“I saw her yesterday, just for a minute. I think she wants you to wear her veil.”
MILLIE CALLED ME. Her voice was scared and apologetic, and it was so reminiscent of the call she’d made six weeks before, looking for Tag, that I was immediately taken back, immediately seized by fear and dread.
I’d just seen them at their wedding a week ago, and I’d been so hopeful. I’d been so sure that they were going to beat the odds. Not just the cancer, but the odds. They were crazy about each other, and their beauty and devotion was tangible, a rosy-hued pulse that I had itched to paint. They were moving fast, which was Tag’s style, but it wasn’t rushed. It was right. The impromptu wedding and celebration at Tag’s bar made me wish I could marry Georgia all over again, and we’d gotten a sitter and danced together for the first time since our own wedding.
“Moses?”
“What’s wrong, Millie?”
“We were supposed to start chemotherapy tomorrow. But Tag has been running a fever all day. He’s sick, Moses, really sick, and I want him to go to the hospital. He says we should just wait until tomorrow, since we have an appointment anyway. But I don’t want to wait. I could call Axel or Mikey. But he’s their boss. And they tend to do what he says, even if he’s being an idiot.”
“I’m on my way.”
Tag didn’t argue very much, actually. By the time I arrived an hour and a half later, he was too sick to put up much of a fight, although he winked at me and insisted on sitting in the back seat with Millie so he could hold her hand. They hadn’t gotten much of a honeymoon, though Millie said she didn’t care. She was more interested in having her husband. Honeymoons could wait, chemotherapy could not. Henry didn’t want to go back to the hospital again. I didn’t blame him—I didn’t want to go back either—so he stayed with Robin, who wasn’t hiding her fear very well. None of us were.
“I’ll be back, Henry,” Tag promised. “Record the fights for me, okay? I ordered them on pay-per-view. I want the run-down when I get home,” he warned.
Tag’s white count was elevated, but his platelets were still high enough for the first round of chemotherapy to be administered, according to the doctor. They admitted him for observation, but couldn’t find any infection or any reason for the fever, and finally concluded, twenty-four hours later, that the fever was just his body’s attempt to fight the cancer on its own.
With the fever under control and no reason to hold off any longer, they administered the first round of chemotherapy there in the hospital. Tag was resting comfortably, Millie by his side—he even had them convinced that he could go home as soon as he was done.
Then the shaking began. Tag shook so hard the bed shook with him, and he went from resting comfortably to courting death in a very short time. I ran for a nurse who could do nothing for him, and she paged the doctor. The shaking continued. It was like the seizure all over again, but Tag was perfectly aware and racked with pain that seemed never-ending.
“Don’t let them s-s-sa-save me-e, Millie. I d-d-don’t want to be p-plugged in t-t-to anyth-thing someone will e-e-eventually have, have, have t-t-to unplug. I d-don’t want that.” Tag stuttered, grinding his jaw with the effort to form the words. “P-p-promise m-me you’ll l-le-let m-me g-g-go.”
“Okay, David. Okay, I promise. I promise,” Millie crooned, but her eyes were wide open, as if she were straining to see him, as if she were focusing all of her energy on him, as if she refused to have any barrier between them, even her closed eyes. He had turned onto his side, and his forehead was pressed against her chest. She struggled to hold onto him, the rigors shaking her off and making her teeth vibrate with his. But she didn’t let go. He asked for something to bite down on at one point, after his mouth started to bleed from him biting his tongue. But he managed to keep his head pressed into her chest while his body bucked on the narrow bed.
“We see this sometimes,” the doctor said helplessly, when he finally responded. “The chemotherapy is attacking the cancer. There’s a battle going on right now, and his body is just reacting to it.”
What the doctor wouldn’t say was whether or not Tag would win the battle. And for four long hours, none of us knew. I had to step out of the room at one point and get control of myself, call Georgia, and reinforce my walls. If my best friend was going to die, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to see his dead sister at his shoulder, his great-grandmother waiting patiently for him to cross over. I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want to know. I refused to know, because hope was vital. Hope was precious. And I would not take that from my friend or the girl who loved him.
At one point toward the end of the night, when the shaking started to slow and the very worst was over, Millie stepped into the bathroom, and I took her place beside Tag. He looked at me and said, “Do you see them, Moses? Is Molly waiting for me? If she’s waiting for me, then we both know what that means.”
“No. She’s not waiting, man. It’s just us—you, me and Millie. We’re the only ones here. It isn’t time yet, Tag.” It wasn’t a lie. I just refused to believe anything else.
He breathed deeply and grabbed my hand.
“I love you, Mo.”
“I love you too.” It was the first time I’d ever told Tag I loved him, the first time I’d ever said something like that to anyone but Georgia, and the words hurt. When I told Georgia I loved her it didn’t hurt. But this? This was excruciating.
“I knew you did,” he whispered. And with a reassured sigh, Tag slid into sleep, and I clung to my friend, determined to keep my promise to keep him earth-bound.
IT’S WEIRD. I started Tag Team because I knew, in the ring, in the octagon, no one really fights alone. You’re standing there, battling an opponent, but the fight really takes place in the weeks and months, sometimes years, that come before a fight. It’s in the preparation, it’s in the team you assemble that helps you prepare. See, a fighter always has a team.
Because you have a team, and that team is counting on you, no one wants to tap out. In MMA, tapping out is worse than losing a fight. If you battle to the end and you lose the fight, you haven’t really lost. But if you go into a fight and you have to tap out? That’s hard on a fighter. That’s hard on his team. That’s tough on morale. That means you didn’t take your opponent seriously, you didn’t do your homework, you didn’t prepare, your team didn’t help you prepare, and you got caught with your pants down. Or it means you got scared and you didn’t trust your training. You didn’t trust yourself. You didn’t trust your team. So you tapped out. And that’s hard to come back from.
No one fights alone. That was my motto for Tag Team, yet it was my motto for everyone else. It was my motto for my teammates, but I never believed it myself. I was the team, I wanted to be the team for everyone else. I’d told Millie before the Santos fight that everyone fights alone. And I guess, deep down, I didn’t want anyone to have to fight for me. Stupid? Obvious? Maybe. But that’s who I am. Or who I was.
My goal now? No tap outs. Stick around. Stay in it. Fight. And like I told Moses, when the bell rings, it rings. And so far, my team is getting me through. My whole team.
The guys all came to my wedding in Tag Team shirts. In fact, every single person in attendance was wearing a Tag Team shirt with a suit or a skirt. Even my parents and my two sisters, who surprised me with their presence, were wearing them. Henry wore his shirt with a tuxedo jacket and a bow tie. Moses wore all black, as usual, but he added a pair of shades that he didn’t remove even once, even though the ceremony was inside Millie’s favorite old church. The shades hid his eyes, and I knew he was crying. I cried too, but I didn’t feel compelled to hide it. The room was filled with people I cared about, people who cared about me, and it was easily the best day of my life—proof that even with a cancer diagnosis, you can still have a best day. You can still have lots of best days.
Henry walked Millie down the aisle, and she wore her mother’s veil and a white lace dress that seemed more suited to another era—maybe the era I’d d
escribed when we first met. Watching her walk toward me in that dress made me believe in destiny and all the crap Moses and I had always said we didn’t believe in. Or maybe it wasn’t about the dress at all, maybe she was just beautiful. Looking at her made me happy to be alive. But then again, she’d always had that effect on me.
We had a reception at the bar that was more after-party than anything, and Millie and I danced until we were breathless, but left when it was still in full swing. I wasn’t supposed to drive, so Mikey played chauffeur and drove us to our hotel, dragging boxing gloves and cans and a pair of Axel’s size 16 shoes from the bumper, blaring “Accidental Babies”—Millie’s request—as we made out in the backseat.
Speaking of accidental babies, we found out Millie was pregnant exactly a month after the wedding. It wasn’t really accidental at all. Millie had willed it to happen, I think. Once chemotherapy and radiation started, there wouldn’t be any little Taggerts until it was over—whatever ‘over’ meant. So she made sure it happened before. She was strengthening the team, calling in new recruits, making sure I had every reason to dig deep. We kept the all or nothing mindset. And we celebrated the news and refused to see the giants lurking in the shadows, making us fearful of what was to come.
I was just glad she wouldn’t be able to dance around that damn pole for much longer. I hadn’t wanted to show my inner caveman—and let’s be honest, my inner caveman is an outtie—but I wasn’t crazy about other men looking at my wife dancing around a pole. I suggested she should play her guitar a couple of nights a week at the bar instead, but she seemed content to keep the dancing in the basement and add some pre-natal yoga classes to the Tag Team fitness schedule, and actually pulled in quite a few new memberships.
Moses did his best to keep death away, and I let him believe I thought he could. I’d come close enough with that first round of chemo to know better. Nobody could stave it off when it finally came. And I watched it come for many suffering around me at the same treatment center. I was grateful Millie couldn’t see them. In some ways, it was a small mercy.
I’d been referred to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and upon further analysis, my tumor had been downgraded from a stage four glioblastoma to a stage three anaplastic astrocytoma. That was good news. Gigantic news. It changed a terminal diagnosis into a diagnosis threaded with hope. But the good news was cut off at the knees when the tendrils of the tumor I’d had removed refused to die, and month after month my MRI results hardly varied.
But bad news or good news, we still celebrated. We laughed. We loved. I kept singing and Millie kept dancing—if only for each other. She said as long as I kept singing she wouldn’t lose me. And it seemed to be working. Her belly grew, my businesses did too, and Henry grew most of all. He shot up over the summer and started packing on muscle with continued guidance at the gym. With his short hair and changed body, he was hardly recognizable when he started his junior year in high school.
Henry had stopped looking for giants around every corner. Instead of giants, we were looking for miracles. It’s strange, the more we looked the more we found, and Henry kept an ongoing, detailed log of our finds and recited them every day.
MILLIE’S LABOR LASTED a long time. Too long. But we made it. We all made it. Millie handled it like a champ, which wasn’t surprising; she was good at almost everything she tried. He was a big boy—nine pounds, eight ounces, twenty-two inches long and he looked so much like me I could only laugh . . . and cry. He was completely bald, which made him look even more like me. I’d lost all my hair with the radiation, and had kept it short ever since. Henry just nodded sagely like our resemblance was a given.
Millie thought we should let Henry name him, and I braced myself for a son named after Japanese beef or something equally exotic that would sound ridiculous on a little white boy. Instead he thought carefully and pronounced him David Moses, which worked for me. Interestingly enough though, Millie, who’d never warmed up to my nickname, called him Mo. She said I was her David, and the little guy needed his own identity in the house. She was certain Moses wouldn’t mind sharing his nickname, and when Moses heard the news, he said little Mo could have it, he didn’t want it. He hated it when I called him Mo. But I knew he was secretly thrilled.
Little Mo might have been a big baby, but he was still so small we held him for three days straight for fear we would lose him if we laid him down. Millie broke down a few days before he was born, telling me how afraid she was that she wouldn’t be able to take care of him, but I never doubted her. She was a natural. What she didn’t know, she figured out, and she figured it out quick. She approached motherhood with the same attitude she approached everything, and she’d been mothering Henry for a long time. She wasn’t exactly new to the job.
I wondered how many blind mothers there were in the world. I knew there were some, even if there weren’t many. She demanded that I describe every minute detail as she ran her hands over his tiny body and traced his miniature features—his button nose, and his bow-shaped lips, his little ears, and his paper-thin eyelids. His fingers, his toes, the bumps of his spine, the slope of his belly. I’d caught her lovingly exploring him many times since his birth, as if she was determined not to miss a thing. It made me ache for her that she couldn’t see him, that she would never see her son’s face. She would never see my face, for that matter. But Millie was convinced that if she could see, she would know us immediately. Maybe she was right. Maybe she actually saw us better because she took the time to touch us, to feel us, to find us, to know us.
Millie was asleep now, and in the soft moonlight streaming through the window in our room, I could see the pale length of her arm and the dark pool of her hair against the white pillow. She was a worker, my Amelie, very well-named. She’d been true to her word, and had matched me stride for stride and taken care of me easily as much or more than I’d taken care of her.
I sat watching my wife sleep, holding my two-week old son against my chest, my hand on his tiny back, feeling the rise and fall of his little body as he pulled life into his lungs and let it go again. His fat cheek lay against the opening of the V in my shirt, and I could feel that he’d drooled on me, or drizzled. He’d fallen asleep while nursing, and I’d eased him out of Millie’s arms to burp him so that she could rest, and so I could hold him. He ate constantly, and I was convinced it was just because he liked where the milk was coming from. What was it with boys and boobs? He would cry when we forced him to detach, and I had started saying “Mo wants mo’, which had inspired the Mo wants Mo’ slogan I was now going to market with my Tag Team clothing line. Maybe there would even be a kid’s line—Mo & Co or a maternity line, Millie & Mo. I liked that even better.
“Mo always wants mo’, don’t you, big guy?” I whispered, kissing his soft head. He smelled like boobs. In other words, he smelled like heaven. He sounded like heaven too, even when he cried. Millie declared his lusty cry one of her favorite sounds the moment he came into the world, bellowing like his life was over instead of just beginning.
“Daddy wants mo’ too. More, and more, and more,” I murmured, still watching his mother.
I had started making him tapes. I could have moved on to a digital recorder. But the tapes worked for me. I liked how tangible they were. Millie said she was going to take them all and have the contents transferred onto discs, and I said that was just fine. But I kept making the tapes, and I had a big stack of them, a verbal journaling of the last year, the days of my life, the days of our life together. Now I was making them for little Mo.
“David?” Millie asked drowsily. She carefully patted the space beside her.
“I’ve got him. Go back to sleep, Silly Millie.”
I thought she had, she was quiet for so long. We were both tired. Exhausted. The last year had been heaven and hell. Music and misery. It had not been an easy battle, and I still wasn’t cancer free. But I wasn’t losing the battle either. I might lose the war. Eventually, I might lose. But we didn’t think about that.
&n
bsp; “Now I’ve got that song stuck in my head,” she said suddenly, startling me. I jerked and Mo stuck out his lips and let out the saddest cry known to man.
Millie and I sighed together, a synchronized, “awwww,” that lifted on the end and conveyed our shared sentiment that he was the cutest thing in the universe. The cry turned into panicked suckling, his little head bobbing over my chest, his mouth wide in search of something I couldn’t help him with, and I had to turn him back over to his mother.
Millie heard me coming and reached for him, snuggling him down next to her, giving him what he always wanted.
“So spoiled,” I whispered, laying down beside them, watching them because they were too beautiful to look away.
“He’s not spoiled, he’s a baby,” Millie whispered, a smile playing around her mouth.
“I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about me,” I whispered back.
I kissed her softly and she started to sing.
“I love your legs. I love your chest, but this spot here, I love the best,” she crooned.
“Is that the song that’s stuck in your head?” I chuckled quietly.
“Yes,” she complained in a whisper. “And I need a different verse because nothing rhymes with David.”
I laughed again.
“I love you more each passing day, I’ll love you when you’re old and grey,” I rhymed.
“Oh, that’s better,” she sighed.
“I love you morning, noon and night,” I sang.
“I love you even when we fight,” she made up the next line.
“I love to fight,” I teased.
“I know,” she answered, and her voice was tender. “And that’s the thing I love the most.”
I kissed her again and forgot about the song. I kissed her until her eyes grew heavy and Mo started to wiggle between us. I took him out of her arms once more and let her sleep while I held my boy and told him about my very first fight. It seemed to sooth him and it soothed me too, remembering the adrenaline, the way it felt to right a wrong, to settle a score, to come out the victor.