The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (21 page)

“Was that a no on the dentures?”

“Yes that was a no,” Tess says.

“Have you removed all your jewelry?”

Tess lifts her quivering left hand from beneath the sheet.

This must not be the first time this problem has come up because Susan reaches down to the bedside table and lifts off a strip of precut surgical tape. “You need to be grounded,” she says as she wraps it around her patient’s gold wedding band.

Tessie remembers how often Dr. Drake mentioned the importance of being “grounded” during their sessions. Anchored to reality. But “grounded” was also an electrical term.

The hospital has to keep their success rates up. If the surgery doesn’t go well, they’re gonna electrocute you and blame it on faulty wiring
, Louise promises.

When Dr. Whaley comes by to say good morning, he sets a hand on Tess’s foot and gives it a playful wiggle. “See ya in there,” he says. “I’ll be the one with the scalpel.”

Susan slips a clip onto Tess’s middle finger that measures her heartbeat, which sounds like a Geiger counter at a nuclear waste dump. She’s shaking so hard that she’s almost levitating out of the bed, when another shower-capped man shows up.

“I’m Dr. Gritzhammer. We talked last night.” The anesthesiologist had called during
Murder, She Wrote
. The thought of being put under was so overwhelming to Tess that she’d tuned him out in favor of Jessica Fletcher. “I’d like to give you a valium to help you relax.”

She shakes her head at the bushy-haired man. “No, thanks. I’ve had weird reactions to tranquilizers in the past.” She must stay on guard. She must.

“I wish you would’ve told me that last night,” Gritzhammer says perturbed. Doctors have routines and she’s disrupted his.

Susan covers shivering Tess with warm blankets before she wheels her into the surgical suite. Masked people are milling about the freezing room like a gang of bad guys ready to pull off a mid-winter caper. Two of them transfer Tess from the bed onto the operating table. She recognizes the anesthesiologist’s bulky brows as he leans down and tells her, “I’m going to place this mask over your face now. Count out loud backward from one hundred.”

Desperate to end the panic, she pictures Will and her children, breathes deeply, and whispers, “I love you. Forever and always. Ninety-nine…ninety-eight…ninety-seven…eleven….”

So this is death.

The weather is lovely.

Since it would never occur to Tess that she’s ended up in Heaven, she figures she’s made a layover stop in Purgatory. She’ll hang out here until whosever in charge can get caught up on their paperwork, after which, her mortal-sin-ridden soul will be sent packing to the ninth circle of Hell.

Then again, if she
is
in death’s waiting room, she wonders why she feels so serene. She loves the ethereal saxophone music that’s playing—
At Last
is her favorite song—but she hates to wait.

She can’t be sure how much time goes by, but her number must’ve been called because she’s on the move now. There’s an immediate sense of black weightlessness, and then she finds herself barreling toward a yonder light brighter than any she’s ever seen. Whatever she’s inhaling smells divine. In some other way other than words, a voice that is neither male or female or young or old, informs her that the aroma is called, “Heaven Scent.”

Tess laughs. Dr. Drake was right. Humor
is
holy.

When she arrives at a beach with sand the color of burnished copper, she understands that she’s supposed to enter the water that’s the most unusual blue, which switches to lilac, then silver. It’s not just shimmering, it’s alive, and imploring her to become one with it.

Without a thought of what lies beneath, normally cautious Tess dives in, and is engulfed in a protected feeling that she never knew existed. “Welcome to the Sea of Unconditional Love,” the voice informs her.

Above her, stalactite sunbeams hang off the surface, below, a school of pink angelfish with pleased starfish eyes glide through a magnificent garden of kaleidoscope flowers. Two women appear. They wave at Tess like they’d been expecting her. One of them is her gammy, standing in the middle of the blooms dressed in a pretty yellow collared dress. She is not old and withered anymore, but young and vibrant. Alice, her daughter and librarian, is looking studious by her side. Her aunt is holding a field guide to flowers in her hand. Practical-joke-playing Boppa gives Tessie a wave from a nearby gazebo where he’s affixing a Kick Me sign to the back of his favorite son, Eddie. Tess shouts, “Daddy!” and when he gives her the thumbs up, she can feel his everlasting love, and when he breaks into to, “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream,” euphoria floods her very essence. He’s absolved her. Freed her of the burden of guilt she’s carried around since the afternoon she didn’t save him. She feels so much lighter that she wonders if she’s about to rise to the surface. She doesn’t want to. She wants to stay so badly, but the guide accompanying her—his name is Frank B. Willis—objects. (I requested him because no one gives a tour quite like Frank. He’s knowledgeable, but funny as hell.) He gently informs Tess, “Not yet, dear one. Now is not your time.”

But what
is
time?
she asks when who should come swimming by but the star of
Sea Hunt
. Of course, she can’t help but check out Mike Nelson’s…ah…spear gun. She’s impressed. You’d think with all the time the guy spent in the water…. Three other swimmers appear from behind a curtain of bubbles. Sisters Faith, Hope, and me. As we draw closer, Tess senses that whatever I’m about to tell her will be the most life-changing news she’s ever received other than hearing Will’s matrimonial, “I do,” and the wails of her newborn children.

“Theresa Blessing! Theresa Blessing!”

She cocks her head. That’s not my caring, drawled voice. This one’s demanding, like her mother’s.

“Open your eyes! Now!”

With much difficulty—it feels like fifty-cent pieces are taped to her eyelids—Tess does as commanded. She’s lying flat on her back beneath a perforated white ceiling.

“What…where?” she mumbles.

Susan, the plain nurse who prepped her for the operation, leans down and fills her in. “You’re in St. Mary’s North recovery room. The surgery went well.”

Tess doesn’t care. She wants to dive back to where she was. She closes her eyes and begins to fade, but Susan quickly steps in, places an oxygen mask on her face, keeps after her to, “Breathe…breathe…breathe!” and when she does, the nurse goes back to dishing with two other nurses that are gathered at the foot of the bed. One of them, a blurred blond, is railing on someone named Penny, who only got promoted to head of the unit because, “She’s a complete and utter skank.”

Jerry appears from stage left, unlocks the wheels of the rolling bed, and throws his two cents into the hen party. “Breaking news. Angela and Dr. Howdy Doody got caught hooking up in the cafeteria pantry.” If her throat didn’t feel so sore, Tess might’ve snickered too because she realizes now that tumor-lassoing Dr. Brewster had reminded her of Buffalo Bob’s sidekick as well.

Jerry doesn’t say much during the trip back to her room. Tess figures he must be as captivated as she is by the pastoral prints hanging on the hospital walls. Why had she not noticed the gorgeous texture, the subtle shading, and the vivid colors earlier?

After he maneuvers the bed through her room door, Jerry asks, “How ya doin’?”

“I wanna…I wanna….” When Tess sits up, the room does too.

“Not so fast,” Jerry says, amused by the bewildered look on her face. “If you need anything.” He sets a call button next to her hand. “Stay put until,” he gives her an in-the-know wink, “you get your land legs back.”

Was Jerry referring to her dive into the Sea of Unconditional Love? Was he part of some cosmic conspiracy?

She replays the watery excursion. She could still hear Frank’s reassuring but light-hearted voice, her daddy’s singing, and feel the joy she’d experienced when she’d been reunited with her lost loved ones, and the silvery warmth of the silver-lilac water caressing her skin. What happened? Could she have had one of those near-death experiences people claim to have had on
Oprah
? Or maybe it was some sort of religious epiphany—number seven on her list. If so, it wasn’t the kind she’d had in mind. She envisioned one more Biblical in nature. A Saul on the road to Damascus sorta thing. Yet, seeing her departed family, and experiencing the powerful no-strings-attached love, did feel awfully divine. And then there was her daddy’s absolution. She’d been told by Dr. Drake and other therapists that she was not responsible for her father’s death, but there’s nothing quite like hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

The longer the scenario replayed in Tess’s mind, the clearer it became to her that there was no way of knowing exactly
what
she’d experienced. No proof of any kind, other than a profound sense of well-being, but, she tells herself, that could be the drugs in her system, or just relief that the surgery was over. The only thing she’s absolutely certain of is that the same way traumas are imprinted in her brain, the sacred experience was indelibly tattooed on her soul.

Still…she is the most mentally unreliable person she knows. Utterly untrustworthy. She’d like to bounce what had happened off somebody, but who? Can’t be the children. Will? Uh-uh. He’d probably say something about her ability to make erroneous assumptions even while she’s unconscious. About the only one who might understand what she’s feeling is Birdie, who has had many a strange trip of her own. And then, of course, there’s another who might understand what she went through. Her new best friend.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.

Tessie slowly opens her eyes when she senses my presence. “Hey, Grace,” she says with a blissed-out smile.

She knows who I am now the same way Birdie knew who Bee was when she appeared in her life. And as I suspected, once she figured it out, Tess willingly surrenders to my existence without a fuss.

She asks, “Do you think that…ah…adventure or pilgrimage, or whatever that was I just had, would allow me to scratch number seven off my list?”

“That the religious epiphany one?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.”

I’m not allowed to answer that question directly since she needs to piece it together herself. But a little nostalgia and a dollop of hope can go a long way. When they were kids, Tess and Birdie loved those Davy Crockett TV shows with Fess Parker, so I tell her, “As the King of the Wild Frontier would say, ‘I ain’t sayin’ yes, and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ mebbe.’”

She grins. (When she gets more comfortable with our relationship, she’ll become less compliant. Pushy even. Mark my words.)

“Now would be a good time to call Will,” I tell her.

Her husband answers on the first ring, “Count Your Blessings.”

The diner greeting had always felt like a reprimand to Tess, but this time it feels like a reminder. She tells Will, “You were right.” Might as well get it out of the way. “I lived. Come get me.”

The two of us remain in companionable silence until Jerry returns with supplies in tow. “Pain level?” Tess lies and tells him that she doesn’t feel a thing before he can whip the laminated unhappy faces out of his pocket. He looks skeptical, but says, “Okay, then let me show you how to empty your drain.”

Discombobulated by the drugs and the discomfort, she’s sure that Jerry just said, “Let me show you how to empty your
brain
.” Maybe I should’ve read the consent forms more thoroughly, she thinks. Had her lymph nodes been so visibly ridden with disease that Dr. Whaley followed a trail to her frontal lobe and removed some of that as well? Is that what this unfamiliar, unworldly contentment is about? She’d had a partial lobotomy?

She asks, “Did you just say…? Empty my
what
?”

Jerry folds back the bed clothes so she can squint down at the shoulder-to-mid-abdomen bandage. The wide adhesive tape holding it all together has an off-putting smell. A clear tube with a black bulb is lying beside it. The nurse points at it and says, “Your drain. Some of your lymph nodes were removed for testing and the excess fluid needs to go somewhere.” He pops open the top of the bulb with this thumbnail and pours the blood-tinged liquid into a plastic cup with numbers on the side. “You’ll need to empty it three times a day and keep track of how much fluid there is and,” he takes out a small notebook from a bag with the hospital’s logo printed on the front, “enter the numbers in this diary.”

Her mouth fills with nervous saliva. “Is it like one of those…you know, those bags that people have attached to them to collect their…um….” She can’t remember the proper medical word. “Poop movement?”

“No,” Jerry reassures in his big bass voice that Tess suspects he puts on because he’s a male nurse. “It’s not a colostomy bag, and it isn’t permanent. Once the fluid diminishes, Dr. Whaley will remove the whole kit and caboodle.”

She’s not concerned about coming in contact with body fluids, she’s a mother, but Will is another story. When she pictures how put off he’ll be when he sees the drain, the rejected, hurting part of her takes pleasure picturing his squirming, but another greater part of her that wants his love back recoils when she imagines the look of utter revulsion on his face.

Jerry checks her temperature again. “Looks good. Did you call for your ride?”

She nods.

“You feel up to dressing?”

She tosses back the covers.

“Well, then,” he says with a little bow. “That concludes our business for today. Here you go. Everything you’ll need until your next doctor’s visit. Enjoy Valentine’s Day tomorrow.” He passes her a navy-blue plastic sack. “I’m bringing my wife to Count Your Blessings for lunch. It’s her favorite spot. Maybe you know her? Mare Hanson?”

That about stops her heart. She’d been too jumpy to pay much attention during check-in, but she now notices Jerry’s full name on his shirt badge. She knew that Mare’s husband worked in the medical field, but for some reason, Tess had it in her mind that Mr. Hanson worked for a drug company.