I can’t go today.
For the first time since he went to Tallahassee, I’m not going to see Mickey. I’m not going to sit in the chair or rub cream into his feet. I put my hands on the terrace railing and breathe. This is irrational. The wedding needs me here. Mickey is in a hospital with doctors and nurses, and he’s not going to die if I miss one day.
Knowing all that does not help. My first thought is I need to tell him so he’ll eat whatever food they bring him for dinner.
Benji:I’m not going to be able to make it today. Dante’s flight was delayed and there were no rental cars so I had to pick him up. We’re at the beach house now and I can’t leave him without a car. I’m so sorry.
Mickey:Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Handle the wedding. I’m fine.
I’m fine.Mickey says he’s fine the way I say I don’t have feelings for him.
Benji:I’m bringing Dante tomorrow. We’ll be there. I promise.
Mickey:Looking forward to it. Go save the wedding.
The wedding details fill the rest of the afternoon and evening. Dante handles vendor calls while I finalize the ceremony layout. We end up on the rental condo’s sad little balcony with a bottle of grocery store wine, the breezy, hot night air, and the parking lot view. It feels good to have my best friend beside me with cheap wine.
But I keep thinking about Mickey. What is he eating? What is he doing there all alone tonight? Does he miss our long talks on the phone there and back?
I text him.
Benji:I’m on the balcony with Dante. He survived his first day in the Panhandle. Barely.
Mickey:Tell Dante welcome to the Panhandle. Goodnight, Benji.
Benji:We’ll be there tomorrow, I swear.
Mickey:Looking forward to it.
Tomorrow, I’ll walk into his room with my best friend and introduce the two most important men in my life to each other.
Dante is going to take one look at my face when I walk into that room and know exactly how far gone I am.
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.
