by Lesley Kagen
(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
Buy broccoli.
Make sure Haddie gets the help she needs from a better therapist.
Set up vocational counseling appointment for Henry.
Convince Will to love me again.
Get Birdie to talk to me.
Bury Louise once and for all.
Have a religious epiphany so #8 is going to be okay with me.
Die.
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 w
hole 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.”
“Was that a no on the dentures?”
“Yes that was a no,” Tess says.
“Have you removed all your jewelry?”
Tess lifts her quivering left hand from beneath the sheet.
This must not be the first time this problem has come up because Susan reaches down to the bedside table and lifts off a strip of precut surgical tape. “You need to be grounded,” she says as she wraps it around her patient’s gold wedding band.
Tessie remembers how often Dr. Drake mentioned the importance of being “grounded” during their sessions. Anchored to reality. But “grounded” was also an electrical term.
The hospital has to keep their success rates up. If the surgery doesn’t go well, they’re gonna electrocute you and blame it on faulty wiring, Louise promises.
When Dr. Whaley comes by to say good morning, he sets a hand on Tess’s foot and gives it a playful wiggle. “See ya in there,” he says. “I’ll be the one with the scalpel.”
Susan slips a clip onto Tess’s middle finger that measures her heartbeat, which sounds like a Geiger counter at a nuclear waste dump. She’s shaking so hard that she’s almost levitating out of the bed, when another shower-capped man shows up.
“I’m Dr. Gritzhammer. We talked last night.” The anesthesiologist had called during Murder, She Wrote. The thought of being put under was so overwhelming to Tess that she’d tuned him out in favor of Jessica Fletcher. “I’d like to give you a valium to help you relax.”
She shakes her head at the bushy-haired man. “No, thanks. I’ve had weird reactions to tranquilizers in the past.” She must stay on guard. She must.
“I wish you would’ve told me that last night,” Gritzhammer says perturbed. Doctors have routines and she’s disrupted his.
Susan covers shivering Tess with warm blankets before she wheels her into the surgical suite. Masked people are milling about the freezing room like a gang of bad guys ready to pull off a mid-winter caper. Two of them transfer Tess from the bed onto the operating table. She recognizes the anesthesiologist’s bulky brows as he leans down and tells her, “I’m going to place this mask over your face now. Count out loud backward from one hundred.”
Desperate to end the panic, she pictures Will and her children, breathes deeply, and whispers, “I love you. Forever and always. Ninety-nine…ninety-eight…ninety-seven…eleven….”
A Reunion
So this is death.
The weather is lovely.
Since it would never occur to Tess that she’s ended up in Heaven, she figures she’s made a layover stop in Purgatory. She’ll hang out here until whosever in charge can get caught up on their paperwork, after which, her mortal-sin-ridden soul will be sent packing to the ninth circle of Hell.
Then again, if she is in death’s waiting room, she wonders why she feels so serene. She loves the ethereal saxophone music that’s playing—At Last is her favorite song—but she hates to wait.
She can’t be sure how much time goes by, but her number must’ve been called because she’s on the move now. There’s an immediate sense of black weightlessness, and then she finds herself barreling toward a yonder light brighter than any she’s ever seen. Whatever she’s inhaling smells divine. In some other way other than words, a voice that is neither male or female or young or old, informs her that the aroma is called, “Heaven Scent.”
Tess laughs. Dr. Drake was right. Humor is holy.
When she arrives at a beach with sand the color of burnished copper, she understands that she’s supposed to enter the water that’s the most unusual blue, which switches to lilac, then silver. It’s not just shimmering, it’s alive, and imploring her to become one with it.
Without a thought of what lies beneath, normally cautious Tess dives in, and is engulfed in a protected feeling that she never knew existed. “Welcome to the Sea of Unconditional Love,” the voice informs her.
Above her, stalactite sunbeams hang off the surface, below, a school of pink angelfish with pleased starfish eyes glide through a magnificent garden of kaleidoscope flowers. Two women appear. They wave at Tess like they’d been expecting her. One of them is her gammy, standing in the middle of the blooms dressed in a pretty yellow collared dress. She is not old and withered anymore, but young and vibrant. Alice, her daughter and librarian, is looking studious by her side. Her aunt is holding a field guide to flowers in her hand. Practical-joke-playing Boppa gives Tessie a wave from a nearby gazebo where he’s affixing a Kick Me sign to the back of his favorite son, Eddie. Tess shouts, “Daddy!” and when he gives her the thumbs up, she can feel his everlasting love, and when he breaks into to, “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream,” euphoria floods her very essence. He’s absolved her. Freed her of the burden of guilt she’s carried around since the afternoon she didn’t save him. She feels so much lighter that she wonders if she’s about to rise to the surface. She doesn’t want to. She wants to stay so badly, but the guide accompanying her—his name is Frank B. Willis—objects. (I requested him because no one gives a tour quite like Frank. He’s knowledgeable, but funny as hell.) He gently informs Tess, “Not yet, dear one. Now is not your time.”
But what is time? she asks when who should come swimming by but the star of Sea Hunt. Of course, she can’t help but check out Mike Nelson’s…ah…spear gun. She’s impressed. You’d think with all the time the guy spent in the water…. Three other swimmers appear from behind a curtain of bubbles. Sisters Faith, Hope, and me. As we draw closer, Tess senses that whatever I’m about to tell her will be the most life-changing news she’s ever received other than hearing Will’s matrimonial, “I do,” and the wails of her newborn children.
“Theresa Blessing! Theresa Blessing!”
She cocks her head. That’s not my caring, drawled voice. This one’s demanding, like her mother’s.
“Open your eyes! Now!”
With much difficulty—it feels like fifty-cent pieces are taped to her eyelids—Tess does as commanded. She’s lying flat on her back beneath a perforated white ceiling.
“What…where?” she mumbles.
Susan, the plain nurse who prepped her for the operation, leans down and fills her in. “You’re in St. Mary’s North recovery room. The surgery went well.”
Tess doesn’t care. She wants to dive back to where she was. She closes her eyes and begins to fad
e, but Susan quickly steps in, places an oxygen mask on her face, keeps after her to, “Breathe…breathe…breathe!” and when she does, the nurse goes back to dishing with two other nurses that are gathered at the foot of the bed. One of them, a blurred blond, is railing on someone named Penny, who only got promoted to head of the unit because, “She’s a complete and utter skank.”
Jerry appears from stage left, unlocks the wheels of the rolling bed, and throws his two cents into the hen party. “Breaking news. Angela and Dr. Howdy Doody got caught hooking up in the cafeteria pantry.” If her throat didn’t feel so sore, Tess might’ve snickered too because she realizes now that tumor-lassoing Dr. Brewster had reminded her of Buffalo Bob’s sidekick as well.
Jerry doesn’t say much during the trip back to her room. Tess figures he must be as captivated as she is by the pastoral prints hanging on the hospital walls. Why had she not noticed the gorgeous texture, the subtle shading, and the vivid colors earlier?
After he maneuvers the bed through her room door, Jerry asks, “How ya doin’?”
“I wanna…I wanna….” When Tess sits up, the room does too.
“Not so fast,” Jerry says, amused by the bewildered look on her face. “If you need anything.” He sets a call button next to her hand. “Stay put until,” he gives her an in-the-know wink, “you get your land legs back.”
