Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (6 page)

8

“Shit.”

This favorite word that passed across the lips of Rebecca was like dessert to her. No matter where she was or what happened, just saying the word “shit” made her somehow feel better.

“Some people think it’s filthy because someone told them it was a dirty word,” she told someone at least twice a day. “But ‘shit’ gets me through. I say it and it makes me smile. I can’t stop it or help myself. I love ‘shit.’ ”

That made her laugh too.

“I love shit.”

“Say it,” she would tell people, some of them people Rebecca had never met but happened to be sitting next to, or sharing a meal with at a convention, or parked next to at a busy intersection. “Just say it and see what happens.”

Mostly people laughed too because a fairly attractive, kind-looking and gentle-speaking—well, except for that “shit” word—woman who appeared sort of harmless, looked her age (which was fifty-three), was talking to them about a word that most people perceived as being from the Swear Family.

Rebecca was swearing when the phone rang. She was saying something worse than “shit.” A word that has become as acceptable as part of everyday verbiage in many cultures but a word that even she was loath to speak out loud. Except when the phone was ringing when she did not really want to answer it. Except when she was wanting to lie down and sleep and yet was seemingly waiting for something else to happen. One more thing. One more shitty thing.

“What?” she asked herself out loud as she picked up the phone and then asked it again without waiting for some kind of reply or question in return.

“What? What the shit do you want?”

Katherine laughs. She should have expected this. This is Rebecca. Katherine knows this. She does. She knows about the “shit” and the somewhat messy life, like shit itself, and the way Rebecca often talks in questions because she is always going someplace and she is always in a hurry and in a shitty mess. She imagines Rebecca who just about always wears flip-flops, has refused to dye her hair, loves huge earrings and men’s tailored shirts, dressed just like that and with her hand cradling the phone between her chin and chest.

“Hey, Rebecca, it’s Katherine Givins. How are you?”

“What the hell?”

Katherine laughs again. She can’t help it and then her mind launches into one of those tired, kind-of-hysterical places because she has been up now for a very long period of time and she is manic at best and getting worse. Rebecca’s predictableness makes her laugh and she quickly stops herself from sketching out the rest of the conversation.

“Just hearing your shitty voice makes me want to laugh. Annie would like that.”

Rebecca laughs, too, just hearing her response, and then quickly flies into a place that brings her out of orbit very fast. It is their connection. How they know each other. Why they may be speaking on the phone this very second.

Annie.

How she misses Annie.

“Katherine Givins,” Rebecca says. “Of course I know who you are,” she adds, acknowledging a name, then a woman, then a parade of memories that come marching toward her before she can think to get out of their way.

“Oh my God . . .” she manages to say and then Katherine gives her a minute.

She gives her a minute because she knows who Rebecca Carlson is and was and always will be. She knows how Annie moved in next door to Rebecca in 1993 following six months of heated and sometimes hilarious and frequently shitty debate about the price of the piece of the land—money which Rebecca needed desperately but would never admit so—and the location of the house that was to be built and its height and the landscaping until Rebecca was about to suggest and then demand the placement of stones up the driveway and Annie finally said, “No, damn it, no. You let go, woman. You let me be your neighbor and take my money and let me share your view.”

Rebecca let go. She had no choice. Depleted resources. A mother and a father who gave her everything and then took it all back and then some as she nursed them over and through and then way beyond a valley of sickness so dark and thick and wasteful that it was a wonder Rebecca could wake and walk and breathe in the morning.

Then she dragged herself through a succession of funerals. Father. Mother. Aunt. Then her sister. Her lovely, young beautiful sister, who bounced against the steering wheel and then flew out of the car window as if she were trying to grab something off the top of the tree she hit. An endless succession of improbable loss.

And then there was Annie G. Freeman with her wide life and her damn earthmovers and those young men of hers and Rebecca could not help herself. She could not keep from falling into the arms and life of her sassy and sometimes shitty neighbor who had the gall, the goddamn gall, to die.

“She died too,” Rebecca whispered into the phone, thinking that maybe Katherine would not hear her.

But Katherine was ready. She knew this story and she was ready to stretch her arms across the miles from where she was standing in her kitchen and fool this woman, this Rebecca Carlson, into thinking that her own fine limbs could substitute for the limbs and heart of the neighbor who had turned into family—solid, true, loving, forever lasting.

“Give me a minute,” Rebecca says. “Don’t go. I just need to catch my breath. To sit.”

Rebecca sits. Grief had exhausted her. She sits where she can see Annie’s house, dark and quiet and nestled against a small hill that she had always imagined, since the house was built, was put just there to help support a home where a woman lived who could hold up the entire rest of the world. A house where Rebecca learned how to keep moving and to allow herself to feel and to love again. A house where Annie pushed her fingers against Rebecca’s not-yet-healed scars of loss and grieving that had barely disappeared when she had to do it all over again. And again and then one more time.

And the day Annie told her. Rebecca moving from the gate and garage toward the house and then catching a glimpse of Annie walking slowly, her hands tucked inside of her blue down vest that she wore so much it had faded three shades up so that it was more white than blue. Annie walking with her eyes on Rebecca’s face, a face covered in an ocean of wetness, and then a cry of anguish that came from a place so far away that it was not real, could not be real, was nothing more than an imagined echo from an ancient time and place.

“Honey,” Annie cried. “Oh, honey.”

They moved from the walk to the porch to the living room couch where they had spent so much time, so many hours of talking and solving and sharing and getting on about every aspect of life that it had become their four-legged oasis, a harbor, a place to nest and heal before they threw themselves back into the orbit of the real world.

And now the real world would never be the same. Everything would change and for once Rebecca knew, she knew exactly what would happen next and what she could do and could not do and she knew, too, that her heart had healed just long enough to be severed in half one more time.

“Oh, Rebecca, I’m sorry to do this to you again. I’m so sorry and I’m so damned scared.”

They talked after that with Rebecca holding on to her as tightly as Annie was holding on to Rebecca. Hours of touching and talking that set them on a course that took them to a place that was not and could never have been imagined.

“Rebecca?” Katherine asks.

Katherine asks this question because she imagines that Rebecca, like Jill and Laura, has fallen into a place of remembering, into the heart of her grief, into that place where when you close your eyes you can still feel the faint breath of your friend when she kisses your cheek, the warm fingers of her hands supporting your arm when you scurry up the hill during a hike, the call at one
A.M
. when you see her bedroom light still flickering through the trees at the edge of the lot line, the waving hand on your way to work, the six-pack of beer on a Friday night that she leaves on your doorstep, the edge of laughter that has been pounded like an ancient drum against your own laugh line.

“I’m here,” Rebecca responds, lifting her head and then turning so she moves away from the view, that shitty shared horizon.

“These have been tough weeks. I haven’t called in a while and now I have something else to tell you.”

Rebecca laughs and the laugh, which is raucous and bold—almost something you could lift over your shoulder it is so real—makes Katherine laugh too.

“This isn’t really funny,” Katherine says through her own machine-gun giggles. “But we both know something else had to happen. We both know that Annie would have to do something else.”

“Please do not tell me you are dying,” Rebecca begs in all seriousness.

“No, Rebecca, that’s not it. We should all have known that Annie had one more request up her sleeve for us. Something she wants us to do. One last thing.”

“Nothing, so it seems, is ever really over.”

Rebecca is thinking of her own divorce when she says that. The painful throb of the mere word makes her laughter shriek to a halt, and the last laugh, for now, the last laugh lingers while she pauses to hold that anguish from his leaving, her wanting him to leave, the idea that was once an eternity will now be locked forever at 7.7 years and that the one daughter they have managed to create will now become a tool, a pawn, a poker chip that he will choose to throw on the table, take back and then throw again so many times it almost blinds Rebecca with anger.

“Should I go?” the tiny voice of her daughter Marden asked her so many times when she was eight and then nine and then twelve and then finally when she was sixteen and said, “This is enough. Now I know I should go.”

The phone calls about insurance and who pays for what and the screams of his new babies in the background and the unmistakable pounding of the new woman’s hands on the table as she locked his eyes with hers and most likely mouthed, “Hang up on the bitch,” while Rebecca waited for an answer about the band trip, summer vacation, a car, college tuition, the rest of their daughter’s life.

Even now, random phone calls: “Did she move?” “How can I get hold of her?” “Did you take my name off of her insurance?”

You think it might be over and then something turns up in the basement boxes that throws you into a place of swift agony. The shitty photos from the trip to Mexico the year before the divorce. Remembering things now that should have been a tip-off. A phone number on the bill that he said “must have been a wrong number.” The way he looked away when you asked him to make love to you on the beach, “Too much sun,” he’d said and added, “Maybe tomorrow.” Tomorrow there was the fiesta and then the bus tour and then in six months the fighting and what you considered trying without knowing that he was already gone, that he had left so long ago it would be impossible to remember back that far.

“Rebecca, she wants us to do something,” Katherine says again, shaking loose the divorce memories for just a moment.

“God, yes, it was always one more thing with Annie. This proj-ect. That project. A party. Another party. Another article. Rounding up protesters this week, getting them ready for the week after that. What am I telling you this for? You know all of this. It was constant and endless and I miss every damn minute of it.”

Katherine misses it too. She misses the phone calls and the wild trips north to attend a party or rake a yard or plant a new row of trees or bail Annie out of jail again.

“How many times did I end up on your couch because there wasn’t enough room at her house?” she asks Rebecca.

“Was I supposed to count?”

They laugh again, which is the entire point. It’s the laughing that they need to hold on to and they talk about that too. They talk about lining everyone up on the porch that one day in July and spitting watermelon seeds into tin cans. They talk about running naked through the sprinkler the night they drank a case of champagne when Annie got an article accepted into a prestigious journal; they talk about the road trip to the ocean where they ended up getting kicked out of the resort for “not acting their age.” They talk about Annie’s boys watching them all the years and learning things about women that made other boys jealous and other girls want to just be in the same room with them. They talk about daughters and the boys and girls that weekend from hell when they realized that their kids don’t necessarily have to be friends just because
they
are friends. They talk about being together in ways that are unique and should not be and how the word “family” is not something you can easily define, and Rebecca stands with both hands on her thin hips as she often does, still looking out across her yard and into Annie’s yard. She wears her silver hair down to her shoulders and just long enough so that she can put it in a ponytail and stick it through the baseball hats she loves to wear when she is not at work. Worry and life have kept her thin—you can stay thin lifting sick and dying people, driving to the hospital, and planning funerals.

Rebecca wonders, as Katherine talks and she splits her mind in two, if it will be something hard that Annie will ask of her. Will she have to beg off work, her position as a marketing specialist for a real estate development company, again? Will they let her? Will they even believe her? Will Annie’s boys feed the cats and pick up the mail and do the 267 other things that might be asked if she has to go away from what is left of her life without Annie?