The Summerhouse Read online

  “Yeow!” Ellie said.

  “And you left New York and modeling to go back to him?” Leslie asked softly.

  Madison stubbed out her cigarette. “Yes. But before you two start thinking of what I gave up, I want to remind you that modeling wasn’t my idea. It was the town’s idea.”

  “You wanted to be a nurse,” Leslie said.

  “Yes.” Madison smiled at them. It was nice to be remembered so well. “Roger called me from the hospital and said that he’d been told that he’d never walk again. Then he told me that he still loved me, that he’d sent his fiancée packing, so I went running home. It wasn’t any great sacrifice for me to give up the idea of modeling. I hated . . .” Pausing, she lit another cigarette.

  “I didn’t like modeling,” she said after a moment, “so I was glad of any excuse that allowed me to return home. And Roger said all the right things. He blamed his dumping me on his father, saying that his father had threatened that if he married an uneducated girl like me, he’d be disinherited.”

  “No wonder you have a chip on your shoulder about not having gone to college,” Ellie said under her breath.

  Madison pretended she hadn’t heard Ellie. “So I went home and I married a man who was in a hospital bed in a body cast. Then, let’s see . . . How should I put this? Then I entered hell. Yes, I think that’s about right.”

  Madison looked at Ellie and Leslie to laugh, but they didn’t.

  “Roger was a horrible patient. He’d always been very physically active, so he didn’t take well to being confined to a bed. And his parents—” Madison stopped for a moment to take a deep drink of her wine; then she looked up at the other women. “Roger’s parents were very rich, but they were also extremely cheap. They wouldn’t shell out any money for Roger’s rehabilitation. I’ll never know for sure, but I think my ex-father-in-law got Roger to marry me so I’d be a free nurse. After all, I’d had years of experience with my mother. I’d even worked in a hospital.”

  Ellie and Leslie could see that Madison was trying to make light of what had obviously been a horrible situation, but the women didn’t smile; they couldn’t. It wasn’t fair that Madison had had to give up college to nurse her mother, then she’d given up a chance at modeling to nurse a husband.

  “What about the ‘one who got away’?” Leslie asked as she refilled Madison’s glass.

  “Oh, yes,” Madison said, and there was a genuine smile on her face. “Thomas.”

  As she picked up her glass, Leslie looked at Ellie and raised an eyebrow. There was something about the way that Madison said the name . . . Thomas.

  “Roger was injured, but he could still, you know,” Madison said as she set down her glass, “so I was six months pregnant and Roger’s parents were away that weekend, so—”

  “You were living with your in-laws?” Ellie asked in horror.

  “Oh, yes. Roger didn’t have any money and I didn’t either. I mean, I had the money the town had given me for modeling, but that was soon gone.”

  Ellie opened her mouth to explode at that, but Leslie put her hand on her arm and stopped her. Madison had given her college money to her mother’s illness; then it seemed that she’d given her modeling money to a rich, whining, ungrateful—

  “That weekend Roger’s parents were away, so we were alone, and, as I said, I was six months pregnant. What happened was very simple really. I was rolling Roger to the bathroom when one of the wheels of the chair caught on one of those expensive rugs his parents had everywhere. I was afraid that the rug was going to move and topple one of their vases.” Madison’s still-beautiful mouth hardened into a line. “His parents would make me beg them for money for rails in the bathroom, but they’d go to New York and pay ten thousand dollars for some old Chinese vase.”

  She had to light another cigarette before she could speak again, and the other two women watched in silence. Already, the air was full of Madison’s pain, and no matter how much she tried to pretend that she wasn’t still angry, she obviously was.

  “Roger’s legs were healing and they had spasms where they’d kick out of their own accord. I had several bruises on my ribs from being in the line of them during a spasm. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t think of those legs as I bent down and pulled the rug out from under the wheel.”

  She looked up at the other two women. “You see, I had paused at the head of the stairs, and when Roger’s leg kicked out, it knocked me off balance and I went headlong down the stairs.”

  At that she stopped for a moment and concentrated on her cigarette. The other women just watched her. There was nothing they could say, as “I’m sorry” was wholly inadequate.

  “I was unconscious, so Roger had to get to the only phone on the second floor, in his parents’ bedroom. He couldn’t get the chair through the doorway, so he had to drag himself across the room. His upper body was strong, but, still, it took him a while. And I . . . was bleeding.” Madison took another deep drag, then slowly let out the smoke. “The nearest hospital was—and is—over fifty miles away. And it was winter in Montana. Roger managed to get hold of some neighbors and they came, but there was nothing they could do. Except soak up the blood, that is.”

  Madison looked down at her full ashtray. “By the time the ambulance got there, I was in labor. He didn’t live very long. He was so tiny.”

  Madison turned to look out the window for a moment. “When I did get to the hospital, the only way the doctors could get the bleeding to stop was to remove my uterus.”

  At that Ellie reached out to take Leslie’s wrist. She didn’t dare touch Madison, as she guessed that this proud woman wouldn’t want to think someone was feeling sorry for her.

  After a long moment, Madison looked back at the two of them and gave them a strained smile. “So now you know why I never had kids. But weren’t we talking about something else?”

  “The summer you met a man,” Leslie said softly as Ellie withdrew her hand.

  “Ah, yes. It was the summer after the miscarriage and I was still pretty low. I’d lost a lot of weight and I admit that I was looking pretty bad. And I’d been having more fights than usual with Roger’s parents. They were embarrassed by their son’s injuries. He no longer fit in with their idea of the perfect son, so they kept him, and me with him, locked away on the second floor. There was no wheelchair ramp built—not that I hadn’t tried to get one, but they said it would destroy the ‘lines of the house.’”

  “So you and Roger were kept prisoners,” Leslie said.

  “More or less. And I can tell you that we were sick of each other’s company. But, to be fair, I think it was more my fault than his. I was pretty, well, I guess . . . sad about the baby.”

  “Suicidally depressed?” Ellie asked.

  “Exactly!” Madison answered, and gave a bit of a real smile. “Truthfully, I was going crazy with grief and loneliness. And I was so tired that my hair was beginning to fall out.”

  “Now that’s tired,” Ellie said, and was glad to see that Madison smiled wider at her joke.

  “Yes,” Madison said, and her voice was lighter. “Anyway, when some college friend of Roger’s called and asked us to fly to Upstate New York to spend two weeks with him and his family at their summerhouse, both Roger and I were ecstatic. The man had been Roger’s college roommate and he’d recently fallen over a washtub while playing touch football and broken his leg. He was in a cast, and by that time Roger was using two canes, so the two of them planned to commiserate together.”

  “With you waiting on both of them,” Leslie said in a voice that said she knew all about waiting on people.

  “Actually, that’s just what I thought would happen. In fact, I was so sure that that’s what the trip was going to be that I begged Roger to go without me.”

  “You mean you were asking him to feed himself, clothe himself, get himself on and off a toilet, all by his widdle self?” Ellie asked in sarcasm.

  Madison laughed. “You’re reading my mind. I was so depressed a