Back to Homepage

Back to The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Back to English I Stories

Review of Foreshadowing YouTube video

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

By Mitch Albom

A FREED SOLDIER is often furious. The days and nights he lost, the torture and humiliation he suffered—it all demands a fierce revenge, a balancing of the accounts.

So when Morton, his arms full of stolen weapons, said to the others, "Let's burn it down," there was quick if not logical agreement. Inflated by their new sense of control, the men scattered with the enemy's firepower, Smitty to the entrance of the mine shaft, Morton and Eddie to the oil barrels. The Captain went in search of a transport vehicle.

"Five minutes, then back here!" he barked. "That bombing's gonna start soon and we need to be gone. Got it? Five minutes!"

Which was all it took to destroy what had been their home for nearly half a year. Smitty dropped the grenades down the mine shaft and ran. Eddie and Morton rolled two barrels into the hut complex, pried them open, then, one by one, fired the nozzles of their newly acquired flamethrowers and watched the huts ignite.

"Burn!" Morton yelled.

"Burn!" Eddie yelled.

The mine shaft exploded from below. Black smoke rose from the entrance. Smitty, his work done, ran toward the meeting point. Morton kicked his oil barrel into a hut and unleashed a rope-like burst of flame.

Eddie watched, sneered, then moved down the path to the final hut. It was larger, more like a barn, and he lifted his weapon. This was over, he said to himself. Over. All these weeks and months in the hands of those bastards, those subhuman guards with their bad teeth and bony faces and the dead hornets in their soup. He didn't know what would happen to them next, but it could not be any worse than what they had endured.

Eddie squeezed the trigger. Whoosh. The fire shot up quickly. The bamboo was dry, and within a minute the walls of the barn were melting in orange and yellow flames. Off in the distance, Eddie heard the rumble of an engine—the Captain, he hoped, had found something to escape in—and then, suddenly, from the skies, the first sounds of bombing, the noise they had been hearing every night. It was even closer now, and Eddie realized whoever it was would see the flames. They might be rescued. He might be going home! He turned to the burning barn and . . .

What was that?

He blinked.

What was that?

Something darted across the door opening. Eddie tried to focus. The heat was intense, and he shielded his eyes with his free hand. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he'd just seen a small figure running inside the fire.

"Hey!" Eddie yelled, stepping forward, lowering his weapon. "HEY!" The roof of the barn began to crumble, splashing sparks and flame. Eddie jumped back. His eyes watered. Maybe it was a shadow.

"EDDIE! NOW!"

Morton was up the path, waving for Eddie to come. Eddie's eyes were stinging. He was breathing hard. He pointed and yelled, "I think there's someone in there!"

Morton put a hand to his ear. "What?"

"Someone . . . in . . . there!"

Morton shook his head. He couldn't hear. Eddie turned and was almost certain he saw it again, there, crawling inside the burning barn, a child-size figure. It had been more than two years since Eddie had seen anything besides grown men, and the shadowy shape made him think suddenly of his small cousins back at the pier and the Li'l Folks Miniature Railway he used to run and the roller coasters and the kids on the beach and Marguerite and her picture and all that he'd shut from his mind for so many months.

HEY! COME OUT!" he yelled, dropping the flamethrower, moving even closer. "I WON'T SHOO—"

A hand grabbed his shoulder, yanking him backward. Eddie spun, his fist clenched. It was Morton, yelling, "EDDIE! We gotta go NOW!" Eddie shook his head. "No—no—wait—wait—wait, I think there's someone in th—"

"There's nobody in there! NOW!"

Eddie was desperate. He turned back to the barn. Morton grabbed him again. This time Eddie spun around and swung wildly, hitting him in the chest. Morton fell to his knees. Eddie's head was pounding. His face twisted in anger. He turned again to the flames, his eyes nearly shut. There. Was that it? Rolling behind a wall? There?

He stepped forward, convinced something innocent was being burned to death in front of him. Then the rest of the roof collapsed with a roar, casting sparks like electric dust that rained down on his head.

In that instant, the whole of the war came surging out of him like bile. He was sickened by the captivity and sickened by the murders, sickened by the blood and goo drying on his temples, sickened by the bombing and the burning and the futility of it all. At that moment he just wanted to salvage something, a piece of Rabozzo, a piece of himself, something, and he staggered into the flaming wreckage, madly convinced that there was a soul inside every black shadow. Planes roared overhead and shots from their guns rang out in drumbeats.

Eddie moved as if in a trance. He stepped past a burning puddle of oil, and his clothes caught fire from behind. A yellow flame moved up his calf and thigh. He raised his arms and hollered.

I'LL HELP YOU! COME OUT! I WON'T SHOO—"

A piercing pain ripped through Eddie's leg. He screamed a long, hard curse then crumbled to the ground. Blood was spewing below his knee. Plane engines roared. The skies lit in bluish flashes.

He lay there, bleeding and burning, his eyes shut against the searing heat, and for the first time in his life, he felt ready to die. Then someone yanked him backward, rolling him in the dirt, extinguishing the flames, and he was too stunned and weak to resist, he rolled like a sack of beans. Soon he was inside a transport vehicle and the others were around him, telling him to hang on, hang on. His back was burned and his knee had gone numb and he was getting dizzy and tired, so very tired.

THE CAPTAIN NODDED slowly, as he recalled those last moments.

"You remember anything about how you got out of there?" he asked.

"Not really," Eddie said.

"It took two days. You were in and out of consciousness. You lost a lot of blood."

"We made it though," Eddie said.

"Yeaaah." The Captain drew the word out and punctuated it with a sigh. "That bullet got you pretty good."

In truth, the bullet had never been fully removed. It had cut through several nerves and tendons and shattered against a bone, fracturing it vertically. Eddie had two surgeries. Neither cured the problem. The doctors said he'd be left with a limp, one likely to get worse with age as the misshapen bones deteriorated. "The best we can do," he was told.

Was it? Who could say? All Eddie knew was that he'd awoken in a medical unit and his life was never the same. His running was over. His dancing was over. Worse, for some reason, the way he used to feel about things was over, too. He withdrew. Things seemed silly or pointless. War had crawled inside of Eddie, in his leg and in his soul. He learned many things as a soldier. He came home a different man.

DID YOU KNOW," the Captain said, "that I come from three generations of military?"

Eddie shrugged.

"Yep. I knew how to fire a pistol when I was six. In the mornings, my father would inspect my bed, actually bounce a quarter on the sheets. At the dinner table it was always, 'Yes, sir,' and, 'No, sir.'

"Before I entered the service, all I did was take orders. Next thing I knew, I was giving them.

"Peacetime was one thing. Got a lot of wise-guy recruits. But then the war started and the new men flooded in—young men, like you—and they were all saluting me, wanting me to tell them what to do. I could see the fear in their eyes. They acted as if I knew something about war that was classified. They thought I could keep them alive. You did, too, didn't you?"

Eddie had to admit he did.

The Captain reached back and rubbed his neck. "I couldn't, of course. I took my orders, too. But if I couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.

"For me, that little idea was what I told you guys every day. No one gets left behind."

Eddie nodded. "That meant a lot," he said.

The Captain looked straight at him. "I hope so," he said.

He reached inside his breast pocket, took out another cigarette, and lit up.

"Why do you say that?" Eddie asked.

The Captain blew smoke, then motioned with the end of the cigarette toward Eddie's leg.

"Because I was the one," he said, "who shot you."

EDDIE LOOKED AT his leg, dangling over the tree branch. The surgery scars were back. So was the pain. He felt a welling of something inside him that he had not felt since before he died, in truth, that he had not felt in many years: a fierce, surging flood of anger, and a desire to hurt something. His eyes narrowed and he stared at the Captain, who stared back blankly, as if he knew what was coming. He let the cigarette fall from his fingers.

"Go ahead," he whispered.

Eddie screamed and lunged with a windmill swing, and the two men fell off the tree branch and tumbled through limbs and vines, wrestling and falling all the way down.

WHY? YOU BASTARD! You bastard! Not you! WHY?" They were grappling now on the muddy earth. Eddie straddled the Captain's chest, pummeling him with blows to the face. The Captain did not bleed. Eddie shook him by the collar and banged his skull against the mud. The Captain did not blink. Instead, he rolled from side to side with each punch, allowing Eddie his rage. Finally, with one arm, he grabbed Eddie and flipped him over.

"Because," he said calmly, his elbow across Eddie's chest, "we would have lost you in that fire. You would have died. And it wasn't your time."

Eddie panted hard. "My . . . time?"

The Captain continued. "You were obsessed with getting in there. You damn near knocked Morton out when he tried to stop you. We had a minute to get out and, damn your strength, you were too tough to fight."

Eddie felt a final surge of rage and grabbed the Captain by the collar. He pulled him close. He saw the teeth stained yellow by tobacco. "My . . . leggggg!" Eddie seethed. "My life!"

"I took your leg," the Captain said, quietly, "to save your life."

Eddie let go and fell back exhausted. His arms ached. His head was spinning. For so many years, he had been haunted by that one moment, that one mistake, when his whole life changed.

"There was nobody in that hut. What was I thinking? If only I didn't go in there . . ." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Why didn't I just die?"

"No one gets left behind, remember?" the Captain said. "What happened to you—I've seen it happen before. A soldier reaches a certain

point and then he can't go anymore. Sometimes it's in the middle of the night. A man'll just roll out of his tent and start walking, barefoot, half naked, like he's going home, like he lives just around the corner.

"Sometimes it's in the middle of a fight. Man'll drop his gun, and his eyes go blank. He's just done. Can't fight anymore. Usually he gets shot.

"Your case, it just so happened, you snapped in front of a fire about a minute before we were done with this place. I couldn't let you burn alive. I figured a leg wound would heal. We pulled you out of there, and the others got you to a medical unit."

Eddie's breathing smacked like a hammer in his chest. His head was smeared with mud and leaves. It took him a minute to realize the last thing the Captain had said."The others?" Eddie said. "What do you mean, 'the others'?"

The Captain rose. He brushed a twig from his leg.

"Did you ever see me again?" he asked.

Eddie had not. He had been airlifted to the military hospital, and eventually, because of his handicap, was discharged and flown home to America. He had heard, months later, that the Captain had not made it, but he figured it was some later combat with some other unit. A letter arrived eventually, with a medal inside, but Eddie put it away, unopened. The months after the war were dark and brooding, and he forgot details and had no interest in collecting them. In time, he changed his address.

"It's like I told you," the Captain said. "Tetanus? Yellow fever? All those shots? Just a big waste of my time."

He nodded in a direction over Eddie's shoulder, and Eddie turned to look.

WHAT HE SAW, suddenly, was no longer the barren hills but the night of their escape, the hazy moon in the sky, the planes coming in, the huts on fire. The Captain was driving the transport with Smitty, Morton, and Eddie inside. Eddie was across the backseat, burned, wounded, semiconscious, as Morton tied a tourniquet above his knee. The shelling was getting closer. The black sky lit up every few seconds, as if the sun were flickering on and off. The transport swerved as it reached the top of a hill, then stopped.

There was a gate, a makeshift thing of wood and wire, but because the ground dropped off sharply on both sides, they could not go around it.

The Captain grabbed a rifle and jumped out. He shot the lock and pushed the gate open. He motioned for Morton to take the wheel, then pointed to his eyes, signaling he would check the path ahead, which curled into a thicket of trees. He ran, as best he could in his bare feet, 50 yards beyond the turn in the road.

The path was clear. He waved to his men. A plane zoomed overhead and he lifted his eyes to see whose side it was. It was at that moment, while he was looking to the heavens, that a small click sounded beneath his right foot.

The land mine exploded instantly, like a burping flame from the earth's core. It blew the Captain 20 feet into the air and split him into pieces, one fiery lump of bone and gristle and a hundred chunks of charred flesh, some of which flew over the muddy earth and landed in the banyan trees.

The Second Lesson

AW, JESUS," EDDIE SAID, CLOSING HIS EYES, dropping his head backward. 'Aw, God. Aw, God! I had no idea, sir. It's sick. It's awful!"

The Captain nodded and looked away. The hills had returned to their barren state, the animal bones and the broken cart and the smoldering remains of the village. Eddie realized this was the Captain's burial ground. No funeral. No coffin. Just his shattered skeleton and the muddy earth.

"You've been waiting here all this time?" Eddie whispered.

"Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."

Eddie looked lost.

"I figure it's like in the Bible, the Adam and Eve deal?" the Captain said. "Adam's first night on earth? When he lays down to sleep? He thinks it's all over, right? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and he thinks he's leaving this world, right?

"Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday."

The Captain grinned. "The way I see it, that's what we're getting here, soldier. That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."

He took out his plastic cigarette pack and tapped it with his finger. "You followin' this? I was never all that hot at teaching."

Eddie watched the Captain closely. He had always thought of him as so much older. But now, with some of the coal ash rubbed from his face, Eddie noticed the scant lines on his skin and the full head of dark hair. He must have only been in his 30s.

"You been here since you died," Eddie said, "but that's twice as long as you lived."

The Captain nodded.

"I've been waitin' for you."

Eddie looked down.

"That's what the Blue Man said."

"Well, he was too. He was part of your life, part of why you lived and how you lived, part of the story you needed to know, but he told you and he's beyond here now, and in a short bit, I'm gonna be as well. So listen up. Because here's what you need to know from me." 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-parted 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 talking 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 longhaired 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, lets go," she says.

The small flames wiggle as they move together. The group enters Eddies 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-day to you."

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.

"Get up . . . and get a job!"

The old man was wobbling, but he came toward Eddie and pushed him. "Get up and get a job! Get up and get a job! Get up . . . and . . . GET A JOB!"

Eddie rose to his elbows.

"Get up and get a job! Get up and—"

"ENOUGH!" Eddie yelled, surging to his feet, ignoring the burst of pain in his knee. He glared at his father, his face just inches away. He could smell the bad breath of alcohol and cigarettes.

The old man glanced at Eddie's leg. His voice lowered to a growl. "See? You . . . ain't . . . so . . . hurt."

He reeled back to throw a punch, but Eddie moved on instinct and grabbed his father's arm mid-swing. The old man's eyes widened. This was the first time Eddie had ever defended himself, the first time he had ever done anything besides receive a beating as if he deserved it. His father looked at his own clenched fist, short of its mark, and his nostrils flared and his teeth gritted and he staggered backward and yanked his arm free. He stared at Eddie with the eyes of a man watching a train pull away.

He never spoke to his son again.

This was the final handprint on Eddie's glass. Silence. It haunted their remaining years. His father was silent when Eddie moved into his own apartment, silent when Eddie took a cab-driving job, silent at Eddie's wedding, silent when Eddie came to visit his mother. She begged and wept and beseeched her husband to change his mind, to let it go, but Eddie's father would only say to her, through a clenched jaw,

what he said to others who made the same request: "That boy raised a hand to me." And that was the end of the conversation.

All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done.

DON'T BE ANGRY," a woman's voice said. "He can't hear you."

Eddie jerked his head up. An old woman stood before him in the snow. Her face was gaunt, with sagging cheeks, rose-colored lipstick, and tightly pulled-back white hair, thin enough in parts to reveal the pink scalp beneath it. She wore wire-rimmed spectacles over narrow blue eyes.

Eddie could not recall her. Her clothes were before his time, a dress made of silk and chiffon, with a bib-like bodice stitched with white beads and topped with a velvet bow just below her neck. Her skirt had a rhinestone buckle and there were snaps and hooks up the side. She stood with elegant posture, holding a parasol with both hands. Eddie guessed she'd been rich.

"Not always rich," she said, grinning as if she'd heard him. "I was raised much like you were, in the back end of the city, forced to leave school when I was fourteen. I was a working girl. So were my sisters. We gave every nickel back to the family—"

Eddie interrupted. He didn't want another story. "Why can't my father hear me?" he demanded.

She smiled. "Because his spirit—safe and sound—is part of my eternity. But he is not really here. You are."

"Why does my father have to be safe for you?"

She paused.