The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (4 page)

Father and daughter whiled away the hours in the record-setting summer heat talking, fishing, and laughing that fateful afternoon. When “Good-time Eddie,” who was known far and wide for his funny bone, stood to reach for a worm out of the tin can to thread Tess’s hook, he comically pretended to lose his balance, but then due to the heat of the day and the consumption of more than a few bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, he grew dizzy and lost his balance. On his way down, he conked his head against the outboard motor and tumbled over the side of the boat named
The High Life
.

Her daddy loved practical jokes of all kinds, but he absolutely adored the ones that scared you before they made you laugh. Like, when he jumped out of the girls’ bedroom closet, or when he put a hunk of raw meat under their bed on Halloween. That’s why after he fell into the lake, Tess swallowed back the water from his splash and wasn’t worried at all. Her daddy was an excellent swimmer who took his jokes very, very seriously, so she was ready for him to stay underwater longer than Houdini before he popped back up. She was doubled over in laughter while she waited for him to resurface with a sputtering, “
Gotcha!
”

Her mother, Louise, called the police when they didn’t show up by suppertime. The sun had already set by the time the lake patrol showed up to comb the waters for the missing girl and her father. They found and rescued Tess, and began their search for Eddie early the following morning, but a few days later, they gave up any hope of resurrecting him.

With a pencil poised over his pad, Dr. Ganges interrupted Tess’s story to ask, “You do realize that you couldn’t have saved your father, correct?”

She remained flat faced.

“Was there a memorial service for him?”

She nodded.

“Did you and your sister attend?”

“No.”

The psychologist scribbled like mad on his yellow pad. “Were you later given the opportunity to tell him goodbye?”

Tess gave him an eerie smile. “Every day.”

Thanks to the Veterans Administration, which had supplied a cheap coffin and a simple stone free of charge, her daddy was buried in the backyard of the Finley sisters’ Keefe Avenue house. Mind you, her father’s
actual
bones were not interred; they’re still lying undiscovered at the bottom of Lake Michigan not far from a freighter that sank in 1822. And I don’t mean the Finley sisters’
actual
backyard, but the grounds of Holy Cross Cemetery that butted up against their property.

Louise’s adamant refusal to allow Tess and Birdie to commemorate their daddy’s passing was somewhat a sign of the times, but also a harbinger of the punitive anger she felt toward her husband for leaving her with two small girls to raise and less than a hundred dollars in the bank.

Not attending the pretend funeral Mass and the burial wasn’t quite as vital to Tess for she had borne witness to her father slipping into his watery grave. She knew her daddy was gone forever, but Birdie? Not being in the boat that afternoon nor having the opportunity to play a part in the normal end of life rigmarole—hearing folks praise Eddie Blessing from the altar lectern, grieving for him into their hankies, and meeting up at the cemetery to throw pink carnations on the coffin that held only memories—left the already delicate girl at odds, to say the least.

Their mother’s family, the Fitzgeralds, had never played a part in the sisters’ lives. Louise had an older brother named Virgil who’d run off when he was sixteen to join the Navy and was never heard from again. Her father died in the second World War, and her mother, a bitter woman whose name was Faye, passed a few years ago of complications from a bladder infection, so during the weeks following their father’s demise, the sisters had only their beloved Gammy and Boppa. Tess and Birdie wanted more than anything to spend time with their grandparents in their stone house in the country, but due to a combination of their mother’s contentious relationship with her husband’s family, and the grief that had taken a toll on the elderly couple, their comfort was not forthcoming, not for a while anyway. Eddie, their youngest, was the second child they’d lost. They had another son who lived in the area, but “The Professor,” was quite a bit older, and didn’t appear to want much to do with his family.

So the Finley girls—or the “Finley Ghouls,” as they were known in the neighborhood on account of their unusual hobby, which essentially was death—were left to their own devices. After they cleaned the house as directed by their mother, they’d sit on the back porch of the Keefe Avenue house that was just yards away from the black iron fence that ringed the cemetery. They’d while away the hours of the hot August days playing Cat’s Cradle or Candy Land on the wooden steps, but never Go Fish! because that was just too sad.

Tessie would always work their conversations back to their father’s death. She had to, for something alarming had developed. Birdie was refusing to believe that their daddy was gone forever, which was so weird on top of all her other problems. She would drift off in the middle of chats, had a hard time grasping reading or time-telling, and barely understood what was happening in the movies at the Tosa Theatre. Tess grew so worried about her that she’d had to come up with another of her never-ending lists to help her deal with the situation:

1. Talk Mom into letting Birdie and me go to Daddy’s pretend funeral.
   
2. Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.
   
3. If #1 and #2 don’t work out, find Daddy’s pretend grave in the cemetery when Mom isn’t around so Birdie can say goodbye to him once and for all because seeing really is believing.
   
4. Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.
   

Feeling like a broken forty-five, Tess told her sister once again on one of those Candy Land-playing, back-porch afternoons, “Daddy’s dead.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Yeah, he really is.”

“Is not.”

“Okay,” Tess said, “if you don’t believe that Daddy is at the bottom of the lake then where is he?”

“Boca Raton.”

Tess stopped on her hop over to the Candy Cane Forest. “Boca…what?”

“Boca
Raton
,” Birdie said like her sister was deaf and dumb. “It’s a city.”

“Oh, yeah? Where is Boca Raton a city?”

“Florida.”

Tess, who always got A’s in geography said, “Where’d you hear that? School?”

Birdie said, “Nope,” and gave her a wisenheimer smile because she rarely knew something that Tess didn’t. “I heard about it at the drug store. There’s a picture postcard taped on the side of the cash register and the man on the front of it is Daddy! He’s holdin’ up a huge silver fish with a pointy nose and wearing a blue shirt. Mr. Dalinsky told me it says, “Greetings from Boca Raton! Wish you were here!”

Tess thought,
Oh, boy.

Birdie drew another card because she didn’t like the one she’d gotten. “They looked really hard for three days and they didn’t find Daddy in the lake,” she said very full of herself.

“Yeah, but just because they didn’t find him,” Tess said, “that doesn’t mean that he isn’t down there.”

“Doesn’t mean that he is, either.”

“But that doesn’t make sense, Bird. If Daddy
is
still alive, after he fell outta the boat, why didn’t he just get back in? And why didn’t he just come home?”

“He wanted to,” Birdie said wistfully. “But he couldn’t because he got am…am…am—”

“His arms got amputated?”

Birdie flapped hers up and down. She did that sometimes when she got frustrated. “He didn’t get back in the boat because he got am…am…amnesia.”

Tess thought,
Double, oh, boy.

Even though the pine box that had been sunk in the cemetery was empty, Tess felt sure if Birdie could only
see
the grave and her daddy’s tombstone it would help her accept his death. It might even stop her from yelling out in her sleep and wetting the bed, which is why Tess swore to herself then and there that she’d start looking for her father’s pretend grave in the cemetery the following day.

She stopped, blew her nose, and told Dr. Ganges, “What’s the point of going all over this again?” Sharing the stories that ran through her mind on a continual loop didn’t feel healing, it was like picking at a scab. “Couldn’t you just give me a drug to make me better? Something to erase the memories, or help me,” she made air quotes, “relax?”

“I could refer you to a prescribing physician, but drugs will only mask your symptoms,” he said, because he couldn’t very well tell a woman in her state that there was no real known cure for what she had other than exposing it to the light of day and learning how to manage it. “The best way to get to the bottom of your problems is by talking about them. We’ll need to dive deep.”

She could feel his genuine concern and appreciated it, but his diving deep suggestion reminded her of the old television program
Sea Hunt—
a very touchy subject indeed—and she never returned to Dr. Ganges’s office.

So, other than comparing notes with her younger and even-more-mixed-up sister, Tess rose every morning hoping for divine intervention even though she didn’t believe in that sort of thing by that time. Imagine her surprise when not one, but two miracles were eventually sent her way. William Blessing. And Dr. Charles Drake.

Shortly after she met and fell madly in love with Will when he showed up for lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, he told her she was hilarious, but everybody had always told her that. “You’re a funny kid, Tessie,” her father used to say.

“And all those voices and impressions you can do…you should be a comedian!” Will had said. “Like one of those girls on
Saturday Night Live
. Like Glenda!”

“Gilda,” she corrected.

“Right!”

The idea of being funny for money clicked with Tess, and after researching the subject, she found that one of the best formal training grounds in the country was The Second City in nearby Chicago. The two-hour, twice-weekly round-trip to the improvisation and stand-up classes was horribly challenging given her fear of travel, but she thrived on the laughter and the thought of how proud her father would be. Socially awkward, she also felt more at ease around the other comedians, who tended toward instability as well. One of the other stand-ups did a bit about her Woody Allen look-alike shrink. She called him, “A real
mensch
.” Tess didn’t know what a
mensch
was, but she liked the sound of it, so she got his name and made an appointment hoping that he might do her more good than the university psychologist had.

Turned out Dr. Charles Drake was indeed a good man who could be counted on. An added bonus was the fact that his office was on the ground floor of a building located on Chicago’s
Miracle Mile
. (I arranged that.) Besides coming up with a more modern name for what was troubling Tess—post-traumatic stress disorder—Dr. Drake proved to be much more useful than Dr. Ganges in others ways as well. He didn’t look like he wanted to harpoon her for one thing.

The mild-mannered, middle-aged psychiatrist explained to Tess during one of their many sessions, “If too many traumas happen too close together, the mind can’t process them. Feeling under siege, it shifts into high gear to protect a person against further damaging experiences. It appears that your father’s death, your mother’s indifference, and your tumultuous childhood has become more than you can integrate.”

Dr. Drake also assured her early on that she would not spend the rest of her life in a padded room eating ice cream with her fingers. And that the probability of the scenario she feared the most more than likely would never happen. “Yes, that
could
happen,” the good doctor stated, but the chance was slim that a tubercular-looking man would hitch up his oily jeans, gob on the floor of a nearby Mobil station’s bathroom, rub his overly moisturized hands together whilst muttering to himself, “There she is, that redhead, Tess Blessing. I’ll wait until she goes in to the mini-mart to buy a Three Musketeers bar, then I’ll grab the Coke can out of her car and slip in some of this curare I carry with me at all times. She’ll never know what hit her.”

Over the years that she saw him, Dr. Drake didn’t only help Tess examine her struggles through brilliant analysis, he taught her what an important role her sense of humor played in transcending her pain, different relaxation techniques, how to recognize when she was in danger of being overtaken by PTSD rage, and they’d worked together to reduce her phobias from fourteen to eleven. They parted ways only when the both of them agreed that her panics, flashbacks, depressions, and other symptoms had quieted down to dull roars.

So other than managing her emotions, and the day-in-and-day-out problems, her life proceeded mostly without incident. Tess married, bore her children, tended a beautiful home and garden in a darling town, enjoyed waitressing at the family diner, and was generally in good physical health. But…isn’t this how it always goes? Right about the time you dare to get comfortable enough to lower your guard, something unexpected jumps out at you and screams, “
Gotcha!
”

After checking in at the front desk of St. Mary’s North Hospital, Tess makes herself uncomfortable in the waiting room. She picks at the stack of magazines on the side table with the tips of her fingers, left hand casually placed over her mouth, breathing shallowly in order to avoid inhaling any germs until she accidentally brushes against the
National Geographic.
If Haddie accepts the internship the magazine has offered after she graduates, she’ll pack up her cameras and travel to exotic locales to photograph ferocious beasts. Maybe even headhunters, or cannibals with arrows dripping with curare.

God only knows what kind of foreign diseases they’d be carrying
, Louise whispers to Tess as she scrounges in her lucky purse for her antibacterial wipes.

“Theresa Blessing?” a woman who looks similar to greeter Vivian calls out, or maybe it
is
Vivian, when humans get to be a certain age they can be as hard to tell apart as newborns. “Good morning. I’m Ginger Baestock, director of the Women’s Center.”