The Five People You Meet in Heaven

  Eddie felt his back straighten.

  “SACRIFICE,” THE CAPTAIN said. “You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.

  “You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.

  “A man goes to war…”

  He stopped for a moment and looked off into the cloudy gray sky.

  “Rabozzo didn’t die for nothing, you know. He sacrificed for his country, and his family knew it, and his kid brother went on to be a good soldier and a great man because he was inspired by it.

  “I didn’t die for nothing, either. That night, we might have all driven over that land mine. Then the four of us would have been gone.”

  Eddie shook his head. “But you…” He lowered his voice. “You lost your life.”

  The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth. “That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”

  The Captain walked over to the helmet, rifle, and dog tags, the symbolic grave, still stuck in the ground. He placed the helmet and tags under one arm, then plucked the rifle from the mud and threw it like a javelin. It never landed. Just soared into the sky and disappeared. The Captain turned.

  “I shot you, all right,” he said, “and you lost something, but you gained something as well. You just don’t know it yet. I gained something, too.”

  “What?”

  “I got to keep my promise. I didn’t leave you behind.”

  He held out his palm.

  “Forgive me about the leg?”

  Eddie thought for a moment. He thought about the bitterness after his wounding, his anger at all he had given up. Then he thought of what the Captain had given up and he felt ashamed. He offered his hand. The Captain gripped it tightly.

  “That’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

  Suddenly, the thick vines dropped off the banyan branches and melted with a hiss into the ground. New, healthy branches emerged in a yawning spread, covered in smooth, leathery leaves and pouches of figs. The Captain only glanced up, as if he’d been expecting it. Then, using his open palms, he wiped the remaining ash from his face.

  “Captain?” Eddie said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why here? You can pick anywhere to wait, right? That’s what the Blue Man said. So why this place?”

  The Captain smiled. “Because I died in battle. I was killed in these hills. I left the world having known almost nothing but war—war talk, war plans, a war family.

  “My wish was to see what the world looked like without a war. Before we started killing each other.”

  Eddie looked around. “But this is war.”

  “To you. But our eyes are different,” the Captain said. “What you see ain’t what I see.”

  He lifted a hand and the smoldering landscape transformed. The rubble melted, trees grew and spread, the ground turned from mud to lush, green grass. The murky clouds pulled apart like curtains, revealing a sapphire sky. A light, white mist fell in above the treetops, and a peach-colored sun hung brilliantly above the horizon, reflected in the sparkling oceans that now surrounded the island. It was pure, unspoiled, untouched beauty.

  Eddie looked up at his old commanding officer, whose face was clean and whose uniform was suddenly pressed.

  “This,” the Captain said, raising his arms, “is what I see.”

  He stood for a moment, taking it in.

  “By the way, I don’t smoke anymore. That was all in your eyes, too.” He chuckled. “Why would I smoke in heaven?”

  He began to walk off.

  “Wait,” Eddie yelled. “I gotta know something. My death. At the pier. Did I save that girl? I felt her hands, but I can’t remember—”

  The Captain turned and Eddie swallowed his words, embarrassed to even be asking, given the horrible way the Captain had died.

  “I just want to know, that’s all,” he mumbled.

  The Captain scratched behind his ear. He looked at Eddie sympathetically. “I can’t tell you, soldier.”

  Eddie dropped his head.

  “But someone can.”

  He tossed the helmet and tags. “Yours.”

  Eddie looked down. Inside the helmet flap was a crumpled photo of a woman that made his heart ache all over again. When he looked up, the Captain was gone.

  MONDAY, 7:30 A.M.

  The morning after the accident, Dominguez came to the shop early, skipping his routine of picking up a bagel and a soft drink for breakfast. The park was closed, but he came in anyhow, and he turned on the water at the sink. He ran his hands under the flow, thinking he would clean some of the ride parts. Then he shut off the water and abandoned the idea. It seemed twice as quiet as it had a minute ago.

  “What’s up?”

  Willie was at the shop door. He wore a green tank top and baggy jeans. He held a newspaper. The headline read “Amusement Park Tragedy.”

  “Hard time sleeping,” Dominguez said.

  “Yeah.” Willie slumped onto a metal stool. “Me, too.”

  He spun a half circle on the stool, looking blankly at the paper. “When you think they’ll open us up again?”

  Dominguez shrugged. “Ask the police.”

  They sat quietly for a while, shifting their postures as if taking turns. Dominguez sighed. Willie reached inside his shirt pocket, fishing for a stick of gum. It was Monday. It was morning. They were waiting for the old man to come in and get the workday started.

  The Third Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

  A SUDDEN WIND LIFTED EDDIE, AND HE spun like a pocket watch on the end of a chain. An explosion of smoke engulfed him, swallowing his body in a flume of colors. The sky seemed to pull in, until he could feel it touching his skin like a gathered blanket. Then it shot away and exploded into jade. Stars appeared, millions of stars, like salt sprinkled across the greenish firmament.

  Eddie blinked. He was in the mountains now, but the most remarkable mountains, a range that went on forever, with snow-capped peaks, jagged rocks, and sheer purple slopes. In a flat between two crests was a large, black lake. A moon reflected brightly in its water.

  Down the ridge, Eddie noticed a flickering of colored light that changed rhythmically, every few seconds. He stepped in that direction—and realized he was ankle-deep in snow. He lifted his foot and shook it hard. The flakes fell loose, glistening with a golden sheen. When he touched them, they were neither cold nor wet.

  Where am I now? Eddie thought. Once again, he took stock of his body, pressing on his shoulders, his chest, his stomach. His arm muscles remained tight, but his midsection was looser, flabbier. He hesitated, then squeezed his left knee. It throbbed in pain and Eddie winced. He had hoped upon leaving the Captain that the wound would disappear. Instead, it seemed he was becoming the man he’d been on earth, scars and fat and all. Why would heaven make you relive your own decay?

  He followed the flickering lights down the narrow ridge. This landscape, stark and silent, was breathtaking, more like how he’d imagined heaven. He wondered, for a moment, if he had somehow finished, if the Captain had been wrong, if there were no more people to meet. He came through the snow around a rock ledge to the large clearing from which the lights originated. He blinked again—this time in disbelief.

  There, in the snowy field, sitting by itself, was a boxcar-shaped building with a stainless steel exterior and a red barrel roof. A sign above it blinked the word: “EAT.”

  A diner.

  Eddie had spent many hours in places like this. They all looked the same—high-backed booths, shiny countertops, a row of small-paned windows across the front, which, from the outside, made customers appear like riders in a railroad car. Eddie could make out figures through those windows now, people talkin
g and gesturing. He walked up the snowy steps to the double-paned door. He peered inside.

  An elderly couple was sitting to his right, eating pie; they took no notice of him. Other customers sat in swivel chairs at the marble counter or inside booths with their coats on hooks. They appeared to be from different decades: Eddie saw a woman with a 1930s high-collared dress and a long-haired young man with a 1960s peace sign tattooed on his arm. Many of the patrons appeared to have been wounded. A black man in a work shirt was missing an arm. A teenage girl had a deep gash across her face. None of them looked over when Eddie rapped on the window. He saw cooks wearing white paper hats, and plates of steaming food on the counter awaiting serving—food in the most succulent colors: deep red sauces, yellow butter creams. His eyes moved along to the last booth in the right-hand corner. He froze.

  What he saw, he could not have seen.

  “NO,” HE HEARD himself whisper. He turned back from the door. He drew deep breaths. His heart pounded. He spun around and looked again, then banged wildly on the windowpanes.

  “No!” Eddie yelled. “No! No!” He banged until he was sure the glass would break. “No!” He kept yelling until the word he wanted, a word he hadn’t spoken in decades, finally formed in his throat. He screamed that word then—he screamed it so loudly that his head throbbed. But the figure inside the booth remained hunched over, oblivious, one hand resting on the table, the other holding a cigar, never looking up, no matter how many times Eddie howled it, over and over again:

  “Dad! Dad! Dad!”

  Today Is Eddie’s Birthday

  In the dim and sterile hallway of the V.A. hospital, Eddie’s mother opens the white bakery box and rearranges the candles on the cake, making them even, 12 on one side, 12 on the other. The rest of them—Eddie’s father, Joe, Marguerite, Mickey Shea—stand around her, watching.

  “Does anyone have a match?” she whispers.

  They pat their pockets. Mickey fishes a pack from his jacket, dropping two loose cigarettes on the floor. Eddie’s mother lights the candles. An elevator pings down the hall. A gurney emerges.

  “All right then, let’s go,” she says.

  The small flames wiggle as they move together. The group enters Eddie’s room singing softly. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to—”

  The soldier in the next bed wakes up yelling, “WHAT THE HELL?” He realizes where he is and drops back down, embarrassed. The song, once interrupted, seems too heavy to lift again, and only Eddie’s mother’s voice, shaking in its solitude, is able to continue.

  “Happy birthday dear Ed-die…” then quickly, “happybirth-daytoyou.”

  Eddie props himself against a pillow. His burns are bandaged. His leg is in a long cast. There is a pair of crutches by the bed. He looks at these faces and he is consumed by a desire to run away.

  Joe clears his throat. “Well, hey, you look pretty good,” he says. The others quickly agree. Good. Yes. Very good.

  “Your mom got a cake,” Marguerite whispers.

  Eddie’s mother steps forward, as if it’s her turn. She presents the cardboard box.

  Eddie mumbles, “Thanks, Ma.”

  She looks around. “Now where should we put this?”

  Mickey grabs a chair. Joe clears a small tabletop. Marguerite moves Eddie’s crutches. Only his father does not shuffle for the sake of shuffling. He stands against the back wall, a jacket over his arm, staring at Eddie’s leg, encased in plaster from thigh to ankle.

  Eddie catches his eye. His father looks down and runs his hand over the windowsill. Eddie tightens every muscle in his body and attempts, by sheer will, to force the tears back into their ducts.

  ALL PARENTS DAMAGE their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

  The damage done by Eddie’s father was, at the beginning, the damage of neglect. As an infant, Eddie was rarely held by the man, and as a child, he was mostly grabbed by the arm, less with love than with annoyance. Eddie’s mother handed out the tenderness; his father was there for the discipline.

  On Saturdays, Eddie’s father took him to the pier. Eddie would leave the apartment with visions of carousels and globs of cotton candy, but after an hour or so, his father would find a familiar face and say, “Watch the kid for me, will ya?” Until his father returned, usually late in the afternoon, often drunk, Eddie stayed in the custody of an acrobat or an animal trainer.

  Still, for countless hours of his boardwalk youth, Eddie waited for his father’s attention, sitting on railings or squatting in his short pants atop tool chests in the repair shop. Often he’d say, “I can help, I can help!” but the only job entrusted him was crawling beneath the Ferris wheel in the morning, before the park opened, to collect the coins that had fallen from customers’ pockets the night before.

  At least four evenings a week, his father played cards. The table had money, bottles, cigarettes, and rules. Eddie’s rule was simple: Do not disturb. Once he tried to stand next to his father and look at his cards, but the old man put down his cigar and erupted like thunder, smacking Eddie’s face with the back of his hand. “Stop breathing on me,” he said. Eddie burst into tears and his mother pulled him to her waist, glaring at her husband. Eddie never got that close again.

  Other nights, when the cards went bad and the bottles had been emptied and his mother was already asleep, his father brought his thunder into Eddie and Joe’s bedroom. He raked through the meager toys, hurling them against the wall. Then he made his sons lie facedown on the mattress while he pulled off his belt and lashed their rear ends, screaming that they were wasting his money on junk. Eddie used to pray for his mother to wake up, but even the times she did, his father warned her to “stay out of it.” Seeing her in the hallway, clutching her robe, as helpless as he was, made it all even worse.

  The hands on Eddie’s childhood glass then were hard and calloused and red with anger, and he went through his younger years whacked, lashed, and beaten. This was the second damage done, the one after neglect. The damage of violence. It got so that Eddie could tell by the thump of the footsteps coming down the hall how hard he was going to get it.

  Through it all, despite it all, Eddie privately adored his old man, because sons will adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion. Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.

  AND ON OCCASION, as if to feed the weakest embers of a fire, Eddie’s father let a wrinkle of pride crack the veneer of his disinterest. At the baseball field by the 14th Avenue schoolyard, his father stood behind the fence, watching Eddie play. If Eddie smacked the ball to the outfield, his father nodded, and when he did, Eddie leaped around the bases. Other times, when Eddie came home from an alley fight, his father would notice his scraped knuckles or split lip. He would ask, “What happened to the other guy?” and Eddie would say he got him good. This, too, met with his father’s approval. When Eddie attacked the kids who were bothering his brother—“the hoodlums,” his mother called them—Joe was ashamed and hid in his room, but Eddie’s father said, “Never mind him. You’re the strong one. Be your brother’s keeper. Don’t let nobody touch him.”

  When Eddie started junior high, he mimicked his father’s summer schedule, rising before the sun, working at the park until nightfall. At first, he ran the simpler rides, maneuvering the brake levers, bringing train cars to a gentle stop. In later years, he worked in the repair shop. Eddie’s father would test him with maintenance problems. He’d hand him a broken steering wheel and say, “Fix it.” He’d point out a tangled chain and say, “Fix it.” He’d carry over a rusty fender and some sandpaper and say, “Fix it.” And every time, upon completion of the task, Eddie would walk the item back to his father and say, “It’s fixed.”

  At night they would gather at the dinner table, his
mother plump and sweating, cooking by the stove, his brother, Joe, talking away, his hair and skin smelling from seawater. Joe had become a good swimmer, and his summer work was at the Ruby Pier pool. Joe talked about all the people he saw there, their swimsuits, their money. Eddie’s father was not impressed. Once Eddie overheard him talking to his mother about Joe. “That one,” he said, “ain’t tough enough for anything but water.”

  Still, Eddie envied the way his brother looked in the evenings, so tanned and clean. Eddie’s fingernails, like his father’s, were stained with grease, and at the dinner table Eddie would flick them with his thumbnail, trying to get the dirt out. He caught his father watching him once and the old man grinned.

  “Shows you did a hard day’s work,” he said, and he held up his own dirty fingernails, before wrapping them around a glass of beer.

  By this point—already a strapping teenager—Eddie only nodded back. Unbeknownst to him, he had begun the ritual of semaphore with his father, forsaking words or physical affection. It was all to be done internally. You were just supposed to know it, that’s all. Denial of affection. The damage done.

  AND THEN, ONE night, the speaking stopped altogether. This was after the war, when Eddie had been released from the hospital and the cast had been removed from his leg and he had moved back into the family apartment on Beachwood Avenue. His father had been drinking at the nearby pub and he came home late to find Eddie asleep on the couch. The darkness of combat had left Eddie changed. He stayed indoors. He rarely spoke, even to Marguerite. He spent hours staring out the kitchen window, watching the carousel ride, rubbing his bad knee. His mother whispered that he “just needed time,” but his father grew more agitated each day. He didn’t understand depression. To him it was weakness.

  “Get up,” he yelled now, his words slurring, “and get a job.”

  Eddie stirred. His father yelled again.