Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral (14 page)

Melissa turns and looks slowly from one woman to the other. Her secluded world has given her the grace and ease and the poise of patience, respect, the ability to truly see. She sees sweet doses of wisdom and intelligence in each face as she turns from one woman to the next, smiling and grateful to know them in this small space.

“What if,” she says out loud, “what if one of you is about to give me something and I am about to give you something?”

Laura smiles because she has sensed something like this from the moment they walked into the bar. Rebecca, Katherine and Jill frown as if they are about to answer a tough question on an SAT exam. They wonder how this young, attractive and wise-beyond-her-years young woman has entrapped and entranced them in such a short period of time.

Jill’s heart has never beaten so wildly. For the first time in many months she knows exactly what she is supposed to do and what will happen, but she does not know how the pieces of information that Melissa holds in her hand will fit into anything—past or present.

“Melissa,” she says, looking into Melissa’s brown eyes. “Where was the facility? What can you tell us about what it was like? Would your mother come talk to us tonight? Are we asking you too many questions?”

Melissa smiles. She remembers rolling over in her tiny bedroom hours ago and thinking she would die if she had to stay in New Mexico one more day. And then rolling over to look out of her window and say to the late morning sky, “Help me. Faster, please. I want it faster. Three months until college starts. Give me something to hang on to until then. Please.”

“Eat or talk first?” she asks the women.

“Would your mother come here?” Katherine asks impatiently. “We could go get her. You tell us. We don’t want to be too much of a pain but anything would help us right now.”

“Here,” Melissa says, standing and taking charge. “Order your food and then I’ll call her and come back and talk to you until Mom gets here. She’ll come. I know she’ll come talk to you.”

Jill finds Melissa remarkable. The young woman’s thirst for challenge and change has sparked something inside of Jill that has been frozen. While Melissa takes their orders Jill watches every move and she gets an idea that suddenly changes everything. It is a whisper at first that grows into a tiny scream and then a snarl that bangs at the back of her throat. Jill bites it back, holds it there for a while, and waits, which is not easy. In the waiting, in the minutes she watches Melissa hand over the order, make the phone call and come back to the table, Jill imagines a change coming toward her like a rifle shot. She imagines something that is a possibility of promise for herself and for Melissa of New Mexico. Jill, the pensive professor, can barely sit still. Laura notices it. She reaches over to place her hand on Jill’s knee, to let her know that whatever it is must be good, to keep her still for just a few more moments.

“Mom will be here in less than an hour,” Melissa tells them, hands on hips, the new commander of the Ranchero Grill, captain to funeral-goers, women in mourning, and eager ears awaiting word from the front.

“So?” Rebecca asks.

Melissa smiles. She knows there must be more to their story but she has already agreed to surrender everything she knows to these wild women from places that she has only glimpsed through her computer screen, on television shows and in magazines.

“So,” she begins and launches into not only the history of Desert Dreams but into her own history and that of her family.

The women fall into Melissa’s stories. They search through every word for pieces of Annie, a sign that points in her direction, a hint of who she was and what happened when she passed through the open desert door.

“The buildings are still there,” Melissa tells them. “Too bad I didn’t know sooner, I’d take you down there and show you around. It’s like walking into a different world, kind of spooky. Some people even think they can hear voices when they are there.”

“Voices?” Jill asks. “What kind of voices?”

“The place was shut down about thirty years ago when some parents filed complaints after their kids claimed they had been restrained against their will, tied onto stakes in the sun and forced to march for days in the desert without food or water.”

“What?” they all exclaim at the same time.

“Some of the accusations were true and that’s why the place closed down. The owners vanished and the voices, so they say, are from the kids who were tied to the stakes.”

Everyone is leaning forward, four sets of hands are gripping the table’s edge, eyes focused on Melissa’s lips—the pallbearers are poised for action.

“What the hell happened there?”

“It was sort of funky experimental psychology. Some of it was just normal stuff. They had dorm rooms and a few psychologists who worked with people, probably like your Annie, who were basically good kids but just a bit off-center, but some of the kids who came needed to be slapped upside the head and so the people in charge designed their survival programs kind of like outdoor shock therapy.”

“Jesus,” Laura murmurs. “No wonder they folded. Was anyone ever hurt?”

“More people were helped, I think. That’s what my mom tells me anyway. She was there right from the start. She worked in the kitchen and part-time in the office and she pretty much knew everything.”

Rebecca is fixated on the part about kids being tied to stakes in the open sun. She needs to know more. In her mind she’s already planning a trip back to New Mexico so she can hike through the canyons and see Desert Dreams.

“Were there really stakes in the sun?” she asks.

“Yes,” Melissa tells her. “Some kids were tied to stakes there. My mom said it really happened but she also said it worked. Well, she said it sort of worked on some of them, but it sure doesn’t make sense to me.”

Melissa tells them about the first time she saw the Desert Dreams Ranch. It had been abandoned for years by the time she saw it but she remembers each detail of that first journey.

“It was like walking into a dream, because my mom had told us so many stories about it and then there it suddenly was, this cluster of empty buildings, pieces of old furniture still scattered around, in one building the table was still set. It was so weird and I never let go of my mom’s hand as we walked from building to building and then out to the creek where I saw the stakes in the ground,” she tells them. “I kept thinking I heard voices too.”

“They were probably the screams of those kids who were tied to the stakes.” Rebecca crosses her arms and pushes back from the table. “Would they have tied someone like Annie to the stakes?”

“Ask my mom. She knows more about stuff like that. Unless your Annie was totally wild, probably not. Your food is ready. Want to take a break to eat?”

They eat through a storm of questions, all the while imagining what it must have been like for Annie to be yanked from her high school world which may as well have been on the other side of the world, and thrown into the desert winds.

“Maybe it wasn’t bad,” Katherine shares. “She made the decision to
live
here, because she came back alive and moved forward after this experience; she sent us back here, it was clearly an important part of who she became. It sounds beyond freaky now but something good must have happened here for her.”

Just after they finish eating, Melissa’s mother flies into the bar, embraces Buck, and then kisses each one of the cowboys. She’s a much older version of Melissa, gray hair tied up in a bun, jeans worn white from actual wearing and not a chemical that was applied to make them look as if they came from New Mexico, her face creased into long tunnels by years of sun and desert wind, a wide smile and an openness that is immediately perceived as inviting and kind.

“Hey,” she says as she grabs a chair. “I’m Pat, Melissa said you needed me to make a house call.”

Pat is as gracious as her daughter and the vision of all the women together entrances the cowboys so much they order more shots and Buck also brings them another round of beers which makes everyone’s eyes bulge just a little but they begin drinking anyway.

Before they can begin talking, however, Melissa comes to say goodbye. She’s off-duty and anxious to see friends in Santa Fe. Jill slips her a twenty-dollar tip, her phone number, and a note that asks her to call in a few weeks. Melissa takes the gift without question, smiles and does not ask why Jill wants her to call. She stuffs the money and note inside of her jeans pocket and is gone with a wave and a short hug for Jill.

Then they hear Pat’s story. She wasn’t much older than half the young people she worked with all those years ago and she recalls being astounded by their damaged hearts and souls.

“This is my world,” she tells the four women, scanning her hand around the restaurant and bar, palm up.

She does not remember Annie.

“I worked there two years and then I took off, I had to leave, just like Melissa has to leave. I had her very late, as if you can’t tell—I was forty-four years old when she was born,” she says, laughing. “People thought her father and I were nuts. I thought the same thing for a while myself, but as you can see she is magnificent.”

Pat reassures them that most of the work done at the ranch was good work. She said a few counselors went too far and the survival behavior modification work was way too close to the edge but she swore that many young lives were changed and saved before the ranch closed.

“At least once or twice a year someone comes back,” she tells them. “Lots of the families stayed here before they dropped off their kids, so the first glimpse of the real desert and Desert Dreams they had was right from the edge of the cabin you are staying at tonight.”

The women talk for another two hours. Pat shares her stories as if she is passing out Christmas presents one at a time and the women take notes on napkins and in their heads and then just as Buck looks as if he’s ready to fall asleep on top of the bar and the cowboys throw them goodbye kisses and head back to their own ranch, Jill asks to see Pat alone for just a minute.

“What?” the women ask each other when Pat and Jill disappear. Laura knows but she also knows this is Jill’s story and she will wait patiently for Jill to tell it when she is ready.

After Jill comes back, they each say goodbye to Pat. Back at the cabin, they struggle to stay awake while the beer and whiskey shots flood through their veins like a stampede of wild alcohol.

“I just had this way-out idea that felt perfectly normal as Melissa talked to us,” Jill explained. “What I have missed most this past year is the contact with the students, the mothering, I suppose, that I never had through real kids. So here’s this bright, exceptional young woman whose parents struggle to make a living and there’s me with a nice house, a fine retirement plan, and access to one of the most wonderful universities in the country. Stack that on top of my missing passion and it was as if something clicked inside of me.”

“So, what?” Rebecca asks her. “Are you opening a halfway house?”

“Well, I’m opening my house. That’s the first step. I offered Pat the chance to bring Melissa to California to see where I live, to find out I am not some kind of nut and to maybe have Melissa move in with me, so that I can help her find her way. I’ve never pulled one university string in my entire career to get a student admitted and I’d like to see what that feels like.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Jill says. “It’ll change her life just like this place changed Annie’s life, and it will change mine, too. I can hardly believe it myself. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if an alien has taken over my body. We’ve only been gone what—one day?—and already I’m a changed woman.”

“I bet Annie planned this whole thing,” Katherine says. “I bet she knew exactly what would happen when we went into that bar and met Melissa. I wouldn’t be surprised if Annie’s ashes aren’t out there smiling and clapping their dusty hands right now.”

“Are you sure?” Rebecca asks Jill, frowning. “It’s one thing to leave them at the edge of the classroom every day. It’s quite another to bring them home and look at them another twelve hours.”

“Why the hell not? I already feel as if I’ve been reborn. The way I see it, I don’t have much to lose.”

“Which is exactly what Annie probably felt when she stood at the edge of that cliff and decided to live,” Laura points out. “Why the hell not indeed?”

“Why the hell not indeed,” each of the women repeats as each falls into her own bed with their boozy words leaping over each other and the thought that Annie would have indeed wanted Jill to take Melissa home, wanted for them to plunge into the desert world, wanted for her ashes to be spread at this remote place that she saw as the beginning of everything.

16

The airplane leaves so early that each of the women feels half drunk when it takes off and the plane dips quick and seemingly fast toward the east. Below them the desert disappears under clouds the color of fresh snow, and when they blink, the shaded browns and dark greens of New Mexico in spring have vanished.

Katherine has the box of ashes on her lap, her hands folded over the top of them as if she is saying a prayer, and her fingers holding lightly on to a small piece of paper that she usually keeps neatly folded just inside of the box. It is her mother’s obituary, her last physical link to another woman who helped form the soul of who she was to become, who she remains, who she will always be. Katherine has read the obituary so many times that it looks as if the piece of paper has been through the wash a dozen times. She wonders if she will ever stop reading it.

Katherine holds it, as she held her mother,
finally
held her mother, once she crossed over the threshold of adulthood herself and realized the power of a mother’s love for a child, the sacrifices her mother made that she never appreciated, and that great gift of patience that can only be learned through becoming a mother.

Sacramento Bee

DEATH NOTICE

LEVENS
, Frances A. (Frannie)

Passed away at the Fonera Hospice Center while resting quietly in the arms of her daughter on January 5 following a long and brave struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. She was born on Dec. 13, 1931, in Milwaukee, WI, grew up in that area and later moved to California with her husband, Thomas, where she thrived in her roles as a loving mother and wife. Her maternal instincts and kindhearted ways extended beyond her own family and out into the community and neighborhood that surrounded her. Frances never locked her door and it was not unusual for her home to be filled with friends, organizers of a local charitable cause, or a stranger who needed a little help. A consummate volunteer, she was active in the Girl Scouts, various parent and teacher organizations, Planned Parenthood, was an original member and lifelong supporter of the National Organization for Women and participated in many activities at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Rosemont. Besides her family, her greatest joy was the volunteer services she offered at the Canyon County Women’s Shelter. There her loving spirit helped countless women find the focus and direction that they needed. She will be deeply missed by her family and friends, who carry on the peaceful spirit that covered a life well lived. Frannie is survived by her husband, Thomas; daughter, Katherine P. Givins; son, Joshua; sister, Gloria; granddaughter, Sonya; and countless friends and others who were all touched by her generous heart. Donations to the Canyon County Shelter in her name are appreciated. In a letter written several months before her death, Frannie asked that instead of a traditional funeral service, a party be held in her honor to celebrate her life and the lives of everyone who touched her life as well. The party will be held January 15 at the Girl Scout Service Center complex in Carol City from 7 p.m. to midnight. Refreshments and music will be provided.

Jill catches Katherine crying as the plane levels out and they head east toward the Miami airport and the next phase of the traveling funeral. She pulls Katherine’s face away from the window and close to her so that they can talk and wipes Katherine’s tears from her face with her fingers as she asks her, “What is it?”

Katherine hands her the obituary, watches as Jill reads it, and then tells her how Annie’s funeral has her thinking about her mother.

“It took me forever to understand why my mother lived the way she did,” she shares with Jill. “There is so much of her inside of me, yet we were so different, so very different. Sometimes the guilt I feel because it took me so long to appreciate her and love her for who she was and what she did for me almost consumes me.”

“I didn’t know, Katherine,” Jill says, taking her hand. “Annie’s death on top of what happened with your mom, that’s a lot.”

“What’s a lot though?”

“Whatever you can or can’t handle, I suppose,” Jill tells her. “Everyone has a different level of ‘what’s a lot.’ ”

Katherine thinks about that. She thinks about having a baby when she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have a child, about marriage when she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married, about filing for a divorce when the entire world seemed to be pounding at her back window telling her not to do it. Katherine thinks about how her mother moved against her in her small hospice bed and the smell of her hair—lemon and lilac—the final time she turned to lie against her and then the hour that her mother died and everything, every single thing changed forever. Katherine thinks about making love after she has not made love for a long time. She thinks about the weight of that release on her heart and also on her pelvis and how she thought she might die if she had sex and she might die if she did not have sex. She thinks about how she felt when she learned that Annie was dying and then how she pushed that away to focus not on her own aching heart but on Annie and her life and needs and wants. She thinks of the void of missing her when the call came and while she wondered if she had done or been everything she could have been.

She imagines that Jill has thought of the same things. And she realizes, in the newness of their friendship, because they have been so focused on the loss of Annie and the ashes and what they are supposed to do, she has failed to ask her. Katherine turns in her seat and she takes Jill’s hand off the top of hers and places her hand over her long, slim fingers.

“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.”