Читать книгу Speaking of Summer - Kalisha Buckhanon - Страница 14

THREE

At night, the heat in my top-floor apartment was punishing. Practically speaking, the building’s old boiler did what it was supposed to. Theoretically, the temperature could have easily arisen from Mama and Grandma’s spirits boiling over. Their lecture would start off like this: We raised you so much better than this.

I couldn’t deny it. You did, I’d respond.

They would be referring to how I let my grief, immaturity, and needs cloud my judgment to give in to a man who was not really mine. A man who still cried about Summer sometimes, and I let him. The confusion and stress he and I both felt, me more than him, had driven him away for weeks. Tonight was his first back with me again.

I planned, in time, to tell Detective Montgomery, and anyone else who could help, that I had indiscretions with my sister’s man and I know she sensed it, in an intuitive mist where all women know what that odd call or perfume scent means.

I limited it. He respected that. We never spoke of it. She never confronted us. Life went on. I exhaled. I thought she’d never know. Now, I had to consider she did.

At first, Chase Armstrong was just one of the constants I could depend on as Mama was passing away. He was always there, whenever we needed him. He belonged to Summer, but I knew he was there for me, too. Summer was no real help with Mama’s affairs, doctor’s appointments, prescriptions. Damn the “sensitive artiste” in her. If not for Chase, and Mama’s hospice nun Penny, I would have been on my own. I suspected Summer sensed Chase could be attracted to me, not because she and I had exact looks or personalities. We weren’t those kinds of twins no one could tell apart in a glance or two, and we were no more alike than any other siblings who grow up together.

I can only hope depression from Mama’s death encouraged me to cross the line. He claimed intimacy at a time like that was a mere mistake. I told no soul, not even Detective Montgomery, about us. If he and anyone else knew Summer had real motive to get away from us, and better yet to punish me for betraying her, they would not help me search for her.

But it still did not account for why she’d punish herself in freezing cold on our rooftop. Footprints only. No shoes. Door wide open. No notes. Never seen again.

At first, it was just one time with Chase. That one time was one too many, but I took solace it happened when Summer had put him on “off” in their off-and-on thing. We stopped, completely. I ended our friendly chats when I was just to take a message over the phone. I stopped asking about his job. I played dead in my room if he came over. I pointed to my desk if Summer invited me to a movie or party with them.

It went this way until several days after I called 911 to report I thought something happened to Summer. Chase finally returned my call, and she wasn’t with him. Our calls and meetings at bars were all about her. Then, when our hysterics that Summer hadn’t come home reached boiling points, we fell into bed as we were just supposed to be looking through her things. Or, maybe we were just calling around looking for her. Maybe we were just sitting around talking about how this could have happened to her. To us. I can’t recall what I was thinking, but I know sex wasn’t my drive. I’d never even thought Chase was especially attractive. Now, I saw beauty in his valor to emigrate from the West Indies alone to make something of himself, and his honesty and commitment to me, while I knew it was also betrayal.

“I’ll lose you both when she returns, because I can’t play that game,” he’d told me. I just put my head in his palm in admission we were only a matter of tainted time.

And he said—no, promised—it was not about sex for him either. Did it matter? No matter what happened or how it happened, it was happening.

We had left the TV on. The Roots were signing off the Jimmy Fallon repeat.

Chase thought I loved spooning tight, with my spine sunk into his ribs and his hairy thigh over my hip. But his affection smothered me. Summer was my sister, after all. I couldn’t flaunt it, no matter how much security and serenity I felt when I was in bed with him again. I sat up in Summer’s four-poster canopy bed, its grand posts and headboard out of character for me. Summer and I dismantled and hauled the bed so many times it felt like an old friend. “What about ice cream?” I asked aloud, as if I half expected Chase to leap out of bed and get it for me. Specifically, I wanted Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond.

Neapolitan was my flavor back when Mama coughed herself to final sleep. There was something organizing about moving my spoon across the carton from white to pink or brown to white or pink to brown, depending on the brand. With Summer gone, the new flavor was much simpler and less fattening. It took so long to suck the chocolate off the nuts stuck in the ice cream, I ate less of it. I thought to walk to the bodega alone in ChapStick and bedhead, to buy it through a bulletproof window slit. Maybe one of the bodega cats would be out. The regular ones all came to me by now.

When Mama came to visit her big girls, “alllll grown up in the big city now,” she cringed to see us leave out after midnight to buy orange juice and milk and eggs. “Why can’t you wait until the morning?” she always asked. She never understood every need in life wasn’t clouds and mileposts and winding roads away. She regarded the black plastic bodega sacks we brought back with suspicion, like they held babies kidnapped from Harlem Hospital down the road. She listed a cascade of farfetched outcomes to cap our biographies: men in black come through our screenless open windows, insane cabbies to be the deaths of us, baby-faced gang rapists in train cars before morning rush hours. It was part of the “wild imagination” Summer inherited from her, their eccentric personalities the relatives called it, their You just don’t understand her gossip shields. Now I knew all the evidence of those outlandish warnings from Mama were based in true stories. I may not have been alive then but she was, and she had never forgotten the tales, and the daily news reports I was too busy living life to the fullest to pay much attention to, and the implausible possibilities more years on Earth show everybody. Like Mama did for us, one day I would tell girls they would disappear if they were not careful.

I untangled from the maroon crochet blanket I was sad to have all to myself, finally. Summer and I both watched Grandma put the blanket’s final knot into place, right at the corner edge of a slight rouge border one must squint to see. Summer curled up in the blanket without asking me if I wanted to toast with her. Later that night, the feathers in my down comforter may as well have been gossamer. I kicked it off out of spite, so stayed with a cold that winter, the stinking and barking kind. Then, Summer took the maroon blanket to camp. She didn’t need it. It was hot. She dragged it to sleepovers with the friends I was not invited to know. Finally, she took it to college. Now, it lies between me and her past lover.

When I slipped Chase’s arm from around me he growled, stretched, and sucked his tongue before going motionless again. He never snored. His farts were unalarming, almost banjo twangs. He made Godiva coffee in mornings and decaffeinated tea at night. He had yet to leave the toilet seat up or lose the toothpaste cap. He loved to cook. He actually could cook. This did not stop him from ordering in, and tipping well. Besides the spoons after sex, he kept to his side of the bed and never hogged the covers.

At the edge of the kitchen, with my eyes on the microwave’s time—3:21—I realized I glided down the hall naked. Not even a robe, in March. I was still hot. I remembered no footsteps. When I turned, I saw another memory of Summer to join the many others twisting around my mind these days. Ever the artist, she had made her own black-and-white copy of the photo of our first birthday with Mr. Murphy in our lives. It hung inside a cream mat and copper-colored pewter frame. I knew the balloons were pink because I remembered the day, the moment, the tendrils of lightning before clouds shattered and Mr. Murphy set his hat down to stay the whole night. I saw the rocking chair in the background, and considered Summer’s viewpoint could be more accurate than my memory of it. The back of the chair no longer looked as tall as I had thought it was.

“Hey, baby.”

By the time I knew Chase was out of bed, he had his hands on my shoulders and his chest against my back.

“You all right?” Chase asked.

He turned me back to bed, to lie naked next to him. Soon he was asleep again.

I was far from promiscuous; I once aimed to keep lovers at five, before I grew old with one. Chase made it eight. I still hadn’t figured out how to use it to marry up, no matter where the number went. Chase made money, but he made it for New York rent and more student loans than I had defaulted on. He owned nothing but career advancement, to send stories of the American dream back to his Caribbean homeland. Summer and I had the only suitable love nest. It wasn’t even soundproof.

My downstairs neighbor, Belinda, clued me into that. Her three kids and no man were her Section 8 guarantee she did not have to pay the raised rent we did. She hinted diplomatically: “Well, you know, my kids’ windows face the back, uh . . . just like your bedroom.” It was a thorny noise complaint to make, unlike our tolerance to never report her for her old Phyllis Hyman and her kids’ new rap music.

Though we weren’t exactly friends, I felt bad my sex was too loud. I learned to muffle myself and pat Chase out of his own moments, the worst of which sounded like movers in the middle of the night. I picked up a cheap mini-carpet. We moved the monstrous bed to place the carpet under it for some soundproofing. The comfort and escape our lovemaking gave us graduated to tough: bite marks, hickeys on brown skin, and fingernail dents. We tried, but could not, wrestle out of this nefarious blossoming in the shadows of my sister and her bed we slept in now.

“It’s a record,” he said, his eyes half-open. He wasn’t asleep after all.

“What, how long we managed this time?” I giggled.

“No,” he groaned. “How long it took you to wake back up after I put you to sleep. Three hours. Up from two and a half.”

“You’re counting?”

“I’ll try harder next time.”

He passed back into sleep, with my unspoken permission to replace me with Summer in his dreams. I deserved nothing more. I certainly had no shortage of men around me, but I never trusted men like Summer could. A few serious boyfriends proposed to her. Some paid her bills between taking her on trips. Meanwhile, what should have been my robust bachelorette life eroded into a serious relationship with my computer. I only found a few brief hookups from online dating.

I asked Chase if he felt sorry for me. He laughed I would think such.

“I don’t know why I can’t leave you alone,” he’d said. “I’m mixed up right now, too.”

As the weeks and then months passed, he tamed his compulsion to fixate on the predicament while mine became more disobedient. We drifted to two opposite poles. Like me, he started off zealous and pushy for answers. Then, he just paused. His face adopted a stoic gauze. His eyes became a simplified film. It could have been men and women’s different natures. I felt more like that mother who’d wait by the door or phone for decades to no end if her child went missing. He operated like that father who would dismantle the swing set and throw out the bike.

To doze off again, I zoned in on the repeat news broadcast. The face on the news looked like any one of them I passed on the street every day: light or dark brown, late teens or twenties, baby or senior dreadlocks, a half-triumphant and half-defeated face, brand-name tennis shoes, sagging pants and handcuffs. A White attorney’s hand and his legal pad shielded this boy’s face. I heard something about DNA. The somber male investigative reporter explained Jaylyn Stewart was arrested on suspicion of the rapes and murders of sixteen-year-old Dejanay Little and forty-two-year-old Shanice Johnson in Harlem.

The Black women’s and girls’ stories weren’t repeated enough for me not to forget them. I had forgotten their names but remembered a little of their tragedies. Fragments of it all came rushing back: Dejanay went out to Crown for a box of chicken and never came back, the last trace of Shanice was her Metro-North ticket after work. In weeks apart last fall, a garbage man and church janitor found their bodies in nearby dumpsters.

I could tell Chase was back asleep; I left him for my other lover: my desktop.

PayPal declined my digital New York Times subscription charge once and I forgot to renew it manually, so I hit the paper’s paywall. I had to settle for a Google search. I did see its headline on a Harlem killer. Every other Jaylyn Stewart headline was connected to Dejanay or Shanice. The Daily News, New York Post, NJ.com, Star-Ledger. Before the birds started to chirp, I mined enough headlines to learn Jaylyn was twenty-six, born in the Bronx but raised in Harlem, and the first child of a forty-year-old mother. His father was unknown or unmentioned, and he and five younger siblings were once wards of the state after incidents of questionable care, including one sister’s hospitalization because an uncle raped her.

I wandered to the Murderpedia vortex of mass murderers, rapists, and serial killers. I had my fill of snapshots of depositions, police reports, and biographies of society’s deplorables. Then I watched two twenty-two-minute Forensic Files episodes on YouTube. The killings were in small towns, not big cities, but still relevant. The stories were about women’s murders. I learned resistance, not rape, hurt female victims most. Their attackers wanted power, and defensive wounds proved these women wouldn’t give it easily. Summer was that kind of woman. Pride and will could override her fear anytime.

I revisited the Black and Missing website (I bookmarked it at the New Year). In 2014, almost sixty-five thousand Black women and girls were missing. Where was uproar, outrage, 20/20 segments, sniffer dogs, two-hundred-volunteer search teams, TV specials, addresses from the White House? Still, in the Missing Persons Clearinghouse, I could not find even one of the many pictures of Summer I gave to police.

I noticed daybreak only when I heard the shower. Chase awoke without an alarm right at 6:30 a.m. I wasn’t the amateur barista he was, so I was happy to find a Café Bustelo bag on hand, which I measured with a shot glass for two instant cups.

“What’re you doing up all night?” he smiled. “You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

“Relax, I had a deadline,” I told him. “I scared up a speechwriting gig.”

“Get it done?” he asked.

“Almost.”

I warmed up toast and cut up a cantaloupe going soft.

Then he showed me three dents curved around his left shoulder, in the middle a small slit of broken skin my teeth made.

I was not ready, yet, to tell him how much I wondered if Jaylyn Stewart had more victims than anyone realized. That morning, again, Summer remained our unmentionable, both the reason we should not be together and the reason we could not bear to be apart.