Chapter 36 Miz
36
MIZ
Hours after I get in from the airport, Kal still hasn’t come home. I look him up on Find My Friends and see that he is at his house. I tell myself he must have decided to stop off there to catch up with everyone first. Maybe he needed a man-to-man with Silvio. Even as I crawl into bed early, teeth chattering from the shock of winter—this is why I go to Ethiopia only in summer!—I still expect Kal to come home and, despite everything, warm me up. When I wake up the next morning and see that his side of the bed is flat and cold, I begin to feel the devastation. He really is gone.
For now. I just have to wait him out. He’ll come around. I control myself from stalking his location or reaching out. He knows where to find me. I resume our daily routine. I buy groceries and cook for two. I don’t do the laundry because that’s his department. I don’t catch up on the shows we watch together. I wipe the snow off his bike so it will be ready to ride. After work, I wait for him a little bit before going out on my second daily run, in case he wants to cruise alongside me, showing off his no hands steering while checking out my backside and tempting me with carbs.
On the weekend, Aimé comes over for a long run and to pick up her souvenirs. “Where’s Kal?” she says, doing a full circuit of the apartment. She’s all energy now. A real runner who gets up early in the mornings on her own and ticks off another of them boxes on the schedule, baby! Her endurance is increasing, her form improving. She doesn’t pump her arms, keeps her chin up, eyes ahead, trusts the beautiful symbiosis between pain, discomfort and endurance. And she has decided to do a half-marathon instead of the full marathon she threatened back in September, on the eve of my wedding. Like a good coach, I’ve laid the praise on thick.
“He’s out,” I say, pulling on a second pair of socks.
“Already?”
“Wanted to let us catch up. Says hi.” I know that’s not much of an explanation, but thankfully, she’s more interested in our upcoming run than Kal’s odd absence from his home at eight in the morning. She undoes her shoelaces and reties them, tugging very precisely to get that perfect-to-the-millimetre hold that’s snug without being restrictive.
“I’m so jealous you got to train in Ethiopia for two whole weeks!”
Among other things , I think, knowing that for the first of those two weeks, the most cardio I got was when I was darting to cross the street without dying.
“Did you read my new post?” Aimé has even started a training blog, subscribed everyone she knows and branded her social. Monetizing is next.
“Bet.” I’ve barely glanced at the blog because something about her hook, the challenge of making the switch from short to long distance, hit too close to home. “Ready?” I do a few high jumps, ignoring the tingling in my knees. “Fifteen kilometres aren’t going to run themselves!”
Outside, we start the warm-up around Nathan Phillips Square a bit faster than we used to. Right away, I feel myself struggling, but Aimé doesn’t even slow down to pluck her water bottle from her belt pack and glug when her latest-model Garmin tells her it is time for hydration. As I exert harder to avoid ending up being her next blog post topic, I sense Aimé forcing herself to slow down for my benefit, before inevitably speeding up, then pulling back again. This isn’t the Aimé who didn’t know how to pace herself. This is conditioned Aimé, who simply is faster than I am. The next time Aimé picks up speed despite her efforts not to, I try to match her. She stops.
“The safest thing,” she says carefully. I know what’s coming. She’s going to give me the same line I’ve given people who tried to run with me. They never come back for a second time. “Is if we both go at our own pace and just meet me back at your place.”
Her implication, that she’s going to finish before me, which of course is accurate, stings. “Oh, excuse me, am I cramping your style?”
“I’m aiming for two fifteen. That doesn’t mean you have to.”
“Okay, madam expert. Run alone. Oh, I mean, along!”
“Miz, I want you to be able to do this race safely.”
“I never wanted to. I don’t do races. I got into it for your sake, ’member that?”
“And I’m saying—”
“I heard ya. Bye!” I blast off like a wild horse, fuelled more by pure will than by energy. Within minutes, I start to flag. Flag! Yes! Remembering my motivational reel, I try to pull it up in my mind now. That three-minute clip from YouTube of Derartu winning, the people screaming. But it’s unavailable. What begins to scream, instead of my imaginary fans waving the Ethiopian flag at the finish line, are my quads. Then come the cramps in my lower abs, like the ones Aimé used to complain about in her early days. Meh. Something is always supposed to hurt anyway. Then I start to feel nauseous. A bit of bile comes up. I swallow it. Not like it’s blood. For a nanosecond, my vision goes black. But the route is a straight shot, so I don’t really need to see. It was probably just a long blink.
The message from my body, of course, is clear. Stop.
On I run. Ten kilometres won’t run themselves either. Next, my left toes join the strike and begin to go numb and, shortly thereafter, my right toes too. Then, on top of my gradual system shutdown, I get camel toe. Great, how much crappier can this run get? All of a sudden, I am flying. But this isn’t the runner’s high. I am actually airborne. Black ice? In my peripheral vision, right before I go full body patty-cake with the ground, I see a cyclist zip past, the rider screaming bloody murder at me. I lie sprawled on the frozen asphalt for a good while, trying to focus on the birds surfing the breeze instead of the pain thrumming in my right ankle. I feel the vibrations of Aimé’s elegant, even stride through the asphalt. That used to be me , I say to the pale moon still visible in the sky.
Aimé comes into view, looms over me, hands on her waist. I raise my hands, like a child wanting to be carried. Wisely, Aimé crouches down to me instead. Without a word, she puts my arm over her shoulders, eases me off the path and props me up against a tree.
“Stay there. I’ll call a ride. Okay?”
I nod, sipping at the pain, blinking back tears.
—
After a trip to the walk-in clinic, where I react badly to finding out I have a hairline fracture in my ankle, and worse to Aimé’s advice that I drop out of the race, we pick up breakfast and head back to my place. Aimé only eats the orange slice and melon cubes, since she plans to finish today’s run. She sits with me while I eat, springing up the second I take the last bite.
“I’ll check on you later, okay?” she says, tossing my used napkins and condiment packets into the empty container.
“You’re leaving me?”
She ties the takeout bag and gets up. “I don’t want to miss a day. Consistency is crucial.”
The tense truce we’ve been in since the walk-in clinic splinters. “Is that going to be another one of your blog posts?”
Aimé smiles. “I forgot you are a mean high.”
I am on mild painkillers. But Kal is the painkiller I want. One dose would fix everything. Hell, I wish he had been that cyclist!
“No,” she says. “My next one is on how stress is bad for training. I’ll check on you later, okay?”
“Then we’ll go to the sauna?” I say, feeling pathetic that I so transparently don’t want to be alone.
“I don’t have any of my stuff here.”
“I wish Mom was here.”
“Mom is busy with her man.” I give her an ew face. She leans in, serious. “Miz, tell me where Kal really is at this hour on a Saturday morning. Something happen?”
I shrug. “Kal moved out.”
“Wha—?”
“I have no idea where he is. We’re not speaking. Sorry to tell you, we are through.”
Aimé looks around the place. “But he had moved in.”
“Not officially.” We were just joined at the hip there for a while. “My apartment is husband-free. We failed. Just like you warned me we would.”
“I did not.”
“Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you did. Anyway.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.” I can feel all that Aimé is brimming to say, to ask. But she holds her tongue and waits. Which for some reason makes me dissolve into tears. “I should have known better. Marriage ruins everything. Haven’t I always said so? I’m not cut out for it. I know I said that . Who did I think I was that I could “try out” marriage? I should have left well enough alone. Accepted Kal had reached the end of his time in Canada.”
Aimé looks at me like I’m something too broken to take for repair. She lets me just cry it out against her, someone who has been married in all but name for longer than all my hookups combined. Maybe that is why she is being quiet, just patting my head until I subside to intermittent babyish hiccups.
“Tell me what happened.”
“No. You go run.” Nothing has been resolved, but I actually feel a little bit lighter. And I know Aimé doesn’t really want to get too deep into it right now either. She needs me to be okay, for my fight with Kal to be a minor spat, for life to be drama-free between now and the day of the race. I get it. She was like this in college too. Back then it was all about whatever had to get shelved so she could go pro. Now, it’s about possibly relaunching her athletic career so she won’t be stuck peering into hairy wax-clogged ears for the rest of her life.
“Whatever it is, it will blow over,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, believing. “Yeah?” I say again, doubting.
“Absolutely. It’s one thing to know your friend is human but a whole other thing to know that about your spouse.”
I groan. Aside from the fact that I don’t understand how she can be so convincing, having never been a spouse herself, I do not have the energy to go over all that again, what labels I am willing to take on and not, and why. Once she abandons me, I put Asni on repeat, down two shots of NyQuil, and melt into the bedcovers to hibernate until Mommy comes back.
—
But Monday comes first. By then, I can hop and lean my way around my place. After a trip to the bathroom, I’m lingering in my walk-in closet to sniff the special laundry detergent Kal had convinced me to buy for my run clothes, when I hear a knock at my door. I gasp, instinctively knowing it’s Kal. Yay! “You’re such a nerd. Why’re you knocking?” I yell, turning to the door, completely forgetting my ankle. I feel the punishment the second my full weight lands on it. I crash, howling in pain, but giddily happy at the same time because Kal’s arms will wrap around me and he’ll carry me back to bed and everything will be okay.
So why am I hearing Everest’s voice in my apartment?
Because the face that appears over me is not that of my Kal. It is Daniel’s.