Moses
TAG WOKE UP just as the doctor predicted, but they didn’t let us see him until they moved him out of the ICU, which didn’t happen for a full twenty-four hours after he regained consciousness. We’d gone back and forth from the hospital to a nearby hotel, running on terror and little sleep, until, two days after we’d begun our vigil, we went back to the hotel to shower and change, and Henry climbed into bed and refused to get out again. Millie didn’t dare leave Henry alone at the hotel for hours on end, so she stayed behind and I went back to the hospital.
I was surprised to find Tag sitting up in his bed, his eyes heavily circled, his jaw rough with several days’ worth of beard, his shaggy hair hanging lank around his face. The bald patches and staple marks were extremely visible now, and he scratched at his skull as if the bare skin were driving him crazy.
“It’s been almost three weeks. It’s mostly healed, and it itches,” he complained with a smile, as if it were just road rash—nothing serious.
“I think I’ve convinced one of the nurses to help me shave it all off. We’ll be twins, Mo,” he said, referring to the fact that my hair had never been much longer than stubble.
I couldn’t respond. I didn’t do small talk and bullshit as well as Tag did. In fact, I didn’t really do it at all. I just stared at my friend and shoved my hands in my pockets to repress my urge to paint . . . or kill him.
“I think Millie will dig a smooth head—” He stopped abruptly and rubbed at his jaw, clearly agitated. “Is she here, Mo? With you?”
“She’s at the hotel with Henry. He was exhausted, and she didn’t dare leave him alone.”
Tag nodded and closed his eyes, as if he too were exhausted. “Good. That’s good.”
A nurse bustled in, saw me, and hesitated slightly. I almost laughed. She probably wanted Tag all to herself while she fussed over him. Typical female. He probably had the entire nursing staff at his beck and call. He’d be the most well-cared for patient in the history of the hospital.
I watched as she carefully covered him with a sheet and gently started removing his hair with an electric razor, one long clump at a time, until he sat before me, smooth-headed and scarred, looking so different and defeated, so changed, that I unclenched my hands, releasing some of my rage.
The nurse exclaimed that he “must feel so much better now,” and whisked away the shorn hair and the sheet that covered him. Then she helped him maneuver out of his hospital gown—avoiding his IV and the various monitors—and assisted him in donning a new one. I caught Tag’s eye as she carefully tied the strings at his back. I raised an eyebrow, and he gave me a smirk that let me know that he hadn’t changed all that much.
Still, when she left the room, he closed his eyes briefly, resting momentarily, and I felt the fear swell in my chest once more.
“You look like shit, Tag,” I said.
“So do you, Mo,” he shot back, not even opening his eyes.
“It’s your fault,” I said.
He sighed and then murmured, “I know.”
I didn’t comment, thinking he needed to sleep. But after several long breaths he opened his eyes again and met my gaze.
“I’m sorry, Moses.”
“You shouldn’t have left like that. You’ve put us all through hell.” I guess we were going to go there, after all.
“I didn’t see a better solution.”
“I can think of one,” I snapped, and when he didn’t respond immediately, I exhaled heavily and pressed my palms into my tired eyes.
“Sometimes I feel like death is the only thing I haven’t done,” he said eventually. “Hell, and I’ve even attempted that a couple of times. The problem with death is that it’s exclusive, like sex and child-birth. Once you’ve done it, there is no going back.”
His thoughts were clearly rhetorical, and I waited him out again.
“The thing is, Mo. I’m okay with it. If I’ve learned anything from being your best friend, from watching you commune with the dead, it’s that death isn’t anything I need to be afraid of. I’m not a perfect man. But I think I’m a good man. I’ve lived a hell of a life, even with all the heartache. Millie told me once that the ability to devastate is what makes a song beautiful. Maybe that’s what makes life beautiful too. The ability to devastate. Maybe that’s how we know we’ve lived. How we know we’ve truly loved.”
“The ability to devastate,” I repeated. And my voice broke. If that wasn’t a perfect description of the agony of love, I didn’t know what was. I had felt that devastation. I had survived it, but I didn’t want to survive it again.
“I love her so much, Mo. I love her so damn much. That’s the thing that sucks the most. I can deal with the cancer. I can deal with death. But I’m going to miss Millie. I miss her already.” He swallowed, his throat working overtime against the emotion that choked us both. “I would miss you too, Mo, but you can see dead people, so I can haunt you.”
I laughed, but it came out a groan, and I stood, needing to escape, hating the sorrow, raging against the futility of grief, yet feeling it anyway. Tag watched me pace and when I finally sat back down, indicating I was ready, he spoke again.
“I’m okay with death, Mo. I’m good with it,” Tag said quietly. “But dying . . . dying is different. I’m afraid of dying. I’m afraid of not being strong for the people who love me. I’m afraid of the suffering I will cause. I’m afraid of the helplessness I’ll feel when I can’t make it all better. I don’t want to sit in a hospital bed, day after day, dying. I don’t want Millie trying to take care of me. I don’t want Henry watching me fade from giant to shadow. Can you understand that, Mo?”
I nodded slowly, though doing so made me feel sick, like I was condoning what he’d done, leaving like he had.
“I laid in bed all night after they told me what I was facing. They gave me all the risks, the time frames, best case scenarios, worst case scenarios. By morning, I knew it wasn’t for me. I told my doctor, thank you very much, but I’m gonna go now.”
“And you weren’t going to tell anyone?”
“No.” Tag shook his head, his eyes on mine. “No.”
“But . . .” I didn’t understand. I wasn’t following.
“I got my affairs in order. I met with my attorney, got things figured out. Drew up the will, liquidated a bunch of stuff. The only thing that was bothering me was the money I still owed my dad. I could sell it all—the bar, the gym, the clothing line. If I did, I’d have more than enough, but I don’t want to sell. I want to leave the gym to the guys. I want to leave the bar to Millie and Henry so Millie can dance around that damn pole until she’s eighty-two and no one can tell her no, and so that Henry can have a place where he can talk sports and someone will listen. He loves the bar. I wanted to leave you something too, but I knew you would hate that.”
He got that right. He was messed up about everything else. But he got that right.
“But even with the sale of the apartments, the liquidation of everything but my truck, I still owe my dad fifty grand,” Tag continued.
“Wasn’t that an inheritance?”
“I didn’t want an inheritance. I wanted to build my own road,” Tag argued. “I told him I would pay it all back by the time I was thirty. Thirty ain’t gonna happen, Mo. So I needed to find a way to pay it back sooner.”
“The fight.”
“Yeah.” Tag nodded. “The fight. It just so happens I got offered a title fight that would pay me fifty Gs if I won. And I had absolutely nothing to lose.”
“And after the fight?”
“I was going to take a trip to Dallas, see my mom and my sisters and pay my dad back. I haven’t seen them in a while. Then . . . take a hike up into the hills above that overpass in Nephi.”
“The one where Molly was buried?”
“The one where Molly was buried,” he confirmed. “Hike up into the hills. Take a pill. Watch the sun-set as I went to sleep.”
“That’s it?” I asked, reining in my temper.
“That’s it,” he answered, with no temper at all.
I felt the rage surge in my chest and pop in my ears, but I kept my voice level. Apparently, he hadn’t thought he needed to say goodbye to me.
“So you left the tapes. Why?”
“It was my way of saying goodbye. I wanted Millie to know how I felt. Every step of the way. Falling in love with her. I never wanted her to have a reason to doubt me. I wanted her to know it was real, that is was perfect, that it was the best gift I’ve ever received.”
“And you repay her by taking that gift and tossing it?”
Tag was silent, staring at me, his face a study in compassion. Love lined his face and leaked from the corners of his eyes.
“I love you, Mo. You know that, don’t you?” he said gently. And I knew he did. I had no doubt whatsoever. But he had a hell of a way of showing it.
“Fuck you, Tag!” I hissed. “I know what you want from me. I know you want me to tell you I support your decision. But I’m not that selfless. I’m not that friend. I don’t want you to suffer. I really don’t. I would share that burden if I could. I’d spell you on the worst days if I could, because I know you’d do that for me in a heartbeat. But I’d rather see you suffer than say goodbye. Sorry. If that makes me an asshole, then I’ll change my name. Just put it on a nametag, and I’ll wear it. I don’t give a shit. When did you start being afraid of a little pain?”
“That’s not it, Mo.”
“Bull-shit!” I roared. “You owe it to the people who love you to battle. You owe us!”
“It’s not my pain I’m worried about, man,” he said it so softly I barely heard him.
“Where is your rage? Where is the green-eyed monster who wanted to kill me just for breathing his sister’s name? Where’s the guy that grabbed the bull by the horns in Spain just to see if he could? Where’s the guy who shot a man to protect me, who threw himself in the line of fire? Let me get this straight, Tag. You would die to save my life, but you won’t even fight to save your own?”
“Not if I have to put people through hell to do it.”
“Take off the cape, bro. Take it off! Or I’m going to beat the hell out of you, put you in a strait-jacket, and start pumping you full of chemo myself. You watch me.”
“I love you, Mo.”
“Stop saying that, Tag!”
“I love you, Mo.”
I felt a splintering sensation inside my chest, and I knew I had to get out before I lost it. I rarely cried, but I had a tendency to store up the grief, tucking it away in hidden compartments, boxing it up, building partitions. I hoarded my grief. But now I was bursting at the seams, unable to escape the towering feelings that had been threatening to bury me since Millie called and told me Tag was gone. I was falling apart. And I had to go.
IT TOOK ME several days to make the tapes. It had started out as a way to say goodbye, a way to express my feelings, my love for Millie in my own words. And as I told our story, I realized what a miracle it was. Moses was right. I got a miracle. And with every word, every tape, I became more convinced of it. The problem was, I didn’t know how to stop. I didn’t want the tapes to end. I couldn’t say goodbye.
When I got the call about the fight, I put the tapes I’d completed, along with the tape recorder I’d borrowed from Henry, in the filing cabinet in the office at the gym, and left the key in an envelope for Millie. But I still had so much to say. I would remember something else, something I’d missed, something I wanted to tell her, and I would want to call her and talk to her. Then I’d remind myself of what the doctor said—stage four glioblastoma—and I would consider all the terrible things I’d read and researched about my diagnosis. I’d think about the pictures I’d seen, recite the survival rates. I’d think about the way I would die, the way I would suffer, the way those closest to me would suffer. And I wouldn’t let myself call her. Instead, I went searching for a tape recorder of my own so I could make more tapes.
I ended up spending the next day, when I should have been on the road to Vegas, going from pawn shop to pawn shop looking for one. I hit pay dirt at the fifth shop I tried when an old woman sold me a dusty hand-held tape recorder from her back room, along with an unopened package of empty cassettes, all for a hundred bucks. She’d told me, straight-faced, that I was getting a deal. She was probably right. I would have paid two hundred.
The results of my biopsy had come back fairly quickly. I was only in the hospital for two days after my craniotomy. Not very long, considering they drilled into my head and took a big chunk of tissue off my brain. They were able to remove ninety-five percent of the tumor, which was great news. They also got the biopsy results back much sooner than they anticipated. They thought it would take six days post-op to get results. I got lucky. It only took them four. Lucky, lucky me.
When I went in for the craniotomy, I made a deal with myself. If the results came back negative, no cancer, I would call Moses and I would call Millie, and I would tell them about the little scare I’d had. I’d tell them I hadn’t wanted to worry them, and hey, no big deal. I was fine. I would let Millie get mad at me and huff, and then I would kiss it all away, and I would make her marry me. Why wait? What had I said? When you love something you give it your name. I’d done that with my bar, I was going to do it with my girl. Hell, if Henry wanted my name, I’d adopt him too. I didn’t see why it couldn’t be done. We’d all be Taggerts. That’s the deal I’d made with myself.
And if the news wasn’t positive? If I had a terminal diagnosis? If the news wasn’t positive, I wouldn’t be calling anyone.
And that’s what I did. I called a cab to come and get me after the craniotomy. The nurse had insisted on calling someone, and I’d insisted right back that I could take care of myself. I felt fine. My head ached, which made sense. But other than that, I felt fine. I kept saying that because it was true. My body felt fine. It was my heart that hurt. My heart felt like shit. But I felt fine. I went home and slept for two days, waking up to drink water, go to the bathroom, and go back to sleep. Then I got the word that the results were in, and I drove myself to the hospital to find out I had anywhere from six months to a year to live.
I drove myself back home again.
I still didn’t call Moses, and I didn’t call Millie. I didn’t call Axel or bother Mikey. Instead, I let everyone believe I had gone to Dallas to see my family, and I called my lawyer. Then I started putting things in motion. During that time, I ignored my phone calls. I didn’t read my texts. I couldn’t. I couldn’t and remain strong. But I was in the middle of making Millie a tape when the phone started ringing, interrupting my flow, and I’d grabbed at it to silence it, only to see Cliff Cordova’s name lighting up the display. I’d answered it on instinct.
He had a fight for me. Saturday night in Vegas—six days away—against Terry Shaw. Fifty thousand dollars if I won, ten thousand just for showing up. I told him I’d only do it for fifty thousand, regardless if I won or not, but I promised him I would win. He agreed and told me if I won, Tag Team would get another twenty-thousand dollars, and he told me to be in Vegas in forty-eight hours.
It would mess up my plan. My team would find out. They would be hurt that I’d fought alone. Word would wind itself to Millie. She would be hurt too. Moses would find me in the afterlife and kick my ass. But what a hell of a way to go out.
I thought I would be strong. I thought I would take one for the team. I thought I was going to go out in a blaze of glory. Fight and die. Strong. But they found me first. And when I’d seen Millie, standing there in the crowd, Henry at her side, Moses holding her hand and looking at me like he wanted to strangle me, my resolve shook and my legs got weak.
And it had pissed me off.
I wasn’t going to dissolve in a puddle for Terry Shaw to wipe up in one round. I was not going to have all my sacrifice and all my plans shot to hell because my girl was in the audience and my best friend was pissed. I was not going to let the dull throb in my head that hadn’t gone away since I’d woken up with twenty staples in my skull make me sloppy and slow. I was not going to let cancer win. Not this round, at least.
I fought harder than I’ve ever fought before. Everything hurt, my energy was spotty, my two weeks out of the gym more of a factor than the surgery. I’d jogged three miles the day Cordova called. I ran five the next. The day before the fight I’d hit a Vegas Gold’s gym and worked up a good sweat punching and kicking the hell out a bag, smelling the last of the anesthesia on my skin, feeling pretty damn strong, reminding myself I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t even nervous. It was bizarre.
That feeling had continued until I’d seen Millie. Then the nerves had hit me like a fire hose and I’d been terrified that I would let her down, worse that I would get my trash kicked and she would have to stand there and witness it happening. I’d seen her face after that first round. She was miserable. And I’d called out to her. I couldn’t help myself. I had to reassure her. I’d done it again after the next round. And again. And then I’d won. Her face had worn the most beautiful smile, and Henry was screaming my name. Moses still looked pissed.
Then the room spun. One screaming face blurred into another, as if I was on a carousel. The octagon was revolving. I didn’t know that was possible. Must be a new feature. Then I realized it was me. I was the one spinning. And then I was falling, and my body bounced off the floor, my head connecting half a beat later, the dot on the ‘i’, the point on the exclamation mark. And the crowd roared. I didn’t lift my hands to catch myself or cover my face. The fight was over, wasn’t it? The bell had rung. Instead my eyes focused blearily on Moses, his smeared face further obscured by the criss-crossing web of the cage. Moses didn’t look angry anymore. He looked stunned, and I saw him run toward me. Up over the side of the octagon, he came. I felt like I was in a fog and I couldn’t control my right arm. My muscles were suddenly twitching, jerking, trying to jump out of my skin. And then the roaring began. It sounded like a big rig bearing down on me. Like I stood on the side of the road. Like I stood beneath the overpass not far from where they found my sister’s body.
“Tag, can you hear me? Damn it. I think he’s having a seizure!
It was Moses talking to me, but he sounded odd, far off. Like his voice came from far across the field where Molly was buried. Across the field and past the truck stop that paid a negligent vigil on a dead girl. The roaring of the trucks continued, one after the other, a typhoon of semis flying past me.
“He’s biting the shit out of his tongue! Put the mouth guard back in his mouth! Tag! Tag, come on, baby!”
The pain in my head was suddenly so enormous there was no way I could open my eyes. Maybe I was the one with a bullet in my brain. Maybe my sister’s killer had killed me too. No. That wasn’t right. Molly’s killer was dead. I killed him. I found him and killed him. And the dogs found Molly.
“Mr. Taggert, if you can hear me, can you try to open your eyes?”
I tried. I tried to open my eyes. The pain ricocheted in my head again, the sound of a gunshot reverberating from my memory into my present. Nah. That wasn’t it. There wasn’t a bullet in my brain. There was another problem with my brain.
Once, my sister Molly had dared me to eat two handfuls of sand. She’d said I couldn’t do it. So of course I had. It hadn’t even been wet sand. It had been gritty and sharp, and so dry that it got stuck in my throat and I’d coughed sand for three days afterward. My mouth felt like that again. I couldn’t swallow and my tongue was fat and foreign behind my cracked lips. My throat was on fire.
Maybe I was back on the beach with Molly, the sky a never-ending blue, interrupted only by a low-flying plane pulling a streamer about car insurance behind it. But the buzzing and the light didn’t come from the bright sky above a long stretch of beach, and my throat wasn’t filled with sand. Bright lights circled my head instead of bi-planes, and the buzzing morphed into beeping machines and worried voices.
“Mr. Taggert?”
“Call me Tag,” I rasped.
“Tag, do you know where you are?”
“Montlake Psychiatric Hospital,” I whispered. I could even smell the bleach.
“Mr. Taggert?” Moses didn’t call me Mr. Taggert. No one at Montlake called me Mr. Taggert. Not even Dr. Andelin. Maybe I wasn’t at Montlake. But I was in a hospital. I was sure of it.
“You were in a fight, Mr. Taggert. Do you remember the fight?”
“Did I win?” I whispered, trying to lift my hands to see my knuckles. If I was in the hospital because of a fight, then I probably hadn’t won. My dad would be so disappointed. I shut my eyes against the light and the voices, trying to remember how I lost.
“I’m proud of you, David.” My father hadn’t ever said that to me. Eleven years old, and he’d never said he was proud. But he was proud now.
“You are?” My voice cracked in amazement.
“Yeah. Sometimes we have to get mean in life to get some respect. There’s nothing wrong with defending yourself. It’s not a popular thing in this day and age. People think it’s enlightened to be weak. It isn’t. There’s a time for words and a time for action.”
I nodded. I liked words. But action had felt amazing.
“Words work much better if the person you’re talking to knows you got something to back it up if words fail. How long you been tryin’ to be friends with that kid?” My dad looked over at me and then back at the road.
“A long time.”
“I thought so.”
“I think I broke his nose.” I tried not to sound as pleased as I felt.
“Yeah. You probably did. But now that he knows you can, he won’t be quite as quick to start a fight, now will he?”
“Nope.” I was silent for several minutes, until I forced myself to confess. “Dad?”
“Yeah, son?”
“I liked it. I like fighting. I want to do it again.”
“I want a rematch. I thought I won. I thought I had that guy beat. The bell rang.” I tried to form the words but they were slurred and sloppy and I wasn’t sure anyone would understand. It was the sand in my mouth. The sand and my sore tongue. Damn my mouth hurt.
“You won the fight. It was over. But you had a seizure, Mr. Taggert. We need to find out why.”
And then my eyes closed and the world went dark, darker than the world had ever been. That was the last thing I remember. And now I was here. Now I was in a hospital, the one place I’d sworn I wouldn’t return to. And there would be no more running away. So what did I do now? Where did I go from here? I didn’t know.
Idon’tknowwhattodo Idon’tknowwhattodo Idon’tknowwhattodo—the old refrain was back in my head, an ear worm that refused to morph into a solution. So I was talking to the tape recorder. Again.
Someone on Cordova’s payroll had delivered my truck to the hospital, as well as all my things. I got a nurse to help me up—I was shaky and dizzy, but I could get around well enough—and I positioned the player by my head on the flattened out hospital bed, talking into it so I wouldn’t have to hold it up to my face. They wouldn’t keep me here much longer. We would be heading back to Utah in a day or two. Axel would be driving my truck home. When I said I could do it, Millie had cut me off immediately and the nurse had laughed.
I hadn’t been alone with Millie. Not once. She’d stayed close, her hand on my arm, always touching me, but we hadn’t had any time to ourselves. I didn’t want a repeat of the scene with Moses, and I had no idea what to say to her. The seizure had left me exhausted and sleep was a relief. When I was awake and she was nearby I could only stare at her, cling to her hand, and try to imagine what she was thinking. What she was feeling. I think I knew, and her agony only made me want to sleep again. I’d tried once to tell her how sorry I was, and she just nodded and said, “I know, big guy. I know.” But her eyes had filled up with tears, and she’d laid her forehead down on my chest to hide them from me. I’d smoothed her hair until sleep pulled me under.
The guys—Axel, Cory, Mikey, Paulo and Andy—were in and out. They refused to head back home without me. I got the feeling they were taking turns guarding me, like I would slip away again. None of us talked about why I was here. We tiptoed around that elephant like talking about it would make us all fall apart. So for now, we pretended it was the fight that landed me here. A fight I had won in fairly glorious fashion. It gave us something to talk about.
Moses hadn’t come back. Moses had never been capable of pretending. He delivered Millie and Henry and picked them up again when Henry got restless and needed to head back to the hotel. I could tell Millie wanted to stay. But duty called, and she left without protest, a squeeze to my hand, her arm looped through Henry’s, and none of the things that needed to be said were discussed.
It was late. The guys had all finally left, heading back to their hotel for the night, after making a big show of tearing up the contracts my lawyer had sent them, saying the gym was mine and they weren’t going to sign anything. They were gone, but I was pretty sure someone had stayed behind to sit outside my hospital room door.
I was finally alone, talking to a tape recorder that was easily as old as I was, telling my story in hopes I would figure out an ending that wouldn’t devastate the people I love.