The Summerhouse

by Jude Deveraux

  “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
k about the drugs used in Roger’s recovery.

  By the time they got to the truck, she realized that she had talked nonstop and she felt embarrassed. Truthfully, she didn’t think she’d talked so much in all the last two and a half years combined. Neither Roger nor his parents were much for talking.

  There was no one at the truck, just the big orange raft, ready to inflate, and a couple of heavy-looking backpacks.

  “Where’s . . . Pretty, is it?” Madison asked, looking around. They were by a wide, shallow stream, the truck parked on gravel. The narrow road was overgrown, and tall, drooping trees nearly obscured it.

  Thomas was leaning over the side of the truck checking the supplies. “She’s around, but you probably won’t see her. She’s shy.”

  Madison moved closer to him. “So why’s she called Pretty?” she whispered.

  He didn’t look up from the truck bed where he was rummaging, and his answer was so smooth that he’d obviously repeated it many times. “Pretty shy. Pretty useful. Pretty-much-not-seen. Take your pick.” He looked up at her. “Looks like everything is here. Can you carry a pack?”

  Tilting her head, Madison smiled at him. “If I said no, would you carry it for me?”

  She was teasing, but Thomas didn’t treat her words as though she were. “Yes,” he said simply.

  For a moment, they locked eyes and Madison began to feel her heart rate speed up. Nervously, she looked away from him. “I can carry it,” she said at last.

  So she had carried a pack. Thomas had carried his pack plus the big raft for about a mile before he reached a place where he put it down and inflated it. “And what else?” he asked as he helped her off with her pack. As before, he had questioned her about every detail of her rehabilitation of Roger.

  “I can’t think of anything else,” she said honestly; then, as she looked around them, she realized that she felt lighter. To her left was a rock wall that went straight up for about fifty feet. To the right was the stream, much deeper here than it had been where the pickup was. And between the water and the rock, in the deep shade of the overhanging cliff face, it was quiet and private and Madison was suddenly aware of being alone with this attractive man.

  She watched Thomas strap everything down into the rubber raft. If it had been Roger, he would have been complaining that Madison wasn’t doing her share. But of course that thought was absurd. Roger would never think of taking a female into the woods with him. No, Roger was a “man’s man.” He did the interesting things in his life with other men. With Roger—

  “And what have you done about your beauty?” Thomas asked, breaking into Madison’s reverie.

  “My what?” she asked, taken off guard.

  Thomas didn’t smile. “Your beauty. What have you done with it?”

  She blinked at him. “Fed it a lot of moisturizer?” she said, having no idea how to reply to his question. “Dry skin.”

  He motioned for her to get into the raft; then as he pushed it into the water, he said, “Beauty like yours is like having a talent, like being able to play the piano or to paint. So what have you done with this talent?”

  Holding on to the safety straps of the raft as he jumped inside, Madison could only look at him. She’d never thought of her looks as a “talent.”

  Picking up the oars, Thomas began to manipulate the raft about in the water. The sun filtered through the trees and it was very quiet. She’d never been in a raft before and she liked it.

  Once he had the boat straight, he looked at her. “Well?”

  “My hometown sent me to New York to become a model,” she blurted out.

  “And what happened? Other than Roger, that is?”

  At that Madison again blinked at him, for his words showed great perception. Since she’d married Roger, she’d been living away from her hometown, but whenever she met anyone from Erskine, she told them that she’d had to give up modeling to nurse the man she loved.

  “What makes you think that I didn’t abandon a potentially fabulous career to nurse the man I love back to health?”

  As Thomas muscled the raft around some rocks sticking up out of the water, he said, “Your enthusiasm for what you did tells me that you love nursing. But I’ve not heard or seen you show any enthusiasm for Roger. Based on those two things, it’s my guess that you love nursing more than you loved modeling.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh; then she leaned back against the back of the raft and let her hand dangle over the side. “You’re exactly right. I know that many little girls dream of the glamorous life of modeling, but I hated it. I don’t mean that I disliked it. I mean that I really and truly hated it. And, besides, they made me feel ugly.”

  At that Thomas stopped rowing and looked at her. And his expression made Madison feel very good. His face said that her being less than beautiful was impossible.

  “Modeling is a science,” she said. “Well, sort of, anyway. It was enough of a science that I wanted nothing to do with it.”

  He was still staring at her in that way that told her that he didn’t believe a word she was saying. “Isn’t nursing a science?” he asked.

  “All right,” she said with a sigh. “My ego was crushed. Really. It was trampled into the ground and smashed beneath the feet of those . . . those prissy little men in their—” She broke off because she was becoming angry.

  After a moment of staring at the water, she turned back at him. He had a way of looking at a person that forced you to tell the truth. “I can’t get you to buy my story that I’m a martyr to the cause of love?”

  “No. Roger’s a jerk and you don’t love him. Truthfully, I doubt if you ever did. But when you talk about rehabilitating him, your face glows. You went to him because you wanted to. But then we all do what we want to, don’t we? So why didn’t you want to model?”

  “You’re tough,” she said, then looked away for a moment, then back at him. “Okay, so the truth was, I liked being the most beautiful girl in my hometown. I liked people stopping their cars to talk to me; then I’d pretend that I didn’t know why they’d stopped.”

  She looked at him to see how he’d take this confession. Madison wasn’t used to talking about her beauty. She’d worked hard to perfect her modest smile when someone told her she was beautiful. She liked to act as though she’d never heard that before.

  “In New York girls like me are everywhere. I was nothing special.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Thomas said flatly. “I live in New York and I don’t see women like you every day.”

  “Maybe not, but they’re there. They get up early and go to bed late. And in between they’re pushed around and told to stand and to sit and to look and to . . . Well, to do whatever anyone can think up for them to do.” She grimaced. “And they are criticized. That’s what my ego couldn’t take.”

  For a moment, Thomas rowed and didn’t say anything. “How could they criticize you?”

  “I have one eye that is slightly smaller than the other. See?” she said, leaning toward him. “And I’m a bit heavy in the seat.”

  “Ha!” Thomas said. “You are perfect.”

  “But you are not a photographer.”

  “If you have flaws, then all those other women you see on magazine covers must also have flaws,” he said, looking at her hard.

  Madison smiled. “True. They do, and they learn how to cover them. Lighting helps a lot. Ever see the sixties model Jean Shrimpton? She had big bags under her eyes, but when she was lit properly . . .” Madison trailed off and looked at the riverbank they were passing. Thomas was right: She left modeling because she had wanted to, not for Roger.

  She turned back to him. “Why don’t we talk about you?” she said. “What made you choose medicine?”

  “When I was a kid I saw a cousin of mine drown. I was only nine at the time, but I decided at that moment that I wanted to learn how to keep people alive.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Before Roger, I had to watch my mother die. It took her four long years.�
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  Thomas was silent a moment as he rowed. The water was calm and the sunlight made everything sparkle. “Is that what you did during your college years?”

  Madison shook her head at him. “I’m beginning to think that you’re clairvoyant.”

  “Naw,” he said with a one-sided grin. “Just years of reading mystery stories. I like to watch people and figure them out. I like to look at clues and see what they add up to.”

  “Oh? The first time you met me you thought I was going to try to extort money from you. Or was it your sister I was going to blackmail?”

  Thomas ducked his head to one side, and she thought maybe he was hiding a blush. “I was distracted by the look of you.” Before she could say anything in reply to that, he said, “So what else do you want to know about me? I’m a very interesting fellow. I’ve been everywhere and seen a lot.”

  She thought he was teasing her. “In medical school? Isn’t that the place where you’re not allowed to sleep for years at a time?”

  “I’m thirty-one, so I’ve done some things other than sit in a classroom.”

  At Madison’s age of twenty-three, thirty-one seemed old. Very mature. “Tell me,” she said, and there was a little catch in her breath, “I’ve been in Montana and New York and that’s it. But I’d like to go to . . . to . . . ”

  “Name a place,” he said as he moved the boat around a tree that had fallen halfway across the river.

  “Tibet. Petra. Morocco. Some tropical island somewhere. The Galapagos to see the turtles.”

  Thomas didn’t so much as smile. “So give them to me in order of preference and I’ll tell you all about them.”

  “You’ve been to all those places?” she asked, one eyebrow arched in disbelief.

  “All of them that you named. So where do you want to start?”

  She thought for a moment. “Australia.”

  “The wet part or the dry part? City or outback? Where the orchids grow or where they mine opals?”

  “Anywhere,” she said breathlessly, eyes wide.