The Song of David(105)

“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.