Just After Sunset(103)

It wasn't cancer. It was kidney stones. My miracle was called extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy, which-in tandem with diuretic pills-dissolved them. I told my doctor I had never felt such pain in my life.

"I should think you never will again, even if you suffer a coronary," he said. "Women who've had stones compare the pain to that of childbirth. Difficult childbirth."

I was still in considerable pain but able to read a magazine while waiting for my follow-up doctor's appointment, and I considered this a great improvement. Someone sat down beside me and said, "Come on now, it's time."

I looked up. It wasn't the woman who had come into my father's sickroom; it was a man in a perfectly ordinary brown business suit. Nevertheless, I knew why he was there. It was never even a question. I also felt sure that if I didn't go with him, all the lithotripsy in the world would not help me.

We went out. The receptionist was away from her desk, so I didn't have to explain my sudden decampment. I'm not sure what I would have said, anyway. That my groin had suddenly stopped smoldering? That was absurd as well as untrue.

The man in the business suit looked a fit thirty-five: an ex-marine, maybe, who hadn't been able to part with the bristly gung-ho haircut. He didn't talk. We cut around the medical center where my doctor keeps his practice, then made our way down the block to Groves of Healing Hospital, me walking slightly bent over because of the pain, which no longer snarled but still glowered.

We went up to pedes and made our way down a corridor with Disney murals on the walls and "It's a Small World" drifting down from the overhead speakers. The ex-marine walked briskly, with his head up, as if he belonged there. I didn't, and I knew it. I had never felt so far from my home and the life I understood. If I had floated up to the ceiling like a child's Mylar GET WELL SOON balloon, I wouldn't have been surprised.

At the central nurses' station, the ex-marine squeezed my arm to make me stop until the two nurses there-one male, one female-were occupied. Then we crossed into another hall where a bald girl sitting in a wheelchair looked at us with starving eyes. She held out one hand.

"No," the ex-marine said, and simply led me on. But not before I got another look into those bright, dying eyes.

He took us into a room where a boy of about three was playing with blocks in a clear plastic tent that belled down over his bed. The boy stared at us with lively interest. He looked much healthier than the girl in the wheelchair-he had a full shock of red curls-but his skin was the color of lead, and when the ex-marine pushed me forward and then fell back into a position like parade rest, I sensed the kid was very ill indeed. When I unzipped the tent, taking no notice of the sign on the wall reading THIS IS A STERILE ENVIRONMENT, I thought his remaining time could have been measured in days rather than weeks.

I reached for him, registering my father's sick smell. The odor was a little lighter, but essentially the same. The kid lifted his own arms without reservation. When I kissed him on the corner of the mouth, he kissed back with a longing eagerness that suggested he hadn't been touched in a long time. At least not by something that didn't hurt.

No one came in to ask us what we were doing, or to threaten the police, as Ruth had that day in my father's sickroom. I zipped up the tent again. In the doorway I looked back and saw him sitting in his clear plastic tent with a block in his hands. He dropped it and waved to me-a child's wigwag, fingers opening and closing twice. I waved back the same way. He looked better already.

Once more the ex-marine squeezed my arm at the nurses' station, but this time we were spotted by the male nurse, a man with the kind of disapproving smile the head of my English department had raised to the level of art. He asked what we were doing there.

"Sorry, mate, wrong floor," the ex-marine said.

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.