by Kris Radish
“Vitamins, I think,” the older woman tells her eagerly. “I’m sure they would be safe.”
Suddenly, Rebecca thinks the woman must be mad. She does not want to startle her so she looks at the bottle, then sets it back down and without thinking further turns sharply, leans in close to the woman’s ear and whispers, “I’m naked under these two things.”
That’s when Laura shakes her gently awake and Rebecca screams, crosses her hands over her breasts to cover herself as if she is really naked, and looks as if she has seen Annie’s ghost.
“Shit,” she tells Laura. “A dream. It was crazy.”
“Are you okay?” Laura asks her, sitting back down as the rest of the people file past them to get off the plane.
“It’s just a dream. I thought I was naked.”
Laura laughs. Rebecca laughs too and they decide the bizarre dream is a combination of the hangover, airplane food for breakfast, being with a group of women whom you know but don’t really know, a pile of guilt from not being where everyone else thinks you are supposed to be, and the intensity of not knowing what is about to happen on the second leg of the traveling funeral.
Even with that boost of knowledge, Rebecca cannot forget the dream. She talks about it as the two women walk off the plane, and she decides, speaking mostly to herself, that the half-naked towel thing must mean she is hiding something that needs to be uncovered. Rebecca always embraces her thoughts, even though they have mostly been filled with anguish and loss and so much grieving time that it has been hard to recover all these years and see a side of life that is not covered in a shroud of black. Dreams, she knows, always lead to something and maybe—maybe—something is shaking itself loose and she’ll be able to walk naked everywhere and only need an occasional shawl and nothing else to protect herself from the evils of the world and insane and corrupt rummage sales. Maybe.
There is little time to linger on those thoughts of glorious recovery because as Katherine, Jill and Laura are standing near a Cuban coffee vendor and shouting about the vibrant colors and the warm late morning air, Laura suddenly decides she knows the name of the older woman in Rebecca’s dream.
“What?” Rebecca asks. “How could you know that?”
“The same way I know other things. I think our dreams may have crossed over. I was dozing while you took a nap. Hang with me here. I know a woman who used to do what you said the woman in your dream does. Before my neighbor got sick she did that. She’d try and sell a jar with stones in it and she’d always tell you a story about them in broken English like they were gold nuggets or something. She looked like the woman in your dream. She was the woman. We—you and I, Rebecca—just have some interesting connection that is about to get richer for many reasons.”
Rebecca gets it, sort of. She knows Laura’s wild mind is a gift and she believes that Laura can and does know things. Some of those “things,” she should probably just keep to herself. But she can’t help it. She wants to know. She has to know who it was but beyond that, she’ll wait a bit. Is there really something else coming to connect her with Laura beyond this trip, Annie’s death, what they already know?
“Who the hell is she? Your neighbor?”
“Jencitia Chalwaski,” Laura shouts to her startled friends.
They look at her as if she really is naked like Rebecca was in her dream.
“What?” they all ask, sipping their tiny cups of coffee that is strong enough to lubricate the bearings on the airplane that just dropped them onto Florida soil.
“She’s a who, not a what. Jencitia Chalwaski.”
Just as Laura gets the last letter out of her mouth, her cell phone rings. This is only amazing to everyone but Laura because her phone was not turned on and has not been turned on since they touched down in Miami.
“Magic,” she tells them as they freeze in place, white cups to lips, afraid to move, wondering if Laura has not already had several conversations with Annie during the last twenty minutes that only she can hear.
Laura turns away, covers her ears, and they hear bits and pieces, Jencitia’s name again, the word “maybe,” lots of questions, and they watch Laura shaking her head up and down and then leaving it down as she dances a bit from one foot to the next and then after a long time and another cup of powerful coffee that could fuel a rocket to Mars, she turns back to them and says into the phone: “I’ll ask them and call you back soon.”
“What?” they demand again in unison as she disconnects the phone, and Laura looks at them, smiles, and thinks how wonderfully lucky Annie was to have known the three women she now sees standing against an orange wall in the Miami airport.
“You are all beautiful,” she says sincerely, taking one of her mental photographs of the trio and loading it into the slice of space behind her right eye so that she can look at them, reserve the space and place of the moment in the Miami airport when her new friends were sipping coffee roasted from the bark of coffee plants that smelled of tar and she stood in front of them, one hand on her hip, smiling.
“What?” they ask again, just a bit louder.
She tells them. Laura tells them about her neighbor, Balinda Chalwaski, who has been taking care of her terribly ill mother, Jencitia, for the past eight years. She tells them that Balinda is forty-six years old, never married and has put her entire life on hold to nurse her mother. She tells them that last night Balinda finally took her mother to a long-term care facility and is now in the process of having a mild nervous breakdown.
“I’m like part of her family, I’ve helped her do simple things and not-so-simple things like go to the grocery store and pick up a newspaper because her mother can’t be alone for five minutes or even a minute at a time,” Laura tells them, watching as their cups stop moving and their minds focus on what she is telling them, what she is about to ask. “They are from Poland. Her mother speaks very little English.”
Chicago, Laura explains, has the largest population of Polish people in the United States and the Chalwaskis came to follow a cousin, to start a new life just like Laura’s grandparents before them started a new life from that same country.
“What does she need?” Jill asks first, speaking for all of the women. “This Balinda.”
“A break, just a small break, because it may be the last time she can leave until her mother dies,” Laura tells them, repeating what Balinda has just told her. “There is a Polish-speaking nurse at the home where she took her mother. The nurse is leaving in one week. After that, unless she finds an interpreter, Balinda will be back to her schedule and unable to leave especially if her mother comes home. It could be months and months or even years and years, depending on the health of her mother.”
All of the women understand schedules. They understand sacrifice. They know what it feels like to never sleep, to always get up first, to wonder in the middle of a day that seems as if it stretches to forever what was the initial question and they know that they all have many more miles to go, more hands to hold, more, so much more yet to give.
And to receive.
Katherine steps forward and simply says, “Yes.”
Rebecca and Jill nod and Jill says that Marie would understand better than any of them that Balinda needs them now in a way she can’t need them when she is the constant caregiver for her mother.
And even if they find Laura’s premonitions a bit strange, even if they are hoping that Laura cannot see so far inside of them that she spots something even more horrible than the death of Annie G. Freeman, they do not stop her.
Laura quickly calls Balinda back and gives her the name of their hotel in the Keys, tells her she can arrange a shuttle from the far terminal at the airport and lets her know that there will be a cold glass of dark beer waiting for her the minute she walks into their arms.
“Come join the traveling funeral,” she invites Balinda. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
The conversation surrounding the word “sacrifice” never quite ends. The women talk nonstop as they load up the
van and wish out loud that it was a red convertible. Their words cross over each other as they throw their suitcases into the car, drive out of the terminal, then back, and then Jill hops out because they forgot the map and directions and they talk as they stop to buy a Styrofoam cooler, beer, several bottles of wine, snacks and Tampax for Rebecca who got her period fifteen minutes after the last cup of coffee.
“Praying for menopause,” she shouts through the back of the open van door as she flings her bag of supplies on top of their luggage, adds, “Damn it,” and climbs back in for the ride to the Keys.
Rebecca, they decide unanimously, still talking as Laura wheels them past the edge of Miami, is the queen of sacrifice. The deaths of her parents, her aunt and now Annie have devastated Rebecca financially, emotionally and physically. Rebecca accepts the title but swings the conversation to other kinds of loss. She tells them she’s had ample time to think about loss in all shapes, sizes and forms as she’s waltzed through hospital stays, caregiving and so many other funerals.
“Relationships. Animals. Jobs. Retirement,” she tells them. “Loss and then the grieving that comes after it arrives in many ways and forms. Think of it.”
Jill, the spouseless spinster, tells them about the dog who broke her heart. Eland, an Irish setter, was her hiking companion. They walked through the California hills together for nine years until Jill detected a slight limp in her companion’s front paw.
“Cancer that had driven a stake into her bones,” she recalled, turning her head to look out of the window as the city flashed by. “They tell you so many things to keep you thinking it will go away, that you can have another month or so, but it isn’t true and I didn’t think it was fair either.”
Sometimes, Jill tells them, her dog comes to her in her dreams barking wildly at a bird in a tree or dancing outside of her door because she knows they are about to go for a walk.
“I put her down fast,” Jill says as Rebecca reaches over to take her hand. “The second she could not do the one thing she loved to do more than anything—run—I knew that her heart was broken.”
Everyone has an animal story that brings them to tears.
Katherine’s mother’s yellow canary that sang every single time her mother put her fingers on the cage, and when the tiny bird died and they buried her at the edge of the tomato plants it was the first time Katherine saw her father cry.
Rebecca’s family dog who slept by the kitchen door and followed her to school so many times the principal finally let the dog come into the classroom, and when Sparky (“Really, we named him Sparky,” Rebecca said softly, as if she were sharing a secret) was hit by a car chasing a deer, Rebecca’s mother threw herself onto the living room couch and wept for so long that Rebecca ended up calling her aunt who drove fifty miles, wrapped Sparky in an old blanket, put him in her trunk and took Rebecca with her to bury him in her own backyard, because her mother had no yard, so that her mother would always be able to visit.
Laura’s cat, Pinky, who was actually black, and who she left behind when she went to college. When she called home, her mother would make Laura talk to the cat on the phone and the cat would wail for hours after hearing her voice. When the cat died, her mother cremated her and put the ashes into a ceramic bowl that still sits on top of Laura’s piano.
“Well,” Jill philosophizes, “I know what Annie thought about euthanasia and a person’s right to choose what to do with his or her own body and life, and I agree with Annie that throughout the course of a lifetime there is enough suffering. Enough is enough. Why do we make each other suffer? Why isn’t marijuana legal? Why do we plug people into machines who have no hope of ever doing a crossword puzzle again or reading a fabulous book?”
Why indeed, the women agree as Rebecca flips the conversation and asks everyone about their first great loss of love.
“Isn’t this a conversation for the beach tonight?” Katherine asks, realizing as she says it that the loss of her first love is almost as painful that moment as it was the day it happened.
“Ha!” Rebecca mockingly laughs. “Apparently you should go first.”
“She doesn’t have to,” Laura says, rescuing Katherine from a memory that surprises her with its intensity. “Maybe we should continue with the pet stories for a while.”
Quiet erupts for just a moment while the women tuck their love stories back where they came from and think about the burden sorrow often brings to its bearer. They think about how all those years ago they wondered how they would breathe, get up in the morning, live until the end of the week when what they thought was a major tragedy had struck them. They think about the weight of loss and how age has given them a view of life that is so much different than it was when they were 18, 28 or 38. They think about wisdom as being a gift from time but they also know that often time skips a beat because no matter where you are in your life pattern, sorrow can cripple and maim the hearts and hands of anyone—14 or 45 or 105.
“It doesn’t matter sometimes, does it?” Katherine asks and then continues to talk almost as if she is alone. “You look at yourself in the mirror, see the laugh lines getting longer and think that you can handle life now, you can handle what it brings and where it takes you and that nothing, no pain, will ever be as great as the one before it.
“But . . .” She trails off and begins to cry.
Jill reaches over to place her hand on Katherine’s cheek. She lets Katherine’s tears fall into the folds of her fingers and then she says, “But what? Tell us, Katherine. It’s okay.”
“This trip, Annie dying, my damn favorite bra falling apart, the loss of my mother—I feel as if everything has changed and it’s unsettled me in a way that I am having a hard time understanding.”
Jill takes her hand away. Katherine swallows and searches for what she wants to say because she isn’t certain. She doesn’t know what she wants to say. All she knows is that the day the red shoes arrived everything changed. Or maybe everything just started to change faster.
“This traveling funeral has made me think about everything, every aspect of my life, and I am wondering now how happy I have been or could be,” she confesses. “It’s not like I’ve ever even focused on what I want or where I am going. It’s like life has been driving me and I have not been driving my life.”
As she says it, Katherine realizes that is exactly what has happened. She realizes that her life has become a pattern of routines, routines that she always thought were necessary, have turned her into a person she no longer recognizes when she bothers to stop and look.
“I think maybe we are all feeling like that,” Laura shares. “I mean it’s not like my life has had rich consistency to it except for always hoping my daughter will come home again, but how often do we get a chance like this to stop and fan through things to see if we’ve become a damn zombie? I’ve got my job at the women’s center and a husband but what does any of that even mean anymore?”
“I suppose Annie thought about all of this,” Rebecca whispers from the back seat. “I suppose she knew we’d go beyond honoring her and find out where the empty spaces in our own lives have been hiding. It’s good. It’s all good.”
They decide to think about the traveling funeral as a pause, like a chance to take an extra breath, and then they each say what they would have been doing at that exact moment if they had not disrupted their life patterns.
Work.
Crying on the porch.
Work.
And more work.
Grieving for Annie.
And all of it, every single part of it okay, they decide, until this moment or one last night or the one when they decided to go on the traveling funeral when they opened up a chasm of thought, of time and thinking about not only Annie’s life but their own lives with and without her.
“Listen to us,” Jill says softly. “I think we all thought about this trip as our last gift to Annie. That’s what I thought, anyway. But it seems as if there are other gifts exploding all over the place.”
“Katherine, didn’t you say once that funerals are for the living?” Jill asks.
Miami disappears into the flat Florida horizon very quickly then as Annie Freeman’s pallbearers drive toward a long bridge that leads them deeper and deeper into a conversation that centers more on living than on dying. Which, they all agree, is exactly the kind of conversation Annie G. Freeman would have expected them to have.
18
* * *
John Chester is looking underneath the side of his wooden pier, his glasses tucked into his buttoned front shirt pocket and is busy untwisting anchor ropes and fishing line when he looks up, spots a blur of red moving toward the pier, realizes it’s a group of women and mumbles to himself, “Jesus, what the hell do they have on?”
By the time he drops his lines, fishes his glasses out, stands, and realizes it’s the Annie G. Freeman gang, the four women are rocking the pier with so much movement he’s afraid he’s going to go ass-end-first right into the bay.
“Hey, ladies!” he shouts as they move toward him to the end of what is the longest and best built pier in Islamorada. “Spread out a little bit and slow down or we’ll all be going swimming.”
Laura, Jill, Katherine and Rebecca have been in a trance for the past hour. Their conversation trickled into short sentences as they drove through the top of the Florida Keys, past Key Largo, Tavernier and Plantation to the front door of the Harbour Haven Bed and Breakfast. Their serious conversations about life and love and what death does to both those glorious elements tapered off as they started focusing on the glorious spot where Annie’s traveling funeral had delivered them on the second part of their journey.
None of the women had ever been to the Keys before—Miami, Tampa, the sandy and college-student-filled beaches along the Atlantic, maybe, but never to the dark green land meshed against sky the exact same color as the ocean that now seemed to be seducing them in waves that called their names constantly.
