Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Page 3

  Honor me now and you will honor yourselves. Honor me now with this one last gift of a traveling funeral no matter how impossible the asking might seem when you first hear it and I promise that you will find something that will secure you a place in your grieving, in your other losses that will set the tone for the days and nights that are lined up and waiting for you—maybe not so patiently and maybe not so far away.

  I have given great thought to this adventure because I have been given a tiny gift of time to ponder that and so many other things as well. I have selected six locations for you to spread my ashes—places where something grand and remarkable passed into and through my life. Places—one where I made love for so many nights in a row we almost had to send for help (you guess the location), one where I let go of something so old and heavy that I almost flew without wings . . . Well, you get the pattern and you five women will now set the pace for this trip and see what happens. Just see.

  For if people could see—if women especially could see—what is real and true and how the elegant possession of what is in each of our individual hearts is what matters more than anything—well, oh, please just see—always see.

  This is what you will see next:

  California—my beloved Sonoma County.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  The Florida Keys.

  New York City.

  The North Shore of Lake Superior.

  A small island close to Seattle.

  Those were my places. That is where each and all of you will spread my dusty bones. Every single one of you has already met through me though not necessarily in person—I can tell you now which of you will notice what, who will become best friends, who will sit in the front and who will order first and that’s what pisses me off the most.

  I want to fucking be there with you.

  So Katherine, Jill, Laura, Rebecca and Marie—be there for me. Think about me. Throw not just my ashes, the dust of my life, into the wind—but throw a bit of yourself too and enjoy this time, these places, each other—as my final gift of thanks to you for all that you have given me, for the love we six women have shared, for the degrees of fineness that you added to a life that was as rich and full as anything I could have dreamed or made up.

  I love each and every one of you. That will never fade.

  Never.

  My traveling funeral better be grand.

  Now go.

  I am the whisper of the wind at every stop. I am there—with you.

  Always,

  Annie G. Freeman

  The tickets fall from the envelope like heavy chunks of wet, late-winter snow. A car rental slip for each city is pulled from its binder with the weight of the tickets and then a long list of hotels, a check for spending money and food, and one last note—handwritten—describing the best wine that is available in each location.

  Katherine laughs because Annie could always make a party out of death and then sprinkle her love of wine and song and fine friends all over it. Then she gathers up all the tickets and notes into a pile as if she is in Las Vegas and has just won the last deal at a blackjack table. She pushes all the papers in between her legs and she finishes up her glass of wine knowing now that perhaps the damn bra snapped loose for a reason and that no matter what happens in the next hour or day or week, she is now in charge of, and going on, a traveling funeral.

  She is.

  But then she looks down and the instincts of a mother, woman, attorney to get the detail in the midst of an emotion rise as fast as a bullet, and she sees that time is of the essence. Can she really do this? How can she do this? A flash of her own schedule makes her stomach clench. Her daughter. Work. The man in her life. The possibility of the seemingly impossible makes her beyond nauseous. Was Annie insane when she wrote out this request?

  The first plane leaves in nine days.

  “Shit,” Katherine says, rising to search for a phone. “Nine days? I’m going to kick your ass, Annie.”

  And then she stops because Annie G. Freeman is dead and Katherine P. Givins realizes that the traveling funeral Annie has requested will be no picnic. Who knows what will happen when a group of grief-stricken women who have never even been in a car together embark on a traveling funeral and bare their hearts and who knows what else to one another?

  “How in the hell,” she whispers to herself, “can I make this happen?”

  Katherine keeps moving and then her hand moves instinctively to touch the side of her bra—the lovely Bali—and she’s so accustomed to its support that she gasps as she remembers that the bra too has died.

  “Damn it,” she says probably for the fiftieth-plus time in the last ten hours. “The bra is gone.”

  Gone and now lying like a trophy on top of the dresser near the window in her bedroom.

  And there is barely time now for more than that quick thought of the bra before her mind explodes with the dozens of details that must be handled before tomorrow, as fast as possible, in a hurry, this exact moment. Schedules. Meetings. Plans. What should she erase? How should she erase it?

  She starts at the beginning, with the first name on the list, the list of other women who are about to have their own lives and schedules collapsed as if they were made of air. When Katherine makes the first call she does it braless.

  And the traveling funeral begins.

  3

  Annie and Katie

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1963

  * * *

  The long halls at West High School are barely light at noon, so when Katie Givins finally figures out how to sneak into the school through the gym door at 7:16 P.M. there is just enough light to see her way past the locker room and toward the far side of school.

  Katie is not scared to be in her own high school walking alone from one dark room to the next without a flashlight or a friend. She is not afraid of what her mother will say when she gets home from the store and finds her note—“Gone to find Annie”—lying next to the telephone. She’s not afraid of being suspended or getting locked in all night. Katie is only afraid of one thing. She is afraid that she might not find her best friend in the girls’ bathroom near the science lab where Cheryl Swanson said she saw her just after the late bell. Her best friend since first grade. Her best friend who is in a mess of trouble.

  “She was just sitting there on the window by the register, you know the one we throw our cigarettes into, and I tried to talk with her but she was just sitting there—like she was there but she wasn’t. Do you know what I mean?”

  Katie knew.

  For the past six months Katie had watched her best friend dip in and out of a depression so deep it was as if Annie had surrounded herself with a brick wall. Annie talked about things, horrible things, and Katie had worked hard to know where she was twenty-four hours a day, to alert her parents—well, at least her mother, because no one knew where Annie’s father was half the time—and she talked to a counselor herself so she could try to understand what was happening. All big stuff for a fourteen-year-old who barely knew how to keep pace with her own inner emotional turmoil, let alone try to save her best friend from falling off the face of the earth.

  She didn’t see Annie in the bathroom at first. Annie was lying against the far wall, back behind the garbage can, with her feet up against the wall. She was barely conscious.

  “Shit,” Katie said as she ran to pull her upright. “Annie? What did you do?”

  Annie would say later that she remembered only that she reached up to put her hand on Katie’s face and that she wanted her to say something nice, just one nice thing before she died, and then she slipped away to the edge of a place that was just a breath away from what she thought she really wanted.

  It wasn’t the end, and it was barely the beginning, but Katie didn’t let go and Annie held on at first to her smallest finger and then to two more and then to her entire hand until she was in a place where her mind could heal and where she could see the light, the trees, the wisp of air off the lake in the morning, the sin
cere words from the mouth of her mother, everything in her world for what it really was and not what the thin ledge at the bottom of her brain tried to tell her it was.

  She lived and Katie helped her live and the salvation of their friendship—of two girls becoming women and ascending the next mountain and the one after that—became a bond that lasted through forty-two more years and to the moment when the sudden arrival of a brown box filled with red shoes launched Katherine Givins to the edge of one more mountain and made her remember the bathroom floor, the power of caring, and the love she felt for a lifelong friend who apparently had one more thing to say from the depths of a pair of shoes that were now resting comfortably on the dresser and screaming every second of the day for attention.

  4

  * * *

  Jill Matchney gets the first call.

  Sitting outside, not more than a mile from the backyard of Annie Freeman’s back porch, with her feet propped up on the edge of her deck, she can see stars bounce like fireflies against the bank of clouds that open and close just long enough to expose the tiny planets she loves to watch.

  When the phone rings, Jill is right there in the clouds, all those hundreds and thousands and millions of miles away, floating through this day and the one before it and the one she anticipates tomorrow. Jill watches herself and her life like she would watch a movie—pushed back against the side of her house, legs dangling off the edge of her porch, a glass in her hand, imagining in the center of her analytical mind how the end will match the beginning and the middle.

  “The smell of roses, someone singing at the end of a long hall, all my papers in order, a small dinner party after the ceremony . . .” she says to herself, planning her own funeral as she watches another cloud bump into another set of stars and then swallow them.

  Jill, the retired educator, is like this and she has no intention of ever changing. She always had her papers graded before they hit her desk, loved committee work, swelled with the challenge each new student brought to her table, and each time a new and naive faculty member blew into her office she would look them in the eye and promise herself that she’d turn them into a diamond, a living promise, one of her own stars.

  That’s what she vowed when she first saw Annie Freeman—wide-eyed and naive but far from quiet. Annie Freeman who galloped, not walked, into her office and shared a litany of excited prose about her classes and her own promises and a dozen other wide-eyed calculations that made Professor Jill Matchney close her own eyes in eager astonishment at the abrupt appearance of her protégé—the successor she had been searching for ever since she had been appointed the head of the English department.

  Annie G. Freeman.

  “Damn her,” Jill grumbled, pushing herself away from the wall and toward the end of her deck so that her voice would spread out across the dark, empty yard and into the sky, toward one of the stars where she imagined Annie G. Freeman was even now holding court.

  “Damn you, Annie.”

  The phone rings then, splinters this thought, and every one that might have come after it. Thoughts that someone like Jill craved like sugar to keep her existence in line, to adhere to her patterns, to keep her knowing what might come next.

  “Is this Jill Matchney?”

  “Yes,” Jill responds, knowing that only the chosen few who have this number would dare to call her past 10:30 P.M.

  “My name is Katherine Givins. We’ve never met but you sort of know me.”

  At this, Jill smiles and then looks at the stars, selects the one she imagines is now inhabited by her fine friend Annie Freeman, and then she listens, grabs the edge of the tall banister to support herself while she hears the entire story about the funeral, minus the bra, and realizes that something fierce has unexpectedly grabbed hold of her fairly empty appointment calendar and is about to swallow it whole.

  Jill, who should have been the hardest sell, did not seem to hesitate.

  “I’ll be there,” she told Katherine, and “Yes,” with a slight chuckle, “I know who you are and I imagine I know everyone else you are about to call.”

  And call she did.

  Jill first. The retired professor who knew there had been no formal funeral. Jill who talked softly and who quickly but surely promised to be at the San Francisco airport in nine—wait, now only eight—days with equipment for something that Katherine has already begun calling The Traveling Funeral.

  “Well,” Katherine says, thinking as she speaks because she is shooting from the hip or really from the knees because she is moving so quickly she can barely pick her words off the ground—shooting from the hip would be way too late. “I suppose you need to bring something for hiking, something for sitting in the car we rent, something for sleeping—if you sleep in something—a bathing suit . . .”

  Katherine stops.

  Jill Matchney laughs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “She knew this would happen.”

  “What?”

  “Annie knew we’d have this discussion. And she would have laughed and then told us we were predictable.”

  There is a short pause. Both women have jumped into the same track. They almost talk at the exact moment but Katherine, edged with coffee, gets there first.

  “She thought about this for a long time, didn’t she?”

  Jill speaks in a kind of whisper when she talks about her friend. She misses Annie so much sometimes that she drops to her knees because the burden of sorrow, the empty shadow of what once was is too much for her to bear. She really drops to her knees.

  “I don’t know you, but I know you because of Annie,” Jill says slowly to Katherine, who is listening with her eyes closed, her fingers wedged on either side of her temples, her mind focused on this memory of Annie speaking about this woman, this teacher, this Jill, with such respect and love that Katherine felt jealous because she had not yet met her. “She’s already linked all of us and she knows that we may end up loving each other, not like we love her, but in new ways that take us to places she went to before she left all of us—”

  Katherine cuts her off. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “She was dying. Remember that. Everything changes when that happens. I think she simply planned a funeral and that she wanted the women in her life to be her traveling attendants. Call us the moving female pallbearers. That’s what we are—this is our duty because we loved her and she loved us.”

  Jill leans forward and moves her eyes off the horizon. She thinks that maybe she doesn’t really know what will happen in eight days. She thinks that maybe she should stop thinking so much. She continues thinking anyway because she cannot stop herself from thinking after all the years of school and classes and schedules and students—oh, the students!—that set her days and weeks and months and years into such distinct and precise patterns. She thinks that maybe her intellectual inner guideposts may need to be retired for a while, just like the rest of her life. She thinks that the loss of her friend coupled with the loss of her students, her administrative post, all the patterns in her life that gave her comfort and something to spread out in front of her to see day after day, has dimmed everything she thinks she knows.

  Everything has changed.

  Everything is changing.

  “You don’t know?” Katherine finally asks, snapping Jill back to the present.

  Jill moves her eyes back to the horizon, where they belong, she knows, but looking there, toward what is to come, is now sometimes frightening. Too much has happened. So much loss. All the empty hours.

  “I don’t know about this traveling funeral she planned, perhaps one of the boys knows, but my guess, knowing Annie the way I do, is that no one knew and that you, lucky you, Katherine, were the first to know.”

  “You were so close to her though.”

  A swell of grief rises from Jill’s stomach and passes directly through her heart. It is a fast wave that catches her off-guard and changes how she speaks and thinks and moves and talks.

/>   “Oh God . . .”

  “Jill,” Katherine whispers. “We all loved her so goddamn much. I don’t really know you but I am certain of that. Are you okay?”

  Jill answers in short sentences. She tells Katherine, a woman she has never met but knows through stories and tales and clippings from newspapers and from the voice of her dead friend, that the loss of Annie has knocked her flat. She tells her about the days and nights following her recent retirement and how she struggles to see—after years of knowing—where all the pieces will now fit from day to day. She stops once or twice to gain control of her own voice. She stops again because she simply cannot speak. Then she admits to Katherine Givins and to herself: “I want right now to just lie down on this porch and not wake up for a very long time.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Katherine says. “Do you want me to drive up there?”

  Jill smiles again. She grabs the blanket off the wicker chair behind her, wraps it around her shoulders, and slides to the floor of the porch. Then she laughs.

  “Are you laughing?” Katherine asks, bewildered, and worried that she may indeed be crying.

  “Yes, and now I am lying on the porch floor all tangled up in a blanket.”

  “Should I come?” Katherine offers again, immediately worried.

  “You are already here, Katherine. It’s okay. I have to ride this until it’s just a whimper. I didn’t think about this happening. I wasn’t ready for all this change. In my wildest dreams, which were pretty damn tame—this right here—me lying on the porch and preparing for a traveling funeral, Annie’s death, the emptiness I feel now that my career has ended—it never felt quite real. I’m also terribly used to being alone, although alone without Annie won’t be the same. You will probably get heartily sick of me in the first three seconds on this funeral trip.”

  Katherine thinks for a moment about changes and chance. She thinks about loss and movement and how in a million years she could never have dreamed of this set of circumstances that has rocked her world in a new direction, and then she thinks about her mother.