On the hospital steps a few minutes later, he said, "You can find your own way back, can't you?"
"Sure," I said, "but I'll have to make another appointment with my doctor."
"Yes, I suppose you will."
"Will I see you again?"
"Yes," he said, and walked off toward the hospital parking lot. He didn't look back.
He came again in 1987, while Ruth was at the market and I was cutting the grass and hoping the sick thud in the back of my head wasn't the beginning of a migraine but knowing it was. Since the little boy in Groves of Healing, I had been subject to them. But it was hardly ever him I thought of when I lay in the dark with a damp rag over my eyes. I thought of the little girl.
That time we went to see a woman at St. Jude's. When I kissed her, she put my hand on her left breast. It was the only one she had; the doctors had already taken the other.
"I love you, mister," she said, crying. I didn't know what to say. The ex-marine stood in the doorway, legs apart, hands behind his back. Parade rest.
Years passed before he came again: mid-December of 1997. That was the last time. By then my problem was arthritis, and it still is. The bristles standing up from the ex-marine's block of a head had gone mostly gray, and lines so deep they made him look a little like a ventriloquist's dummy had carved down from the corners of his lips. He took me out to an I-95 exit ramp north of town, where there had been a wreck. A panel truck had collided with a Ford Escort. The Escort was pretty well trashed. The paramedics had strapped the driver, a middle-aged man, to a stretcher. The cops were talking to the uniformed panel truck driver, who appeared shaken but unhurt.
The paramedics slammed the doors of the ambulance, and the ex-marine said, "Now. Shag your ass."
I shagged my elderly ass to the rear of the ambulance. The ex-marine hustled forward, pointing. "Yo! Yo! Is that one of those medical bracelets?"
The paramedics turned to look; one of them, and one of the cops who had been talking to the panel truck driver, went to where the ex-marine was pointing. I opened the rear door of the ambulance and crawled up to the Escort driver's head. At the same time I clutched my father's pocket watch, which I had carried since he gave it to me as a wedding present. Its delicate gold chain was attached to one of my belt loops. There was no time to be gentle; I tore it free.
The man on the stretcher stared up at me from the gloom, his broken neck bulging in a shiny skin-covered doorknob at the nape. "I can't move my f**king toes," he said.
I kissed him on the corner of the mouth (it was my special place, I guess) and was backing out when one of the paramedics grabbed me. "What in the hell do you think you're doing?" he asked.
I pointed to the watch, which now lay beside the stretcher. "That was in the grass. I thought he'd want it." By the time the Escort driver was able to tell someone that it wasn't his watch and the initials engraved on the inside of the lid meant nothing to him, we would be gone. "Did you get his medical bracelet?"
The paramedic looked disgusted. "It was just a piece of chrome," he said. "Get out of here." Then, not quite grudgingly: "Thanks. You could have kept that."
It was true. I loved that watch. But...spur of the moment. It was all I had.
"You've got blood on the back of your hand," the ex-marine said as we drove back to my house. We were in his car, a nondescript Chevrolet sedan. There was a dog leash lying on the backseat and a St. Christopher's medal hanging from the rearview mirror on a silver chain. "You ought to wash it off when you get home."
I said I would.
"You won't be seeing me again," he said.
I thought of what the black woman had said about Ayana then. I hadn't thought of it in years. "Are my dreams over?" I asked.
He looked puzzled, then shrugged. "Your work is," he said. "I sure don't know anything about your dreams."
I asked him three more questions before he dropped me off for the last time and disappeared from my life. I didn't expect him to answer them, but he did.
"Those people I kiss-do they go on to other people? Kiss their boo-boos and make them all gone?"
"Some do," he said. "That's how it works. Others can't." He shrugged. "Or won't." He shrugged again. "It comes to the same."
"Do you know a little girl named Ayana? Although I suppose she'd be a big girl now."
"She's dead."
My heart dropped, but not too far. I suppose I had known. I thought again of the little girl in the wheelchair.
"She kissed my father," I said. "She only touched me. So why was I the one?"
"Because you were," he said, and pulled into my driveway. "Here we are."