Chapter 19 Mickey
When I was a kid and couldn’t sleep, I’d run. Two miles down the beach road and back, with the slap of my sneakers on asphalt and the salt air in my lungs. By the time I got home, whatever was eating at me had been beaten into the pavement, left behind in the sweat and the miles.
Now the thing eating at me is inside me and it won’t leave. There is no more leaving it on the road or shaking it off. My entire coping strategy has always been physical and that’s gone. What’s left is a mind that won’t stop running in a body that won’t start.
It’s been almost two weeks. The doctors said weeks, not days. They said incomplete and that incomplete means hope. But hope is a resource and I’m burning through it faster than it replenishes.
The worst part is what my mind does when there’s nowhere to go.
It goes straight to Benji.
Not on purpose. I don’t lie here and decide to think about Benji.
But the mind needs to run somewhere when the body won’t move, and it keeps ending up in the same place.
The chair beside my bed at eight o’clock at night.
His hands working cream into my forearms with a touch that isn’t medical.
The way his thumb traces the inside of my wrist slowly enough that I feel every ridge of his fingerprint.
His smell when he leans close — not the cream, him, the warm clean skin that I can still pick up on my blanket an hour after he’s gone.
I know what his hands feel like now. That’s the problem.
Before, I could wonder about it and shut the drawer.
Now the drawer won’t close. My skin remembers him in the places he’s touched and the remembering starts on its own, usually at night, in the dark, in the hour after he’s left when the room still carries him and my forearms are still warm.
A man who can’t feel half his body shouldn’t be this wrecked over the half that still works. But the half that works has ideas about Benji that I can’t shut up, and the silence of this room gives them nowhere to hide.
I’m actually looking forward to Jacksonville. The rehab will be brutal, and I know it will break me in new ways, but at least I’ll be moving toward an answer instead of lying in a bed waiting for one. I’m tired of being a spectator to my own survival.
Benji’s sunrise photo pops up on my phone right on time. The water is pink with the sunrise and there’s a pelican on the sand. I save the photo in a special folder on my phone. It’s a digital collection of a world I can’t touch.
Yesterday, Benji didn’t visit, and we didn’t talk on the phone. I could tell he felt bad about it. I said I was fine and the lie was easier through a screen. The evening stretched out long and dull without him — a reminder that my entire calendar is now built around the hours he decides to give me.
Tonight, he’s bringing Dante to meet me. For some absurd reason, I imagined Dante would be a twin of Benji. Small, slim, talkative, emotional. I expected a mirror.
I was dead wrong.
They arrive at seven. I hear them before I see them. Benji’s voice in the corridor, talking fast, laughing, and then a second voice, deeper, warmer, with an accent that isn’t quite there but lives underneath the English.
They’re laughing together and I’m suddenly aware of what I look like from the outside. A pale man in a bed, in a gown, with a blanket over legs that don’t work. Benji knocks instead of blasting through like he does now.
“Get in here,” I call out.
The door opens and Benji comes through first, and tonight there’s a man behind him.
Dante is taller than I expected. Six feet, maybe six-one, lean and angular.
Dark hair pushed back, dark eyes, skin the color of warm bronze.
He’s dressed fashionably and looks like he came from a different world than the Florida Panhandle.
He’s stunning. An important fact Benji failed to mention.
And they’re stunning together. That’s the next thought that goes through my head, and it lodges there like a fishbone that doesn’t come out.
Benji, blonde and lean and bright, next to Dante, dark-haired and tall.
They look like they were designed as a set to go together.
They belong in a club in Miami, not sitting in this room with me.
Instead of pulling a chair close beside my head like he usually does, Benji positions the two visitor chairs at the foot of the bed. I immediately feel the distance, a gap between my world and theirs. They sit close together with their shoulders almost touching.
“Mickey, this is Dante,” Benji says, waving a hand. “Dante, this is Mickey Weaver.”
“Officer Weaver,” Dante says. His voice is warm and direct. His eyes are doing the same thing mine would do in his position, reading the room without showing it. “Benji’s told me a lot about you.”
“He’s told me a lot about you too,” I say. “Apparently you’re the reason he survives.”
Dante tilts his head, a small, knowing smile playing on his lips. “I’m the one who keeps him from starving. Benji will reorganize a stranger’s entire wedding in forty-eight hours and then forget to eat for two days. He needs supervision.”
“Hey,” Benji says, fondly more than annoyed.
“You ate a protein bar for lunch three days in a row,” Dante says, turning to Benji. “That’s not eating. That’s survival. I’m taking you to dinner tomorrow. Real food, Benji. Somewhere with a tablecloth.”
Benji rolls his eyes. Dante reaches over and pushes Benji’s hair off his forehead the way you’d push a child’s hair, casual and affectionate and without a single thought behind it. Benji doesn’t flinch. His body doesn’t notice the touch as anything noteworthy because this is how they are.
Benji’s energy is infectious, bouncing off Dante’s easy Miami cool.
They’re both in constant motion. They use their bodies to emphasize a point or punctuate a joke, their hands carving shapes in the air, their feet shifting restlessly on the linoleum.
They’re vibrating with life, and I’m lying here feeling like a cement statue in a room full of dancers.
The burn starts in my chest, low and hot and stupid.
I know Dante is Benji’s best friend. Dante’s hand stays on the back of Benji’s chair while they talk, fingers brushing his shoulder every few seconds without either of them noticing. The touching is normal.
That doesn’t stop something ugly from twisting inside me anyway.
Dante can touch him without thinking about it. Push his hair back. Take him to dinner tomorrow. Sit shoulder to shoulder with him in a restaurant somewhere while I’m stuck here.
And the worst part is how fast my brain starts acting like Benji belongs to me when he absolutely does not.
“The bamboo came in this morning,” Benji says, leaning forward.
“Twenty poles, clean, straight, beautiful. The driftwood is officially dead to me now. I’m building the arch frame tomorrow and wrapping it in white linen and it might end up looking better than the driftwood would have. Dante took over the pot saga.”
“The pots are handled,” Dante says. “Unglazed. No artisanal anything.”
“What do you do in Miami?” I ask Dante. “When you’re not saving Benji from florists?”
“Real estate,” he says. “Residential, mostly. Luxury market.”
“He’s being modest,” Benji says. “He closed three deals last month. Three. In this market.”
“Two and a half. The third one is still in escrow and the buyer’s attorney is making my life difficult.” Dante uncrosses his legs and leans back. “But yeah, it’s good. Miami’s always good if you know where to look.”
“You should take a drive down 30A while you’re here,” I say.
“If you can get away from the wedding for an hour. The real estate market along that stretch is on fire right now. Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach, Watercolor. Properties are moving fast and the prices are climbing. A guy with your eye could do well up here.”
Dante tilts his head, actually interested. “Yeah? I’ve heard the numbers, but I haven’t seen the architecture in person.”
“Take the drive. Start at Rosemary Beach and go west. You’ll see the potential. It’s a different kind of luxury than Miami, but the money is just as loud.”
He nods, and I can see the wheels turning behind his eyes. A man like Dante in a market like 30A is a natural fit.
Dante asks me about the rehab. He’s direct about it, no tiptoeing, which I respect.
“How long are you looking at?” he asks.
“Six to eight weeks. Depends on how things go.”
“Is it the best place?”
“The doctor says it’s the top spinal cord program in the state.”
“Then that’s where you need to be,” Dante says.
At seven forty-five, Benji stands up. He reaches for the cream and Dante watches him do it, his expression shifting to curious as Benji takes my right hand.
Benji does it the same way as always then he lifts the blanket. He wraps his hands around my right foot. I watch his hands on my feet. Dante is in his chair at the foot of the bed, and his face has gone still in a way it wasn’t five minutes ago.
Benji finishes and lowers the blanket and caps the bottle. His cheeks are flushed. Dante doesn’t look away from Benji.
The nurse appears right on schedule. “Sorry. Visiting hours are over.”
Dante stands. He walks to the side of my bed and extends his hand. I take it and his grip is firm. A solid handshake. Then he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a business card and sets it on my nightstand.
“Here’s all my phone numbers,” he says. “If Benji gets into trouble, call me and I’ll bail him out.”
He says it like a joke. I get the feeling it isn’t.
“Good to meet you, Mickey,” he says. He leans closer, and then, quieter, so only I can hear it, “I understand why he comes.”
They both head towards the door. Benji is standing behind Dante, bag on his shoulder.
He lifts his hand in the awkward wave and I lift mine back.
Our eyes meet over Dante’s shoulder for less than two seconds.
His hair is catching the fluorescent light the way it does and I want to tell him to come back.
Just for a minute. Just long enough for me to say something I haven’t figured out yet.
Then they’re gone and the door closes.
I’m being transferred any day now, maybe tomorrow, to a city five hours away. The drives will stop. The meals on the edge of this bed will stop. His hands on my feet will stop.
I can still hear their footsteps, Benji’s laugh, getting fainter. I lie here pinned to this mattress, listening to the life I want walk down the hall.