The Resurrection of Tess Blessing

  “The song?” I suggest.

  She’s so tangled up inside that she doesn’t even realize she’s acquiesced and given voice to, “I’ve got something in my pocket that belongs upon my face. I keep it very close at hand in a most convenient place,” until another woman with a haunting vibrato joins in, and then one by one so do the other ladies stacked up behind her. “I’m sure you’ll never guess it if you guess a long, long while. So I’ll take it out and put it on it’s a great big Brownie smile.”

  By the time they reach the ground floor, the troopers are in perfect harmony.

  An Encore Performance

  Unlike his response to the initial surgery, Will volunteered to stay in the hospital room while Dr. Whaley completed the margin cleanup, but until Tess’s questions about his faithfulness are satisfactorily answered, she thought it best to keep him at arm’s length.

  After he delivers her to St. Mary’s North, she jumps out of the car and rushes through the hospital’s double doors before he can holler an insipid, “Love you,” out the car window.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Nurse Jerry quips when he shows Tess into the room.

  The accommodations are not as sumptuous as the last time. The bed has been replaced by a La-Z-Boy, and she assumes that Will was right when he’d told her, “This surgery doesn’t sound like a complete engine overhaul like the first one. This will be quick. Like a tune-up.”

  After Susan, the Amish-looking nurse, checks off the presurgery questionnaire, off they go to the operating room where Dr. Whaley asks from behind his green mask, “You set?”

  “Like a table,” hysterical Tess says through chattering teeth. (Birdie had told her that joke when they were kids.)

  When anesthesiologist, Dr. Gritzhammer, lowers the mask it occurs to her that it might’ve been prudent to apologize for not returning his call last night since he’s controlling her air flow, but by her third inhalation—ninety-thirteen—she no longer gives a fig. She’s got bigger fish to fry. The only way she could talk herself into the surgery was by reminding herself over and over that while she’s under, she’ll be reunited again with her family in the Sea of Unconditional Love.

  What a cotton-pickin’ shame nothing like that happened.

  Tess awakens in the recovery room remembering nothing and feeling leaden and groggier than the last time. Jerry returns her to her room, fusses over her vitals for a few minutes, and warns her to stay seated.

  She’s relieved that Dr. Gritzhammer hadn’t transformed her into a salad ingredient, but she’s crushed that she’d not experienced another visit to the Land of Milk and Honey. Close to tears, she asks me, “Why do you think that is?”

  I shrug and say with a smile, “One per customer?” because I can’t answer that truthfully. I can only commiserate. (Another part of my job is to decide how many revelations my already overstimulated friend can handle at any particular point in time. I don’t want her to short circuit.)

  Upon Jerry’s return, Tess tells him how glad she is that Mare’s cancer had gone into remission in an overly lucid way—the way drunks talk to cops—because he won’t release her if she seems too out of it, which she is.

  Will shows up to retrieve her an hour later.

  Back home, he helps her into bed and returns to the diner for the afternoon shift. She drifts into a deep sleep and a drug-induced dream. She and Birdie are having a picnic on the beach where Tess had tried to dispose of her mother’s ashes. The girls are having a grand old time until they notice someone darting amongst the trees in the woods behind them. It takes them a few minutes to figure out it’s Louise. She keeps her distance until the sisters go for a swim, but then she scuttles down to the sand and steals their lunch basket.

  Tess hears herself yell out, “Stop, thief!” when she bolts up in bed drenched in sweat. Unsure how long she’d been out, she checks the clock next to the bed. It’s almost five. “Henry?” she calls out. “You home?”

  If he is, he isn’t answering her. She didn’t tell him about the early-morning surgery. She’d figured that the anesthesia would’ve worn off by the time he got home from basketball practice asking for a snack or complaining about some teacher.

  She calls him on his cell phone because she recently discovered this is a better line of communication as opposed to face-to-face conversation.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “Bobo’s.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Poker.”

  “It’s getting late. Are you eating supper over there?”

  “Yeah.”

  She hangs up and leans back onto the pillows. Other than Garbo, who is lying at the foot of the bed, she thought she was alone until she hears the toilet flush. Will usually came home between shifts, but not always. He zips up and tells her how busy lunch had been and she gives him an update on Henry.

  “You hungry?” he asks.

  “Uh-uh.”

  He kisses her on the forehead. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  Except on Wednesday nights, Louise reminds, before Tess drifts off again.

  She wakes up a few hours later after a fitful sleep. She’s in pain. Her wounded breast is aching more than it had. She rolls onto her back and lifts up her nightie to check beneath the loose bandage. “Oh, man, Grace. Look.” Her good old girl is shiny and swollen, the skin stretched tightly across what feels like a piece of teakwood. “I don’t think this is supposed to happen.”

  I agree. “You better call Will.”

  He has difficulty hearing her because the diner is hopping and that’s good. The medical bills have already started pouring in. Tess shouts into the phone, “There’s something going on with my breast. It hurts and it’s hard and…I don’t know what to do.”

  “Rob Whaley’s here with his wife,” he hollers. “Let me ask him.”

  Tess hopes he remembers to lower his voice. Not blurt out something about the cancer in front of the doctor’s wife or the restaurant staff and customers.

  Will comes back to tell her a few minutes later, “He says we need to meet him at the emergency room. He’s leaving now, and I’ve already got on my coat.”

  Tess hangs up and calls Henry back. “There’s something going on with my elbow. I mean…,” she smacks herself in the head, “my shoulder. I’ve gotta go back to the hospital and get it looked at. Can you get a ride home?”

  No response.

  “Henry?”

  “We’re in the middle of a hold ’em tournament. Can I stay the night?”

  He’s got school tomorrow, but it might be a good idea to keep him away until she knows what’s going on. “Yeah, sure.”

  She doesn’t bother changing out of her cows-sipping-café-au-lait-on-the-Champs-Élysées nightie, just slips on her coat and boots, kisses Garbo goodbye, and waits in the mud room until she hears Will beep the horn in the driveway.

  Dr. Whaley must’ve called ahead because an emergency-room nurse, who looks better suited for work on a loading dock, is expecting them. Will’s holding Tess’s hand in the curtained exam room, but it’s not doing much good to keep her steady. She’s barely recovered from this afternoon’s surgery.

  Her surgeon shows up ten minutes later wearing a leather jacket, creased jeans, and a white button-down shirt. He asks her to lie back and slides his practiced fingers across her petrified breast. “That’s what I thought. It’s a hematoma,” he says. “You’re bleeding into your breast. It’s a complication from the surgery. I have to drain it.”

  This is the second time Dr. Cutie Patootie has screwed up. Where’d he get his scalpel? A Cracker Jack box?

  Tess tells him, “Fine.” She was so very tired. “I’ll rest my eyes and you go fetch your drain.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple. Eventually the blood will be reabsorbed, but that takes time and you need to start your radiation treatments,” the doc says. “You’ll have to have another surgery.”

  She dissolves into k
itten yowls.

  Will asks the man who’d been sharing a romantic banana split a half hour earlier with his wife at Count Your Blessings, “When?”

  “Immediately.”

  Tessie cries out, “Nooo!” but the wheels are already set in motion.

  A little after two a.m., the Blessings return home down the empty streets of Ruby Falls. Will helps his still-woozy woman through the backdoor of the house and up the staircase. As they approach the closed door of their son’s room, which was supposed to be vacant, Tess stops. She can feel Henry’s presence. “He must’ve come home ’cause he lost big,” she says. “I need to check on the snake. Could you let Garbo out?”

  She tiptoes in, but throws only a cursory look at the reptile aquarium. She’s really come to touch Henry the only time he’ll let her. She kneels down beside his bed to stroke his long back and nuzzle his hair. He grunts and rolls away from her.

  When she stands, the drugs hit her hard and she grabs onto the foot of the bed to steady herself. While she’s waiting for the room to stop spinning, Henry says out of the dark, “I know ya got something bad wrong with you and it’s not your shoulder. Or your elbow.” A rustling of sheets, the flipping of a pillow. “And the snake croaked again. ’Night.”

  Four Pairs of Red Wax Lips, The Really Big Ones

  Tess rose determined from a dreamless sleep. Once she gets things straightened out with Henry, she plans to set into her new To-Do List with renewed vigor.

  She’ll be the first to admit that her cooking is nothing to write home about, but she’s a pretty good baker. Her technique isn’t great, but she kneads dough with so much heart you can taste it. She’s thrown together a colorful breakfast for her son this morning: Cinnamon rolls with orange cream cheese frosting and Green Mountain coffee.

  Will’s still asleep. Last night’s emergency surgery took so much out of him, poor baby. So it’s just Henry and gung-ho Tess in the heavenly smelling kitchen this morning. She’s seated in her usual spot at the table. Garbo is nuzzled at her feet and, as always, I’m by her side. Henry’s across from us.

  Instead of tackling the big issue right off, I suggest that she breaks the ice by asking her early-morning-challenged son how cards went last night.

  He paws at one of the rolls and tells her, “I won my fair share of the pots,” in an assured, James-Bond-in-Monte-Carlo way.

  Tess grins. She adores every single thing about this boy, but it’s his sense of humor that really slays her. She takes a sip of tea, then says as offhandedly as she can, which isn’t very, “What you said last night? You’re right. I do…did have something bad wrong with me, but I’m fine now.” She launches into an abbreviated, untechnical version of the cancer ordeal and concludes with, “I kept it a secret because I didn’t want to upset you.” Henry doesn’t appear to be thrown, nor does he pepper her with questions, which doesn’t really surprise her. After all, the tumor was located in one of her good old girls, which he felt entirely uncomfortable acknowledging she possessed. And he’s a teenage boy, with a practiced poker face. She didn’t expect him to dissolve into tears the way Haddie might when she shares the news with her.

  Her children have very little in common except the love they have for one another. They teased, but also confided in each other. Tess had overheard them talking while they were watching a movie together in the basement a few months back. Henry had been jamming pepperoni pizza into his face and making fun of Haddie for nibbling “hamster food,” and the truth about her disorder came out.

  Tess takes another sip of tea and tells her son, “You need to promise me that you’ll keep all of this on the down low. Even from your sister, most especially from your sister. I know that you know she’s going through something really hard of her own right now.”

  “Whatever,” he says as he reaches for a cinnamon roll for the road. “Bobo’s gonna pick me up in ten minutes. He bet giving me a ride to school for the rest of the year and he lost.” Henry isn’t looking at Tess. His focus is over her shoulder, on the flock of snow angels outside the kitchen window. “You sure you’re not gonna…ya know?”

  “Positive,” she says, even though she’s still not convinced that she won’t die sooner rather than later. It appears that she licked it his time, but look at Mare Hanson and all her recurrences. “All that’s left now are the radiation treatments to make sure every bit of it is gone.”

  When Henry pushes his chair away from the table, his eyes are shining, but he’s doing a good job of pretending they aren’t. “What’s radiation?”

  She tells her Star Wars fanatic, “Light-saber stuff,” because that’s how she’s framed the treatment in her mind—Princess Tess fighting the Dark Side.

  He shakes his head, says dryly, “If you’re about to say, ‘May the force be with you’—don’t. Seriously. That’s so lame.”

  Tess laughs as he proceeds toward the mud room to bundle himself against March’s blustering. “Love you, Momil,” he says before he slams out of the house.

  With a warm, fuzzy feeling, the kind one might experience when a lost sock turns up, Tess moves on to the next items on today’s agenda. She removes the new To-Do List from her robe pocket, smoothes it out on the kitchen table, and studies it.

  She crosses out number seven, same for number eight.

  Having a religious epiphany didn’t feel important to her anymore. According to the doctors, her number wasn’t up, and the way she looked at it, if she wasn’t about to die in the next month or so why bother getting all holy?

  Buy broccoli.

  Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.

  Set up a vocational counseling appointment for Henry.

  Convince Will to love me again.

  Get Birdie to talk to me.

  Bury Louise once and for all.

  Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.

  Die.

  She skips past number four because she’s not sure anymore if she even wants to convince Will to love her again. That depends on whether he’s having an affair.

  Number five on the list is her number one priority this morning.

  Tess has been pining for her sister. Desperately needs the comfort of their shared experience. To not say to someone, for instance, her husband, “Do you ever feel like someone has gotten a hold of your mind and is using it to beat you into submission?” and have that someone, say her husband, reply, “Speaking of beating…doesn’t an egg-white omelet sound good?” Birdie would understand. Despite the state their relationship is now in, her sister’s and her connection is as powerful as two soldiers surviving a war, a bond that can’t be replicated. They went crazy together.

  On her walk to the sunroom, Tess reviews everything she’s done thus far to open their line of communication. Besides sending the twenty-eight smiling-suns-and-kitties Hallmark cards that she’d hoped might put Birdie into a “Today Is a Purrrfect Day” frame of mind, she’d tried a telegram—“Let’s stop this. Stop.” Sent a gorgeous tussie-mussie. A yellow angora sweater. The wishing well. And one hundred and forty-two e-mails, as of this morning.

  When I make myself comfortable in the chintz chaise, Garbo plops down next to me. Tess is psyching herself up to write Birdie yet again, and also preparing herself for another rejection. But when she turns on her computer, much to her astonishment, her sister has already beaten her to the punch! (I mighta asked Bee to nudge her a little.) Will felt bad about how much Tess’d been missing her sister and he helped out too. He knew from her past attempts to contact Birdie that she might not pick up if he placed the call from home, so he phoned her yesterday afternoon from a number that he knew she wouldn’t recognize—the diner’s. She was chilly at first, but Will can lay on the Blessing charm when he wants to, and they ended up having a fairly nice talk. Not nice enough that she felt comfortable accepting his invitation to come visit in May, but the groundwork had been laid.

  Tessie’s eyes are locked onto the instant message from Birdistheword t
hat’s appeared on the computer screen. Her immediate reaction was, “Hurray!” but then, of course, her guard went up. She’s suspicious of all fortuitous events, and this one really has her wondering. The timing is too extraordinary, too much of a coincidence. She’d been whining to Will more than usual lately how badly she needed to connect with Birdie and poof—here she is!? Which is why it’s now occurring to my friend that it’s not her sister after all, but Will communicating with her on his laptop upstairs. He’s been slightly more attentive as of late and he might be trying to comfort her. She doesn’t know very much about computers. Is it possible for him to impersonate her sister via instant messages?

  If not, and it really is Birdie, it’s just occurred to Tess that while it’s so, so wonderful to finally hear from her, this conversation might not go as hoped. She’s been dreaming about the loving, close relationship they’d once had, but she had to face the fact that Birdie might not feel the same way. She might’ve only reached out to her this morning because she’s in the grips of a delusion, or she could be having one of her “Today Was a Cloudy Day and Tomorrow Will Be One as Well and Every Day after That Is Not Looking So Hot Either, So What’s the Fucking Point?” days and only contacted Tess to castigate her once again for not being the big sister she’d always wanted and needed. One who would’ve saved their daddy from drowning, one who wouldn’t have agreed with Leon about pulling the plug on Louise, one who would’ve kept her promise to scatter their mother’s ashes.

  Tess’s fingertips are almost vibrating when she places them on the keyboard and pecks out:

  Tessie: Is that really you?

  Birdistheword: No. It’s Boogie Ackerman.

  Tessie: LOL.

  She’s only laughing out of one side of her mouth though. That doesn’t prove anything. It could still be Will pretending to be Birdie. She’d told him how she’d accidentally impersonated the notorious nose-picker in one of her e-mails to her sister.