Chapter 21 Mickey
The transport doors open and the heat hits me. Florida heat, thick, humid, and alive. I’ve been breathing conditioned air for weeks and the first breath of fresh air fills my lungs like a drink of water after a drought. My body, the top half of it anyway, responds with relief.
The hands of the two EMTs move fast around me. They’ve probably done this transfer a hundred times, and their coordination is clean and impersonal. I watch my body being moved the way you watch luggage being loaded onto a conveyor belt.
“Alright, Mickey, we’re going to take you inside.”
The stretcher locks and rolls. Automatic doors slide open and the building doesn’t feel like a hospital. It’s brighter and quieter.
They wheel me down a hallway. Through an open gym door, I watch a man take slow, uneven steps between parallel bars.
Two therapists brace him on either side and his legs shake like they don’t belong to him, trembling with the effort of holding weight they’ve forgotten how to hold.
His face is tight with concentration and his hands are white-knuckled on the bars. He takes one step and then another.
Up ahead is Room 201. There’s a bed, a nightstand, a bigger chair by the window, and a second chair for visitors. I spot a bathroom with rails on every surface. Everything is designed around the assumption that the person living here needs help with the things that used to be automatic.
They transfer me to the bed. It takes two of them, coordinated and smooth, and I hate how easy it looks from the outside and how helpless it feels from the inside.
A nurse comes in. She looks to be in her late thirties, appearing calm and direct.
“I’m Erin. I’ll be your nurse this afternoon.
” She runs through vitals, meds, and the schedule.
“You’ll meet your therapy team in the morning.
We ease you in, but it’s a full program. Expect a few hours of therapy a day.”
That’s good to hear. I’ve been lying in a bed for two weeks doing nothing and the nothing has been eating me alive.
She leaves and the room goes quiet in a way I wasn’t expecting. There are no monitors beeping, or carts rattling past. There is only the air conditioner humming.
I put my phone on the nightstand, and Benji’s cream.
Those are the two things I brought that matter the most. The room doesn’t smell like Benji, though.
I hate that it’s one of the first things I notice.
In Tallahassee, by the end of every visit, the room smelled like whatever soap Benji used that day, or the cream, or the food he brought.
The smell would hang around for an hour after he left and I’d lie there breathing it in.
This room smells like floor wax and nothing else. And I’m lying here, missing the scent of a man I haven’t even kissed yet.
My arms are dry from the transport. The recycled air in the ambulance stripped whatever moisture was left and my skin feels tight across my forearms, cracked at the elbows.
Benji would lose his mind if he saw the state of them.
He told me to use the cream on my arms between visits, and I’d nodded the way I do when I’m watching his mouth move instead of processing the words.
I reach for the bottle on the nightstand and uncap it. The scent hits me, and suddenly I’m back in Tallahassee.
It’s not a strong smell. It smells like Benji’s hands.
That’s all my brain gives me. Not the brand.
Not the ingredients. Just his hands. It belongs in a room at eight o’clock at night when visiting hours are ending and he’s kneeling at the end of my bed, working cream into my feet while both of us pretend it isn’t intimate.
I hold the bottle under my nose and breathe in. For three seconds, he’s here. His thumbs pressing slow circles into my arches. His head bent in concentration. Then I pull the bottle back from my nose and he’s gone.
I shake the bottle. Less than half full. Maybe a third. Benji uses it like he never expects things to run out. If I start using it on my arms like he told me to, I’ve got maybe two weeks left. Three if I’m careful.
After that, it’s gone. And he’s gone with it.
I look at the hospital lotion bolted to the wall beside the sink. My arms would survive that just fine. I cap the bottle and set it back beside my phone. I tell myself it’s because I’m tired.
It’s not.
The truth is, I’m rationing him.
The phone screen glows when I pick it up. His name is right there at the top of my messages — the last conversation, the way it always is now. I type before I can talk myself out of it.
Mickey: Made it. The bed is smaller but the silence is bigger. No monitors. It’s weird. How’s the arch?
The phone doesn’t buzz back. He’s busy, and he should be busy. The wedding is tomorrow.
The phone buzzes much later at ten-thirty.
Benji: You’re there! The arch is beautiful.
Dante is making Cuban coffee and bossing the caterer in Spanish.
The rehearsal went fine. Callie’s mother only cried twice which is a personal best. I’m exhausted and running on fumes.
Wish I was sitting in a chair in your room instead of here. Goodnight, Mickey.
Mickey: Goodnight, Benji.
Morning comes with an early knock. The door opens and a different nurse enters, though she has the same tone. She checks my vitals and meds. Then she looks at me with the steady eyes of a woman who is about to make my day harder.
“Let’s get you sitting up,” she says.
It takes longer than it should. They raise the head of the bed and my body shifts, creating pressure in places I don’t fully feel but still register somewhere distant, like a radio playing two rooms over.
They swing my legs toward the edge. I watch them move and feel nothing; the disconnect between seeing my legs change position and feeling absolutely nothing below my hips is so familiar now that it’s almost boring.
They sit me up and the room tilts. My hands grip the mattress, and my core shakes as the muscles try to remember what they forgot while I was lying flat for two weeks.
I lock my jaw and hold it because I’ve been through the police academy, and the academy taught me that your body quits before it needs to.
I held a plank for six minutes with an instructor standing on my back.
I can sit on the edge of a bed without passing out.
There’s a knock, and then two more people step in.
“Morning, Mickey. I’m Jason from physical therapy.”
“And I’m Leah from occupational therapy.”
Jason is built like a safety, compact and quick, someone who played a sport and transferred the discipline into healthcare.
Leah is calm as if she’s seen everything and nothing surprises her anymore.
I like them both immediately because they don’t look at me with pity. They look at me like I’m a job.
“We’re going to start with some basics,” Jason says, crouching so we’re eye level. “Sitting balance. Transfers. See where you’re at. Nothing crazy. Goal today is to get you from the bed to that chair.”
The chair is five feet away. Five feet that might as well be five miles. Except I’m not going to think that way because that is how you lose.
“You’ve done a transfer before?” he asks.
“In Tallahassee. Took two people. About forty-five seconds. Longest forty-five seconds of my life.”
“This one might be faster. Ready?”
No.
“Yeah,” I say.
They move me. Jason on one side, Leah on the other, my body pivoting between them in a motion that depends entirely on their strength, not mine.
For a second I’m suspended, weight hanging wrong, my legs dangling like they were attached as an afterthought, and then the vinyl creaks under me and I’m sitting in the chair breathing harder than a man should breathe for traveling five feet.
“Don’t brace through your shoulders,” Jason says. “You’re locking your arms. Your traps are doing all the work. Your core still has function above the injury. Use it.”
I try it. Pulling in, tightening what I can, holding myself upright without locking everything else down. It works for about two seconds before I drift right and catch it with my hand on the armrest.
“That’s a micro-adjustment,” Jason says.
“You’re going to be making those constantly.
Every second you’re in this chair, your body is working to stay centered.
It’ll get more automatic over time but right now it’s going to feel like you’re constantly fighting to stay upright in ways nobody else can see. ”
He’s right. Sitting up used to be automatic. Now it’s work.
“The program here is intensive,” Jason says. “Physical therapy twice a day. Occupational therapy once a day. We’re going to keep testing the lower extremities for any response. Every session, we check.”
“Every session?”
“Yes. Spinal cord injuries are unpredictable. We’ve had patients who showed no response for weeks and then started getting twitches, sensation. The spinal cord heals on its own schedule. Our job is to keep pushing and be ready to build on whatever it gives us.”
“I’m going to push hard,” I say. “You should know that about me.”
Jason nods. “That’s good. But I’m going to tell you what I tell every motivated patient.
The physical part isn’t going to be your problem.
You’re strong, you’re young. The problem is going to be the days when you push as hard as you can and nothing changes below the waist. The days when you do everything right and the legs don’t respond.
That’s where patients break. Not from the work. From the waiting.”
The work I can handle. I’ve lived my whole life in the work. Football practice, academy drills, twelve-hour shifts.
“I hear you,” I say. “Let’s get to work.”
The rest of the morning is hard work, the kind that leaves my upper body shaking and my arms burning in a way that feels almost good.
Wheelchair push-ups where I lift my full weight off the seat, and my triceps scream after eight, and I push to fifteen.
Transfer drills, bed to chair, chair to bed, until my shoulders are on fire and the sweat is running down my back and soaking the waistband of my shorts.
Core exercises where Jason pushes me off balance, and my body learns, rep by rep, to compensate for legs that can’t do their part.
At every break, Jason tests. A fingertip down my shin. Pressure on the sole of my foot. “Try to move your toes.” The signal goes out. Nothing answers. Jason makes a note and moves on without telling me what it says. I don’t ask.
Leah takes the afternoon. Occupational therapy is different.
Less about strength, more about the daily logistics of living in a body that only half cooperates.
She starts with a T-shirt and it takes me two minutes and four resets to put it on because every time my arms go over my head, my balance shifts and my hands shoot down to catch the armrests.
Put it on. Take it off. Put it on. Take it off.
Each time a little faster, the catches earlier, the corrections smaller.
By the fifth time the shirt goes on almost straight and Leah nods, which from Leah is a standing ovation.
“Tomorrow, we add pants,” she says.
“I can’t wait.”
“You’re going to hate pants.”
“I already hate pants. I’ve been wearing a hospital gown for two weeks.”
“Pants are going to feel like three marathons. But you’ll get there.”
Five o’clock and the day is over. Jason comes back for the last transfer, bed to chair to bed, and this time I lead it.
His hands are up, ready, but they never make contact.
I shift forward, press down through arms that have been working for seven hours, lift my weight off the chair in one shaking push, pivot, and lower myself to the mattress.
Six inches of space. The hardest six inches of my life. And I did it alone.
He leaves and I’m exhausted. My arms ache, my core is sore, my shoulders feel like I’ve been carrying my full weight all day, which I have. But it’s the good exhaustion. The kind that earns sleep.
My phone has four texts from Benji. A photo of the finished arch with the white ribbon and the bamboo poles golden against the Gulf.
A photo of Dante in a white shirt bossing a vendor.
A text that says “florist delivered the correct pots. UNGLAZED. Dante is a miracle worker.” And one from an hour ago: “wedding starts in 2 hours. I’m terrified and confident which is my natural state. How was your first day?”
The arch looks like a goalpost to me and I hear Benji arguing with me about it and the imagined argument makes me smile.
Mickey: First day was brutal in the good way. I worked hard. My arms are jelly. The therapy team is solid. Jason the PT is going to kick my ass daily and I’m going to let him. The arch looks incredible. Go crush the wedding.
Benji: The wedding was perfect, Mickey. She cried.
He cried. Callie’s mother cried the most. The candles stayed lit.
The arch held. The chairs were ivory. I did it.
WE did it. Your bamboo backup and your LED candles and your grocery store arugula saved this wedding and you weren’t even in the building.
The stars are out, and I’m so tired I could sleep on this concrete terrace.
I miss the chair in your room. Goodnight, Mickey.
Mickey: You did it. Not me. You pulled that off with broken ribs and no sleep and a florist who doesn’t know what unglazed means. That’s all you, Benji. I’m proud of you.
I type it and send it.
Benji: You made me cry. Again. I hope you’re happy. The cleanup crew is staring at me. Goodnight.
Mickey: Goodnight.
I put the phone on the pillow and close my eyes. My arms are sore and my core is screaming. I worked harder than I’ve worked in years.
Six inches. That’s how far I moved on my own today. Six inches from the chair to the bed.
Tomorrow I’m going for seven.