When Nalangu was one, it came time for her to be given a real name—one that could be said aloud, a name that she would keep. Leona allowed Simi to choose that name, and when the girl’s hair was washed with milk and water, and then shaved, Leona watched, notebook and pen in hand. The new name Simi selected was Adia, gift. Like all the kids in the manyatta, she was the child of everyone—free to eat and sleep with any of the mothers, and so Leona’s connection to Adia remained the same as her connection to all the babies around her; affectionate but removed, seen through a telescope, detailed but remote.
Since Maasai fathers played only a tiny role in the lives of their children, Adia’s lack of one was barely a detail worth considering. By the time Adia turned three, Leona didn’t think much about the girl’s father. She’d succeeded in keeping him away. Leona was relieved, frankly, to let it go.
It was easy for Leona to concentrate on her work with all the mothers available to her daughter. And, because of that, it was easy for the days to slip into months, and even years. Occasionally, Leona drove to Nairobi to meet with her government contact. She provided him with the information she’d gathered, and he began taking it to the halls of parliament. Leona liked her trips to Nairobi. She was beginning to crave a city again, the intellectual stimulation of others like her. And she was finally making a name for herself. Other local anthropologists sought her out; she was becoming known in her field. And she rarely thought of Adia. She knew her daughter was safe in the manyatta under the watchful eyes of Simi and the other women.
During one trip to Nairobi, she was introduced to the head of the anthropology department at the University of Nairobi. He’d requested a meeting, and after they talked awhile, he offered her a position on his staff. Leona was thrilled. Now that she had evidence to support her theory that imposed grazing borders were disproportionately damaging to Maasai communities, she could take that to the lecture halls. She could talk to students about the way their own society was changing, and maybe help inspire a new generation of people committed to the work of helping nomadic people.
Leona thought of her daughter and considered her choices. She could mother the girl alone in Nairobi without the benefit of the village women. She thought back to the nightmares she’d had early on and how casually her nightmare self watched as the baby vanished. What an unsuitable mother she was. It occurred to her that she could leave Adia in the manyatta and come to Nairobi by herself. The manyatta was Adia’s home, after all, and she had Simi.
Leona harbored a smoky vision of Adia as a teenager, bent over books in a real high school. That vision, she understood, would require her involvement as a mother. But that was a distant problem. Adia was too young for school, and she’d be safe and happy in the manyatta, at least for a while. She was barely three—far too young for Leona to have to worry about educating her.
The thought niggled at her mind and made her heart beat fast in her chest. She told the department head she needed time to think, to tie up a few loose ends in her research, but she knew her decision was made. The whole drive back to Loita she imagined the way it would feel to teach, to make more contacts in the higher realms of Kenyan government. She could feel excitement in her blood. She could do this; she could use her work, her skills, to help the people she’d come to love so much she’d practically given them her firstborn child.
She stopped for gas a few hours’ drive from the manyatta, and, on a whim, decided not to wait. Leona liked to be resolute after making a decision. While the attendant washed the windshield, Leona asked to use the phone. The connection was fuzzy and unclear, but the department head understood. She accepted the position. She’d move to Nairobi soon. The new semester was only a few weeks away, and as she drove the final miles to the place she’d called home for over four years, Leona listed the things she’d need in her new life: a place to live in the city, clothes to wear for teaching (her old, torn jeans and cotton blouses wouldn’t do); a bank account; an office with a decent computer. These thoughts distracted her as she rolled to a stop outside the manyatta enclosure. She registered the presence of more people than usual milling around but didn’t think about why they might be there. Her mind was full of other thoughts. In her inkajijik, Leona looked around. She’d probably leave most everything here. Simi could use it, and Adia. Absently, Leona reached for a small pile of mail someone—Simi probably—left on her bed. The mail came from Nairobi via Narok, and then to a shop that doubled as a post office nearer the manyatta. Usually, when she received mail, the shopkeeper would send his son to deliver it to her directly. This mail must have come while she was away.
When Leona wrote to her parents, she selected her words carefully. She didn’t keep Adia a secret, but she didn’t write much about her, either. In the letters, she explained only that the father was not present and that the baby—a girl—was happy and safe. As Adia grew, the letters Leona received from her parents became insistent. They’d started a bank account for the girl; they’d rewritten their will. Her father, in particular, couldn’t imagine life in the manyatta. He couldn’t stomach the idea of his only grandchild—a little girl, for that matter—growing up in the dirt, as he said, without the civility of nearby doctors and things like electricity and running water. Leona forced herself to open all of the letters and to read them. But each time a fat, white envelope—half covered with stamps—appeared in the manyatta, she felt her breath quicken and saw sparks of light behind her eyes. She felt she was sinking. She wondered why she’d bothered to tell them about Adia in the first place.
When she read the letters they wrote to her, the pain of her childhood came back like the feeling of a phantom limb, or the flashes of her remembered nightmares. But something surprised Leona, too. Underneath the anger she had for her parents, and the resentment, she fought an unexpected jealousy. The idea of her parents showing concern for Adia when they had never shown much for her was a notion that cut her. She planned to never let them meet her child. She planned to never go back to the wet silence of those Oregon skies or to the dead feeling of being alone in a house with only the ticking of clocks and the hum of the refrigerator to remind her she was alive.
“And who is the father?” this most recent letter asked. “You must know. If nothing else, a girl deserves a father.” It was this that forced a crack in Leona’s long-held conviction about keeping a distance from the white Kenyan. The cruel joke that her own father—simultaneously brutal and absent—should imply that his granddaughter needed something he’d never given Leona sent a shiver up into a hidden spot in her brain. She pushed the thought away and tried to bury it. She told herself that Simi and the village were all Adia needed, at least for now. And yet the thought grew in her mind.
Her father, her parents, made Leona what she was—silent and isolated. During the torturous moments when the worry couldn’t be pushed away, Leona wondered if she was giving her own daughter the same relationship her parents had given her—disconnected and cool. She hated the idea of that, and the guilt it filled her with, but she didn’t know how to be different. Knowing she’d fail was why she’d never wanted to be anyone’s mother in the first place. She was torn. When she watched Adia with the Maasai children, laughing and playing games, never alone and never silent, she was happy. Adia always had Simi. Leona told herself that Adia’s childhood was better than her own. Adia would grow up with age-mates and friends, and the constant activity and watchful eyes of the entire village. It helped Leona to realize that, if her daughter grew up here, she would be nothing like she herself was. Leona tried to convince herself that giving her child a community, a feeling of belonging somewhere, was far more important than giving Adia herself as a mother.
This most recent letter, the one Leona read now after accepting the position at the university, was no different from the others. Leona crumpled it into the tiniest ball she could, tossed it in