The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (2 page)

My Tess is a sly one. Quite the little actress. When called upon to do so, she can appear to be a concerned citizen…a capable mother…the confident wife of the president of the Chamber of Commerce. Appearing ordinary is one of her best talents. As long as nothing unexpected blows up in her face, which, of course, life being the minefield that it is, is about to.

Morning winter sun is streaming through the four-paned kitchen windows that overlook the white picket-fenced backyard of the darling red-brick colonial in Ruby Falls, Wisconsin, population, 5,623. There are three of us gathered around the distressed pine kitchen table that’s been passed down through the Blessing family for generations—forty-nine-year-old, Tess, her lovely eighteen-year-old daughter, Haddie, who has returned to the roost to spend the Christmas holiday, and me, who has always been and always will be, but remains unnamed, for the time being. The man of the house, Will, has already left for the day. He’s busy seating the breakfast bunch at Count Your Blessings, the popular Main Street ’50s-style diner that he inherited from his father upon his passing. Tess’s other child, Henry, a junior in high school, remains upstairs wrapped in his
Star Wars
sheets. Like most fifteen-year-olds, the boy believes the world revolves around him.

“Just a nibble?” Tess asks her daughter.

When the gifted photographer struggling through her first year at Savannah College of Art and Design turns her nose up at the French toast her desperate mother prepared with her secret ingredient—tears, Tess can barely keep herself from pounding the top of the pine table and asking yet again, “What did I do wrong? How can I make this better? Please…please let me in.” She swallows the questions back because she knows from experience that Haddie’ll only change the subject, at best. Worse, she’ll get angrier than she already is.

Tess sets her gaze out of one of the kitchen windows and locks on the solitary snow angel I watched her create last night while her family remained snug in their beds. Others may leave her side, but I never have, and never will. We are bound together not only in this life, but for all time.

Most of what you think you know about “imaginary friends” is probably inaccurate. We’re a much more complicated lot than the way we’re often portrayed in books, movies, psychological articles, and such. For instance, not once have I heard it mentioned what an important part readiness plays in our relationship. Nor have I seen it noted how we are imbued with whatever qualities our friends need the most, which depends upon at what point in their lives we are called into what is known on our side as, “Service.” The profound spiritual component in our friendship has never been touched upon either. Even the term, “imaginary friend,” is nothing more than a handy phrase a psychiatrist came up with to describe the indescribable and put the inexplicable in its place.

Since Tess has had quite a bit of prior experience with an IF—a nickname we like to call each other sometimes—I’m not anticipating that she’ll put up much of a fuss when the time comes for us to connect again. (
At Last
.) While I can’t know exactly when that momentous occasion will occur—that’s entirely up to her—I can feel it drawing nearer. Hoped it might happen last night when I was perched on the faded green Adirondack chair under the weeping willow tree in the Blessings’ backyard watching her swish her arms and legs back and forth in the snow. (Wearing just her ancient cows-sipping-
café-au-lait
-on-the-
Champs-Élysées
nightie on the chilliest night yet this winter proved that she needs someone to lean on sooner rather than later.)

Because I know every thought and feeling she’s ever had, as Tess sets the French toast Haddie had rejected on the floor next to the family’s beloved golden retriever, Garbo, I can hear her telling herself—I’m gonna do it again tonight. Not just once, I’ll make a dozen angels.

And on January 17, 1999, after the dawn smudges peach and blue across tomorrow’s horizon, she’ll rise from her bed, slip on her worn-to-the-nub green chenille robe, and pad downstairs to get things going in the kitchen like her world hasn’t cracked wide open and the contents spilled. And before Haddie takes off for an eight-mile run, Tess’ll wish her a perky good morning, offer her a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice, and not mention the life-shattering news she’s about to receive. My friend will put on the smile she keeps close at hand, point out the kitchen window at her newly created flock, and say, “Look! Angels have come by to say halo!” with the hope that her daughter will be tickled by the corny joke she’d thought was hilarious when was she was ten ’cause Tess would do and say just about anything to recapture the closeness of those days.

Angel shmangels. How many times did I tell you not to have children, Theresa? Yours barely speak to you and look what they did to your figure and….

If you’re thinking that’s me talking mean like that to Tess, well, you’d be wrong.

That there is the unrelenting voice of her mother that she hears in her head even though the gal’s dead.

When Louise Mary Fitzgerald Finley Gallagher passed on last year, instead of leaving her eldest daughter a 1940s bureau with a couple of missing porcelain handles or linen hankies with swirling lavender initials, she left Tess her remains, a heart full of pain, and her head full of criticism.

I’m not sure where Louise is in her celestial education at the current time—upon the death of her body, her soul moved from the living room to the school room where she will be held accountable for her actions and be given the opportunity to learn from her mistakes—but while she was still on Earth that self-centered woman did indelible damage to my friend that I hope to heal when she allows me in. I have a couple of ideas on how to remove her thorny mother from her side, but have yet to come up with anything to stick in the hole to staunch the bleeding. (Not yet, anyway.)

Tess sets the washed fry pan on the yellow-and-blue kitchen counter, wipes her hands dry on the seat of the bulky gray sweatpants she wears to conceal the blubber she’s put on in her efforts to show Haddie how much fun eating can be, checks the clock above the stove, and looks for the black purse that holds her good-luck totems—a hanging-by-a-thread copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, remnants of her children’s baby blankets, and her daddy’s Swiss Army knife that fell out of his pocket that fateful day on the boat. She doesn’t go anywhere without that lucky purse.

“I’ve got an appointment this morning,” she tells the girl whose photographs are so remarkable for one so young that
National Geographic
has shown interest in hiring her as an intern next summer. “Why don’t you call me when you’re done shooting at the Nature Center? Maybe we could—”

“What kind of appointment?”

“No big deal. Just my yearly mammogram.”

“Does it hurt?”

Tess lays her cheek atop her daughter’s head and breathes deeply. Her natural aroma has always been earthy. Like she’d grown the child not in her womb, but her garden. Haddie’s hair is really something too. Not a deep red like her mother’s, but a daisy yellow like Will’s used to be, and the child was blessed with eyes that are a paler shade of blue than Tess’s that are almost navy. “Nothin’ to worry about, honey,” she reassures. “Cancer doesn’t run in the family. Mammograms are just part of the program when you get to be—”

“Uh-huh,” her daughter says as she ducks away from her mom’s lips.

My friend has been raked over these coals so often that she’s grown used to and accepts the rejection, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t try everything she can to change it. She’s sure that if she could only figure out
why
Haddie is so angry with her, she would get better and they could go back to the way they used to be. Inseparable.

Tess wonders if it’s because of the way she reacted when she was first informed that her daughter planned to attend college at the Savannah School of Art and Design. Was that it?

She can’t deny that she was far from thrilled that Haddie meant to fly off and leave her in her contrail. When the acceptance letter was waved in her face, Tess freely admits she said, “Georgia?” like it was the one on the Black Sea. (She also failed to hide the excruciating ripping sensation she was feeling that was not dissimilar to the eighteen-hour back labor she’d endured during the child’s birth.)

But…once she’d gotten over the shock, hadn’t she tried her hardest to be supportive of Haddie’s desire to test her wings the year before she left?

Unfortunately, due to the losses she had experienced as child, the profound sense of abandonment Tess was experiencing was almost impossible to contain. Even though she’s normally highly skilled at keeping her true emotions secret—she’s successfully hidden her severe emotional problems from her children and the rest of the world her whole life—it was pretty damn obvious that she didn’t mean it when she threw kisses and hollered, “Go get ’em, baby!” on the mid-August afternoon that her husband and daughter pulled out of the driveway in the packed-to-the-roof green Taurus her parents had given their overachieving, artistic child after she’d graduated with the highest grade-point average ever recorded at Ruby Falls High.

So, of course, when the homesick freshman called begging to return home sixteen days after her arrival in Savannah—“Mommy, please…I made a mistake. I miss you…I’ll eat whatever you want. Please, please come get me,” Tess didn’t think twice. She scribbled a late-night “Be Back Soon, xoxo” note to Will and Henry, and off she and Garbo drove to save Haddie from her freedom.

She made it as far as Zionsville, Indiana, when the doubts she’d been wrestling with forced her to pull into an abandoned truck stop. Under the fluorescent lights, she finally admitted to herself that as much as she wanted to bring her girl back home, if she did, she’d be acting as selfishly as her own mother had. She cried herself dry, and then called Haddie to tell her in a barely used firm voice that she was sorry, but, “You need to stick it out.”

Is that why she’s mad? Tess wonders. She thinks I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most? She takes another stab at connecting with Haddie before she leaves for her appointment. “Maybe we could get a little lunch today?” In the good old days, shrimp egg rolls followed by chicken chow mein used to be her daughter’s favorite. The number-four special would be out of the question, but maybe she could talk Haddie, who appeared to know the caloric content of every food ever created, into a lettuce wrap. “Wong Fat’s?”

On her daughter’s generous lips even disgust looks good.

What did you expect?
Louise snipes in Tess’s head.
You just invited a kid with an eating disorder to lunch at a place that has FAT in its name. Theresa…Theresa…Theresa…could you be a worse mother?

I wish my friend could shout back,
Yeah,
I could be you!
but at the present time, she doesn’t have the confidence to speak back to her mother, nor bury her either.

Tess tries again. “Do you want to…?” She almost asked Haddie if she’d like to go to the mall instead. That would’ve been another mistake. Her girl used to adore shopping, but she won’t try on flouncy dresses or frilly blouses anymore. She’d grab armfuls of pretty things off the racks, but once they hung in the dressing room, she would collapse in tears after she stripped down to her panties and saw her “grossness” reflected back in the store mirror. “What about…?” Haddie adores illness movies. If she could find one about a young woman suffering with anorexia or bulimia she’d be in hog heaven and expect her mother to wallow in it with her. “We could watch a Lifetime movie tonight.”

“Whatever.”

Sensing that she’s hit yet another conversational dead end, Tess clears the rest of the breakfast dishes and slogs down the basement steps to turn off the TV that Will and Henry left on last night. When she steps back into the kitchen with her arms full of their leftovers, Haddie shudders at the greasy popcorn bowl, empty pop bottles, and gooey candy wrappers.

“Thanks for rubbing it in,” she growls as she stomps past her mother toward the staircase.

Tess calls after her, “I’m sorry…I’m stopping at the grocery store after my appointment. Do you need anything?” but she leaves the house uncertain if Haddie heard her before she slammed the bathroom door shut behind her.

As Tess backs out of the driveway in the dinged-up ’83 silver Volvo she refuses to sell because she brought her children home from the hospital in it, she’s thinking about her family. It’s not just Haddie that she’s having such a hard time with. She’s no longer the star of Henry’s or Will’s lives either. On good days, she figures she has a supporting role, on the not so good ones, she fades into the scenery. Her carefully considered words are nothing more than background noise. Mommy Muzak.

On her drive down Chestnut Street, she passes homes similar to hers, good-sized and over a hundred years old. Tess envies their rock solidness, their ability to withstand the onslaught of time. When was the last time she and Will strolled beneath the old-fashioned streetlights after the children turned in for the night? A month? Two? She’d made him laugh, and they’d shared stories of their day. When the time for words was over, Tess got a hooded look in her eyes and began to softly singing “their” song
—Hernando’s Hideaway
.

“I know a dark secluded place….”

Will knew that place too, and he took his wife of almost thirty years into his arms and they tangoed back to the ancient oak tree that he’d carved their initials into the same way his father had his mother’s. He pressed Tess against the rough bark and cupped her breasts in his hands, laid his lips against hers with insistent tenderness until she felt him rise to the occasion.

They hadn’t made it up to the bedroom.

After circling for a few minutes, Tess spots an open space in nearby St. Mary’s North Hospital lot and pulls in. She bustles toward the pneumatic doors, but once inside, she stomps her feet for an inordinately long time on the long black mat to loosen the snow trapped in her boots. She’s telling herself that she’s just being courteous, but she’s stalling. Her fear of hospitals, a.k.a. “gigantic petri dishes,” is one of many.