The Song of David (41 page)

I laughed harder and wiped at my eyes.

“I’ll fight this thing, Mo. I’ll fight as hard as I can until the bell rings. But if the bell rings sooner rather than later, then you gotta promise me that you’ll take care of my girl. We gotta deal?”

“Deal,” I whispered. And we were both quiet for a time, battling grief and gratitude and the irony that there is no sorrow without the sweet.

I heard the door this time and ducked my head, not ready for an audience, but it was just Millie, and Millie couldn’t see my tears. Her face was shiny and pink, like she’d just washed it, and her dark hair was smooth and heavy around her shoulders. She had coffee in one hand—my pot was definitely gone—and she reached forward with the other.

“Where are you, David?” she asked, and she said David like an endearment.

“I’m here, baby.” Tag stood and reached for her hand, guiding her forward and onto his lap. He took her coffee and stole a sip as she dropped a kiss on his whiskery head. Her left arm was wrapped around his neck, and I noticed the ring on her finger. My heart swelled in my chest, and for a moment there was only the sweet, even if I wasn’t surprised. It reminded me of the images I’d been shown the day before.

“I saw your mom again, Millie,” I said gently. Tag turned to stare at me, his eyes blazing in his tired face. Millie turned too, as if opening her mind to the impossibility.

“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 described 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.