Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (5 page)

The doctor who will hold on to you as tightly as you hold on to her and who will place you without letting you go into the arms of another doctor who will do another test and then whisk you off into the arms of yet another doctor. She will not let you go because she is yours and you are hers and your malignant tumors are now a shared part of a relationship that is a mixture of grief, sadness, anger, longing, zeal, panic, hurt, wondering, more longing and something else indescribable.

Annie’s tumors started out as cells that found her ovaries such an inviting, warm and friendly place. So friendly that they multiplied like those late winter beetles she remembered from the Midwest that collected on her window screens and then crawled into her bedroom to form puddles of soft red and black on her light blue bathrobe like moving paintings from some science-fiction movie. The tumors multiplied, and then as if the ovaries were not enough, they started looking around and then saw another warm place and jumped, one by one, to that warm spot in her abdomen and the other warm spot just below that and from there to the next spot until that day when the doctor put her hands there, at the spot where they were about to jump to next, and said very loudly so Annie could hear it, “No.”

“No, damn it. No, you have had enough of her.”

And then Annie knew what her doctor did—that it was the time for miracles and the trying and the wanting to live. Just simply wanting to live.

And then the next part, which necessitated keeping a spiral notebook with her so that she could plan what happened after this. So that in the end when she knew she had so very few choices left, when she knew that her commands and wishes were buried beneath the tangled mass of the cells leaping over each other to get to the next spot, when she knew that to dare to wish for anything but for the pain to go away for just five seconds or maybe, maybe just one second—one quiet heartbeat of a second—was asking too much, then all she had left was the notebook and this plan. This idea. A reason to keep sailing to Tuesday just one more time.

The notebook never crossed your mind again because that very day you had to call the ambulance because it was impossible for you to know what Annie needed next and which pill was supposed to cap the pain until the next pill and then when you said goodbye you knew that she would never remember and that it would not have mattered if she had remembered anyway.

What mattered had already happened and you, her friend Laura, hold only what you remember in the palm of your hand—a friendship which had turned into a deep love and respect and admiration that carried you through years of richness with a woman who came to you once, just once, for help, and then opened her heart so wide that you slipped inside without ever knowing your feet had left the earth.

“So,” Katherine says, waking Laura from her memory. “Is this all too much to do?”

“Too much to do for Annie Freeman?”

“Ridiculous question, but all I really know of you is how you rescued her that one horrid night and how your connection with women’s centers has never been broken. There are so many things that I don’t know. So I have to ask: Is this too much?”

“It’s not too much for a friend, for what we all had with her, for this one last thing that she asked of us, whatever her reasons.”

Then a quiet descends and at the same moment Laura and Katherine are imagining what Annie’s reasons might be, what might happen, who they will become or what they will know of themselves.

And one more thing.

“Katherine,” Laura says, her voice dipping just below her level of normal command, “when I was there, those days before she died, we talked a lot and one thing we talked about for a very long time was that she wanted me to think about buying her house and moving to California.”

Katherine finds nothing surprising this day. A traveling funeral? Here we go. Jill sobbing on her back porch? Seems normal. Laura and her husband moving to California? Why not.

“If you come on the funeral,” Katherine tells her, “I’ll help you end that part of your story and then we’ll all go back to Chicago and help you pack.”

“There, that was easy,” Laura laughs. “We’ll see. I don’t and can’t see everything about that issue clearly, especially with the news you just dropped into my lap, but we’ll see about this. Annie got me thinking about it for sure and then toward the end when she was so sick we let it go.”

“Will you need anything before we meet at the airport?” Katherine asks finally to move them on, because she is in charge of moving the flock, at least for now. “Will you need anything at all?”

Laura wants to leave for the airport right away. She wants to run from her house wearing only what she has on and get to it. She is already seeing vistas across a New Mexico plateau and the mist rising from a stand of tall grass near a Seattle island. She is already holding the hands of her traveling funeral comrades and she wants to see it all, do it all immediately. She cannot wait. She wants to hurry. Somehow, she knows, she’ll figure out how to escape her job, her husband, the cold Chicago spring.

“I want to write while we do this,” she says spontaneously.

“Write?”

“This is going to be remarkable,” Laura says. “Not just for honoring Annie, but also for what will happen to us and what we might discover. So I want to keep some kind of diary, journal, design a movie script—whatever in the hell it turns out to be.”

“She’d love that,” Katherine almost screams. “She’d love the writing part.”

“I have no clue but let me start now. I’ll start with this conversation and see what happens and I will move a truck with my bare hands to get to the airport.”

“Can you do it?” Katherine asks again.

“I can do it, baby.”

Laura does not know how. It will seem impossible in just a few moments, in an hour and for several days and even after the funeral procession has changed direction. But she is certain, totally certain, that she will be at the airport in seven days.

Then the conversation ends quickly because the time is moving from one zone to the next fast and two more women are waiting and Laura Westma needs to go to the bathroom, unpack her groceries, and make plans for a traveling funeral.

One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

7

Laura and Annie

Chicago, Illinois, 1987

Annie waited 43.8 minutes before she called. Minutes, all 43.8 of them, that were the longest she had ever spent in her entire life.

Almost as long as the minutes when a man once tried to kill her.

A man she remembers having seen only during a lecture on political activism she was giving at the University of Chicago during her four-month sabbatical in the fall semester. She remembers him because he paced constantly during the lecture, rising and falling in the back of the auditorium like one of those moving targets at a carnival that you get to keep if your quarter lands inside of its head or you pop out its eyes with the air gun.

“How strange,” she remembered telling herself during that lecture and again later when she was safe, when it was over and when one part of her life was forever changed. “Why doesn’t he sit down? He’s driving me crazy.”

Driving her crazy.

And then without knowing who or why or what was happening, strange objects began appearing on her car window and outside her office door where she had been given research space, where students lined up every day to see her for just a few minutes, where she spent so many hours each day she considered moving out of her campus housing unit and sleeping on the ancient office couch.

Rubber knives. A glass of wine. Slippers. Then the notes started.

“I could tell you about killing. I could show you.”

“We know what you really mean.”

“Three times and once times 100 and then the end will flatten us like nothing. You will see.”

At first it was funny but then the phone started ringing when she was in the office at 12:30
A.M
. or at 5
A.M
. when it should not have been ringing. There would be a voice on the line, a man’s deep cough, a rough whisper, the sounds of something—metal maybe—and then fear rising in her throat as she began to think that maybe none of this was random. Maybe none of this was random at all.

Annie G. Freeman was no campus kid the year she took her four-month sabbatical. She was thirty-eight years old and her two boys came with her and were plunged into the city/university life and when they were not complaining about missing their friends they were busy making new ones. They may have known something was amiss. They may have known that their mother began staying up too late, making too many quiet phone calls, had too many male friends sleep over on the couch just so someone would guard the door. They may have known she looked too tired all of the time.

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.