Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  They may have known something but no one knew everything.

  No one knew how he watched her and followed her. No one knew he sat in the back seat of her car the days she forgot to lock it. The nights when she did not work late he was often in the unlocked office down the hall listening, waiting, thinking, wondering and hoping. Sometimes he slept in the bushes underneath her bathroom window. He knew exactly how long she stayed in the shower almost every morning.

  Annie was no fool. She eventually called the campus police and they called the Chicago police. The police took the notes and the slippers and the rubber knives and then they made their own notes and said—as if they were simply warning someone about crossing a street—“Be careful.”

  Then they left and then one night he came.

  Even with this man—whom she came to call the Cat Man because he often mentioned during his late night phone calls how he would love to touch her pussy—stalking her nights and days and mornings, Annie often became lost in her work. She was desperately trying to write a high school counseling book and she was teaching writing classes at the university, and raising her two sons. Sometimes in the middle of all that living, she completely forgot about how she needed to be guarding her pussy.

  But he never forgot.

  He came for her at a strange angle, and lost in her life thoughts, Annie G. Freeman was taken off-guard. His arms shot out at her at 37 minutes after 6 P.M. when the campus was strangely quiet and on a Friday when no one was coming in, everyone had left and only Annie on sabbatical was determined to work.

  When he pulled her down in the deserted hallway that led to her office, she went willingly because she was so startled and unsuspecting. He wore no mask. There was no disguise and as he climbed on top of her and worked to push her into the restroom she studied his face in that moment, the moment when something horrible is just beginning and you do not yet realize it, you are simply curious, you are just on the early side of not yet knowing enough to be terrified.

  His eyes were blue, not black. He was handsome, not grotesque. He smelled of musk and soft soap, not sweat and danger. He had on a denim shirt, jeans, a belt with a silver buckle. When she looked at him for those five seconds, before she noticed how large his pupils were, that his face twitched endlessly, that he rolled his neck every few seconds, she had no idea she was about to fight for her life. Five quick seconds. Seconds that fled faster than any seconds she had ever before held or seen or dared to imagine.

  It took her a while to fight because she was not sure what he wanted. Rape? To simply see her pussy? To put his hands around her neck and watch her slip from one world to the next? To beat her senseless? To make small cuts on her writing fingers and across the ancient scar on her wrist that already marked her as a survivor?

  Suddenly it was all of the above and all she could see were the tiny fingers of her boys when they were babies. An image that came from nowhere like a mysterious stranger in a dark hallway. The tiny fingers all lined up on the piano keys in their living room in California feeling the smooth top of the ivory keyboard as if they were playing in the sand on the beach back at Grandma’s cabin on Lake Superior.

  “Oh,” she screamed. Then again. “Oh.”

  The sight of those invisible fingers made Annie do something strange and remarkable. Not unlike the woman near Omaha who lifted the car off her eleven-year-old daughter who had gone underneath it to retrieve a baseball only to have it crash down on her legs. The woman could never do such a thing again. She should never have been able to do it in the first place but there was her daughter, with the fingers from her right hand waving silently for help and the woman simply lifting up the car as if she were picking up the edge of the curtain in the living room to discover a lost tennis shoe.

  That’s what Annie Freeman did. She went nuts. She raised herself up off the hallway floor, with those baby boy fingers in her mind, and she slammed the man in the denim shirt into the side of the stall door in the men’s john on the first floor of the English wing as if she were tossing a scarf over her shoulder. She tossed him and then she ran.

  He grabbed her ankle on the fly but she kept her balance—eyes on the baby fingers—and she ran into her temporary office, slammed the door, locked it and then in another show of mother’s might she managed to push an ancient wooden desk up against the door and wedge herself under it for extra weight. Then she waited.

  Annie waited for those long 43.8 minutes and she listened para-lyzed with fear and unable to reach out for the phone. She heard rattling at the end of the hall. She heard him come close, breathing hard, she heard him whisper—because he knew she was there—“I’ll get you.” She heard fingers tapping across the door. His breath separated from her by the thickness of a wall.

  And then she thought she heard him leave.

  She reached for the phone from under her desk breathless, shaking, unable to think. Her fingers dialed a random number that came up empty. She could not even remember a simple number. Dialing 911 was an impossibility. She waited for a fast miracle, mind blank, hands trembling, a line of dried blood from gashing her head into the metal belt buckle streaked across her left cheek. There on the side of the office phone was a number—1234. The campus crisis line—twenty-four hours every single day of the year. Just dial those numbers and someone will help you.

  “Help me, please.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Professor Annie Freeman. On campus. He’s in the hall. Jesus. I don’t know what to do. Please help me.”

  The voice was so calm, so kind, so wonderful.

  “What building are you? Can you tell me that?”

  Annie G. Freeman who has conquered foreign worlds, salvaged her own soul, given birth to two large-headed babies, faced a Board of Regents as if she were looking into a gorgeous sunset, changed the rules in dozens of books—that Annie Freeman surrenders to that voice.

  She will do anything, any fucking thing, for that voice.

  When they come it is not too late to save Annie but too late to save the man from doing it to someone else.

  “Hey,” she hears the voice say to her from just beyond the door, where he must have been, was, may be again. “Hey, Annie, are you there?”

  Annie waits before she answers. She is in that place where she thinks this might be a trick. She holds her breath to make certain and the voice sounds again. It is strong, safe, wise.

  “Hey, Annie, it’s Laura from the campus crisis line, the women’s center. You called me. It’s safe now. There are police here. He’s gone. It’s okay.”

  Laura. Oh, wonderful Laura.

  It did not happen overnight. It was not easy. It would never be forgotten or forgiven. Annie fell into the arms and heart and talents of Laura and her women’s center and its many causes and concerns. It was an embrace that transcended the incident where they first met, an embrace that blossomed into friendship, fine love, and passed the test of time and place that often triggers a distance that makes friendship cloudy and forgotten.

  But Annie never forgot.

  Laura never forgot.

  They forged a bond of hope, of change, of memorable moments that covered the night they met and moved them both to a place of shared strength, talents and friendship that lasted until the day Annie died.

  And even longer than that.

  8

  * * *

  “Shit.”

  This favorite word that passed across the lips of Rebecca was like dessert to her. No matter where she was or what happened, just saying the word “shit” made her somehow feel better.

  “Some people think it’s filthy because someone told them it was a dirty word,” she told someone at least twice a day. “But ‘shit’ gets me through. I say it and it makes me smile. I can’t stop it or help myself. I love ‘shit.’ ”

  That made her laugh too.

  “I love shit.”

  “Say it,” she would tell people, some of them people Rebecca had never met but happened to be sitting next to, o
r sharing a meal with at a convention, or parked next to at a busy intersection. “Just say it and see what happens.”

  Mostly people laughed too because a fairly attractive, kind-looking and gentle-speaking—well, except for that “shit” word—woman who appeared sort of harmless, looked her age (which was fifty-three), was talking to them about a word that most people perceived as being from the Swear Family.

  Rebecca was swearing when the phone rang. She was saying something worse than “shit.” A word that has become as acceptable as part of everyday verbiage in many cultures but a word that even she was loath to speak out loud. Except when the phone was ringing when she did not really want to answer it. Except when she was wanting to lie down and sleep and yet was seemingly waiting for something else to happen. One more thing. One more shitty thing.

  “What?” she asked herself out loud as she picked up the phone and then asked it again without waiting for some kind of reply or question in return.

  “What? What the shit do you want?”

  Katherine laughs. She should have expected this. This is Rebecca. Katherine knows this. She does. She knows about the “shit” and the somewhat messy life, like shit itself, and the way Rebecca often talks in questions because she is always going someplace and she is always in a hurry and in a shitty mess. She imagines Rebecca who just about always wears flip-flops, has refused to dye her hair, loves huge earrings and men’s tailored shirts, dressed just like that and with her hand cradling the phone between her chin and chest.

  “Hey, Rebecca, it’s Katherine Givins. How are you?”

  “What the hell?”

  Katherine laughs again. She can’t help it and then her mind launches into one of those tired, kind-of-hysterical places because she has been up now for a very long period of time and she is manic at best and getting worse. Rebecca’s predictableness makes her laugh and she quickly stops herself from sketching out the rest of the conversation.

  “Just hearing your shitty voice makes me want to laugh. Annie would like that.”

  Rebecca laughs, too, just hearing her response, and then quickly flies into a place that brings her out of orbit very fast. It is their connection. How they know each other. Why they may be speaking on the phone this very second.

  Annie.

  How she misses Annie.

  “Katherine Givins,” Rebecca says. “Of course I know who you are,” she adds, acknowledging a name, then a woman, then a parade of memories that come marching toward her before she can think to get out of their way.

  “Oh my God . . .” she manages to say and then Katherine gives her a minute.

  She gives her a minute because she knows who Rebecca Carlson is and was and always will be. She knows how Annie moved in next door to Rebecca in 1993 following six months of heated and sometimes hilarious and frequently shitty debate about the price of the piece of the land—money which Rebecca needed desperately but would never admit so—and the location of the house that was to be built and its height and the landscaping until Rebecca was about to suggest and then demand the placement of stones up the driveway and Annie finally said, “No, damn it, no. You let go, woman. You let me be your neighbor and take my money and let me share your view.”

  Rebecca let go. She had no choice. Depleted resources. A mother and a father who gave her everything and then took it all back and then some as she nursed them over and through and then way beyond a valley of sickness so dark and thick and wasteful that it was a wonder Rebecca could wake and walk and breathe in the morning.

  Then she dragged herself through a succession of funerals. Father. Mother. Aunt. Then her sister. Her lovely, young beautiful sister, who bounced against the steering wheel and then flew out of the car window as if she were trying to grab something off the top of the tree she hit. An endless succession of improbable loss.

  And then there was Annie G. Freeman with her wide life and her damn earthmovers and those young men of hers and Rebecca could not help herself. She could not keep from falling into the arms and life of her sassy and sometimes shitty neighbor who had the gall, the goddamn gall, to die.

  “She died too,” Rebecca whispered into the phone, thinking that maybe Katherine would not hear her.

  But Katherine was ready. She knew this story and she was ready to stretch her arms across the miles from where she was standing in her kitchen and fool this woman, this Rebecca Carlson, into thinking that her own fine limbs could substitute for the limbs and heart of the neighbor who had turned into family—solid, true, loving, forever lasting.

  “Give me a minute,” Rebecca says. “Don’t go. I just need to catch my breath. To sit.”

  Rebecca sits. Grief had exhausted her. She sits where she can see Annie’s house, dark and quiet and nestled against a small hill that she had always imagined, since the house was built, was put just there to help support a home where a woman lived who could hold up the entire rest of the world. A house where Rebecca learned how to keep moving and to allow herself to feel and to love again. A house where Annie pushed her fingers against Rebecca’s not-yet-healed scars of loss and grieving that had barely disappeared when she had to do it all over again. And again and then one more time.

  And the day Annie told her. Rebecca moving from the gate and garage toward the house and then catching a glimpse of Annie walking slowly, her hands tucked inside of her blue down vest that she wore so much it had faded three shades up so that it was more white than blue. Annie walking with her eyes on Rebecca’s face, a face covered in an ocean of wetness, and then a cry of anguish that came from a place so far away that it was not real, could not be real, was nothing more than an imagined echo from an ancient time and place.

  “Honey,” Annie cried. “Oh, honey.”

  They moved from the walk to the porch to the living room couch where they had spent so much time, so many hours of talking and solving and sharing and getting on about every aspect of life that it had become their four-legged oasis, a harbor, a place to nest and heal before they threw themselves back into the orbit of the real world.

  And now the real world would never be the same. Everything would change and for once Rebecca knew, she knew exactly what would happen next and what she could do and could not do and she knew, too, that her heart had healed just long enough to be severed in half one more time.

  “Oh, Rebecca, I’m sorry to do this to you again. I’m so sorry and I’m so damned scared.”

  They talked after that with Rebecca holding on to her as tightly as Annie was holding on to Rebecca. Hours of touching and talking that set them on a course that took them to a place that was not and could never have been imagined.

  “Rebecca?” Katherine asks.

  Katherine asks this question because she imagines that Rebecca, like Jill and Laura, has fallen into a place of remembering, into the heart of her grief, into that place where when you close your eyes you can still feel the faint breath of your friend when she kisses your cheek, the warm fingers of her hands supporting your arm when you scurry up the hill during a hike, the call at one A.M. when you see her bedroom light still flickering through the trees at the edge of the lot line, the waving hand on your way to work, the six-pack of beer on a Friday night that she leaves on your doorstep, the edge of laughter that has been pounded like an ancient drum against your own laugh line.

  “I’m here,” Rebecca responds, lifting her head and then turning so she moves away from the view, that shitty shared horizon.

  “These have been tough weeks. I haven’t called in a while and now I have something else to tell you.”

  Rebecca laughs and the laugh, which is raucous and bold—almost something you could lift over your shoulder it is so real—makes Katherine laugh too.

  “This isn’t really funny,” Katherine says through her own machine-gun giggles. “But we both know something else had to happen. We both know that Annie would have to do something else.”

  “Please do not tell me you are dying,” Rebecca begs in all seriousness.

 
; “No, Rebecca, that’s not it. We should all have known that Annie had one more request up her sleeve for us. Something she wants us to do. One last thing.”

  “Nothing, so it seems, is ever really over.”

  Rebecca is thinking of her own divorce when she says that. The painful throb of the mere word makes her laughter shriek to a halt, and the last laugh, for now, the last laugh lingers while she pauses to hold that anguish from his leaving, her wanting him to leave, the idea that was once an eternity will now be locked forever at 7.7 years and that the one daughter they have managed to create will now become a tool, a pawn, a poker chip that he will choose to throw on the table, take back and then throw again so many times it almost blinds Rebecca with anger.

  “Should I go?” the tiny voice of her daughter Marden asked her so many times when she was eight and then nine and then twelve and then finally when she was sixteen and said, “This is enough. Now I know I should go.”

  The phone calls about insurance and who pays for what and the screams of his new babies in the background and the unmistakable pounding of the new woman’s hands on the table as she locked his eyes with hers and most likely mouthed, “Hang up on the bitch,” while Rebecca waited for an answer about the band trip, summer vacation, a car, college tuition, the rest of their daughter’s life.

  Even now, random phone calls: “Did she move?” “How can I get hold of her?” “Did you take my name off of her insurance?”

  You think it might be over and then something turns up in the basement boxes that throws you into a place of swift agony. The shitty photos from the trip to Mexico the year before the divorce. Remembering things now that should have been a tip-off. A phone number on the bill that he said “must have been a wrong number.” The way he looked away when you asked him to make love to you on the beach, “Too much sun,” he’d said and added, “Maybe tomorrow.” Tomorrow there was the fiesta and then the bus tour and then in six months the fighting and what you considered trying without knowing that he was already gone, that he had left so long ago it would be impossible to remember back that far.