“Do what you want to do,” was the last thing I said to him.
It was the time in the night when preachers talk about God above toll-free numbers on many channels. One year ago, I would have used the time Chase was still snoring or Summer was just going to bed to do those things Emily Post, Iyanla, Dolly Parton, and my mother told me to do: meditation and yoga, journal out my thoughts, touch my toes, visualize the expansion of my organization and my name in lights.
Instead I was head-split drunk from a bottle of wine tucked between my breasts. Spit rolled down to land on the cucumber-green pillows. A gray-haired and twinkly-eyed preacher shouted “You can change your life!” at me. He had humming and a choir in the background of his lecture. I turned around to be more comfortable. Then Chase smashed his lips onto my stinky-spit cheek with a whisper: “I do love you, Autumn. I really do.”
It was the thing that put me to sleep. But it was not real.
CHASE CAME TO THE UNITED STATES to live with illegal relatives in a Black and immigrant depot in Miami called Liberty City. He was only ten. He traveled here by boat, starting from Venezuela. The relatives told him to forget his real name and his home. He was put in private school by a White woman his uncle’s wife cleaned house for. New paperwork was created for him at the school; old paperwork was “lost” or “missing.” The woman kept him in schools that sped him to a high ACT score, a scholarship, and in-state tuition. He moved to New York later to work at the college buddy’s marketing company. Summer temped there, a necessity for her. It was where they met.
All this time, I had seen him as one of the few constants of our lives. Near family. I never considered we were the same for him. I knew he wouldn’t go for long.
He’d miss me.
We are framing a new school picture from our “daughter” Fatu, in Sierra Leone, and thank God these do-gooders have given me an African child smiling rather than in stereotypical pain and suffering for being $20 richer every month.
We are headed to Far Rockaway, last stop on the A train, squirming with our knees pressed together, trying not to laugh, as wine coolers in our thermoses run through us until we get to his coworkers’ house on the water, where cool women turn roasting s’mores over burning branches into a teaching moment for their toddlers, and spectacled men bob to John Coltrane and Tom Petty. We are anonymous adulterers, in separate disparate friend groups who know nothing of our secret history.
We are on the fire escape, counting the number of White people who walk by or through nearby doors.
We are under the covers, and I tell him I think I want to be celibate but it is not true because we laugh and use the last condom.
We are watching Saturday Night Live with the lights dimmed and too much butter on the popcorn, complaining it is not as funny as it used to be and waiting for Lorde to wail “Royals.”
We are tasting the freezer-burnt ice cream we just bought and blaming the bodega.
We are wobbling on the bed to swish dust off the ceiling fans, pollen off the sills.
We are yelling at Asha to “get yo ass in the house, girl!” out of an open window.
We are making sure the rooftop padlock is secure, that I am safe at home, always.
We are dreaming in familiar arms. We are in love. And I missed it.
How?
SEVENTEEN
I awoke short of breath, relieved to unshackle a nightmare where Summer was screaming in back of a truck-stop killer’s semi. I tumbled to the toilet, retching. Once in the kitchen to ignite my teapot, I remembered it was scorched. I’d left it on during a nap. Chase must have used something to smash my framed poster of Gabriel Johns’s SWAG Marketing ad to itty-bitty bits of glass. I cut my feet when I stumbled upon them.
Without Chase I had one less guarantee I would not become a Joyce Vincent, a very real fact of urbane singledom. I found a Netflix documentary about her. London, England’s sister city to my New York, swallowed her alive in its overpopulated galaxy, just as Cathy had said. She wilted to teeth and bones in the unfair grave of her flat, absent of visitors. Her sad biopic, Dreams of a Life, paraded intelligent, articulate associates who falsely concluded an active member of society not yet forty would choose to go missing. Some expressed guilt. Many, without self-blame, came up with reasons to blame her for her own neglect: She was moody, she disappeared often, she rushed away when she ran into friends.
These were similar smears I heard poured onto Summer. I felt how I had slackened with her disappearance, caught in a maelstrom of my own crises: financial, romantic, emotional.
And this laxity and paucity is what doomed Joyce. Maybe Summer. Maybe me.
So I broke down in a few days. Online, Chase showed no new updates. It remained that way, so I just liked an old picture he first uploaded of him with college friends. Then, I called after I knew he’d be sleeping. I did not want to put him on the spot.
“Hi. I was just thinking about you. I know we have a lot to talk about. I’m ready to listen now. Can see each other this week?”
I eagerly checked his voice message the next morning.
I have a conference in Boston to get ready for. I’ll call you when I get back.
When a few days passed, I tried texting.
“Hi. How was Boston?”
“It was productive.”
“Great. Any new clients? Your roommate find a new job yet?”
He left me hanging.
I went the professional route.
“Good morning. I been poking around on other Caribbean bed-and-breakfasts websites. The Johns’s job could take a while, but I’m up for it.”
“You didn’t seem interested at first, but I’ll pass Olivia your info.”
Desperate, I emailed him a nag: “We’re supposed to go to the Nicki Minaj concert at the Barclays Center.”
He got back to me after the end-of-July concert took place. “I didn’t think you still wanted to go. I sold the tickets.”
I tried email again, and decided to play the weaker sex. “Look at this email Clara McIntyre sent me. She says her company wants an expert ‘more equipped’ to handle their needs at this time, and she wishes me the best in my future endeavors. You think it’s worth a try to meet with her? I really need her business.”
“It’s up to you. Do what you want to do.”
He hit me with the last words I had spoken to him. Those were his last to me. For now, at least. So I made like my taste for sushi at this one place in his neighborhood had nothing to do with passing by his apartment. Neither did window-shopping for gold pens at a store I could not afford near his Chambers subway stop. I kept my apartment free of garbage and the counters clean, in case he showed up. I cooled beers in the fridge. I picked up a man’s terry cloth robe, slippers, and sweat suit at Marshalls. He’d need something to wear if he stayed overnight. He had run away without leaving a sock behind. I Googled “love spells.” This led me to a number in New Orleans, on a website picturing a long-bearded pink man standing at a straw-roofed storefront, in a swamp. His spell casting started at $300 one-time and $500 for a package.
“I won’t do anything negative,” he cautioned in a Creole voice laced with coughs.
I felt scared and hung up.
Determined, I improvised. I bought red, pink, and white dollar-store candles. These were the common colors of love, passion, and purity according to many spells I condensed into one all my own. I chanted several verses compiled from different versions. The August waxing gibbous moon wasn’t totally full. I chanted twice to make up for the inconvenience. Had it not been for my dwindling bank balance, I would have called a psychic.
I did the next best thing.
NO WOMAN COULD CONSOLE A downturn she had never known the upside of, so I called Asha over other friends who never really saw me with Chase. Our usual watering holes, St. Nick’s Jazz Pub and the Lenox Lounge, had both closed in recent years. Neither their fame nor the lingering spirits of all their past regular jazzmen (and women) could surmount Harlem’s rising rents.
Asha and I settled for Red Rooster’s upper circle bar, the last-ditch fort against folks with no reservation. We crunched next to a dance floor the size of a small farm pigpen, full of aging B-boys and house dancers. We stole our seats only because the DJ got them moving.
“I’d take the bartender home tonight if I couldn’t tell he’s gay,” Asha said. “Why waste such a thing? Look at him . . . A vision from above.”
“I don’t know,” I pouted. “He’s cute.” Then, “Chase hasn’t been around lately. Seems like since I got out of the hospital, he’s been busy with his job.”
“Girl, let the man work,” Asha told me. “Then marry him so you won’t have to.”
“Well, I’ve lost enough people. It’s rude of him to disappear like this now.”
“Don’t let your qi spin out of control again from worrying about it. Girl, you were a mess. He’ll be back around. If I had money, I’d bet you. You know, I screwed two dudes last month. Not one had money for a movie. I had to tell one I wanted an orgasm, too.”
“I told you to leave those broke brothers alone.”
“They’re good men. Really, good men. Fine. Talented.”
“Good men have money for the movies, certainly the matinee,” I told her. “You’re a beautiful, good, hardworking girl, Asha. Love who you want, but raise the bar.”
I waved my PayPal card for business expenses. The cute bartender seized it.
“You have no business messing around with any man who doesn’t have a good job and education or can’t take you to the movies,” I lectured, ironically. Apparently, I didn’t have business messing around with a man who worked a good job and took me to movies.
“Well, they’re working on their educations. One is studying welding. The other was getting his associate’s in business. He did some time, you know.”
“Now, what did you expect? Do these men even have names?”
“Solomon and Jay. But Autumn, Black men are hurt and lost. The only way we can come together is to abolish these standards set up by establishments who’ve left us out.”
“Just get drunk on me to get yourself good to call up Mr. Right Now when we get back—but only the one who gave you an orgasm, please. You can’t marry either one.”
We avoided looking at the mostly older men and young boys in caps. In a pair, it was easier to look like lesbians in love, so the male species kept a distance. We took our minds off not belonging here with Cokes, caffeine for the road, before I closed the tab.
“I will definitely take your advice, though it means I have to raise the bar when I haven’t lifted weights since college,” Asha said. “But so long as you keep taking all my advice, I’ll do the same. I’m proud of you, lady.”
Her tone was not the usual: the rehearsed parody of a holistic quack to the stars who gets a book deal, infomercials, and glitzy website. Her expression was one to stop the conversation. I did not understand it, or my reply:
“I’ll be glad when I’m proud of me too,” I said. “I can’t get there if I’m losing everybody.”
“Even if you keep everybody, it’s no good to you if you can’t find yourself,” she smiled. “So long as we stay off rooftops and out of hospitals, we have a shot.”
I pretended I was not worried PayPal would not come through. It did, though probably from giving up on that balance and going directly to my bank account. Uber was out of the question though. Asha and I wobbled away. My blurred vision made out a subway entrance and its directions: UPTOWN & THE BRONX. We felt the sidewalk quake, joined hands, and ran down as best we could to meet the 3 train uptown to home, a nice thing to say we had. On the way, Asha dozed. I just felt happy, at peace.
“What did you say?” I heard Asha giggle, as I gripped the railing inside home.
In my head, I thought I had said I would get hard at work on her website soon, and it would be tempting with tons of juicy citrus colors and subtle call-to-action leads. But I would have failed a sobriety test at that point and could not clarify.
I staggered to the top floor. I smelled the new neighbors’ weed smoke. How audacious, for these people not even here two months. How entitled, to just know we would not complain to our landlords. What if our mothers were visiting, if I had one? I guessed they saw assumed we were “down.”
I timed my entrances and exits wisely to avoid an encounter. I could not muster polite pleasantries now. If I heard their conversations or bags whisking through the halls or keys turning the lock, I hesitated at my landing. If I glimpsed them detained in hellos or good-byes or deliveries in the foyer, I continued on around the block until I was sure they were gone. The few times I crossed one of the three on the street, they barely looked at me—the most telling introduction. Colonialists weren’t known for warm greetings.
But I would remind them we were here first and they needed to play by whatever rules we indicated they should. I would do it subtly, quietly, and in so many other words—the way Summer taught me to handle ones who thought the whole world was theirs.
EIGHTEEN
Control. I had to find it.
Excuses to give up and check out wouldn’t stop. I had just wrapped my head around the possibility of a Joyce Vincent, perhaps worse than a Shanice Johnson and Dejanay Little. A family mob missed them. Not Joyce. Not Summer either. I understood why she wouldn’t endure the abrupt family reunion Mama’s funeral became, knowing we wouldn’t see most of those people again until our funerals or theirs. I was an army of one for her, scanning every public face and voice until I had headaches. I counted my blessings, for at least every time I thought I saw her, a real body was the cause. The woman just walking her dog was no hallucination, but an illusion. Asha saw her, too. Still. At the rate of getting myself so worked up to land in a hospital bed, hallucinations were only a matter of time.
And now a young Black woman, Sandra Bland, got stopped somewhere in Texas for changing lanes improperly. She somehow found herself fighting with a White male cop over this. Or rather, her failure to put out a cigarette when he asked her to. She was only in the hick town to start a new job at the college she graduated from. I could identify what broke in her mind: your reward for a job offer is a struggle with a man, then a weekend in a jail. How’s that for irony? Only time would tell if her “suicide” in her jail cell was really foul play. I watched her confused mother and sisters, dignified women under pressure to be professional mourners, without rage, in press conferences. I remembered all the times I also strut the high road over my own living hells.
But the high road was sinking in the fleeting comfort of a spent life insurance windfall, my average woman’s dependence on a lost man, an overextended term of mourning, and a losing battle for justice I was all by myself in. The most alive thing in my space now was a desktop IBM. It had chips and wires—no blood, teeth, or bones. The only thing here who could make money was me. If I had to, I would show up back in Hedgewood, the alien planet of small-town middle America. The mall was always hiring. Residents had nowhere else to go. My deadline to make that decision lit a fire under me to get control in New York.
Today.
Right now.
I started with a call to Fran under pretense of a complaint about marijuana smoke.
“I’m not related to Bob Marley, though I wish I was part of his inheritance kingdom today,” I told her. “Just because I’m Black—”
“Oh, no, Autumn,” Fran interrupted. “Please don’t imply that. I would never assume you should be automatically comfortable with marijuana because you’re Black. I’ll let it go this time, but let me know immediately if it happens again.”
“Cool beans.”
Then I took another matter into my own hands: “Have you heard from Belinda?”
“Um, no, Autumn. She didn’t exactly leave on the best terms.”
“I know she owed you money. She borrowed a lot of money from neighbors, too,” I lied. “Maybe I could contact her at work to see if she plans to pay us back.”
“We tried that, Autumn,” Fra
n sighed. “Several times, trust me. But . . .”
I knew my old neighbor was a nurse’s assistant at a rehabilitation facility in Queens. After we hung up, I searched for the address. It was quite a train trek. No wonder she always rushed out at the crack of dawn only to get home in the dark.
With the information I had, next I had to plan how best to approach her. I should probably start off slow, with some friendliness and concern about how she moved without telling us. Then, I would not beat around the bush. First responses are truth.
“Did you put somebody up to trying to rob us here, for your money troubles?”
Only her swift, vehement denial or utter confusion would satisfy me it was not possible. A seemingly rehearsed pat answer would not.
I wanted to consult with Detective Montgomery first. I went to the precinct in the morning, unannounced.
“No, I have not tracked down your old neighbor,” he answered me.
“How could you not take this seriously?” I asked. “I’m saying maybe this woman is untrustworthy. She couldn’t pay rent, left in the middle of the night, like a thief. Those kind of people do set up robberies. We never went up to the roof. Why was my sister up there?”
“Belinda fully cooperated with police and gave a statement. Did you see it?”
“No,” I said. “I’d like to. Look, I’m not accusing Belinda of murder or anything.”
“It sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“She had motives to send someone, a stranger we wouldn’t recognize, to three single women living alone. She knew our habits, our comings and goings.”
“She did,” he agreed. “But in this case, her knowing all that saved your life.”
Speaking of Summer Page 15