Jacob McDonald had lived a long life, and now he was going to die. There were no two ways about it. That thing that he only ever saw in an x-ray was killing him. He had coughed up so much blood in the last week that he didn’t think he had any more left. His wife was with him, his first and only love. Well, unless you counted that one golf swing in ’58. Courtney was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, as far as he knew anyway. They had met one rainy day on a street corner, just the way all good love stories start out. It was raining something fierce, as if all the rain droplets wanted to get down to the ground at once. She was stuck under a bus stop, having missed her bus and trying wait out the rain till she could find a better place to seek refuge. The bottom half of her blue dress was soaked, turning it from the color of the sky on a clear day to the color of an ocean below a moonless night. That and her dark red lips were the only colors he could remember from that day. He had seen her from across the street. He thought she hadn’t seen him walk into a nearby drug store and buy a new umbrella. I wouldn’t have mattered. When he walked over to her to offer her some assistance, the price tag dangled right in front of her eyes when he popped the umbrella open. They both stared at it for a few seconds. Jacob thought his face must have lit up to match her lips. That was the first time he heard her laugh. It was also the moment he fell in love.

And now she sat by his bed reading to him, dressed in a slightly larger blue dress, but just the exact same shade of lipstick. She would be what he would miss most about this life. He doubted that he would meet someone like her in his next one. He let a tear roll down his face, but he wiped it away before she could see. Letting her words roll past him, he let his gaze drift toward the window and the outside world. That’s when he saw it, saw him.

It was a man dressed in dress pants and an un-tucked white oxford shirt. He had his black shoes in his hands and his suit jacket over his arm as he walked down the outer perpendicular wall of the hospital building. For a minute Jacob just stared in shock until he realized that his wife was asking him a question.

“What”

“I said, what’s wrong, Jacob?”

Jacob hesitated to answer, “Outside, outside the window.” His hand shook as he raised it to point at the man now stopped and looking in his window. “A man, a man on the wall. He’s, he’s walk…”

Courtney looked over her reading glasses at him then turned to look out the window. “I don’t see anything.”

How could she not see it, he thought? He was standing right there looking at them. Was he smiling at them, at him? Why does he look so familiar?

The man seemed to let go with his feet and hang in the air for a second. Then he fell as if the ground pulled at him with an unseen rope. It surprised Jacob so much that he leapt up from his bed, frightening his wife in the process. He pressed his old face against the glass, craning to see the ground of what was the roof for another wing of the hospital. The man was nowhere to be seen.

Jacob rummaged through his old brain looking for the man’s face. He found it and with it a name.

Nathaniel…