Speaking of Summer - Kalisha Buckhanon

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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.

      My other downstairs neighbor preferred to get intimacy from her customers. Asha Goddess claimed this connectedness as a “claim to fame” in her combination detox-healing-bodywork services. A few weeks after Summer seemed to slip off not just our roof but the face of the Earth, Asha slipped in Jill Scott or Jewel when she knew I was on my way down. My favorites. Just for me. I appreciated her efforts to lift my spirits and provide a retreat. Technically, I wasn’t a customer. I was just her neighbor, the sister who moved in to subsidize Summer Spencer’s mock Manhattan penthouse her many odd jobs and few art sales could barely afford. But I gave Asha much credit for her effort to halt this crisis from getting the best of me.

      “Okay, from the looks of your posture your chakras are imbalanced. And, your sitting bones too elevated. That’s ’cause you’re a desk potato. My meditation partner is a proofreader at a law firm. She threatened to sue the partners if they didn’t bring in stationary bikes for the proof girls. Fifteen minutes of movement for every forty-five minutes of sitting. Run in place, jumping jacks, pace. Anything to get blood circulating and stop bones from atrophying. And, the ass from spreading. You know your crown is balding? Well, it is. Sorry to bear bad news. ’Bout the size of a pencil head, from what I can see. Every day you need Jamaican castor oil for your scalp. Then a tablespoon of molasses. It’s an acquired taste. Hmmm, your eyes are nice. Color of a pile of rice. So, that’s good. Long life. Heard your knee crack. Pick up cod liver oil too. I can see from your tongue you need cold foods: cucumber, celery, lettuce, apple, pear, cabbage salads. Nothing hot now. Stay away from the meat. No peppers. Dump the cinnamon and ginger. None of that nutmeg you gave me my last birthday. And I feel a fever. Not much. But still, it—”

      “Sorry to interrupt, but can I sit up now?”

      Asha had tried and failed to jigsaw me into happy baby pose. To open my sacral chakra and push my aura to take up space. My butt was on the floor, my legs in the air and my arms stretched over the backs of my knees. I was light-headed.

      “If you must,” she answered.

      My free “treatment” was barter for me to do her website she delayed buying a hosting service for.

      Asha ran her odd business from the garden apartment. She found the cold body of its prior tenant—the eighty-year-old deaf and mute maid of the mansion—before the original owner’s children broke the home up into rentals. Asha first met the old maid by helping her up from a crack in the sidewalk. After this, she stood in for the maid’s distant New Jersey and Queens relatives. She daily delivered her lottery tickets, an ice cream sandwich, and large black coffee. The misfortune to find its maid dead handed Asha the fortune of our Hamilton Heights brownstone. It was an upgrade from her fifth-floor walkup in a nearby tenement. When Summer moved in at the top of the renovated apartments the mansion became, Asha told her the whole story. So Summer thought the maid haunted the place. She cited common proof I barely noticed.

      Autumn, that little tapping didn’t keep you up last night?

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