Duct Tape
“Soph, you think duct tape will work?” Laila asked.
The heat this May, after a frigid Toronto winter, caught me by surprise. It was almost midnight, and my skin was covered in a layer of sticky sweat; my glasses were sliding down my nose. Across from me, with the AC hose hanging down from her hands, Laila fared no better. The AC unit was from the building’s storage closet and didn’t belong to any of the other tenants in our apartment, so we claimed it. After hauling the unit up the stairs, we now stood in the dim hallway between our two rooms. I kicked the wall next to the crank-out window. My toes slicked right off the plaster from the sweat.
“Sure, why not.”
When we moved in five months ago, I found a box of duct tape tucked in the back of my bedroom closet on the highest shelf. I had only used the tape once before, to cover a chip in the kitchen counter’s cheap laminate. We had four full rolls and most of a fifth.
Grabbing the tape and a pair of scissors, I motioned for Laila to position the hose against the mesh screen. With the roll squeezed between my thighs, I cut strips of tape the length of my forearm. Once I had a dozen strips cut, I began taping, pressing into the mesh to make the tape stick. As I taped, it occurred to me that this was the longest we had been in each other’s proximity without a fight. I continued to tape in silence, wondering if Laila was thinking the same.
The sight in front of me looked like a grey sunburst. I nodded at Laila, who released the hose.
“Damn, it’s actually staying up,” she said after a minute’s silence.
“Told you.” I spun the roll of tape around my index finger as I continued to admire my handiwork. The roll flew off and hit the wall with a thud.
“Will it stay with the AC on?” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“One way to find out.”
The blast of cool air was a relief. I flopped down in front of the AC, enjoying the shiver that now ran up my arms. Next to me, Laila said, “We should figure out how to position the unit between our rooms.”
“I might just fall asleep right here.” My head slumped forward, and I very nearly did until her foot nudged my thigh.
“Sophie!”
Rubbing my eyes, I said, “Ugh, okay. Maybe wheel it forward? Put it on rotate.”
I held my breath as we moved the unit—me grabbing the rear, her at the front. Once we had the unit positioned between our bedrooms, rotating first toward Laila’s, then into mine, I reinforced the hose, stretching the tape lengthwise around, then over the trim and onto the wall. I walked over to the window and put my hand right next to the hose. Hot air wafted out, but the hose stayed in place.
Looking down the hallway away from our bedrooms, I surveyed the kitchen area that opened into the living room. I glanced at Laila, who had her lower lip between her teeth. I knew she was thinking the same. I counted in my head: one, two—
“We should block that area off too.” She didn’t wait for me to complain. “The AC will do fuck-all if the air can just go anywhere. Don’t worry—I have an idea.”
She disappeared into her bedroom, then reappeared with something folded in her hands. The fabric fluttered out—a bedsheet printed with pink paisley. She then ducked into the kitchen for a chair. She placed the chair right where the window ended and clambered on, sheet in hand. The cool air was lulling me to sleep again, right there, standing by the window with the tape in my hand.
“Look, I need your help.” Once again, Laila’s sharp voice pulled me out of rest. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. I looked up at her, then down at the chair wobbling beneath her. I moved forward, ready to steady the chair. “No, just cut the tape for me.”
I handed strips of tape to Laila one by one. She was tall, reaching the ceiling with ease. As she taped the last corner of the sheet up, I secured the edges of the sheet to the wall.
“Well, we’re trapped here.” I glanced back toward our rooms, then to the bathroom door opposite the window, just inside the sheet’s line.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Laila looking at the bathroom door too. “Don’t crash into the AC when you take your midnight pee.”
When we first moved in together, I would have laughed at what she said. I always got up in the middle of the night to take a piss and was always bumping into my bedroom door, and then my bed on the way back. But her words carried a weekly fight of ours, when she snapped at me in the mornings about waking her up every single night. I tried being quieter; I had even had one night where I made no noise at all. But when she didn’t acknowledge the effort I made, I went back to stumbling through the dark, not caring what I crashed and banged into.
Calm down, Sophie. One, two, three. “I’ll be careful,” I muttered, but she had already disappeared into her room. Alone in the hallway, I taped one last strip to reinforce the hose, then followed suit into my own room, duct tape still in my hand.
I stayed awake longer than I wanted to. We had to keep our bedroom doors open so the cool air could actually reach us. Lying on top of the duvet with my thin top sheet over me, the room was cool enough that I should be able to fall asleep, if not for Laila’s damn snoring. Through closed doors, her snores had been faint enough for me to ignore. As I tossed and turned, I wondered how someone could snore so loudly yet wake up at the slightest noise.
Half an hour passed with me lying there. I got up and went to the bathroom. On the toilet, I squeezed out drops of piss, one at a time, for the length of a Sudoku game. As I pulled my sleep shorts back on and flushed the toilet, a thought occurred to me. Opening the bathroom cabinet, I rummaged through the first-aid items and pads on the lowest shelf.
“Aha,” I said, louder than I meant to. I glanced at the closed bathroom door, but the only sound that travelled through was another snore. In my palm, I pressed my fingers into the neon orange foam earplugs.
Back in my room, I squished and twisted the earplugs into each ear. I lay down; the sound of Laila’s snores were mostly drowned out. Tapping my fingers against my stomach for a second, I reached over to my bedside table, where I had left the roll of duct tape. I taped a thin strip across each ear, securing the earplugs to my earlobes. With the world finally silent, I was able to fall asleep.
Laila and I woke up at the same time, and found ourselves in the hallway looking down at the still-rotating AC unit. On the window, the hose was still in place. In daylight, the grey strips of tape were ugly, blocking out what little light the small window let inside.
I took the first step and turned the AC off. Laila squeezed past me to the bathroom. Once she was halfway through the door, she gestured to the hose and said, “How do we actually get this to stay?”
I didn’t respond to Laila right away. When I had been trying to fall asleep last night, I had looked up ways to get an AC hose to stay in a crank-out window. There were kits we could buy. But buying anything for our shared use was the issue.
The apartment was mostly furnished through items we had brought from home. What we didn’t have, we made do without, like using ceramic eating bowls to mix cookie dough, or a fork instead of a whisk. The one time we had to buy something for the apartment—a baking tray—we ended in a three-day-long silence about who would pay for it and how to split the cost.
“I mean, the tape works.”
She scoffed as she slammed the bathroom door shut. The kit for the AC wasn’t expensive, but I had a feeling Laila would agree with me. Not buying more shared items was pretty much the only thing we agreed on these days.
Laila and I had known each other since first grade, when we were both put in ESL in our school in Oakville. We both only spoke English. Her family was from Jordan, and mine was from Pakistan, and that was enough for the school. The teachers spoke to us like we were idiots. The other kids kept their distance from the two weird Muslim girls. Talking to each other was the only reprieve we had during those days.
We stayed best friends until middle school. More brown and black kids joined, and we weren’t the class weirdos anymore. Then we just moved in and out of each other’s circles until we lost touch completely. I heard about her parents’ divorce through a friend of a friend. I knew she went off to the east coast for university through her Instagram, and thanks to her posts, I also knew when she was back. She came back to Toronto around the same time I knew I had to move out of Oakville, and out of my parents’ home. We ended up as roommates. The first month of living together had involved long nights staying up with glasses of wine, catching up on the years, wondering why we had drifted apart.
Maybe it was the first wine spill on the carpet, but in month two, things like dishes, rotten food in the fridge, strands of hair in the drain came up every day. I knew I wasn’t the cleanest roommate, but neither was she. Still, it was impossible to find our way back to the wine conversations after one of us had yelled about something or the other, and the fight found its way to our damage deposit.
I peeled the duct tape attached to the sheet away, making a gap for myself to go through. The tape hadn’t left any residue on the wall. The sheet fluttered back into place behind me. I blinked once, then twice in quick succession, adjusting my eyes to the sudden brightness on the other side of the sheet.
The rest of the apartment looked so normal—duct tape-less. The coffee table was littered with books, and Laila’s dishes from dinner still in the sink. Couch cushions strewn on the carpet—that was my fault, but at least the cushions didn’t leave a smell. I wrinkled my nose at the odour of fish that wafted toward me as I rifled through the drying rack for my mug.
I breathed through my mouth, the gross taste of morning in every exhale, as I prepared my iced coffee. I poured the last bit of fridge-cold brewed coffee into my mug, then topped it off with milk. I took a gulp, but the coffee wasn’t cold enough. The mouthful washed some of the morning breath out of my mouth, though. From the freezer, I pulled out the ice cube tray and put three cubes in my mug. The third cube caused the coffee to splash over the rim and spill onto the counter.
I reached over for the paper towel roll, but my hand met the cardboard tube. Doing so also brought another whiff of Laila’s fish right into my nose. I gagged audibly just as the sound of the flush came from the bathroom. Leaving the stain, I picked up my mug and walked back through the curtain into my room.
Pulling back the curtain that blocked light from the window in my room, I looked out into our small backyard as I took another gulp of coffee. The coffee was finally cold enough, and refreshed me with every mouthful. A black poodle dashed past my line of sight. I knew that dog belonged to the neighbours who lived directly above us. All three neighbours in our fourplex had dogs, and the yard was their toilet. I had sat out there on the first warm day of spring, the same Saturday Laila and I had fought about me breaking her favourite mug. The mug was still usable—only the handle had broken—but Laila still refused to talk to me. It had been nice to escape the tension of our apartment, but the sight of each dog trotting into the yard, taking a shit and leaving pulled me back inside.
We went into our respective offices on opposite days—me on Monday and Wednesday, her on Tuesday and Thursday. That left us with three days to suffer together. Somehow, we managed to have an argument on every one of those days: the dishes, a broken mug, noise. Today was Sunday, so we would soon be out of each other’s hair for the better part of the week.
As I stared at the poodle lifting its left leg to take a piss against the fence, I remembered that the pieces of Laila’s mug were still in my dresser. I had told her I would fix the mug. I tried gluing it back together, but the glue fell apart as soon as I picked the mug up by its handle.
I set my empty mug on my bedside table next to the roll of duct tape. Even though I had used a considerable amount last night to tape the hose to the window screen, the roll was still far from empty. I pulled the pieces of the broken mug out of my dresser and set them down on my bed. The handle had snapped in two and was completely off the mug. There was a small chip on the rim.
Cutting the tape thin, I first joined the handle back together. Then, using the same method I had used on the AC hose, I affixed the top part of the handle, and then the bottom. As I sat there taping, I heard a door open, then another one closer to me close. Laila was finally out of the bathroom. I had to piss, but I was almost done with the mug. To finish off, I wrapped a small piece of tape over the chip, smoothing the rim. Dangling the mug from my fingers, I bobbed it up and down a few times. The handle stayed in place.
I left the mug on my bed as I got up to go to the bathroom. Refreshed after washing my face and brushing my teeth, I stepped out to the sound of the kitchen sink running. Peeking into the kitchen, I saw Laila’s back as she stood by the sink, soaping up her dishes.
My eyebrows rose so high they disappeared behind my fringe. My coffee spill on the counter was no longer there. I went to my room to grab the mug and slipped the roll of tape over my wrist like a bangle on my way back to the kitchen.
I set the mug on the counter just as Laila turned around, wiping her hands on her loose pants. She looked at the mug, then at me, then back at the mug. The expression on her face was just like the one from last night, when she looked at the AC hose and the window mesh.
I could have sworn I saw the corner of her mouth turn up in a smile for a second.
“It’s hideous,” she finally said.
“It works.” I crossed my arms. The roll of tape dug into my stomach.
“We’ll see.” She turned to grab the kettle, and then her back was to me again as she filled the kettle with water. I could have sworn I saw the corner of her mouth turn up in a smile for a second.
I leaned against the bright yellow pole on the subway. As the train moved further north of Bloor-Yonge, the car emptied. Still, I remained standing for the remaining stop to Eglinton station. Even though we went to school thousands of kilometres apart, Laila and I both did the same degrees and ended up in the same career trajectories. We didn’t work at the same office, though we came close when we interviewed for two spots as analysts at Queen’s Park. Neither of us got the job, but she managed to secure one doing HR at a smaller company, and I followed soon after with an editing gig for a brand’s advertisements. She took the subway north on her days in the office, while I went south, into downtown. Ads flitted by—a mattress, a show at Ed Mirvish, a poem—as I thought about how, although neither career had any relevance to what we had studied, at least we hadn’t ended up working side by side.
The sun was glaring when I hopped off the TTC. I kept my head down as I walked home, tilting it away from the bright rays. Cracks in the sidewalk caught my attention. Grits of salt were buried in the cracks. I thought about bringing the duct tape out here, kneeling down and covering each crack. The grey would blend into the concrete. No one walking over would know the difference. There would be no need to put up orange traffic cones and close off chunks of sidewalk for repairs. The tape was heatproof, waterproof, and would stay, at least for the season. We had so much of it; there was plenty to spare.
I entered the apartment to the smell of apricots. I knew exactly what Laila was cooking at the first inhale, though this certainly wasn’t the season for the warm and full apricot soup. I tossed my backpack down by the door and peeled off my socks. Folding them into a ball, I dropped them on the carpet and watched them bounce once, then roll into the leg of the table that sat in our entryway.
The kitchen was empty, but as I scrubbed my hands clean, I peeked over at the pot of soup bubbling on the stove. I lifted the lid and inhaled. My stomach grumbled. Behind the pot, I noticed a strip of grey over one of the stove’s knobs, a knob that was always sliding out of its hold. Footsteps clacked behind me, and I dropped the lid. I turned over to see Laila hovering right behind me. We had long stopped sharing meals, and even touching her food was grounds for another fight.
So, her next words surprised me. “You can have some if you’d like.”
Another audible grumble from my stomach filled the kitchen. I couldn’t help saying, “It’s not soup weather.”
“I kept the AC running. The cool air—not fainting from heatstroke—made me crave it, you know?” She walked over to the other side of the kitchen island and moved closer to the door. She bent down, disappearing behind the island completely. When she stood up, she had something in her hand. I didn’t get a good look at what that was before she pulled her arm back and threw it at me. “And stop leaving your stinky socks around,” she said as the socks hit me squarely in the chest. The ball bounced off and landed at my feet.
I tucked the socks into the pocket of my pants. Not waiting to strip off my work clothes, I grabbed a bowl from the cupboard before Laila could change her mind. She sat opposite me, and we sipped the soup in silence.
“It’s really good,” I said as I finished my last drop. The soup was a family recipe, and she made it all winter. I’d had it once, in our first week of living together, when we shared our meals. That was before we sat down to split grocery receipts for the first time, and after that, we decided it would be better for both of us if we cooked separately.
“Thanks,” she said, not meeting my eyes. She still had half a bowl full.
As I put my bowl in the sink, a thought occurred to me. I said, “I’ll wash up, Laila. Just leave your bowl there. I’ll take care of it after I’ve showered.”
This time, she turned her head to acknowledge me. I thought about asking her if she wanted to split the wine I had in the cupboard, but she said, “Don’t put the pot away until it’s cool,” before I could make my offer.
When the weekend rolled around again, I grabbed a couple of bottles of the cheapest white wine from Farmboy and left them on the counter as an invitation. We hadn’t shared dinner together since the soup, but I hoped to change that tonight. I knew it was on me to extend the invitation. We had sat on the couch together watching Netflix on Wednesday and gotten together to duct tape a leak under the kitchen sink on Thursday.
The karahi chicken needed to cook for another 20 minutes, so I decided to get a head start on cleaning, even though I knew Laila should offer to clean in exchange for my cooking. I cleaned up the powdered spice on the counter, along with the splashes of tomato paste. All the dishes in the sink, including Laila’s lunch plate, sat sparkling clean in the drying rack. I ran a cloth along the edge of the sink to catch the water that had splashed up while I was washing, and noticed hair stuck to the edge of the counter. The cloth skimmed right over the hair.
“Dammit.” One hand went up to grab a fistful of my hair, when the tape on the stove knob caught my eye. The solution was right in front of me.
The roll of duct tape now lived on the kitchen counter, close at hand. I cut a strip and pressed the sticky side of the tape against the hair. The strands lifted up instantly. Seeing more strands on the tiled kitchen floor, I knelt down and gathered them up: my black straight hair and Laila’s chestnut curls. Even the strands of her hair formed loops. Mixed together against the tape, the chasm of distance between us felt meaningless.
I heard Laila’s door open just as I was finished gathering the last of the hair. “Perfect timing, El,” I called out. “I made us dinner.” I grabbed the bottles of wine off the counter and held them up just as she appeared from the hallway in a silk dress, her face done up with makeup. Her hair was half up, leaving short curls falling on her face.
“I’m going out.”
My brows crumpled as I set the bottles down and looked her up and down. With a dress like that, she could only be going on a date. She saw the scrunched-up duct tape on the kitchen counter, and the hard line of her eyebrows softened.
“We can have dinner together tomorrow if you’d like.”
I didn’t reply as I watched her slip her heels on. Definitely a date.
I ate dinner in front of the TV. When I set my empty plate in the sink, I noticed how clean and sparkling the space looked. The wine I had bought was still on the counter. Cracking the seal on one of the bottles of wine, I poured myself a glass with a couple of ice cubes.
I had told myself that moving to the city would change that, but nothing had changed yet. In another world, I would have known who she was going out with and where, might even be receiving text updates throughout her night.
Something churned in my gut as I took a mouthful of wine. I couldn’t get my mind off Laila and the fact that she was probably on a date. I wondered where they met. I hadn’t been on a date in years. No one worth dating lived in Oakville. I had told myself that moving to the city would change that, but nothing had changed yet. In another world, I would have known who she was going out with and where, might even be receiving text updates throughout her night.
Laila wasn’t home by the time I crawled into bed, the cool AC air pulling me to sleep in the silence.
I heard faint sounds through my earplugs from her room when I woke up for my middle-of-the-night piss. I knew she had arrived home. Removing the tape over my earplugs, I heard the sound more clearly. It wasn’t snoring but faint sobbing. Squishing the foam between my forefinger and thumb, I tiptoed back toward my room. The sobbing grew louder. I was halfway in, then turned, and crossed over to her door. Standing by the door for a few seconds, I made up my mind and went inside.
“El, you okay?”
I was met with a sniffle. In the dark room, I saw the lump of her body on the bed. Something silky crushed under my foot. I knelt down by the side of her bed, and held my breath. Her back was toward me, but I could feel her body shuddering through the sheet. She still didn’t say anything, but she shifted closer to me. I was close enough to rub my palm against the top of her thigh. I repeated the motion a few times, and the sniffling subsided.
Crawling onto her bed, I tucked in behind her, over the blanket. I rubbed my hand over her shoulder, a motion that lulled both of us to sleep.
Laila and I didn’t talk about her night right away. I snuck out of her room before she woke up. I returned to set a glass of water and a banana on her bedside. She didn’t stir, so I left the door open just a crack on my way out. In the hallway, I pointed the AC toward her room.
In the living room, I took stock of the mess. My things were cluttered everywhere: hair clips, socks and pens. I didn’t have anywhere to put them, but I did have a lot of duct tape.
I found the basic layout of a small shelf on my phone. The structure was made with cardboard that would then be covered with duct tape to strengthen the joints.
I had cut out my shapes, taken a lunch break, and was sitting on the floor taping them together when Laila emerged from her room. I caught her shadow from the corner of my eye, then heard the beep of the AC unit as she turned the machine off.
I waited for her to say something, but she just came into the living room and sat on the couch opposite me. My head was bent over, but I felt her eyes on me as I lay a strip of silver over one edge, then around the corner onto the other. After taping another corner, I broke the silence.
“Did you want to eat anything?” When I glanced up, I saw her head hung down and her eyes flicked toward my hands. Her elbows pressed into her thighs.
She didn’t move as she said, “No thanks.”
My fingers clenched over the roll of tape. Our words were still stiff, as though she hadn’t spent the night crying into her pillow. I felt an impulse to offer her something else, but my mind blanked on what I could give.
Then, she said, “What are you making?”
“Ah, here.” I slid my phone across the carpet to her. She picked it up and nodded, and I heard a “hmm” as she scrolled.
“Can I help?”
Nodding, I moved closer to her with my shelf structure in hand. “You can hold this while I tape. It’ll make it so much easier.”
The shelf was ready by the time the day turned orange. Laila laughed when I stretched the tape over her fingernails and smoothed bumps out of every piece laid down. When we were done, I slotted all my clutter into the shelves, and she grabbed my hand and laughed.
Her tears, and what caused them, still hadn’t come up. The question was on the tip of my tongue, but Laila brought up something else, and the moment to ask passed. As I set the shelf up under the window, I wondered if she had actually wanted to talk about the new ice cream place by Eglinton Station, or if she wanted to avoid the topic completely.
I finished prepping dinner while Laila set the table. We took our seats, and for the first five minutes of eating, the only sound was our cutlery scraping against the plate.
Then, with my mouth full of chicken steak, I blurted out, “What exactly happened on your date?”
Laila looked at me with confusion on her face. Under the fluorescent kitchen lights, the dark circles under her eyes were stark. “What date?”
My foot kicked the table leg at that exact moment. I swore under my breath, then said, “Um, last night?”
A laugh escaped Laila’s mouth. The sound was so different from the tears and the silence of the day. I cut in, meaning to ask what she found so funny, but the beginning of my sentence was cut off by her laughter, which grew more and more hysterical.
“God, Sophie, I wish it was a date,” she said when she finally calmed down. She rubbed her eyes, then picked up her fork again. She looked down at her plate, slowly cutting a piece of chicken as she went on. “It was girls’ night with my team—we’re mostly women and we get along. Someone suggested it.” She popped a piece of chicken in her mouth. I followed suit, and swallowed my bite when she started talking again. “Let me tell you—there are some people you should never get to know well.”
“You remember how, when we were in elementary school, there would be girls asked things like ‘Do your parents even know English?’ or ‘What’s that on your hand on Eid?’ but they’d pinch their noses like they couldn’t stand the smell?” Laila slammed her fork down, and it clattered on the plate.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a chip fly out and land in the centre of the table. Her words brought up decades-old memories, memories I had spent half my life trying to forget.
I kept my eyes on the plate chip. “I wish I didn’t remember.” Looking up, I saw Laila’s hair flying wildly around her face. For a moment, she looked like the six-year-old who no one picked as a partner either. “Well, that’s how we became friends, isn’t it?”
A smile softened her features, and the sight of which made the knot in my stomach unclench.
“I guess I thought we left that stuff behind. People learned, kind of. But we went to a bar, and one of the girls said something about how she lied on her law school application because ‘they only want to see immigrant sob stories.’ She made up a grandparent who survived the Black September! She’s the whitest woman in the office. Everyone else laughed—even the other Arab woman. I just wanted to run and hide in the bathroom and cry. I felt like a buzzkill. But coming home would have been even more buzzkill-ish. But I work with these people, so I sucked it up. And I really just wish I hadn’t.”
My chest clenched. I reached my hand over the table and cupped her wrist. “Hey, jobs are hard to get.” I didn’t know what else to say, but Laila’s shoulders fell, making her look more relaxed than she had all day. I stood up, picking up my empty plate. As I gestured toward her plate, she looked down and finally noticed the chip.
“Ah, sorry.” She pushed herself out of her chair.
“I mean, the plates are yours.” I picked the chip up with my free hand and fit it against the plate. The piece fit in perfectly. Looking back at the roll of tape on the coffee table, I turned to Laila and said, “The tape will probably do the trick.”
“It can’t be the solution to everything,” she said, laughing.
“Watch me.”
As summer went on, things in the apartment were good. When issues came up, like a leak in the pipe under the kitchen sink, or a broken doorknob in the hall closet, we would get the duct tape out. One of us would hand strips of tape to the other person. The silvery-grey surface now covered every room in our apartment. When the sunlight streamed in, the tape reflected light in small rainbows, making the sight almost beautiful.
The first roll of tape finished when we fixed the chip in the dinner plate. The second roll was dedicated entirely to re-securing the AC unit throughout the summer. That roll was on its last few strips of tape, but the weather was cooling down and we wouldn’t need it for much longer.
We made more small shelves with the third roll. Laila found a tutorial for a basket woven out of duct tape. The basket took an entire weekend to put together, but it now held the TV remotes. Neither device got lost anymore, and neither of us yelled at the other about leaving it between the couch cushions. The toilet’s fill valve kept filling over the limit, so after we had mopped up the spilled water, we taped the valve down. The water level never rose higher than it should again. I finished up the third roll by spelling our names out in thin strips of tape on the front door. "Sophie & Laila," read the sign. Neither of us ever brought guests home, so the sign was only for us.
The last of the fourth roll was used up when I sliced my finger cutting carrots for our roast. The tip of my finger bled, running over the plastic cutting board held together with duct tape. Laila ran to the bathroom cabinet, but we had never bought Band-Aids to begin with. She was back with a small strip of tape already cut. The tape staunched the bleeding, and stayed on even under the water as I rinsed the carrots off.
When I pulled the fifth and final roll out of my closet, I asked Laila, “Should we buy more?” We were splitting all our grocery receipts now that we were sharing most meals, but the question of other household items lingered in the air.
Laila chewed her lower lip. Like me, I was sure she was contemplating disturbing the delicate balance we had created. She lifted a hand and gestured around to our silver and grey apartment. “I think most things that needed to be fixed have been fixed.”
We started to be more sparing with this roll for the last of the summer. When I dropped a bowl and it chipped at the edge, I kept the bowl on the coffee table as a place to collect shedding hair instead of taping over the chip as I would have done. Laila brought a pack of Band-Aids home, and I paid for half, even though I noticed she used five for every one of mine.
We did have to use up a considerable amount re-taping the AC hose to the mesh screen one unusually hot October weekend. The rest of the roll now sat on the coffee table, next to the chipped bowl and the duct tape basket. The thickness was the depth of a sheet of paper.
A month went by, and neither of us touched the roll. That was the longest we had gone so far since we pulled the first roll out of the closet. But as long as the roll was there, with a small piece of tape available for emergencies, the rift between us in our early days of living together stayed away. I walked through the tape aisles of hardware stores, but something always stopped me from buying another pack. Laila never came home with more duct tape either. We moved through the apartment, now greyer than silver.
The day before Halloween, Laila said to me over dinner, “I’m going to visit my dad next week.”
“He’s in Halifax, right?” I dropped my spoon too vigorously into my bowl, causing my soup to splash up. The thick orange liquid hit my chin, just missing my shirt, and flecked the bottom half of my glasses. Laila nodded as handed me a napkin. As I wiped the mess off, I said, “How long are you going for?”
With her mouth full of soup, Laila held up two fingers. “Two weeks,” she added after a moment.
Two whole weeks. Six months ago, I would have jumped at the idea of having the apartment to myself for two weeks, of not having Laila’s dishes in the sink or her hair on the bathroom tiles or her snores carrying through the walls. Now, I looked around at the kitchen, then back to the living room. The greying tape all around made the space look stark and empty.
“You’ll stop missing me as soon as I’m gone,” she said, taking her spoon out of her mouth and raising it up in a toast. Drops of soup flicked down, right into her bowl.
“Do you need any help packing?”
“I do, actually. My suitcase is broken. You don’t happen to have one, do you?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t travelled in years, but the last time I did, I took a suitcase from my parents’ house. She chewed her lower lip, something I noticed she only did when there were words in her head she was holding back. At the sight of her, I could feel the sliver of remaining duct tape behind me vibrate on the coffee table.
“We have to use it up sometime.” My voice was flat as I said that. But I was tired of walking this delicate line. She nodded, still chewing her lip so hard I was worried she would split her skin.
After we set our bowls in the sink, she brought her suitcase over to the living room. The handle had a crack running horizontally through it, making the suitcase impossible to pull.
“Should be an easy enough fix.” I sat cross-legged with the tape in my hands. I didn’t have scissors with me—I didn’t need any. “One shot.” I cracked a smile, even though my heart was pounding in my chest.
“Soph—” The corner of Laila’s mouth quivered, then fell. “Nothing.” She leaned in, holding the broken part of the handle together as I wound the tape around. This close, I swore I could hear her heart thumping too.
I secured the tape and squeezed all around to make sure it stuck to the handle. Standing up, I said, “Here, test it out.” The cardboard interior of the roll was feather-light in my hand.
We both watched as she wheeled the suitcase back and forth over the apartment’s carpet with ease. The handle stayed strong.
“Hope it does this when it’s full of stuff.”
“You don’t need that much for two weeks.”
Words swam around in my mind. “I’m going to miss you” was what came out.
I lunged forward as soon as the last word left my mouth. My glasses smashed into my nose as my face buried into her collarbone. The cardboard interior of the tape slid onto my wrist as I squeezed her between my arms. At her sharp intake of breath, I loosened my grip but held the hug. The cardboard dug into her back. Words swam around in my mind. “I’m going to miss you” was what came out.
Her arms went around my shoulders. “I know,” she said, rubbing her palm up and down my back. “It’ll be okay, I promise.”
