Read Online Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral by Kris Radish - Free Book Online Page B

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