Chapter 5 Mickey
The light above me is wrong. Not home. Not right.
Hospital. Bed. IV in my left arm, tape pulling on the hair. A smell that isn’t home. Antiseptic.
I try to move and my lower back explodes, a white-hot bolt of pain that shoots from my spine to my hips and then stops. Just stops. Everything above the line is screaming. Everything below it is... wrong.
I can’t feel my legs. Or I think I can’t.
That thought arrives and I let it sit there. The drugs keep it at arm’s length.
My body is too heavy. I try to move my right foot. Nothing. Left. Nothing. I try to bend a knee and there’s no response. Not pain. Not tingling. Nothing. Like the bottom half of my body has been unplugged.
The fog is holding. If I were clear, the panic would be overwhelming. The drugs are the only thing holding it back.
I try to turn my head and can’t. There’s a collar around my neck, hard plastic, locked tight, holding my head in place. It digs into the base of my skull when I try to move. I can’t look left or right.
I’m staring straight up at a ceiling I don’t recognize. The only thing I can move is my hands.
I hear breathing that isn’t mine. Close.
To my left. A chair creaking under too much weight.
Then the sound of someone leaning forward, and a shape moves into the edge of my vision, a big shape, filling the space above me.
I know who it is because I’ve known the sound of Tex’s heavy breathing since we were kids.
His face appears over mine. He’s leaning in so I can see him.
I’ve never seen this look on his face. When you’ve known someone since seventh grade, you’ve seen every version of their face.
I’ve seen Tex happy, angry, drunk, heartbroken, asleep on my couch with Cheeto dust on his shirt.
I’ve seen him in love with Stormy and I’ve seen him hold a man by the throat in a parking lot without blinking.
This face is what happens when what he’s most afraid of actually happens.
“Hey,” I say. My voice sounds like it’s been scraped over gravel.
“Hey.” His voice is steady, but he’s gripping my hospital bed rails tightly.
“You look terrible,” I say.
“You should see the other guy,” Tex says.
“Which one?”
“The one with the gun. He’s got a jaw held together with wire right now. He’ll be eating through a straw for a long fucking time.”
“I’m glad. How long have I been out?”
“About five hours. Surgery took three. You’ve been in recovery since. You’re in a room now.”
“Surgery.” I repeat the word. “What happened?”
I remember pieces of it. The hallway. The sound of my own voice saying “Everybody on the ground.” The car show guys on the floor. A hand sliding inside a jacket. And then a quick step to the left. A man on the floor behind me that needed to be protected.
Blue-gray eyes.
I remember his eyes. On the floor, looking up at me through blood and tears. A torn shirt. Blonde hair dark with sweat. A face that even bloody and broken was...
The drugs won’t let me hold the thought.
“You were shot,” Tex says. “At the bar. One of the car show guys had a gun in his jacket pocket. It went off.”
“The bullet,” I say. “Where did it hit?”
“Lower back. Left side. Above the hip. They got it out. Missed the organs.”
“What else?”
Tex looks at me. We’ve been having conversations without talking for twenty years and this one is the worst one.
He’s deciding what to say and what to hold back.
Trying to decide how much truth I can handle right now with the fog and the IV and what we both already know because I’ve been lying here trying to move my feet and they won’t move.
“There’s swelling,” he says carefully. “Around the spinal cord. The bullet passed close. Didn’t sever anything but there’s swelling and until it goes down, they can’t tell what’s temporary and what’s not.”
“I can’t feel my legs, Tex.”
Saying it out loud makes it real.
Tex doesn’t flinch or glance away. He holds my eyes and every ounce of what that’s doing to him is right there on his face.
“I know,” he says. “The doctors said that could be the swelling. They said when it goes down, the feeling could come back. There’s no way to know until the swelling goes down.”
“Could come back,” I say. “Could means maybe. Could is what I say to a victim’s family when I don’t want to say what I actually think.”
“Mickey.”
“Does Mom know?”
Tex’s face changes, a small shift behind the eyes. “I called her. From the waiting room. She knows everything I know.”
“How is she?”
“She’s holding up. She’s tough, just like you.”
I close my eyes. My mom. June Weaver. Five foot two, a hundred and twenty pounds. Tough as nails and hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in two years because my father wanders.
My dad. Walter Weaver. Sixty-seven years old.
Retired from the Bay County Road Department years ago when the forgetting got bad enough that they couldn’t pretend anymore.
He was the foreman. Ran a crew of fifteen guys for decades.
Now he can’t find the bathroom in the house he’s lived in for thirty-five years.
Some days he knows my mom. Some days he doesn’t.
My mom is fifteen minutes from this hospital and she can’t come. Not tonight.
“Give me the phone,” I say.
Tex hesitates. “Are you sure you’re up for that? She’ll understand if you can’t call until tomorrow. You’re still groggy from the surgery. I’ll call her for you.”
“Tex, dial her and give me the phone. You know she’s waiting to hear from me.”
He presses her number and hands me his phone. My hands are clumsy from the drugs and Tex steadies it for me.
She picks up on the first ring.
“Tex?”
Her voice. That’s what gets me. My mother’s voice at one in the morning.
“Hey, Mama. It’s me. I’m using Tex’s phone.”
“Oh, honey. Oh, Mickey. Tex told me. He told me what happened. Are you okay? Are you in pain? I’ve been sitting here by the phone just waiting.
Your father went down about an hour ago but he was up again twenty minutes later and I had to get him settled and I wanted to call but I didn’t know who to call. Or if you’d be awake...”
“Mama.”
“I should be there. I’m so sorry, baby. I called Linda next door and she said she’d come over first thing in the morning so I can come see you but tonight I can’t.
.. your daddy got up twice already and he was looking for the car keys and I hid them but he gets so upset when he can’t find them, he just stands in the kitchen opening drawers and. ..”
“Mama. Stop.”
She stops talking.
“I’m okay,” I say. I’ve spent my entire life making my voice hold for other people and it holds now, for her, full of a lie so large I can barely breathe. “I’m okay. I’m out of surgery. Tex is here. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Mickey. You were shot. I should be there and I’m sitting in this house and your daddy doesn’t even know what’s happening. I told him and he looked at me and he said ‘who’s Mickey’ and I...”
She breaks down crying. My father forgot my name.
The man who taught me to throw a football and stood in the front row at my academy graduation and cried when they pinned the badge on my chest, he doesn’t know who Mickey is anymore.
And now I’m lying in a hospital bed and my mother is alone with a man who doesn’t remember his own son today.
The two men she loves most in the world are both disappearing on her and she can’t stop either one.
Tex is watching me. He can hear her through the speaker phone. The room is quiet enough that he can hear every sound she’s making and it’s hurting him too.
“Mama, listen to me. Stay with Dad. That’s what I need you to do. Stay with him tonight. Linda will come in the morning and you can come see me then. Okay? I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. My mother has never sounded so small.
“I’m sure. Tex is right here. He’s not leaving. Are you, Tex?”
“I’m not leaving, Mama Weaver,” Tex says, strong and loud enough for the phone. His voice holds too. We’re both holding it together for her.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I love you, Mickey. I love you so much. I’ll be there first thing. First thing.”
“I love you too, Mama. Tell Dad I love him too.”
“I will. I’ll tell him.”
I hang up and hand the phone back to Tex. Tex puts his hand on my arm. Doesn’t squeeze. Doesn’t pat. Just puts it there. The weight and warmth of my best friend telling me what he can’t say out loud.
I’m here. I’m not going anywhere either.
A minute passes. Maybe more.
“What about the guy from the hallway,” I say. “The blonde guy. The one they were beating on. Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s okay,” Tex says. “Busted up quite a bit. Bruised ribs, split lip. But he’s okay. He was in the waiting room all night.”
“Here?”
“For four hours. Wouldn’t leave until you came out of surgery.”
A stranger sat in a hospital waiting room for four hours. That’s not what strangers do.
“Why?” I ask.
Tex shrugs. But it’s not really a shrug. It’s Tex deciding how much to say. “I think he feels responsible for what happened.”
“Why? Did he start the fight?”
“No, all four of them jumped him because they didn’t like the way he looked. Sheila told him three times it might be best to leave the bar before those guys went after him. He didn’t leave. Guess that’s why he feels responsible.”
It’s not his fault. It’s the fault of four drunk men who decided to beat up a stranger because he was different from them.
That’s whose fault it is. I’m a cop. I know how fault works.
The guy on the floor didn’t pull the trigger.
The guy on the floor didn’t bring the gun. The guy on the floor was just a victim.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Benji.”
A name to go with the eyes. Terrified, looking up at me from the floor, beautiful in a way I had no business noticing and noticed anyway. Only for a split-second but I noticed.