Читать книгу Speaking of Summer - Kalisha Buckhanon - Страница 12

ONE

Unforgiving cold couldn’t deter me from reaching the nearest precinct on 151st Street. Normally my eyes filtered out all the trash stuck to the uptown curbs, lapping at my ankles. I was used to it. Litter was the only shawl for a dead gray cat along my way. Its odor cut my breath off. It was March but looked like June. Sunlight warmed the corpse over days I spent mostly inside now. I would have called the city to complain, about indignity to the animal and us good hardworking people of Harlem. I would have used a stick to move it to rest in peace. But I ran late, again. When I stepped to cross Lenox, a man crept up beside me. He donned a blue afro and green python around his neck, gathered down to his waist. When he noticed me look, he winked. Then he licked his lips. That made just seven minutes outside my door before a man reminded me he was a man. And it wasn’t even a record.

Property owners and the city did not bother to salt the streets yet and the old snowfall was juicy now. I almost slipped on my way inside. Thank God for Uggs’ strength and dependability. I needed steadiness on this latest trip. I hoped for some real news finally.

Still, three months after my report, “Summer Spencer” was not listed in New York State’s online Missing Persons Clearinghouse. There, I saw haunting photos of hundreds of men and women, all ages and walks of life. They listed disappearances as recently as last month. My sister’s absence from them wasn’t a mistake. It was a disgrace.

My quest to find out what happened to Summer was a noisy, gobbling goal I couldn’t quiet. I wasn’t aiming for a sticker, trophy, degree, paycheck, or title at the end. I was losing my security, stability, and mind along the way. Friends listened to me say I wanted answers. If distant family heard my questions, I guessed they pretended not to hear. Neighbors treated my sister like someone who never lived in our brownstone with us. They carried on with a dark pause in their minds, forgetting that woman who went up to our rooftop and seemed to vanish into icy air. But my body moved in her ideas and habits like a sepulcher she remained alive within. Deep inside me, she remembered. She thought. She planned. She felt. I knew if I listened hard and fought and tuned into her spirit strong enough, she would show up again.

Three months ago. Last year, actually. An early December morning. Or late December night, depending on the viewpoint. I climbed a frigid stairwell. I saw our rooftop door open and footprints in the rooftop snow. I called 911. Cops came, then turned to the other misfortunes that would hit Harlem before dawn. I never again saw the night-beat cops I reported this strange scene to. Days passed. I did not sleep for them. Summer never came through our apartment door. A week passed. My dealings with the law upgraded to a long wait, a statement, an interview about Summer’s habits and crew. That was it.

I could get further on attention with an online petition or crowdfunding page and social media–friendly headline: “Nobody Gives a Fuck My Sister Is Missing.” Then, tens of thousands of anonymous names and email addresses and credit card numbers would mean more than my lone voice and Summer’s single human life. But I predicted it to become a distraction. If Summer joined legions of other Black women trying to eek out concern for our lives and became a hashtag, then I would become open to scrutiny and intrusion my fragility couldn’t withstand. I was mourning. I needed to do it outside of any spotlight.

However, I could bear to hassle police until I became a familiar to the day officers at the precinct desk. Two women officers, Black and Latina, always greeted me with warmth. They liked me, I felt. Their kindnesses served as their condolences.

“Good afternoon,” I smiled. “I’m here to speak with Montgomery. I’m a little late.”

They looked at me, then whispered to each other. I fidgeted with my scarf.

“Montgomery’s out to lunch, I think,” Officer Torres explained.

Officer Jackson looked up from papers on a desk, and nodded, “He is.”

“Well, when is he back?” I asked. “I’ve come all the way here in the cold.”

They had their duties. I had mine. I hadn’t been there since February. I became exhausted of shouting out my tiny voice. I was a Midwest transplant to New York City. I scrambled for attention with twelve million other people. I was Black. I wasn’t rich. I was a freelancer, not a company head. If I didn’t make myself known to the powers that be, I wouldn’t even get my order taken at a decent bar let alone help a missing person be found.

I focused on the station bulletin board. A notice for a missing girl or woman stuck out. From so far away, I could not tell her age and ethnicity, or see her name. All I could decipher was “MISSING.” I envisioned all the flyers of Summer’s face I taped on trees and building gates, laundromat and bodega doors, in subway stations and parks. They yielded one call. It was a Korean woman who owned a nail salon down by a Brooklyn friend’s way. I did not change out of clothes I’d worn in there the day before and fallen asleep in at home. I hustled back at breakneck speed. She laughed when I appeared again, desperate and manic. She said the flyer just reminded her of a customer she’d just seen: me.

And, for all my time and effort and printing costs, that was it. It was karma. I’d often had a choice to zoom in on similar flyers rolled around streetlight and station posts. Instead I chose to stare down choked streets for a headsign, or into dark passages for a train light. I now needed people to stop, notice, care, and recall. But I saw we people were all just alike.

More than thirty minutes later, Detective Noel Montgomery waved me past the public corridor into his tight side office. It was always so neat and perfect for an NYPD space, like a television show set. His water cooler was full, as usual. He offered me a tray of herbal teas atop it. He had the audacity to display polished rocks with positive words painted on: LOVE, HEALTH, HAPPINESS. He kept a sandy wooden hourglass within reach.

He shut the door and I didn’t wait. I got right to it. My soliloquy was long.

“Miss Spencer,” Detective Montgomery said when I finished, “I’m not sure what goes on with that clearinghouse or what the criminal justice division’s posting criteria are. I can check on it for you. How you doin’ overall? Is your rooftop door still locked?”

Over the doorway to the stairs up to our rooftop, the landlords tacked a sheet with a peace sign emblem. Back in the day, they had promised us a rooftop garden. But none of us tenants climbed up there more than a few times. And, never at night. That door was always just a possible intruder entrance or exit. I had requested the landlords seal it off. The gaudy sheet covered a thick slat to the outside door, adjacent to my apartment door and up a few steps. A padlock looped between chain links through the deadbolt. Hooks attached to keep robbers out.

“I’m not worried about anybody coming in there now,” I told Detective Montgomery. “The landlords have us locked up now like we’re on Devil’s Island. I’m more worried about who came through before.”

“I see,” Detective Montgomery said. “There’s never been break-ins at the brownstone. The precinct confirmed no criminal reports for that address. Not even noise complaints. So anybody who gets to your roof either lives there or let someone in to do so.”

“I wonder if Summer’s pegged low priority, and not a real missing person, because she’s Black,” I told the detective, a still and poised man with glasses.

“That has nothing to do with it, Miss Spencer,” he answered. “Trust me. I’m Black. I get what you’re saying. That’s why I’m here doing this. But if she just ran off and—”

“Summer always had an aloof side,” I interrupted. “Well, I told you that. She was moody. I don’t think she was the best judge of people always. But that girl is strong. When our mother died, Summer held up well. She broke at the very end, like that did something to her, snapped her out of her mind. But we both picked up our load and carried on.”

“I agree it sounds atypical for someone like her to up and run away,” he said. “And I have the same concerns you do about foul play. I don’t think investigators took time to interview as many people as they could have. Yes, deprioritizing most Black people’s cases is a fault of the system. Did you bring any mail that could help us?”

“Her mail stopped.” I thought. “None since the New Year now. Christmas greetings from a few distant relatives, but that’s always addressed to both of us. If she was abducted, or worse, wouldn’t the perpetrator see her name on IDs, stop mail on purpose?”

“Hmmm,” he sighed, “there’d have to be motive to be that elaborate and thorough. Which brings us back to who lives there or who she knows, someone who would plan, not a random incident. I’ll push a police check on formal mail stops and a forwarding address.”

Of course. A forwarding address. She could be out there somewhere, with a new address I didn’t know, maybe under a new name, for reasons she would apologize for.

“Look,” Montgomery said, “you say you two hid nothing from each other. Look through her things again. Maybe you were still in shock at the time, so you could have missed something. This might be a woman who is upset or mad about something, and ran.”

He was used to people’s theories of mourning: intended to rewind time back to whatever could have been prevented if only one had known, or to exact revenge if it was to be had . . . Someone has to know the truth. What about this guy or that one? Can you take another look? Are you sure this was really the case? But, I just talked to him or her. They were fine. You missed that bitch. Can you question her again? Gimme the file. I said gimme the file. Son of a bitch motherfucker . . .

Detective Montgomery took a sip from his plastic Popeye’s large drink. I was robbing him of a peaceful two-piece spicy lunch.

“The cell number you gave is disconnected,” he continued. “No recent text messages or calls. And, according to you, she was anti–social media and whatever. So, her online footprint is scant and no help. Did she meet a man?”

“I would’ve known. Did you call every single number in the phone?” I demanded. “I did. But I’m no authority. People don’t have to answer me.”

“Even you said you recognized the names of all the contacts, so there are no strangers in your lives. Responding officers processed your roof. No signs of struggle, Autumn. No blood. A clean path to the edge. Just one set of footprints in the snow . . .”

It snowed that night. By the time cops took their time to respond, other footprints could have filled in. I paced around, calling for her. I could have shuffled snow atop them.

“Autumn, Autumn?” I heard. “You got any friends?”

“Any what?”

“Friends,” he repeated. “You know, people to go out with, talk to sometimes?”

A detective, of all people, shouldn’t expect a woman with a close missing relative to be the world’s greatest conversationalist. My tunnel vision was explicable and excusable. It was even above average. I could be tearing files off his desk with my bared teeth, or thrown from the lobby amid a piercing tirade on discrimination.

“I’m quite fine, Mr. Montgomery,” I replied. “And I have many friends, thank you very much. But partying is not my biggest concern right now.”

“You ain’t gotta party,” he said. “But just go out a little bit. Have some fun. Take your mind off Summer for a while.”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“Miss Spencer—”

“Autumn is fine.”

“Autumn, I’m not trying to get in your business. But, I go through this kind of stuff with people. You’re hurt. You’re shocked. You feel helpless. The only way to feel better at a time like this is to try to keep living life. You have a bright future.”

“So I’m unreasonable just because I want to know where my closest living relative is? Now, not later? Because I expect some answers and accountability for how a healthy young woman can just up and disappear?”

“No. It means I’ve done all I can do until new leads and information turn up. It doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means I’m telling you that.”

“I’m her sister. Twin, born with her. I can’t go on. Part of me is missing, too. My head is split on her all the time. My heart is broken in half. What about that?”

He pointed his hands together on his chin. He walked to a low file cabinet to jam his hands between what I imagined was too much work. He handed me a bright, shiny brochure.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“This is a group for people getting over lost loved ones and other catastrophic events. They have firsthand experience with what we normally just read about in the news or see in movies. Loved ones murdered, suicides. Losses no one prepares for. Kind of like if a sibling just up and disappeared, with no answers for it yet. Thankfully, only a small group would know what that really feels like.”

The brochure, to “We Go On” or something like that, was his parting gift/final say/hint. So I could leave. So he could return to other human beings—dead and alive.

So he can brush us off, I heard her say.

It was Summer’s voice, clear as a wrong note in a well-known song. I didn’t actually hear a voice. I wasn’t a nutcase, after all. She was just my inner wisdom. A megaphone for my own thoughts perhaps, but continuous in message: Don’t let them shut you up. Not now, not ever, not just about me. Forever, and for everything.

I knew my time was up. I would roar back in next week, more brazen and energetic than ever. Montgomery at least checked on what I suggested he should and shared his own ideas. He pushed it further than I could go banging on doors, hanging up flyers, and seeking out information all by myself. I had to keep him around for all he was worth.

“I want to be your hero here,” he said. “I really do.”

“Well, no matter where she is now and when she’s coming back, she’ll always be my hero. She’s the best sister anyone could ever hope 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.