The Brightest Sun Read online

  An illuminating debut following three women in sub-Saharan Africa as they search for home and family

  Leona, an isolated American anthropologist, gives birth to a baby girl in a remote Maasai village and must decide how she can be a mother, in spite of her own grim childhood. Jane, a lonely expat wife, follows her husband to the tropics and learns just how fragile life is. Simi, a barren Maasai woman, must confront her infertility in a society in which females are valued by their reproductive roles. In this affecting debut novel, these three very different women grapple with motherhood, recalibrate their identities and confront unforeseen tragedies and triumphs.

  In beautiful, evocative prose, Adrienne Benson brings to life the striking Kenyan terrain as these women’s lives intertwine in unexpected ways. As they face their own challenges and heartbreaks, they find strength traversing the arid landscapes of tenuous human connection. With gripping poignancy, The Brightest Sun explores the heartbreak of loss, the struggle to find a sense of belonging and the surprising ways we find our family and home.

  THE BRIGHTEST SUN

  Adrienne Benson

  My parents, who cracked the world open for me so stories could spill out. My brother, who somehow made them all seem funny. And TCKs everywhere, who grow wild in the spaces between. This is for you.

  Contents

  Part I

  From a Different Tribe

  A Woman Like A Wilderness

  Water in a Dry Place

  Narok

  Juju

  God is the Rain, God is the Sky

  Children Become Themselves

  Solai Valley

  Children are the Bright Moon

  The Baobab in Solai

  Part II

  Khamsa

  Riptide

  Nakuru

  Forest of the Lost Child

  Jacaranda

  Buffalo

  Girl in the Shape of Africa

  Part III

  Moffat’s Wife

  A Zebra Takes its Stripes Wherever it Goes

  Captivity

  A Father, Found

  Behind the Book: How Nostalgia Brought The Brightest Sun to Life

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART I

  FROM A DIFFERENT TRIBE

  One of the old women severed the umbilical cord and passed the tiny body, slippery and warm, up into Leona’s arms. It felt unnatural to hold the baby; the infant seemed too small somehow, almost weightless. Leona rolled carefully onto her side and settled the baby next to her. The brand-new hands splayed and stretched blindly in the dim air. Dust motes floated in the crack of light coming through the one palm-sized window cut from the mud walls. Leona watched as the dust swirled. She wished she had a bigger window. She craved light and air. For the first time in the almost twelve months she’d been in Kenya, she yearned for things she’d left home in America. She wanted clean lines and shiny surfaces, nurses in sensible shoes and the comfort of hospital machinery whirring and clicking and dripping around her. For a minute, she even wanted her mother.

  The small body wiggled beside her and a sound came out—staccato like the bleating of a newborn goat. It was a tenuous sound, hesitant, an experiment with an uncertain outcome. The tiny lips pursed in anticipation of what only Leona could give. It was a girl, Leona saw. She squeezed her eyes against the coming tears and tried to roll over onto her stomach. She wanted to bury her face in darkness. She was so tired. She felt a sob in her throat and then a sound filled the dark room. It was her scream, she understood, although she couldn’t feel her mouth opening or the reverberation of air. She only heard the sound of keening fill the space around her head and saw Simi and the Maasai attendants jerk their faces up and look at her, then glance at one another, concerned. Simi reached across the baby’s back to take Leona’s hand, but Leona shook her friend off and brought her hands to her face. She tried to press them over her mouth tightly enough to stop the sound. Her insides were glass, shattering in the shell of her skin. This baby was born of loneliness—the desperate kind that arises in people who live among foreigners; who don’t share language or gestures.

  * * *

  Leona arrived at the manyatta in a little, dented Renault 4 she purchased, with cash, from a departing French expatriate who she’d met her first night in Nairobi. She drove the distance between Nairobi and Loita hesitantly. It was her first time in Africa and the small car didn’t feel like it would offer protection from lions or elephants or any other wild game that might lurk in the yellow savannah grassland she drove through. The drive terrified her so much that she promised herself to stay in the manyatta and only use the car for emergencies. But after a few weeks the dry dust made Leona’s skin itch, and the nearest water source, a little tributary of the Mara River, was low and thick, too muddy to bathe in. Leona didn’t miss much from home, but she did miss the feeling of a shower, the water soaking her hair and skin. She couldn’t stand the way her skin felt, the way her body stank. She wanted a hot shower. She wanted to immerse herself in soap and water, to scrub her hair and fingernails and wash the spaces between her toes. Her yearning to be clean was visceral.

  So, only six weeks after her arrival, she packed an overnight bag and drove to Narok to spend the night at the Chabani Guest House. The hotel was small and cheap, mostly used by safari guides and the occasional shoestring tourist or traveling Peace Corps volunteer. But it was clean, and with electricity, running water and a real, if old, mattress, it felt luxurious to Leona. The sky outside was darkening and cool when she arrived. The purple dusks in Kenya were short; night came quickly. Leona turned on all the lights in her room, and laughed at how easily they flicked into brightness. The manyatta had no electricity. After she scrubbed the dirt from her skin and scalp and stood under the warm, rusty water until it ran cold, she dressed in clean clothes, the one set she hadn’t worn yet, saved in the bottom of her suitcase. Until now, she’d only smelled it occasionally. The scent of the American detergent lingered in the fibers and reminded her of home.

  She felt new and lighter somehow, cracked free of her dusty shroud. With the smell of floral shampoo still lingering in her hair, Leona went down to the hotel’s café to order a drink.

  The bar was wooden-walled and dark. The only light came from a string of colored Christmas tree bulbs—the big ones people back home wrapped around outside tree branches—and a disco ball revolving slowly above a central space where people could dance. There were no dancers that night. Maybe it was still too early.

  Leona chose the bar stool farthest away from the only other customers, a white couple, both about her age, maybe a little older. Leona didn’t like small talk so she avoided making eye contact with the two. But she hadn’t seen other white people for weeks, and she found herself unable to keep from glancing up at them. The two were clean; both neatly dressed, which made Leona think they might be tourists. But the woman turned slightly, and Leona recognized the logo of a well-known antipoaching foundation on the front of her T-shirt. The woman was pretty. Petite and blonde with a sunburned spot on her nose and rosy pink cheeks, she watched the man intently as he spoke, his body movements fluid as he gestured with his arms, acting out the story he was telling her. The man was attractive, square shouldered and blond with large, tan hands. Leona forced herself to look away and focused her concentration on gathering the right collection of Swahili words to order a beer. She felt the sudden lightness of joy when the barkeep slid a sweating, brown Tusker bottle her way. She didn’t bother asking for a glass.

  The beer—after so long without alcohol—made her feel luminous and unencumb
ered. The couple laughed loudly and Leona glanced at them again. The blonde woman was standing, holding out a bill, which the man waved away. He turned to the barkeep and said something in rapid-fire Swahili. Then he turned back to the woman and laughed again. Leona heard him say, “Now you’ll have to meet me again, next one’s on you.”

  Leona watched him watch the woman walking out of the bar. She wondered if anyone had ever watched her with that intensity.

  Halfway through her second beer, she found she didn’t mind when the blond man slid his stool closer to hers and offered to buy her another drink. As they talked, the ease of English after the weeks and weeks of only rudimentary Maa made Leona giddy. Normally a reserved, quiet person, she felt almost drunk with the millions of words she could so easily pluck from her head and toss out, like confetti.

  “You’re a flirt,” she said. “Your girlfriend barely left.”

  “I am a flirt.” He nodded, smiling. “But you’re wrong. She’s not my girlfriend. I met her here tonight. Interesting girl, though. Working on antipoaching—elephant protection.”

  They purposely avoided names. It didn’t come up at first, names hadn’t mattered, and anyway Leona, after weeks of being a curiosity among the Maasai, wanted the anonymity. As an anthropologist, she constantly had to study, observe and ask questions. Now, with this man, she wanted to suspend words and curiosity and talk. Later, alcohol erased the curiosity of names, and the next morning, slow and headachy, Leona felt exposed. She wasn’t new to sex, she’d had a couple of boyfriends during her college and grad school years, but they drifted into, and then out of, her life like ghosts. She’d never, though, slept with someone she’d just met, and under the weight of her headache and nausea, she was ashamed of what she’d done. She wanted to disappear. Sex was a fraught thing. Hard for her to indulge in, an unsettling mix of pleasure and fear.

  The man was breathing evenly and heavily next to her, and she had to very carefully slide from under his arm and out of bed. She found her clothes and dressed quickly. But the door creaked when she opened it, and she heard his voice, sleepy and rough. “Going to leave without a goodbye?”

  “I have to go back,” she whispered.

  “You mean you have to come back to bed,” he said, patting the empty mattress beside him.

  Leona turned back to the door and grasped the handle again, pulling it open. When it clicked shut behind her, she raced down the hall to her own room and tossed her shampoo, razor and yesterday’s clothes in her bag. She’d planned to stay in Narok for the day. She wanted to have the hotel do her laundry, and indulge in a big breakfast with coffee. But now she changed her mind. She was embarrassed. She hated feeling out of control, and she was ashamed of herself for letting it happen. She lived by the mantra that it was best to be alone—less difficult, less complicated. She didn’t want to see the man again, or look him in his eyes. She thought she’d see her own shame there, reflected back at her.

  Outside the hotel, the morning street was almost empty, but already the air smelled like wood smoke, frying dough and rotting produce. She opened the trunk of her car and tossed her bag in.

  “Is it me, or are you running out on your hotel bill?” a voice called, and when Leona turned, he was there. He was dressed and his feet were shoved into unlaced boots. “I have to go up to Solai today. Can’t put it off. But I’ll come to the manyatta as soon as I’m done there. I’ll find you.”

  Leona felt the bubbling up of terror deep inside her. It was always this way. Even in college, and graduate school, it wasn’t the sex that made her most frightened, but the aftermath. The first time she’d seen a therapist, it only took thirty minutes of talking through her background before the therapist said, “It sounds like you’re not sexually frigid, but emotionally cut off.” She’d never gone back for another appointment.

  “No,” she said, “don’t bother with that.” She inhaled consciously. The panic made her breathing shallow, the imaginary walls that closed in around her made her lungs tense and ineffective. The man was standing close, looking down at her. His eyes were calm, and his face open. She could smell him—warm skin and sleepy breath.

  “No, I want to,” he said. “I had fun with you last night. No reason we can’t see one another again, is there?”

  There was always this dread when a man wanted to get to know her. She wasn’t normal in this way. Other women her age wanted boyfriends, wanted to marry. The idea set off an alarm in Leona’s mind. It always had. She could share physical intimacy, but the notion of allowing herself to want anything else, to be vulnerable in any other way, tore her in two—yearning and revulsion. She wanted to be normal and allow someone to love her, and to return love, but the fear was always too great, and it always won.

  She couldn’t look at the man’s face when she answered. Instead, she glanced sideways, pretending to watch a mangy dog rolling in the dust. “I’m not interested in a relationship,” she said. It was her typical line, worn thin from use. She wondered if it sounded as implausible to him as it did to her.

  “Who said anything about a relationship?” the man asked. His lips turning up into a grin that made Leona’s pulse quicken. “I’m just talking about seeing you again. Maybe reprising our night.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively. He was flirting. Leona felt that hollow ache she always felt at moments like this; the ache of wanting something she was far too terrified to actually reach for.

  “I have a boyfriend.” That always worked. Even so, Leona didn’t wait to see if his face changed, or if his voice hardened into understanding.

  She turned, climbed into her car and slammed the door shut. She might have heard him calling, but she couldn’t be sure. She sped off as fast as she could toward the manyatta. She didn’t look back. She didn’t glance into the rearview and see him standing next to his truck watching her leave. She didn’t want to think about how she’d feel if he never really came looking for her.

  * * *

  Now, with the baby beside her in her little mud-walled hut, she had no desire to speak. She wept with fatigue and terror as the dark women hunkered at her side, murmuring and running their rough fingers along her arms and across the new baby’s head.

  “You must let her nurse,” the Maasai midwife said. She reached over and pulled Leona’s T-shirt up, freed her aching breast and clasped it firmly, rubbing the nipple on the baby’s new mouth.

  “Now it’s empty, but the baby will bring the milk.”

  Leona wanted to cringe at the unfamiliar fingers on her breast and at the mewling little thing next to her. The baby was blindly flailing, her mouth open hopefully, trying to burrow into Leona’s flesh like a chigger. Leona closed her eyes. She only wanted to sleep. The midwife grasped Leona’s breast again, flattened it in her hand and inserted it firmly into the baby’s mouth. Leona felt a strange sensation and opened her eyes. The baby was connected to her and its desperate little mouth was pulling on Leona’s flesh. A shudder of alarm rippled through her and she bit her lip against the scream she could feel rising in her mouth again. She couldn’t be a mother.

  At first when Leona noticed her missing period, she was relieved. The task of finding enough privacy and water to wash herself—let alone driving all the way to Narok to buy supplies—was something she dreaded. When the bleeding didn’t appear, as it should have, Leona was happy. It was all the changes in diet and the syncing with the other women, she assumed. But then it didn’t come again, and again.

  When it dawned on her that she was pregnant, it was like she’d been diagnosed with a fatal disease. Her thoughts obsessively circled back to it, again and again. She couldn’t concentrate on work and she couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, the tide of dread and distress washed through her. She spent hours flipping through the medical manual she’d brought with her in a desperate search for a remedy. The book offered no way to flush this thing out of her.

  By the time she sought out the
laiboni, the witch doctor and spiritual leader of the community, she hadn’t slept for nearly a week. The laiboni was a wizened elder who sucked his few remaining teeth when he saw Leona and never seemed to understand her halting Maa. As the village doctor, he had a special role here and knowledge of traditional medicines Leona was dying to include in her work. But he was a stubborn interviewee, and Leona suspected he was wary of her presence in the village. She’d been delicately trying to gain his trust, not asking too much of him yet, instead hoping that the other villagers would assure him of her intentions. Being too direct with the old man might cement his unfavorable opinion. But now Leona was desperate.

  “Sopa,” she greeted him, ducking her head as a gesture of respect. He was sitting alone under an acacia tree just outside the village enclosure. He lethargically waved a bead-handled cow tail in front of his face to keep the flies from setting into his eyes. He murmured his own greeting back but said nothing else. Leona lowered herself to the ground in front of him and crossed her legs. She batted a few lazy flies away and tried to decide what to say. Her phrase book lay in her lap, and she flipped through it. Where were the words she needed?

  “Hello, my friend.” A voice above Leona pulled her from the book. Simi stood above her, smiling. Simi was the third and youngest wife of the secular village leader’s son. She had been educated in the local school up to sixth grade, and was the only woman in the village who spoke English. Simi wasn’t absolutely fluent, but had enough for most basic conversations and, more important, had the curiosity and dedication to interpret Leona’s explanations and hand gestures. Simi had a sense of the things Leona needed to learn to live in the manyatta, and was never shy about teaching them. She’d been the one, early in Leona’s stay here, to grasp Leona’s hand and guide her outside the village to the shallow riverbed, dry now, and indicate that Leona should come to this spot when she needed to relieve herself. Simi helped Leona buy the few kitchen items she needed—the large pot, or suferia, for boiling water, the frying pan, the tins of sugar and tea—and taught Leona how to keep the embers in her fire pit alive all day. She was the one who Leona talked to like a friend. But Leona couldn’t bear to be honest now. Not about this. Especially not about this.