So for the rest of the day, Madison listened to Thomas talk about where he’d been in the world and what he’d seen. And she never gave her feet a thought. But as the sun set, Thomas pulled the raft to the side of the river, saying that they could camp there, and when Madison stepped out, pain shot up her legs.
Thomas saw her wince, and saw her limp. He told her to sit down on a flat rock, pulled her foot onto his lap and untied her shoe. “I should have noticed that your hiking boots were really worn out,” he said, his scowl more pronounced than usual. “Look at that!” Holding up her foot, he showed her the blisters on her heel and her toes. “Do you know that these could become infected?”
“They’re just blisters,” she said.
“A former president’s son died from a blister he got while playing tennis,” was Thomas’s answer as he put her foot down, then opened his pack to remove a first aid package in a plastic bag.
Madison couldn’t help but laugh. “Haven’t we made some medical advances in the last few years?”
Thomas didn’t laugh as he poured clean water on sterile gauze, then cleaned the blood from the ruptured blisters. “Not really. In fact, I’ve just seen in England that they’re going back to using leeches.”
“Tell me,” Madison said eagerly, then listened intently as Thomas described how leeches were being used to drain the excess blood from such things as amputated fingers that had been reattached.
When he’d finished his description, which Madison found to be fascinating, Thomas said, “Have you ever thought of doing something in the medical world?”
“You mean like becoming a nurse?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of your becoming a doctor,” he said quietly as he began to bandage her foot.
“Me? A doctor?” she said, her voice telling him what she thought of that idea.
Thomas frowned. “You’ve doctored two people. Why not more?”
“One of my patients died, and the other . . .” She lowered her voice. “Roger hates me for what I did to him. He says my nursing skills are as subtle as a stone baseball bat.”
Thomas snorted. “Roger is jealous of you.”
“Of me?” Madison said, laughter in her voice.
“Of course. He reeks with it, like a fish left out in the sun for a week.”
Madison smiled. “You make me feel good. Smart, I mean.”
“You don’t need that from me. Roger knows that you’re smarter than he is, as well as better looking and a better person. How can he compete with someone like you?”
“Someone like me,” she said softly. “‘A Montana cowgirl.’”
Thomas didn’t respond to what she’d said, nor did he apologize for having called her that before he’d met her. Instead, when she looked down at the top of his head, at his thick, black hair, she thought that he was taking an extraordinarily long time bandaging her second foot. As for her, she thought that he could go on holding her foot—or touching any part of her—forever.
It was growing darker by the minute, and they were so very alone, with nothing but the water to one side of them, high rocks to the other.
She was looking down at him hard. What would she do if he made a movement toward her? If he, say, ran his hand up her leg under her trousers? She’d never been touched in that way by any man except Roger, and she had never felt with him as she did with this man right now. Every pore in her body seemed to be alive.
It was Thomas who broke the spell. Abruptly, he dropped her foot, stood up, then looked down at her. “We only have one tent for the two of us. Two sleeping bags but one tent. If we sleep in the same room, so to speak, are you going to try to take my virtue?”
The way he said it made her laugh. “Depends on what color your underwear is,” she said as she stood up.
“Red,” he said instantly.
“Nope, does nothing for me.”
“Sorry. I forgot. It’s black.”
Madison laughed again. “No. Nothing.”
“Green?” he asked hopefully.
She smiled. “So what are you serving me for dinner? I could eat a horse.”
“Ah, now I remember. My underwear is made of that pony fabric. You know, white with big brown spots. Makes me look like a horse. Dead ringer.”
Madison laughed hard. “Go away. Get me something to eat. And where can I . . . You know?”
“I’ll take you,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.
“What happened to ‘No romance’?”
“That was before I liked you so much,” he said, smiling at her.
For a moment she looked at him. “I bet you had some interesting encounters with women while you were traveling. All you had to do was look at them without your scowl and they’d—” She broke off because Thomas was looking at her with a wide smile. His scowl was gone, so his eyes were round, not narrow slits, and his lips were soft and full.
It was in that moment that Madison knew that if—a big, big if—there was ever to be anything between them in the future, then she must, absolutely, positively, must not allow anything to happen on this trip. For all his leering and teasing, her intuition told her that she had to keep this whole trip light.
“Well, I like you too,” she said as though to a little boy, “but there’s a matter of previous ownership.” With that, she headed for the bushes.
“Sharing,” Thomas called after her. “People should share. The world would be a better place if people shared their toys.”
Madison’s laugh echoed off the overhanging rocks.
Eleven
“I like him,” Leslie said as she finished the last of the pizza.
Ellie was staring at the ceiling and thinking. “I could see how it would have been easier after the two of you acknowledged that you had the hots for each other,” she said thoughtfully.
“Yes,” Madison agreed as she lit another cigarette. “It did. But we also seemed to have made a rule between us that we weren’t to act on our inclinations.”
“That must have been difficult,” Leslie said, looking over her glass of cola at Madison. “I’d think that in a setting like that, alone as you were, that it would have been nearly impossible to keep your hands off each other.”
“Probably,” Madison said. “Actually, I don’t think we could have. If we’d stayed alone, that is. We spent that first night in the tent together, and I’m not sure what would have happened if I hadn’t fallen asleep as soon as I closed my eyes. I’m sure I would have stayed awake all night lusting after Thomas.”
“I would have,” Ellie said. “But you fell asleep? What kind of heroine are you?”
“At that time I was a very tired one,” Madison said. “You can’t imagine what it was like nursing Roger around-the-clock.”
“I’ve had two kids,” Leslie said. “And my daughter—” She cut herself off. “Trust me, Roger couldn’t have been more demanding than Rebecca was—and is.”
“You said ‘if we’d stayed alone.’” Ellie said. “You didn’t?”
“No. The next morning we met some friends of Thomas’s on the river. His family had lived in the area for generations, so I should have expected that he knew everyone.” Madison stubbed out her cigarette. “But, you know, I think I had a better time when the others were around than Thomas and I would have had alone.”
“Right,” Ellie said.
“No, I mean it. What were Thomas and I to do? After just a few hours alone together we had trouble keeping our hands off each other, so did we go to bed together and later—if something emotional did happen between us—did we have adultery hanging over our heads?”
“Montana is in the U.S., isn’t it?” Ellie asked Leslie. “This whole country is in bed with everyone else, but you had a husband you couldn’t stand, you were alone with a man you were mad about, yet you worried about having sex with him.”
Looking at Ellie through a cloud of smoke, Madison said, “Now, tell me again how many times you were unfaithful to your husband? The one you couldn’t sta
nd?”
Ellie gave her a one-sided grin. “Okay. But I never—”
“If you say that you never looked like me, I’ll hit you with this ashtray,” Madison said seriously.
“Okay, point taken.”
“So what happened after you met Thomas’s friends?” Leslie asked, getting the two of them back on the story.
Madison took a while to answer as she thought back to those many years before. “Thomas and I sort of . . . well, we lied. When we saw the people in the other raft, they assumed that Thomas and I were ‘together,’ you know, a couple. I started to tell them that we weren’t, but Thomas stopped me. Later I thought about how it would have sounded if he’d told them that he was in the woods alone with another man’s wife. There would have been questions about my husband, and if I’d told them that Roger was recovering from having been run over by a car . . . well, it could have made Thomas and me look quite bad.”
“And Roger look great. I’ve been there,” Ellie said bitterly. “My ex-husband was a master at getting sympathy from people. I was working day and night to support him while he was out having lunch—at my expense, of course—whining that all he wanted was ‘a wife.’”
After Ellie finished this little tirade, the other two were looking at her in silence. “Sorry,” Ellie said. “Go on with your story.”
“But you’re next,” Madison said, pointing her cigarette at Ellie.
“No, I know my story. Leslie is next.”
“Would you two mind!” Leslie said. “What happened, Madison?”
“In a way, I guess you could say that for two days Thomas and I played house. Or at least we played at being part of the real world.” Madison took a breath, closed her eyes in memory for a moment, then opened them again. “My mother always said that I had no idea what a ‘normal’ relationship between a man and a woman was. She said that since she’d been a single mother, I hadn’t learned anything at home about men and women. Then Roger . . . Well, my mother never really liked him.”
“I can’t understand that, can you, Leslie?” Ellie asked sarcastically. “Tell me, Madison, if you had a daughter and she was dating a guy like Roger, the man you can see him as now that you’ve had some experience in the world, would you like him?”
“Actually, I can’t imagine having a daughter,” Madison said softly.
Ellie started to say something, but Leslie cut her off. “So you got to see a ‘normal’ relationship. Why don’t you tell Ellie and me what that’s like? I’m sure I’ve never seen one.”
“I’ve not only not seen one,” Ellie said, “I’ve not even written about one.”
Smiling, Madison lit another cigarette. “Thomas’s friends assumed that Thomas and I were a couple and they treated us as though we were. It was . . . a . . . revelation to me. You see, Roger was the only man I’d ever even been out on a date with, and his parents thought I was trash. They were rich and I was . . .”
“A bastard,” Ellie said angrily.
“Exactly. I think that Roger’s mother knew who my father was—is, for all I know. I overheard her once on the telephone saying, ‘Imagine the gall of the woman naming her child after him! What must his lovely wife feel?’”
“You never tried to find out more about your father?” Ellie asked. “At least who he was?”
“He always knew where I was, but he didn’t make any effort to contact me, so why should I bother him?” Madison said.
Ellie frowned. She didn’t like the way Madison said, “bother him,” as though Madison weren’t worthy to contact her own father, a man who had abandoned a woman he’d impregnated.
“I want to hear the rest of this story,” Leslie said impatiently.
Ellie grinned. “I love people who love stories.”
“And I love people who listen to stories,” Leslie said sharply.
“Okay, no fights,” Madison said. “Thomas and I spent the night at his friends’ ‘cabin,’ if you can call it that. It wasn’t as big as Thomas’s place, but it wasn’t what I think of when I imagine a cabin. Thomas’s friend’s name was Alex and he was there with his fiancée, Carol. They were getting married in about six weeks, and all Carol could talk about was the coming wedding. Alex’s parents were there and his young sister, Paulette, who everyone called Pauli.”
Twelve
“You’re not like Thomas’s usual girlfriends,” Pauli said as she flopped down on the grass beside Madison. She was thirteen and still trying to decide if she wanted to remain a child or grow up.
“Pauli!” her mother, Mrs. Barnett, said sternly. “That’s not a polite thing to say.”
They were sitting outside the big log house under an oak tree that George Washington had probably sat under and drinking lemonade.
“It’s all right,” Madison said in what she hoped was a demure way. At least she hoped that none of the eagerness she felt was in her voice. “And what were his other girlfriends like?”
“Boring,” Carol said without looking up from an issue of Bride’s magazine that was three years old. She’d been collecting issues ever since she’d met Alex, and according to Pauli, she carried them with her wherever she went. “If my brother hadn’t asked her to marry him, Carol would have committed suicide,” Pauli had confided to Madison on the first evening she and Thomas had arrived. Truthfully, Madison doubted that, as Carol was pretty and smart and educated.
“Really, Carol,” Pauli’s mother said, “we’re going to give Madison the wrong idea. Thomas’s other girlfriends weren’t exactly boring; they were—” She broke off as she looked at the three pairs of eyes looking at her in question. Mrs. Barnett looked down at her lemonade. “All right, so maybe they were a tad . . . well, uninteresting.”
“Hmph!” Carol said, then looked back at her magazine.
“You know all those girls with the thick glasses and the big noses who can’t get a date to the prom? They are the girls Thomas dates,” Pauli said.
“Why?” Madison blurted out before she thought, then tried to retreat. “I mean, why would someone like Thomas want . . . ?” She trailed off. She was trying hard to remind herself that she didn’t belong with these people, but she wasn’t having much success. Both Thomas’s family and this one had been born to wealth and privilege such as Madison had seen only in the movies. And, like most people who had to struggle to pay the utility bills, she’d assumed that these rich people were snobs, that they were only interested in “their own kind.”
But, inadvertently, on the first night, Madison had said something to that effect to Mrs. Barnett. For all the deception about her “involvement” with Thomas and about her marital status, Madison had been brutally truthful about her origins. At the time, Mrs. Barnett and she had been alone in the kitchen, breaking green beans that Mrs. Barnett had grown in a little plot at the back of the cabin. Unlike Mrs. Randall, she had no full-time cook.
Mrs. Barnett had listened to Madison’s words, but she’d listened harder to her tone. “We’re not the British royal family, dear,” Mrs. Barnett had said calmly. “Our children don’t have to find virgins to marry, or even someone ‘suitable.’ And our children have trust funds, so they don’t need to marry for money. If you think about it, it gives them great freedom of choice.”
Madison had stood there gaping at the woman, both for what she’d said and for her insight.
“So you nursed your mother?” Mrs. Barnett had continued when Madison said nothing. “I’ve always had a great sympathy for single mothers, especially since, when my children were young, my husband was gone so often that I was too often alone. So tell me how you met Thomas.”
Madison picked up another handful of beans. Mrs. Barnett’s words had relaxed her so much that she told the truth about her first meeting with Thomas. However, she left out any mention of her husband, Roger. Madison told of her friendship with Thomas’s aunt, Dr. Dorothy Oliver, being vague about how she’d met the prominent physician. Then, with her breath held, Madison told how Thomas had caught her hiding in the kitchen
and later how he’d accused her of blackmail.
Mrs. Barnett smiled. “That sounds just like Thomas. He’s a throwback to his great-grandfather. It was said that the man never laughed, except when he made some brilliant business deal and had earned a fortune, that is. I sometimes think that Thomas went into medicine because he wanted to be the opposite of what his grandfather was. There now, that should be enough for dinner. Do you cook, dear?”
“I can thaw anything,” Madison said with a smile.
“All right, then, stay and talk to me while I cook. The boys won’t be back for a while, so we might as well get to know each other.” Mrs. Barnett gave Madison a steady, penetrating look. “I think that Thomas may be serious about you.”
“I don’t think so,” Madison said as she ducked her head to hide her blush. “He and I are worlds apart.”
“Not so far apart,” Mrs. Barnett said softly. “I think that there’s a very serious side to you that you hide from the world. That beautiful face of yours is a mask, isn’t it?”
Madison didn’t know how to reply to that, and since the door opened and two men, Thomas and Mr. Barnett, entered at that moment, she didn’t have to answer.
Thomas caught Madison off guard when he exuberantly threw his arms around her waist and lifted her off the floor. “What’s for dinner, woman? I could eat a bear,” Thomas said as he let her back down, then nuzzled her neck.
Madison knew she should push Thomas away, but his light play was new to her and startling. Roger was aware of his dignity when others were around, and when they were alone, Roger was aware of sports on TV or on a field or—
“Green beans,” Madison said when she realized that everyone in the kitchen was looking at them. She had no idea that they’d never seen Thomas act so lighthearted. He had been serious even as a child.
“That it?” Thomas asked, smiling at her. “Just green beans? I’m sure they’ll take hours to cook, so let’s go outside and catch fireflies until the food’s ready,” Thomas said in such a leering voice that they all laughed.