Speaking of Summer - Kalisha Buckhanon

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my mother’s camera she loved. The first snap became the doll we could only look at, never play with. The last became me and Summer over a Kroger sheet cake. Grandma had found candles in the junk drawer. In the picture, we are blowing out the candle. Beside us, Mama blows up a balloon. Grandma looks off-camera, like she hears somebody walk through our door without knocking first. Mr. Murphy took the picture.

      The tornadoes hit Ohio, not Illinois. But even when it was no lavender-gray sky or weather horns or panicked birds, Mr. Murphy set his hat down on the table until the next morning. He soon bought a new coffeemaker, more boxes and bags for us, a pottery wheel for my mother, a Hoveround for my grandmother, and more booze for the china cabinet.

      With Mama calmed, me and Summer started to talk about separate paths, beyond ideas from the amused faces encircling us to marvel at our resemblance. Everybody took it upon themselves to point out their plans for our presumed matching futures: actresses, Alvin Ailey dancers, doctors, models. On TV, we saw other girl jobs we felt better for us—Oprah, Silkwood, G.I. Jane, Julia Child, Christa McAuliffe, Sally Jessy, and Anita Hill. We made books about our bigger, older selves. I drew the pictures. My sister wrote the stories.

      Slowly but surely, the comparisons between us started to die off along with Mama’s attention and Grandma’s energy.

      After that doll and blanket, we never shared birthday presents again.

      A lot happened in the years after Mr. Murphy and his hat on our table and tornadoes and balloons.

      My last view of the story is a disquieting but quiet reel. The reel makes no sound besides the tick of a film projector, home movie–style: an early morning a few hours ahead of daybreak in winter, a curvy woman’s body in a slip, wind talk to her hair, a bowing hem at her knees, black tar shapes of her feet carving footsteps in shallow snow on a rooftop. A south-facing Harlem brownstone and Manhattan’s skyline meet a vanishing point. The movie’s film scrambles, then stills on a close-up: little French-pedicured toes at the tip of the very top, curled around a cornice.

      My sister is gone, hardly forgotten. Whatever came for her is coming for me, too.

      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

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