Speaking of Summer

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  He opened his eyes wider, stretched like it was his first morning in years, and patted at his disheveled clothes as he stood to get on his way.

  “Glad you been cool since everything went down. My moms was scared.”

  His voice had a depth it had not before, whether from maturity or seriousness I was unsure. His caring smile disarmed me. I never considered the role Summer played for him and his family, how much longer she knew them, and how much more she engaged them. I hardly could remember the children’s names or tell them apart. I confronted myself. I knew I could have stigmatized the one who stood before me as a threat if I did not know him.

  I went down to check the mailbox, gambling on a real holiday to guilt Summer into sending me a card or note to say she was okay, or clue me in to where she may not be okay. I slid my fingers through an empty, cold tunnel and closed the box. I moved on to browse for energy food at the bodega. I resigned to a cup of black coffee and bottle of water. One of the bodega cats, a short Russian blue, came from its water bowl and through my legs for the first time ever. I let it twist around my calves.

  “Life ain’t so bad, sweetie, now is it?”

  I set $2 on the counter and picked up a New York Daily News. I knew I could flip through without paying, as I often did, the benefit of many years on one block and not knowing the owners’ language but them knowing my face. I saw half a page on Jaylyn Stewart. So I put another dollar and quarter on the counter.

  The story careened my walk and sank me into my familiar emotional oubliette, where I was not safe, no one cared about my Black female life, and unimaginable things happened to my sister.

  New evidence has challenged murder charges against Jaylyn Stewart, 26, who confessed to raping and stabbing Dejanay Little, 16, and Shanice Johnson, 42.

  Little was a student at the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex. Johnson was a secretary at a Westchester real estate firm. Their bodies were discovered in Harlem last fall.

  A condominium board turned over its outdoor surveillance video appearing to show Little, who lived nearby, getting into an SUV with an unidentified man on the night she disappeared. The man in the video appears much taller and larger than Stewart. The video’s quality is too poor to identify a license plate number.

  Bite marks found on Johnson do not appear to match Stewart’s teeth impressions.

  Today, Stewart’s attorneys released a statement calling his prior confession to the murders “forced” and “an unfortunate outcome of New York City Police Department abuse tactics.”

  Police last month arrested Stewart for an unrelated charge and made a preliminary match of Stewart’s DNA to evidence taken from the victims. The bodies of Little and Johnson were found in uptown dumpsters just blocks apart.

  “We have maintained Jaylyn’s innocence from the moment he was arrested and hopefully this new information will push the District Attorney’s Office to end prosecution of this innocent man so he can move on with his life,” said the family’s attorneys, Reardanz and Lowell, in the statement.

  Stewart has previously served time as a juvenile and an adult in Lincoln Correctional Facility in Manhattan and Washington Correctional Facility in Comstock for drug dealing and attempted robbery offenses.

  “All this is definitely a disappointment,” said Johnson’s daughter Latisha, 19, a sophomore at Hunter College. “At first nobody was even doing anything about my mom’s death, and now they can’t get what they’re doing right.”

  Little’s mother, Bernice Little, 37, believes Stewart is the right suspect.

  “It’s probably gang-related,” she says. “It’s part of their initiation. They have to kill innocent people. Rob folks, rape. Everybody think Harlem changed. It didn’t, especially not for women.”

  Stewart remains held on $1 million bail.

  I had no rights to the disappointment Shanice Johnson’s daughter expressed. All we had in common is we both lost our mothers. But a real suspect with a name and face gave me the most comfort I’d had about Summer since she disappeared. I was sad for myself. For I was just as poisoned as White women who crossed the street when Jaylyn Stewarts approached or White men who lynched them with no trials in the past. When I imagined who could have hurt Summer, it never occurred to me to imagine anything but a Black man. He was convenient, the distraction from so much more to be scared of in this world. Even I believed in the Black boogeyman I had been told all my life was near, waiting for us at corners and alleys and rooftops.

  THE GRAHAM COURT WAS LIKE a tall sandcastle moated by the makeshift African village on 116th and 117th Streets, where a few little restaurants addicted me to fried whole red snapper with oto. There, French-speaking Black women I could never find twice micro-braided my hair when I wanted length without chemicals or scalp scorching. I draped a cream pea coat over a pink sweater dress paired with beige boots, because it was Easter Sunday. I added a scarf, my signature back when I lived among regulars I spent more than a moment with. It was a bargain to go to Detective Montgomery’s. I could curry favor to spark him into helping me get past this latest catch-22: Boogeymen certainly existed but I may have to look elsewhere, plus beg forgiveness, for thinking Jaylyn Stewart should burn in hell. Whether he was a killer or not, I had scarier questions carried into a whole new season now.

  How come Summer wouldn’t think of me and how I must feel, and try to get in touch just to ease my mind, if she ran away in sadness after Mama died? Could she be that cold? Perhaps. I never thought I could be so cold as to enjoy a man she had first.

  How come Gregory, Fran, and Asha acted like no one vanished from our midst? When did being polite become being insensitive to another person’s reality?

  How could any woman’s body be an acceptable erasure from the world, brushed off as her doing or her wish, but the news treated only prominent or rich women and girls like victims to look for?

  I put those questions aside under the entrance’s arch. The courtyard’s silence stood apart from city racket. The arcade behind the first set of bars waited like a cage, the hoary guard’s chamber empty. Through the wrought-iron gate I spotted a baby-blue Easter egg rolled to the oval sidewalk at the edge of the soon-to-be garden. A breeze fluttered neat bushes. The court’s four pavilions seemed protective and stately. I had not called or confirmed, so had no one ready to meet me or give me instructions to the inside. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Detective Montgomery’s number.

  “Autumn,” I said. “It’s Autumn Spencer.”

  “Oh, goodness.”

  I could not turn back now. He sounded too boisterously pleased. The buzzer static droned while I let myself through two gates into the courtyard. There, I saw a carousel of open first-floor windows. I turned away from them and up to sky in the open courtyard, a simple circular nest of a private yard Mama would have enjoyed. The eight floors of nearly a hundred apartments was a neighborhood unto itself, like we had back in a carefully wound enclave in Hedgewood.

  I paced the circular pavement to thwart talking to myself. Humming took care of it. The door to one of the complex’s rotundas opened on my left, and Detective Montgomery appeared. He looked like an entirely different type of man in his blue jeans, red hooded sweatshirt, and baseball cap—kind of thuggish in a middle-aged cornball way.

  “Well, hi there,” he said. “Glad you made it.”

  I held out my hand and he hugged me instead.

  “I really shouldn’t be here,” was my greeting. “I have so much to do . . .”

  My words echoed in the chunky foyer as we went to the cage elevator.

  “There’s no rules here,” he said. “Stay as long or short as you want.”

  “Just know it’s my work and not my manners when I eat and run, Detective Montgomery.”

  “Please, call me Noel.”

  Happening upon these elevators was a rare city delight as stirring as good restaurant service or a better slice of street pizza. The ascent fluttered my stomach the way I imagined Charlie’s did during his adventure in W
illy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

  “I’ve never been in this building,” I said at the fourth floor. We were going to the top. “It’s a landmark I hear.”

  “My wife’s family grew up in here. There’s been some hiccups over the years, but things are quieter now.”

  “Good.”

  We stepped into a circular hallway shared with a few other homes, one door open enough for me to have eased in. A few little brown girls, in pastel tutu garb, wobbled and jiggled in a circle they made for a room full of well-dressed adults who paid them or the open door no mind. The gospel music contradicted the champagne a butler poured. Guests challenged his balancing act of the bottle and silver serving tray. Inside Montgomery’s place, his landing was rimmed by an ancient telephone secretary, coat rack, winter boot and summer sandal cubbies, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and large studio photograph of a neat family of four—parents, boy, and girl. To the side was a narrow kitchen slot still wide enough to hold a table. Directly behind it was a dining room garnished in flowers: curtains, upholstery, rugs, framed prints, and bouquets in several vases. Clear vases of Easter lilies and baby’s breath centered the table setting.

  Three women in the kitchen did not risk losing a heavy pan, train of thought, or the right spice to do more than say “Hi.” A chocolate face was the same one framed in a picture on Detective Montgomery’s desk. In an adjacent living room an elaborate entertainment center caught my eye—with a movie screen and surround sound. An aquarium sat on a fortified stand. Its golden and tropical fish drifted under a pink-tinged light. Detective Montgomery took my coat and latched it onto a twig on the rack. His hand on my back pushed me inside the kitchen.

  “This is Autumn Spencer,” he told the three, no resemblance between them but a profound fondness shared among people who can whisper in each other’s ears or drink from the same glass. He pointed out Mrs. Montgomery, her friend Sybil, and a neighbor Thandiwe. I offered to help. “Oh, no, no, no,” “You’re a guest,” “Sit down,” “Make yourself comfortable,” “Food’ll be ready soon,” and “Have a mimosa.”

  “Jesus would be hungry now, especially after three days,” Montgomery teased.

  “You want it quick or you want it good?” the neighbor asked him. She fished the tip of her bleached-gold dreadlocks out of a high boiling pot.

  “It works either way for him,” Mrs. Montgomery told her. “I’ve been married to the man for almost thirty years, so I know.”

  She handed me a mimosa.

  “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that, Noel,” Sybil said.

  “We all will. Lemme introduce our guest to the sane people around here.”

  “Sane people can’t cook like this, honey . . .”

  I was relieved to be there. I felt silly about my prediction of what a policeman’s home would look like—doused in outdated furniture, pistol set at the door, thrift store prints of lakes and mountains on the wall, and a mounted deer head in there somewhere.

  “Your home is really nice,” I told him.

  “Thanks, like yours,” he told me. “Has your day been good so far?”

  “Well, I didn’t get much sleep,” I confessed. “I would’ve gone to church. But it was a long night. I wasn’t gonna let that ruin the day.”

  “Always a new day.”

  “And yours? Church?”

  “If I’m lucky enough to get Easter off, I won’t be waking up early for church,” Detective Montgomery grinned. He seemed a regular person now, outside the station.

  We passed a cologned toilet room. Mrs. Montgomery or another “sane” person had adorned it with real plants, bowls of potpourri, thick maroon and taupe towels, a heavy fan rug trimmed in hieroglyphics, and more smooth affirmation stones like Detective Montgomery put on his desk.

  Five people holed inside the family room, and there we stopped before a deep hallway for the private spaces. Three women and two men sat on cream couches and chairs watching a basketball game. A teen girl held a bottle to a baby’s mouth. I had not thought about how Detective Montgomery would present me: a victim, a suspect, a nuisance, a “client”?

  He was diplomatic.

  “This is one of our Harlem neighbors, Autumn Spencer,” he told the group, and the women smiled while the men struggled to take their eyes off a full-court press to glance and wave at me. “She’s up on Sugar Hill.”

  I spoke hello to all as Detective Montgomery rounded out the names and associations: his daughter, Celeste; her boyfriend, Marcus; his nephew Shane and Shane’s wife, Monica; and Shila, Shane and Monica’s daughter, and her baby boy, Christopher, three months.

  We watched basketball until Thandiwe rang a real silver dinner bell to call us. There were enough trays, serving basins, and warmers on the dining table for lunchtime at my old Catholic school, leaving hardly enough room for the dinnerware itself. Mrs. Montgomery saw me staring and explained: “Oh, we aren’t this gluttonous. People gonna come by here all day and night. This is still Harlem, honey.”

  The deal became the men would stick around long enough for prayer before they made plates, to finish Easter dinner in front of a basketball game. The women shamed them for this. We bowed our heads and Detective Montgomery said grace: “Dear God, thank you for allowing us to live to another Easter. Thank you for family and new friends. We pray for the safety of those not with us, our passed-on loved ones and Noel Jr., who is unable to be here with us today. Watch over him, Dear Father. Hold him close. Bless this food and the hands that made it. Amen.”

  I hardly knew where to begin, so I started nearest to me: on cheese grits with shrimp, peas and rice, cranberry sauce, rice pudding, broccoli salad, and sausage links. I wanted to sample everything, including braised chickens Thandiwe informed me were slaughtered that morning at a selling coop on Amsterdam Avenue. The conversation was light and unimportant: mostly complaints about work, long church services, and delays in building improvements. Mrs. Montgomery was a doctor at a Bronx clinic. Her besties were teachers. Monica worked at MTA headquarters and Celeste was studying law, as her father had told me. I was the oddball, accustomed to the fuller job description and convoluted explanation of my professions: freelance entrepreneur, marketing and media expert, language artist, ghostwriter, ghostblogger. I left the two-steps-from-dire-straits part out.

  Evidently, Noel did more than ponder who followed Harlem women up to roofs and pushed them into cars and locked them in basements. He tuck-pointed where management did not, buried his tropical fish in shallow courtyard graves, accepted Marcus’s work around the home in exchange for his promised loan repayments, and gave Shila rides upstate to visit her boyfriend, serving time for an unmentioned offense.

  As promised, Detective Montgomery huffed away from the game to retrieve other people who breezed in on what I gathered was an uptown tour to fill tote bags with plates covered in aluminum foil. The visitors ranged from the kente cloth–clad young woman whose powerful afro belied her silence, to a sweaty alcoholic holding a paper bag as he avoided food and filled up on mimosas. A female bus driver appeared with three teenagers, just long enough to pack their Easter dinner in Tupperware. They were all “neighbors” as well. It was quite an assortment of familiars, strikingly random, like a carnival of dejection. But everyone who settled in for a while loved the Montgomerys. The game ended and the men re-joined us. The women won a vote as to which bootleg DVDs to start a marathon on.

  Mrs. Montgomery hugged me good-bye, seeming sincere, glad to know me, I was a sweetheart and I should come back again for the Fourth of July.

  Detective Montgomery and his nephew Shane walked me downstairs. Shane flipped out two cigarettes from a Newport box the moment he shut the cage to the elevator.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” I told Detective Montgomery.

  “Used to, like a chimney,” he said.

  “How can you chase down bad guys all day with smoky lungs?”

  Shane laughed. “Oh, so you told her ’bout our penchant for cops? Fam almost recruited me into it. No
, not me.”

  “She knows all about it,” Detective Montgomery said. “I’ll concentrate on getting you a car now. Unless you do that new Uber thing.”

  “Oh, no.” I shook my head. “I mean, yes, I do. But I’m not sure if my bank balance needs to do it now.”

  “This Harlem, sweetheart,” Shane said. “You’re a pretty woman.”

  “Even if she wasn’t. Makes no difference.”

  “This is Harlem,” they said in unison.

  How nice it was that none of them mentioned it, for surely Noel whispered around that I was his hopeless and lonely “client” missing her twin sister. And this is why they were so wise, even when I wasn’t. Thirty-two blocks at night was a different stroll from thirty-two blocks in the afternoon. The gypsy cabs rolled easily from a depot near one of its largest buildings. Montgomery told me to get home safe, and he waved until the cab broke through the next traffic light and turned to take me home.

  ELEVEN

  I was satisfied. I finally sculpted what I felt was a powerful, eye-catching, and still succinct description for Summer’s “Circumstances,” ready for the moment the state criminal justice division notified me she would finally be publicized through the Missing Persons Clearinghouse. I huddled on the fire escape and read aloud from my tablet: “Summer is a missing vulnerable adult who may have depression or require medical attention. She was last seen on December 19th or 20th in her brownstone apartment in Harlem. She accessed the building’s roof with no trace to indicate she returned inside. Summer changes her appearance frequently. She is originally from Hedgewood, Illinois.”

  The corner of our living room stood out of its shadows under the streetlights, a mausoleum of unfinished inspiration. I needed to pack up Summer’s artwork, books, and things. Her creations sank into the wall like part of the construction. Save for an exposed brick wall where we’d been promised a phony fireplace, my home was Summer’s shrine, a place to wait rather than live. This couldn’t go on. The most humane, and fair, solution was to give her belongings to our relatives in Illinois at Christmas. Maybe by then they would be ready to bring up Summer. Our relatives never left Hedgewood, not even for Chicago. And, they thought Mama and her girls were so weird for living out in the country over in town. So, two girls living without husbands in New York City—just a movie set for them—was weirder. They never saw us anyway, well before Mama died, so Summer was not a concern for them.