Speaking of Summer Page 2

  “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.

  TWO

  I walked home slower this time, my body loaded with some regret. I had wanted to tell the detective all I could to help us, but I was cautious with my trust. Strangers preferred to discredit one another than expand to new people to sacrifice their time to.

  At home I checked the mail, in hopes Summer sent a carrier pigeon. She did not. A big check was too much to expect, though a few enterprises owed me small ones for work on their websites and steadily unnecessary paper marketing. I was a Big Apple “slasher” with a grab bag of media and communications talents in a gig economy, beat up by computerized resume readers and even video auditions to interview for some real jobs, now a find as preposterous as a pot at the end of a rainbow. In the best of times, it was a feat to stay disciplined and entrepreneurial. In the last year, with Mama’s care and then her death, followed by my sister’s vanishing act, I lost spunk to promote myself online and network to new clients cutting out full-time employees.

  I left behind the only things in the box: bills and junk with my name on it. I ran my fingers along my mailing label, and scratched the space where now only my name was listed. Autumn Spencer: the last living trace of my parents, Grace and Ricky Spencer.

  I felt my father as sporadic warmth and tightness inside my chest. The most I know about him is he loved doing tricks on motorcycles. This killed him right before I carried a metal My Little Pony lunchbox and Rainbow Brite umbrella off to busy, sunny classrooms for the first time. Mama died in my Harlem apartment, after Valentine’s Day, in 2014. A whole year now. She passed in a fog of gentle panic and mental slippage the painkillers toned down. She came to live her last days with us. I was the daughter who insisted on it. Now I know I should have let it be, kept the moment distant and remote.

  Before we could even mark the one-year anniversary of our mother’s passing, Summer apparently went to our brownstone’s rooftop and I had not seen her since.

  I am thirty-four years old. No children. No nieces or nephews.

  I exhausted my IRA. Mama’s life insurance policy paid half its $100,000 after the medical bills and taxes. My “double income” was my sister.

  Who will take care of me when I’m old?

  I climbed to my hallway, pausing at the few colorful abstracts Summer gifted our environment. I walked up two little steps to the very top of the building. I pulled back the peace-signed sheet across the rooftop doorway. I never liked that door, wood-paneled like a prop of seventies television. I put my palm to it. It was cold. A padlock and chains, screwed in separately from its original construction, were warm. The landlords’ gesture came after Summer stopped letting herself in, stopped greeting them in the foyer, stopped dousing our brownstone in her scents.

  Why hadn’t it been there before?

  Detective Montgomery brought up an interesting point. I grew up as a twin girl in a house of four women. I learned to leave other women’s shit alone. Women detect disturbance and changes too easily. As Mama hid the severity of her cancer from us, I joined her old maid of honor and her sister to go through the majority of our house on Trummel Lane. Mama was not terminal then; she called it “paring down.” I carted out toys, one too many little rocking horses, nice sweater bundles—all finally passed on to others’ children. I became more disillusioned about her that week than I had in my whole life. I never had any idea she made as many good paintings and as much decent pottery as she did. I felt ashamed I had dismissed how much anonymous creation meant to her, as if it were a tendency she passed on only to Summer. So even in normal times, we live around people and their things but don’t see who those people truly are. It was certainly possible I’d missed a lot while looking through Summer’s things, one eye fixed on the door she could walk through.

  I plowed through stockpiled industrial wine and foraged through Summer’s sketchbooks and unpolished artworks. She was enviably neat. My bookshelves strangled the hallways, since I turned out to be the bookish one. Summer’s small contribution was a few heavy books about art and artists whose names I could never pronounce, to spite my education in words. Caravaggio, Frankenthaler, Modigliani, Klimt. The biographies and re
trospectives mixed with fine arts and foundation books on color theory, life drawing, and portraiture, so much heavier and more demanding than my grammar manuals, paperback novels, and self-improvement guides. Her notebooks held more doodles than notes. I was the freelance wordsmith she asked to check over the tiniest writings, like her Dear John letters to needy booty calls and her resignation emails to odd jobs. Summer drew versions of herself all her life, leading family and friends to call her recuperative self-portraits “art.” What else were we supposed to say to visions of noose necklaces and self-inflicted stab wounds? Later I helped her submit this stuff to contests and editors who always declined.

  The Black and women artists’ catalogs she collected had much to do with the number of times she was tardy with her part of the electric and cable bills. I was fine to tag along to the Bronx Museum, Studio Museum, and tiny eclectic galleries as a spectator; Summer needed to bring the experiences home. Sometimes the books accompanying these shows cost nearly $100, just to sit untouched and tight together like artworks themselves. Basquiat, Ligon, Ringgold, Bearden. It comforted Summer to know people of color broke through the ceilings, wooed patronage, and achieved name status. I flipped down a Kehinde Wiley catalogue. I joined Summer at one of his first shows at Studio Museum, when I’d arrived to New York to escape a certain future writing corporate copy in Chicago.

  Summer pasted the book’s receipt on the inside cover of promising portraits that foreshadowed Wiley’s eventual ascension. The pages gave way in the middle and a piece of paper floated to my feet. I leaned down to pick up a Xerox of newsprint, with thick block borders and letters time had deformed into unreadability.

  It was an archived feature from The Hedgewood Sentinel, our local paper back home. I was a paper girl for it once, drawn to an entrepreneurial fate and life of words by the time I was in middle school. Then, I got high on the lemony scent of a stack of fresh newspapers. Later, I held off conversion to online news as long as I could.