TOBA
June 1999
Our apartment was unbearably hot.
New York summers, I was learning, were almost as brutal as Lagos—but different. In Lagos, the heat was dry. You could fight it with shade and cold water. Here, the humidity pressed down like a weight, thick and suffocating, soaking through your clothes and into your bones.
The room had no air conditioning. We had a small fan that Mummy bought at a garage sale—a plastic thing that oscillated back and forth, pushing hot air from one corner to another. Someone at church had told her to put a bowl of ice in front of it, but the ice melted so fast we might as well have been pouring money down the drain.
“I’m dying,” Rola announced from her spot on the bed. She was lying on top of the covers, wearing the shortest shorts and the thinnest tank top she owned, her arms and legs spread wide to expose as much skin as possible to the useless fan.
“You’re not dying.”
“I’m definitely dying. This is what dying feels like. Hot, sticky and miserable.”
“You’ve never died before. How would you know what it feels like?”
“I’m very intuitive.”
I laughed despite the heat. Rola had gotten funnier over the past months, becoming more American in her humor. Learning to use sarcasm as a shield the way the kids at school did. I liked this version of her, even as I missed the softer, more innocent version from Lagos.
But Lagos was a long time ago now. Almost two years. Sometimes it felt like a dream, like something I had imagined. The compound with its coconut tree. Kids playing football on the street. The sound of motorcycles and impatient drivers honking. All of it fading, day by day. Replaced by the reality of this room with its brick wall view, its broken drawer and heat that never let up.
“Toba?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m hungry.”
“There’s rice from yesterday.”
“I don’t want rice from yesterday. I want something cold. Ice cream.”
“We don’t have ice cream.”
“I know.” She sighed dramatically. “But I can dream.”
I got up, went to the refrigerator and opened it. Inside were the remains of yesterday’s dinner, a half-empty carton of milk, and three eggs. Not exactly a feast.
“What if I made fried eggs?” I suggested. “And toast? The bread isn’t too stale yet.”
“That’s hot food. I want cold food.”
“Cereal then. With the last of the milk.”
She scrunched up her face, acting like she was thinking hard about it. I loved that face. Loved the way she took small decisions seriously, as if they mattered.
“Fine,” she said finally. “Cereal. But you have to eat with me.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to eat alone.”
So I made two bowls of cereal—the cheap kind that came in big bags instead of boxes. We sat on the bed together, eating in silence, the fan pushing hot air past us, sounds of the city drifting through the open window.
This was our life now. Small moments. Simple meals. The two of us, together, surviving.
“Toba?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever think about going back to Lagos?”
I paused, my spoon halfway to my mouth. It wasn’t a question she asked often. We had an unspoken agreement not to talk too much about the past, about what we had left behind.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “But we can’t go back. You know that.”
“I know. I just... sometimes I miss it so much it hurts. The heat here is bad, but at least in Lagos the heat made sense.” She gesticulated with her spoon, waving it this way and that. “Here everything feels wrong. Like how can we be freezing one moment and the next, we’re sweating like Christmas chicken? And the sun doesn’t go down until nine in the night!”
I held back a laugh.
“I still don’t think we’re supposed to be here,” she concluded before spooning more cereal into her mouth.
“We’re supposed to be wherever we are,” I said. “That’s how it works. We’re here now, so this is where we belong.”
“But what if I never feel like I belong? What if I always feel like a stranger?”
It was a big question. Too big for a summer afternoon in a hot room. But I tried to answer it anyway.
“Then you find the things that make you feel less like a stranger,” I said. “People. Places. Moments. You build belonging out of small pieces. That’s what everyone does.”
“What pieces do you have?”
I looked at her. My sister. My responsibility. My whole world, really, whether I admitted it or not.
“You,” I said. “You’re my piece. As long as I have you, I belong.”
Her mouth curved into a bright, warm smile that made the heat almost bearable.
“You’re my piece too,” she said. “My only piece.” When she went for a wink, we both giggled at her twitching.
We finished our cereal. Watched some TV—a cartoon marathon on one of the channels we got for free, the antenna Mummy had rigged up from coat hangers pulling in fuzzy images of talking animals and superheroes. Rola laughed at the jokes, even the ones that weren’t that funny, and I watched her more than I watched the screen.
At fifteen, I was starting to understand things I hadn’t understood before. That the world was harder than it looked. That people could be cruel for no reason. That the gap between who you were and who you were supposed to be could feel like an ocean.
But when I was with Rola, none of that mattered. When I was with her, the ocean shrank to a puddle. Cruelty faded to background noise. The world became manageable. Survivable. Almost okay.
Was that normal? I didn’t know. I had nothing to compare it to. Other boys at school talked about their siblings like they were nuisances, obstacles, people they tolerated rather than loved. “My sister’s so annoying,” they would say, rolling their eyes. “I wish I was an only child.”
I couldn’t imagine feeling that way about Rola. She was annoying sometimes, sure—what ten-year-old wasn’t? But underneath the annoyance was something deeper. Something that felt less like sibling affection and more like... necessity. Like she was air, water and food. I couldn’t survive without her.
Mummy came home around six, exhausted as always, carrying a bag of groceries from the discount store. She kissed both our foreheads, asked about our days, heated up yesterday’s rice for dinner. We ate together at the small table, the fan still pushing hot air around, the sounds of the building mixing with the sounds of our spoons against bowls.
“I got a raise,” Mummy said halfway through the meal.
We both looked up.
“A small one,” she added quickly, before we could get too excited. “But enough. I’ve been looking at bigger apartments. Two bedrooms. Maybe we can move by the end of summer.”
“Really?” Rola’s face lit up. “My own room?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
I should have been happy. More space. More privacy. The chance to sleep without Rola’s elbow in my ribs, her hair in my face, her body pressed against mine in the narrow bed.
But fear twisted in my chest at the thought.
“The two-bedroom places are more expensive,” I said. “Are you sure we can afford it?”
Mummy gave me the look she gave me when I was being too adult, then smiled wanly.
“Let me worry about what we can afford,” she said.
“But mummy, on the long run, can we—”
“You just focus on school. Both of you.”
We finished dinner. Washed the dishes. Watched more TV until it was time for bed.
When darkness finally came, bringing with it a slight—very slight—cooling of the air, Rola curled up next to me like she always did now, and I held her like I always did. I tried not to think about a future where we might have separate rooms. Separate beds. Separate lives.
This is temporary, I told myself. We won’t always live like this. We won’t always need each other this much.
But even then, I knew I was lying.
We fell asleep together, two pieces of a whole that didn’t make sense without each other.
* * *
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