That night, Leona avoided the bar. Instead, she walked a teary-eyed Adia to a café down the street. Adia, over and over again, asked for Simi, for her mother.
“I want to stay with my mother,” she said once. “Not with you.”
Leona lied and told the girl they’d go back home soon. She ordered Adia french fries, grilled meat and ice cream. The novelty of the ice cream worked. This is a vacation, she told her daughter. Back in the hotel, Adia consented to a shower and laughed at the feeling of water pouring over her head and down her back. When she climbed into bed, wet hair slicked against her neck, looking as small and pale as a grub, she asked Leona what the sheets were for? The pillow?
Her own daughter had never slept on a mattress. The thought shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it shocked her. Leona flicked off the light and lay in the dark. She remembered her own childhood home, her father distant and silent, with hard, hard hands. She remembered what it felt like when she was a child and a stranger in her own life. She thought of the man who gave her Adia, a gift that terrified her into numbness for so long. The girl lay in the bed beside her, so close Leona could feel the rise and fall of her breathing, the tiny lungs; the warm air she expelled.
When Leona finally fell asleep, she fell asleep with Adia’s soft hair under her chin and her arm wrapped around Adia’s shoulders. There wasn’t a nightmare that night. Leona’s sleep was calm. She dreamed about the sky, clear and calm and infinite. It was the kind of sky she remembered from one long ago summer when she was a child, and the darkness hadn’t bloomed inside her, and the endless rain hadn’t come.
When Leona woke up it was barely light. A centipede trailed along the polished floor and Leona watched it disappear and reappear through the shadows. She absently smoothed back Adia’s hair with her palm. They were in Narok now. The white Kenyan came here, Leona knew. He lived nearby. If they waited long enough, asked the right people the right questions, they could find him. Leona was sure of that. She felt a twinge inside of her somewhere, a place so deep she’d almost forgotten, silent and still but, finally, shivering with potential. The sky was getting lighter outside the window and there were squares of light on the wall opposite the bed. Leona twisted her back so she was facing her baby. She traced her finger along the small nose that looked like hers, the ears that reminded Leona of her own mother’s. Then she recognized the feeling that was so tiny and so deep down between her bones. Hope was a seed inside of her.
Simi’s earliest memory was one she wished she could forget. Mostly she pushed it to the back of her mind and kept it trapped there in the dark. Sometimes, though, mostly while she slept, it slipped out of its confines and floated, ghostly, into her consciousness.
The details were no longer clear. In her memory, the inkajijik was chilly. That didn’t make sense, Simi knew, because her mother was a good Maasai woman who always kept burning embers in her fire pit. She would never allow the fire to burn out or let the air chill. There would have been fire. But still, in Simi’s adult mind, the memory was cold. It was a typical evening, happy and calm. She and her mother and brother sat by the fire. Simi and her brother were telling their mother about their day at school. Their mother loved hearing about school and was proud that she was sending both her children, not just her son.
Simi’s family was rich in cattle and children. Her mother was her father’s fourth wife. This was a lucky thing for Simi because by the time she was born he’d grown accustomed to the demands children placed on his time and his money. Mostly her father kept away from the children, and he only visited Simi’s mother’s house when he needed something. He spent his time with other elders under the shade of an acacia tree. One of his wives made honey beer, and he enjoyed that and spent most nights in her hut. Sometimes he liked the honey beer so much his speech slurred and his walking became erratic. Before the night when everything changed, Simi thought her father was funny when he was drunk. Afterward, it made her hate him.
Simi’s mother was quiet and thoughtful; she didn’t spend much time with the other women. Instead, in her free time she sat alone and made intricate beaded jewelry. Her designs were delicate and unique. They were so beautiful that people from other manyattas, some two or three days’ walk away, began to seek out her creations. Sometimes they would trade a goat for a piece, sometimes they would pull a faded wad of shillings from their wraps. Simi’s mother allowed the animals to wander with the others. She made no secret of them. The money, though, she hid. She saved it in an old tobacco tin she kept hidden in the dark space under the bed. When Simi turned seven, her mother bought a used school uniform and sent Simi to school. Simi’s father didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that Simi left the manyatta each morning, dressed in a uniform she carefully kept pristine by washing it each week in the river and hanging it to dry over a small, thornless bush.
As the years passed, her mother earned enough money to buy Simi a new uniform, and she provided Simi with a clean exercise book each year. In all her eight years of school, Simi never missed a day. She walked in rain and dust, and through the torrent of taunts and names the boys tossed her way as she went. In the early years, she walked with other girls, but one by one they all left. They were circumcised, married and sent to live in their husband’s villages. Every time another girl left, Simi fought dread that she would be next. But her mother kept sending her. Every evening when it grew dark and all the people withdrew to their houses, Simi and her brother showed their mother letters; they taught her how words were written. They taught her addition and subtraction and times tables. Those years, in Simi’s mind, were the happiest. But, in the way daylight follows a dark night, the dark follows daylight, too.
Simi couldn’t remember the details anymore. When her father entered, her brother was in the middle of speaking. What story was her brother telling? Simi only remembered that he stopped, mid-word, when their father burst into the hut. This is where her memory skipped from a feeling of contentment to one of fear.
“Where is the money?” Her father’s voice. Angry and urgent. “You have been stealing money.” His voice stank of honey beer.
Simi’s mother was a good wife. Simi knew that. She’d never seen her mother disagree with her father. But now, Simi’s mother turned to him and said quietly, “I have not taken your money. I have given you many sheep and goats.”
Simi remembered sliding closer to her mother. She remembered the warmth from her mother’s skin, and how suddenly it disappeared when her father leaned down and pulled her mother up.
“You are a liar, wife!”
Simi watched as her father dragged her mother from the hut. She couldn’t move. Her brother jumped up and disappeared through the door. There was scuffling outside. Simi heard her mother make a guttural sound and then she heard a thud. Suddenly her father was back, standing above Simi. His red eyes, foul breath and the angry quivering of his lips made him look inhuman, like a monster or a wild beast.
He leaned down slowly and, when his face was only inches from Simi’s, he growled.
“You, child, find me my money.”
Later Simi would cry and wonder why she did what she did. But at that moment, her monster father took all the thoughts from her head. It was just an empty cave.
“It is there,” she whispered, pointing under the cowhide bed.
Her father pivoted, still leaning low, and stretched a long arm out into the space under