Speaking of Summer

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  Copious choices in Barnes & Noble dizzied me. Book titles leaped out from spines packed in tightly; Smash Your Competition and Climb Over, Not Up, the Ladder both arrested my interest. I whittled them out. I wanted to find the books where the authors had fangs, horns, and blisters on their knuckles. Or a glob of blood on the right side of their shirts. I would know they had bleeding hearts. Then, I might be able to trust what they had to tell me. I clutched the books under my arms and continued along the shelves.

  I saw a tall woman on a ladder, to help her just one step up to higher shelves. She did little more than make sure tightly packed books were still tight. She climbed down and rolled the ladder a little to her left. In the crook of the section, she flipped through one of the books for enough time for me to notice she was reading it—not handling it for work.

  What kind of job was that? Where could I apply? How much was this woman paid to go up and down a ladder like she’s on the StairMaster? And read books for free?

  The woman wearing man-size brown penny loafers met my eyes and smiled. I guessed I was supposed to smile back at her. It was not my responsibility to hold the hopes of Team Kindness on my little shoulders. One thing Summer’s self-absorbed discourtesies showed me is I cared too much about what others needed even when I do not need it back.

  “Can I help you find anything?” she asked, glancing at the titles under my shoulders. “Something with a more positive approach?”

  She said positive the way a debutante cotillion coach might say virginity. I went from being a worthy adult contributor to society—enjoying myself in privacy and freedom—to a charitable Team Kindness catch of the day. She looked at me, with her glasses parked low and eyes peering above them, and finally walked away.

  Something felt heavy in my hands. I needed air. I threw two $20 bills at a stunned cashier and walked into Union Square. A baby-faced freckled boy, probably in college and dreaming of being the next Jay-Z before this world comes down and tears dreams out of your mind, ran onto the street. He called me “Ma’am,” not “baby.” He gave me the change I left. Then I looked at a book in my hands with a title just as true as The Art of War. It was The Myth of Sanity.

  I WAS OUT OF FOOD. And wine added up. I had to pare down from Manhattan’s prices, even though those prices seemed to include only coffee and junk food unless Chase supplied a real hot meal. I decided on a fresh start, maybe even detox. Between Asha and me, I was the only one who had enough credit, or an intact driver’s license, to reserve a Zipcar for a cheaper stock-up in Jersey. One Sunday I got a Mini Cooper, not the most practical for bulk shopping, but well . . . compulsions.

  Just like a long-term love, past the point of surprises, Chase gave a familiar list from his SWAG office phone: “Those snack-bag thingies . . . you know, with Doritos and Cheetos and pretzels all mixed in together? Twenty-four pack of Corona, a big Tide, a twelve-pack of Zest, and as much toilet paper as you can stuff in without blocking the rear window.”

  “A hundred pack of ultra-thin condoms?” I suggested.

  “I got that one covered, sweetie. Drive safe.”

  Asha knocked so we could go. She had totes for us, to save the world in recycling. I suddenly felt queasy and not up to it, as wine and toast was no real brunch, but the car was already reserved. We walked to 145th Street to wait for the number 7 bus down, to get nearer to the car’s reserved parking space. As usual, inside the bus was colder than outside. We had a nice pick of seats. Asha and I sat in the furthest possible back. She read a natural hairstyle magazine. I brought along Night Wind, drawn to it for the first time since the trip to meet its author, refreshed on the curves and grooves of Gabriel Johns’s writing, episodic and saga-like. I opened it to the section devoted to his lost wife.

  Anna was a beautiful storm, as lovely as a woman could be when she arrests your loins and your mind. She required patience and ability to still, like a portrait subject as the painter searches out her angles and shades. For those whom she passed quickly and at first, in mercy to unhear the treble of what would come next, she remained an astonishing figure. I know the sway she brought upon the boughs of our spice trees, the scent of it all one a child could have remembered as the most heavenly he ever knew, for ignorance of the malevolence it was. I squashed a leatherback turtle, and many fish, when I ran to her near the sea, hoping to sell her sewing and her singing so I could write. We had not known. Water pushed me back, not my vigor and will. Certainly not my heart. Her hands, like a child’s with no hairs and lines yet, reaching out to me as gray water lashed at our sides and bucketed our bodies from above. I could swim, but I could not push hard enough. This is just one way my mind will see it, forever maybe. She simply disappeared.

  Then the bus veered onto Columbus so sharply I lost my place and thought. I looked out to the coming street before us, with Central Park at the fringe of Harlem and the traffic slimmed down to fewer lanes.

  That’s when I saw her.

  On the east side of the street, in the doorway of a stone house with high steps behind an iron gate. Summer. The coffee cup in her hand was no surprise. She wore jeans and a gray hoodie. Her hair was a puff-bun on the top of her head. She leashed an orange poodle. The bus jutted forward away from her. I strained to look back through the window across from me. Warmth seeped through my midsection. My eyes watered into a blur. I dropped the book in my lap, grabbed the handrail, and leaped up. Asha looked up from her magazine. Her mouth was moving. I stepped over her knees onto her toes, reaching back to press the yellow strip to stop the bus.

  “Summer!” I shouted.

  “What?” Asha yelled.

  I reined in the angry tirade furling in my brain, the insults and shouts Summer deserved for finding her way out of our sadness but leaving me here, the abuse I would heap to return the anguish her insensitivity and irresponsibility created. What the hell was wrong with her? How could she have run off to a new life right uptown without even explaining? I ignored the Upper West Sider wearing large black sunglasses. My tennis shoes may have plowed through her tough Chanel loafers to mash her toes, as her “Watch it!” indicated they had. The bus did not come to a complete halt but I pushed the door open.

  “Autumn, wait for me!” Asha scrambled to collect our tote bags.

  I turned to see Asha smashed between the doors before she wriggled out after me. The driver cursed us out as he passed. On the quiet block, the houses all looked the same behind their iron gates. I jogged two blocks. My eyes stayed on Summer and her dog, now hunched in a gated grass patch around the lone tree across from the house they left. I was so intent on catching her I almost ran past.

  She did not look my way at all. So I stood and caught my breath before the pretty woman’s eyes angled into my direction. And I was so sure. Then, embarrassed. Asha came up to me, expectant and poised. But I had no one to show her. The woman was not Summer, not even close to a lookalike, up close. I could not name her a hallucination, because an actual person truly stood before me. Rather, she was an optical illusion.

  “You look like somebody I know,” I told her anyway.

  As I felt Asha’s palm in mine, my illusion frowned and rushed away.

  THIRTEEN

  I tumbled off the edge of the George Washington Bridge and barely escaped being crushed on the West Side Highway or flung into the Hudson River, drowning and disappearing like Gabriel Johns’s wife, the water pushing in until my car became as uncaged as a skeleton freed of skin. I don’t like the bridges or tunnels anymore. They are too unpredictable and sly, it appears to me now. I am lost, in water. I will never be found.

  Where is the car? My bag? My bag. My purse. I need it. I need it . . . right . . . now.

  My feeble arms seemed matchsticks with skin, too tired to raise. I looked down at my body, cloaked in white. My toes were freshly manicured, a sparkly magenta. I felt no itchiness down below; my underwear must be fairly recent. I checked my underarms. Just a little musty, not much. What made me understand I was in a hospital was the television
mounted high up, rather than in front of me. And my arm hurt. I was wearing a gold tennis bracelet, a gift from Chase. A little bathroom was in my peripheral vision—but I didn’t see a bathtub to boot. I saw a steel rod on the side of the toilet.

  My tongue felt bloated out of my mouth. Judging from the taste, my breath was repulsive. My behind was sore. When I lifted my arm and slightly turned to rub it, it felt like a raccoon leaped to rake its claws across my forearm. No. I just had tubes in my arm. They ripped out.

  I knew there should be an alarm button to press, for me to get an explanation. I was not going to spend a second to find it. I was just going to holler.

  Two women in cartoon-character scrubs run in.

  “Missus Spencer,” one of the women said.

  Her hair was curly waves she corseted into a bun, and her breasts were soft and full and plump as she leaned over me. Still I struggled. I hollered. I was too weak and tired to throw her off. The other woman had run out.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” I yelled. I kicked my pretty toenail feet against the bed. The woman held down my arms. She talked to me.

  “Missus Spencer, you’re in the hospital. You’re okay. You—are—okay. Please. Please. Your heart rate. Relax.”

  I pitched a tantrum and an imaginary fistfight I was not too ladylike to have. I had something I needed to take out on someone. She just happened to be there—alone, until the other nurse returned with a male nurse. Working together, they subdued me, one nurse on my chest and the other two at my feet. I yelled and cried. I was not supposed to be anywhere without lipstick, with bad breath and funky armpits. That aspect of the moment, more than the lacuna as to how I arrived, was more upsetting than feeling chained. I was pinned. There was nothing I could do. So I stopped. I breathed.

  “That’s it . . .” the male nurse said. “That’s it, Miss Spencer . . . breathe.”

  I opened my hot mouth and pulled air in. Wheel of Fortune was on the television. It was the bonus round. Another couples’ week. No vowels on the board but an E and an O. More than enough there with the three T’s, one S, one N, and one P to figure it out. Two people on TV couldn’t see what I did from a hospital bed? It must be my life wasted on words.

  “‘Thing of the Past,’” I blurted, and I huffed and puffed and squirmed.

  “What? What did you say?” one nurse asked me.

  “Thing of the past,” I said again, just as the couple’s ten seconds passed and the short funny buzzer sounded.

  Pat Sajak announced the answer to the puzzle.

  Thing of the past indeed.

  SOMETIME SOON AFTER, CHASE RACED up from SWAG’s offices to Harlem Hospital. When he appeared at the door with the neat, circular Styrofoam containers of food, I was instantly relieved. He brought in sugar-free Jell-O, mashed potatoes with extra gravy on the side, creamed spinach, coffee, and Neapolitan ice cream.

  “Why’d you bring me this?” I asked him.

  He looked disappointed. “I thought these were your favorites,” he told me.

  He kissed me on my forehead. Then he rolled the room’s extra chair closer to the bed. He peeled open the plastic utensils. He poured water from the plastic pitcher into our plastic cups, and was careful to keep the ice at bay.

  “I haven’t eaten these things together since Mama died,” I reminded him.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. You used to send me to the hospital cafeteria for creamed spinach and mashed potatoes. You keep Jell-O cups in the fridge. You know, your diets?”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah.”

  I could only demonstrate my apology when I picked up the plastic spoon to swirl around the coffee and pick through the mashed potatoes. I would try.

  My mother is dead. And so is my sister. She is not in New York City living a new fabulous life without me. She is in a garbage dump, or the woods, far away.

  “You were asleep when I came this afternoon,” Chase updated me. “A nurse called to tell me you woke up.”

  “It’s my sugar and dehydration.”

  I would not entertain one accusation of hysteria, nervous breakdown, mental illness. All the cop-outs. Most people could do so much better, if they wanted to. My life had proved me way too resilient to be unable to control my own spirit and mind.

  “They’re balancing my fluids now. My sugar’s already leveled out. The doctor told me I was just a few insulin grams above hypoglycemic shock when I spazzed out.”

  I winced at the awful clack, just Chase’s hard-edged brown briefcase on the tray. He smiled an apology and snapped open the brass shutters. He set my copy of Night Wind on my tummy. The book curled upward to release the sour smell of its yellowing pages, in aging metamorphosis like a teenaged book kept since college.

  “You dropped this,” he said. “Thank God Asha was there. I took the car back for you already. You need me to bring you anything?”

  “No,” I told him. “I need to be out of here tonight.”

  Weakness astonished me when I lifted up to get ready. Chase patted me to stay down.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “Autumn, something’s going on with you. And it’s more than stress, which I understand. I’m not minimizing it. I’m just saying this has gone on a long time and you’re wearing yourself out.”

  Mine was a silent pout. I let it go. He did not understand. His mother and sister did not disappear in the same year. He had real-job health insurance. My lowest-rung Obamacare plan covered emergencies somewhat, but extended stay would cost. I thought about a deadline I had for Norma Roth, my temp-agency client. She needed to pull in as many resumes as possible before other agencies snatched up college kids free for the summer. I needed to distribute her marketing flyer to regional university career offices. I could not afford to have another client quit me. Two had already.

  “You gotta eat better, and back away from that coffee,” Chase smiled. “I wasn’t supposed to bring you any. But I know you.”

  I was glad he brought me food. I was enormously happy and settled just to see him. He had known all of us. His presence corresponded me to Mama and Summer, together.

  “I got an email from Mr. Johns,” he continued. “Well, from Olivia. She said it’s time they caught up with the rest of the world and posted a website. She wanted permission to use some of SWAG’s photos. She said we really got him. And . . .”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I told her the beautiful young lady she met can design websites, and I’d ask her if she would do it. She was thrilled to know you were back at it, considering how you left.”

  Perhaps he thought it was a favor to me to disassociate the vacation where we’d consummated our relationship from the place where I found out my mother passed on.

  “I’m just worried about keeping up with everything I have to do,” I sighed. “I can’t go making promises to people all around the world now.”

  He looked let down. He soaked all day in a world where connections and networks were so fragile no one could kick too many gift horses in the mouth. This was not how I wanted it to go. He had already been unappreciated by one of us.

  “You’re doing good,” he answered. He put his palm on my forehead. “I know how much you’ve lost. You’re still seeing Noel Montgomery? He helps, right?”

  So, Chase still got it. Somebody else still did want to know. I was not completely alone. Somebody else revered the cause—and no matter if it was because he had loved Summer or because he believed what I believed. I was not stranded on an island of deranged worry all by myself.

  “I had to be honest, the past few months totaled me,” Chase said. “It isn’t just you. It’s all hit me too. I asked to slow things down a bit at work. Nobody could make any promises, but I’ll be around a bit more, ’kay?”

  I did not answer him. We were past the point of walking away from each other. I did not think I could. He tricked me to think he wanted to. But, now we were stuck and at some point we would have to show ourselves, come out of hiding. What cou
ld anyone say about it? Summer was gone. And I think a strange woman I chased on the street was God’s sign that Summer was not a woman I could expect to run into again anymore.

  FOURTEEN

  Contrary to what he told me in the hospital weeks before, Chase remained late at the office. Again. And again. According to his message, I had no need to cook or bathe, or do anything remotely satisfactory for him that another red-blooded woman would be compelled to do for a man. It was getting to be more like roommates or siblings or, well . . .

  Hey, babycakes. I’m just calling to tell you hello. I know I’m calling kinda late. So if you cooked something, I’m sorry. I may not be there until late tonight . . .

  Delete.

  I had picked up a whole roasted chicken at Fairway, with French bread and pasta salad. I filled his plate and left it on the stove, not only because it’s tradition and a woman’s sage wisdom to know her place, to keep the organ above the male member full too. And I really wanted to. Ugh. What a sorry feminist I was. It was bad enough he found The Myth of Sanity book, and could have guessed I must be questioning mine. I only left the book in the bathroom a few days for tub and throne reading. It wasn’t my cup of tea.

  But Chase asked, “What are you doing with this?” almost like he was my father and he found a used condom under my princess daybed.

  “It looked like an interesting read.”

  His condemnation didn’t last. He started on it in bed. Then he threw it in his bag for his work commute. He liked it, the bastard. He wanted to discuss it, rather than make love. I scuttled to my desk and its threatening contents.

  Macy’s: $967.

  Rip.

  Discover: $2,249.

  Rip.

  Sallie Mae: $21,934.

  Rip.

  New York State W-9 2013–2014 taxes: $3,236.