by Kris Radish
“I was the first man Annie loved and I turned out to be this gay man who could do and be everything for her except, well, there was this problem of physical intimacy that I could never quite conquer,” he explains. “Annie didn’t know and I agreed to let her come visit me here during the last year of graduate school because I thought—well, I thought something magical would happen on the beach and with the moonlight. Romance and all, you know.”
So Annie had flown to Florida and met John’s parents at the very house where the women are now staying and on the second night of her three-day stay John took her to a beautiful sandy beach, where he fully intended to make love to her and ask her to marry him.
“We were perfect together,” he said. “I had just finished my graduate work in sociology and had been offered a position in San Francisco. It would have been perfect to be with her too because I loved her so much, I’ll always love her.”
John starts to cry then and Ben moves from behind the wheel, lowers the anchor and comes to stand behind him, resting his hands on his shoulders. John moves one hand to touch Ben and then continues.
“I think she knew by then, that night on the beach. I think she knew, but we both played it out until I bent to kiss her and she stopped me,” he says, still crying and looking off into the dark distance of the ocean away from his beloved Islamorada.
Annie had hushed him gently and told him it was past time to tell her whatever it was he had to tell her and so he did.
“My God, I would have died or killed for her,” he explained. “I never wanted to hurt her. I loved her.”
Jill and Katherine and Rebecca and Laura know he loved her. They know he loved her in ways they could not love her and they see the pain of his own loss shadow his face as he bends weeping into Ben’s arms and finally lets go of something precious, tender, and terribly sad. They all want to pick him up and hold him in their arms as he finishes his story but no one can move. No one can breathe.
“We sat there all night talking,” he tells them. “Annie was remarkable and yet honest about her life path. She told me that she would never marry. She told me that I would have been a wonderful father and now I can tell you that I am the father of both of her boys. I am their father.”
John cries so long and hard after he tells his part of the story that the sky turns dark and the shadows of the moon begin to float across the edges of the boat.
“John . . .” Rebecca finally says, with great tenderness.
“No,” he insists. “I have to finish. This is my part of her funeral. The part I need to do. For her. You have to let me finish.”
They do so without hesitation.
That night on the beach Annie told him that she was sealing off a part of her heart. She told him that section of her heart would always belong to him and she asked him to let her go until she contacted him, until she knew she was not going to die from a broken heart, until she could understand how she could honor their love in a way that would never really totally fulfill her.
“What happened here in Islamorada was that Annie G. Freeman found a level of love within herself that was pure and nonjudgmental and lasting,” John said. “She gave me the courage to be who I needed to be, who I was, and she taught me that love can take many forms.”
They did not speak again for years, he explained. When they reconnected, they designed a relationship based on a kind of love that not everyone understands, and he agreed to father her children after months of planning and great thought and they also agreed that someday, perhaps when they were an old man and woman, one of them would tell their sons.
Katherine interrupts. She cannot help herself. It is as if someone else is speaking from inside of her body.
“Do they know?”
“They’re coming here next week. They don’t know, but I am sure they may have guessed by now.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell them? Why keep it a secret?”
“It was her idea,” he answers. “Ben and I have been together twenty-seven years. He was part of this. You know Annie. She had other relationships after me, before me, for crying out loud she was married for a while, and the decision not to tell them who their father is was not made or accepted lightly by any of us.”
John admits that he would have been a lousy day-to-day father. He admits that his academic life that had him moving every two years and then his decision fifteen years ago to move back to Islamorada would not have been the best fit for fatherhood.
“Annie was competent, caring, gentle, brilliant,” he explains. “Look how those boys turned out. She did it alone. She told me women are doing it alone all the time. It was a life choice, a lifestyle that I supported and that most of the rest of the world could or would not understand. They could accept her having an affair and getting pregnant and keeping the baby but for her to have a baby on purpose, that she wanted and loved and cared for with all of her heart even though she was not married—well, society isn’t prepped for that scenario.”
When they head back to the dock Ben is back behind the wheel and John is standing at the bow with his hands on the railing watching the boat dip in and out of waves that descend like tiny waterfalls.
When they tie up the boat no one wants to go to bed. Ben makes hot buttered rum and passes out afghans and they all settle in on the porch and tell Annie G. Freeman stories until it is past midnight and they hear a car turn into the driveway.
Balinda rides into the traveling funeral with tired eyes and a heart that is as heavy as the night sky. Exhausted from travel, her caregiving life and the uncertainty of her own future, she falls into the willing arms of Annie Freeman’s friends as if she has been along for the ride from the beginning.
Three hours before dawn, when the house is finally quiet and the whispers have faded into sleeping sighs, the Florida horizon is suddenly streaked with a long ribbon of white that looks as if it is a trail toward the heavens.
Katherine rises suddenly as if someone has pushed her arm to waken her, looks out the window and imagines the streak of light as a path for Annie’s ashes. “How absolutely beautiful,” she whispers out loud as the clouds suddenly fill the space, hiding it and keeping it safe until morning.
19
* * *
The smell of coffee is like one of Ben’s favorite fishing lures and one by one, and not very early at all, the traveling funeral brigade makes its way from the upstairs bedrooms and into the dining room off the kitchen that has a view of the bay that seems to change every single time one of them looks at it. This morning there is a low mist hanging off the shoreline and above it there are long clouds being pushed out to sea that look as if they are being herded by an invisible cowboy.
The women arrive in a variety of costumes—two bathrobes, boxer shorts and a T-shirt and two long summer nightgowns—and Ben, who is cooking a heap of scrambled eggs and something that smells as if it came right out of the oven at the best bakery in town, immediately thinks of them as a parade and he wants them all to walk past the kitchen divider at least three more times which they do gladly.
“What time did you and John go to bed?” Laura asks, signaling with her hands that the parade has come to an end.
“Oh, we don’t keep track of things like that down here,” Ben tells her, setting out breakfast. “See?” He holds up a wrist without a watch. “If I have a court appointment or someone coming into the office, my secretary calls but otherwise we just kind of amble around here.”
Ben sets breakfast down on the counter, tells the women to dig in, then stands watching them as they fill up their plates. He fills his own plate, hollers out the window to tell John breakfast is ready and joins the women at the table that is large enough, so it seems, to fit half an army at any given moment.
“Well . . .” he says. “Does anyone need anything? Is everything okay?”
“I need to say thank you for letting me join this intimate gathering,” Balinda says first. “I am very, very grateful to be joining you.”
Balinda is a small woman, scarcely over five feet tall, with dark hair that cascades down her back, and when she speaks it is with the tiniest accent that automatically makes her sound elegant, foreign, and just a bit on the sexy side. She also looks exhausted and has dark circles under her eyes and would probably be happy to stay in bed for the entire day or maybe the rest of the week.
Katherine replies that they would have it no other way and begins talking about the day’s most important event just as John enters the room. Because it’s close to noon already and they have to get up before five A.M. to drive back to Miami the next day, she thinks they should make plans for the “funeral of the day,” as she now prefers to call it.
“I’ve talked to each one of you about this, and, Ben and John, we’d all like to invite you to participate in the ceremony today. Actually, we’d like some input and your help in directing us to the best location for this,” she explains, then raises her hand as if to stop any oncoming words. “Let me tell you that we all agreed that the ceremony probably should be at the beach where you talked with Annie all those years ago, John, unless that would be too difficult for you.”
John smiles shyly, sits, and pours himself a cup of coffee before he answers. Ben is looking at him, waiting for his response, and clearly knowing the entire time what it will be.
“I was hoping you’d ask and at the same moment was thinking what marvelous women Annie chose to do this, to be her friends, to help her through the other tough passages,” John says. “I’d be lying if I said it was easy and that I never worried about her, but I worried less as the years passed and she told me about some of you. You were all beyond important to her. You became her family.”
They settle on sunset, that sweet time just before it’s truly dark, as the lightness of day falls into the arms of evening.
Ben suggests they walk to the beach and then down the coastal sidewalk to the men’s favorite restaurant, the Bay Breeze, following the ceremony. He thinks a “celebration of life” will be in order and he promises to make certain they don’t close the place down so they can get up early and get to the airport. “I’ll be the mom,” he volunteers.
Then there is a storm of activity. Katherine announces she needs to run an errand, asks directions to the closest and largest department store, and takes off so fast she almost forgets to remove her nightgown. Laura and Balinda invite Rebecca to go for a swim with them off the pier so they can find a treasure for Marie and Jill lingers in the kitchen to talk to John about the funeral book.
“You need to write in it and we’ll have Ben do it, too. She’d like that. I’m sure you know that,” she explains. “It’s been kind of helpful for all of us as we travel through our own emotions. You’ll see.”
John wants to talk. He wants to know if Jill thinks he’s crazy for having given Annie up, for having fathered the boys, for living a life in a way that doesn’t fit the mold.
“Absolutely not,” Jill replies, firmly. “You are who you are and I know for a fact that Annie is the first person in the world who would embrace that. Love comes in various sizes, we all know that, and damn the people who judge, just damn them.”
John tells her stories then. He tells her how his family would not speak to him for a dozen years and how his mother refused to visit and how it was the local mechanic who finally helped his father and eventually his mother learn to love him for the man he was and always would be.
“The mechanic? Whatever did he say or do?”
“His daughter was a lesbian and one afternoon while my dad was waiting for the oil in his Chevy to be changed, the mechanic came over to him and they talked.” John turns to look out of the window and into the bay where the women are swimming. “He told my father that he had felt the same about his daughter as my father did about me.”
“What changed? What happened?”
“His wife got ill, really ill, she had cancer and it was two things really,” John tells her. “His daughter came home right away to help and he walked in on her giving her sick mother a bath. He saw his daughter gently talking to her, helping her wash her hair and back and as she was doing that tears kept running down her face.”
Jill closes her eyes and she imagines what the mechanic saw. She sees the young woman holding up her mother as her mother once held her up. She imagines the daughter’s heart cracking as she realizes her mother is going to die, as she sees that her mother has turned into a frame of brittle bones to support her dwindling weight.
“Then, just a few days later, his daughter called him at work. She said he needed to come get them as fast as possible to help her get her mother to the hospital,” John continues. “He rushed home. He found his daughter in his bed, with his wife, holding her like she was a baby and telling her that everything would be okay.”
“When he looked at his daughter then, he saw how extraordinarily beautiful she was. He saw that she was kind and gracious and giving. He saw her as a woman of courage and strength and he realized he had made a terrible mistake in judging her on one aspect of her life.
“He stood in front of my father and he told him not to wait until it was too late. He told my father to look beyond his own limitations, to see that I was a man of great worth who loved him no matter how I lived or how I had been treated.”
John said his father told him this story only once. Before his father died, he took John’s hand, told him the story, and said, “John, you are a fine man and you must never forget I am proud of you.”
Death brings forgiveness, John tells Jill, but real forgiveness, before the dying, is a gift that is immeasurable.
“Sometimes I feel as if I have spent half my life hoping that people will forgive me for who I am,” he continues. “My family . . . Annie . . . friends who I lost when I came totally out of the closet . . . Knowing who I am and how I have to be true to myself—Annie helped me get to that place as the years passed and we talked.”
John took the book, as Jill left to swim, and he wrote. He cried as he wrote and as he remembered what a precious gift Annie had given him and was still giving him.
* * *
JOHN THOUGHT: Oh, my sweet, lovely, wise Annie, what gifts you continue to bring into my life. Your honesty and forgiveness. Years of friendship and understanding. The confidence to move forward without second-guessing who I am, who I was, who I always will be. Thank you for letting me love you the way I loved you and for staying a part of my life, for being there in the ways that you could. Thank you now for this gift of the traveling funeral. Did any of us even know how important this was going to be? Did we know how much we needed to talk about what we thought we could not live without? Living—that’s what it’s all about. That’s what you were trying to tell me all those years ago and through the very way that you lived. I love you, Annie—deep and rich and strong, like I have never loved anyone else. My heart beats stronger because of you and my life has been a sea of joy because of what you gave me.
* * *
ANNIE THOUGHT: Oh, you ass. I know you loved me. I know that I could have made it even easier and I know that you wanted so much to be a part of the boys’ lives but it couldn’t work that way. Be strong and good, John. Do not linger over my death too long. Do not look back any longer than necessary and be there for our boys—no longer boys but always boys to me—if they ever need anything. And for crying out loud—did you ever learn how to properly tie a damn necktie?
An hour before sunset, everyone gathers on the front porch of the bed-and-breakfast and Katherine passes out red tennis shoes and bandanas to Balinda, John, and Ben during an informal ceremony that launches the evening’s events. Her early afternoon shopping trip had taken her on a scavenger hunt that led her to five stores but triumphantly helped her produce three sets of shoes and the bandanas.
Only Balinda can wear the shoes. John and Ben’s are inches too small, so they tie them together and hang them around their necks and then the group forms a line and they all follow Ben as he leads them out past the driveway and to
a path that they would never have seen themselves even in the best light of day.
Katherine is carrying Annie’s ashes. The red tennis shoes are tucked snugly into the shoebox, which Katherine has placed under her arm, protecting it with her free hand as if she were keeping a tree branch off of a baby’s tender face during a hike through the forest. The path is wide and edges at first along the water and then narrows as it moves inland and courses through a stand of trees that Laura thinks are probably called groves in Florida.
The traveling funeral pallbearers are quiet. Red sneaker bottoms over the sand and a tight breeze off the lip of the ocean that nudges treetops and creates a swishing sound—these are the only sounds.
This does not include the beating hearts of the men and women who loved Annie G. Freeman.
This does not include the occasional deep breath from the open mouth of a pallbearer who is desperately trying not to burst into tears.
This does not include the sighs of longing and loss that seep from the limbs of every single person who is walking toward the beach.
This does not include the private whispers of stories and songs and conversations that each one of them is remembering as they pass by a private home and then move to the beach where they will take turns throwing some of what’s left of their friend Annie, the physical Annie, but never ever their memories and never ever the sections of their hearts that Annie filled and will always fill.
In what can only be considered a cosmic and wonderful gesture the sun slips into the ocean as they come onto a beautiful wide beach and Jill, astounded by the moment, breathes, “Oh my God” and stops right where she is standing.
“It’s so beautiful,” she exclaims. “No wonder people who lived by the water thought the world was flat. They just turned around and saw that sun come up the other side and imagined that the sun and moon slipped under the edge of the earth and came up the other side after resting for a few hours.”