Over the next few days, Simi was broken. She could only lie in her bed. The other women—even Loiyan—came into her hut to see how she was. They kept watch, boiled chai in the suferia, and tried, constantly, to make Simi open her mouth to drink, to swallow, to take the small sustenance that the sugar and tea and milk might give her. The women whispered to each other as they watched her. Simi didn’t speak. She couldn’t open her mouth, not to answer the women and not to drink the tea; she could hardly open her eyes.
She remembered the time after Adia’s birth, and how Leona had sunk into herself, barely speaking, barely eating. A thought crossed her mind that this was Adia’s mark—that her mothers were destined to share a kind of darkness. And then she remembered that Adia had been pulled away from her; she was nobody’s mother—not anymore. It was that thought that made her stomach heave, and she leaned over and retched. Because she hadn’t eaten for days, it was nothing but bitter, sticky foam she coughed out. She watched as it disappeared, slowly absorbed into the dirt of the floor. The women in her hut tsked and sucked their teeth.
Late that night, Simi woke up. Her hut was empty. The other women had gone home. That was a relief. Her stomach growled. Her mouth still didn’t want food, but her belly called for it. She stretched her weak legs and slid off the bed. Even though she’d barely sipped water in the last few days, she had a desperate need to urinate. The cattle in the manyatta enclosure lowed softly and shook their great heads as Simi slipped past them. There were fewer than there used to be, Simi noted. The drought was bad again. It seemed the pattern was changing—a year of good rains and hope, followed by several years of dry land and dry skies, starving animals and hungry people. It struck Simi just then that nothing was certain. Not ever. Not even the continuation of the life she’d always lived. More and more Maasai men were abandoning cattle herding and moving to Nairobi to seek work. There were manyattas where no men lived at all, only women and children, all the husbands and sons having left for new opportunities. Everything was changing.
Simi squatted down and felt the relief of emptying her bladder. It felt good to be outside, to breathe the cool night air and look up at the stars. It was a clear night, not one cloud to tease her with the possibility of rain, but none to obscure the universe above her, either. The moon was new. It was a curved edge, as sharp and clean as a scythe. The Maasai myth said that the sun and the moon were married. Olapa, the moon, was short-tempered and, during a fight one day, she wounded her husband. To cover his wound, he began shining more brightly than anything else. To punish his wife, he struck out one of her eyes. Now, Simi thought, as she slowly stood up, her body weak from lack of food, the sun was punishing all of them by shining too hard, never allowing rain clouds to form.
The moon, the wounded wife, was lucky, Simi thought. She’d only had an eye taken. Simi remembered her mother always said nobody could take an education from her. That was true, but her mother never told her that everything else could be taken; a body part, grazing grasses for the cattle, a way of life and a daughter.
Nairobi lay in the highlands, but Narok was on the floor of the Rift Valley, and when Jane’s plane cruised over the valley’s edge and the land fell away in a great crack, she stared out the window and searched for her first glimpse of the elephants. Kenya was red. The terrain was rusty and volcanic—the dust made from layers and layers of ancient lava, dried to a crust and ground down by time. The earth looked like gaunt stretches of skin seen through a magnifying glass—gray-brown and pocked, with the scabby outcroppings of rock and the dried blood of the barely damp riverbeds.
Kenya was new to Jane. Africa was new. Her flight from Washington had come in for its bumpy landing at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi less than twenty-four hours ago, and now she was about to touch down in her new home. Her eyes were raw with fatigue, and her skin felt dry and grimy. She pressed her face to the tiny plane window and tried not to blink. She didn’t want to miss any of this first introduction to her new home. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see. She’d been told that the drought was severe, that all of eastern Africa was drying out, dying. The rivers were low and water was precious.
Jane traced her interest in elephants back to a day at the National Zoo. She was six, and her brother, Lance, was four months old. Her mother had Lance strapped in a front pack, snuggled against her chest. This made her walk slowly under the weight of the baby. Jane wanted to hurry, to run from one animal to another, taking everything in at once. She knew if Lance weren’t there, they would have been able to walk faster, and it made her angry with the baby. Her mother led Jane over the zoo’s winding pathways, and when they reached the elephant enclosure, she let Jane step up onto the lowest rung of the metal fence. The elephants had just been fed, and they rooted through the bales of hay and grasses with their trunks. They waved their enormous ears gently, like the tails of the tropical fish her father kept in the tank in his study. Jane heard her mother sigh with pleasure. The gentle motion of the animal’s trunks up and down between hay and tiny mouth, and the rolling motion of their jaws, gave them a delicacy that made Jane laugh and clap her hands. Jane’s mother wrapped her arm around Jane’s shoulders, and her breath was warm and sweet in Jane’s ear. Jane could feel her mother’s joy at the sight of them.
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked. “They’re very maternal creatures. I read that somewhere.” She leaned down and kissed the top of Jane’s head. “Very maternal, just like I am.”
Jane’s mother was sick for a long time before she died. Jane was ten when the diagnosis came, Lance was four. At first nothing changed. There were doctor’s appointments and days when her mother was too tired to cook dinner so her father brought home McDonald’s instead. But mostly it was the same as it always had been, and Jane began to believe it would always be this way. On the tired days, Jane would come home after school and curl up on the couch next to her mother and do homework. Lance would lie on the carpet watching TV and eating Cheerios one by one from a plastic bowl. But by the time Jane was twelve, there were more and more tired days. She turned thinner than any grown-up Jane had ever seen, and she was always cold. She began coughing and spitting up blood into a bright green bandanna she kept shoved up the sleeve of the nubby brown sweater she always wore. The sounds of the wet coughs scared Jane, and she found herself avoiding her mother; instead of sitting next to her on the couch, Jane spent the hours between school and dinner in her bedroom. Once she heard her mother calling her in that thin, weak, dying voice. When Jane came down the stairs, her mother was standing at the bottom of the flight, clutching the newel post to steady herself.
“I understand it’s hard to watch me, Jane,” her mother said. “And I know you love me and if you need this time alone, take it. But we have to talk about Lance. You’re his sister. That gives you some responsibility.” Jane didn’t hear what her mother said next, because she’d already turned and raced back up the steps. She slammed her door as loudly as she could, and after that, she always pretended she couldn’t hear when her mother called.
There was an open casket at the funeral. Jane’s father left Lance with a babysitter and wanted to leave Jane home, too, but she begged and cried and finally he relented. Her mother’s body was ravaged by disease, but someone had put foundation on her face, blush on her cheeks. Jane thought she looked beautiful, and that she would like the blush and the rosy color of the lipstick they’d put on her. But it struck Jane that just under the powders and the creams her mother’s face was gone. That is, it was intact and Jane could see it all—eyes, lips and the familiar way her mother’s ears curved and the diamond studs in her lobes that she wore every day. But they didn’t