Speaking of Summer - Kalisha Buckhanon

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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,

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