The First Lesson

“Please, 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.”

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.”

With that, the Blue Man pulled Eddie close. Instantly, Eddie felt everything the Blue Man had felt in his life rushing into him, swimming 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 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.

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.