Speaking of Summer. Kalisha Buckhanon
for. That’s a fact.”
“I’m sure she is,” Detective Montgomery agreed.
I HAD LEFT SUMMER’S FINGERPRINTS on her dressing mirror. I joyfully borrowed her clothes. If I breached her journals or notes or emails, I heard her voice saying her old words and I felt better. I washed her scent from her pillowcases, sheets, and comforter. I switched her bedding and moved in to her room, to feel she was still here. My bedroom, the smaller one facing the brick gangway, never invited the breeze. Now it was just my dressing closet, in need of a good sweeping and dusting. The comforter crumpled and twisted at the foot of my Ikea bed. I finally threw out a rank coffee cup with spoiled cream and a saucer of pizza crusts on the nightstand. One day, I stomped from Summer’s bed to smash down my digital alarm clock, automatically set to go at 7 a.m. I arose around noon now, later in rain.
Her absence clogged my head with memories of our life together, now separated. I just wanted to know she was okay, alive, because without that assurance my mind produced a steady carousel of conjecture. Each stop was dark, terrifying, and sad. I drifted from most so-called friends. None of them knew what to say. Sadly, I suspected some suspected me. I failed to return calls from back home, not that I received many. I felt betrayed, and guilty. I wanted to know what I had done, or what someone else did. I didn’t want to intrude on her new life, if she wanted to start over so fresh I was unwanted. We had, after all, estranged from our history and nearly our own mother, before the inevitable. Our last parent’s dying left us no choice but to repair the breaches. With our whole history and origins dwindled, it was possible one more lost person might not add up to much.
I walked home slower this time, my body loaded with some regret. I had wanted to tell the detective all I could to help us, but I was cautious with my trust. Strangers preferred to discredit one another than expand to new people to sacrifice their time to.
At home I checked the mail, in hopes Summer sent a carrier pigeon. She did not. A big check was too much to expect, though a few enterprises owed me small ones for work on their websites and steadily unnecessary paper marketing. I was a Big Apple “slasher” with a grab bag of media and communications talents in a gig economy, beat up by computerized resume readers and even video auditions to interview for some real jobs, now a find as preposterous as a pot at the end of a rainbow. In the best of times, it was a feat to stay disciplined and entrepreneurial. In the last year, with Mama’s care and then her death, followed by my sister’s vanishing act, I lost spunk to promote myself online and network to new clients cutting out full-time employees.
I left behind the only things in the box: bills and junk with my name on it. I ran my fingers along my mailing label, and scratched the space where now only my name was listed. Autumn Spencer: the last living trace of my parents, Grace and Ricky Spencer.
I felt my father as sporadic warmth and tightness inside my chest. The most I know about him is he loved doing tricks on motorcycles. This killed him right before I carried a metal My Little Pony lunchbox and Rainbow Brite umbrella off to busy, sunny classrooms for the first time. Mama died in my Harlem apartment, after Valentine’s Day, in 2014. A whole year now. She passed in a fog of gentle panic and mental slippage the painkillers toned down. She came to live her last days with us. I was the daughter who insisted on it. Now I know I should have let it be, kept the moment distant and remote.
Before we could even mark the one-year anniversary of our mother’s passing, Summer apparently went to our brownstone’s rooftop and I had not seen her since.
I am thirty-four years old. No children. No nieces or nephews.
I exhausted my IRA. Mama’s life insurance policy paid half its $100,000 after the medical bills and taxes. My “double income” was my sister.
Who will take care of me when I’m old?
I climbed to my hallway, pausing at the few colorful abstracts Summer gifted our environment. I walked up two little steps to the very top of the building. I pulled back the peace-signed sheet across the rooftop doorway. I never liked that door, wood-paneled like a prop of seventies television. I put my palm to it. It was cold. A padlock and chains, screwed in separately from its original construction, were warm. The landlords’ gesture came after Summer stopped letting herself in, stopped greeting them in the foyer, stopped dousing our brownstone in her scents.
Why hadn’t it been there before?
Detective Montgomery brought up an interesting point. I grew up as a twin girl in a house of four women. I learned to leave other women’s shit alone. Women detect disturbance and changes too easily. As Mama hid the severity of her cancer from us, I joined her old maid of honor and her sister to go through the majority of our house on Trummel Lane. Mama was not terminal then; she called it “paring down.” I carted out toys, one too many little rocking horses, nice sweater bundles—all finally passed on to others’ children. I became more disillusioned about her that week than I had in my whole life. I never had any idea she made as many good paintings and as much decent pottery as she did. I felt ashamed I had dismissed how much anonymous creation meant to her, as if it were a tendency she passed on only to Summer. So even in normal times, we live around people and their things but don’t see who those people truly are. It was certainly possible I’d missed a lot while looking through Summer’s things, one eye fixed on the door she could walk through.
I plowed through stockpiled industrial wine and foraged through Summer’s sketchbooks and unpolished artworks. She was enviably neat. My bookshelves strangled the hallways, since I turned out to be the bookish one. Summer’s small contribution was a few heavy books about art and artists whose names I could never pronounce, to spite my education in words. Caravaggio, Frankenthaler, Modigliani, Klimt. The biographies and retrospectives mixed with fine arts and foundation books on color theory, life drawing, and portraiture, so much heavier and more demanding than my grammar manuals, paperback novels, and self-improvement guides. Her notebooks held more doodles than notes. I was the freelance wordsmith she asked to check over the tiniest writings, like her Dear John letters to needy booty calls and her resignation emails to odd jobs. Summer drew versions of herself all her life, leading family and friends to call her recuperative self-portraits “art.” What else were we supposed to say to visions of noose necklaces and self-inflicted stab wounds? Later I helped her submit this stuff to contests and editors who always declined.
The Black and women artists’ catalogs she collected had much to do with the number of times she was tardy with her part of the electric and cable bills. I was fine to tag along to the Bronx Museum, Studio Museum, and tiny eclectic galleries as a spectator; Summer needed to bring the experiences home. Sometimes the books accompanying these shows cost nearly $100, just to sit untouched and tight together like artworks themselves. Basquiat, Ligon, Ringgold, Bearden. It comforted Summer to know people of color broke through the ceilings, wooed patronage, and achieved name status. I flipped down a Kehinde Wiley catalogue. I joined Summer at one of his first shows at Studio Museum, when I’d arrived to New York to escape a certain future writing corporate copy in Chicago.
Summer pasted the book’s receipt on the inside cover of promising portraits that foreshadowed Wiley’s eventual ascension. The pages gave way in the middle and a piece of paper floated to my feet. I leaned down to pick up a Xerox of newsprint, with thick block borders and letters time had deformed into unreadability.
It was an archived feature from The Hedgewood Sentinel, our local paper back home. I was a paper girl for it once, drawn to an entrepreneurial fate and life of words by the time I was in middle school. Then, I got high on the lemony scent of a stack of fresh newspapers. Later, I held off conversion to online news as long as I could.
This article, however, was before my time as a paper girl in Hedgewood. It was also before our family expanded to include Mama’s local star boyfriend, Cole Murphy. Summer cared to dig up in online archives that Mr. Murphy’s resigned from the local NAACP leadership, as the article’s headline and brief story informed me he did. One look at his businessman headshot cornered my memories to childhood, switched from disadvantage to privilege due to money our real father left for