had slid back down all the way onto the tip of her nose. She was perfectly still. For an instant Leona thought she’d killed her mother or turned her into stone—maybe she was a medusa with snake words. Leona’s blood was streaming with adrenaline, and her heart beat wildly. During her speech, she’d felt separate from the body she inhabited, just a mind floating somewhere far above the quivering, angry woman spewing out feelings like pus from a wound. Now, watching her mother, Leona’s two parts slowly seeped back together. She looked around. She must have been shouting. She hadn’t meant to, hadn’t thought she was, but people around the pool were watching them. Leona had the feeling of eyes on her, and then she saw that Adia, too, was standing stock-still in the water, staring at Leona from under her slicked wet hair.
Suddenly, Leona felt sad. This wasn’t how she’d pictured it. She wanted to hurt her mother, yes. She wanted to punish Joan for the complicity she’d shown all through Leona’s forty-two years. But it didn’t feel good to finally shout what she’d held in for so long. There was no relief, no burbling up of happiness to fill the now-vacant space. Nothing like that happened. Just emptiness. A heavy emptiness. Leona didn’t like all the eyes on her; she wasn’t one for dramatic scenes, and the idea that Adia might have heard, that she would know...it was too much. She’d taken such care to construct a relationship with her daughter that would never allow light to shine on Leona’s earlier life. Leona stood quickly, shoved her feet into her flip-flops and walked away before her mother could say a word.
The lobby was cool and deserted. Leona felt faint and dizzy. It wasn’t like her to get emotional. She saw a chair tucked into an alcove and sat down. She wanted to hide, and it felt good to be folded up in this deep chair with its large, winged sides that hid her from view. Leona closed her eyes and forced herself to think about something besides the words she’d just spoken.
She focused on the bush. Should she let Adia go on safari with Joan? Her first reaction had been to say no. When Adia was born, Leona swore she’d do anything rather than expose Adia to her parents. But really, with her father dead, the danger was gone. Joan had been complicit, but never cruel. And Adia seemed happy to meet her grandmother. Leona prickled with a surprising jealousy when she saw how Adia hung on to Joan’s every word, desperate for the old woman’s affection.
Leona opened her eyes and saw that the lobby was still empty. The shelf of brochures was just across the hall. She knew there were safaris her mother would be comfortable taking. She’d heard of the luxury some of them promised, but she’d never known details. Leaving her flip-flops behind, Leona padded over to the display. There were plenty to choose from. Looking past the ones for parasailing in Lamu and exploring Mount Kenya, she pulled out all the ones that looked suitable. Once gathered, she brought the whole pile back to her chair and curled up in it again.
They were all just variations of one theme: game watching from the air-conditioned comfort of safari vans, and sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets in tents more Beverly Hills than bush. Most of the safaris went into Tsavo and Amboseli. If Joan wanted to go closer to where Adia was born, those wouldn’t be good options. Leona noticed only one that went closer to Loita. It was a photo safari based out of a luxury camping site near the Nguruman forest. Adia might even know some of the Maasai guides; it was close enough to the manyatta that some of them might work there. She could even escape and make her way to the manyatta if she had to. Leona opened the brochure to study the itinerary.
Before she saw anything else, she caught sight of a face in the upper right-hand corner, a photo of the proprietor, she assumed. She looked closer and blinked to clear the flashes of light that were exploding in her head. She tried to steady her breathing, but the flashes in her brain were so violent she thought she might throw up.
He wasn’t dead. Even if the brochure was out-of-date, it couldn’t be that old. When had she met his mother? Ten years ago? And his face in the photo was different—he’d clearly aged.
He wasn’t dead and he wasn’t far away. The whole time he’d been in plain sight. Maybe they’d crossed the same street in opposite directions. Maybe they been at the same bar one night, just hours apart. Had she seen him once and not recognized him?
There was a noise next to her and she looked up. Her mother stood there, her face a closed window.
“I just need to tell you.”
“Jesus!” Leona said loudly. Her mother standing there was a surprise, and an unwelcome one that pierced the shock. But Leona was too exhausted to argue, or to refuse and stand up and walk away. The photo left her stunned in complete inaction. Her mother, now, was the least of her concerns. Leona nodded in the direction of another chair and watched as her mother, thin as a stem, struggled to pull the chair close.
“I was a bad mother,” Joan said, lifting her hand against the argument from Leona that didn’t come.
“I knew I was bad from the moment you were born. It didn’t ever come naturally to me. I was terrified all the time when you were a baby. I could hardly leave the house for the first year because it all scared me too much. My mother didn’t even come to help for the first couple of weeks, but then she had to go, and by the way, she was a bad mother, too.” The words scraped Leona’s skin. She didn’t expect this—a plea for mercy, and she didn’t want it. Seeing her mother as vulnerable now upset the entire balance of Leona’s memories. But the older woman’s words kept coming. They were a wave Leona was pinned under, and the only way to keep from getting sucked out to sea was to let it pass over her.
“Your father was a stern man. Not at all affectionate. He was always desperate for order, for things to be just so. He got mad one spring when the rows of tulips I planted along the walkway came up red and pink. He wanted only pink ones. He made me pull the red ones out and then go to the florist to buy replacements in little pots. Can you imagine? But I did it. I did everything he asked because I had nothing else. Where could I go? My parents would have been horrified if I’d gone back to them. I had no job, no skills. And then there was you, this daughter I felt completely unable to manage. We hired nannies and, after a while, I relaxed a little... I had to keep busy all the time, had to be out of the house as much as possible. That’s where my freedom was. Yes, I knew. I knew but I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t allow myself to believe it, because if I did, and still I stayed? What would that have made me? A monster.
“Once I even asked him. I hoped that if he knew I knew, he would stop. He told me I was wrong, that I was imagining things, and that the depression was back and making me think things that weren’t there.”
She paused, and Leona looked up. There were tears in her mother’s eyes, but Leona pushed back a pang of sympathy. This didn’t change anything. Her mother could have mustered up the courage to help and she didn’t. But somewhere, somewhere Leona couldn’t identify or pinpoint, there was something new. Being a mother was confusing and hard. Children sometimes took things from you that you wanted or needed. She came from a long line of bad mothers. She hadn’t yet broken the streak, and she saw, now, that her mother was nothing but a flawed human who, in the sea of motherhood, was weighed down by her own albatross. This feeling was new. Maybe not the burbling up of relief she’d wanted, but maybe a pinprick of light.
“When you escaped to college and grad school and then all the way to Kenya, I was relieved. I was glad for you. But, by the way, you didn’t do it without help, did you? You’ve been living off the account he left you when he died. I’m glad.”
Leona breathed deeply and exhaled. She couldn’t believe that her mother, her reticent mother who hardly spoke more than the basic exchange of pleasantries while Leona was growing up, was saying all of this. She didn’t know her own mother at all, she realized.
“When your father died, I missed him. I grieved. But I also felt a weight had been lifted from me.” Here, Joan reached over and touched Leona lightly on Leona’s hand—the one still holding the brochure.
“I saw a therapist. Can you believe that? It took me that long...all these years, to gather the courage to come to you.”
Leona glanced away. Seeing her mother so exposed, so raw, made Leona feel as if she’d been dropped into a new country where she didn’t understand the customs or the language. She couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. This conversation was too big to consider now. She needed to let it absorb more slowly. Her mother was still leaning in close, watching Leona. Leona noticed the tight network of lines on Joan’s cheeks, and the drapey quality of the skin across her neck. In her memory, her mother’s face was smooth and expressionless, her constant makeup a mask, her thoughts always unreadable behind it.
“Well, Mom, I’m not sure how to react,” Leona said, and her voice came out more sharply than she’d planned. Her mother’s eyes flashed in surprise, and she leaned back, pulled her hand from Leona’s arm. Instantly Leona knew she’d offended her mother somehow, and a bewildered feeling overtook her. Why was she feeling guilty for hurting her mother’s feelings? It wasn’t equal, not in the least, to how her mother had hurt her. Still, that she admitted she’d made a mistake somehow made Leona flush and, as a way to deflect the feeling, she separated out the brochure with John’s photo in it and thrust the rest into Joan’s lap. She slid John’s into the space between the side of the cushion and the chair’s arm. She stood up.
“I think you and Adia should go on safari together. I’m sorry I insulted you before. They do look nice. I want her to spend time with you.”
* * *
The next time Adia popped up from under the water in the pool, she saw that both her mother and grandmother were gone. She was glad. Hearing them fight made her insides loose and scratchy, and when her mother cursed at Joan in that shrill voice that didn’t seem like her mother’s at all, Adia felt like she was tumbling in space. She’d barely gotten a grandmother and she didn’t want to lose her so fast. Now the chairs where they’d been sitting were empty. The sun was pulled back and settling down on the other side of the sky, and the pool, which had been sunny and bright, was now shaded and cool. Adia climbed out of the water and stepped off the patio’s cement steps and onto the warm, soft sand. Down at the surf, a few little kids were running back and forth along the frothy line where ocean met sand and up to where their parents stretched out on brightly colored beach towels. Adia walked as close to the little family as she could without their noticing and sat in the warm sand.
“Don’t go in the water too far, kids!” the mother called at one point. “There may be riptides.”
The oldest-looking child, a girl of about seven, plopped down on the edge of her mother’s towel.
“What’s a riptide?” she asked.
Adia knew. She’d studied them in science class. She whispered to herself, “A narrow stream of water traveling swiftly from shore out to sea.”
She heard the mother say, “It’s most important that if you get caught in one, you don’t fight. The real danger is not in being in one, but in how you react to it.”
Adia remembered that her teacher told the class that rip currents were caused by the shape of the shoreline itself, not by the moon or the sun or the particular undulations of the seafloor. The tides reacted to the particular way the shoreline behaved. The shore was in charge of the whole dynamic.
Adia watched the kids and their parents for a long time, trying to discern the pattern the children made between water and family. Who responded t
o whom? Which were the shoreline, Adia wondered, the kids or the parents, and which the tides? If she had a father and a mother together, like those kids did, Adia knew what she would be. She would be the water that answered the shoreline of her parents. She would swirl around their edges, delighted to be the third in their dynamic of two. They would be happy together—just like these parents seemed to be. Adia’s parents would laugh and hold hands and be as steady as land. Adia, then, would be free to drift and return, drift and return, always knowing she had a safe, dry place waiting for her.
Later, at dinner, Adia watched her mother’s face closely when her grandmother said, “I’m going to book a safari, the one that Adia liked the most.” All three of them were rosy and exhausted from the sun and the water. Adia’s eyelids drooped and she could hardly eat the hamburger the waiter had set down in front of her. Joan and Leona sipped wine and picked at their fish.
“Which one did you choose?” Leona asked Adia, briefly pushing the fatigue away and concentrating on her daughter’s face.
“I forget the name,” Adia said quietly, “but I picked it because grandma wanted to see our manyatta, and this one was the closest.”
“What?” Leona asked, her voice shrill in the quiet restaurant. “I didn’t see one anywhere closer to Loita than Amboseli.”
“Really?” Joan said. “It must have dropped out of the pile you gave me. I found it sticking out of the chair cushion after you left this afternoon. It looks wonderful. Perfect for us. Adia, you’ve held on to it, right? I’ll need the number.”
Adia nodded. Earlier that evening, while they waited for Leona to shower and change for dinner, Adia and Joan sat on the balcony off Joan’s room and looked through the various offerings. Adia picked the one closest to the manyatta, it was the only criteria she used. She’d been looking at the pictures when Leona called to them, saying she was ready and should they go down to the dining room? Adia needed her shoes and found them under her bed. She dropped the brochures on her bedside table. “Good girl. Give it back to me tomorrow and I’ll try to book us in next week. Adia will miss a few days of school, but never mind. Of course, you’re welcome to come along.”
The Brightest Sun Page 19