There was silence for a moment as Madison drew on her cigarette and looked down at her hands. “Thomas had to leave the next morning, and I . . . I hid so I wouldn’t have to say good-bye to him. For the rest of our stay, I walked. Miles and miles I walked, and Roger . . .” She drew on her cigarette. “I really don’t know what Roger did.”
After Madison stopped talking, Leslie asked softly, “What happened between you and Roger?”
“He divorced me about four months later. The first step he took without his canes, he walked straight to a lawyer. He married Terri, but it lasted only about three years. I think he was sick of getting money from his parents, so he thought he’d get himself a rich wife. But all Terri’s money was tied up in trust funds, so Roger couldn’t get his hands on a penny of it.”
Madison gave a little smile. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that the minute Terri’s family told him he had to get a job, he filed for a divorce.”
For a moment she looked away, then back again. “But in the end, it all worked out all right, as two years later, his parents drowned in a boating accident and left him everything. Roger sold the house, sent his parents’ art collection to Sotheby’s, where it was called ‘important,’ and so it sold for over a million. Roger turned the money over to one of his college buddies, who invested it, and, the last I heard, Roger was a multimillionaire and—” She took a deep breath. “And he married well and has three children. The youngest is only five.”
“Bastard!” Ellie said under her breath.
“Ditto,” Leslie echoed, and the room filled with their unspoken thoughts of the injustice of what had been done to Madison.
“And Thomas?” Ellie asked. “What happened to him?”
Madison had just lit a cigarette, but now she turned the pack over and shook out a new one, then lit it. She now had two of them going at once, but she didn’t seem to be aware of this.
“Thomas . . .” Madison said slowly, “didn’t fare as well. Years later, after Roger and Terri had divorced, I saw Dr. Oliver again. She and I hadn’t had much contact after Roger and I split up, but I was up at the ski basin with my veterinarian boss and there she was. My first inclination was to run the other way, but she insisted that I stay and have dinner with her, just her, without her husband or children.”
Madison picked up the second cigarette. She now had one in her mouth and one in her hand. “I tried to stop myself, but I wanted to hear about Thomas, so I asked. She told me that he finished medical school, but he didn’t go into rehabilitation medicine as he’d talked about. Instead, he studied tropical diseases. She said he’d decided to go into research rather than hands-on care.”
Madison stubbed out one of the cigarettes. “I’m not sure if anyone in Thomas’s family knew about Thomas and me—not that anything had actually happened for them to know about—but Dorothy told me that that summer at the cabin had changed Thomas. After that he’d become even more reclusive than he had been in the past. ‘More morose,’ is what she said.”
For a few moments Madison concentrated on smoking, not looking at either of the two women across from her. But they were waiting and she knew it.
“It was a long time ago,” Madison said so quietly that they could barely hear her. “But I don’t think that any amount of time can lessen the pain.”
She lifted her head and looked at them, and when she did, Ellie gasped. Madison, beautiful woman that she’d once bee
n, looked as though she were a hundred years old. She looked as though she were a corpse that by some freak of nature just happened to be still moving.
“Thomas was in a small plane that was taking medicines into the rain forest in Brazil when the plane went down. They think it might have been struck by lightning. All three passengers died instantly.”
There was nothing either of the two women could reply to that.
“What a waste!” Ellie said after a few minutes. “What a horrible, horrible waste of lives. And that a low-life like Roger came out on top makes me . . .” She couldn’t think of a word that was strong enough to describe what she was feeling.
Abruptly, Madison stood up. “Do you mind if we go to bed? It’s been a long day and I’d like to get some sleep.”
Ellie wanted to stay up and talk. After three years of living alone and having no stories in her head, she was starving for stories. Famished. But Leslie also stood, so Ellie knew that she had to quit listening.
“Beds?” Ellie said as she got off the couch. “Who sleeps where?”
It was Leslie, the peacemaker, who came up with a schedule so they alternated beds and couch. Leslie took the couch for the first night, and fifteen minutes later, the three women were asleep. And Madison slept the most soundly that she had in years. It was as though, by telling her story to sympathetic listeners, she had released something inside of her.
Fourteen
Ellie woke to a heavenly smell, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. Had the deli delivered early? she wondered, in her half-awake state. But then, nothing from the deli had ever smelled that good.
Grabbing her clothes off the back of a chair, she left the bedroom and went to the bathroom, where she made a token application of makeup and pulled on black sweatpants and a huge, concealing shirt. With every pound she had gained, her clothes had become bigger, until now she could hardly keep them on her body. She knew it was an illusion, but she hoped that if she covered herself completely, no one could see how big she had become.
The kitchen was sunny and bright, the table was set with pretty green and yellow linens, and in the middle there was a platter with a heap of pancakes and strawberries. Leslie was at the stove wearing a bright yellow apron with cherries on it.
Ellie took one look at the table, then up at Leslie. “Will you marry me?” she asked, eyes wide.
“I’ve already asked,” Madison said as she stepped inside the house. She’d been outside, Ellie assumed for a smoke.
Smiling, Leslie put a plate of blueberry pancakes in front of Ellie. “I can’t tell you how good it is to cook for people who like to eat,” she said, motioning toward Madison.