The younger girls fell asleep early, their bellies full of meat. Simi and Adia sat by the fire. They didn’t talk much. The fact that Adia was leaving tomorrow, back to Nairobi and then on an airplane to America, hung between them. Simi thought about what she’d said to Adia earlier that day—that she should welcome this change, that she should be happy to get such a good education. The truth was muddier. Adia hadn’t come from Simi’s body, but her existence, from the moment she was born, altered Simi’s life in ways she’d never have anticipated. She hated knowing she wouldn’t see Adia for so long, and that she would be so, so far away.
“Yeyo,” Adia said. “I’m really sad to leave. I’m going to miss you and everyone here. I’ll miss the Loita Hills and the sky and the way the grass smells. I lost Grace and now I’m losing everything else.”
Simi stood up and gestured for Adia to follow her outside. She walked to the edge of the manyatta, where light from the fires in the little homes couldn’t reach. The air was chilly. The stars were out. It was a clear night, and the moon was almost a perfect circle. The air smelled like livestock mixed with dust, wood smoke and charred meat.
“I love that smell so much,” Adia said. “I never want to forget it.”
Simi sighed. “You cannot worry about that,” she said. “You know they say ‘A zebra takes its stripes wherever it goes.’ You don’t ever really leave your home behind. It is the stripes of the zebra...it will follow you like your own skin does.”
Simi looked up at the moon and remembered again the way her mother told her an education could never be taken away. She remembered the sad time after Leona took Adia and how she stared at the moon one night and felt that, even though she had that education, everything else had been taken from her. The moon was watching her again tonight, and this time, she wouldn’t be sad. Adia was her oldest daughter, but not her only one anymore.
In the morning, Simi and the girls walked Adia up the road to where she could catch the matatu to Narok, and then the bus to Nairobi. Simi felt the wait was far too short, and too soon, Adia was wiping her tears and saying her goodbyes.
Simi pushed her blonde daughter up into the open door. She’d made a promise to Adia’s other mother, and she would honor it. It was hard, though, feeling Adia’s spine through her thin T-shirt, knowing she was pushing her daughter into something neither of them really wanted. Then Adia was on the van, perched in a window seat, her face pressed against the glass. Simi saw the pink splotches on her girl’s skin, and thought she might die from the weight of sadness.
Adia thought she might die, too; she fought the desperate need to tell the driver to stop, to let her off. Instead, she watched Simi and her sisters through her smudged window and waved until she couldn’t see them anymore. Then she just watched the landscape flying by. She wanted to drink it, to ingest it. She wanted to tuck the whole sweeping savannah into her cells, into her brain, where she could remember it forever.
A couple of hours later, as the bus chugged up the side of the Rift Valley, she turned and looked back at the wide expanse of land far below her. The light was pearly in the late afternoon, and she could barely make out the smudge of greeny-gray that marked the Nguruman forest, and just below it, the place where the manyatta was. Adia sighed and turned around to face forward, toward Nairobi. She wanted to be like the zebra, carrying this home with her, wherever she went, in the very pores of her skin.
CAPTIVITY
The animal was wild. Adia knew that immediately, though she’d seen nothing exactly like it before. It was bigger than a serval cat, maybe the size of a cheetah, but thicker, somehow, leonine, with a wide yellow face and white fur lining its ears. It was a predatory cat—it moved like a lion through the foliage; shoulders rolling purposefully with each step, eyes focused straight in front, head slightly down so the spine was a line, flat as a horizon. Adia took in the details without really thinking. As a child, her Maasai friends taught her how to share space with untamed creatures. She’d been close enough to lions and leopards to reach out and pet them if she’d been stupid enough to try. She’d been close enough to hyenas to smell the rotting meat on their breath and sense the damp blood of zebra on their chins. Adia instinctively slowed her own breathing, taking in air carefully, making herself as motionless as she could. She knew how to behave in the wild.
The animal stilled. It was watching something Adia couldn’t see. It flattened its chest into the earth, leaving its backside still as a stone and showing Adia it had a thick, long tail. It was stalking something. Adia had seen kills before; she’d killed animals herself, in fact. The Maasai only ate goats and cows occasionally, but when they did, they slit the animals’ throats, collecting every drop of blood and every scrap of meat—utilizing every part. Even the smallest bits of wet skin were slit down the middle and worn as bracelets that dried to a fuzzy rawhide around the wrist or ankle. Adia wasn’t squeamish about that sort of thing, so it was with curiosity, not horror, that she watched the tawny creature leap up suddenly and pounce. The bushes were too high for Adia to see exactly what it killed, but she could hear the grunts the cat made and the struggle of its prey.
The bushes stopped moving, the sounds quieted and the cat emerged again. A large gray rabbit was clutched in its jaws. The cat didn’t stop to eat. Adia was surprised. She wondered if it was more like a leopard. They liked to drag their conquests up into trees before feasting. The rabbit was huge, and the cat paused to drop it and reposition it in the grip of its teeth. It was close to Adia now, just a few feet away. The breeze was in her favor, and the animal didn’t sense she was there. She was invisible. With a perfect view of the animal’s profile, Adia could see clearly that its sides heaved with the efforts it had put forward. Adia saw the telltale drooping of its underside, the way the belly widened and stretched. She saw the cat’s swollen teats. Whatever the animal was, it was female, and it was pregnant.
* * *
“Are you Adia?” the woman who picked her up at the Philadelphia airport asked. But she pronounced it “Ay-die-ah.” And the way her thick lips curled into a smile made Adia swallow her correction. “No, it’s Ah-dee-ah,” she wanted to say, but couldn’t. She didn’t correct the woman—the dorm mother, Adia later understood—at all during the forty-five-minute drive to the school, and so the name stuck. Here in America she immediately understood she wasn’t herself anymore; the name assigned to her was strange and ugly to her ears. She’d never been shy about speaking up before now; she didn’t know what it was, exactly, about the unfamiliar place that made her feel mute. She only knew that she was different here, too.
“You’re from Africa?” a group of girls she met that first day asked, their eyes wide with curiosity. And then the cocoa-colored girl who was her roommate asked, “Then how come you’re white?”
The question made Adia stammer and she hated the apologetic way strings of words she’d never even said before stumbled from her mouth. “I’m American. My mom is American...that is...my dad is Kenyan... British Kenyan... He’s Kenyan but, you know, white... I have an American passport...even though I’ve never been here before. I’ve never been to England, either. My real home is Nairobi, but I like it better with the Maasai. In the manyatta.”
“The manyatta?” the cocoa girl asked, and her voice made the word—the word that Adia loved most in the world—sound ugly in her mouth. “What’s a manyatta?” But she threw back her head and walked away, laughing, before Adia could explain.
Her name wasn’t the only thing that was different here. The light in America was different, too. It was thin and hard, somehow, like a pane of glass. Adia was used to a different kind of light, a softer version. Back home, the light cupped around you like a palm. It held you near, but was yielding. You could push your way through it, you could pull it around you, consider it a comfort. This new light, this American light, didn’t look at the people it illuminated. It didn’t move like the Kenyan light did, which always changed and
shifted like a living thing.
The sounds were also different. Adia was used to silence. Sometimes, back home, Adia climbed the jacaranda tree and heard nothing but rustling leaves and starlings. This boarding school was never silent. The wooden hallways echoed with footsteps and voices from early morning until lights-out on the dorms at 10:00 p.m. And then there were other noises, too. There was the noise of her roommate shifting in the upper bunk and causing the bedsprings to squeak, and the uneven legs of the bunk shaking and thumping the floor. There were late-night bangs and clanks from the radiator and the vague traffic sounds from the road outside the school’s gate.
These new sounds—the shouting of laughter from other rooms, the scratching of pencils in notebooks during study hall, the faint, muted voices from the dorm mother’s TV slipping through the wall—they all made Adia feel lonely and stranger than she felt already. The sounds made her hate the sources a little. She didn’t want to get used to these people, these lives, these shiny, clean girls. She didn’t want to become one of them. And yet, she was lonely.
She heard Grace’s voice in her head, always, and cried herself to sleep with the ache of missing her friend. She hated the way the memories wouldn’t loosen their grip. And she’d learned something that Grace was wrong about, something important, and it deepened her grief that she couldn’t tell Grace—that she’d never be able to tell Grace what she finally knew to be true—that it wasn’t really better to be motherless than to have Leona as a mother. Adia would have given anything, now, to be high in the jacaranda tree watching her mother through the window, or listening to the quick tapping of her mother’s keyboard through a closed door. She would have given anything to see Simi now, to curl up next to her in her dark, smoky house, listening to the far-off sounds of hyena and Simi’s heavy, sleeping breath.
It was hard to be away from home, and making it worse was the silence that blanketed her from the inside. She could barely make herself open her mouth; she felt herself melting into the walls and the floor and even the air. People looked past her; they didn’t hear her or notice her absence or her presence. Only the letters from her mother and John, Simi and even Joan made her seen. When a letter arrived, if only for the time it took her to read it, Adia felt like herself.
In the free time between classes and meals and study hall, Adia escaped outside. She was more comfortable without the walls around her, or the waves of other people. When she first found this path down to the little lake in the woods abutting campus, she thought it felt like swimming the way she did in Mombasa. The air in the woods was like water swirling her hair around her face, and the silence a good silence—a heavy and infinite thing that pressed on her like arms holding her tightly. Here, the air smelled wet and cool, and the light was cloudy and green. She could hear the breeze in the treetops and the calling of unfamiliar birds, she could smell decaying leaves on the path and damp earth that she pressed into with her boots as she walked. She could put aside the feeling of being invisible and, instead, reach out and touch things that didn’t recoil from her: the rough bark of the trees, the pinecones that smelled sharp and soapy. She could breathe here without the chaos of all those eyes and voices that never looked at her or spoke to her.
Three weeks in, Adia woke before dawn one Saturday and lay in her bed, watching the rectangle of sky out the window. She traced her finger across the wool blanket she’d painstakingly packed from home. She could hardly bring anything with her—just two suitcases—but she’d insisted on this. She’d had it her whole life, and in its fibers she smelled smoke and the faint scent of sheep. She loved that it smelled like her manyatta home. She’d heard her roommate complaining to another girl about how Adia and her stuff “smelled like a barn,” and once she came back to the room to see her school supplies, the folders and stapler and blotter she’d bought from the school store, pushed way over to one side of the long shared desk that stretched across the wall under the window. Embarrassed, she sniffed and sniffed everything she owned, but couldn’t figure out what smelled bad. She tried to make her things and herself smaller, even more invisible, so her presence wouldn’t bother her roommate. She crammed all of her clothes into her dresser, and left the shared closet empty of her things. She meticulously stored her books and papers in the drawers at her end of the desk and kept them tightly closed. She kept the offending wool blanket folded as tiny as she could make it and pushed far under her pillow.
Careful not to wake her roommate by jostling the bed frame, Adia slipped out of bed and into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. She picked up her boots and closed the door quietly behind her. The wide dorm hallway was empty and still and Adia took a deep breath and padded silently down the stairs to the outside door. It opened when she pushed it and a surprising surge of happiness jolted her into a smile. She slipped the boots onto her feet and ran. She was free. She sprinted past the playing field and down the path toward the lake.
The trees made the dawn darker but Adia wasn’t frightened. She ran until she couldn’t breathe without gasping. Then she stopped and looked around. Her breath was loud in the early silence of the woods. To her left, the lake shimmered under the barely rising sun. Adia turned and found a tree with roots large enough for her to sit comfortably between. She leaned back against the tree and closed her eyes. She wanted to imagine herself into a different place. By the time the cat appeared, Adia had been sitting between those roots for hours.
When she saw it, Adia stood slowly, gripping the tree trunk for balance. That’s when the cat made its kill. Now the dust-colored animal held the rabbit tightly in her jaws and began her slow, shoulder-rolling walk down toward the lake and slunk between two bushes and out of sight. The leaves closed behind her like a door. Adia knew it was stupid, especially since she was alone, but she was bored now, and achy from sitting so long. Plus, the animal had made her kill already, and big cats were less dangerous when they weren’t hungry. Adia crept along the same path the animal took. She tracked it easily. The late stage of the cat’s pregnancy made her slower, less agile. Adia stayed conscious of the breeze, and shifted as the wind did, ensuring the animal wouldn’t smell her. Adia forgot about her roommate and the silence inside her and the feeling of being completely invisible. By the time she heard shouts, the sun was high in the sky.
Adia pushed through the underbrush in the direction of the voices. Judging by the screams, something terrible had happened. The lake was calm and smooth, the sun dappling the surface. A few kids in canoes slipped across the water, trailing tiny splashes that glinted in the sun with each stroke of their paddles. The long dock and the boathouse were frantic with bodies. The few teachers on weekend duty were herding the kids not already in canoes to the farthest end of the dock. One teacher stood waving her arms above her head to signal the canoes across the lake to come back. Adia wondered why they all seemed scared. When the teacher on the dock saw her, he yelled, “There’s a mountain lion! Get out of the woods.”
“Did you hear?” her roommate asked her that night, just before lights-out. She was breathless. “There’s a lion in the woods. A bunch of people saw it by the lake.”
Adia looked up from her book. She hadn’t heard her roommate speak to her—at least not without sneering or clipping her words angrily—before, and she wondered if this change was a cruel trick. Like someone holding out a cookie to a child and then snatching it away again.
“Yeah, I know. It’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant, how do you know?”
“I was out there really early this morning. I saw it make a kill, and then it got closer and I saw it. It’s really pregnant, too. Like any day now.”
“You saw it? You got close? You’re fucking crazy. Crazy or lying.”
There it was—the cookie snatched from Adia’s hand. She should have known. But talking to her roommate—to someone—surprised Adia by feeling good. Her voice liked the air it slid through, outside her body, and her face liked being looked at. Someth
ing deep inside her blinked awake.
“I can take you to find her if you can wake up early enough tomorrow. She’s not hard to track.”
It was odd being out in the woods with someone else. Adia found it slower going; her roommate stumbled in the dark and kept grabbing Adia’s arm in fear. She made too much noise, and Adia imagined how her Maasai friends would mercilessly tease this rustling, stumbling girl.
“How did you learn how to do this?” she asked once, and Adia was about to answer when she heard a slight sound, a muffled sort of huff. The sound of breathing.
“Shh!” she whispered as quietly as she could. She held her finger to her lips and motioned her roommate to stop, to stay where she was. The huffing was clearly audible. Adia tested the wind with her finger. She knew it would be unwise to go any farther. The Maasai, as brave as they were, weren’t foolish, and tracking a predator in the dark like this would never happen back home. She suspected the animal was feeding, which was both good and bad. It wouldn’t be hungry enough to see the girls as food, but it would be protective of its kill.
“We should turn around. It’s right beyond this bush.” Adia said the words under her breath.
“What the fuck, Adia? We came all the way out here. Are you wimping out or bullshitting me?”
Adia felt her roommate’s moist breath on her ear. Something deep within her pulled taut at her chest and Adia had the feeling of a rush of cold water through her blood. It was that feeling that made her ignore her instincts, take a deep breath and push forward as slowly as she could.
“Fine, come on.” Adia slipped carefully through the branches, spreading them with her hands and moving her body slowly.
“Look! There!” Adia was on the other side of the stand of bushes now, and she had a clear view. Her roommate sidled closer to her, and, to Adia’s surprise, reached for Adia’s forearm and squeezed it.
The Brightest Sun Page 29