Back to The Five People You Meet in Heaven
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
By Mitch Albom
Day 6 Audio |
HOW
DO YOU know all this?" Eddie asked Ruby.
She sighed. "Your father lacked the money for a hospital room of his own. So did
the man on the other side of the curtain."
She paused.
"Emile. My husband."
Eddie lifted his eyes. His head moved back as if he'd just solved a puzzle.
"Then you saw my father."
"Yes."
"And my mother."
"I heard her moaning on those lonely nights. We never spoke. But after your
father's death, I inquired about your family. When I learned where he had
worked, I felt a stinging pain, as if I had lost a loved one myself. The pier
that bore my name. I felt its cursed shadow, and I wished again that it had
never been built.
"That wish followed me to heaven, even as I waited for you."
Eddie looked confused.
"The diner?" she said. She pointed to the speck of light in the mountains. "It's
there because I wanted to return to my younger years, a simple but secure life.
And I wanted all those who had ever suffered at Ruby Pier—every accident, every
fire, every fight, slip, and fall—to be safe and secure. I wanted them all like
I wanted my Emile, warm, well fed, in the cradle of a welcoming place, far from
the sea."
Ruby stood, and Eddie stood, too. He could not stop thinking about his father's
death.
"I hated him," he mumbled.
The old woman nodded.
"He was hell on me as a kid. And he was worse when I got older."
Ruby stepped toward him. "Edward," she said softly. It was the first time she
had called him by name. "Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats
you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who
harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
"Forgive, Edward. Forgive. Do you remember the lightness you felt when you first
arrived in heaven?"
Eddie did. Where is my pain?
"That's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of
it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what
you did, and why you no longer need to feel it."
She touched his hand.
"You need to forgive your father."
EDDIE
THOUGHT ABOUT the years that followed his father's funeral. How he never
achieved anything, how he never went anywhere. For all that time, Eddie had
imagined a certain life—a "could have been" life— that would have been his if
not for his father's death and his mother's subsequent collapse. Over the years,
he glorified that imaginary life and held his father accountable for all of its
losses: the loss of freedom, the loss of career, the loss of hope. He never rose
above the dirty, tiresome work his father had left behind.
"When he died," Eddie said, "he took part of me with him. I was stuck after
that."
Ruby shook her head, "Your father is not the reason you never left the pier."
Eddie looked up. "Then what is?"
She patted her skirt. She adjusted her spectacles. She began to walk away.
"There are still two people for you to meet," she said.
Eddie tried to say "Wait," but a cold wind nearly ripped the voice from his
throat. Then everything went black.
RUBY
WAS GONE. He was back atop the mountain, outside the diner, standing in the
snow.
He stood there for a long time, alone in the silence, until he realized the old
woman was not coming back. Then he turned to the door and
slowly pulled it open. He heard clanking silverware and dishes being stacked. He
smelled freshly cooked food—breads and meats and sauces. The spirits of those
who had perished at the pier were all around, engaged with one another, eating
and drinking and talking.
Eddie moved haltingly, knowing what he was there to do. He turned to his right,
to the corner booth, to the ghost of his father, smoking a cigar. He felt a
shiver. He thought about the old man hanging out that hospital window, dying
alone in the middle of the night.
"Dad?" Eddie whispered.
His father could not hear him. Eddie drew closer. "Dad. I know what happened
now."
He felt a choke in his chest. He dropped to his knees alongside the booth. His
father was so close that Eddie could see the whiskers on his face and the frayed
end of his cigar. He saw the baggy lines beneath his tired eyes, the bent nose,
the bony knuckles and squared shoulders of a workingman. He looked at his own
arms and realized, in his earthly body, he was now older than his father. He had
outlived him in every way.
"I was angry with you, Dad. I hated you."
Eddie felt tears welling. He felt a shaking in his chest. Something was flushing
out of him.
"You beat me. You shut me out. I didn't understand. I still don't understand.
Why did you do it? Why?" He drew in long painful breaths. "I didn't know, OK? I
didn't know your life, what happened. I didn't know you. But you're my
father. I'll let it go now, all right? All right? Can we let it go?
His voice wobbled until it was high and wailing, not his own anymore. "OK? YOU
HEAR ME?" he screamed. Then softer: "You hear me? Dad?"
He leaned in close. He saw his father's dirty hands. He spoke the last familiar
words in a whisper.
"It's fixed."
Eddie pounded the table, then slumped to the floor. When he looked up, he saw
Ruby standing across the way, young and beautiful. She dipped her head, opened
the door, and lifted off into the jade sky.
THURSDAY, 11 A.M.
Who would pay for Eddie's funeral? He had no relatives. He'd left no
instructions. His body remained at the city morgue, as did his clothes and
personal effects, his maintenance shirt, his socks and shoes, his linen cap, his
wedding ring, his cigarettes and pipe cleaners, all awaiting claim.
In the end, Mr. Bullock, the park owner, footed the bill, using the money he
saved from Eddie's no-longer-cashable paycheck. The casket was a wooden box. The
church was chosen by location—the one nearest the pier—as most attendees had to
get back to work.
A few minutes before the service, the pastor asked Dominguez, wearing a navy
blue sport coat and his good black jeans, to step inside his office.
"Could you share some of the deceased's unique qualities?" the pastor asked. "I
understand you worked with him."
Dominguez swallowed. He was none too comfortable with clergymen. He hooked his
fingers together earnestly, as if giving the matter some thought, and spoke as
softly as he thought one should speak in such a situation.
"Eddie," he finally said, "really loved his wife."
He unhooked his fingers, then quickly added, "Of course, I never met her."
The Fourth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
EDDIE
BLINKED, AND FOUND HIMSELF IN A small, round room. The mountains were gone and
so was the jade sky. A low plaster ceiling just missed his head. The room was
brown—as plain as shipping wrap— and empty, save for a wooden stool and an oval
mirror on the wall.
Eddie stepped in front of the mirror. He cast no reflection. He saw only the
reverse of the room, which expanded suddenly to include a row of doors. Eddie
turned around.
Then he coughed.
The sound startled him, as if it came from someone else. He coughed again, a
hard, rumbling cough, as if things needed to be resettled in his chest.
When did this start? Eddie thought. He touched his skin, which had aged
since his time with Ruby. It felt thinner now, and drier. His midsection, which
during his time with the Captain had felt tight as pulled rubber, was loose with
flab, the droop of age.
There are still two people for you to meet,
Ruby had said. And then what? His lower back had a dull ache. His bad leg was
growing stiffer. He realized what was happening, it happened with each new stage
of heaven. He was rotting away.
HE
APPROACHED ONE of the doors and pushed it open. Suddenly, he was outside, in the
yard of a home he had never seen, in a land that he did not recognize, in the
midst of what appeared to be a wedding reception. Guests holding silver plates
filled the grassy lawn. At one end stood an archway covered in red flowers and
birch branches, and at the other end, next to Eddie, stood the door that he had
walked through. The bride, young and pretty, was in the center of the group,
removing a pin from her butter-colored hair. The groom was lanky. He wore a
black wedding coat and held up a sword, and at the hilt of the sword was a ring.
He lowered it toward the bride and guests cheered as she took it. Eddie heard
their voices, but the language was foreign. German? Swedish?
He coughed again. The group looked up. Every person seemed to smile, and the
smiling frightened Eddie. He backed quickly through the door from which he'd
entered, figuring to return to the round room. Instead, he was in the middle of
another wedding, indoors this time, in a large hall, where the people looked
Spanish and the bride wore orange blossoms in her hair. She was dancing from one
partner to the next, and each guest handed her a small sack of coins.
Eddie coughed again—he couldn't help it—and when several of the guests looked
up, he backed through the door and again entered a different wedding scene,
something African, Eddie guessed, where families poured wine onto the ground and
the couple held hands and
jumped over a broom. Then another pass through the door to a Chinese reception,
where firecrackers were lit before cheering attendees, then another doorway to
something else—maybe French?—where the couple drank together from a two-handled
cup.
How long does this go on? Eddie
thought. In each reception, there were no signs of how the people had gotten
there, no cars or buses, no wagons, no horses. Departure did not appear to be an
issue. The guests milled about, and Eddie was absorbed as one of them, smiled at
but never spoken to, much like the handful of weddings he had gone to on earth.
He preferred it that way. Weddings were, in Eddie's mind, too full of
embarrassing moments, like when couples were asked to join in a dance, or to
help lift the bride in a chair. His bad leg seemed to glow at those moments, and
he felt as if people could see it from across the room.
Because of that, Eddie avoided most receptions, and when he did go, he often
stood in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette, waiting for time to pass. For a
long stretch, there were no weddings to attend, anyhow. Only in the late years
of his life, when some of his teenaged pier workers had grown up and taken
spouses, did he find himself getting the faded suit out of the closet and
putting on the collared shirt that pinched his thick neck. By this point, his
once-fractured leg bones were spurred and deformed. Arthritis had invaded his
knee. He limped badly and was thus excused from all participatory moments, such
as dances or candle lightings. He was considered an "old man," alone,
unattached, and no one expected him to do much besides smile when the
photographer came to the table.
Here, now, in his maintenance clothes, he moved from one wedding to the next,
one reception to another, one language, one cake, and one type of music to
another language, another cake, and another type of music. The uniformity did
not surprise Eddie. He always figured a wedding here was not much different from
a wedding there. What he didn't get was what this had to do with him.
He pushed through the threshold one more time and found himself in what appeared
to be an Italian village. There were vineyards on the hillsides and farmhouses
of travertine stone. Many of the men had thick, black hair, combed back and wet,
and the women had dark eyes and sharp features. Eddie found a place against a
wall and watched the bride and groom cut a log in half with a two-handed rip
saw. Music played— flutists, violinists, guitarists—and guests began the
tarantella, dancing in a wild, twirling rhythm. Eddie took a few steps back. His
eyes wandered to the edge of the crowd.
A bridesmaid in a long lavender dress and a stitched straw hat moved through the
guests, with a basket of candy-covered almonds. From afar, she looked to be in
her 20s.
"Per l'amaro e il dolce?" she said, offering her sweets. "Per l'amaro
e il dolce? . . . Per l'amaro e il dolce? . . ."
At the sound of her voice, Eddie's whole body shook. He began to sweat.
Something told him to run, but something else froze his feet to the ground. She
came his way. Her eyes found him from beneath the hat brim, which was topped
with parchment flowers.
"Per l'amaro e il dolce?" she said, smiling, holding out the almonds.
"For the bitter and the sweet?"
Her dark hair fell over one eye and Eddie's heart nearly burst. His lips took a
moment to part, and the sound from the back of his throat took a moment to rise,
but they came together in the first letter of the only name that ever made him
feel this way. He dropped to his knees.
"Marguerite . . ." he whispered.
"For the bitter and the sweet," she said.
Today Is Eddie's Birthday
Eddie and his brother are sitting in the maintenance shop.
"This," Joe says proudly, holding up a drill "is the newest model."
Joe is wearing a checkered sport coat and black-and-white saddle shoes. Eddie
thinks his brother looks too fancy—and fancy means phony—but Joe is a salesman
for a hardware company now and Eddie has been wearing the same outft for years,
so what does he know?
"Yes, sir," Joe says, "and get this. It runs on that battery."
Eddie holds the battery between his fingers, a small thing called nickel
cadmium. Hard to believe.
"Start it up," Joe says, handing the drill over.
Eddie squeezes the trigger. It explodes in noise.
"Nice, huh?" Joe yells.
That morning, Joe had told Eddie his new salary. It was three times what Eddie
made. Then Joe had congratulated Eddie on his promotion: head of maintenance for
Ruby Pier, his father's old position. Eddie had wanted to answer, "If it's so
great, why don't you take it, and I'll take your job?" But he didn't. Eddie
never said anything he felt that deeply.
"Helloo? Anybody in here?"
Marguerite is at the door, holding a reel of orange tickets. Eddie's eyes go, as
always, to her face, her olive skin, her dark coffee eyes. She has taken a job
in the ticket booths this summer and she wears the official Ruby Pier uniform: a
white shirt, a red vest, black stirrup pants, a red beret, and her name on a pin
below her collarbone. The sight of it makes Eddie angry—especially in front of
his hotshot brother.
"Show her the drill," Joe says. He turns to Marguerite. "Its battery operated."
Eddie squeezes. Marguerite grabs her ears.
"It's louder than your snoring," she says.
"Whoa-ho!" Joe yells, laughing. "Whoa-ho! She got you!"
Eddie looks down sheepishly, then sees bis wife smiling.
"Can you come outside?" she says.
Eddie waves the drill. "I'm working here."
"Just for a minute, OK?"
Eddie stands up slowly, then follows her out the door. The sun hits his face.
"HAP-PY BIRTH-DAY, MR. ED-DIE!" a group of children scream in unison.
"Well, I'll be," Eddie says.
Marguerite yells, "OK, kids, put the candles on the cake!"
The children race to a vanilla sheet cake sitting on a nearby folding table.
Marguerite leans toward Eddie and whispers, "I promised them you'd blow out all
thirty-eight at once."
Eddie snorts. He watches his wife organize the group. As always with Marguerite
and children, his mood is lifted by her easy connection to them and dampened by
her inability to bear them. One doctor said she was too nervous. Another said
she had waited too long, she should have had them by age 25. In time, they ran
out of money for doctors. It was what it was.
For nearly a year now, she has been talking about adoption. She went to the
library. She brought home papers. Eddie said they were too old. She said,
"What's too old to a child?"
Eddie said he'd think about it.
"All right," she yells now from the sheet cake. "Come on, Mr. Eddie! Blow them
out. Oh, wait, wait . . ." She fishes in a bag and pulls out a camera, a
complicated contraption with rods and tabs and a round flashbulb.
"Charlene let me use it. Its a Polaroid."
Marguerite lines up the picture, Eddie over the cake, the children squeezing in
around him, admiring the 38 little flames. One kid pokes Eddie and says, "Blow
them all out, OK?"
Eddie looks down. The frosting is a mess, full of countless little handprints.
"I will," Eddie says, but he is looking at his wife.
EDDIE
STARED AT the young Marguerite.
"It's not you," he said.
She lowered her almond basket. She smiled sadly. The tarantella was dancing
behind them and the sun was fading behind a ribbon of white clouds.
"It's not you," Eddie said again.
The dancers yelled, "Hooheyy!" They banged tambourines.
She offered her hand. Eddie reached for it quickly, instinctively, as if
grabbing for a falling object. Their fingers met and he had never felt such a
sensation, as if flesh were forming over his own flesh, soft and warm and almost
ticklish. She knelt down beside him.
"It's not you," he said.
"It is me," she whispered.
Hooheyy!
"It's not you, it's not you, it's not you," Eddie mumbled, as he dropped his
head onto her shoulder and, for the first time since his death, began to cry.
THEIR
OWN WEDDING took place Christmas Eve on the second floor of a dimly lit Chinese
restaurant called Sammy Hong's. The owner, Sammy, agreed to rent it for that
night, figuring he'd have little other business. Eddie took what cash he had
left from the army and spent it on the reception—roast chicken and Chinese
vegetables and port wine and a man with an accordion. The chairs for the
ceremony were needed for the dinner, so once the vows were taken, the waiters
asked the guests to rise, then carried the chairs downstairs to the tables. The
accordion man sat on a stool. Years later, Marguerite would joke that the only
thing missing from their wedding "were the bingo cards."
When the meal was finished and some small gifts were given, a final toast was
offered and the accordion man packed his case. Eddie and Marguerite left through
the front door. It was raining lightly, a chilly rain, but the bride and groom
walked home together, seeing as it was only a few blocks. Marguerite wore her
wedding dress beneath a thick pink sweater. Eddie wore his white suit coat, the
shirt pinching his neck. They held hands. They moved through pools of lamplight.
Everything around them seemed buttoned up tight.
PEOPLE
SAY THEY "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes
many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find
then is a certain love. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a
grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was
irreplaceable. Once she'd gone, he'd let the days go stale. He put his heart to
sleep.
Now, here she was again, as young as the day they were wed. "Walk with me," she
said.
Eddie tried to stand, but his bad knee buckled. She lifted him effortlessly.
"Your leg," she said, regarding the faded scar with a tender familiarity. Then
she looked up and touched the tufts of hair above his ears.
"It's white," she said, smiling.
Eddie couldn't get his tongue to move. He couldn't do much but stare. She was
exactly as he remembered—more beautiful, really, for his final memories of her
had been as an older, suffering woman. He stood
beside her, silent, until her dark eyes narrowed and her lips crept up
mischievously.
"Eddie." She almost giggled. "Have you forgotten so fast how I used to look?"
Eddie swallowed. "I never forgot that."
She touched his face lightly and the warmth spread through his body. She
motioned to the village and the dancing guests.
"All weddings," she said, happily. "That was my choice. A world of weddings,
behind every door. Oh, Eddie, it never changes, when the groom lifts the veil,
when the bride accepts the ring, the possibilities you see in their eyes, it's
the same around the world. They truly believe their love and their marriage is
going to break all the records."
She smiled. "Do you think we had that?"
Eddie didn't know how to answer.
"We had an accordion player," he said.
THEY
WALKED FROM the reception and up a gravel path. The music faded to a background
noise. Eddie wanted to tell her everything he had seen, everything that had
happened. He wanted to ask her about every little thing and every big thing,
too. He felt a churning inside him, a stop-start anxiety. He had no idea where
to begin.
"You did this, too?" he finally said. "You met five people?"
She nodded.
"A different five people," he said.
She nodded again.
"And they explained everything? And it made a difference?"
She smiled. "All the difference." She touched his chin. "And then I waited for
you."
He studied her eyes. Her smile. He wondered if her waiting had felt like his.
"How much do you know . . . about me? I mean, how much do you know since . . ."
He still had trouble saying it.
Today Is Eddie's Birthday
The racetrack is crowded with summer customers. The women wear straw sunhats and
the men smoke cigars. Eddie and Noel leave work early to play Eddie's birthday
number, 39, in the Daily Double. They sit on slatted fold-down seats. At their
feet are paper cups of beer, amidst a carpet of discarded tickets.
Earlier, Eddie won the first race of the day. He'd put half of those winnings on
the second race and won that as well, the first time such a thing had ever
happened to him. That gave him $209. After losing twice in smaller bets, he put
it all on a horse to win in the sixth, because, as he and Noel agreed, in
exuberant logic, he'd arrived with next to nothing, so what harm done if he went
home the same way?
"Just think, if you win," Noel says now, "you'll have all that dough for the
kid."
The bell rings. The horses are off. They bunch together on the far straightaway,
their colorful silks blurring with their bumpy movement. Eddie has No. 8, a
horse named Jersey Finch, which isn't a bad gamble, not at four to one, but what
Noel has just said about "the kid"—the one Eddie and Marguerite are planning to
adopt— flushes him with guilt. They could have used that money. Why did he do
things like this?
The crowd rises. The horses come down the stretch. Jersey Finch moves outside
and lengthens into full stride. The cheering mixes with the thundering hooves.
Noel hollers. Eddie squeezes his ticket. He is more nervous than he wants to be.
His skin goes bumpy. One horse pulls ahead of the pack.
Jersey Finch!
Now Eddie has nearly $800.
"I gotta call home," he says.
"You'll ruin it, "Noel says.
"What are you talking about?"
"You tell somebody, you ruin your luck."
"You're nuts."
"Don't do it."
"I'm calling her. It'll make her happy."
"It won't make her happy."
He limps to a pay phone and drops in a nickel. Marguerite answers. Eddie tells
her the news. Noel is right. She is not happy. She tells him to come home. He
tells her to stop telling him what to do.
"We have a baby coming," she scolds. "You can't keep behaving like this."
Eddie hangs up the phone with a heat behind his ears. He goes back to Noel, who
is eating peanuts at the railing.
"Let me guess, "Noel says.
They go to the window and pick another horse. Eddie takes the money from his
pocket. Half of him doesn't want it anymore and half of him wants twice as much,
so he can throw it on the bed when he gets home and tell his wife, "Here, buy
whatever you want, OK?"
Noel watches him push the bills through the opening. He raises his eyebrows.
"I know, I know," Eddie says.
What he does not know is that Marguerite, unable to call him back, has chosen to
drive to the track and find him. She feels badly about yelling, this being his
birthday, and she wants to apologize; she also wants him to stop. She knows from
evenings past that Noel will insist they stay until closing—Noel is like that.
And since the track is only ten minutes away, she grabs her handbag and drives
their secondhand Nash Rambler down Ocean Parkway. She turns right on Lester
Street. The sun is gone and the sky is in flux. Most of the cars are coming from
the other direction. She approaches the Lester Street overpass, which used to be
how customers reached the track, up the stairs, over the street and back down
the stairs again, until the track owners paid the city for a traffic light,
which left the overpass, for the most part, deserted.
But on this night, it is not deserted. It holds two teenagers who do not want to
be found, two 17-year-olds who, hours earlier, had been chased from a liquor
store after stealing five cartons of cigarettes and three pints of Old Harper's
whiskey. Now, having finished the alcohol and smoked many of the cigarettes,
they are bored with the evening, and they dangle their empty bottles over the
lip of the rusted railing.
"Dare me?" one says.
"Dare ya," says the other.
The first one lets the bottle drop and they duck behind the metal grate to
watch. It just misses a car and shatters onto the pavement.
"Whoooo," the second one yells. "Did you see that!"
"Drop yours now, chicken."
The second one stands, holds out his bottle, and chooses the sparse traffic of
the right-hand lane. He wiggles the bottle back and forth, trying to time the
drop to land between vehicles, as if this was some sort of art and he was some
sort of artist.
His fingers release. He almost smiles.
Forty feet below, Marguerite never thinks to look up, never thinks that anything
might be happening on that overpass, never thinks about anything besides getting
Eddie out of that racetrack while he still has some money left. She is wondering
what section of the grandstand to look in, even as the Old Harper's whiskey
bottle smashes her windshield into a spray of flying glass. Her car veers into
the concrete divider. Her body is tossed like a doll slamming against the door
and the dashboard and the steering wheel, lacerating her liver and breaking her
arm and thumping her head so hard she loses touch with the sounds of the
evening. She does not hear the screeching of cars. She does not hear the honking
of horns. She does not hear the retreat of rubber-soled sneakers, running down
the Lester Street overpass and off into the night.
LOVE,
LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But
sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must
nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.
The accident on Lester Street sent Marguerite to the hospital. She was confined
to bed rest for nearly six months. Her injured liver recovered eventually, but
the expense and the delay cost them the adoption. The child they were expecting
went to someone else. The unspoken blame for this never found a resting place—it
simply moved like a shadow from husband to wife. Marguerite went quiet for a
long time. Eddie lost himself in work. The shadow took a place at their table
and they ate in its presence, amid the lonely clanking of forks and plates. When
they spoke, they spoke of small things. The water of their love was hidden
beneath the roots. Eddie never bet the horses again. His visits with Noel
came to a gradual end, each of them unable to discuss much over breakfast that
didn't feel like an effort.
An amusement park in California introduced the first tubular steel tracks—they
twisted at severe angles unachievable with wood—and suddenly, roller coasters,
which had faded to near oblivion, were back in fashion. Mr. Bullock, the park
owner, had ordered a steel-track model for Ruby Pier, and Eddie oversaw the
construction. He barked at the installers, checking their every move. He didn't
trust anything this fast. Sixty-degree angles? He was sure someone would get
hurt. Anyhow, it gave him a distraction.
The Stardust Band Shell was torn down. So was the Zipper ride. And the Tunnel of
Love, which kids found too corny now. A few years later, a new boat ride called
a log flume was constructed, and, to Eddie's surprise, it was hugely popular.
The riders floated through troughs of water and dropped, at the end, into a
large splash pool. Eddie couldn't figure why people so loved getting wet, when
the ocean was 300 yards away. But he maintained it just the same, working
shoeless in the water, ensuring that the boats never loosened from the tracks.
In time, husband and wife began talking again, and one night, Eddie even spoke
about adopting. Marguerite rubbed her forehead and said, "We're too old now."
Eddie said, "What's too old to a child?"
The years passed. And while a child never came, their wound slowly healed, and
their companionship rose to fill the space they were saving for another. In the
mornings, she made him toast and coffee, and he dropped her at her cleaning job
then drove back to the pier. Sometimes, in the afternoons, she got off early and
walked the boardwalk with him, following his rounds, riding carousel horses or
yellow-painted clamshells as Eddie explained the rotors and cables and listened
for the engines' hum.
One July evening, they found themselves walking by the ocean, eating grape
popsicles, their bare feet sinking in the wet sand. They looked around and
realized they were the oldest people on the beach.
Marguerite said something about the bikini bathing suits the young girls were
wearing and how she would never have the nerve to wear such a thing. Eddie said
the girls were lucky, because if she did the men would not look at anyone else.
And even though by this point Marguerite was in her mid-40s and her hips had
thickened and a web of small lines had formed around her eyes, she thanked Eddie
gratefully and looked at his crooked nose and wide jaw. The waters of their love
fell again from above and soaked them as surely as the sea that gathered at
their feet.
THREE
YEARS LATER, she was breading chicken cutlets in the kitchen of their apartment,
the one they had kept all this time, long after Eddie's mother had died, because
Marguerite said it reminded her of when they were kids, and she liked to see the
old carousel out the window. Suddenly, without warning, the fingers of her right
hand stretched open uncontrollably. They moved backward. They would not close.
The cutlet slid from her palm. It fell into the sink. Her arm throbbed. Her
breathing quickened. She stared for a moment at this hand with the locked
fingers that appeared to belong to someone else, someone gripping a large,
invisible jar. Then everything went dizzy.
"Eddie?" she called, but by the time he arrived, she had passed out on the
floor.
IT
WAS, THEY would determine, a tumor on the brain, and her decline would be like
many others, treatments that made the disease seem mild, hair falling out in
patches, mornings spent with noisy radiation machines and evenings spent
vomiting in a hospital toilet.
In the final days, when cancer was ruled the victor, the doctors said only,
"Rest. Take it easy." When she asked questions, they nodded sympathetically, as
if their nods were medicine doled out with a dropper. She realized this was
protocol, their way of being nice while being helpless, and when one of them
suggested "getting your affairs in order," she asked to be released from the
hospital. She told more than asked.
Eddie helped her up the stairs and hung her coat as she looked around the
apartment. She wanted to cook but he made her sit, and he heated some water for
tea. He had purchased lamb chops the day before, and that night he bumbled
through a dinner with several invited friends and coworkers, most of whom
greeted Marguerite and her sallow complexion with sentences like, "Well, look
who's back!" as if this were a homecoming and not a farewell party.
They ate mashed potatoes from a CorningWare dish and had butterscotch brownies
for dessert, and when Marguerite finished a second glass of wine, Eddie took the
bottle and poured her a third.
Two days later, she awoke with a scream. He drove her to the hospital in the
predawn silence. They spoke in short sentences, what doctor might be on, who
Eddie should call. And even though she was sitting in the seat next to him,
Eddie felt her in everything, in the steering wheel, in the gas pedal, in the
blinking of his eye, in the clearing of his throat. Every move he made was about
hanging on to her.
She was 47.
"You have the card?" she asked him.
"The card . . ." he said blankly.
She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, and her voice was thinner when she
resumed speaking, as if that breath had cost her dearly.
"Insurance," she croaked.
"Yeah, yeah," he said quickly. "I got the card."
They parked in the lot and Eddie shut the engine. It was suddenly too still and
too quiet. He heard every tiny sound, the squeak of his body on the leather
seat, the ca-cunk of the door handle, the rush of outside air, his feet
on the pavement, the jangle of his keys.
He opened her door and helped her get out. Her shoulders were scrunched up near
her jaws, like a freezing child. Her hair blew across her face. She sniffed and
lifted her eyes to the horizon. She motioned to Eddie and nodded toward the
distant top of a big, white amusement ride, with red carts dangling like tree
ornaments.
"You can see it from here," she said.
"The Ferris wheel?" he said. She looked away.
Day Seven Text | The Five People You Meet in Heaven |
English I Stories | Evans Homepage |