“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.