League of Extraordinary Women by Vark_Driver
This is a slow-starting story. I hope it will reward you you if you stick with it, but if not, thanks for trying.
As always, it’s a work of fiction. No persons or events are more than my imagination.
ONE
I stood on the slight rise overlooking the gravesite. The soil was still mounded over the casket, now six feet below the surface. Tomorrow the laborers would put new grass over the grave, making it almost anonymous amidst the hundreds of others already there. There were no tall monuments to mark these graves, just a small brass plaque, each with a name and two yearly dates marking birth and death. Christie’s grave would look like all the rest. I had returned three days after the funeral. Everything was quiet here, the tall pine trees marching away in silent rows. Call it morbid, or whatever for what I care, but I was back, not yet ready to face the world without the woman of my life for these eight years. She was too young to die, especially to die in such a horrible manner. Brain cancer had been diagnosed eighteen months before she died and I and the others close to her had had to watch this vibrant, vital person who had such a gift of wit, love and sheer intellect be turned into a living vegetable before her inevitable death, losing every shred of the myriad of things that had made her so unique and loved.
Now I was alone, as I had been before she swept into my life eight ago. I was filled with wonderful memories of that time, punctuated with other memories of times we had struggled and fought. Life had not been a picnic, but it had been worth living. Now I wasn’t so sure.
The phone rang, and I glanced to see who it was. It was Evan, of course. My brother had been at the funeral but had had to fly away at the end of the ceremony. I let it go to voicemail. What was there to say at a time like this? I know the drill: the five stages of grief seemed engraved on my forehead. You get a head start with cancer. You know the outcome, just not when it will finally happen. There’s no sudden absence, there’s just a light burning dimmer with each passing week. I had wanted to be alone for weeks, just isolating and being unwilling to have the comfort of those who had known her. I had already indulged in anger, anger at the world, God, medicine, hospitals, virtually anything and everything associated with this process. I had bargained to no avail. Take me instead of her. She’s too valuable, too vital to be gone so soon. Now there was depression, that numbing desire to sit in a corner and let the world pass on by without me.
The phone rang again. This time it was Stephanie, Christie’s best friend and co-worker. I started to let this go to voicemail as well but on an impulse hit the answer key and said hello.
“Jeremy, come to see me, now. You cannot sit alone in that house. If you won’t come to me I’ll come to you. This is not what Christie would have wanted.”
“I’m not at home. I’m at the cemetery, listening to the silence that surrounds the dead.”
“Get in your car and come here. We’ll have a cup of coffee and talk. I’ve made fresh cinnamon roles and might even give you one, even though it’s not on your diet plan.”
“OK, I’ll come to see you. Will you leave alone after that?”
“No, I’m going to be the burr under your saddle until you move on.”
I disconnected and slowly walked back to my car. I was on bereavement leave from work. I had nothing to fill my time except the infinite list of things to do that I wanted to avoid: donate her clothes and other items; throw out the food in the refrigerator that had sat there while we waited for her to die; buy some real food; get a death certificate, file an insurance claim with her life insurance and with her HR department at work to collect her insurance money; sell her car, and on and on.
Stephanie lived close by our house, now my house. Another thing to get used to, singular versus plural. I pulled up in her driveway and parked, walked up the sidewalk and rang the doorbell. She opened the door and motioned me in, closing the door behind me. She gave me a hug, a kiss on the cheek, and led me into the sparkling clean kitchen. Stephanie was a ball of energy, one that needed a constant outlet. It was one of the things that had attracted the two women to each other and brought her into my life as well.
“What are you doing off work, Steph?”
“I took a sick day, a mental health day if you will.”
“How’s John?”
“You mean the man who works constantly and occasionally sleeps here?”
“Yep, that’s the one.”
“Still unsuspecting, if you must know.”
Stephanie and I had carried on a torrid affair for almost a year before Christie was diagnosed as having brain cancer. Guilt had led to an immediate end of the affair. For the last eighteen months we had returned to being friends, good friends. I had spent untold hours talking with her as we sat with Christie, taking turns holding her hand. I felt I knew her as well as Christie at this point. The guilt over the affair had been excruciating but had diminished as my grief over losing Christie increased. She had been incredibly supportive and had just been there whenever I had needed someone. All of Christie’s close friends had been wonderful, but Stephanie stood out, as always. She had always stood out in one way or another. John, her husband, had swept her away in their courtship days, but had regressed into a workaholic following the first two years of their marriage. The man was a fool.
I was surrounded by incredible women, all of them Christie’s immediate friends. She had attracted just a dazzling group of accomplished women, all of whom I liked and admired. I would be sorry to see them go as we all moved on with our lives without Christie.
“What’s your plan for today?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Good, I have one for you. I’ll get my coat and we’ll go to your place. We need to start emptying out the house of Christie’s things.”
Ten minutes later we were moving through the garage into the kitchen. Unlike her immaculate home, mine had a smell, a combination of neglect and decay.
“We’ll start with the kitchen. This is where most of the smell is.”
She knew her way around my house as well as her own. She rounded up trash bags, cleaning supplies, mops and brooms. All I did was take off my coat.
“Hey,” I said to her.”
“What, Jeremy?”
“Come here. Let me take off your coat first.”
She came over and turned around, shrugging off the coat into my hands. I put the coat down next to mine and put my arms around her waist.
“Thank you for being an incredible friend.”
“It’s complicated, but friendship comes before all other thoughts.”
She opened the refrigerator, gave a small cry, and starting gathering up items and throwing them into trash bags. She quickly went through the major items, emptying out bottles and jars into the sink, then tossing them into the bags. I watched in admiration as she weaved through the smaller jars, selecting only those that would have expired by now, leaving the ones with longer shelf lives. She glanced back at me.
“Start carrying these bags out to the garbage bins in the garage. We’ll get the big stuff now and do the real cleaning another day.”
I moved to collect the bags, amazed that there were already four bags filled.
“The vegetable bins are just gross. Everything goes, then the bins have to be washed or we’ll never get rid of the smell.”
We worked our way through the other cabinets, dumping any open containers of food that would possibly be spoiled or stale. She even did a quick scan of the canned goods and tossed unopened cans that had expired. The last eighteen months had taken their toll. Eating had been reduced to the absolute minimum to sustain life. Christie had been a marvelous cook. I had lived on canned soup and sandwiches.
“Go into the other rooms on this floor and collect anything you don’t want to keep. Set those items by the front door.”
So much for a slow, studied review of our worldly items, interweaved with memories of the specific times each item brought to mind. I scanned the bookshelves, open shelves, table tops, anything that held pictures or other memorabilia. I pulled out books that were Christie’s. All of this was gathered into a growing pile by the front door.
“What about the pictures? Are you going to keep all of these?”
Some were of Christie and her friends, marking their journeys here and there.
“Why don’t you go through them and keep the ones that seem memorable.”
“Don’t worry about the upstairs today. A group of us are coming over Saturday to gather her clothing and other items. We’ll take those to donate. Start a pile in one of the spare bedrooms of other items you don’t want to keep.”
It was fast and furious. We sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes. “I’ll start with the dishes, get a load in the dishwasher and then sweep and mop the floor. You should go through her car and take out anything personal. I’d have it detailed, then sell it somewhere. If you price it fair it’ll go pretty quickly.”
I moved to the car. I had driven it back and forth to the hospital many times, much of the stuff in the car was now my material to sort through. I cleaned out the glovebox and the trunk. It was dirty. Stephanie was right, it would need a thorough cleaning before being sold. Other than the car, the garage was pretty well my domain. There might be a few things in storage that would eventually go but otherwise it was just the stuff you slowly gathered as the years go by. I’d have to go through the Christmas stuff someday but certainly not today. I moved back to the kitchen. It already had been Stephanied, it now had a certain sheen to it. The floor, counters and sinks were gleaming clean. If I gave her another hour the windows would be as well. The dishwasher was churning away. The fridge was running again after being turned off to facilitate the mass cleansing. I heard noises from another room. Stephanie had already moved on to the downstairs bathroom and had gone through it, tossing whatever was appropriate.
“Jeremy, would you go through the hall closet?”