Chapter 9 Mickey #2
The transfer takes about forty-five seconds and it is the longest forty-five seconds of my life. Eddie lifts my upper body while Angela positions my legs. I watch them swing off the bed, heavy and limp.
They pivot me into the chair and my legs dangle until Angela arranges them on the footrests, positioning my feet like a mannequin’s feet in a department store window.
The whole time, Benji is in the back of my head. He could walk through that door right now and see me being lifted by two people, one of them a young woman, to move two feet from a bed to a wheelchair. I don’t want to be seen this way.
I’ve had a gun pointed at me a handful of times on the job. Every time I was scared but I could move. I could talk and think. Being scared when you can still act is a different kind of scared than this. I’d rather him never come back than see the reality of what my body actually is right now.
I’m seated in the wheelchair now. The seat is vinyl and it creaks under my weight.
The armrests are cold under my palms and the world looks completely different from down here.
For a second my body tilts forward just enough that my hands clamp down on the armrests on instinct, like I’m about to fall even though Eddie is still right there.
I’ve always been tall, same as Tex. Once we started growing, we didn’t stop.
Now I can’t see the parking lot through the window, only the sky.
The floor, which I haven’t thought about once since arriving, is suddenly right there, scuffed linoleum and the wheels of the IV stand.
Everything is lower. The room that I’ve been staring at for days looks like a different place from down here.
“How does that feel?” Eddie asks.
“It’s fine. Very comfortable. I’ll rate it five stars.”
Eddie doesn’t buy it. He’s been doing this for years and he’s heard every version of bravado a broken man can produce.
“Are you ready to do some work?” he asks.
“You bet.” I perk up at the thought of finally being able to do something productive for a change.
He has me put my hands on the wheels, shows me how they move, how the brakes lock, but I don’t actually go anywhere. Just a small push forward, a correction back. More demonstration than movement.
I’m already tired. Sitting here feels like work I didn’t sign up for, like my body’s spending energy just staying upright.
“Alright, that’s enough for today,” Eddie says after what can’t be more than ten minutes.
The second he says it, I realize I’m lightheaded. Not bad, just enough that I don’t argue.
The transfer back to bed is just as bad. Eddie and Angela lift me, swing my legs, arrange my body, tuck the blanket around me. I glance at the door three times during the process.
Benji, please don’t knock on that door.
He didn’t say what time he’s coming today. He’ll probably be here tonight. But the fear of that door opening during the twenty seconds when I’m suspended between the chair and the bed, legs hanging, arms gripping Eddie’s shoulders, nothing but dead weight, that fear is real.
I can never let him see that. I care and I don’t know why. Why the fuck do I care? It doesn’t make sense. All I know is that I do.
After the session, Angela takes the chair back to the wall and they leave. I lie there and stare at it while my brain starts running every scenario to its worst possible end.
I think about my little house with the screened-in porch. Two steps up to the front door. Two concrete steps that I’ve walked up and down four thousand times without a single thought.
In a wheelchair, those two steps might as well be a cliff.
I’d need a ramp built over the steps to my own front door to get into my house.
The bathroom is too narrow for a wheelchair.
The shower has a step-in tub. The kitchen counter is the right height for a man standing and the wrong height for a man sitting.
I wouldn’t even be able to reach my coffee maker or my sink faucet.
My house that I’ve always loved would need to be rebuilt for me to live in it. Or I’d have to sell it and buy one that fits a wheelchair. Or maybe I won’t need any of that. Nobody knows yet. That’s the worst part.
Then there’s my job. My badge is in a plastic bag in the closet of this room with the rest of my personal effects.
Sure, there are desk jobs and administrative roles.
All cops know about these the same way we all know about the disability benefits and the department chaplain who calls after a critical incident.
You know these things exist and you never think they’ll apply to you.
Desk duty is for other cops. Wheelchairs are for other people.
I’ve been Officer Weaver since I was twenty-three.
Every part of that job needed my legs. The foot chases, the twelve-hour shifts on concrete, the stance you take when you knock on a door and don’t know what’s behind it.
Without my legs, I’m a badge in a drawer.
And then there’s the rest of it. The part I don’t want to say out loud.
I’m wearing a catheter. I have a tube in my dick.
I can’t feel anything down there. Not pressure, not temperature, nothing.
My dick might as well be dead too. That’s what it feels like right now. That’s the blunt, ugly truth of it.
I’m thirty-two years old, healthy everywhere else, strong arms, clear head, and my dick doesn’t work. Can’t get hard. Can’t feel a hand on my thigh or my own hand on myself.
No more sex.
I cut the thought off before it can get any bigger. I’ve had a sex life. Not a spectacular one, or a consistent one, but I had one. Men came and went. A week here, a weekend there. Nobody stayed and I never asked them to because staying was never the point and I wasn’t ready for it to be.
That was fine when I had a body to offer. A week with a fun cop in a beach town was enough for most guys even if it wasn’t enough to build on. I was part of their vacation. The fun story they told their friends back in Atlanta or Nashville. And I was fine being that.
Except now I’m not even the vacation anymore. Who’s going to swipe right on a cop in a wheelchair? Who’s going to fly to Panama City and hook up with a guy who can’t feel his own legs and needs help getting into a chair and currently has a catheter bag strapped to the side of his bed?
The answer is nobody.
My phone rings. I reach for it, grateful for anything that pulls me out of where my head is going.
It’s Tex.
“Is your stalker coming today?” he says, no hello, just Tex.
“What stalker are you talking about?” I know damn well who he’s talking about.
“Ben-Geeee,” he says, drawing the name out. I can hear the big grin in his voice.
“Why are you saying his name like that?” I ask.
“Like what?”
“Drawing it out in a deep Southern drawl. Ben...Geeeeee.”
“Just messing with you to see if you’d get defensive about it. And you did. You fell right into that.”
“He’s not a stalker.”
“Oh, really? You sure about that? He’s a stranger who drives four hours round trip to lurk behind an aquarium. That’s stalker territory in most jurisdictions. Tell me I’m right.”
“I’m a cop. I know what stalker territory looks like. This isn’t it.”
“Then what is it?”
Tex is asking me a real question underneath the joke. I don’t have an answer. I know what Benji says, that he feels responsible, that he can’t walk away from what happened. I heard every word he said through his tears and it was one of the most honest speeches anyone has ever given me.
I believe him and I still don’t fully understand why he keeps coming back. Guilt sends a card and a vase of flowers and moves on.
“I don’t know what it is,” I say. “He feels guilty. He was there that night. He watched me get shot.”
“I get the guilt,” he says. “I do because I feel guilty too. But Mickey, this guy doesn’t know you.
He doesn’t know us. And he’s showing up every day like he’s on the volunteer visitor rotation set up by the local church ladies.
Oh no, wait a minute...he’s not laying hands on you and trying to heal you, is he? ”
“No, he shows up with pizza. And good coffee. That’s it.”
“He’s bringing food now? Don’t you think it’s a little...”
“What? Weird?”
“No, I was going to say unusual. Stormy says I’m not allowed to call it weird because Stormy likes him. He gave him a hug at the hospital. You know how big a deal that is.”
I do. Stormy doesn’t touch people. For Stormy to do that means he saw something in Benji that he trusts, and Stormy’s judgment about people is better than anyone’s I know. Stormy learned to read people the hard way.
“What’s your point, Tex? Should I tell Benji to get lost? To stop coming?”
“Hell no,” Tex says. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. Why are you getting defensive? You’re touchy about him.”
“I’m not. You’re the one who told me to let him come in if he knocked on the door. Remember?”
“Yes, because hospital hours are very long. So, is he coming today or not?”
“Probably,” I say.
Tex bursts out laughing. “I knew it. When he gets there put your cop face on and ask questions. Find out why he keeps coming around. There must be a good reason.”
“Why the fuck does it matter? I’m lying here flat on my back with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. The TV only gets a few channels and they suck. All I have is my phone to entertain me. Does it really matter why he keeps showing up with food and coffee?”
“Nope, it doesn’t,” he says. “I’m just being nosy and want to know what’s going on. That’s all. Besides Sheila wants to know too. She told me to ask you about him.”
“You tell Sheila that if she wants to know something, she can ask me herself.”
Tex chuckles. “Oh yeah, I’ll do that for sure. In fact, I’m looking at her right now across the bar. I’m going over to tell her what you said and hand her the phone. Hang on. I’m walking now. Here we go. Getting closer.”
“Tex! Dammit! Don’t go get Sheila riled up! Tex! Stop, right now. You know, I was kidding. I don’t have the energy to be grilled by Sheila.”
Tex keeps laughing. The best sound in the world right now.
“Alright,” he says. “Anyway, let me know when you figure out what’s going on with Benji. We’re all dying to know. It’s the talk of the bar. By the bar I mean me, Sheila and Stormy. Talk to you later.”
Click.
Tex hangs up because he doesn’t do goodbyes. Never has. He just says the last thing that matters and the line goes dead and you’re left holding a phone like a dumbass.
I didn’t dare tell Tex how much I’m looking forward to Benji coming today. He’d never let me hear the end of it. Besides there’s nothing I need to explain or justify. The hours in this room are long and the highlight of my day so far has been a physical therapy session that left me lightheaded.
When Benji comes to visit, the whole room changes.
He doesn’t look at me like anything’s missing.
He plops down in the chair, gives me food, and tells me about weddings while I watch his hands.
I don’t mean to. But every person who has touched me since the shooting has done it wearing gloves. Nobody has touched me like a person.
Benji hasn’t touched me either. He sits in the chair and keeps a respectful distance.
But his hands are everywhere. Pizza box, napkins, coffee lid, my blanket, the window blinds, the air in front of him when he’s making a point.
He uses them without thinking, the way people do when their body still does everything they ask it to.
I wonder what they’d feel like. On my arm.
On my shoulder. Somewhere above the waist where I could actually feel them.
But, that’s not a road I need to be going down right now.
For an hour when Benji is here, I’m not a patient. I’m just a guy eating pizza with someone who makes me laugh, even though the laugh hurts my back. But at this point, I don’t care.
I close my eyes and send the signal to my legs one more time.
Move. Goddammit. Please.
Something’s got to answer back eventually.