Chapter 20 Kal
20
KAL
Today was supposed to have been smooth going. I arranged everything with Everest in advance. He let me book the moving elevator on a Friday evening, when it is not allowed, and he promised to let me know when the delivery truck arrived. Things started to fall apart when, at first, the delivery company could not find Miz’s street; then the truck was too tall to enter the underground parking garage. I had to promise them a big tip to circle back to the front of Miz’s building and carry the gift through the lobby, also against building regulations. I have a newfound admiration for how Abay managed to surprise Emay on every one of her birthdays.
At last, we’re outside Miz’s door. I compose myself and knock, putting my hand over the peephole to maintain the surprise.
“Yeah?” she says, from the other side.
“Delivery,” one of the guys says.
“I didn’t order anything,” she says, sounding suspicious. I’m sure she can see that the peephole is covered. The guys shuffle impatiently. They don’t have time for this. I knock again. Now , of all times, Miz heeds my constant advice about her personal safety?
“Daniel, is that you?” she says, now sounding irritated.
My heart jumps. He’s still trying to get in touch with her? Or are they back on again? She did warn me she would continue to date; I just didn’t think she’d date Daniel again.
Before I can respond, Miz throws the door open while my ringtone blares from my pocket. “Kal, what the—”
She freezes, taking in this strange tableau of three guys—one wide eyed and anxious, two drained and indifferent. Her eyes sweep up to the plastic-wrapped mattress towering over all of us.
“Surprise!” I say, trying to read her face. It’s as if time has been suspended while I wait to find out whether this is the smartest or dumbest thing I’ve ever done.
A throat clears. “Excuse us.” The guys shuffle past us into the apartment. “Which way?”
Miz is still staring at the mattress as if it’s a giraffe that ambled into her apartment. I point them to her bedroom. “Miz?” I say, taking the doorknob from her and closing the door. “Do you hate it?”
She blinks, then slams into me, hugging me fiercely, as if she wants to squeeze the life out of me. Her breathing is choppy. I feel her swallow and hear her sniff. A mixture of relief and elation fills me, and I wrap my arms around her just as tightly.
“Oh, Miz, don’t cry,” I say. “This is supposed to make you happy!”
“I don’t have the words…” she mumbles.
I let out a big sigh. Of course, if she had been upset, told me that this was way over the top, I was ready to have it sent back, shower her with the usual scented bath products, wine, gift cards. But this, this is much better.
One of the delivery guys pops out from the bedroom door. “Are we removing too?”
I break the hug. “They can take away your old mattress. It’s part of the service, but if you’re attached to it, they don’t have to take it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Please, have at it,” she says. We go into her bedroom, where I help her remove the sheets.
After the delivery men leave with their tip, Miz collapses on the mattress and rolls around on it, moaning.
“Do you need a moment alone?” I say, smiling ear to ear.
“Shh!” she says, now starfished on the bed, eyes closed. She lets out a deep sigh.
“It’s my small way of saying I appreciate you,” I say.
She nudges me with her foot, laughing. “You Legesses don’t know the meaning of small!”
“And this should make up for your never stretching too. The sales guy told me every sleep is like an eight-hour massage. It’s his job to exaggerate, but I’m hoping he was mostly being honest.”
“Oh yeah, I already feel looser.” She opens her eyes and sits up. “So that’s why you were so determined to work from here today,” she says. “Sneaky.” She gasps and cups her mouth. “Oh my god, how much was it?”
I have no intention of answering that. I hold out my hand to help her up. “We should get back to work.”
—
We are allowed to submit a maximum of twenty pictures, including those of our wedding ceremony. Luckily, Miz has photo albums of all her visits to Addis, starting from ’96. One of the earliest photos is at Queen Burger in Addis. “We were such babies!” she exclaims. Miz, me, Eske and our high school gang slouch around a table in our finest ’90s styles. Miz has sworn that, to this day, she has yet to taste burgers better than the ones I offered her when I found her in the parkette in Addis.
That day, she had looked so broken, all alone. I remember asking her whether she was okay, first in Amharic, then in English. Instead of answering, she had stared at me for too long with her wet, red eyes, looking badass in her bandana, hoop earrings, baggy jeans, and crop top. “ ?a va? ” I’d tried again, thinking she didn’t speak English either, trying to keep my eyes off her exposed belly button. German might have been next if she hadn’t snapped at me in English.
“Do I look like I’m okay?”
I sat on the stone bench opposite her.
“I hate it here,” she said, her pout exaggerating her bold lipliner.
The way she said it confirmed my guess she wasn’t talking about the compound but about Addis itself. “Then why did you come?”
That was all it took for her to regale me with the saga of the fight that ensued from her mom learning of her boyfriend. “Are you planning to marry him?” I asked when she finished.
She looked at me as if I had just pulled a rabbit from my ear. “That’s, like, the first thing my mom asked me. What’s wrong with you people? I’m fourteen!”
“So? I’m fifteen,” I said. “But I already know that my Muna will be my wife. That’s how it is.”
Years later, after Muna and I were over, Miz had told me she’d bit back her immediate thought, Bet Muna don’t know that . I wish she hadn’t. She would have saved me from so much pain. What she said instead was, “According to who?”
“That’s our culture.”
“Eh? Who’s our? ”
“That’s why your parents panicked.”
“Mom did. Dad is sane. Thank God.”
“Your father was probably distressed too. He just didn’t show it,” I said. “They didn’t do dating in their day, and so they don’t really understand the concept. Personally, I don’t either.”
“What century are you from?”
I laughed. “I get that a lot. But when you know, you know. If you don’t, then what’s the point?”
“To date!”
“For what?”
“Life! Fun! Getting to know different people!”
“You can do all that without becoming romantically involved.”
She glowered at me, though it did not prevent her from devouring the last of my burger and getting started on my fries. Bini would be wondering what was taking me so long, so I offered to walk her back to her building. But she said she would walk me back to my building instead. I wasn’t sure whether that was because she didn’t want to be home alone or she didn’t know whether she could trust me. Anyway, we walked back to Bini’s together. And, well, she never left, becoming a permanent fixture of my social group every summer thereafter that she came to see her father.
We set aside the photo from Queen Burger to go in our submission package, writing the date and a short description on the back as required. “It’s like each visit had its own theme,” I say, as we go through the albums. “You notice?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. There are the touristy ones with family the first time around in ’96 and then just us young ones the next time around in ’98—to Hawassa, Langano, the whole Northern Historic tour. Then there are the party- and wedding-heavy ones in ’01, ’04, and ’07, the last two sets only in digital on her cloud drive. “And then,” she says, sighing, after we’ve set aside the best ones, “the individual known as Kalkidan disappears from the scene.”
“You’re never going to get over that, are you?”
“Nope. Because I don’t know if you’re gonna do it again.”
When we reconnected in Toronto, three years later, I’d glossed over the reason for my disappearance as having got busy with work. If there was ever a time to tell her the full reason why I disappeared, I realize now is it. “What if I tell you something that will guarantee I won’t?”
“I’ll just put a chip in you. Right here,” she says, touching the back of my neck. “It’s my right as your lawful—”
I catch her hand in mine and gently lower it to the couch, keeping it in my grasp. Blowing out a long, shaky breath, I launch in. “Muna left me, which you know. What you don’t know is…” I steal a glance at Miz. She looks almost scared. “Is that she came back.”
Miz takes in a quiet, terrified breath. “She did?” she whispers.
“To this day, not one soul knows about this. For over a year, she would get in touch with me sporadically, and we would get together. Of course, at first, I didn’t know that that was how it would be. When she called the first time…” I look up at the ceiling, smiling sadly at the memory of that Kal’s uncontainable joy. “I thought she had come back to me for good. That we were reunited forever . Since grade eight, Miz. Eleven years , we were one. High school, university, work life.” Miz mouths I know repeatedly, her eyes moist while mine are dry. “I was so proud of myself. I remember telling myself, ‘Good for you, Kal. It was painful, but you let her go because you love her, and because she loves you, she came back to you. So what if yours will not be an unblemished story like Emay and Abay’s?’ All was right with the world again. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. She never wanted to meet in public, always in hotel rooms or outside the city. As if I was a secret. As if I was someone who she was being unfaithful with. And this is a shame I’ll carry with me as long as I live—even after I discovered that’s exactly who I was, I still let her control me. Every time she would leave me, it was like going through that first breakup, burning down our future again. Because I couldn’t help building it up again every time she called me. I was hopeless, destroyed, a shadow of myself. Someone I barely recognized. I was hooked on her, on the hope that maybe this time she would stay. Or maybe next time. For over a year.” Miz drops her head into her free hand. “Then I fell apart, distanced myself, became a stranger to everyone. Somewhere in me, I found the strength to stop seeing her, but it was as if I couldn’t see or share life with anyone else either. As if she was the entirety of life. Or I was punishing myself? I don’t know.” I laugh sardonically. “Miz, there will never be another Muna. And I say that as a very good thing. So I will never disappear again, from myself, from you, from anyone.”
I feel light as a bird, free. Miz, however, looks thunderous, her face pinched tighter than her grip on my fingers. “Bitch!” she spits. “If I ever see her again, I’m shaving her head. And her eyebrows!” As if on cue, thunder rumbles from a distance, like a planned pathetic fallacy.
“You wouldn’t know how that feels though, eh? You always show them the door first.”
“You gotta. It’s a jungle out there,” she says, waving her free arm in the air. “I would never do a guy like that though. I’m always up front. Some take it well. Some don’t.” She shrugs and looks down at our connected hands, then releases mine. I remember her irritated tone earlier when she thought Daniel was at the door. And I want to ask whether he’s still trying to contact her, invading her space, or she has let him back in. But I hold back. She has always handled herself fine. And it truly is none of my business.
“Kal.” Miz pokes me in the triceps. “Thanks for telling me that,” she says. “It means a lot.”
“You deserved an explanation. It was long overdue,” I say. You deserve a lot. More than an on-again, off-again thing with Daniel, to start. “You’re my ride and die.”
She busts out laughing. “Or. Ride or die.”
“It’s like a vow,” I say. We reach for the same brownie. “Oh, you go ahead,” I say.
She breaks it in two and gives me a half. “Hey, you know what we never did?” she says, stopping me as I go in for a bite. She extends the arm of the hand holding her chunk of brownie.
“Oh!” I do the same. We interlock elbows and pop our halves. “Hold it there.” I pass her her beer bottle. I pick up mine, and we sip, our elbows still interlocked. “Now it’s official!”
We unwind and take in the collection of photographs we’ve chosen, scattered over the table like a collage.
“They tell a good story, right?” she says.
“They do.” A story of two kids who met by chance, developed a bond, had a long-distance friendship through their teens, and then were reunited by fate in Canada as adults. There must be a plot just like ours in a book, or even many books, out there somewhere.
“Are you noticing what I’m noticing though?” she says.
“I look younger every year?”
“Goof. We don’t have any…you know, lubby-dubby, coupley ones. Even the ones of just us scream platonic. Don’t you think so? I mean,” she says hurriedly, “it’ll be better for the case if we do a few romantic cheesy ones, right?”
“Unless we claim that we’re too culturally modest for public displays of affection.” Although to my eyes, we do look very affectionate in the photos of just us.
“Come on, please, our generation?” she says. “All that alcohol and hookahs. Posing like we’re an R&B group?”
We agree there’s only one way to remedy this: We have to take “romantic cheesy” ones around Toronto. Luckily, we’re both free tomorrow, so we plan to create history on the spot, wearing different clothes at half a dozen locations we’ll pick between us. “But keep them a surprise until we get there!” she says, getting excited. We shake on it. “Shall we call it a night for now?”
“Unless we start our individual sections for 5532—”
“Oh god, I can’t look at another form tonight.”
“Same here.” I close my laptop and start stacking the untouched printouts.
“I guess I’ll take off then,” I say, something making me draw it out, like a child trying to put off bedtime.
“Wait, it’s pitch black out there. I don’t like you riding this late.”
“The streets are actually quieter now, Miz.”
She goes out to her balcony. “It’s raining!” she yells into the darkness. A torrent of rainwater splashes against her window, followed by a worryingly close thunderclap. She comes back in and gathers the empty bowls and used napkins. “Stay. Bring your bike up.”
My insides do a flip. “I’m sure it’ll be okay.” Did I just brush off my bike? Who am I?
“It’ll be a slumber party!” she shouts, looking as giddy as I feel. “You haven’t slept over since…”
Since the time I flew back from my mother’s funeral. “Yeah,” I say. “Feels like yesterday.”
“Won’t it always?” she says gently.
I nod, feeling a sting behind my eyes, but quickly redirect. “Want to watch a movie? The latest one with my body double?”
“Wow, the confidence! Get the cushions down, John David Washington. I’ll go get the sheets.”
“You started it!” I yell out. But did she? I pause, cushion in hand. Or did I start pointing out our resemblance after she developed a huge crush on him last year? I shake it off. No, she saw it first.