The Summerhouse Read online

  “Yeah,” Madison said softly. “I had a good reason. He—”

  “No!” Ellie said. “You’re in my domain now. You have to tell a story in the proper order. You don’t tell the punch line before you tell the joke. Go back to that beautiful wilderness in Upstate New York and tell us about—” Ellie sat up abruptly. “Tell us why that woman was named Pretty.”

  The tears went away and Madison smiled again. “Any more of that wine? Do you think they have a pizza parlor in this tiny town? One that delivers?”

  “They have pizza parlors that deliver even in Egypt,” Ellie said, and when the others looked at her in question, she smiled. “You can read all about that in my third book, but now let’s look for a phone book and order. And can we get something besides pepperoni? And you—” She pointed at Madison. “You sit and talk. So, tell me, did Thomas have really great legs?”

  “Beautiful,” Madison said, leaning back against the leg of the couch. “Every part of him was beautiful.”

  Ten

  “And you’re how old?” Thomas said with a deep scowl as he held Madison’s foot in his palm and turned it to look at the bloody blisters. “You couldn’t be more than six if you did something this dumb.”

  For all that his words were harsh, Madison felt nothing but caring concern coming from him. It had taken them three hours to walk over the hill that Thomas called a mountain to reach the pickup where Pretty waited for them.

  And during the walk, Thomas had encouraged Madison to talk. He told her that his mother had said she’d rehabilitated Roger, so he wanted to know, in detail, what she’d done.

  At first, Madison was reluctant to talk about the matter. For one thing, she’d had no experience with talking with a man. She’d tried it, but as men looked at her, they became “distracted.” And since she’d been married, she’d tried to interest Roger in what she was reading about, but he’d said that it was enough that he had to do what she read about, he didn’t want to have to listen to it too.

  But Thomas, walking ahead of her on the trail, had persisted. “I’m about ready to choose my specialty in medicine, so maybe I’ll become a physiatrist.”

  She knew that he was testing her on this obscure word for a doctor who specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation. “Do you have the personality?” Madison teased, but Thomas glanced back at her with his usual frown.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I had to put it into one word, it’s ‘Encouragement.’ Rehabilitation is nonstop encouragement. The patient isn’t just a doll you can manipulate. You have to deal with his personality and make him want to do all the work involved. It’s easier to lie in bed and watch football than it is to try to lift a leg three inches off the bed, then repeat the process twenty times.”

  “I see,” Thomas said, turning back to the trail. “So what did you do to encourage your patient?”

  Not “Roger,” Madison thought, but “your patient.” She liked that. It made her feel as though she were actually in the medical profession, rather than just Roger’s wife who wasn’t sure what she was doing half the time.

  When she didn’t say anything, Thomas said, “Start at the beginning.”

  Madison made a sound of disgust. “The beginning is difficult. With Roger it was especially difficult because he’d been told by the neurosurgeon that his spinal cord had been severed and that he’d never walk again. When I got back to Montana, Roger was suicidal.”

  “But you gave him hope,” Thomas said softly. “And, more important, you made him walk again. So tell me how you did it.”

  The way he said that made Madison feel wonderful, but she didn’t want him to think she was an egomaniac, so she passed the buck. “I had a lot of help from your aunt. She’d told Roger’s parents that the X-rays seemed to show a complete lesion, but there was so much swelling that she couldn’t be sure. I called her. I was very nervous about doing so, and I didn’t know if Roger’s parents would pay her bill if she sent one but I wanted to learn all that I could. She was very nice and she told me to put towels under Roger’s knees then push down on his legs. If his feet came up and seemed to show signs of movement, then there was hope.”

  “And you did it,” Thomas said, encouraging her to go on.

  “Yes,” Madison said. “And when we saw that there was a possibility that he might walk again, I had to start reading and figuring out what to do next.” With Thomas’s intense listening, Madison began talking about what she’d done over the last two and a half years. At first she tried to be scientific and talk about drugs and pain and specific exercises. But after about twenty minutes, her personal feelings crept in and she started mentioning the troubles she’d had with Roger’s parents and how they wouldn’t give her the money for equipment.

  “It was as though they wanted the neurosurgeon to be right; they didn’t want Roger to walk again. His father said, ‘What does it matter? He’ll never again be able to play sports, so he might as well be in a wheelchair.’”

  As he listened, Thomas made no comment except to now and then look back at her with a sharp glance.

  She told Thomas about the nerve damage to Roger’s right hip. “He’ll never feel much with that leg,” she said. She told about the bone grafts, the skin grafts. She told about having to roll Roger about when he still had on a hip cast, having to lift him and move him in the many months before he could pull himself up by the triangular bar that hung above his bed.

  “And what did you do for the depression?” Thomas asked.

  At that Madison looked away because she didn’t want to tell him about a long conversation she’d had with Dr. Oliver. It was three months after the accident and Roger wasn’t cooperating; all he could think about were the things he could no longer do. Once again, Madison had called the woman who was becoming her friend, and to Madison’s horror, Madison had burst into tears on the phone. “I can lift his legs, but I can’t lift his spirits,” she’d cried, “so nothing I do is making him progress.”

  “It’s a common problem,” Dorothy had said. “Not many years ago hospitals had spinal cord injury wings, and the men and women smoked grass and had sex with each other and outsiders.”

  It took Madison a moment to clear her tears away enough to hear. “What?” she asked.

  “Sex, Madison,” Dorothy said. “After injuries like this the first question is, ‘Will I walk?’ The second question is, ‘Can I have sex?’ or, in women, it’s, “Can I have children?’ I believe that Roger’s genitalia are intact, so you could probably have sex.”

  “A baby?” Madison asked, stunned at the doctor’s words. She’d expected the doctor to tell her about some new exercises or—

  “Actually, I doubt very much if you would get pregnant. Due to his inactivity, the drugs, and the hormone interruptions of the HPAC axis, I doubt if his testosterone levels are high enough to make you pregnant. But try sex. It gives men something to live for.”

  “Oh,” Madison had said. “I . . . never thought about that.”

  “Madison, dear, don’t forget to live.”

  So now Thomas was asking her how she’d given his spirit back to Roger. “As he saw improvement, he was better,” she’d mumbled at last.

  Thomas nodded, seeming to accept her answer. “Tell me about drugs,” he said.

  “Blood thinners,” she replied, once again on safe ground, glad she hadn’t been asked to go into what had become something quite unpleasant between her and Roger. It wasn’t good to be a man’s nurse as well as his sex partner, as the two seemed to get mixed up. Roger had wanted every exercise session to turn into sex. He’d wanted Madison to play out fantasies about being his nurse. “But I am your nurse,” she’d say, exasperated. She found it impossible to reconcile the two roles: love words one moment, fierce orders of, “You must do this!” the next moment. Nurses don’t usually give two-and-a-quarter-inch intramuscular shots one minute and kisses the next.

  Madison skipped all that part of Roger’s rehabilitation and went on to tal