The Song of David

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.