I really was awake, finally now. And not talking to myself in my sleep.
“That’s okay,” I interrupted. “I mailed Olivia a card.”
“That was nice of you.”
“Why are we shouting in the middle of the night?” I shouted.
Chase hunched his shoulders and put his tickets back into his pocket. Then, he disappeared under the door’s awning to mash at my apartment buzzer once more. I slipped back inside, to answer him.
I stopped to check my face in the spare bathroom mirror. The assortments of my personality shone through in a biography of creativity and self-making, moved from phase to phase like a passenger passing through train cars as landscape rolls by. I was unfair to loneliness. It never belonged to me. I was never alone. But I can, for sure, pin that shortcoming on Summer.
EPILOGUE
I ran low on ink, stamps, textured paper, thick envelopes, and good cursive to personalize thank-you notes back to all of them: Belinda, the girlfriends, law officers, relatives, neighbors, clients, and community folks who emerged in my time of need as suddenly as a cold sore, in unpredictable sequence and bulk. Sorrow initially dilated my time and the number of people I had to fill it. Now the sorrow was turned against me and back into what it was all along: the emptying of time and number of people who lived life with me day to day. The only traces left of Summer and Mama were pictures on my walls. Together, we had all made my home a statement.
Why do we end up where we do, and how do we change the ending?
Summer was a dependence who grew, albeit out of acceptable proportion and constraint, like a love story: first sight, meeting, clincher, conversation, touch, get-together, lovemaking, and fight remembered in such exact detail even those not part of the story could retell it from the anecdotes they’ve heard. Yet the lovers never disclose the day, moment, or instant this other person suddenly broke into their minds and thoughts constantly as the time of day. They protect the fall, a break in their otherwise singular, intelligent outer view—now including and beholden to an absence they keep present. Maybe it is because they themselves do not know when the greediness of love, or need, snagged the membrane of their interior life.
So I did not put Summer away entirely.
She comes if I see a mother on the city bus who should have used birth control if she was going to cuss at the children like that. She comes if I see an injured cat on a city sidewalk and I just don’t have the money to take it to the vet or home with me, but I will stop to feed it. She comes if somebody throws a perfectly good bag of food in a sealed trash bin, when they could have left it discreetly at a tree root for a homeless guy shadowboxing hunger at night. She comes if I see sad puppy dog eyes and distended bellies on commercials late at night. She comes if one Black man shoots another. She comes if another White man shoots up a crowd. She comes if another White cop shoots up a Black husband and father. Maybe she will never go.
Summer was the daughter my mother would never know, my twin self born of secrecy, pain, and distrust. I knew when she first appeared, in my youth, but I could only vaguely recall how she reappeared past that and finally decided to stay. Maybe it was the first time I imagined daddy longlegs when I picked up Mama’s hair from the floor. Perhaps Summer tilted into full swing when I saw what looked like oil spill up from Mama’s mouth, much scarier than anything that ever came out of her old man’s pants. Maybe it was the day I realized I could not hold a conversation with the first voice who ever spoke to me, before I was born.
Maybe I’ll never know when Summer came to me, in full. Her flaws I discredited were the anchors of Autumn Spencer, my spine of rebirth. A notable circumference of bystanders kept me from slipping to darker and deeper crevices sans my inner core, strength, and sanity. They were kind enough to do what I probably only survived because they did: treat me like it’s no big thing, I am still normal, all is well, and we all—all—have our own shit.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Great acknowledgment to New York family for all those good times that blossomed a new Harlem story: Aicha Balla, Pamela Appea, Adrienne Paul, Marsha Desormeaux, Ebony Ezike, Tara Betts, William Bryant Jenkins, Darius Hill, Clint Lewis, Elise Johnson, Ron Kavanaugh, Celesti Colds Fechter, Atim Oton and Calabar Imports, Bernice McFadden, Margaret and Quincy Troupe and Harlem Arts Salon, Harriette Cole, Clarence Reynolds, Jenny Milchman, Troy Johnson, Marcia Wilson, Lisa DuBois and Rokafella. Also, Chicago family for being there when I was back to write it: Tara again, Khalia Poole, Sandra Jackson-Opoku, Candace Wilson-Montgomery, Kemati Porter, Josephine Hereford, David Boykin, Lakeya Jefferson, Tiffany Gholar, Jacquie Stewart, Diane Gillette, Dan Porcanstino, Lori Miller Barrett, Anne Jenkins, Paul Gee, Laura Nelson, Tatiana Swancy, Marvanna Cash and Nundia Louis. And John Mazur, for every writer’s best friends, in many computers and more cats: Ralph, Alice, Sybil, Sparky and Pepper. And West Coast spirits: Erica Botts, Judith Trytten and Maya Jensen.
Thank you for loving early portions that determined the whole: Christopher Schnieders of Intellectual Refuge, Quincy Troupe of NYU Black Renaissance Noire, Diane Gillette and Anne Jenkins of Cat on a Leash Review, and Roberta Miles and Jillian Erickson of Chicago’s Loose Chicks women’s reading series, where I read aloud from the novel for the first time.
Bounds of gratitude to an unquestioning champion of this story from the start, my editor Dan Smetanka, and the Counterpoint and Catapult teams for their effervescent and color-blind care for the work: Jenny Alton, Yukiko Tominaga, Megan Fishmann, Alisha Gorder, Katie Boland, Miyako Singer, Wah-Ming Chang, Mikayla Butchart, Nicole Caputo, Jaya Miceli, Jennifer Kovitz, and Dustin Kurtz.
Last and mostly, my exemplary agent Jennifer Lyons—for proving an old, oft-saying where I come from, about God: “He may not come when you want Him to, but He’s always on time.”
© DeJohn Barnes
KALISHA BUCKHANON is the author of the novels Solemn, Conception, and Upstate, which was selected as an inaugural National Book Foundation Literature for Justice title. Her other honors include an American Library Association Alex Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, Pushcart Prize and Hurston/Wright Awards nominations, and a Terry McMillan Young Author Award. She also appears on Investigation Discovery, BET, and TV One as a true crime expert in cases involving women. She lives in Chicago. Find out more at kalisha.com.
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