Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  “Jill, what has been a lot for you?”

  Jill looks at Katherine and smiles. She wants to tell Katherine everything. She wants to pour every secret and scared thought into this woman’s other hand and then watch her as she sifts through them to learn about the mysteries of her heart and life. She wants to say things she has not said in a very long time.

  “Do you really want to know?” she asks, hoping with a fierceness that stops her heart for just a second that Katherine will say yes.

  There is a pause but it is not a hesitation. It is a pause of surprise because Katherine cannot imagine that Jill would not think that she would want to know. Katherine cannot imagine that Annie would have picked each of them if they were not the same in so many ways, if their hearts had not twisted and bent and danced in similar directions.

  “Yes,” Katherine says firmly and watches as Jill lets out all the air she has been holding inside.

  “Oh, so much, Katherine. I suppose I have my own things to let go of, too.”

  Katherine smiles and lets her right hand fall open onto the shoebox. She squeezes Jill’s right hand with her left and leans over to kiss her on the side of the face in a spot that she finds precious, where her hair meets her ear.

  “So much, I suppose, so much that I have kept so close, too close to the edge of all that I could have been,” Jill says, thinking aloud. “Sometimes, I think I missed too many chances, that life was slapping me right in the face and I just looked the other way. Sometimes I was so damn busy reading the map to get directions that I forgot to look up and see what was outside the window. Do you understand?”

  Katherine doesn’t answer right away. She just looks at Jill, and holds her hand a bit tighter and waits for whatever it is, the one thing, the small secret that will link them forever.

  “I know,” she whispers. “We all have our lost directions. It’s okay, Jill. Whatever it is, it’s okay. It doesn’t mean you can’t start a new road trip.”

  Jill tells Katherine about a lost love that would not carry into the university life of a woman who was destined to govern the entire campus. A woman loving a woman all those years ago was not so easy and Jill tells Katherine a story of a choice that changed everything.

  “I could have had it all, I could have loved her and lived with her but I never knew that, I never felt that and so I let her go and part of a life I wanted so desperately I let slip away,” she explains. “One day I simply went away on one of those long walks that I still love to take and I sealed off my heart from romantic love, from the kind of feeling and life that lust and passion can bring to you.”

  Katherine wants to make the pilot land the plane so that she can grab Jill up in her arms and take her to a place where she can see that she can have everything. She wants to run with her naked through a women’s festival and through a dozen major cities and show her how a woman loving a woman is possible. She wants to sit up, slap Jill and tell her that she knew better, that the world, even all those years ago, was more accepting and open than she might ever have imagined. Katherine opens her mouth to speak but Jill guesses what she is about to say.

  “It could have worked,” Jill tells her. “I know that but I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t have the years and power behind me that I have now,” she explains. “It was too much then but maybe it’s never too late. Maybe I can start lots of things over. Maybe if I can get off my damn porch and go on a traveling funeral I can do a lot of other things.”

  Katherine smiles. She wonders if Jill would have ever thought this or felt this if she had stayed on her back porch and mourned the loss of Annie’s life and her own life. Death, she will tell her, opens a door into more than just the life of the person who has been lost.

  Jill goes on. She tells Katherine it was too much to keep up all the walls of her world and too much when she refused to cross the lines with students who would have made remarkable lifelong friends and too much when she turned down other chances to love.

  “Too much, too many times,” she finally admits, sitting back into her chair and placing her face in her hands. “And this was supposed to be your time to grieve for your mother, to grieve for Annie. And here you are listening to me.”

  “This is a part of it all.” Katherine is trying hard to stay in her seat when she wants to run through the plane shouting, “Live, goddamn it, live every damn day and stop being so afraid.” She wants to shout it, to say it to Jill, so that she can listen to it herself.

  Instead she keeps talking. Instead she throws a wild question to Professor Jill.

  “Do you think she knew this would happen?”

  “What?” the professor asks, looking just a bit stunned.

  “Look at us, for crissakes. We are all hungover, I’m carrying around a box of human ashes as we fly to an island we have never heard about, you’ve just invited a virtual stranger to live with you, and we all keep going to confession to each other. It’s like a new reality show, ‘Annie Unleashed’ or something.”

  The professor laughs. It is a loud snort that whips like a wild scarf that has just caught the end of a breeze that was designed to screw with humans who think everything should be just a certain way.

  “Hey,” Laura shouts. “No spitting.”

  “Sorry,” Jill explains, “but I’m having an Annie moment.”

  Of course Annie knew this would happen, the professor finally admits. Of course Annie knew I needed a kick in the ass and that we all needed something to fuel our lives for the next stop. Of course she knew that the common bond of her friendship with all of us before and after her death would live on because of this trip and then beyond. Of course she knew. Maybe.

  “Maybe it was just supposed to be a funeral too,” Jill says. “Maybe just Annie’s funeral.”

  A ringing phone, a tiny chorus of chimes, startles both Jill and Katherine until the good professor remembers she forgot to turn off Marie’s cell phone when they took off from the airport.

  “Shit,” she says, turning to grab the phone and answer it.

  “Good answer,” Rebecca whispers through the split in the cushions.

  “Marie!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Probably about twenty-five thousand feet and climbing.”

  “Can you talk to me?”

  “Yes, unless the stewardess comes past and tries to bust me.”

  And so the two women talk about patients and patience. They talk about halfway houses for retired professors and about the way change sometimes leaps up to bite people in the ankles and they talk about sorrow and how it comes to every woman in different shapes and sizes.

  “Not just in death,” Marie explains. “It can be so many things.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In my backyard. I came home for a small break. My feet are killing me and I’m going to throw on some coffee and sit for a minute before I have to run into the office and write out three thousand reports.”

  “I remember,” Jill says, turning to watch Katherine fold her hands over her mother’s obituary. “There’s something comforting about regularity and things like forms and agendas and plans and promises kept.”

  Marie laughs and tells her regularity’s also a royal pain in the ass and that she’d rather just hop from patient to patient and never fill in another form the rest of her life.

  “People can get so tied to the regular agenda that they think that’s how life is supposed to be. Do you have any idea how many of my terminal patients retired just a week before they found out they had cancer? Or how many of them fell and broke a hip or just wore out before they got to travel to some exotic place they have always dreamed about visiting? Why do people wait? It’s not always the best thing to do.”

  Marie needs to sit but she can’t. She’s suddenly caught up in her own conversation, which has quickly turned into a confession of sorts.

  “Sometimes I wait and then when I think about Annie dying and everyone else along with her I scream,” she says, walking as if sh
e is in a marching band, back and forth, back and forth in her own front yard. “I need to be more spontaneous. If I could pick one thing—that would be it. Spontaneous.”

  Katherine can hear parts of the cell phone conversation and she has quietly folded her mother’s obituary and placed it back inside the shoebox. When she hears the word “spontaneous” the second time, she grabs the phone from Jill.

  “Hey, you,” Katherine says. “Are you looking for a good time?”

  “Like a traveling funeral?” Marie laughs into the phone. “The people I deal with can actually lean over the edges of their beds and tell me what it’s going to look like the day they die. A traveling funeral? I’m not so sure. I’m trying hard to leave. I am. I have calls in to three subs. I should know something by this evening.”

  Katherine thinks for just a few seconds. She thinks about the routines of her own life that have swallowed her up and kept her locked into places that she no longer finds comfortable and she realizes this for the very first time because she is on a traveling funeral. She can also not let go of the feeling that her mother would be telling her something important, something like “Make more time” because that is exactly what her mother did.

  “Spontaneity is good for the heart and soul and whatever else you believe in, Marie,” Katherine explains, trying to convince herself and Marie at the same time. “That’s what my mother would say anyway. This whole thing has already, in what—not even two days?—turned into something much more than a funeral. Remember what I said? These things are not really for the dead but for the living and you have to decide how you want to do that. I suppose I do also.”

  “Do what?” Marie asks quietly, halting her march, placing her hand over her heart to still the beating blasts that propelled her to say things she already thinks she may regret.

  “Live. How do you want to live?”

  Marie cannot remember anyone ever having asked her this particular question. She cannot remember when she stopped long enough, beyond her moments of silence in her bedroom, to consider such a notion. She worries and talks about how everyone else lives. Her patients. Her children. Her husband. But her? She feels a hard ball forming in the pit of her stomach.

  “Marie?” Katherine asks after a long pause when she thinks the cell must have gone into hibernation as they passed over some kind of invisible communication wall thousands of feet above the rest of the ringing phones and loud voices of the world.

  “Isn’t this supposed to be about Annie?” Marie asks softly.

  Katherine laughs. She’d love to push back the seat and become hysterical for a good week.

  “About Annie? Oh, yes, I suppose that’s what she wanted us to think, but you know Annie—always pushing toward some secret and wild conclusion. Maybe this funeral will end up to be more about us, each one of us, than about Annie.”

  Marie doesn’t skip a beat. She tells Katherine that at least she doesn’t have to finish thinking about her own life or what she wants for a few more hours.

  “Not for long,” Katherine warns. “Wait until you get here. You are in big trouble.”

  “Katherine,” Marie says suddenly because something large has roared to the forefront of her mind. It is something she has never told anyone, not even Annie G. Freeman.

  “What?” Katherine asks as the Miami-bound plane hits its fly zone and she can hear Rebecca snoring softly above the pilot’s description of the flight and the temperature and the glorious fact that anyone who needs to can now use the bathroom.

  “I’ve always wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle.”

  “A motorcycle?” Katherine says back with a smile that could probably ignite three cycles without the use of an electric starter.

  Katherine knows that Marie is serious and out of all the possibilities life has to offer, how interesting that the kind nurse would choose two wheels and an open road as her most pressing secret desire. When she closes her eyes and listens to Marie describe how being alone and in control of her time is so foreign to her that she can only imagine this dream where she is wearing a leather vest and riding into a sunset on two wheels, Katherine decides that it makes perfect sense.

  “Do it,” she urges. “Where is the closest Harley dealer up there? They have classes.”

  Marie starts moving in the yard again, then slaps herself in the head. “Here we are in the middle of a funeral. We shouldn’t be thinking about ourselves. What is wrong with me?”

  “Look,” Katherine explains, “here is what I think. There’s a wound that opens when someone you love dies. It’s a raw emotion that needs to be revealed every now and then.”

  Silence.

  Marie is thinking, “Of course,” just “Of course that is exactly true” and she tells Katherine it almost makes her want to go to a bar and open her wound except she has too much to do and so many people waiting on her and—

  Katherine cuts her off just as Rebecca tosses the funeral book into Katherine’s lap and the pilot gives them the okay to turn on some computer devices but surely not a cell phone.

  “Hey, take a breath.”

  “A simple breath, one at a time,” Marie responds quietly. “That’s good advice, always very good advice.”

  They hang up after that without saying another word and Marie breathes deep and long and she drives to her next hoping heart and desperately ill patient with the windows, all of them, rolled down so that she can feel the California air on her face, imagining the entire time that Annie could have touched some of the air that has lingered long and wild in the swirling and very friendly winds of Northern California.

  Katherine glides while Marie drives.

  She turns to see that Jill is asleep with her head tilted against the two pillows and her hands open, palms up. She doesn’t have to unstrap her seat belt and lean forward to see that Rebecca and Laura are also asleep, because she hears them snoring not-so-sweetly in the seats ahead of her and that is what she writes because it is her turn.

  * * *

  KATHERINE THOUGHT: How lovely. Women at rest miles above the mostly sleeping world. We take turns, it seems, trying to imagine why we are here and what this really means and in the quiet moments that none of us seem to have during the rest of our lives, we think of ourselves. Where we are now, who we are when we knew you, Annie, who we would have become with or without you in our lives. I feel weary and then exhilarated. I feel confused about my direction and the fear that seems so real that has me treading in place. One minute I am there and the next I see something fuzzy on the horizon that is a desire I have yet to identify and then I think of you. You. Annie Freeman.

  This is long because everyone is sleeping. So, too bad.

  Remember that day when we were seniors in high school and I leaned over and told you that I had always wanted to skip school? Remember? Remember how we ran into the bathroom and waited until Ancient History had started and then we bolted out into the parking lot to your car and skipped last period?

  Remember how fifteen minutes into the gig we turned to each other and both pretty much said at the same time, “This is goofy?” and how we got back in time to not even be missed during class?

  I’ve always been torn that way. I’ve always wanted to skip the whole damn class and go behind the grocery store and smoke some weed and then head for the Hawaiian Islands and never come home. But then I think about something like the way my daughter still calls my name the second she walks into the door and I think, “Well, maybe this—being here—is paradise.”

  So this is it. This is what your loss has me doing. I’m confused and I miss your sorry ass, Annie. Come skip class with me again. Hurry.

  * * *

  ANNIE THOUGHT: You could always have skipped class. You could have but the real problem for you was wondering what you’d miss while you skipped class. Maybe something really wonderful was happening that day and then you missed it for what? A fast ride down the highway? The thrill of escape? Here’s what I know now dear Katherine. It’s very cool to skip
class once in a while because you can copy someone’s notes the next day. Follow your own advice sweetheart. You told Marie to breathe and that’s what you need to do now too. Run from class. Do it. Take a breath and then stop and listen to the sound of your own beating heart. This minute is yours. Grab it hard.

  17

  * * *

  Rebecca’s airplane dream is a breezy affair that has her singing in a kitchen that looks like something from an art deco film at the Sundance Film Festival in 1987. She is naked and thinks nothing of it as she watches herself prepare to leave the house without even considering putting on clothing.

  She’s leaving on a ride to pick up someone or something when she spies a tiny, very, very tiny sign posted at the side entrance of a white house on the corner of a quiet intersection. Rebecca does not know why she turns her head to look at the house she has ridden past hundreds of times but she does. The wind blows her hair across the tops of her breasts. She can feel the sun beating against her arms, the back of her neck, the tops of her thighs. No one passing by mentions her nakedness and she turns the car into the slanted driveway, gets out, leans over to grab a towel and starts walking toward the house.

  Before she walks more than a few feet she stops, throws off the towel, puts on a white polo shirt—nothing else—and then wraps the towel back around herself again.

  Rebecca knocks but no one answers the door. She boldly walks inside and a woman quickly hurries from somewhere inside the house and greets her in the kitchen. They do not know each other but they embrace and the woman is eager to show off what she has for sale. Just a few things. Really, maybe just four things. “It is a very tiny sale, like the sign,” the woman explains, pointing toward the items she has spread out for purchase.

  Rebecca picks up one bottle. It is a small mustard jar and it is full of pills.