The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (12 page)

“Forget something?” Tess asks the white-haired woman on her way to the bank of lockers.

“My face.” She chortles. “I was halfway to the bus stop when I remembered.” She snaps the lipstick back into the gold tube and is out the door again with a chipper, “Happy trails!”

That leaves just Tessie and me now in the pink room. She figures I’m there to change out of the hospital uniform I was wearing during the procedure into my street clothes.

After she slides the shower curtain shut behind her, I sit down on the locker-room bench outside the changing area and tell her, “You might want to start thinkin’ about how
you’re
gonna handle all this if it works out for the worst. This is one of those times that I’ve found hope comes in real handy.”

I chose that remark because the reappearance of Francis wearing the fox stole has brought Tess’s gammy to the forefront of her mind and that’s something
she
would’ve told her granddaughter under these circumstances. If only she was still alive, what a comfort Caroline Finley would be in the predicament my friend finds herself in.

She’s not only alone and frightened, because she skipped Will’s delicious breakfast offering this morning—she’s starving. She could really go for one of those marshmallow and peanut butter sandwiches their gammy would make Birdie and her on the Sunday summer afternoons their daddy would drop them off to visit his parents in their little stone country house before he died.

Once they had polished off their lunch, dirt-hating Birdie would retreat into the house to play Gin Rummy with Boppa, and Tess and Gammy would get to work in the garden. Her grandmother was the one who taught her how to pull together tussie-mussies. The darling bouquets whose origins go back to buttoned-up-tight Victorian times when lovers would use them to send coded messages. Especially, the stirrings-below-the-waist type, which might explain why roses (passionate, romantic love) were such big sellers back in those days.

Alongside the large garden where flowers and a few radishes, carrots, pole beans, and wandering prickly stalks that bore pumpkins her beloved grandchildren carved into silly faces around Halloween, there was a precious plot that Caroline Finley tended in honor of her daughter, Alice, who had passed on years ago. Those who were still able to wrap their arms around their children had told her that time heals all wounds at the funeral, but she knew they were wrong. Her loss would not be diminished by the tick of a clock, if anything, its roots would sink deeper. She needed a way to tend to it. So she planted baby’s breath for purity and lily of the valley for humility and shy Alice’s favorite—pink peonies—drooped proudly for bashfulness. She nurtured the garden not with the expectation that it would somehow alleviate her suffering, but simply to honor her departed daughter, and mark the passage of sunrises and sunsets until she would be reunited with her again.

Of course, it being the 1950s, a time that death, and just about any other trauma was treated with a firm, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach, Caroline didn’t discuss her grief. She buried it beneath common sense subjects like cleaning and baking while they toiled in the garden together. But my Tess, a curious and sensitive child who had found out early in life that forewarned is forearmed, was compelled to ask, “What made Aunt Alice so sick and die anyway? Can you catch it?”

Her grandmother, who had been gathering green beans into her yellow checked apron at the time, responded to the question by dropping the whole kit and caboodle, pressing Tess to her bounteous breasts, and saying through tears that came as fast and unexpected as a spring shower, “Time to say a rosary for our dearly departed.”

They left their muddy shoes at the backdoor of the ranch house, washed the dirt off their hands at the kitchen sink, and after they collected Birdie from the parlor, the three of them padded to their grandparents’ feather mattress to hold their beads beneath a picture of Jesus displaying his sacred bleeding heart that was an exact replica of the one that Tess passes as she searches the hospital halls now for Jill.

Room #121 was where she’d been instructed to meet the nurse to discuss the results of the pathology report, but Tess is not having much luck staying in the here and now. The smell of disinfectant has shifted her mind into reverse again. She’s being reminded of Birdie now. And how she’d cut one of their last telephone visits short because it was almost four o’clock and she needed to clean out the hinge holes in the back of her washing machine with Q-tips and witch hazel.

Her sister was born on the fussy side of the blanket, so Tess isn’t exactly sure when Birdie escalated into compulsive cleanliness. She thinks it might’ve been about a year after their mother married Mr. Gallagher. Louise told the girls, “It’s official,” on the ride home from the legal adoption proceedings at the Milwaukee courthouse. “Leon’s your father now. You can be arrested if you don’t call him Daddy.”

Being the fastidious person that she was, their mother wasn’t done housecleaning. When the girls showed up at the breakfast table nine days later to jelly doughnuts and two glasses of Ovaltine, she wished them a cheery, “Happy birthday,” and slowly withdrew an envelope from her capri pants and set it down next to her pack of L&M cigarettes that Tess was sure she smoked because they were her mother’s first two initials. She recognized their gammy’s handwriting and reached out for the card, but her mother’s hand slapped down hard. “You won’t be seeing them anymore. Don’t call or write to them either. It hurts Leon’s feelings.” Louise deposited the card that Tess knew would have eleven dimes scotch-taped to the bottom into the trash can under the sink, thought better of it, and slipped it back into her apron pocket. “Think of Caroline and Al as deceased and desisted. Like your father.”

At first, the girls didn’t think they could face a life without the Sundays afternoons they’d spent with their funny boppa, who’d been a fireman in his prime, but now spent his days in a bank protecting money and pulling practical jokes on the tellers, and their gammy, who loved to garden and could make a mean leg of lamb. But, in time, the memories faded, and the Lord’s Day became like any other. And as weeks turned into months, as summers passed and winters arrived, the sisters could barely recall anymore the way Boppa would pass out gum that turned their teeth black, or how their gammy would prepare a Nativity scene each Christmas and since she wasn’t that great of a baker, the holy tableau would always come out looking like blobs of dough looking religiously at other blobs of dough.

It wasn’t until many moons later—New Year’s Day of last year—that forty-seven-year-old Birdie, who was still living in Boca Raton, and grappling with unresolved grief over the loss of her mother, got it into her unbalanced head that if she couldn’t have Louise anymore she’d replace her with the next best thing. “We found Daddy in the cemetery, didn’t we? Now I’m going to find Gammy, not dead, but alive!” she told her big sister way, way too excited on the phone call from Florida.

Birdie’s resolution greatly concerned Tess. For when she failed to find Gammy, who
had
to have passed on years and years ago, she would be devastated and pay dearly. Her symptoms would ratchet up ten notches. She didn’t experience the breaks with reality with the same frequency she’d once had, but when she did, they were doozies. She would call Tess, usually in the middle of the night, to report something like, “Guess who just visited Birdie? Marie Antoinette!” Since she’d always refer to herself in the third person when she was experiencing a delusion, Tess had no problem recognizing when Birdie had a meltdown, and, of course, the high improbability of the dead Queen of France dropping in on her sister in Boca Raton was also a tip-off.

Tess was stumped during the disturbing calls at first, but through trial and error, she’d stumbled upon the most effective way to reel Birdie back to the here and now. It was quite simple, really, as so many profound ideas are. All she had to do was dig a little deeper. She would say, “No kidding! Wow! Marie Antoinette? Was she speaking French?” The questions would be met with a hollow silence on the end of the line, but then her sister would say softly four times, “Birdie doesn’t remember,” and then Tess would tell her she loved her and remind her to take her green pills.

When the end of January drew closer and nothing more was mentioned about the search for their long-dead grandmother, she thought that Birdie had forgotten all about finding her because her OCD brain had latched onto something else, so Tess relaxed some, well, as much as she can relax.

On February 2, six weeks after she had brought up the preposterous idea, Birdie called early to make sure Tess had received her four Happy Groundhog’s Day cards because commemorating every holiday, no matter how inconsequential, was one of her compulsions.

Tess thanked her four times for the cards, told her how much she loved the pictures of Punxsutawney Phil she’d included, but what about the other photo she’d sent? She asked, “Who’s the old lady sitting on the sofa?” The woman was kind of turned away from the camera, but Tess thought it might be the gal who lived downstairs from her sister. They’d struck up a friendship over their mutual love for cards and anise cookies. “Is that Esther?”

“No!” Birdie replied with glee. “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! It’s Gammy! I found her just like I told you I would!”

Tess’s heart tanked. Unable to ask her outright because she didn’t know when she was suffering from a delusion, she did what she always did to shut down her sister’s troubled brain. She leaned back in her sunroom chair and said with a sigh, “Really? Wow! Gammy? What’s her address?”

“Seventy-five-fifteen Nash Street. Apartment two.”

And then Birdie babbled on about how she’d found their grandmother in the phone book only a few days after she’d set forth to look for her, and how over the last month she’d spent time with ninety-three-year-old Gammy in Milwaukee, but not Boppa, who had died of a heart attack at the bank years ago and…and she’d met their Uncle Raymond and they’d had a big party with balloons and liver sausage and…played charades.

Tess, thinking that her sister’s desire to replace their dead mother was so profound that she’d taken the delusion one step beyond, quickly composed another question. She was just about to ask aviophobic Birdie how she’d gotten to Milwaukee when her sister said, “I can fly now!” And then she went on to explain how she’d been hypnotized, which didn’t surprise Tess. Birdie had that wild streak, and had always been the more adventurous in seeking out fringe cures, like astrology, psychic visits, and past-life regression therapy.

As Tessie listened to her sister prattle on, she slowly realized that not once during the conversation had Birdie referred to herself in the third person, which was an absolute, without a doubt, delusion indicator. Which was why, as far-fetched as the story was, she grew more and more convinced of two things. Birdie really
had
found their gammy alive and not dead. And she’d withheld that vital information from her for over a month.

How could she?

“But…why didn’t you tell me as soon as you found her?” a wounded Tess asked.

Birdie crowed, “Because I wanted to keep her to myself for a while. You like to garden and you don’t have scars on your wrists and….” She was unremorseful and wound up tighter than usual. “You got a husband, children, a nice house, and what do I have after you let Daddy and Louise die?”

Tess wanted to say,
Me, you got me
,
Bird,
but it was at that moment that she realized that her sister hadn’t nudged her off the pedestal she’d placed her on so many years ago, she’d knocked her clean off.

Bewildered, but still somewhat hopeful that Birdie really had made it all up, Tess hung up and raced over to the address on Nash Street in Milwaukee. She was familiar with the neighborhood. Their old house and Holy Cross Cemetery were just three blocks down.

The apartment building their grandmother was purportedly living in was four units up, four down, sandwiched on a block between a savings and loan and a Shell station. The usual stale smells rose out of the matted gold carpet that ran in front of apartment number two. Tess knocked hard, but it took some repeating to be heard above parakeet chirping and a TV commercial selling the quicker picker upper. It seemed like forever before she heard rustling on the other side of the apartment door and a voice tentatively asking, “Yes? Who’s there?”

She sounded different, shakier, but the pit of Tess’s stomach had no difficulty identifying her. When she answered, “Lily of the Valley stands for returning happiness,” her gammy cried out, “Tessie?” and fumbled with the lock. “Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What are you doing here? Birdie told us you were dead!”

Bulky black-and-gray medical machines hover in the shadows of Room #121 like subversives devising an end-of-the-world plan.

Jill is sitting on a three-wheeled stool across from recently biopsied Tess, who is studying her facial expressions for a hint of things to come. Did the nurse look happy? Sad? Concerned? She had learned how to mood-read early on in life because if she could figure out the way her mother was feeling, she and Birdie could get running starts because Louise was fast. Real fast.

Jill slides closer. Their knees are touching. Tess can smell her perfume, something rosy. “It’s cancer,” the nurse says fast, like she’s pulling off a Band-Aid. “But the good news is that the tumor doesn’t look very angry.”

My friend is saddened, but not unduly shocked by the verdict because she’s always prepared for the worst. She
is
perplexed by the way Jill described it though. “Angry?”

“That means—” she glances down at the folder in her lap. “How much do you know about the disease? I noticed on your questionnaire that no one in your family—”

“Ahhh….” Since Tess hadn’t really taken what she’d been told by her gammy or her uncle seriously, considering the circumstances, she kinda forgot about the whole thing until just this very moment. It might be important information for these people to have. “I just remembered that my aunt might’ve had….”