The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (34 page)

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?” Birdie 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.”

It was more of a statement than a request. Birdie has that get-out-of-my-way-buster look in her eyes. She was normally pretty docile, but she had that unpredictable wild streak. When they were kids, Birdie dove off the high dive at the neighborhood pool and she wasn’t even that great a swimmer. She cracked Dennis Patrick in the back with a rock when he attacked Tess in an alley. She rang Mr. Johnson’s doorbell—he was the Lutheran that all the kids in neighborhood said would stuff you like the deer he had hanging on his living room wall if he caught you playing ding dong ditch. She liked to stick her head too far out of the window of a fast moving car.

Tess was becoming very frightened that the guy with the friendly face would have it rearranged by her sister’s fist if he didn’t allow her into the duplex.

Thankfully, after he gives the two middle-aged women standing on his front porch the once over, he says, “My family’s at Mass and I’m just puttering. Why not?”

Tess can think of a hundred reasons.

She tells her sister, “You go.” She doesn’t want to stir up the past and doesn’t understand why Birdie does. One of them had to stay as close to the present as possible. “I’ll wait out here.”

Birdie leans in to the handsome man like she’s telling him a secret. “She’s shy,” she says with a wink. “Give us a minute.” She pushes Tessie to the side of the porch and begins to softly sing in a demanding way, “All kinds of weather, we stick together. The same in the rain or sun.” The
Sisters
song from the ’50s musical
White Christmas
is one of the girls' favorites. They used to perform it up at Lonnigan’s for their daddy and all the customers on special occasions. “Two different faces, but in tight places, we think and we act as one.”

Tess can’t resist when Birdie locks her arm through hers and drags her back to the nice young man to tell him, “We’re the Finley sisters.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Dave Trilby. Come on up.”

Birdie quietly counts the sixteen steps that deliver them to the small landing in front of the entry door.

Dave escorts them straight into the living room and there he is. Leon, on the old flowered couch in his boxer shorts, glued to the boxy black-and-white Zenith, a Swanson’s fried chicken dinner on a metal TV tray in front of him. A snubbed-out Lucky Strike is jammed into what’s left of the gummy brownie.

The three of them proceed through the dining room that holds few memories since the sisters never once remember using it.

The blue paint on the girls’ old bedroom has been replaced with a color that’s almost the same as the pink in Haddie’s room. Someone had tried repeatedly to patch the long crack in the ceiling that Tessie used to stare at night after night, waiting for it to burst open and the world to fall down upon them. “This is my little Natalie’s room,” Dave says. “The ceiling is a work in progress.”

Birdie steps into their old room and says, “I love what you’ve done with it,” but Tessie remains mum. The memories are coming fast and hard. Birdie rocking. Birdie wetting the bed. The two of them huddled together with the pillows over their heads to muffle the screaming on the other side of the wall. Shadow puppets.

“The bathroom,” Dave says a tad embarrassed as he walks past.

Tess peeks in. She can smell the Dutch cleanser they used to scrub the tub and their mother’s Aqua Net hair spray.

Dave steps to the right, into Louise and Leon’s former bedroom, and says, “Speaks for itself.”

Indeed it does. A cacophony of double L’s arguments are bouncing around in Tess’s brain. Birdie admires the bedspread, and then elbows her sister to say something polite, so Tessie closes her eyes and sticks her head in. “Hasn’t changed one bit.”

Dave leads them into the kitchen where the lovely Louise is standing in front of the stove complaining about cooking or her useless children or threatening to throw a pot of boiling water at Leon when she finds out he gambled away his paycheck again.

As Tess had feared, Birdie hadn’t anticipated how being in the duplex would affect her. She tells the guy, “Thanks so much for taking time out of your day,” puts her arm around her now-quivering sister, and guides her down the front staircase. Dave’s face is puzzled as he locks the door behind them.

On the familiar front porch stoop where the Finley girls sit hand in hand to await Haddie’s return, Birdie says in her littlest-girl voice, “Oh, heck, Tessie, I’m having a cloudy day.” She sets her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I need some candy.”

On the short drive over to the third destination, Birdie insisted they stop at a Mobil station on North Avenue so she could clean off the Volvo windshield and check the oil. Four times each.

Tess calls to her out the car window, “You could get a freakin’ job here it looks so good. Please get back in the car.”

Birdie flaps her arms and says, “We’ve gotta run it through the car wash. Get off
all
the filth…filth…filth…filth.”

“Wow,” Haddie says from inside the car. “She reminds me of Otto.”

Tess, who has often thought the same thing, says, “Me too.”

Birdie leans through the Volvo window while they wait for the customer in front of them to run through the cycle. She pants, “I got the super-duper version.”

Tess grabs ahold of her. Birdie lets her for a moment, then pulls back, and says as she gets back in, “Just get the fucking car washed.”

Wanting to make her sister feel better about her looniness, as the car is sprayed and soaped, Tess tells her and Haddie about her deep-seated fear of a greasy man watching her from a cracked window in a gas station washroom. How he’d wait for her to leave the car to pick up a Three Musketeers bar in the minimart so he could spike the Coke in her cup holder with curare.

Not exactly sure how to react, Haddie snorts.

But Birdie says perplexed, “I get being afraid of a greasy guy. “The Peeker” up at the Clark Station was always bugging you when we were kids, but curare? Where the hell did
that
come from?”

When Tess says, “
Freaks of Nature
. Those pygmy cannibals?” her sister laughs.

Back on track, at least for the moment, Tess gives Haddie the directions to Ma’s as they exit the service station. Birdie is bouncing around in her seat now, giddy with delight. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to do this!” By the time they make the turn onto 63rd Street, her car door is halfway open. She runs up the stairs, yanks open the door of the house-shop, and yells out, “Ma, we need candy!”

Tessie had told her about Little Ma taking over the business after her mother passed away, so Birdie isn’t thrown when her successor comes out from behind the curtain. After they make their delicious selections, the three of them snuggle together on the steps out front.

Tess catches sadness flit across Haddie’s face as she watches her aunt dig into her bag of sweets. Her daughter can’t eat sugar without feeling guilty. Tess shakes out a few M&M’s into her hand, offers them to Haddie, and says, “Baby steps, right, Bird?” and she nods in agreement.

They talk and eat their goodies until the Blessed Children of God church bells ring out twice. According to the schedule Tess had devised, it was time to fulfill their last order of business for the day. She stands and grabs onto the iron railing for support, smiles wanly down at her little sister, and says, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for we.”

Will greets them in the mudroom and takes Birdie’s suitcases out of her hands. The last time he’d spent time with his sister-in-law was at Tessie’s and his wedding. Soon after, she had relocated to Florida. He’s unsure if he should hug her, so he comes off like a diner owner greeting a customer who hasn’t frequented his establishment in a while. “Good to see you again,” he tells her as he takes her hand in his and gives it a firm shake. “Hungry?”

Birdie says, “No,” but that’s the extent of her chit-chat repertoire.

Tess leads her into the den where Henry is playing online poker, oblivious to all but his full house. She calls him on his cell phone. He doesn’t pick up. “You are so gay,” he says with his killer smile. “I love you too,” she says. “Don’t forget we’re having supper together night as a family. Turn around and say hello to your aunt.”

Just like Birdie had with Haddie, she and her nephew quickly find common ground. Like him, she has always loved cards. Solitaire when they were kids, and Gin Rummy, when she got older. A few years ago when her agoraphobia got so bad that she couldn’t leave the house for a few months, she became addicted to one of the first online poker sites and made a small fortune. When Tess steps back into the kitchen to touch base with Will, she can hear her sister sharing betting strategy with Henry.

Will whispers to his wife, “I drilled a hole in the box and covered it with an adhesive flap so you won’t run into the same problem you had the last time you tried to scatter them. I’ll show Birdie how to open it, so you don’t have to, okay?”

A still-recovering Tess sighs; she’s so very weary. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take.” She looks over at her skinny sister deep in conversation with Henry. “If we’re not back by five thirty….”

Will gives her a hug and says, “Supper will be waiting.”

Birdie wants to hold the golden box as they descend down the beach path, but they hadn’t planned anything else out funeral-wise. Tessie’s only priority is to be rid of her mother once and for all, but her sister looks sad and solemn. She doesn’t feel the same bitterness toward Louise that Tess lugs around, which was hard for the both of them to understand after the way their mother had treated her.

After they wend down the crumbly asphalt path and arrive at the shore, they sit in the sand, slip off their shoes, and dig in their toes. They study the thrown-away and lost items that’ve rolled up onto the beach. Down the beach, a flock of seagulls are arguing over a carp.

When Birdie stands and walks to the water’s edge, Tess joins her. Puffy clouds are rolling across the sky, pushed by a wind that’s not coming off the lake, but at the girls’ backs. Tess points up and says, “It’s your color. Robin’s egg blue.”

Birdie tries a smile. “I was just remembering all the time we spent at the beach with her when we were kids. How beautiful she was lying on that white sheet.” She begins to cry. “I know you didn’t so much, but I really loved her, Tessie. I never gave up believing that if I worked hard enough, lost weight, got smarter, that she’d love me back.” She turns to face her sister. “The day you agreed with Leon and let them pull the plug, you killed my hope too.”

“Oh, Bird. I’m….”

“I know.” She leans into Tess. “I’m sorry too. I know now that you only did what you thought was right.”