by Kris Radish
“What do you think?” Katherine asks.
“Perfect,” Jill and Rebecca say at the same time.
The women wait silently for just a second and then Laura talks first. She thinks they should honor the girl/woman who was Annie when she stood right in this same spot, or close to it, all those years ago when she was deciding who she was and what she wanted to do with the person she would be.
“Clearly, Annie came here and decided to live, to let go of whatever it was that was holding her in place, or trying desperately to drag her to a place that was darker than anything I have ever known,” Laura explains, speaking not just to her friends but to the world of spirits and ancient voices she imagines still inhabit the world where she now stands.
Katherine talks next. She recounts the month when Annie returned and how it was clear something had happened because it seemed as if even the color of Annie’s eyes had changed.
“They were light, she was light,” Katherine remembers out loud. “She had lost a great deal of weight, her hair was streaked with strands of blonde that I now know came from this wild sun, but she was also peaceful, so peaceful.”
They all imagine Annie as a teenager who had just tried to take her own life. Annie standing on the very edge of the world and still having the capacity to make that choice, to dip backwards and not fall forward, to slip away and never come back, to hike to the far end of the trail and mingle her bones with the bones of everyone else who had done the same thing.
“The view would have blown her away,” Rebecca said. “She would have dropped to one knee, then to the other, and she would have been breathless for a while.”
Something had happened to Annie then. Maybe, they all imagine, maybe an eagle—a bird of greatness and hope—flew from a hidden nest and whispered in her ear. Maybe one of those magical desert rainbows paused in front of the closest mountain and Annie thought she could touch it, or maybe she simply saw that the world was filled with endless choices, endless places, endless opportunities.
“She cried,” Katherine states as if she is talking about herself. “She would have cried quietly after she made the decision. It would have been like a bath, a cleansing moment, and after that she would have had a burst of energy that launched her back into my life and toward each one of you.”
They are all silent then as they imagine Annie G. Freeman in 1968 with her tattered jeans, long dishwater-blonde hair and the somewhat ratty green sweatshirt that she wore constantly. Hiking boots, the hint of musk on her neck and the weight of the world on her shoulders.
When the moment passes, Jill asks if they think she really might have been at this same spot.
“Shit, yes,” Rebecca says. “She knew that we would follow her scent. She stood right here. And something wonderful happened here, just like something wonderful is happening to us now.”
“Katherine.” Jill takes a small step forward because to take a larger one would send her off the cliff. “This is your spot too. This is where you played big in her life and I think you should send her off here. Can you?”
“Can I?” Katherine asks herself softly but still out loud. “Can I?”
Before she does anything, Katherine asks each woman to touch the shoes, “Just like they do in church before they take the casket away,” she explains to them and as they do this Jill bends down to pick up a long white stone for Marie. They touch the red tennis shoes and they each have a thought of Annie, young, beautiful, alive—alive.
Katherine unlaces the red shoes and unties the tidy plastic bag full of ashes that rests inside one. Jill tips the shoe slightly so that the ashes flow into the palm of Katherine’s right hand, ashes as soft as the desert air. Without asking or saying a word, each one of the women dips her fingers into the ashes, takes a little, and then as Katherine turns and throws her hands into the soft morning wind, the women, Annie’s friends, her female family, do the exact same thing.
The ashes move fast. They dip for just a second and then a gust of wind, the breath of the very desert itself, takes them and scatters them into every direction.
“Yee-ha,” Katherine shouts.
Jill raises her hands and smiles. Laura weeps quietly. Rebecca drops to one knee and simply looks into the sun. Marie, just then, at that exact moment, turns her head toward the window in the middle of Willard’s twenty-eighth cough and blows a long kiss toward New Mexico.
15
* * *
The six cowboys, two trailer-park refugees, a seventy-eight-year-old bartender named Buck, and Melissa, the nineteen-year-old waitress from Bernahillo, who is saving every tip so she can move to Denver or some other large city that has green grass and trees to block her view, have never quite seen anything like these women with their red tennis shoes, red bandanas, sunburned noses and tear-streaked faces.
“You at the far cabin?” Buck asks them as they literally fall into the Ranchero Grill.
This after a day spent spreading ashes, hiking more than six hot miles, debates on staying near Albuquerque or bunking one more night at the cabin before an early flight, several phone calls from Marie, numerous entries in the funeral log, a terrific argument between Katherine and Laura about directions, Rebecca hauling out her hidden bottle of vodka just after two P.M., and more than a few hilarious stories about other trips, Annie’s life and the interesting set of circumstances that brought them to a bar that looked from the outside as if it had been dragged to New Mexico behind a stagecoach in 1895.
“Let’s corral a table,” Laura says, shaking hands with Buck and introducing herself as she passes him near the cigarette machine. “The cabin is almost as lovely as the view.”
Melissa brings them a round of beers, four menus and word from Jake Hasdorf, the cowboy at the edge of the bar, that he is sending over a round of whiskey shots because they looked as if they need it.
“What?” Jill asks, looking from left to right as if she has never heard of such a thing.
“The guy in the brown felt hat, red shirt, jeans, at the bar is buying you each a shot of whiskey.”
Melissa says this slowly as if she is talking in a foreign language, then she watches Jill patiently to make certain that she understands what a free shot of whiskey might entail.
“He is?”
“Yes, ma’am, he is.”
Jill looks as if someone has slapped her. Katherine starts laughing because she realizes that the often isolated university world that has cradled Jill Matchney for most of her life most likely did not include traveling funerals, vodka tonics after lunch, and whiskey shots from cowboys before the buffalo burgers were even served.
“What’s so funny?” Jill asked her.
“The look on your face,” Katherine answers, reaching over to put her hand around Jill’s wrist. “Quick—tell me what you were doing a year ago right at this very moment?”
Jill gets it and as the shots make their way toward the table she stands to greet Melissa, slides the whiskey in front of her friends, and throws back the first one before anyone can move.
“That was for Annie.”
The women instantly launch into a wild discussion about other nights in bars that included Annie. The cowboys and the husband and wife from the trailer park watch them as if all four of them have tuned into a movie that has them mesmerized. Melissa wants to sit down and join them. The waitress can’t stay away from them.
“Where are you from?” she asks them, anxious to hear of anything besides what she considers to be the end of the earth where she has spent the first two decades of her life.
“California and Chicago,” Laura tells her. “Big places, lots of people.”
“Not like this.” Melissa looks past them and out onto a stretch of dark desert that makes her want to vomit. “I can’t wait to leave.”
“It’s a big world and this is a lovely part of it too, you know. Well, you don’t know but you will someday.”
“You sound like my mother,” Melissa says, leaning from the waist and putting both hands on
the table. “Why did you guys come here?”
The question stops everyone. Do they tell her? Do they look into this young woman’s eyes and just say it? Do they say, “We came to spread our best friend’s ashes off the edge of the cliff”? Do they tell her they are a traveling funeral? Will she run screaming from the room? Will they have to go someplace else to get more beer? Will the revelations change this woman’s life so that she never leaves home and ends up waitressing until her legs give out?
“Well,” Jill finally says, “it’s kind of complicated.”
“Complicated?” Melissa repeats, finally pulling up a chair and forgetting that the women have not even ordered.
“Let me ask you a question before I answer that,” Jill continues. “Okay?”
“Sure,” Melissa says, elbows on the table, hands on her chin, looking at Jill as if she is about to hear the greatest bedtime story of her life. “Ask away. You are the only eating customers in here and the customers always get what they want.”
Jill has this idea. She’s thinking about the history of a place, how the people in that place are the keepers of the past. She knows this girl has a story. Melissa is part of this arid desert place and she always will be, no matter where she ends up, and she knows something. Even if it’s one tiny thing, one slice of information, this young woman knows something.
“Is your family from this area?”
Melissa laughs. She immediately launches into an oral recitation of her family’s past and Jill knows even before the story ends that they are all about to learn something that has to do with Annie. Melissa’s ancestors founded one tiny community after another along this entire section of New Mexico. Land-rich and money-poor, they struggle to this day, Melissa tells them, to do things like help put a daughter through college, buy a new pickup truck, or move beyond the limits of a land that has captured their hearts.
Jill is patient but her foot is tapping under the table. She wonders if anyone has ever bothered to ask Melissa what she wants or thinks or cares about. Melissa needs to talk. The older women squirm and finger their tiny shot glasses, as the waitress unloads.
“I understand why they love this land but my heart isn’t here, it never has been,” she tells them softly. “When I was a little girl my father took me with him when he drove and drove and drove through all these canyons and I sat in the back reading, all the time I was reading. I didn’t care about the blooming sagebrush or the way the damn sun rose over the far mountain.”
The women smile, put down their glasses, and listen. All mothers but Jill, who was a mother to hundreds of college girls and boys, they see the strain of yearning in Melissa’s face, in the way she bends toward the window, how she rushed toward them, their lives, their purpose in what she perceives as her tiny corner of the world.
And then there is her age.
Annie was a teenager when she stood at the edge of the canyon just blocks beyond this restaurant’s windows. Melissa is nineteen. Suddenly this common denominator grabs all of them and they wait for Jill to do whatever it is that has come into her head and heart.
Jill is kind but it is a struggle for her to be still while Melissa talks. She can barely sit quietly with her questions rubbing against the bad nerve on her left leg but she waits and then she asks a question she knows someone must have asked Annie—maybe in this same restaurant, maybe at this same hour, maybe, maybe, maybe.
“What do you want, Melissa?”
Melissa rises off her chair, pushes her hands against the edge of the table as if she is fending off a stampede, and speaks slowly and very clearly.
“My own life,” she says, looking directly at Jill. “Not their life or my grandma’s life or whatever someone else has planned for me. A life of books, words, learning. A life that shows me more than one way to look at things. All the horizons, hundreds of them, not just this same one over and over again. Choices.”
She hesitates for a moment and then begins again slowly as if she has memorized what she is going to say and is afraid she will miss a word.
“Mostly, mostly,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment and then opening them again, “I want just a chance to see who I am beyond the invisible fence-line that has been constructed around the horizon they all seem to think is endless and free.”
Melissa steps away from the table then as she remembers that she is a waitress and should probably not be splitting herself in two like she has just done. But Laura gently grabs her wrist and keeps her in place.
“Wait,” she tells Melissa. “The saying that customers are always right is a crock of shit but wait. We’ll order eventually. You need to stay here for just a little while.”
Katherine looks over at Buck asking him with her eyes if it’s okay for Melissa to sit for a while, before they order, before she gets them another drink, and he smiles, gives her the thumbs-up, and starts pouring more beer, including one for Melissa who has been drinking beer since she was a baby.
“Hey,” Rebecca says. “It makes sense to me. You should leave. Once you find out who you are, you can always come back. Some people never know that. Then again, some of us are still trying to find out who we are. It’s pretty much a daily event in my life.”
Something has clicked into place inside of Jill. It’s like a slipped gear that has suddenly grabbed hold of its correct position and helps the entire machine leap back into motion. Jill knows that Melissa needs to hear that she is not alone and that hundreds and thousands of other young women in places that are not even half this remote know and feel the same things but Jill cannot hold back any longer. She is on the edge of something that she knows must be there and she has to see if it really exists.
“Melissa . . . ? Before we get into this any more I have to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Your family has been here forever, right?”
“Before forever. Why?”
“Was there ever a treatment center around here? A place where people from other places sent their kids? Or came themselves to heal or see the light or save their dreary and lost souls?”
Melissa laughs. The soft growl from her throat is sweet and kind. When she finishes she sits up again and moves her eyes from Laura to Rebecca to Katherine and then to Jill.
“It’s been a while,” she says. “I should have asked right away but you all threw me off. Maybe it’s the drinking or your openness. It all threw me off. No one has asked for a while.”
“Tell us, please,” Rebecca urges, leaning across the table to touch Melissa’s arm just as Buck brings over a round of beers and sets one down in front of Melissa with a wink.
“He’s my great-uncle,” she tells them. “Around here we are all related. He’s sweet. I love him.”
“Was there a center or something around here?” Jill presses.
“The place was called Desert Dreams.”
“The place?”
Melissa tells them as she drinks her beer and realizes that her local knowledge is a golden commodity with these women. A commodity that she clearly sees as a sudden and fun gift exchange. She tells them. She tells them because even with her rural and wide-open heart she senses that they must have kind hearts and that there is something sad that has brought them to her desert and they might help her. They might help her find her own non-desert dream. Everyone, she thinks, is looking for something. That’s one thing she has learned from her nineteen years. The one thing she knows for certain beyond knowing that she has to leave the very place where she is now sitting. These women with their eager eyes and soft smiles want an exchange of information, kind of a knowledge barter, Melissa thinks, and Melissa, who has a soft smile and a young but equally kind heart, cannot stop herself. Even without the exchange, Melissa, Melissa from Bernahillo, New Mexico, would do it anyway because her southwestern life is rooted in giving and she knows another true heart when she sees one or four of them.
She tells them about a place founded in the late sixties by psychologists from California who though
t that adolescents needed to remove themselves from a world that was often nasty and cruel. A world where children were groomed to be and think and act like all the other children and where someone like Annie G. Freeman would be paralyzed.
“My mom worked there,” Melissa tells them, closing her eyes to help her remember a story, any story, the dozens of stories her mother recounted time and time again.
Kids from everywhere. Many of them not much younger than Melissa’s mother. Wild. Savage almost. Lonely and lost souls who gathered in a place that had the power, the potential to heal them if they came to the ledge with the same feelings.
The four women are entranced. They look at Jill as if she has just discovered a cure for cancer. “How did you know to ask this?” they want to say. “Will you make some unique discovery everywhere we go? What do you know that we don’t know?”
They press toward Melissa without knowing it, shifting hands and legs and arms and heads as if they were all trying to catch a cool breeze in the middle of July.
“Melissa, look,” Jill finally reveals. “We came here to celebrate the life of a woman who was probably here when your mom was working there. She was young like you then and we all loved her and now here we are to remember whatever we can, to try and know her even better, to understand why this place was so important to her.”
Melissa wants to say “wow,” but she can’t. A thousand stories are flashing through her mind and she wonders which one they want to hear and she wonders, too, about their friend who has died. Should she tell them about the girl who could only walk backwards? What about the boy who killed all his pets? How about the family who stayed in their car at the edge of the gate for three days because they were afraid their son might be eaten alive? The wild dogs? The survival walk? Or the way so many of the “kids” came back year after year to just stand at the cliff edge so they could try to remember who they were and how they had survived?
Melissa turns and looks slowly from one woman to the other. Her secluded world has given her the grace and ease and the poise of patience, respect, the ability to truly see. She sees sweet doses of wisdom and intelligence in each face as she turns from one woman to the next, smiling and grateful to know them in this small space.