The Song of David (42 page)

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.

“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.

Mo snored softly in my arms, and I smiled down at him, acknowledging that my battles weren’t of very much interest to him. He only liked boobs. I couldn’t blame him, but I hoped to be around long enough to help him discover a few other pleasures. I needed to show him how to throw a punch and how to take one too. I wanted to show him how to fall and how to come back when you were losing. In my life there weren’t many fights I hadn’t won. But the truth was, I didn’t know if I was going to win this one. I just didn’t know.

My story might not end in a miracle. But I’m not eager for an ending, so I’ll take the miracles along the way and avoid the ending all together. I’ve discovered I don’t have to see what’s in front of me to keep going. Millie taught me that.

Perks of loving a blind girl.

Moses

WE ALL DIE. Eventually, that is how the story ends for all of us. There is no variance. There is no exception. We all die. Young, old, strong, weak. We all go sooner or later. I’ve come to accept that, maybe even better than most, though I don’t think I’ll ever embrace it.

When the weather permits, I like to walk to the cemetery on the rise overlooking the valley south of Levan. There isn’t much to see—a few houses on the edge of town, fields, a highway, and distant hills. In fact, the view has hardly changed at all these past forty years. I had lots of family buried here. My great-grandmother was buried here. My mother too. My little son who I’d never known in life was buried here as well.

Eli’s grave was the one I visited most. I liked to leave things for him on his stone. Shiny rocks and arrowheads, a new paintbrush and a little plastic horse. As the years passed, the gifts never changed, because he never changed. In my mind he was always the little boy, the little boy who never aged and waited somewhere for me to join him. I knew he didn’t need the things I left. I knew he didn’t even want them. I left them because I needed to, because I needed him. Still. Even though I got along without him, and even though my life was filled with loved ones, nothing filled the space where he should have been.