The Resurrection of Tess Blessing Read online

  Then again, all the extra lovely touches lately could be expressions of Will’s guilt. But why had he smiled impishly when he told her before they turned in last night, “Thirty years. The pearl anniversary. Love ya.”

  Tess wasn’t much on Bible verse, but this one popped unbidden into her head as she lay it on her pillow:

  Do not give what is holy to the dogs;

  nor cast your pearls before swine,

  lest they trample them under their feet,

  and turn and tear you in pieces.

  Louise was quick to add on a loud Amen to that sister.

  Ruby Falls is ramping up for the Spring Festival this weekend. Flower baskets hanging from the old-fashioned street lamps perfume the air. Fluttering banners and sales signs top the shop marquees. More than a few of the visitors have remnants of The Emporium’s famous fudge smeared on their lips and a Count Your Blessings’ malt in their hands.

  While taking a turn through the town is an antidote for all the time Tess’d spent cooped up over the last couple of months, the walk is serving another purpose. The same way she’d discovered that it was easier to communicate with Henry on the phone, she found that Haddie was more receptive when they were on the move.

  After they drop the dry cleaning at Melton’s, they pick up a few odds and ends for Birdie’s arrival in a few of the adorable shops that line Main Street. Tess had done the best she could to freshen up Will’s mom’s old room with sweet-smelling candles, a new quilt, and flickering bulbs in the antique lamps. An extra night-light if Birdie forgot hers. A new bottle of witch hazel and a carton of Q-tips was waiting in the bathroom cabinet, should the need arise.

  As they approach Count Your Blessings, Tessie asks Haddie, “Hungry?”

  She shakes her head, looks pensive, and switches everything up by dropping the bomb that Tess was about to unload on her as they make the turn off Bridge Street toward the park. “Dr. Chandler keeps asking me if I can remember anything traumatic that was happening around the time I started to have my problems,” she says. “I don’t, so she asked me to ask you.”

  Of course, Tess can remember. Perfectly.

  Back when the diner had been experiencing critical cash-flow problems on account of the addition of the party room, Tess blamed Will. She couldn’t stop herself from tearing into him in the backyard or the basement or garage. In front of the children, she was careful that they appeared to be who they always had been—devoted to each other. The picture of domestic bliss. Or so she thought. The second Haddie asked her on the Easter night walk, “Are you getting a divorce? Is the diner having money troubles again?” she knew she’d failed miserably at keeping the scorching battles from her. She’s disgusted with herself for inadvertently subjecting her daughter to the same kind of ugly fights that her mother and stepfather had exposed Birdie and her to, but she’s also feeling a glimmer of hope. A silver lining. She may have finally found a key that fits the lock she’s been trying to open for years. If her daughter ends up hating her for opening this Pandora’s Box, so be it.

  When they come around the corner of Main and Park, Tess asks her, “Do you remember a few years ago when Daddy and I were fighting all the time after he opened the party room? About money and…other things?”

  When her daughter’s chin starts to quiver, Tess realizes that Haddie’s emotions are much closer to the surface than she’d imagined. “You mean when you told him you were gonna leave him?”

  “Yeah,” Tess says on a heavy exhale. “I think I might’ve unintentionally made you feel as frightened and powerless as I was feeling at the time and…and I think you started starving yourself and binging and vomiting to give yourself a sense of control that you couldn’t get in any other way.” It must have been so scary for her to hear Will and her going at one other. “And the fights…they might’ve triggered your problem, but I think it’s more complicated than that.” Tess had spent years researching eating disorders. “Being a teenager is hard. Your body is changing, there are so many insecurities to deal with and…,” she tries to center herself. “I don’t want to shift blame, but I also think the way Dad shows his love with food, the air-brushed models in magazines, and you’re over-achieving personality may be contributing factors.”

  This was difficult for Haddie to hear, harder for Tess to say. “I’d give anything to take away your pain, sweetheart, but other than loving you and being here for you…I don’t know what else to do.”

  Haddie nods, fists the tears off her check. “I know you’ve been trying to help me all along, but I wasn’t ready to get better,” she says. “I am now. With help from Dr. Chandler. We’ve already talked about some of the body-image stuff you mentioned, the pressure society puts on us to be thin, and…and what you just said about you and Dad fighting? I think that’s gonna be helpful.” She slow smiles at her mom. “Talking about it with the other girls in the group also helps me realize that I’m not the only one struggling with this. Not having to hide it from at least a few people takes some of the pressure off too.”

  Tess considers all that she’d hidden for so long and how those secrets had compounded her problems. She stops, places her arms around Haddie, and says, “I’m so sorry for whatever part I played in your pain. Sorrier than you’ll ever know.”

  Haddie hugs her back and says, “I’ve been so confused and mad and sad and…I’m sorry for the way I treated you. I’m so, so glad you’re not gonna die. I love you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Exhausted emotionally and physically, Tess says, “I love you too, baby,” and points to the green wooden bench that overlooks the Ruby River. They’ve made a trip to the park because Haddie wants to take her yearly pictures of the baby ducks. She’s been doing it every spring since she was eight years old. “Let’s look on the bright side.” (Did she really say that?) “We have a lot to deal with, but we’re already getting better at talking about things. And I think Birdie’s visit is going to be a real help to both of us.”

  Haddie squats, brings her Nikon up, and squeezes off shots of the duck mother and her five fluffy babies. “What’s Aunt Birdie like?” Over the years, she and Henry had received cards from their Hallmark-loving aunt, talked to her on the phone too, but the Finley sisters went through so many ups and downs that Tess didn’t want the children’s feelings hurt, so she told her sister that it’d better if she wasn’t involved in the kids’ lives anymore, too confusing, and she agreed. “Does she have the same kind of problems you told me about?” Haddie asks.

  During their many evening walks with Garbo, Tess had given her a somewhat sanitized version of her emotional struggles. She was surprised by Haddie’s reaction. Instead of the depressions, panic attacks, phobias, and flashbacks scaring her the way she thought they would, when her daughter realized that she wasn’t the only one in the family grappling with tough stuff, it forged a bond between them that’s similar to the one Tess feels with her sister.

  “In some ways Bird and I are a lot alike, but in others…not so much.” She opens her lucky purse and withdraws the leftover dinner rolls she’d brought along. She tosses a few to the feathered family gliding by. They’re making it look easy, but below the water, their little feet are paddling like mad. “She cleans. A lot. And counts and…,” she stops when she realizes that she’s not sure what kind of problems her sister has been dealing with recently. “I’m hoping this visit might help her put some of that stuff to rest.”

  Haddie takes her head away from the back of her Nikon and asks, “How?”

  Tess can’t go into all the details, but in the spirit of their new-found open communication, she says, “Well, like we talked about today, the past is a powerful place that can hold the answers to a lot of questions. Birdie and I are going to travel back in time and take care of some unfinished business.”

  “Can I come?”

  Tess believes that could be helpful to her in a lot of different ways, but she doesn’t want her along when Birdie and she scatter Louise’s ashes. She says g
ently, “I’d love for you to spend as much time as possible with your aunt and me while she’s here, but there’s one thing that Birdie and I have to do alone,” she says. “You understand?”

  Haddie takes a few more shots of the ducklings. “Is it a sister thing?”

  “Exactly.”

  Unearthing

  Henry and Will wanted to come along for the ride, but Tessie thought it might be better if it was just Haddie and she who picked up Birdie from the airport early Sunday morning. Less overwhelming.

  Her sister is thinner than she should be; she looks like a coat hanger for her stylish clothes, but I could see by the look on Tess’s face that it feels so good to hold her in her arms.

  On the walk to the baggage claim, Birdie tells her, “When I first came off the plane, I thought…,” she shivers, “you’re starting to look a lot like Louise.”

  Tess would have to agree that the likeness is uncanny. She didn’t possess her mother’s outrageous beauty, but their coloring was the same. Sometimes when she caught her reflection in a shop window, it scared her too.

  Honoring her sister’s demands—“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,” Tess made sure they got right down to it.

  Haddie drove so the sisters could sit together in the backseat. Tess is hovering, asking Birdie every few minutes, “Still good?” as the streets of Milwaukee whiz by. Her sister hadn’t been back in a while, and then only to reunite with their grandmother. No telling what memories might be drudged up when they hit their old haunts.

  “I’ll be okay,” Birdie baby talks, “but if I’m not…you know what to do.”

  Out of her lucky purse, Tess pulls an Olsen’s brown paper bag—a hyperventilation buster. She’s also brought along a bottle of Maalox if her sister’s delicate tummy starts acting up. And Pepto too, if the other end stops cooperating.

  “Turn right here,” Tess tells Haddie.

  They slow, but do not stop in front of their “cemetery house,” the one they were living at when their father died. A dark-skinned, corn-rowed girl is playing with a one-legged doll on the sagging front steps. A piece of graffiti-filled plywood covers the front window. As they slow down to get a better look, the little girl jerks her head up like she’s expecting the worse and runs inside the house.

  Birdie says, “Sad,” and Tess echoes that sentiment.

  When they reach the end of the block, the formal entrance to Holy Cross Cemetery looms. Tess remembers the amazing night she and little Birdie had climbed the black iron fence to search for their daddy’s pretend grave. She hasn’t been back to visit the graveyard for years and she wonders now why not. As they enter through the imposing gates, she says, “I’m sorry. For some reason…I can’t believe…I don’t remember where Daddy is buried.”

  Birdie does.

  Tess shakes out the tan blanket she’d brought along and sets it next to Eddie Blessing’s stone. Upon her gammy’s death, my friend had been left a shoe box full of family snapshots. She’d brought along the best to show her sister. “A little present for you,” she says as she hands Birdie a black-and-white photo of their daddy and them on the merry-go-round at Kiddie Land circa 1957. In another, the three of them are in a row boat in the lagoon at Washington Park. Birdie is smiling her adorable head off, but Tess is gripping onto the sides for dear life. The last shot was taken at Lonnigan’s. The Finley sisters are sitting on top of the mahogany bar beside a small Christmas tree decorated with tinsel and bottle caps. Their bartender daddy is in the background wearing a Rudolph red nose and beaming at his girls.

  Birdie stares especially hard at that last picture. “I remember that night,” she tells Tess.

  “You do?!” As a result of either the powerful drugs she’d taken over the years to relieve her anxiety, OCD, and delusions, unlike Tessie, her sister’s childhood recollections are spotty and rare.

  “Yeah,” Birdie says. “It was taken on Christmas Eve. We were eight and seven. Daddy was supposed to take us to midnight Mass and we ended up at the bar instead. We were having a great time. Christmas carols were playing on the jukebox and Daddy was telling Polack jokes and making everyone laugh and you and me were drinking kiddie cocktails with maraschino cherries until…until Louise showed up.”

  The fascinated look that Haddie’d had on her face when the sisters were limping down Memory Lane turns to one of concern when her aunt bolts up off the blanket and begins to pace amongst the headstones. Tessie has minimal physical manifestations of her anxiety, but Birdie had not been as fortunate. She cannot hide the supreme effort it takes to hold back the fear that quakes inside of her. She trembles and shakes, and her breathing becomes tortured.

  Haddie scoots closer to her mom and asks, “Is she okay?” She isn’t alarmed the way some people might be while watching another person fall apart before their eyes. Not only had Tess prepared her for Birdie’s symptoms, the child had grown up with Otto at the diner dressed in full paranoid regalia going on about the CIA and the Planet Argon.

  Birdie was leaning against the sooty-looking Gilgood mausoleum about fifty yards away. Tess hands Haddie the brown paper bag and she jogs over with it. They look alike. Blond hair and those eerie light-blue eyes. Thin, like drinking straws. Tess watches proudly as Haddie pats her aunt tentatively on the back after she plunges her head into the bag.

  When her daughter rejoins her on the blanket, Tess holds her close and reiterates what her girl already understands, “Feelings are not for sissies.”

  “I remember the stub of whiskers on the back of his hands and the muscles in his arms and beer on his breath and how he’d call me tweetheart sometimes and…and before we fell asleep at night how he would come into our room, give us a hug, and tell us, “I love you two as much as the stars and the moon,” Birdie stutters as they get back into the car.

  Tess considered that seeing all the familiar places might free up her sister’s repressed memories as it seems to be doing. She also considered that could be helpful and work out really well, but then again it might not. She asks her again, “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I cut back on my antidepressants before I came,” Birdie says. “I thought I was ready, but….” She turns her head to look out the window at the kaleidoscope of streets that the girls had once raced down on their red twenty-inch Schwinn, perhaps thinking about a time when she could still kid herself.

  When they arrive at Birdie’s next requested destination, Tessie shows Haddie where to pull in. Unlike their rundown cemetery house, the duplex off of Center Street looks scarily the same, except for a little wear on the roof and the paint that’s been changed from white to beige.

  “You sure you want to keep going?” Tess asks her sister. “We could come back tomorrow.”

  Birdie shakes her head and gives her an unexpected, almost peaceful smile.

  Tessie could think of nothing about being back at the duplex that could make her feel that serene. “Who or what are you remembering?” she asks.

  Birdie opens the car door and says, “Bee.”

  “Who’s Bee?” Haddie asks.

  Birdie says, not bashful at all, “My imaginary friend.”

  When Haddie makes an oh-boy-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into face, her aunt grins and says, “A friend in need can be a real saving grace, right, Tessie?”

  She had mentioned her relationship with me during their online chats, so Tess says, “Indeed,” as they brush past the peony bushes that line the sidewalk that leads to the backyard.

  Dented aluminum garbage cans are leaning against one another on the concrete block that had crumbled on the edges and cracked down the middle since Tess had last seen it. She flashes back to the morning she’d raced down from their bedroom on their birthday to find her garden buried beneath its weight.

  “Remember how we’d play Red Light, Green Light with the other Blessed Children of God bad girls?” Bi
rdie says as they double back to the front of the house. “That’s kinda like what we’re doing today. Coming out of our hiding places and getting captured by the ghosts.” She tilts her head back, looking up to the second floor of the house. “And there was that summer when it seems like all we ate were popsicles and potato chips and…and that time Louise didn’t talk to us for two weeks because we forgot to take out the garbage and…and…when she dropped us off in the Core and when she hung the pee sheet on the front porch and….”

  She is talking way too fast, twirling her hair. Tess is getting a really bad feeling about what might come next.

  “I need to go inside,” her sister announces amped up.

  “Ahhh…I don’t think that’s a good idea. We don’t want to bother people on a Sunday morning,” Tess replies as calmly as she can. “Let’s go to the park or drive past the Tosa Theatre or—”

  “I’m doing this,” Birdie says, “with or without you. I need to.”

  Obsession is a shared problem, so Tess knows there’s no point in arguing with her.

  Dreading the awful effect the inside of the house might have on the inside of an already-agitated Birdie, Tess tells Haddie, who she feels has partaken of enough weirdness for one day, “Why don’t you take a little jog around the block, honey? This shouldn’t take long.”

  Haddie has on her running shoes. They’re worn down in the heels from the fast and furious five miles she ran every day with her running partner, her pain. “Okay. Be back in twenty minutes or so.”

  Birdie rings the duplex doorbell four times. It makes the same sound it had when they were kids. Through the filmy door curtains, they watch a handsome young man in khakis and a plaid shirt hop down the steps. “Yes?” he says when he opens the door.

  “Good morning. Sorry to bother you, but we used to live here when we were kids,” Birdie says with a darling, dimpled smile. “We’d like to come in and look around for a few minutes for old time’s sake.”