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.
“Sopa, Simi,” Leona said. She used the Maa word for hello, even though Simi preferred speaking English whenever possible. “I am researching the doctor’s work today. Can you help translate?”
Simi hunkered and spoke quickly to the old man. He nodded and waved his cow tail faster.
“What do you want to know?”
Simi relayed Leona’s question without a blink. Leona