Read The Resurrection of Tess Blessing Online
Authors: Lesley Kagen
Tess wonders briefly if Patience got too chatty with someone in Ruby Falls, or maybe Rob Whaley told his wife and she let it accidentally slip to their daughter, Mandy, who called her ex-teammate to sympathize. Why else would Haddie be calling if it wasn’t to confront her with the cancer? Could she have been in an accident?
Rushing to the den phone, Tess punches in the oft-used numbers that’ve begun to look more like hieroglyphs. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier, honey. Henry just gave me your message. Everything okay?” she says after her daughter picks up.
“No big deal. Just wanted tell you that they have a new therapist at school. Dr. Chandler. She’s an eating disorder specialist. I’ve still got a long way to go, so don’t get excited and think that I’m all better, but…,” Haddie sounds both proud and scared, “I ate some french fries today, Mom, and they’re still in my stomach.”
She doesn’t trust herself to reply. She can feel the tears coming and Haddie can’t stand it when she cries. Any suggestion that her mother is a mere mortal is confusing. So instead of bawling, and showering her daughter with compliments as is her nature, she snorts back her tears and says, “Good job. That’s a step in the right direction, honey.”
But the moment my Tess replaces the phone back in its cradle?
What a crybaby
.
During the days leading up to the surgery, Tess acted the same way she usually does. Like she was under surveillance and she was the one doing the surveilling. She traveled from Olsen’s Market to the post office and to the Horizons Home, so the old folks could coo and fuss over Garbo the way they do every Wednesday afternoon. She waitressed. Mare Hanson was in with some breaking news. Her bladder cancer was in remission. “Until it comes back,” she’d said with a snarl. “I’m sick of all this healthy crap. Get me some fries, a Blessing burger with extra cheddar and fried onions.” Tess gave her the order on the house because she was glad that her pissy attitude had returned, no matter how short-lived.
Richie, her ALS customer, stopped in on his regular day as well. For this visit, Tess drummed up an old joke that had been a favorite of her father’s. The one about the Lone Ranger and Tonto getting into a fuss with a tribe of war-painted Comanches. Clearly outnumbered, the masked man assures his faithful companion, “Don’t give up. We can beat these Injuns,” and Tonto looks over at him and says, “What do you mean
we
, kemosabe?” But when Tess stopped by the table to lay the joke on Richie, she saw that he had worsened. So instead of kidding around with him, she set down his malt and rubbed his shoulders, which she wouldn’t have if she’d known it would make his wife hide her eyes in her napkin.
She also stepped up the e-mails to her medical transcriptionist sister:
“Dear Birdie,
For sure, I have cancer. You better come. You’re going to feel guilty if I die on the operating table. You’ll probably develop a phobia about dead sisters or breast cancer that could affect your work and cut into your bottom line. How will you pay your rent? Or buy witch hazel and Q-tips?
Love,
Tessie”
The night before the surgery, Tess raps on Henry’s bedroom door.
“Yeah?”
Garbo and I are already sitting together on the edge of his bed on top of a navy-and-white checked bedspread that Tess covers in kisses when it comes out of the dryer. Shoes are littering the floor and laundry is scattered everywhere. He’s added a new poster to his wall alongside the cowboy and poker-playing Phils. It’s one of Mr. Hefner’s Playmates. The glass aquarium that holds the current incarnation of Snakey sits atop the white dresser alongside a boom box playing Phish at an indecent level. Tess wonders if it might be the vibrations of the jam music that are killing the reptiles off, which she could completely understand. With a start, she realizes that she’d been so scared about the impending surgery that she’d forgotten to check on Snakey Nine the last few days. She reminds herself to come back later with her flashlight once Henry’s asleep. If the snake is no longer alive, she’ll push the creature into the back of the plastic cave and sneak in and remove him in the morning when he’s showering. After Will drops her off at the hospital, she’ll insist that he head straight to the Pet Palace to buy another so by the time her boy gets home from school tomorrow, all will be right with his world again.
(Other than his mother being dead, of course.)
Henry is stretched out in his bean bag chair doing his homework at the last minute, like always. He thrives on pressure. Believes it helps build “his poker chops.”
Tess toes his sneakers into the closet, picks up a pair of dirty socks, and says, “Oh, yeah,” like she just remembered. “I’m going into the hospital tomorrow to get something taken care of.”
Henry doesn’t look up from his copy of
Heart of Darkness
. It’s his favorite. “What?”
She thinks he wants her to repeat herself and she starts to, but he cuts her off with, “What do you need to get taken care of?”
He doesn’t usually ask for explanations so Tess has to think quick. If by the remote chance she should live, he might get a glimpse of the bandages so thank goodness that
Playboy’s
Miss June is holding a sportily situated tennis racket. “I’ve got something going on in my shoulder. The doctor isn’t sure, but she thinks it’s a rotator cuff tear.”
“Okay.” He still hasn’t looked up at her. “When will you be back?”
“Probably by the time you get home from school,” she says, even though she knows that’s a long shot. If the operation doesn’t kill her, the doctors could screw up in a myriad of other ways. That’s what happened to the husband of Sonya Phillips, the head librarian in town. Her husband of twenty-eight years, Dale, had gone in to have a simple hernia corrected, and an anesthesiologist, or his faulty equipment, had deprived her man’s brain of oxygen for five minutes.
Tess sees Sonya sometimes steering her cart through Olsen’s vegetable aisle fighting back tears.
At the breakfast table the following morning, surgery morning, Tess can’t take her eyes off her son. This might be the last time she ever sees him chew, swipe the curls out of his eyes, or head out the door without a word.
She watches Henry walk down the driveway out of the living room window, finding it hard to believe that he’d refused to go to preschool and she had to bribe him to attend kindergarten. He wanted to stay home with his
Momil
to eat chocolate-chip cookies and watch cartoons. She places her palm on the window and wills him to come back to her, and then she and Garbo make their way to the sunroom. She immerses herself in Haddie’s photos, pictures her in her dorm bed, pink and toasty, her hair damp at the neck and curling in front of her ears. She needs to talk to her. To say goodbye.
“Mmm…?” the college girl answers after many rings.
“Hey, baby. I’m sorry if I woke you, I just wanted to—”
“Later,” she grumbles before she hangs up.
There’s one last farewell to be made before they leave for the hospital. Tess releases Garbo into the backyard, throws her Frisbee, and heaps kisses and praise upon her for what she thinks will probably be the last time. “Take good care of everyone,” she tells a woman’s best friend after Will sticks his head out the porch door and reminds her that they better shake their tail feathers.
Tess finds it sweet that he’d warmed the car up for the short trip to St. Mary’s. “If I die,” she says to her husband as he turns onto Lakefield Road, “promise me you’ll tell the kids how much I love them and that I’m in Heaven watching over them.” That would be some comfort to Haddie, but Henry would probably laugh in scorn, call God an asshole, the same way he had when the Almighty took away his great-grandmother, but it’s all she can think of to say.
Will reaches over and pats her hand as he turns onto Port Washington Road. “You’re not gonna die.”
If she did, he’d get the news via phone. Rob Whaley had told her that after she checked in, they’d begin immediately to prepare her for surgery. Since Will believed Tess would be fine, he didn’t see the point in getting down on his knees to pray in the waiting room, and she didn’t see the point in asking him. Was he too frightened? Shallow? Or so optimistic that he couldn’t grasp a negative outcome? Why can’t she be more like him?
After she hops out of the car in the hospital’s drop-off zone, Will rolls down the window and says, “Call me when it’s over. Love you.”
Tess had been looking forward to seeing the usual greeter, Vivian, and is disappointed to find her post being manned by a much-younger woman. Out with the old, in with the new? Seems to be a growing trend. “The check-in area is right around the counter,” the new gal says with a perky smile.
Tess signs in, takes a seat in the waiting area, clutches her precious lucky purse to her chest, and tries to quiet her runaway mind by staring at a picture of Jesus leading a flock of furry animals through craggy mountains that’s hanging on the wall in front of her. Sheep? Lambs? Is He saving them, or leading them to the Butcher of Nazareth? This could be
her
final hour on Earth, and she’d only fulfilled a few of the items on her new list.
TO-DO LIST
Haddie was in the care of the new eating-disorder doctor at school, and Tess felt okay about crossing out number three because she
had
set up an appointment with Henry’s guidance counselor. “There’s nothing wrong with being a professional poker player,” he told her when he’d refused to go. “You lack imagination, Mom.”
“Theresa Blessing?” A big guy in scrubs and a Hitler mustache has barged through a set of double doors to her right. “I’m Jerry, your nurse this morning,” he says as he leads her to what looks like a checkpoint with a scale. She steps up and watches him fiddle with the adjusting weights. “A hundred and fifty-four.”
Whale. Cow. Sow
.
“This way.” Jerry takes her into a room with a chair, a bed, and pleated Teflon window curtains. He motions for her to sit and slides a blood-pressure cuff over her left forearm. He smells like Band-Aids and her stepfather, Leon. They still make Brylcreem? When the nurse has gotten the numbers he needs, he steps back and says, “Cancer, eh? My wife completed three rounds of chemo.”
Taken off guard, Tess utters, “Oh…geeze.” What’s the right thing to say to something like that?
Sorry? Congratulations?
He tells her the gowns are in the bathroom, then hands her a plastic package that contains tan slippers with raised V’s on the soles.
She undresses with clammy hands. She’s light-headed and needs to sit on the toilet to slip off her sweatpants, tennis shoes, and socks. When she emerges from the bathroom, the nurse is gone, but Ginger, the head of the Women’s Center and the original bearer of bad news, is sitting on the edge of a black chair with her ankles crossed.
After exchanging good mornings, she passes Tessie a clipboard. “A little more paperwork,” she apologizes.
The hospital is wondering what course of action they’re to take if they screw up. Tess checks the Do Not Resuscitate box, signs the bottom line, and hands it back to Ginger, who tells her, “I’ll take you to where they’ll perform your wire insertion now.”
As they proceed down the hall, Tess is trying to remember what Dr. Whaley had told her about this procedure. Something about another doctor lassoing the tumor with a wire so when it was his turn to have at it he would know where to cut?
“Here we are,” Ginger says to the doctor and nurse who were waiting for them.
“Good morning, Mrs. Blessing. I’m Dr. Brewster, and this is Angela, my nurse.” The younger-by-at-least-a-decade cute brunette is ogling the physician in his forties. He’s a redhead too, but the freckled sort. He reminds Tess of someone that she can’t put her finger on.
Dr. Brewster disappears to join Angela beneath the tented white cloth that she’d draped across Tess’s chest once she’d helped her onto the table. She had answered, “No, thanks,” to the offer of a numbing shot before the procedure. She didn’t want to go through the whole epinephrine explanation, and local anesthesia seemed superfluous when she was about to get knocked out. She regrets that decision the moment the wire slides into her flesh.
When the two of them emerge from beneath the sheet ten minutes later, Dr. Brewster smiles and says, “You’ll all set,” to Tess who now has something that resembles an errant guitar string protruding from her right breast.
Ginger, who had been standing at the ready, remarks as they walk through the labyrinth of hospital halls lined with the factory-produced nature prints, “I love these pictures don’t you? So inspirational. This one’s my favorite.” She points to a picture of two spotted fawn feeding next to a winter stream and Tessie thinks of Haddie and Henry. The thought of her children growing up without her make her eyes burn.
Their final destination is a large room with many beds. Curtains cover most of the other patients, only their tan-slipper-wearing feet are left exposed. “This is Susan,” Ginger says after she guides Tess down the row. “She’ll be your surgery nurse this morning. God bless.”
Susan appears to be in her late thirties, but she might just
look
older. Her light-brown hair is coiled into a bun at her neck and she doesn’t have on a stitch of makeup on. Tess is thinking the nurse might be Amish as she helps her into the bed. Like everyone else, she seems to be treating this momentous day like it’s just another Monday at the office, or in Susan’s case, just another day on a farm in Pennsylvania.
“Do you have any dentures?” she asks.
My friend is distracted by a groaning, gruff-voiced man a few beds down. “Mommy…I want my mommy.”