The Five People You Meet in Heaven Page 12

  “You were angry with me.”

  “No.”

  Her eyes flashed.

  “OK. Yes.”

  “There was a reason to it all,” she said.

  “What reason?” he said. “How could there be a reason? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and you lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved.”

  She took his hands. “No, you didn’t. I was right here. And you loved me anyway.

  “Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.

  “Life has to end,” she said. “Love doesn’t.”

  Eddie thought about the years after he buried his wife. It was like looking over a fence. He was aware of another kind of life out there, even as he knew he would never be a part of it. “I never wanted anyone else,” he said quietly.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I was still in love with you.”

  “I know.” She nodded. “I felt it.”

  “Here?” he asked.

  “Even here,” she said, smiling. “That’s how strong lost love can be.”

  She stood and opened a door, and Eddie blinked as he entered behind her. It was a dimly lit room, with foldable chairs, and an accordion player sitting in the corner.

  “I was saving this one,” she said.

  She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness.

  “All that’s missing,” Marguerite whispered, taking his shoulder, “is the bingo cards.”

  He grinned and put a hand behind her waist.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “How come you look the way you looked the day I married you?”

  “I thought you’d like it that way.”

  He thought for a moment. “Can you change it?”

  “Change it?” She looked amused. “To what?”

  “To the end.”

  She lowered her arms. “I wasn’t so pretty at the end.”

  Eddie shook his head, as if to say not true.

  “Could you?”

  She took a moment, then came again into his arms. The accordion man played the familiar notes. She hummed in his ear and they began to move together, slowly, in a remembered rhythm that a husband shares only with his wife.

  You made me love you

  I didn ‘t want to do it

  I didn’t want to do it…

  You made me love you

  and all the time you knew it

  and all the time you knew it…

  When he moved his head back, she was 47 again, the web of lines beside her eyes, the thinner hair, the looser skin beneath her chin. She smiled and he smiled, and she was, to him, as beautiful as ever, and he closed his eyes and said for the first time what he’d been feeling from the moment he saw her again: “I don’t want to go on. I want to stay here.” When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she was gone, and so was everything else.

  Friday, 3:15 P.M.

  Dominguez pressed the elevator button and the door rumbled closed. An inner porthole lined up with an exterior porthole. The car jerked upward, and through the meshed glass he watched the lobby disappear.

  “I can’t believe this elevator still works,” Dominguez said. “It must be, like, from the last century.”

  The man beside him, an estate attorney, nodded slightly, feigning interest. He took off his hat—it was stuffy, and he was sweating—and watched the numbers light up on the brass panel. This was his third appointment of the day. One more, and he could go home to dinner.

  “Eddie didn’t have much,” Dominguez said.

  “Um-hmm,” the man said, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “Then it shouldn’t take long.”

  The elevator bounced to a stop and the door rumbled open and they turned toward 6B. The hallway still had the black-and-white checkered tile of the 1960s, and it smelled of someone’s cooking—garlic and fried potatoes. The superintendent had given them the key—along with a deadline, Next Wednesday. Have the place cleared out for a new tenant.

  “Wow …” Dominguez said, upon opening the door and entering the kitchen. “Pretty tidy for an old guy.” The sink was clean. The counters were wiped. Lord knows, he thought, his place was never this neat.

  “Financial papers?” the man asked. “Bank statements? Jewelry?”

  Dominguez thought of Eddie wearing jewelry and he almost laughed. He realized how much he missed the old man, how strange it was not having him at the pier, barking orders, watching everything like a mother hawk. They hadn’t even cleared out his locker. No one had the heart. They just left his stuff at the shop, where it was, as if he were coming back tomorrow.

  “I dunno. You check in that bedroom thing?”

  ‘‘The bureau?”

  “Yeah. You know, I only been here once myself. I really only knew Eddie through work.”

  Dominguez leaned over the table and glanced out the kitchen window. He saw the old carousel. He looked at his watch. Speaking of work, he thought to himself.

  The attorney opened the top drawer of the bedroom bureau. He pushed aside the pairs of socks, neatly rolled, one inside the other, and the underwear, white boxer shorts, stacked by the waistbands. Tucked beneath them was an old leather-bound box, a serious-looking thing. He flipped it open in hopes of a quick find. He frowned. Nothing important. No bank statements. No insurance policies. Just a black bow tie, a Chinese restaurant menu, an old deck of cards, a letter with an army medal, and a faded Polaroid of a man by a birthday cake, surrounded by children.

  “Hey,” Dominguez called from the other room, “is this what you need?”

  He emerged with a stack of envelopes taken from a kitchen drawer, some from a local bank, some from the Veterans Administration. The attorney fingered through them and, without looking up, said, “That’ll do.” He pulled out one bank statement and made a mental note of the balance. Then, as often happened with these visits, he silently congratulated himself on his own portfolio of stocks, bonds, and a vested retirement plan. It sure beat ending up like this poor slob, with little to show but a tidy kitchen.

  The Fifth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

  White. There was only white now. No earth, no sky, no horizon between the two. Only a pure and silent white, as noiseless as the deepest snowfall at the quietest sunrise.

  White was all Eddie saw. All he heard was his own labored breathing, followed by an echo of that breathing. He inhaled and heard a louder inhale. He exhaled, and it exhaled, too.

  Eddie squeezed his eyes shut. Silence is worse when you know it won’t be broken, and Eddie knew. His wife was gone. He wanted her desperately, one more minute, half a minute, five more seconds, but there was no way to reach or call or wave or even look at her picture. He felt as if he’d tumbled down steps and was crumpled at the bottom. His soul was vacant. He had no impulse. He hung limp and lifeless in the void, as if on a hook, as if all the fluids had been gored out of him. He might have hung there a day or a month. It might have been a century.

  Only at the arrival of a small but haunting noise did he stir, his eyelids lifting heavily. He had already been to four pockets of heaven, met four people, and while each had been mystifying upon arrival, he sensed that this was something altogether different.

  The tremor of noise came again, louder now, and Eddie, in a lifelong defense instinct, clenched his fists, only to find his right hand squeezing a cane. His forearms were pocked with liver spots. His fingernails were small and yellowish. His bare legs carried the reddish rash—shingles—that
had come during his final weeks on earth. He looked away from his hastening decay. In human accounting, his body was near its end.

  Now came the sound again, a high-pitched rolling of irregular shrieks and lulls. In life, Eddie had heard this sound in his nightmares, and he shuddered with the memory: the village, the fire, Smitty and this noise, this squealing cackle that, in the end, emerged from his own throat when he tried to speak.

  He clenched his teeth, as if that might make it stop, but it continued on, like an unheeded alarm, until Eddie yelled into the choking whiteness: “What is it? What do you want?”

  With that, the high-pitched noise moved to the background, layered atop a second noise, a loose, relentless rumble—the sound of a running river—and the whiteness shrank to a sun spot reflecting off shimmering waters. Ground appeared beneath Eddie’s feet. His cane touched something solid. He was high up on an embankment, where a breeze blew across his face and a mist brought his skin to a moist glaze. He looked down and saw, in the river, the source of those haunting screeches, and he was flushed with the relief of a man who finds, while gripping the baseball bat, that there is no intruder in his house. The sound, this screaming, whistling, thrumming screak, was merely the cacophony of children’s voices, thousands of them at play, splashing in the river and shrieking with innocent laughter.

  Was this what I’d been dreaming? he thought. All this time? Why? He studied the small bodies, some jumping, some wading, some carrying buckets while others rolled in the high grass. He noticed a certain calmness to it all, no rough-housing, which you usually saw with kids. He noticed something else. There were no adults. Not even teenagers. These were all small children, with skin the color of dark wood, seemingly monitoring themselves.

  And then Eddie’s eyes were drawn to a white boulder. A slender young girl stood upon it, apart from the others, facing his direction. She motioned with both her hands, waving him in. He hesitated. She smiled. She waved again and nodded, as if to say, Yes, you.

  Eddie lowered his cane to navigate the downward slope. He slipped, his bad knee buckling, his legs giving way. But before he hit the earth, he felt a sudden blast of wind at his back and he was whipped forward and straightened on his feet, and there he was, standing before the little girl as if he’d been there all the time.

  Today Is Eddie’s Birthday

  He is 51. A Saturday. It is his first birthday without Marguerite. He makes Sanka in a paper cup, and eats two pieces of toast with margarine. In the years after his wife’s accident, Eddie shooed away any birthday celebrations, saying, “Why do I gotta be reminded of that day for?” It was Marguerite who insisted. She made the cake. She invited friends. She always purchased one bag of taffy and tied it with a ribbon. “You can’t give away your birthday,” she would say.

  Now that she’s gone, Eddie tries. At work, he straps himself on a roller coaster curve, high and alone, like a mountain climber. At night, he watches television in the apartment. He goes to bed early. No cake. No guests. It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary, and the paleness of surrender becomes the color of Eddies days.

  He is 60, a Wednesday. He gets to the shop early. He opens a brown-bag lunch and rips a piece of bologna off a sandwich. He attaches it to a hook, then drops the twine down the fishing hole. He watches it float. Eventually, it disappears, swallowed by the sea.

  He is 68, a Saturday. He spreads his pills on the counter. The telephone rings, Joe, his brother, is calling from Florida. Joe wishes him happy birthday. Joe talks about his grandson. Joe talks about a condominium. Eddie says “uh-huh “ at least 50 times.

  He is 75, a Monday. He puts on his glasses and checks the maintenance reports. He notices someone missed a shift the night before and the Squiggly Wiggly Worm Adventure has not been brake-tested. He sighs and takes a placard from the wall—RIDE CLOSED TEMPORARILY FOR MAINTENANCE—then carries it across the boardwalk to the Wriggly Worm entrance, where he checks the brake panel himself.

  He is 82, a Tuesday. A taxi arrives at the park entrance. He slides inside the front seat, pulling his cane in behind him.

  “Most people like the back,” the driver says.

  “You mind?” Eddie asks.

  The driver shrugs. “Nah. I don’t mind.” Eddie looks straight ahead. He doesn’t say that it feels more like driving this way, and he hasn’t driven since they refused him a license two years ago.

  The taxi takes him to the cemetery. He visits his mother’s grave and his brother’s grave and he stands by his father’s grave for only a few moments. As usual, he saves his wife’s for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.

  The Last Lesson

  The little girl appeared to be asian, maybe five or six years old, with a beautiful cinnamon complexion, hair the color of a dark plum, a small flat nose, full lips that spread joyfully over her gapped teeth, and the most arresting eyes, as black as a seal’s hide, with a pinhead of white serving as a pupil. She smiled and flapped her hands excitedly until Eddie edged one step closer, whereupon she presented herself.

  “Tala,” she said, offering her name, her palms on her chest.

  “Tala,” Eddie repeated.

  She smiled as if a game had begun. She pointed to her embroidered blouse, loosely slung over her shoulders and wet with the river water.

  “Baro,” she said.

  “Baro.”

  She touched the woven red fabric that wrapped around her torso and legs. “Saya.”

  “Saya.”

  Then came her cloglike shoes—“bakya”—then the iridescent seashells by her feet—“capiz”—then a woven bamboo mat—“banig”—that was laid out before her. She motioned for Eddie to sit on the mat and she sat, too, her legs curled underneath her.

  None of the other children seemed to notice him. They splashed and rolled and collected stones from the river’s floor. Eddie watched one boy rub a stone over the body of another, down his back, under his arms.

  “Washing,” the girl said. “Like our inas used to do.”

  “Inas?” Eddie said.

  She studied Eddie’s face.

  “Mommies,” she said.

  Eddie had heard many children in his life, but in this one’s voice, he detected none of the normal hesitation toward adults. He wondered if she and the other children had chosen this riverbank heaven, or if, given their short memories, such a serene landscape had been chosen for them.

  She pointed to Eddie’s shirt pocket. He looked down. Pipe cleaners.

  “These?” he said. He pulled them out and twisted them together, as he had done in his days at the pier. She rose to her knees to examine the process. His hands shook. ‘‘You see? It’s a …” he finished the last twist “… dog.”

  She took it and smiled—a smile Eddie had seen a thousand times.

  “You like that?” he said.

  “You burn me,” she said.

  Eddie felt his jaw tighten.

  “What did you say?”

  “You burn me. You make me fire.”

  Her voice was flat, like a child reciting a lesson.

  “My ina say to wait inside the nipa. My ina say to hide.”

  Eddie lowered his voice, his words slow and deliberate.

  “What … were you hiding from, little girl?”

  She fingered the pipe-cleaner dog, then dipped it in the water.

  “Sundalong” she said.

  “Sundalong?”

  She looked up.

  “Soldier.”

  Eddie felt the word like a knife in his tongue. Images flashed through his head. Soldiers. Explosions. Morton. Smitty. The Captain. The flamethrowers.

  “Tala …” he whispered.

  “Tala,” she said, smiling at her own name.

  “Why are you here, in heaven?”

  She lowered the animal.

  “You burn me.
You make me fire.”

  Eddie felt a pounding behind his eyes. His head began to rush. His breathing quickened.

  “You were in the Philippines … the shadow … in that hut…”

  “The nipa. Ina say be safe there. Wait for her. Be safe. Then big noise. Big fire. You burn me.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Not safe.”

  Eddie swallowed. His hands trembled. He looked into her deep, black eyes and he tried to smile, as if it were a medicine the little girl needed. She smiled back, but this only made him fall apart. His face collapsed, and he buried it in his palms. His shoulders and lungs gave way. The darkness that had shadowed him all those years was revealing itself at last, it was real, flesh and blood, this child, this lovely child, he had killed her, burned her to death, the bad dreams he’d suffered, he’d deserved every one. He had seen something! That shadow in the flame! Death by his hand! By his own fiery hand! A flood of tears soaked through his fingers and his soul seemed to plummet.

  He wailed then, and a howl rose within him in a voice he had never heard before, a howl from the very belly of his being, a howl that rumbled the river water and shook the misty air of heaven. His body convulsed, and his head jerked wildly, until the howling gave way to prayerlike utterances, every word expelled in the breathless surge of confession: “I killed you, I KILLED YOU,” then a whispered “forgive me,” then, “FORGIVE ME, OH, GOD …” and finally, “What have I done … WHAT HAVE I DONE? …” He wept and he wept, until the weeping drained him to a shiver. Then he shook silently, swaying back and forth. He was kneeling on a mat before the little dark-haired girl, who played with her pipe-cleaner animal along the bank of the flowing river.

  At some point, when his anguish had quieted, Eddie felt a tapping on his shoulder. He looked up to see Tala holding out a stone.

  “You wash me,” she said. She stepped into the water and turned her back to Eddie. Then she pulled the embroidered baro over her head.

  He recoiled. Her skin was horribly burned. Her torso and narrow shoulders were black and charred and blistered. When she turned around, the beautiful, innocent face was covered in grotesque scars. Her lips drooped. Only one eye was open. Her hair was gone in patches of burned scalp, covered now by hard, mottled scabs.