This article, however, was before my time as a paper girl in Hedgewood. It was also before our family expanded to include Mama’s local star boyfriend, Cole Murphy. Summer cared to dig up in online archives that Mr. Murphy’s resigned from the local NAACP leadership, as the article’s headline and brief story informed me he did. One look at his businessman headshot cornered my memories to childhood, switched from disadvantage to privilege due to money our real father left for a nice house and money a surrogate father brought into that house. I put the article on the pile of filing I needed to finish. It was destined for a manila folder of similar Hedgewood Sentinel keepsakes: our honor roll and graduation listings, annual events we attended, my parents’ obituaries.
It felt spooky to dip my hands into thatched dark bamboo cubes where Summer kept odds and ends in her living room workspace. I remembered her in there, on stained beige sheets, curled cross-legged in the corner or on her stomach. Our candles and incense mostly covered the smells of her pastime: not just paint, but the enamel and glues. I kept her unfinished statement in that space. She shredded fashion brand names and labels she cut from stacks of magazines. She glued them to canvas and spray painted them in light metallic tones. She was just half done on the side where she managed to rubber-cement scraps into texture and grade. It was part of her efforts to join the natural and “meaningful” art crowd, to be more politically and less personally focused, to go the direction the art blogs and dark bar small talk told her to if she wanted notice. I didn’t get it. I liked her less flashy work with faces, as damned and disgruntled as she intended them to be.
“Nobody cares about Black angst anymore, Autumn,” she said about them.
For that acerbic take, I helped her wrap and stack her oil and chalk portraits of imaginary friends. Together, we buried them down in our cellar storage space. It gave me something to do to retrieve them again. She rarely framed. It was too expensive. So I carried the light canvases up a few flights, at night, all by myself. The neighbor boy, from the floor beneath us, helped me once. I was fine alone. But he insisted. He reminded me when young adulthood smelled like red candy, grass, and Vaseline. And not because those were his scents. It was because they were not. Nowadays young people smelled like sour candy, smoke, and electric current. His efforts, and Summer’s laziest paintings, gave me occasion to talk fondly about where I came from.
These makings were nostalgic, juvenile even, as she took subjects like our old backyard shed, and titled it Summer: A fringe of pastel dots along the shed’s bottom border was supposed to be the petunias, marigolds, and geraniums sprouting every year. Autumn could have been mistaken as saturated honey wands bundled together. It was the little-girl view from our bedroom window down onto the front yard every fall, before the gilded boughs of oak trees detassled. Another picture was Grandma’s rocking chair. I recalled it towering to the height of my chest, proud for a mere piece of furniture. Summer rendered it squat and flabby. She painted a mock family portrait of stray cats we used to feed, though I did not recall them in the dull colors she portrayed. So much of her work on our old house was hasty and incorrect, as if she rushed to document the nest before Mama sold it.
Her other artworks were the same unrevealing things, mostly peddled online and at little fairs and to Harlem shop owners, because she couldn’t figure out the people and places and games to leap into real galleries. I gave up on her stuff to go to my photo albums she hated—the cheap sticky plastic-sheet kind. I thumbed through pig-tailed school pictures, shots of frilly dresses at dances. They weren’t fancy art, but I know Summer pulled the albums off my shelf often. She always put them back crooked or out of order. A few really old ones were upside down. I savored those most, because they were filled with my father and his family.
Over the years, we girls became Spencers in name only. Birthday and Christmas presents stopped from my father’s side of the family. They missed our graduations. If Mama didn’t make efforts to take us to see them, we didn’t see them. Summer and I talked often about forcing a relationship with Daddy’s people, all the aunts and uncles and cousins we used to see at the funerals until we stopped flying back home to even see Mama. The money dried up. Our tries at dream jobs demanded us. Time, we thought, was tight. Now, I had regrets. I wanted more heritage in my future.
I went to my desktop to check the train schedules back to my hometown. Fairly straight shots from Penn Station to Chicago’s Union Station, then one short layover until a route would drop me off in back of Hedgewood’s main post office. The ticket price was not high. Perhaps Mama’s death pushed Summer into regret about distance from the Spencers. For all I knew, she was back home. The Big Mamas were feeding her well. She was looking at our baby pictures in their photo albums. She was hearing what our father was like as a child. She was closing that past wound, finding that part of herself, reclaiming a legacy. She was driving past our old house on Trummel Lane, to relive blissful times when the biggest thing we had to manage was time: to rake all the leaves, to dodge every earthworm after a rainstorm, to chase down our school bus filled with pink and yellow faces we never fully fit with.
“But why not do all that with me?” I asked out loud.
The Hedgewood Police Department was little to no help. Summer was not a formal resident there for almost twenty years. We left for college and never looked back for more than holiday visits. We became expatriates and rebels relatives eventually forgot.
House lights, streetlights, and headlights from Harlem’s dense population appeared like iridescent algae through my front windows. I dreamt of the journey, adventure, and escape Summer found. Even when I should have, I never considered leaving New York. Now blocks of darkened houses, low rooftops, and spread-out silence seemed a solution worth fleeing for. I would reach out to family again soon.
By the end of the night, I proved Montgomery and myself wrong. Not one earmarked page of Summer’s books indicated anything but her observations on color, shading, angle, and lines. The occasional biographical tidbit she found interesting, but little more. My sole discovery was a detached eyelash.
Useless memories and thoughts took over too many moments. I could never complete a thing without them. They were my water cooler breaks from hoping, wishing, waiting, and listening for Summer’s key to turn the front door lock. I could not get through a night without believing I heard that sound.
I grabbed a pen to write on my necessary “To Do” list waiting, always, on the kitchen counter. I crossed off the first thing.
1.Look through Summer’s things again.
2.Respond to emails from the precious few clients who are not abandoning me for tardiness, slow response, and my typos in their content.
3.Renew subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly and Writer’s Digest.
4.Go out for toilet paper.
5.Skip the wine tonight.
6.Eat.
I procrastinated on numbers two through six. They weren’t as important as braving to peek more inside Summer beyond what her work showed me, and indeed all of us, for quite a while. We were the ones who chose to think hauntings and disorder were just her chosen “style,” all about art, with no truth in the bones.
THREE
At night, the heat in my top-floor apartment was punishing. Practically speaking, the building’s old boiler did what it was supposed to. Theoretically, the temperature could have easily arisen from Mama and Grandma’s spirits boiling over. Their lecture would start off like this: We raised you so much better than this.
I couldn’t deny it. You did, I’d respond.
They would be referring to how I let my grief, immaturity, and needs cloud my judgment to give in to a man who was not really mine. A man who still cried about Summer sometimes, and I let him. The confusion and stress he and I both felt, me more than him, had driven him away for weeks. Tonight was his first back with me again.
I planned, in time, to tell Detective Montgomery, and anyone else who could help, that I had indiscretions with my sister’s man and I
know she sensed it, in an intuitive mist where all women know what that odd call or perfume scent means.
I limited it. He respected that. We never spoke of it. She never confronted us. Life went on. I exhaled. I thought she’d never know. Now, I had to consider she did.
At first, Chase Armstrong was just one of the constants I could depend on as Mama was passing away. He was always there, whenever we needed him. He belonged to Summer, but I knew he was there for me, too. Summer was no real help with Mama’s affairs, doctor’s appointments, prescriptions. Damn the “sensitive artiste” in her. If not for Chase, and Mama’s hospice nun Penny, I would have been on my own. I suspected Summer sensed Chase could be attracted to me, not because she and I had exact looks or personalities. We weren’t those kinds of twins no one could tell apart in a glance or two, and we were no more alike than any other siblings who grow up together.
I can only hope depression from Mama’s death encouraged me to cross the line. He claimed intimacy at a time like that was a mere mistake. I told no soul, not even Detective Montgomery, about us. If he and anyone else knew Summer had real motive to get away from us, and better yet to punish me for betraying her, they would not help me search for her.
But it still did not account for why she’d punish herself in freezing cold on our rooftop. Footprints only. No shoes. Door wide open. No notes. Never seen again.
At first, it was just one time with Chase. That one time was one too many, but I took solace it happened when Summer had put him on “off” in their off-and-on thing. We stopped, completely. I ended our friendly chats when I was just to take a message over the phone. I stopped asking about his job. I played dead in my room if he came over. I pointed to my desk if Summer invited me to a movie or party with them.
It went this way until several days after I called 911 to report I thought something happened to Summer. Chase finally returned my call, and she wasn’t with him. Our calls and meetings at bars were all about her. Then, when our hysterics that Summer hadn’t come home reached boiling points, we fell into bed as we were just supposed to be looking through her things. Or, maybe we were just calling around looking for her. Maybe we were just sitting around talking about how this could have happened to her. To us. I can’t recall what I was thinking, but I know sex wasn’t my drive. I’d never even thought Chase was especially attractive. Now, I saw beauty in his valor to emigrate from the West Indies alone to make something of himself, and his honesty and commitment to me, while I knew it was also betrayal.
“I’ll lose you both when she returns, because I can’t play that game,” he’d told me. I just put my head in his palm in admission we were only a matter of tainted time.
And he said—no, promised—it was not about sex for him either. Did it matter? No matter what happened or how it happened, it was happening.
We had left the TV on. The Roots were signing off the Jimmy Fallon repeat.
Chase thought I loved spooning tight, with my spine sunk into his ribs and his hairy thigh over my hip. But his affection smothered me. Summer was my sister, after all. I couldn’t flaunt it, no matter how much security and serenity I felt when I was in bed with him again. I sat up in Summer’s four-poster canopy bed, its grand posts and headboard out of character for me. Summer and I dismantled and hauled the bed so many times it felt like an old friend. “What about ice cream?” I asked aloud, as if I half expected Chase to leap out of bed and get it for me. Specifically, I wanted Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond.
Neapolitan was my flavor back when Mama coughed herself to final sleep. There was something organizing about moving my spoon across the carton from white to pink or brown to white or pink to brown, depending on the brand. With Summer gone, the new flavor was much simpler and less fattening. It took so long to suck the chocolate off the nuts stuck in the ice cream, I ate less of it. I thought to walk to the bodega alone in ChapStick and bedhead, to buy it through a bulletproof window slit. Maybe one of the bodega cats would be out. The regular ones all came to me by now.
When Mama came to visit her big girls, “alllll grown up in the big city now,” she cringed to see us leave out after midnight to buy orange juice and milk and eggs. “Why can’t you wait until the morning?” she always asked. She never understood every need in life wasn’t clouds and mileposts and winding roads away. She regarded the black plastic bodega sacks we brought back with suspicion, like they held babies kidnapped from Harlem Hospital down the road. She listed a cascade of farfetched outcomes to cap our biographies: men in black come through our screenless open windows, insane cabbies to be the deaths of us, baby-faced gang rapists in train cars before morning rush hours. It was part of the “wild imagination” Summer inherited from her, their eccentric personalities the relatives called it, their You just don’t understand her gossip shields. Now I knew all the evidence of those outlandish warnings from Mama were based in true stories. I may not have been alive then but she was, and she had never forgotten the tales, and the daily news reports I was too busy living life to the fullest to pay much attention to, and the implausible possibilities more years on Earth show everybody. Like Mama did for us, one day I would tell girls they would disappear if they were not careful.
I untangled from the maroon crochet blanket I was sad to have all to myself, finally. Summer and I both watched Grandma put the blanket’s final knot into place, right at the corner edge of a slight rouge border one must squint to see. Summer curled up in the blanket without asking me if I wanted to toast with her. Later that night, the feathers in my down comforter may as well have been gossamer. I kicked it off out of spite, so stayed with a cold that winter, the stinking and barking kind. Then, Summer took the maroon blanket to camp. She didn’t need it. It was hot. She dragged it to sleepovers with the friends I was not invited to know. Finally, she took it to college. Now, it lies between me and her past lover.
When I slipped Chase’s arm from around me he growled, stretched, and sucked his tongue before going motionless again. He never snored. His farts were unalarming, almost banjo twangs. He made Godiva coffee in mornings and decaffeinated tea at night. He had yet to leave the toilet seat up or lose the toothpaste cap. He loved to cook. He actually could cook. This did not stop him from ordering in, and tipping well. Besides the spoons after sex, he kept to his side of the bed and never hogged the covers.
At the edge of the kitchen, with my eyes on the microwave’s time—3:21—I realized I glided down the hall naked. Not even a robe, in March. I was still hot. I remembered no footsteps. When I turned, I saw another memory of Summer to join the many others twisting around my mind these days. Ever the artist, she had made her own black-and-white copy of the photo of our first birthday with Mr. Murphy in our lives. It hung inside a cream mat and copper-colored pewter frame. I knew the balloons were pink because I remembered the day, the moment, the tendrils of lightning before clouds shattered and Mr. Murphy set his hat down to stay the whole night. I saw the rocking chair in the background, and considered Summer’s viewpoint could be more accurate than my memory of it. The back of the chair no longer looked as tall as I had thought it was.
“Hey, baby.”
By the time I knew Chase was out of bed, he had his hands on my shoulders and his chest against my back.
“You all right?” Chase asked.
He turned me back to bed, to lie naked next to him. Soon he was asleep again.
I was far from promiscuous; I once aimed to keep lovers at five, before I grew old with one. Chase made it eight. I still hadn’t figured out how to use it to marry up, no matter where the number went. Chase made money, but he made it for New York rent and more student loans than I had defaulted on. He owned nothing but career advancement, to send stories of the American dream back to his Caribbean homeland. Summer and I had the only suitable love nest. It wasn’t even soundproof.
My downstairs neighbor, Belinda, clued me into that. Her three kids and no man were her Section 8 guarantee she did not have to pay the raised rent we did. She hinted di
plomatically: “Well, you know, my kids’ windows face the back, uh . . . just like your bedroom.” It was a thorny noise complaint to make, unlike our tolerance to never report her for her old Phyllis Hyman and her kids’ new rap music.
Though we weren’t exactly friends, I felt bad my sex was too loud. I learned to muffle myself and pat Chase out of his own moments, the worst of which sounded like movers in the middle of the night. I picked up a cheap mini-carpet. We moved the monstrous bed to place the carpet under it for some soundproofing. The comfort and escape our lovemaking gave us graduated to tough: bite marks, hickeys on brown skin, and fingernail dents. We tried, but could not, wrestle out of this nefarious blossoming in the shadows of my sister and her bed we slept in now.
“It’s a record,” he said, his eyes half-open. He wasn’t asleep after all.
“What, how long we managed this time?” I giggled.
“No,” he groaned. “How long it took you to wake back up after I put you to sleep. Three hours. Up from two and a half.”
“You’re counting?”
“I’ll try harder next time.”
He passed back into sleep, with my unspoken permission to replace me with Summer in his dreams. I deserved nothing more. I certainly had no shortage of men around me, but I never trusted men like Summer could. A few serious boyfriends proposed to her. Some paid her bills between taking her on trips. Meanwhile, what should have been my robust bachelorette life eroded into a serious relationship with my computer. I only found a few brief hookups from online dating.
I asked Chase if he felt sorry for me. He laughed I would think such.
“I don’t know why I can’t leave you alone,” he’d said. “I’m mixed up right now, too.”
As the weeks and then months passed, he tamed his compulsion to fixate on the predicament while mine became more disobedient. We drifted to two opposite poles. Like me, he started off zealous and pushy for answers. Then, he just paused. His face adopted a stoic gauze. His eyes became a simplified film. It could have been men and women’s different natures. I felt more like that mother who’d wait by the door or phone for decades to no end if her child went missing. He operated like that father who would dismantle the swing set and throw out the bike.
Speaking of Summer Page 3