I stayed.
Autumn, I can walk away if I have to. I still have concerns. But, it’s your choice and I hope you are well. You can always stop in or call. Anytime.
WITH HER, THE APARTMENT EXPANDED to grandness. It was ornate, affluent, and pristine. The view was higher. There was a chill, but the seasons were changing.
In the night, I opened my eyes and she was there. In a new way now. She was out of my mind. That’s where she had been. I only knew that because now she was form and shape without color or detail, like a woman dipped in dirt our mother ate as we stole the iron in her blood for ourselves. The shape of her face told me she smiled. And she came to my own tiny bed where I was lying, and this was strange, not the way things should be.
But she came closer and closer, to sit next to me and rub me with hands rough like dried mud. And her shoulders broadened, her legs lengthened, and her arms stretched. No caress. A hard press. It was a smashing, her heaviness. I couldn’t move, or breathe, or speak. I could feel myself push up against her, but nothing changed.
Then she was gone. Just like that. I could breathe again. I knew it was not her.
I was scared. I needed my lights, but the lamp and switch had erased somehow. So did all the windows I could jump out of. I forgot about the lights because I knew the way. And it wasn’t even the dead of winter. This time, I would leave no footprints in the snow. I would be She-Ra, and fly away. I was relieved I could move again. I leaped out of bed. There was only the door now. I came through it, wanting to see the peace sign on a sheet.
But she was there, blocking the rooftop door. She was all figure and mud and no face and something like two tiny horns on her head now. And she walked forward and I backed up. She moved faster than I did. She did not care if I fell back in the long hallway. I turned and ran back to my tiny bed. By the time I pulled the covers over my head, all the room’s contents had erased.
She twisted around the doorjamb and ran to the bed again, next to me and then over me. And this time when she pressed her dry, dirty body onto mine, I carried no breath to make the sound of “Help.” I tried, and felt it was in there. But it wouldn’t push up. I kept pushing for something deep inside me to make the word. But there was nothing inside of me, not even the energy to mouth a syllable or whisper.
The whole world was hard mud with no oxygen, and I was going to die now.
“Hello? Hello? Yes, this is the Montgomery residence . . .”
Fall
TWENTY-FOUR
He could not unearth a history of mail delivered in her own name to her own address. He could not see one picture of Summer together with me, or alone and distinct, in her own apartment. He glanced at a life insurance policy from her mother and saw she was no beneficiary. Her own sister put off pressure for weeks, popped up zealous and then forgot to show back up again. Her own neighbor for years did not know her well. Her own boyfriend moved on, rather quickly, to her twin. Her own stepfather, a man her sister referenced often, reportedly resigned from a local NAACP due to sexual harassment claims according to old articles dated just before her puberty years. And this was all the detective in him saw through before he sank into the private diaries I allowed him to investigate. For clues.
Noel Montgomery, wearing glasses, peered at me. He sat in front of a window overlooking the Graham Court’s yard. It turned out, he had a home office. His interest in art in my place had been authentic: a Black art tapestry made up the wall in front of another glowing aquarium. I lay on a beige couch, flanked by dark end tables, joined by all the tricks of his trade: a Zen noisemaker and stopwatch, a fire extinguisher and first aid kit, pillows and a plaid throw, and a forearm’s-length crucifix in the center of the one blank wall. Behind the office door his wife pat down their long hall onto the faint orchestral of a late-night snack, perhaps a sandwich and tea or leftovers of the dinner she had made for her husband. Perhaps she was preparing for the same medley of people who strolled through on Easter, like I did. Clients, with such broken lives or families we’d had nowhere else to celebrate.
“I wasn’t trying to deceive you,” I assured him.
“Well, thank you. What weren’t you trying to deceive me about?” he asked.
He looked more human when he was baggy-eyed and unshaved.
“I knew she wasn’t missing,” I told him. “I just didn’t want anyone to think I’d have a sister out here prostituting herself through life. Or on drugs. That’s what the world usually says when women disappear, and there’s no body or blood.”
“Yes, stigmas get in the way of the truth,” Montgomery said. “It can feel bleak to feel no one cares about you, as a woman. It can exacerbate everything else you must cope with. Like grief, loneliness. Autumn, how does it feel to be in contact with Summer?”
I admired him for his efforts to shunt me into some truths I knew, now, finally.
“Well,” I sighed, “it feels traumatic and relieving and sad and exhilarating all at once. I feel emptied and hollowed to think of myself alone in my apartment, no one there anymore, with only a false figment to keep me company. It feels good to have her near me. And scary to know how she got there. I have never had such a night terror before.”
“I’m glad you called me. You aren’t thinking of hurting yourself, are you?”
“You mean, jumping off my roof?”
Montgomery smiled. He was more courageous than I was to ignore the reason behind our bizarre meeting: a lonesome woman’s urgent needs for care, a social services solution to allowing real health insurance to slip out of a poverty-line budget.
“You didn’t jump. You climbed down, on your own. First responders know how to read people, quickly. They have to. Coming after you could’ve made it worse.”
Anyone standing on a rooftop in winter is out of something or on something. I was both. That night last December, the caul of another identity dressed my skin. Summer was who I wanted with me when I did not want to be alone. She was an ally, a formidable doppelganger against disrespect, offense, rage, and violation. Then, she became an excuse.
“I’m still Autumn Spencer, even with Summer. I haven’t changed. You can be straight with me.”
“I’ll talk to Autumn just the same. It’s more important that you talk with Summer. This is a part of you. It can’t be separate from you. We have to get you whole again.”
His phone rang, twice. I tensed. Another nutjob on my tail, waiting for me to pass the baton. His last name was the only correct thing I had crystallized of him. Montgomery (I didn’t know what to call him now) appeared frailer, less like a detective. He was also left-handed. He looked familiar but only vaguely, like a visiting relative resembling photos from the past.
His advice sounded simple, but made no sense: “Now that you’re aware, you’re going to have to come to terms with this gift you have to place things elsewhere in your mind and integrate yourself with Summer, accept all you handed to her to carry for you.”
“How is it a gift that I’ve messed up my life slipping between two lives?” I asked.
“I’ve heard of much more serious manifestations of dissociative identity disorder. Overdosing. Alcoholism. Violent crime. Unacceptable and damaging acts committed as an alternate personality. And the real, dominant one suffers from that. You have bad habits to break, moods to control, binging to stop, trances to rein. This outcome is fortunate.”
“Fortunate?”
“Yes. You gave yourself a creative funnel, what you call your artist, your twin.”
“Wasted money,” I laughed. “Stuff. I guess I should check with Parsons to see if all that money I gave them for non-credit courses added up to that certificate after all.”
“You should. Remember, in many ways, you were doing good things with it or not even thinking about this other person. And it all adds up to you. It’s no subtraction.”
“Tell that to my bank account. Does Summer have a social security number?”
“She’s your twin. You two shared everything, right? You’ll
have to learn to get along with her. A good start might be to put some of those bills in her face.”
I was not going to try to decode it all in one night.
“I think I know what happened on the roof,” I said. “Care for more of my blues?”
“Certainly. I’ve understood you were a victim of child sex assault. The dissociative outcome is prevalent for those survivors. I still do not understand how it led to that night.”
Someone called. A man who liked me. He wanted me to come out. Bar 13 was in the Meatpacking District, not entirely converted. Back in the day, it was the go-to spot after Parsons, Mannes, and other New School security locked the campus doors. The potent mishmash of past slaughtering and traffic exhaust nauseated me before I went inside the smoke-filled club. After that, it was all would-be suitors’ bad breath and strong spilled drinks. I could not find the group of so-called friends I thought waited for me. They moved on to another destination, without even telling me. I texted the person who invited me. I was inconspicuous and alone in the phantasmagoria where men of all colors inched up to me little by little, one by one. Nobody texted me back. I was enraged. Not over the total strangers I admit I did not care much about. I was enraged at abandonment, its stinginess and arrogance. There was nothing, nothing I could do to vanquish my mother’s abandonment.
“I felt so stupid, and powerless,” I cried. “Alone. I planned to go have fun, but I just spent my money on watered-down drinks. It wasn’t my scene anymore. I was lonely. I had a man with me, like a real good boyfriend finally. But now I know I barely saw him there.”
Chase.
His employer, SWAG Marketing, was my sweet find when it first started up. I was the “Temporary Cutting-Edge Content Creator with Keen Instincts for Multicultural Markets” they were looking for. In their suite of a coworking space, I first encountered a man with a nice accent. Mama was not sick then, back in 2013. She was just “not feeling well.” Chase did not wander to the couches, yoga mats, and Ping-Pong tables. He stayed behind closed doors. He was uncommunicative beyond pleasantry and client updates delivered like speeches. He was often the most serious face, and the only Black one besides mine. His wardrobe impressed me. His focus inspired me. His effortful greetings warmed me. His belief in his career, as a shield against discrimination and degradation, taught me.
My assignment ended after two months. I still thought of Chase. He could be a nice inroad to freelance work for executives who might remember me. My voicemail to him led to our emails. Our emails led to his invitation to a penthouse networking party in Midtown. That invitation led to a carefully worded friendship. He had an older woman girlfriend, also Grenadian, way out in Sheepshead Bay. He said she was married, all along, and using him. I suppose I was the rebound. We kept finding reasons: a new restaurant, a movie, just talking on the stoop. We first got carried away as he helped me to bag books to sell at the Strand. Just one season after that, Mama was sick. I recalled he once told me he felt like he took advantage of me, and did not want to. So, for a time, we became “just friends.” Support, contact, and care in a city where associations expired fast.
Until Grenada. A business trip, for both of us. To help me on my portfolio, he said. After the trip, coinciding with Mama’s passing, I could not square feeling good about anything, not even a good thing. I smeared Chase in emotional crimes he never committed.
Sex had always been something the man initiated, my body a lush retort to the things done to it, on authority of touch and maybe a little skill. It was a man’s desire, not mine. Chase changed this. As much as I enjoyed him, the pleasure conflicted me. I never let myself go. Whenever I did, it felt shameful, like an affair that could not be a romance.
“I believe I wanted to push Chase away, and find reasons for what I felt with him to be wrong, like we were cheating and not just being,” I continued. “I know I hurt him.”
“Dissociative identity disorder causes many complications for the sufferer’s support system,” Montgomery said. “The amnesia, mood swings, and impulses are challenging. Even if they are understood. In this case, they weren’t. He couldn’t have saved you here.”
“He helped,” I insisted. “That night wouldn’t have happened if I was with him. I don’t know why I needed all the other people. I met someone, a man, in Brooklyn.”
“I’m not sure you want to get into any new relationships right now—”
“No,” I assured him. “He was just a guy on the street.”
“He hurt you?” Montgomery asked.
“Oh, no,” I laughed. “He helped me. I stayed with him. In the way back of my mind, I knew him. I knew the neighborhood, the stores, his apartment. It felt like I’d seen it all in a movie theater, not real life. He called me a friend. He said people missed me.”
“We need to explore how many of these altered states, or fragments, you have,” Montgomery said. “Your concentration on Summer alone for all this time leads me to believe you may not have many. If others emerge, we will work on them then.”
Montgomery settled into the deep armchair. It was a brawny hold where he listened to ugly confessions and truths were handed over to him for safekeeping and padlocking, the keys thrown away in confidentiality and trust, as if he were a priest. Tonight, a notepad and pen rested beside him, useless and irrelevant.
“On the roof, I heard the voice,” I continued. “That’s all I heard. It was so quiet. Harlem is, really, a quiet place at night. A bus or two in the distance. That’s all. But I knew the voice so well. I heard it all the time, at home. Autumn, Autumn, come down . . . come right now. Get down from there. That’s all I heard. I thought it was my mother.”
“It was your neighbor downstairs,” Montgomery said.
“I never thanked Belinda. I avoided her. Then she left.”
“It’s not too late to thank her now,” Montgomery told me. “Autumn, your reality is harsh. You are, well, alone. Not too many people exist with no nuclear family, at your age. You are . . . ?”
“Thirty-five, today,” I sparkled. “Well, yesterday. But I guess it’s still my birthday.”
“Oh,” and he blushed. “Happy birthday, Autumn.”
“Thank you. I had a table reserved at Red Rooster tonight, for me and Chase. We didn’t go. We’re broken up.”
“Well, that’s no good.”
“It is what it is.”
“You never know what the future holds. For now, I want you to understand these realizations you’re coming to deserve all your attention and care. I want you to tell me if you ever told anyone these things. I’m unsure of Illinois law, but there could be a chance for charges still. But that’s something you’d have to want, no one else.”
“Mama started to see things.” I couldn’t stop the memories now, a Vesuvian rush of misunderstood moments and hurtful enigmas piled up over the last few years.
“I would look all around, even run my fingers along the walls and get the broom when she told me ‘Kill that spider,’ or ‘Get that bat outta here.’ She said ‘Thanks, Mama’ when I brought her a popsicle one time, because she would not drink enough water. Penny changed her bedding and bedpans and went home for the night. I insisted she take a break. Mama just took naps, three or four hours here and there. Then wake up and stare, wake up and stare. I sat by the bed and started telling her. All about him. Mr. Murphy, not Cole. That he didn’t love her. He didn’t love me. He didn’t love us. He raped me. She listened. She watched my lips move on every single word. And she said, ‘I need to sleep. Just lemme sleep.’ She didn’t act shocked. She didn’t say sorry. She just fell asleep. And for a second I wanted her to die. Was that wrong?”
Montgomery surprised me.
“It’s a tough call. As a parent myself, you have a tendency to be in tune. I don’t know if your mother sensed problems. Maybe she felt the better life he gave you all then compensated for any suspicions she had, or whatever she understood you told her later.”
“So, she let me get hurt for show? Appearances? Things?�
�
“I wouldn’t think she would knowingly hurt you.”
“She hurt me. She brought him. I’m her daughter. I was her daughter.”
“You are her daughter,” he said. “I’m relieved you are caring more about the one she had, and not the one she didn’t. That’s where your work begins now.”
IT WAS DAWN WHEN I finished what I could now share about me and Summer. A light appeared under the door. Mrs. Montgomery knocked, then spoke: “Celeste found her keys. They were with security. Marcus just dropped her off.”
“Splendid,” Montgomery said. “I really didn’t feel like driving to Brooklyn tonight.”
She said to him: “You’re saved.” And to me: “Good night, doll. Get home safe.”
We walked to the courtyard exit. I was leaving the square panopticon to go home to watch myself now.
“I’ll hold off now on psychiatric referral, but if you disappear again . . .”
“I won’t,” I assured him. “I promise. Not anymore. I believe you now.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “But remember, go outside every day. Don’t stay up all night. Limit the news, the internet. Eat three times a day. And, call my cell if you ever feel unsafe or disoriented or lost. We have an appointment this Friday. I’ll confirm.”
Silent, we awaited a cabbie on the block. Then I remembered my manners.
“How much do I owe you?”
Nearly my last $100 wadded in my purse, in cash.
“No charge,” he said.
I swirled my eyes, proud and scrupulous.
“I’m covered,” he told me. “You can thank We Go On. They fund me. I’m a survivor too.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Mostly for Montgomery, I filled out an online form to join the next Survivors Meeting at We Go On. He became aware of the advocacy group after his son, Noel Jr., slid into opioid addiction from painkillers for a knee he injured in a Syracuse basketball game. Soon, his character changed. Then he dropped out and went missing for weeks. A housekeeper found his body in a by-the-hour motel room on Lenox. The bottles and evidence of alcohol, crack, marijuana, Vicodin, and hydrocodone surrounded him. Montgomery and his wife became group members around the time their son would have graduated college, debt-free after the basketball scholarship. Then, they graduated to volunteers. His pro bono work was in addition to private practice.
Speaking of Summer Page 21