The Five People You Meet in Heaven (5 page)

The man somehow regains control, and the Model A rolls on. The child has disappeared in the rearview mirror, but the man's body is still affected, thinking of how close he came to tragedy. The jolt of adrenaline has forced his heart to pump furiously and this heart is not a strong one and the pumping leaves him drained. The man feels dizzy and his head drops momentarily. His automobile nearly collides with another. The second driver honks, the man veers again, spinning the wheel, pushing on the brake pedal. He skids along an avenue then turns down an alley.

His vehicle rolls until it collides with the rear of a parked truck. There is a small crashing noise. The headlights shatter. The impact smacks the man into the steering wheel. His forehead bleeds. He steps from the Model A, sees the damage, then collapses onto the wet pavement. His arm throbs. His chest hurts. It is Sunday morning. The alley is empty.

He remains there, unnoticed, slumped against the side of the car. The blood from his coronary arteries no longer flows to his heart. An hour 26

passes. A policeman finds him. A medical examiner pronounces him dead. The cause of death is listed as "heart attack." There are no known relatives.

Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, at an arcade, with the little boy in tawny pants dropping pennies into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue, where one worker calls another worker over to marvel at the blue skin of the newest arrival.

"You see?" the Blue Man whispered, having finished the story from his point of view. "Little boy?"

Eddie felt a shiver.

"Oh no," he whispered.

Today Is Eddie's Birthday

He is eight years old. He sits on the edge of a plaid couch, his arms
crossed in anger. His mother is at his feet, tying his shoes. His father is
at the mirror, fixing his tie.

"
I don't WANT to go
,"
Eddie says
.

"
I know," his mother says, not looking up, "but we have to.

Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen
."

"But it's my BIRTHDAY."

Eddie looks mournfully across the room at the erector set in the
corner, a pile of toy metal girders and three small rubber wheels.

Eddie had been making a truck. He is good at putting things together.

He had hoped to show it to his friends at a birthday party. Instead,
they have to go someplace and get dressed up. It isn't fair, he thinks.

His brother, Joe, dressed in wool pants and a bow tie, enters with a
baseball glove on his left hand. He slaps it hard. He makes a face at
Eddie.

"
Those were my
old
shoes," Joe says. "My new ones are better
."

Eddie winces. He hates having to wear Joe's old things.

"Stop wiggling," his mother says.

"They HURT!" Eddie whines.

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"Enough!" his father yells. He glares at Eddie. Eddie goes silent.

At the cemetery, Eddie barely recognizes the pier people. The men
who normally wear gold lame and red turbans are now in black suits,
like his father. The women seem to be wearing the same black, dress;
some cover their faces in veils.

Eddie watches a man shovel dirt into a hole. The man says
something about ashes. Eddie holds his mothers hand and squints at
the sun. He is supposed to be sad, he knows, but he is secretly counting
numbers, starting from 1, hoping that by the time he reaches 1000 he
will have his birthday back.

The First Lesson

P
LEASE, MISTER . . ." EDDIE PLEADED. "I DIDN'T know. Believe me . . . God help me, I didn't know."

The Blue Man nodded. "You couldn't know. You were too young."

Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight.

"But now I gotta pay," he said.

"To pay?"

"For my sin. That's why I'm here, right? Justice?"

The Blue Man smiled. "No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you."

Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched.

"What?" he said.

"That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

Eddie shook his head. "We were throwing a
ball
. It was
my
stupidity, running out there like that. Why should
you
have to die on account of
me
? It ain't
fair
."

The Blue Man held out his hand. "Fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

28

He rolled his palm upward and suddenly they were standing in a cemetery behind a small group of mourners. A priest by the gravesite was reading from a Bible. Eddie could not see faces, only the backs of hats and dresses and suit coats.

"My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they
should
?

"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not.

We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

"It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners.

"And to funerals."

Eddie looked again at the gravesite gathering. He wondered if he'd had a funeral. He wondered if anyone came. He saw the priest reading from the Bible and the mourners lowering their heads. This was the day the Blue Man had been buried, all those years ago. Eddie had been there, a little boy, fidgeting through the ceremony, with no idea of the role he'd played in it.

"I still don't understand," Eddie whispered. "What good came from your death?"

"You lived," the Blue Man answered.

"But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger."

The Blue Man put his arms on Eddie's shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.

"Strangers," the Blue Man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know."

W
ITH THAT, THE Blue Man pulled Eddie close. Instantly, Eddie felt everything the Blue Man had felt in his life rushing into him, swimming 29

in his body, the loneliness, the shame, the nervousness, the heart attack.

It slid into Eddie like a drawer being closed.

"I am leaving," the Blue Man whispered in his ear. "This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet."

"Wait," Eddie said, pulling back. "Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?"

The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. "Then my death was a waste, just like my life."

"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

He stepped back toward the gravesite and smiled. And as he did, his skin turned the loveliest shade of caramel—smooth and unblemished. It was, Eddie thought, the most perfect skin he had ever seen.

"Wait!" Eddie yelled, but he was suddenly whisked into the air, away from the cemetery, soaring above the great gray ocean. Below him, he saw the rooftops of old Ruby Pier, the spires and turrets, the flags flapping in the breeze.

Then it was gone.

SUNDAY, 3 P.M.

Back at the pier, the crowd stood silently around the wreckage of Freddy's Free Fall. Old women touched their throats. Mothers pulled their children away. Several burly men in tank tops slid to the front, as if this were something they should handle, but once they got there, they, too, only looked on, helpless. The sun baked down, sharpening the shadows, causing them to shield their eyes as if they were saluting.

How bad is it
? people whispered. From the back of the crowd, Dominguez burst through, his face red, his maintenance shirt drenched in sweat. He saw the carnage.

"Ahh no, no, Eddie," he moaned, grabbing his head. Security workers arrived. They pushed people back. But then, they, too, fell into impotent postures, hands on their hips, waiting for the ambulances. It was as if all of them—the mothers, the fathers, the kids with their giant gulp soda

30

cups—were too stunned to look and too stunned to leave. Death was at their feet, as a carnival tune played over the park speakers.

How bad is it
? Sirens sounded. Men in uniforms arrived. Yellow tape was stretched around the area. The arcade booths pulled down their grates. The rides were closed indefinitely. Word spread across the beach of the bad thing that had happened, and by sunset, Ruby Pier was empty.

Today Is Eddie's Birthday

From his bedroom, even with the door closed, Eddie can smell the
beefsteak his mother is grilling with green peppers and sweet red
onions, a strong woody odor that he loves.

"Eddd-deee!" she yells from the kitchen. "Where are you? Everyone's
here!"

He rolls off the bed and puts away the comic book. He is 17 today,
too old for such things, but he still enjoys the idea—colorful heroes like
the Phantom, fighting the bad guys, saving the world. He has given his
collection to his school-aged cousins from Romania, who came to
America a few months earlier. Eddie's family met them at the docks
and they moved into the bedroom that Eddie shared with his brother,
Joe. The cousins cannot speak English, but they like comic books.

Anyhow, it gives Eddie an excuse to keep them around.

"There's the birthday boy," his mother crows when he rambles into
the room. He wears a button-down white shirt and a blue tie, which
pinches his muscular neck A grunt of hellos and raised beer glasses
come from the assembled visitors, family, friends, pier workers.

Eddie's father is playing cards in the corner, in a small cloud of cigar
smoke.

"Hey, Ma, guess what?" Joe yells out. "Eddie met a girl last night."

"
Oooh. Did he
?"

Eddie feels a rush of blood.

"Yeah. Said he's gonna marry her."

"Shut yer trap," Eddie says to Joe.

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Joe ignores him. "Yep, he came into the room all google-eyed, and he
said, 'Joe, I met the girl I'm gonna marry!' "

Eddie seethes. "I said shut it!"

"What's her name, Eddie?" someone asked.

"Does she go to church?"

Eddie goes to his brother and socks him in the arm.

"Owww!"

"Eddie!"

"I told you to shut it!"

Joe blurts out, "And he danced with her at the Stard—!"

Whack.

"Oww!"

"SHUT UP!"

"Eddie! Stop that!!"

Even the Romanian cousins look up now—fighting they
understand—as the two brothers grab each other and flail away,
clearing the couch, until Eddie's father puts down his cigar and yells,

"Knock it off, before I slap both of ya's."

The brothers separate, panting and glaring. Some older relatives
smile. One of the aunts whispers, "He must really like this girl."

Later, after the special steak has been eaten and the candles have
been blown out and most of the guests have gone home, Eddie's mother
turns on the radio. There is news about the war in Europe, and Eddie's
father says something about lumber and copper wire being hard to get
if things get worse. That will make maintenance of the park nearly
impossible.

"
Such awful news
,"
Eddie s mother says. "Not at a birthday
."

She turns the dial until the small box offers music, an orchestra
playing a swing melody, and she smiles and hums along. Then she
comes over to Eddie, who is slouched in his chair, picking at the last
pieces of cake. She removes her apron, folds it over a chair, and lifts
Eddie by the hands.

"Show me how you danced with your new friend," she says.

"Aw, Ma."

"
Come on
."

Eddie stands as if being led to his execution. His brother smirks. But
his mother, with her pretty, round face, keeps humming and stepping
back and forth, until Eddie falls into a dance step with her.