Speaking of Summer

by Kalisha Buckhanon

  There, we withered under the boys’ comments and interest in our fresh new faces. Their spitting remarks about our asses, deep throats, and torn-up pussies were common. The other girls grew up creeping past boys and men who talked like that. Our smiles diminished. We became cozy with the counselors and secretaries. They would cut short phone calls or temperature-taking to find out what was wrong, again, with the new girls.

  We were not babies, together, anymore. And we were growing apart. She wanted different things than I did.

  But some things stay inseparable, frozen in time, permanent. We buried some of our stories underneath broken cement in the shed. We wrote about how life was scary the bigger you grow, but we’d always be together. We rolled the papers with our words and jiggled them inside the bad bottles Mama left out in the shed, and other places. And we put the tops back on and knew we would always find each other there, no matter what.

  “I’M SO SORRY,” I INTERRUPTED myself. “I didn’t mean to tell you all that.”

  “No problem,” Detective Montgomery said.

  His pages of notes waited on the table, for what I guess he expected would be real clues and information. But it was more of the same: conjecture, speculation, useless nostalgia. I needed him as uproared as he was at the start. As more time passed, more hope faded. My new batch of FIND SUMMER SPENCER flyers sat on his desk. I copied them for ten cents each at a nearby pharmacy. I knew better than to pay too much, like the one thousand color ones I soon saw floating in garbages on our block, even in drains.

  “So, this Mr. Murphy seems like he kind of just took over everything, acted like he owned the place,” was Detective Montgomery’s summary of my extended report on how Summer and I drifted from each other. New York City brought us back together.

  “He did,” I confirmed. “I don’t ever remember struggling, or starving, or tension. Maybe it was there. Mama was only a secretary at the water plant. But she got us a house in a good place. We stayed. She wasn’t gonna have us all moving around like vagabonds.”

  “Does this Murphy know you’re out here searching for Summer?”

  I laughed. After his stroke, Mama went to see him every single day. He had a big old ranch, two properties with wooden stake-like fencing around it. But not one of his relatives wanted to come out to tend his needs or mash his food or pretend to understand what he said. He wound up in a private room at a senior living and elder care facility.

  “I saw him in February last year, when I took care of business for my mother’s life insurance policies. I had to see Mr. Murphy’s son. He had taken over things.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “I got to his senior community and it had an approved visitors list. I thought surely I wasn’t on it. I was. He put ‘Autumn Spencer. Daughter.’”

  “It sounds like you all were the only real family he had in his older life.”

  “Mr. Murphy was not a humble man. He put a lot of people off, I think. It doesn’t help me now, but I found this old article Summer printed out about him resigning from a position . . . Local NAACP, I think. I recall, vaguely, gossip about him being a flirt. Pushy, complained about, before Mama met him. He told her high and mighty Black folks were jealous of him, wanted him down a peg. But he never seemed unfaithful to her.”

  “So, you’re not close to him as a stepfather now?” Montgomery asked.

  “He’s demented, now. This was a fancy place. These people got dressed up for dinners. It smelled like Glade, not pee. They had nice chandeliers. A big enclosed patio off the dining hall, with a courtyard and garden and geese and greenhouse. I saw a bunny. Mr. Murphy was in the courtyard. In a wheelchair. An attendant was helping him eat. When I went outside, he lit up. He said ‘Aum . . . Aum.’ And the man helping him saw me, said he’d get out the way. I told him to go on. I wanted to see Mr. Murphy get spoon-fed. So many years bossing us around, pushing my mother to walk on eggshells. I told him Mama was gone, and I was on my way to bury her. I haven’t spoken to him since.”

  I took up so much time Detective Montgomery could do little more than jot down the original reason I came: My downstairs neighbor Belinda was not who I thought she was, or even where I thought she was, for a long time. I needed to know why she left with no good-bye, where she was the night Summer disappeared, why she left so soon after. Her son shot up like a redwood in just a few years, surely capable of overpowering one of us women he grew up past. He kept using his key to come back into our building long after they were evicted. He never mentioned they no longer lived there.

  “But, back to why I came,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s odd Belinda didn’t say good-bye? After everything this winter, I thought we were all a team around there. Now I don’t know whose team she was on.”

  “Autumn,” Montgomery said, “It feels like we’re running out of our options to keep thinking about Summer. I’ve helped you push police to do more than they wanted to do. I’ve been to your home, met neighbors, read the journals. My hands are tied with how much privacy I can invade to question others further. It’s time for you to think about yourself, and how your life can go on with or without Summer, beyond looking for her.”

  There was no beyond for me. I would remain unflinching, strident.

  I could not walk two roads: one intact and cleared for my progress, another detoured and blocked by my past. I picked my road. Every vision I had for what life could have been had to go off the side of it. My only compass was strength and force, for the rest of my life if necessary, in my drive to guarantee someone answered for my sister’s disappearance, even if she was that someone. Even she was going to have to answer me.

  Summer

  SIXTEEN

  Summer may have forgotten Chase’s birthdays by design. I did it by accident.

  We certainly discussed it. I had to do better. He deserved it. I tried for a table at Red Rooster on Lenox. But with Fourth of July weekend and its tourists, my effort was moot. I got on the months-long waiting list in hopes to make it past the velvet rope on my own birthday in September. It would be my independent woman treat, to compensate. We settled on Red Lobster on 125th Street instead. I had put together a belated gift bag of cologne, new underwear, and socks. And lingerie, for me. But birthday sex was pat, dry, and quiet, even with the assistance of the Quiet Storm on 107.5 and the lingerie. We took everything off neatly. I even folded my dress.

  Chase had stopped picking up my laundry. I had stopped picking up dinner to have ready for him after work. We stopped emailing during the day to take our minds off our jobs. It was hot by now, yet we hadn’t been to one outdoor concert or festival. A few times, I met him at his office for nearby happy hours. He put me in a cab uptown after. Then it was the solstice: concerts, full beaches, and blankets spread. We were nowhere near them. We barbecued on his tiny patio on the Fourth of July. His older balding roommate scared up a younger blonde to talk to; she and I waited patiently to eat while the men showed off their grilling skills.

  “Let’s go on the fire escape . . . I have this bottle of wine,” I suggested one night.

  “No drinking for me tonight, babe. Booze isn’t on my diet, remember?” he said.

  So I slipped into his boxers and T-shirt to go drink Riesling outside alone, barefoot, staring ahead at an ashy moon and squares of light from so many Hamilton Heights windows. When I came back into bed, Chase was engrossed in The Myth of Sanity, with its subtitle Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness.

  “I’m really digging this,” he told me. “This lady knows what she’s talking about. We’re all going through life with something, wearing these masks, to cover it up. I wonder if I’m doing that. A Black man, everything on my back. I never thought of it as trauma.”

  I shrank away. It seemed he talked to me personally and I didn’t like it. He didn’t want to do anything about my traumas. His great American Dream was always so much more important. When our mother was dying, he wanted to network in the tropics and visit his boyhood home. The honeymoon feast
cooked down to the gristle of grief responsible for the first time we fell into each other’s arms, and the next times, and the upcoming times.

  He threw salt in the wound, reading straight from the book: “‘The survivors I see in my practice have known undistilled fear, have seen how nakedly terrifying life can be, and in many cases have seen how nakedly ugly their fellow human beings can be. Listening to their stories, no one could be surprised that they consider the possibility of not going on. In the struggle with the power of their past experiences, even the biological imperative to survive is puny . . . No. Their choosing to die would not be surprising. What is so extraordinary about these people is they choose to live.’”

  I did not know how to fill the space of his pregnant pause. He reached for my hand.

  “Yes, we do,” he said to me. “No, we have. Whatever it takes, babe, we’ll make it.”

  There was safety in his touch. The beauty in his face drew me into it. When we started kissing, just like the first times, I knew he wanted me—purely Autumn, not Summer packaged in a new way. And what bothered me most, more than how true what he said was, is it was that easy. It was easy to forget her, put her away. Just like the world had.

  I pulled away from him. “I can’t read that pompous, cathartic shrink stuff. It’s too much information to trust.”

  “You bought it.” He pulled away with me, to the edge of the bed.

  “I was looking for something else.”

  The maroon blanket was handy, gnarled at my pillow. I put it over my body, then slipped it up over my head.

  “Autumn, I’m sorry. I guess I thought this would help. I’m having a hard time figuring out how to be with you, with everything going on.”

  Chase closed the book, pitched it to the floor, and pressed not too gently against me to reach over to turn off the lamp.

  “What’re you trying to do, smother me?” I yelled.

  “Good night, Autumn.”

  I slapped his arm. “You really hurt my chest.”

  “Autumn, I said good night. Damn!”

  He jumped up from under the covers with his pillow. He slammed the door so hard small wall hangings shook. I could not believe he did it. It was bad luck to go to bed angry. I did my best to stay silent as I walked after him. He was comfortable on the couch. I flipped the light switch. He twisted up with his arm over his eyes.

  “Turn the lights off, Autumn,” he mumbled. “I don’t want to talk about this now. I have to get up early. I have a real job.”

  I tried, but couldn’t hold back the anger. “You don’t care a thing about anything I go through. You pulled me away from my mother knowing she was on her last legs!”

  “Oh, so there you go. Autumn, that was not my fault.”

  “You cared about none of us. You were just thinking about fucking me then, right?”

  “Me? Me? You were the one with panties on from Asha’s sex party bullshit. While you wanna talk about me, I wasn’t packing that kind of shit on a business trip.”

  “I was busy, taking care of my mother. It was all I had clean!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You were the one who didn’t let them know you needed your own room,” I shouted. “I was just supposed to be going to get away and rest, not fuck your brains out.”

  “The travel department messed that up. You know that.”

  “You could’ve had the balls to demand those sons of bitches pay for my mother. And Penny. And all of us to come along! For your bullshit campaign.”

  “There’s no way your mother could’ve come with us in the state she was in. And my bullshit campaigns just paid your damned rent this month.”

  “My mother’s grave paid for my damned rent.”

  “Okay, look, whoever paid for the rent, I’m not gonna keep coming here to be your whipping post any longer. I haven’t recognized you in months. I’ve tried to be there for you. No, I have been there. I’m outta here, Autumn.”

  He flew down the hall. I stood there. I felt like both cracking him upside the head with a bottle of wine and drinking what was left. I chose to do the latter.

  In my old room, Chase pulled out the luggage he stored there because we had more space. A group of button-down shirts stuck on their hangers and flopped over the extended handle. He dumped a mesh bag of his socks and threw balled-up pairs onto the floor next to the luggage. He turned to the Lane cedar trunk at the foot of my four-poster bed, its covers bundled to near-human form. I had not slept there in ages. We rarely opened the trunk. Summer received it as a gift from a college friend’s parents. They sent it straight from the manufacturer in Altavista, Virginia. Now, the trunk’s baby-smooth wooden top was piled with my and Chase’s hoodies, sweaters, and gym clothes I forgot to send to laundry. It explained the mustiness.

  Chase hurled everything off the chest in one heap. Then he tore open the lid. The underside of the smooth caramel-colored lid snapped down gently into a folded-in, velvet-lined shelf. There he kept a watch, cuff links, and a few pinky rings I had forgotten about. Now I wished I had pawned his stuff. For what seemed like the first time, I glimpsed the diamond clusters and trinkets he gave Summer and me these past few years. The compartments in the trunk held the assortment with meticulousness. With his back to me, he picked his baubles from ours and pretended not to know I was at the door, swigging.

  “Don’t you put one finger on my stuff. They’re gifts,” I reminded him.

  The tenor in my voice belonged to something else, not me. It was a woman barking for a part of her already gone, and another leaving soon. The part of Summer I carried with me readied to smash the wine bottle against the wall and carve our names into his back. So he would never, ever forget me and this chunk of our lives he tore into.

  “I’ve been the only one here for you!” he yelled. “When you were in the hospital, I was the one who was there. All this madness this past year. I’ve been here, Autumn!”

  “Fine, you don’t have to be here for me anymore,” I said. “Get out!”

  “I’m going.”

  Chase feigned examining the jewelry—slowly and surely, with close-up inspection as if he had never seen it before, just like I barely had.

  “Autumn, I told you to stay in New York. They wanted you to go to Grenada.”

  He set his jewelry inside a soft suede pouch that came with the luggage. He went on to slip each button-down off the heavy mahogany hangers and fold it. I stared at the luggage. I totally forgot. I bought him that luggage, as a platonic thank-you for the Grenada trip. It was half off at Barneys during the massive winter clearance. How could he think I did not care about him, or appreciate us together? We had risked our reputations to be with each other. We had moved past the shame and guilt. It had to mean something.

  You can apologize, I thought to myself. Or beg. Or say: “I need you. I really do.” As I was thinking about saying what I did not, Chase was talking to me. He stopped.

  “You’re not even listening to me,” I heard him say. “You never listen anymore. I’m just here. Just a warm body. I don’t know how to, what to . . . Fuck it.”

  “Do I really want to hear what you have to say to me?” I asked him. “You’re leaving me. You said it. Why do I wanna listen to you now?”

  “I tried to cancel the trip. They wouldn’t let me. They’d already promised the client the timeline. They knew about Missus Spencer. It was all in motion. I tried to move it back, Autumn. I did. Then, you all made it seem like it was this great thing, for you to get away.”

  I never said out loud that I deduced Summer set me up to have time with Mama all to herself, precisely because she sensed an end that maybe I just did not want to. I never wanted to mar his memories of Summer, to put it in his face how calculating she had been.

  “No,” I told him. “I’m an adult. It was my choice, and fault. I shouldn’t have gone. And maybe if I hadn’t, she wouldn’t have gone either.”

  I was trying to talk to him about our shame, humiliation, and lowering of our standards
in this affair that needed to evolve into honesty and openness, not lies and hiding.

  It was too late.

  He sat down on the side of the bed, poking at the Timberlands he wanted to stuff his feet into. He struggled. With his head bent, I could see a colony of gray hairs at his crown. In my mind, I saw myself mount him on the bed. I would stroke his chest and jiggle my behind on top of his hardness, and squirm and twist until he reached for me to slip my panties off and bring him into me. But he shot up before I could reach him. He was on to one of my laundry bags now. Its contents were his random effort to pack enough clothes for a pouting period I was now nervous about.

  He was really and truly getting out of my apartment. With him gone, I would have no other motion or sound in the house to remind me what day and time it was. Even the alarm of the refrigerator door shooshing open and shut or the soft pound of his feet on faux hardwood could do the trick. He kept me alive each time he put the shower to use, clicked on the light switches, or burdened the teakettle. And, his oblivious late-night snores had taken the place of Summer tapping around in the night. If Chase had caught me last year, before I came home to the end of my childhood, before I regretted not cherishing it with as much pride and celebration as my mother gave to my baby teeth or drawings, I would have hurled myself in front of him and fought. I would have come out of my corner ready to knock him out in my home, our home, so he would awaken so happy he would stay.

  But now, I was spent. To have a man walk out on me would not be the worst thing that happened. To feel this way was thrilling and poignant and disappointing all at once. I had entered the “I’ve seen worse” category of jaded human beings. Before innocence goes rancid, we fight for perfection and guard against the worst of any outcome. We know how to hunt down optimism in the darkest trenches, to retain those goals of purity young eyes depend on. But after long, grown-ups have so many checked boxes add up along the sanity-insanity divide: bankruptcy, home loss, divorce, defaulted loans, unemployment, health scares, dead parents, quicksands into adultery, faded looks, slowed metabolisms. The bar is so lowered that more is tolerable and “worse” does not terrify like it used to. Maybe Chase felt this way too. He was methodical, pragmatic, organized, unemotional about another lost thing.