The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (7 page)

After Tess had mostly convinced her fragile little sister that—“Daddy’s not in Boca Raton. He didn’t swim there or anyplace else. He’s dead, Bird, you gotta face the music”—she hunkered down to conquer the remaining item on her To-Do List—number three. She needed to find their father’s pretend grave so Birdie could say goodbye to him once and for all. She didn’t anticipate it would take too much longer because it had become a whole lot easier to sneak into the cemetery after their mother got a nine-to-five job at a local hat shop—Turner’s Toppers—once they’d run out of money. And now that she wasn’t flying solo anymore since Birdie was accompanying her on the search, she felt their odds were even better.

She had just finished pointing out to her sister that their daddy’s bones wouldn’t be in the grave when they finally visited it, but something else would be. “A lot of people die and it takes a little while for St. Peter to sort out the good from the bad things they did before he can open the Pearly Gates or send them to Hell, so his soul will still be down there waiting its turn,” Tess said. “We should start right around here today.” She took a few steps toward a part of the massive cemetery that she hadn’t scouted out yet. “S’awright?”

When she didn’t hear her sister laugh the way she usually would at her Señor Wences impression, she turned around to see why not. Birdie was standing still and looking back at the black iron cemetery fence they’d just come over. Her lips were moving and she was smiling her head off like she was talking to her sister, only she wasn’t.

Afraid she might’ve gone as blind as Helen Keller, Tess trotted back, held up three fingers, and said, “Count ’em.” Birdie did, so her eyes were working fine, so what the…? Terrified that their mother was just itching to send her unusual sister to the county insane asylum, Tess pinched Birdie’s ear, just a little, to let her know that she wasn’t goofing around. “No talking to yourself. That’s not allowed.”

Birdie swatted her hand away and giggled. “I’m not talkin’ to myself, silly. I’m talkin’ to Bee.”

“Talkin’ out loud to bees is also not allowed. Same goes for flowers, rocks, houses, cemetery fences, and…and just about anything else but dogs, people, and God is not a good idea. I’m warning you, Bird.” She got her by the shoulders and squeezed. She hated to scare her sister, but a girl had to do what a girl had to do. “If you keep this up, they’re gonna throw you in the snake pit.”

Birdie shook herself free and said a little too uppity for Tess’s taste, “For your information, I’m not talking to
bees
. I’m talking to…,” she spun around, “her.” She pointed at absolutely nothing. “Her real name is Betsy Elizabeth, but she said I can call her
Bee
. She’s my new friend.”

Tess thought—
Oh, boy,
and was unsure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Probably bad. Seemed like everything was since their daddy died. She briefly wondered if Birdie had been hitting the bottle. Like that guy in that movie they saw who had a very tall, imaginary rabbit named Harvey for a best friend. She did ask to stop by Lonnigan’s a lot. Had Birdie been sneaking up to the bar without her?

Tess took a step closer to get a whiff of her breath. It smelled like cherry Pez and nothing like Daddy’s after a long shift at the bar, so that was good, but knowing that didn’t solve the problem. Birdie was still talking to somebody who wasn’t there.

Tess asked her in a very ho-hum way, like this sort of thing happens every day, “So…you and your friend are the Bird and the Bee?”

Her sister nodded and smiled.

Tess couldn’t help it, she laughed. The Bird and the Bee? That hit her funny bone. She said, “That’s rich,” and was sure that their daddy would’ve told her the same thing. “Does she talk back to you?”

“A course!”

Tess didn’t want to hurt her delicate feelings, so she didn’t point out that it was weird to have an “imaginary friend.” She told her, “I think it’s neat that you’ve got ah…a new pal, but we gotta keep Bee a sister secret, okay?” The girls had many. “Don’t tell
anybody
. And you have to be really careful not to talk to her in front of Louise.” She took Birdie’s hands in hers, thought about how Daddy sometimes called her sister his “Little Dream Boat,” and made sure to look her straight into her light-blue eyes so she didn’t drift off. “If she finds out she might….” She couldn’t tell her that their mother would sign her up for a padded room. “She won’t let you play with Bee anymore.”

“I know, Tessie,” Birdie said in her teeniest voice. “Bee told me that already.”

Shortly after getting the “imaginary friend” situation straightened out the best she could, Tess had another surprise in store. She spotted their daddy’s pretend grave two down from the Gilgood mausoleum! She wanted to shout, “Holy shit!” and pull Birdie in that direction, but before she had the chance to, Louise, who wasn’t supposed to be home from the hat shop for hours, called for them off the back porch and the girls went into panic mode.

It wasn’t until later that night that they got the opportunity to sneak out of the house and climb the cemetery fence again. Tess could hardly contain herself as she led her sister beneath stormy skies toward the pretend grave she’d seen earlier that day. When they were greeted by a swarm of fireflies that, according to Birdie, Bee had summoned to light their way, they dropped to their knees in awe.

Tess is brought back to the here and now by B.B. King singing
When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer
. She and Will are R&B enthusiasts with an impressive record collection they enjoy listening to on the retro hi-fi they’d found at a garage sale.

With his silver hair and gray eyes, her husband looks fetching sitting across from her at the dining room table in a pin-striped, powder-blue shirt that she doesn’t remember buying him. He’s slicing up a cherry pie with a perfect crust and talking about Norm “Stingy” Harris who is so famous around Ruby Falls for his cheapness that he’s become part of the town’s folklore. Will drops a scoop of vanilla-bean ice cream on the plate next to the pie, passes it to Henry, and says, “I heard from one of the ushers at Mass this morning that Stingy dropped a Dairy Queen coupon in the collection plate.”

Tess hears her family laughing the way you hear music in a passing car—the beat, not the melody. She’s worrying about how the children will cope when she kicks the bucket, but she’s not concerned about Will. He’s already distanced himself from her, so he’ll do just fine after the cancer kills her. The man who was voted Mr. Popularity in high school will have everyone in town to console him, including former Prom Queen, Connie Lushman. They’ll probably marry quickly. The same way Tess’s mother had after her father had passed.

The widow Finley bumped into Leon Gallagher at the Clark gas station on North Avenue after she had a flat tire on her way to work at the hat shop. Leon knew the owner and he was doing him a favor that day by pumping gas and cleaning windshields because the regular guy, who was known as “The Peeker” by the children in the neighborhood because he spent too much time around the restroom window, hadn’t turned up for his shift. Mr. Gallagher, a thin man with small feet and hands and a melting jaw line, asked the gorgeous Louise out to dinner and a movie that night, even after she’d accidently let it slip that she had two mouths to feed. A few months later he married their beautiful mother and moved her and the girls away from the cemetery house to an upper duplex off 66th and Center Streets to “Get a whole new start,” and to be closer to his job at the American Motors factory where he worked on the assembly line making Ramblers.

As you’d expect, Tess and Birdie were beside themselves about leaving the home that held cherished memories of their daddy, but were relieved to find they didn’t hate their stepfather as much as they thought they would. The girls, in fact, welcomed an additional target for Louise’s volatile moods. Also in the plus column, Leon had a job, so their mother could quit hers, which made her slightly more pliable. And the duplex was near enough to their old neighborhood that the sisters could still ride their bikes to their usual haunts—Holy Cross Cemetery, Dalinsky’s Drugstore, the Tosa Theatre, and the Finney Library. They would attend a different Catholic grade school—Blessed Children of God—which was good by them since things hadn’t gone too smoothly at St. Catherine’s due to the “Finley Ghouls” love of the dead and Tess’s increasingly delinquent behavior.

During the muggy summer nights in the new neighborhood, the sisters would sit outdoors on the stoop and listen to the shouts of the kids up the block playing nightly neighborhood games without an iota of desire to join in. Ghost in the Graveyard seemed pretty dull considering what they’d been through, and they had each other, and Birdie had Bee, and they were fine with playing their usual games, watching TV, and pedaling up to the cemetery and movie theatre every Saturday and the library twice a week.

When, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” came drifting out of their next-door neighbor’s window on one of those summer nights—they were always playing Elvis over there—Mrs. Hauser laughed at her husband, Gary, who could do a pretty good impression of “The King” after he hoisted a few at a church shindig.

Birdie stopped picking at the scab on her knee, cocked an ear, and said, “That song always makes me miss Jane Russell.”

“Yeah, me too,” Tess said as she handed her the Kleenex she always kept in her pocket to mop up the blood that’d stream down Birdie’s leg. “Jane was a good dog while she lasted.”

Leon’s pet, an affectionate black Labrador retriever he’d named after his favorite movie star, had also made him more palatable. The dog had puppies a month after the wedding, and Louise, who could be whimsical at times, appeared delighted. But around six weeks later, the girls returned from a trip to the library to find that their mother had sold the black babies to a pet store and given Jane Russell to the pound. “Too much shedding,” she snapped at the girls.

Tess told Birdie at the time that their mother wasn’t telling them the whole story, and she was right. Louise needed cash to pay off a debt. Her new husband shot craps after work and he’d lost a bundle to an overly-muscled fella name of Tiger Hardesty, who was threatening to break his right arm, which would make it impossible for Leon to bring home the bacon.

After the streetlights popped on, which was their signal to head back into the house, Tess told Birdie, “It’s movie day tomorrow.” She rode their red Schwinn to check for the new features at the Tosa Theatre every Friday because she enjoyed movies so very much. But sometimes her sister didn’t want to go to the matinee. She didn’t care for the movies set in outer space. It was hard enough for her to follow stories about people with regular names, but if you threw Dr. Zarkov and Ming from Mongo at her, that was just asking for trouble. “Something called
To Kill a Mockingbird
is playing.”

Birdie thought about that as they climbed up the last of the duplex steps. “Sounds like one of those animal-dying movies like
Bambi
and
Dumbo
. Okay.”

On the three-block walk back home from the neighborhood theatre the following afternoon, the girls took turns kicking a rock and agreeing hands down that
To Kill a Mockingbird
was the best movie they’d ever seen. And how next to their daddy, Atticus Finch was the best father. Tess, who’d been profoundly and forever affected by the film, said, “Finch even sounds like Finley! That’s got to be some kind of sign!”

Birdie kicked the stone hard and replied with a wistful, and what would turn out to be a prescient smile, “But the name of it reminds me of me, just me.”

When the flashback fades to black, Tess finds herself yearning for her little sister, uses her napkin to dab at her welled-up eyes, and drags her attention back to her family at the dinner table. Will and the children have stopped talking and are looking at each other bemused. Familiar with her internal interludes, but unclear about their origin, they roll their eyes at one another when they catch her drifting off. Eventually, one of them would make a, “Houston, we have a problem,” or “Find any life on a distant planet?” quip.

This time, it’s fifteen-year-old Henry, who says with a laugh, “Hey, Kevin!” (Spacey.)

That’s something mother and son have in common. A love of movies. Tess isn’t, but Henry is also a gifted writer. His scathing movie reviews for the school newspaper are not so popular with the teachers, but the students of Ruby Falls High eat ’em up. Hadley looks more like her dad, but her red-headed son bares a strong resemblance to his mother except for his height. Tess is pretty sure who he got his length from, but there are other parts of her son that remain a mystery. A potboiler. She absolutely adores the boy. Even though he isn’t much fun to be with most of the time now, she thinks, no, she
knows
their hearts are a matched pair that have been temporarily separated. When she folds the laundry and cannot find its mate, she’s sure it’ll eventually turn up in the most unexpected place to be reunited with its other and she thinks of Henry.

“Take your time reentering Earth’s atmosphere,” he tells her with a winning smile. “I’ll clear.”

Since getting her teenage son to help around the house is nearly impossible, she knows that after Henry walks the dishes to the sink he’ll ask her for money.

You’re a doormat
, Louise says disgusted.

Haddie scoots her chair back from the table and tells her dad again, “Delicious.” He acknowledges the compliment with a show of his impressive dimples because she’s licked her plate clean. She won’t eat for her mother, but she binges for her father. Will can’t face the truth, but Tess knows that their daughter will stick her fingers down her throat the minute she gets the chance.

What did I do wrong? my friend wonders for the umpteenth time.

When the nurse had brought the impossibly beautiful Haddie into the hospital room for her first breast-feeding, Tess was shocked at the ghastly error in judgment she’d made. This helpless innocent was depending on her, a messed-up woman with no experience in loving and nurturing a child. “I’ve changed my mind,” she cried. “I can’t…please give her to someone who can take care of her.”