Speaking of Summer. Kalisha Buckhanon
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is in front that was not there before we closed our eyes. After sweat and lightning-fast heartbeats sprint forward to leave us immobile for an eternity, we will determine the block is a person. The person is a man. The man wants to do things to us and the things will feel excruciating, and we are already at a disadvantage called shock. So, we will just close our eyes to pretend it is all a dream. And as we are waiting to reawaken, we will repeat blame on ourselves: for leaving the door unlocked, the window open, both eyes shut.
The looming block in my bedroom had hands the size of rosebushes. I smelled Hedgewood, aroma of fresh cut grass wafting from nearby yards. I saw scarecrows we kids made in those yards. This was the dream I fell into as the block did more than cut up my space, but come toward me. I blamed myself for not moving the hell out of a building my sister already proved was unsafe.
THE SHOWER REFRESHED ME AND just the smell of coffee made me more alert. I wrapped a towel around and came into the bedroom. Chase dabbed a wet sponge at soft magenta stains from the bougainvillea leaves fallen to the light comforter and carpet. He had cleaned up the ruined plant’s potted soil. Then he gathered and neatened all my research, notes, and news printouts I meant to examine before I passed out. He skimmed a few pages, shook his head, and sighed.
“Autumn, you really need to stop looking at all this stuff. No wonder you acted like I came in here to kill you. This ain’t healthy.”
I kissed him to distract from taking my notes out of his hand.
“I’ll do that,” I told him. “It’s my fault things are a mess.”
“No, you get dressed,” he said. “I’ll do it. And I’m sorry. I’ll call next time.”
But of course, I also should not have been dead to the world at 6 p.m., when Chase was that guy every girl wants. He remembers even the mistress is a lady. He remembers to celebrate milestones and make reservations. He picks up flowers with significance, not just roses in a hurry. I adjusted to his surprise eventually. My terrified response to him using his key to let himself inside was a knot on his forehead and scratch on his cheek.
I chose a red shirtdress for the evening we had planned weeks ago, but work kept us too busy. We missed the steakhouse reservation and had to settle for walking in like the younger crowd. It was our anniversary of sorts. In Chase’s telling, it was “A night to let the drama go for a while and remember what brought us together.”
My sister brought us together, technically. Chase was her man first, off and on. In retrospect, only our mother’s deterioration pushed him on more often for her.
Perfumed and put together in killer heels, I hugged Chase in the back of our cab to Lower Manhattan, the night air more even-tempered and cool. His gesture forced us out of my apartment where Summer’s absence made her an ongoing presence. Yet, I marked our “anniversary” in secret thoughts of my argument with Summer that led me into this affair. She and I never resolved the last time we had Mama with us, alive.
I was single. Caring for my ill mother provided my excuse to bail out of a six-month egomaniac ordeal. But Summer had the nerve to refuse Chase’s invitation to accompany him on a business trip to his homeland, Grenada. We had spoken in hushed tones away from her bedroom, the one Mama took over, the larger one capable of holding her rolling carts of medicines, pain packs, and drawing stuff.
“Most guys just want to drag us to the Poconos or Atlantic City for a change of sex venue, Summer,” I told her. “He wants to take you to Grenada.”
“He’s not taking me,” she snapped back. “His job is.”
Chase’s bright marketing idea was a story and photo shoot on a ninetysomething Grenadan author named Gabriel Johns. Chase dreamed of launching a Grenadan author as a Wolcott or García Márquez in the world. The win-win was a smarter, patrician image for a men’s luxury brand seeking more than pretty boys who couldn’t drink yet to sell their goods to the kind of men who drank only the best. Out of everybody he could have brought along, Chase invited Summer. She found his offer rude, in light of Mama’s care needs.
I continued to scold her: “Most guys wanna jiggle us out of meeting their mothers. He wants to take you thousands of miles away for it. Maybe he’ll propose.”
“And what about Mama?” Summer wanted to know.
“It’s only five days,” I had argued. “Somebody’s gotta break out of this tomb.”
“Fine, you break out.” She walked back to answer our mother’s latest moan.
The fact “somebody” wound up being me was the reason for “anniversary” now.
Chase wriggled us into a South Street Seaport restaurant with a river view. He ordered us a Chianti. We waited for his steak and my whole snapper. I spoke of celebrity gossip, avoided my own. He was especially happy for his work updates. I appeared to enjoy him. I celebrated us as friends, above everything else, always without question, even if Summer waltzed in tomorrow, to tumble our house of cards. The prospect always loomed in both hope and paranoia, undergirded in deceit.
But the dinner table’s candlelight drew me in like Summer’s greedy and mocking eyes. They’d been so different from Mama’s proud ones, vicariously living through my sweepstakes trip with the nice young man who came around. Summer’s eyes had disturbed me when I set out that morning for the getaway she pushed me to accept in her place. For the favor, she didn’t even help me to the taxi with my bags. She just crossed her arms at the top of our hallway staircase, her dramatic “Bon voyage!” in the tenor of a child who seized the last cookie in the jar, or a victor wearing the cape our grandmother crocheted for both of us, or the icebreaker with a party joke at her sister’s expense. Mama just said, “Go, go, go!” As our mother weakened, she relaxed her hold, encouraged us into adventures, women of a different time she may have caught up with had she been granted more than sixty years on the planet. I was the underdog in a joust I never picked up my sword for, hurt by the eyes of my sister who purposely got rid of me via her boyfriend, just so she could be the only scared little girl our weakened mother was to coddle for a while.
It was February 2014 when Summer dispatched me so Chase’s special guest didn’t become another woman, and I sunk down a notch in my commitment to Mama, which Summer was certainly flaunting now. With one gesture, she’d played us both.
We left reeling in the news that Philip Seymour Hoffman had overdosed down in West Village. I trusted technology to obstruct total alienation from Mama—in good spirits—and the godsend that was our hospice helper Penny, now on my mother full-time, to assist Summer as I traveled.
We flew business class from JFK to San Juan. Then we transferred to land at Maurice Bishop International Airport in the capital of Grenada, Saint George’s. Door-to-door, it took an entire day of travel to get to the bed-and-breakfast on Gabriel Johns’s nutmeg tree estate. When we touched down, our limo was outside with its driver holding a sign with Chase’s name. Well, our limo was actually a sandy Jeep, very necessary to roll through steep hills and sharp turns on to Saint Andrew Parish. Our driver explained the history I had researched beyond Wikipedia. I took a moment from his spiel to discover the hidden cost of downgrading to a pay-as-you-go smartphone to save money. It had a full battery but no signal.
I took that as a warning not to call Mama every second. I returned to the spiel.
Gabriel Johns was nearly a king in his parts. He spent his days in a coach house back closer to where his trees grew. He was one of the first in on the burst of tourism after the United States’ 1983 invasion to restore order, in our Congress’s mind, to back-to-back violent coups of Grenadian Parliament heads. Maurice Bishop, the beloved former head of state for whom their airport was named, was executed by firing squad once a rebel military regime captured him. While casualties and battle on their soil created animosity between the small island nation and the States, our vindication of Bishop’s death overrode natives’ lingering hostility, to make us welcome allies in no time. We should rest; they love Americans.
“Not