The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (31 page)

“Grace…don’t go…PLEASE!”

Too late. I’ve already deactualized, but just because I can’t resist having the last word, I whisper in her ear with breath that is redolent of an eternity of hellos and goodbyes, “Aloha, Tess Blessing.”

Over the past weeks, Tess has reflected often on our heart-to-heart chat in the church. She hasn’t radically changed—these things don’t happen overnight—but she
has
noticed that she’s become a tad untethered to the person previously known as Theresa Marie Blessing. Her PTSD symptoms haven’t disappeared, there is no known cure, but they’re becoming more manageable. When she gets depressed, color her gray instead of black, the panics are not as frantic or frequent, and the flashbacks seem fuzzier. Her dead mother is still harping, but every so often she’s being replaced in Tess’s brain by the kinder, drawling voice of you know who.

Big picture? She’s experiencing warm feelings that you’d think she’d welcome, but instead of reveling in the benefits of our hard work, she’s questioning her essence—
God almighty, who the hell am I? What’s happening to me? Am I becoming chipper? What if I start yodeling?

She tells Will through the bathroom door, “Time to abdicate the throne.”

As promised by Dr. Sherman, the radiation treatments have taken their toll. Tessie is so damn exhausted that she drops into their bed each night thinking that she’s
finally
found the cure for her insomnia. Radiation poisoning. She doesn’t trust herself to drive to herself to the treatment this morning, so Will will be sliding behind the wheel of the Volvo.

He’s been sweeter, more sensitive to her needs since she’s started the treatment. Tess wants to believe those are signs that he’s gotten a handle on his midlife crisis, but that’s a stretch for one as pessimistic as she. (She received his permission to talk to their family doctor and Scottie confirmed the diagnosis.) Especially since her husband still hasn’t shown any interest in making love to her. She overheard one woman telling another woman in the cancer center’s waiting area that her husband walked out after she got sick because he no longer found her sexy. Could that be the problem? Or is he just saving himself for Connie?

The receptionist at the cancer center looks up from her computer to say, “How are you today, Tess?”

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve got cancer and I’m undergoing radiation treatments, so I am not doing all that well.”

Miniature Marty rewards her with a sunny smile that has done Tess’s heart good over the past few weeks. “Irwin’s on his way out.”

She drags back to the waiting area and says to Will, “I just remembered that I have an appointment with Cappy after the treatment, so instead of sitting around here and absorbing the fantastic ambience, do you want to head over to Starbucks?”

He folds up his newspaper, hops out of the plastic chair, and tells her, “Call me when you’re finished.” She hasn’t seen him move this fast in years. “I’ll bring you back a hot cocoa and a scone.” As she watches him hightail it through the center’s doors, she doesn’t want to, but all she can think about is how much she loves him. Squeamishness and all.

Irwin gently calls to her from across the waiting room, “You’re up.”

As he helps her onto the table the same way he has the previous seventeen times, she asks him how he’d spent his weekend because she’s grown very fond of him.

“I cleaned the house, baked three cherry pies for the church bake sale on Saturday, and after Mass on Sunday, I dug around in my garden.” Irwin positions her arms in the holders above her head. “The Farmer’s Almanac predicted we’d have a warm spring and how right it was.” He slaps the plate into the radiation machine. “My daffodils are already up.”

“Yeah, mine too.” She’d gasped when she spotted their unfurling yellow heads out of the sunroom window this morning. They reminded her that Haddie would return home in a few days to start her spring break.

Irwin is puttering with her breast. Pushing it this way and that, until it lines up perfectly with the radiation machine. On his way out, he reminds her, the same way he always does, that there’s a microphone in the room. “If you need me, just yell.”

After the initial round of whirring and click-click noise, he comes back, makes some adjustments, minces out, and the machine gets busy again.

Bzzz.
“Okay,” his tinny voice announces a few minutes later through the nearby speaker. “You can rest your arms now, Tess.”
Bzzz.

Upon his return to her side, he helps her into an upright position and asks, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“That was perfect,” she tells him, like always. “So, what are you planting this year?”

“Flowers that bring joy to the parishioners.” He lives on the grounds of St. Boniface, a Catholic Church in Richfield, a town west of Ruby Falls. Tess pictures a cottage with a thatched-roof and talking bluebirds flapping about the dormer windows. “Daisies, sunflowers, and I absolutely adore pink peonies, don’t you?”

Resisting a double entendre that might offend pious Irwin, she says, “I certainly do.” She thinks of Will’s
Monsieur Pierre
, and how in the language of flowers, peonies stand for bashfulness. She hopes that’s the case.

Irwin, already busy changing the paper sheet on the radiation bed with a whistle, tosses out his parting line as Tess opens the door to the room. “See you tomorrow, hon. Same time, same setting!”

She takes a deep breath, thinks of me, says, “Fuck it,” and steps into the elevator to travel three floors up to the office of the medical oncologist on her team—the one who’d come up with her treatment regime—Dr. Cappy Anderson.

She had liked the mid-fifties man right off. There was gentleness inside his big bear of a body that made her feel safe, and a cut-to-the-chase sensibility that Tess appreciated. When she’s led back to his office by Jennifer, his receptionist, the doctor greets her with, “Morning.”

“Brilliant observation, Cappy,” she says with a smile.

That’s the worst comb-over I’ve ever seen. If the man can make a serious grooming mistake like that, how dependable could he be?

Tess disagrees with her mother. The part that Cappy makes an inch above his left ear is so touching that nothing he did could make her trust him more.

“How’s the Badger State been treating you?” she asks as she settles in on the other side of his desk. He’d relocated from Upstate New York shortly before she’d begun seeing him.

“The food’s hearty, the people are helpful, and there’s so little traffic, but…I miss waterfalls. I’m a watcher from way back.” Tess has never heard of that hobby before, but if she was a doctor who dealt with death all day long watching cascading water might make her feel brand new again too. “Would you like to do the exam in here today? Patients tell me it’s more comfortable.”

It’s a typical doctor’s office, nothin’ special, but anything’s better than the sterile room around the corner, so she opens her gown to give him easy access and tells him, “Have at it.” (To any woman cancer patient who is shy about displaying her breasts, Tess would say, “Get over it, sister.”)

“Well,” Cappy says as he’s staring at her chest. “The right one is still quite a bit smaller.” She knows that and doesn’t care. She’s begun to find it as endearing as the runt of the litter or the scraggliest Christmas tree on the lot. She’s about to close up the gown when the doctor surprises her with a new move. He leans in, closes his eyes, and places his hands lightly on her breasts. “But they feel similar, so that’s good.”

Tess hadn’t even considered how they might feel to Will.

Cappy has sworn to first do no harm, so even though she’s made her wishes abundantly clear, he asks yet again, “You sure I can’t interest you in a round of chemo?” like it’s an after-dinner cocktail.

She knows he has her best interests at heart and is not offended. “No, thank you.”

The oncologist smiles and says, “Enjoy the holiday.”

“Thanks, you too. See you in a few weeks.”

Tessie sounded chipper enough during the visit, but as she walks down the hallway outside Cappy’s office, she’s not imagining the family Easter egg hunt, dark chocolate bunnies, or even Will’s scrumptious maple ham and sweet potato casserole. She’s thinking about how much she’s dreading telling Haddie about the cancer.

She slows, then stops in front of the elevator, takes a deep breath, and asks another patient waiting to go down, “Excuse me. Do you know where the stairs are?”

1. Buy broccoli.
   
2. Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
   
3. Set up a vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
   
4. Convince Will to love me again. (What about Connie?)
   
5. Get Birdie to talk to me.
   
6. Bury Louise once and for all. (With Birdie.)
   
7. Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
   
8. Die.
   
9. Tell Haddie about the cancer.
   
10. Prepare the guest room for Birdie.
    

Tess is feeling somewhat disheartened. She’d had to make additions to numbers four and six on her list, and now there’s a nine and ten.

She’s working on number ten on Good Friday morning, and not doing a great job. She’s phobic about cleaning products and doesn’t even know what the heck half of them are used for. That was her sister’s area of expertise. Now there’s a gal who knows her Lysol from her Clorox. Birdie would be here soon and Tess could barely contain herself.

Four days after she’d sent the package off, she received this message:

Birdistheword: Thanks for the lips. I’m coming.

Tessie: Hurray!!!! When?!

Birdistheword: May 13-20.

Tessie: xoxoxoxoxxoxxoxoxoxoxo!

Birdistheword: First thing, straight from the airport, I want to visit the old houses. Go to the cemetery to see daddy. Get candy from Ma’s. Have the funeral for Louise. It’s got to be in that order.

Tessie: Ok.

Birdistheword: And did Will say that your wedding anniversary is on the 16th? Should I pack a party dress?

Tessie: About that. I’ll explain when you get here.

She can’t very well celebrate thirty years of wedded bliss if she discovers that she’s the only one who feels that way.

She’s on her knees planting geraniums in the front garden mulling over how she was going to deliver the news to Haddie, when she startles at the sound of the Chevy’s classic
ah
…
oo
…
ga
horn as Will pulls into the driveway. She waves at her daughter as she gets out of the car and calls, “Welcome home, baby!” She thinks Haddie looks slightly more filled out. That could change after she told her about the cancer.

Henry, who’d been playing poker on the computer, hears Garbo’s happy yipping and comes strolling onto the front porch to welcome his sister home. “Yo,” he says. “What up?”

After Tess had told her son about her illness, he’d made a small turnabout, the same way she has. He still spoke to his mama much of the time like she was deaf and dumb, but in a more polite way. And when she suggested they make Thursday “their” night, he’d agreed. He even let
her
pick the movie, and grumbled only mildly on the drive to the East Side of Milwaukee to participate in the midnight showing—exhaustion, be damned—of the musical comedy,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. (She wanted to wear her packed-away Janet Weiss costume, but it didn’t fit anymore, which was for the best. Henry would’ve refused to sit with her.)

Tess believes that her boy’s sporadic thoughtfulness is the opening gambit of a more grown-up Henry. Someday he would show his true colors. (She’s right. Years from now, he’ll settle down after he gets into a couple of scrapes with bookies in Las Vegas. He’ll turn his back on cards, move to Los Angeles, and after many years of paying dues will receive kudos, not only for the documentary films he and his partner—waiter Cal from the diner—write and direct, but for his humanitarian efforts to feed the homeless, which will make his movie-loving mother and foodie father inordinately proud.)

After Haddie had gotten unpacked and settled in, Tess asks Will and Henry if they’d change the oil in the Volvo, so she and her daughter can have, “A little girl time,” which is code for:
I’m about to break the cancer news to her so you might want to seek cover
.

On the back porch deck, a relaxed Haddie informs her tense mother that she dumped boyfriend Rock. Her new beau is a boy from Chicago named Kevin Scanlon, who is an “awesome watercolorist,” and then she moves on to how much she’s getting out of her therapy with Dr. Chandler, the eating disorder specialist. A little nervous, a little proud, she asks, “Can you tell? I’ve gained two pounds.” And then she launches into how once school is over, she’ll need to prepare for her trip to New York to work the summer as an intern for
National Geographic
and…and….

She sounds far away, like she’s talking from the bottom of a wishing well, because Tess’s mind is otherwise engaged. She’s remembering the conversation they’d had the morning of her routine mammogram appointment four months ago. How’d she reassured her daughter that it was nothing to worry about.

When Haddie takes a break from her excited chatter for a sip of tea, Tess unearths her courage, and says, “Honey, I’ve got something really important to tell you.”

“What?” she asks with a sunny smile.

“Ah…I….” It’d been so long since she’d seen her daughter so happy. It’d be cruel to burst her bubble. “I…I love you. It’s so good to have you home.”

The weather had been so great that the Ruby Falls Country Club opened the golf course early, so Will and Henry took off on Saturday to play nine holes between the lunch and the dinner rush, while Haddie took herself and her camera to the Easter festivities in town.

There was a parade down old-fashioned Main Street with marching bands and baton twirlers and merchants advertising their shops. High atop the last float, the Easter Bunny—Stan from Olsen’s Market—tossed candy to the kids who’d lined up on the sidewalks with baskets.