There even had been a girl once who went about in a squeaky wheelchair who he was sure had eyed him. But she hadn’t stayed long at the center. And after spending more than half his life there, now Michael wasn’t going to get to stay either.
The center was closing, and Michael was shipped to live at the rehabilitation hospital, far from his friends and worse, far from Betty.
That’s when Michael turned into a recluse. He wouldn’t come out from his room. He left it dark. His friends drove more than two hours to see him. But Michael’s spirits sagged so low, no one could reach him.
And then, one day, he was lying in bed when he heard a f***liar creaking sound coming down the hall. It sounded like that same, ancient, squeaky wheelchair that girl, Juana, had used at the center where he used to live.
The squeaking stopped at his door, and Juana peered in and asked him to come outdoors with her. He was intrigued and from the moment he met Juana again, it was as though she breathed life back into him.
He was staring at the clouds and blue skies again. He began to participate in the hospital’s recreation programs. He spent hours talking with Juana. His room was sunny and light. And then he asked Juana, who’d been living in a wheelchair since age twenty-four, if she would marry him.
Juana had already had a tough life. She was pulled out of school before finishing the third grade, because she collapsed and fell a lot. Her mother, thinking she was lazy, slapped her around. She lived in terror that her mother wouldn’t want her anymore, so on the occasions when she was well enough, she cleaned house “like a little maid”.
Before the age of twenty-four, like Michael, she had a tracheotomy just to breathe and that was when she was officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By the time she was thirty, she had moved into a hospital with round-the-clock care.
So when Michael asked her the big question, she didn’t think she could handle the pain if he was teasing.