"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 rememberu"

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.

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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.

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The Third Person Eddie Meets in Heaven ASUDDEN WIND LIFTED EDDIE, AND HE spun like a pocket watch on the end of a chain. An explosion of smoke en!gulfed 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 ex!ploded 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 directionuand 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 dis!appear. 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 againuthis 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 sameuhigh-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 long!haired young man with a 1960s peace sign tattooed on his arm. Many of the patrons appeared to have been wounded. A black man in a work shirt was missing an arm. A teenage girl had a deep gash across her face. None of them looked over when Eddie rapped on the window. He saw cooks wearing white paper hats, and plates of steaming food on the counter awaiting servingufood 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 thenuhe 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!"

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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 themuEddie's father, Joe, Marguerite, Mickey Sheaustand 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.

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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 begin!ning, 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 dis!cipline.

On Saturdays, Eddie's father took him to the pier. Ed!die 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 after!noon, often drunk, Eddie stayed in the custody of an acro!bat or an animal trainer.

Still, for countless hours of his boardwalk youth, Ed!die 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 Ed!die'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 brotheru"the hoodlums," his mother called themuJoe 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 fa!ther'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 gen!tle stop. In later years, he worked in the repair shop. Ed!die'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 pointualready a strapping teenageruEddie 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 alto!gether. This was after the war, when Eddie had been re!leased 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 andu"

"ENOUGH!" Eddie yelled, surging to his feet, ignor!ing 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 back!ward 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 Ed!die 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 fa!ther 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 el!egant 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 familyu"

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

She smiled. "Because his spiritusafe and sounduis part of my eternity. But he is not really here. You are."

"Why does my father have to be safe foryou ?"

She paused.

"Come," she said.

SUDDENLY THEY WERE at the bottom of the mountain. The light from the diner was now just a speck, like a star that had fallen into a crevice.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" the old woman said. Eddie fol!lowed her eyes. There was something about her, as if he'd seen her photograph somewhere.

"Are you ... my third person?"

"I am at that," she said.

Eddie rubbed his head. Who was this woman ? At least with the Blue Man, at least with the Captain, he had some recollection of their place in his life. Why a stranger? Why now? Eddie had once hoped death would mean a reunion with those who went before him. He had attended so many funerals, polishing his black dress shoes, finding his hat, standing in a cemetery with the same despairing question:Why are they gone and I'm still here ? His mother. His brother. His aunts and uncles. His buddy Noel. Marguerite. "One day," the priest would say, "we will all be together in the Kingdom of Heaven."

Where were they, then, if this was heaven? Eddie stud!ied this strange older woman. He felt more alone than ever.

"Can I see Earth?" he whispered.

She shook her head no.

"Can I talk to God?"

"You can always do that."

He hesitated before asking the next question.

"Can I go back?"

She squinted. "Back?"

"Yeah, back," Eddie said. "To my life. To that last day. Is there something I can do? Can I promise to be good? Can I promise to go to church all the time? Something?"

"Why?" She seemed amused.

"Why?" Eddie repeated. He swiped at the snow that had no cold, with the bare hand that felt no moisture. "Why? Because this place don't make no sense to me. Be!cause I don't feel like no angel, if that's what I'm supposed to feel like. Because I don't feel like I got it all figured out. I can't even remember my own death. I can't remember the accident. All I remember are these two little handsuthis lit!tle girl I was trying to save, see? I was pulling her out of the way and I must've grabbed her hands and that's when I ..."

He shrugged.

"Died?" the old woman said, smiling. "Passed away? Moved on? Met your Maker?"

"Died," he said, exhaling. "And that's all I remember. Then you, the others, all this. Ain't you supposed to have peace when you die?"

"You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself."

"Nah," Eddie said, shaking his head. "Nah, you don't." He thought about telling her the agitation he'd felt every day since the war, the bad dreams, the inability to get excited about much of anything, the times he went to the docks alone and watched the fish pulled in by the wide rope nets, embarrassed because he saw himself in those helpless, flop!ping creatures, snared and beyond escape.

He didn't tell her that. Instead he said, "No offense, lady, but I don't even know you."

"But I know you," she said.

Eddie sighed.

"Oh yeah? How's that?"

"Well," she said, "if you have a moment."

SHE SAT DOWN then, although there was nothing to sit on. She simply rested on the air and crossed her legs, lady!like, keeping her spine straight. The long skirt folded neatly around her. A breeze blew, and Eddie caught the faint scent of perfume.

'As I mentioned, I was once a working girl. My job was serving food in a place called the Seahorse Grille. It was near the ocean where you grew up. Perhaps you remember it?"

She nodded toward the diner, and it all came back to Eddie. Of course. That place. He used to eat breakfast there. A greasy spoon, they called it. They'd torn it down years ago.

"You?" Eddie said, almost laughing. "You were a wait!ress at the Seahorse?"

"Indeed," she said, proudly. "I served dockworkers their coffee and longshoremen their crab cakes and bacon.

"I was an attractive girl in those years, I might add. I turned away many a proposal. My sisters would scold me. 'Who are you to be so choosy?' they would say. 'Find a man before it's too late.'

"Then one morning, the finest-looking gentleman I had ever seen walked through the door. He wore a chalk-stripe suit and a derby hat. His dark hair was neatly cut and his mustache covered a constant smile. He nodded when I served him and I tried not to stare. But when he spoke with his colleague, I could hear his heavy, confident laughter. Twice I caught him looking in my direction. When he paid his bill, he said his name was Emile and he asked if he might call on me. And I knew, right then, my sisters would no longer have to hound me for a decision.

"Our courtship was exhilarating, for Emile was a man of means. He took me places I had never been, bought me clothes I had never imagined, paid for meals I had never ex!perienced in my poor, sheltered life. Emile had earned his wealth quickly, from investments in lumber and steel. He was a spender, a risk takeruhe went over the boards when he got an idea. I suppose that is why he was drawn to a poor girl like me. He abhorred those who were born into wealth, and rather enjoyed doing things the 'sophisticated people' would never do.

"One of those things was visiting seaside resorts. He loved the attractions, the salty food, the gypsies and for!tune-tellers and weight guessers and diving girls. And we both loved the sea. One day, as we sat in the sand, the tide rolling gently to our feet, he asked for my hand in marriage.

"I was overjoyed. I told him yes and we heard the sounds of children playing in the ocean. Emile went over the boards again and swore that soon he would build a re!sort park just for me, to capture the happiness of this mo!mentuto stay eternally young."

The old woman smiled. "Emile kept his promise. A few years later, he made a deal with the railroad company, which was looking for a way to increase its riders on the weekend. That's how most amusement parks were built, you know."

Eddie nodded. He knew. Most people didn't. They thought amusement parks were constructed by elves, built with candy canes. In fact, they were simply business opportunities for railroad companies, who erected them at the final stops of routes, so commuters would have a reason to ride on weekends, Youknow where I work ? Eddie used to say. The end of the line. That's where I work.

"Emile," the old woman continued, "built the most wonderful place, a massive pier using timber and steel he already owned. Then came the magical attractionsuraces and rides and boat trips and tiny railways. There was a carousel im!ported from France and a Ferris wheel from one of the inter!national exhibitions in Germany. There were towers and spires and thousands of incandescent lights, so bright that at night, you could see the park from a ship's deck on the ocean.

"Emile hired hundreds of workers, municipal workers and carnival workers and foreign workers. He brought in an!imals and acrobats and clowns. The entrance was the last thing finished, and it was truly grand. Everyone said so. When it was complete, he took me there with a cloth blind!fold over my eyes. When he removed the blindfold, I saw it."

The old woman took a step back from Eddie. She looked at him curiously, as if she were disappointed.

"The entrance?" she said. "Don't you remember? Didn't you ever wonder about the name? Where you worked? Where your father worked?"

She touched her chest softly with her white-gloved fingers. Then she dipped, as if formally introducing herself.

"I," she said, "am Ruby."

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Today Is Eddie's Birthday He is 33. He wakes with a jolt, gasping for breath. His thick, black hair is matted with sweat. He blinks hard against the darkness, try!ing desperately to focus on his arm, his knuckles, anything to know that he is here, in the apartment over the bakery, and not back in the war, in the village, in the fire. That dream. Will it ever stop?

It is just before 4 A. M. No point in going back to sleep. He waits until his breathing subsides, then slowly rolls off the bed, trying not to wake his wife. He puts his right leg down first, out of habit, avoid!ing the inevitable stiffness of his left. Eddie begins every morning the same way. One step and one hobble.

In the bathroom, he checks his bloodshot eyes and splashes water on his face. It is always the same dream: Eddie wandering through the flames in the Philippines on his last night of war. The village huts are engulfed in fire, and there is a constant, high-pitched squealing noise. Something invisible hits Eddie's legs and he swats at it but misses, and then swats again and misses again. The flames grow more intense, roaring like an engine, and then Smitty appears, yelling for Eddie, yelling, "Come on! Come on!" Eddie tries to speak but when he opens his mouth, the high-pitched squeal emerges from his throat. Then something grabs his legs, pulling him under the muddy earth.

And then he wakes up. Sweating. Panting. Always the same. The worst part is not the sleeplessness. The worst part is the general darkness the dream leaves over him, a gray film that clouds the day. Even his happy moments feel encased, like holes jabbed in a hard sheet of ice.

He dresses quietly and goes down the stairs. The taxi is parked by the corner, its usual spot, and Eddie wipes the moisture from its windshield. He never speaks about the darkness to Marguerite. She strokes his hair and says, "What's wrong?" and he says, "Nothing, I'm just beat," and leaves it at that. How can he explain such sad!ness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he can!not explain it himself. All he knows is that something stepped in front of him, blocking his way, until in time he gave up on things, he gave up studying engineering and he gave up on the idea of trav!eling. He sat down in his life. And there he remained.

This night, when Eddie returns from work, he parks the taxi by the corner. He comes slowly up the stairs. From his apartment, he hears music, a familiar song.

"You made me love you I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. . . ."

He opens the door to see a cake on the table and a small white bag, tied with ribbon.

"Honey?" Marguerite yells from the bedroom. "Is that you?"

He lifts the white bag. Taffy. From the pier.

"Happy birthday to you... " Marguerite emerges, singing in her soft sweet voice. She looks beautiful, wearing the print dress Ed!die likes, her hair and lips done up. Eddie feels the need to inhale, as if undeserving of such a moment. He fights the darkness within him, "Leave me alone,"he tells it . "Let me feel this the way I should feel it."

Marguerite finishes the song and kisses him on the lips.

"Want to fight me for the taffy?" she whispers.

He moves to kiss her again. Someone raps on the door.

"Eddie! Are you in there? Eddie?"

Mr. Nathanson, the baker, lives in the ground-level apartment behind the store. He has a telephone. When Eddie opens the door, he is standing in the doorway, wearing a bathrobe. He looks concerned.

"Eddie,"he says. "Come down. There's a phone call. I think something happened to your father ."

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I AM RUBY."

It suddenly made sense to Eddie, why the woman looked familiar. He had seen a photograph, somewhere in the back of the repair shop, among the old manuals and paperwork from the park's initial ownership.

"The old entrance . . ." Eddie said.

She nodded in satisfaction. The original Ruby Pier en!trance had been something of a landmark, a giant arching structure based on a historic French temple, with fluted columns and a coved dome at the top. Just beneath that dome, under which all patrons would pass, was the painted face of a beautiful woman. This woman. Ruby.

"But that thing was destroyed a long time ago," Eddie said. "There was a big . . ."

He paused.

"Fire," the old woman said. "Yes. A very big fire." She dropped her chin, and her eyes looked down through her spectacles, as if she were reading from her lap.

"It was Independence Day, the Fourth of Julyua holi!day. Emile loved holidays. 'Good for business,' he'd say. If Independence Day went well, the entire summer might go well. So Emile arranged for fireworks. He brought in a marching band. He even hired extra workers, roustabouts mostly, just for that weekend.

"But something happened the night before the celebration. It was hot, even after the sun went down, and a few of the roustabouts chose to sleep outside, behind the work sheds. They lit a fire in a metal barrel to roast their food.

"As the night went on, there was drinking and carous!ing. The workers got ahold of some of the smaller fire!works. They set them off. The wind blew. The sparks flew. Everything in those days was made of lathe and tar. . . ."

She shook her head. "The rest happened quickly. The fire spread to the midway and the food stalls and on to the animal cages. The roustabouts ran off. By the time someone came to our home to wake us, Ruby Pier was in flames. From our window we saw the horrible orange blaze. We heard the horses' hooves and the steamer engines of the fire compa!nies. People were in the street.

"I begged Emile not to go, but that was fruitless. Of course he would go. He would go to the raging fire and he would try to salvage his years of work and he would lose himself in anger and fear and when the entrance caught fire, the entrance with my name and my picture, he lost all sense of where he was, too. He was trying to throw buckets of water when a column collapsed upon him."

She put her fingers together and raised them to her lips. "In the course of one night, our lives were changed forever. Risk taker that he was, Emile had acquired only mini!mal insurance on the pier. He lost his fortune. His splendid gift to me was gone.

"In desperation, he sold the charred grounds to a businessman from Pennsylvania for far less than it was worth. That businessman kept the name, Ruby Pier, and in time, he reopened the park. But it was not ours anymore.

"Emile's spirit was as broken as his body. It took three years before he could walk on his own. We moved away, to a place outside the city, a small flat, where our lives were spent modestly, me tending to my wounded husband and silently nurturing a single wish."

She stopped.

"What wish?" Eddie said.

"That he had never built that place."

THE OLD WOMAN sat in silence. Eddie studied the vast jade sky. He thought about how many times he had wished this same thing, that whoever had built Ruby Pier had done something else with his money.

"I'm sorry about your husband," Eddie said, mostly because he didn't know what else to say.

The old woman smiled. "Thank you, dear. But we lived many years beyond those flames. We raised three children. Emile was sickly, in and out of the hospital. He left me a widow in my fifties. You see this face, these wrinkles?" She turned her cheeks upward. "I earned every one of them."

Eddie frowned. "I don't understand. Did we ever . . . meet? Did you ever come to the pier?"

"No," she said. "I never wanted to see the pier again. My children went there, and their children and theirs. But not me. My idea of heaven was as far from the ocean as pos!sible, back in that busy diner, when my days were simple, when Emile was courting me."

Eddie rubbed his temples. When he breathed, mist emerged.

"So why am I here?" he said. "I mean, your story, the fire, it all happened before I was born."

"Things that happen before you are born still affect you," she said. "And people who come before your time af!fect you as well.

"We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much timeuwe often think they began with our arrival. That's not true."

She tapped her fingertips together. "If not for Emile, I would have no husband. If not for our marriage, there would be no pier. If there'd been no pier, you would not have ended up working there."

Eddie scratched his head. "So you're here to tell me about work?"

"No, dear," Ruby answered, her voice softening. "I'm here to tell you why your father died."

THE PHONE CALL was from Eddie's mother. His father had collapsed that afternoon, on the east end of the boardwalk near the Junior Rocket Ride. He had a raging fever.

"Eddie, I'm afraid," his mother said, her voice shaking. She told him of a night, earlier in the week, when his father had come home at dawn, soaking wet. His clothes were full of sand. He was missing a shoe. She said he smelled like the ocean. Eddie bet he smelled like liquor, too.

"He was coughing," his mother explained. "It just got worse. We should have called a doctor right away. . . ." She drifted in her words. He'd gone to work that day, she said, sick as he was, with his tool belt and his ball peen hammerusame as alwaysubut that night he'd refused to eat and in bed he'd hacked and wheezed and sweated through his un!dershirt. The next day was worse. And now, this afternoon, he'd collapsed.

"The doctor said it's pneumonia. Oh, I should have done something. I should havedone something. . . ."

"What wereyou supposed to do?" Eddie asked. He was mad that she took this on herself. It was his father's drunken fault.

Through the phone, he heard her crying.

EDDIE'S FATHER USED to say he'd spent so many years by the ocean, he breathed seawater. Now, away from that ocean, in the confines of a hospital bed, his body began to wither like a beached fish. Complications developed. Congestion built in his chest. His condition went from fair to stable and from stable to serious. Friends went from saying, "He'll be home in a day," to "He'll be home in a week." In his father's absence, Eddie helped out at the pier, working evenings after his taxi job, greasing the tracks, checking the brake pads, testing the levers, even repairing broken ride parts in the shop.

What he really was doing was protecting his father's job. The owners acknowledged his efforts, then paid him half of what his father earned. He gave the money to his mother, who went to the hospital every day and slept there most nights. Eddie and Marguerite cleaned her apartment and shopped for her food.

When Eddie was a teenager, if he ever complained or seemed bored with the pier, his father would snap, "What? This ain't good enough for you?" And later, when he'd suggested Eddie take a job there after high school, Eddie almost laughed, and his father again said, "What? This ain't good enough for you?" And before Eddie went to war, when he'd talked of marrying Marguerite and becoming an engineer, his father said, "What? This ain't good enough for you?"

And now, despite all that, here he was, at the pier, do!ing his father's labor.

Finally, one night, at his mother's urging, Eddie visited the hospital. He entered the room slowly. His father, who for years had refused to speak to Eddie, now lacked the strength to even try. He watched his son with heavy-lidded eyes. Eddie, after struggling to find even one sentence to say, did the only thing he could think of to do: He held up his hands and showed his father his grease-stained fingertips.

"Don't sweat it, kid," the other maintenance workers told him. "Your old man will pull through. He's the tough!est son of a gun we've ever seen."

PARENTS RARELY LET go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define themua mother's approval, a father's noduare covered by moments of their own accomplish!ments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the wa!ters of their lives.

When the news came that his father had diedu"slipped away," a nurse told him, as if he had gone out for milkuEddie felt the emptiest kind of anger, the kind that circles in its cage. Like most workingmen's sons, Eddie had envisioned for his father a heroic death to counter the commonness of his life. There was nothing heroic about a drunken stupor by the beach.

The next day, he went to his parents' apartment, en!tered their bedroom, and opened all the drawers, as if he might find a piece of his father inside. He rifled through coins, a tie pin, a small bottle of apple brandy, rubber bands, electric bills, pens, and a cigarette lighter with a mermaid on the side. Finally, he found a deck of playing cards. He put it in his pocket.

THE FUNERAL WAS small and brief. In the weeks that followed, Eddie's mother lived in a daze. She spoke to her husband as if he were still there. She yelled at him to turn down the radio. She cooked enough food for two. She fluffed pillows on both sides of the bed, even though only one side had been slept in.

One night, Eddie saw her stacking dishes on the countertop.

"Let me help you," he said.

"No, no," his mother answered, "your father will put them away."

Eddie put a hand on her shoulder.

"Ma," he said, softly. "Dad's gone."

"Gone where?"

The next day, Eddie went to the dispatcher and told him he was quitting. Two weeks later, he and Marguerite moved back into the building where Eddie had grown up, Beachwood Avenueuapartment 6Buwhere the hallways were narrow and the kitchen window viewed the carousel and where Eddie had accepted a job that would let him keep an eye on his mother, a position he had been groomed for summer after summer: a maintenance man at Ruby Pier. Eddie never said thisunot to his wife, not to his mother, not to anyoneubut he cursed his father for dying and for trapping him in the very life he'd been trying to es!cape; a life that, as he heard the old man laughing from the grave, apparently now was good enough for him.

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Today Is Eddie's Birthday He is 37. His breakfast is getting cold.

"You see any salt?" Eddie asks Noel.

Noel, chewing a mouthful of sausage, slides out from the booth, leans across another table, and grabs a salt shaker.

"Here, "he mumbles. "Happy birthday."

Eddie shakes it hard. "How tough is it to keep salt on the table?"

"What are you, the manager?" Noel says.

Eddie shrugs. The morning is already hot and thick with humid!ity. This is their routine: breakfast, once a week, Saturday mornings, before the park gets crazy. Noel works in the dry cleaning business. Ed!die helped him get the contract for Ruby Pier's maintenance uniforms.

"What'dya think of this good-lookin' guy?" Noel says. He has a copy ofLifemagazine open to a photo of a young political candi!date. "How can this guy run for president? He's a kid !"

Eddie shrugs. "He's about our age."

"No foolin'?" Noel says. He lifts an eyebrow. "I thought you had to be older to be president."

"We are older, "Eddie mumbles.

Noel closes the magazine. His voice drops. "Hey. You hear what happened at Brighton?"

Eddie nods. He sips his coffee. He'd heard. An amusement park A gondola ride. Something snapped. A mother and her son fell 60 feet to their death.

"You know anybody up there?"Noel asks.

Eddie puts his tongue between his teeth. Every now and then he hears these stories, an accident at a park somewhere, and he shud!ders as if a wasp just flew by his ear. Not a day passes that he doesn 't worry about it happening here, at Ruby Pier, under his watch.

"Nuh-uh," he says. "I don't know no one in Brighton."

He fixes his eyes out the window, as a crowd of beachgoers emerges from the train station. They carry towels, umbrellas, wicker baskets with sandwiches wrapped in paper. Some even have the newest thing: foldable chairs, made from lightweight aluminum.

An old man walks past in a panama hat, smoking a cigar.

"Lookit that guy, "Eddie says. "I promise you, he'll drop that cigar on the boardwalk."

"Yeah?" Noel says. "So?"

"It falls in the cracks, then it starts to burn. You can smell it. The chemical they put on the wood. It starts smoking right away. Yesterday I grabbed a kid, couldn't have been more than four years old, about to put a cigar butt in his mouth."

Noel makes a face. "And?"

Eddie turns aside. "And nothing. People should be more careful, that's all."

Noel shovels a forkful of sausage into bis mouth. "You're a bar!rel of laughs. You always this much fun on your birthday?"

Eddie doesn't answer. The old darkness has taken a seat along!side him. He is used to it by now, making room for it the way you make room for a commuter on a crowded bus.

He thinks about the maintenance load today. Broken mirror in the Fun House. New fenders for the bumper cars. Glue, he reminds himself, gotta order more glue. He thinks about those poor people in Brighton. He wonders who's in charge up there.

"What time you finish today?" Noel asks.

Eddie exhales. "It's gonna be busy. Summer. Saturday. You know."

Noel lifts an eyebrow. "We can make the track by six."

Eddie thinks about Marguerite. He always thinks about Mar!guerite when Noel mentions the horse track.

"Come on. It's your birthday," Noel says.

Eddie pokes a fork at his eggs, now too cold to bother with.

'"All right," he says.

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The Third Lesson "WAS THE PIER SO BAD?" THE OLD woman asked.

"It wasn't my choice," Eddie said, sighing. "My mother needed help. One thing led to another. "Years passed. I never left. I never lived nowhere else. Never made any real money. "You know how it isuyou get used to something, people rely on you, one day you wake up and you can't tell Tuesday from Thursday. You're doing the same boring stuff, you're a 'ride man,' just like . . ."

"Your father?"

Eddie said nothing.

"He was hard on you," the old woman said.

Eddie lowered his eyes. "Yeah. So?"

"Perhaps you were hard on him, too."

"I doubt it. You know the last time he talked to me?"

"The last time he tried to strike you."

Eddie shot her a look.

"And you know the last thing he said to me? 'Get a job.' Some father, huh?"

The old woman pursed her lips. "You began to work after that. You picked yourself up."

Eddie felt a rumbling of anger. "Look," he snapped. "You didn't know the guy."

"That's true." She rose. "But I know something you don't. And it is time to show you."

RUBY POINTED WITH the tip of her parasol and drew a circle in the snow. When Eddie looked into the circle, he felt as if his eyes were falling from their sockets and travel!ing on their own, down a hole and into another moment. The images sharpened. It was years ago, in the old apart!ment. He could see front and back, above and below.

This is what he saw:

He saw his mother, looking concerned, sitting at the kitchen table. He saw Mickey Shea, sitting across from her. Mickey looked awful. He was soaking wet, and he kept rubbing his hands over his forehead and down his nose. He began to sob. Eddie's mother brought him a glass of water. She motioned for him to wait, and walked to the bedroom and shut the door. She took off her shoes and her house-dress. She reached for a blouse and skirt.

Eddie could see all the rooms, but he could not hear what the two of them were saying, it was just blurred noise. He saw Mickey, in the kitchen, ignoring the glass of water, pulling a flask from his jacket and swigging from it. Then, slowly, he got up and staggered to the bedroom. He opened the door.

Eddie saw his mother, half dressed, turn in surprise. Mickey was wobbling. She pulled a robe around her. Mickey came closer. Her hand went out instinctively to block him. Mickey froze, just for an instant, then grabbed that hand and grabbed Eddie's mother and backed her into the wall, leaning against her, grabbing her waist. She squirmed, then yelled, and pushed on Mickey's chest while still gripping her robe. He was bigger and stronger, and he buried his unshaven face below her cheek, smearing tears on her neck.

Then the front door opened and Eddie's father stood there, wet from rain, a ball peen hammer hanging from his belt. He ran into the bedroom and saw Mickey grabbing his wife. Eddie's father hollered. He raised the ham!mer. Mickey put his hands over his head and charged to the door, knocking Eddie's father sideways. Eddie's mother was crying, her chest heaving, her face streamed with tears. Her husband grabbed her shoulders. He shook her violently. Her robe fell. They were both screaming. Then Eddie's father left the apartment, smashing a lamp with the hammer on his way out. He thumped down the steps and ran off into the rainy night.

"WHAT WAS THAT?" Eddie yelled in disbelief. "What the hell wasTHAT ?"

The old woman held her tongue. She stepped to the side of the snowy circle and drew another one. Eddie tried not to look down. He couldn't help it. He was falling again, be!coming eyes at a scene.

This is what he saw:

He saw a rainstorm at the farthest edge of Ruby Pieruthe "north point," they called itua narrow jetty that stretched far out into the ocean. The sky was a bluish black. The rain was falling in sheets. Mickey Shea came stumbling toward the edge of the jetty. He fell to the ground, his stomach heaving in and out. He lay there for a moment, face to the darkened sky, then rolled on his side, under the wood railing. He dropped into the sea.

Eddie's father appeared moments later, scrambling back and forth, the hammer still in his hand. He grabbed the railing, searching the waters. The wind blew the rain in sideways. His clothes were drenched and his leather tool belt was nearly black from the soaking. He saw something in the waves. He stopped, pulled off the belt, yanked off one shoe, tried to undo the other, gave up, squatted under the railing and jumped, splashing clumsily in the churning ocean.

Mickey was bobbing in the insistent roll of seawater, half unconscious, a foamy yellow fluid coming from his mouth. Eddie's father swam to him, yelling into the wind.

He grabbed Mickey. Mickey swung. Eddie's father swung back. The skies clapped with thunder as the rainwater pelted them. They grabbed and flailed in the violent chop.

Mickey coughed hard as Eddie's father grabbed his arm and hooked it over his shoulder. He went under, came up again, then braced his weight against Mickey's body, pointing them toward shore. He kicked. They moved forward. A wave swept them back. Then forward again. The ocean thumped and crashed, but Eddie's father remained wedged under Mickey's armpit, pumping his legs, blinking wildly to clear his vision.

They caught the crest of a wave and made sudden progress shoreward. Mickey moaned and gasped. Eddie's fa!ther spit out seawater. It seemed to take forever, the rain pop!ping, the white foam smacking their faces, the two men grunting, thrashing their arms. Finally, a high, curling wave lifted them up and dumped them onto the sand, and Eddie's father rolled out from under Mickey and was able to hook his hands under Mickey's arms and hold him from being swept into the surf. When the waves receded, he yanked Mickey forward with a final surge, then collapsed on the shore, his mouth open, filling with wet sand.

EDDIE'S VISION RETURNED to his body. He felt exhausted, spent, as if he had been in that ocean himself. His head was heavy. Everything he thought he'd known about his father, he didn't seem to know anymore.

"What was hedoing ?" Eddie whispered.

"Saving a friend," Ruby said.

Eddie glared at her. "Some friend. If I'd have known what he did, I'd have let his drunken hide drown."

"Your father thought about that, too," the old woman said. "He had chased after Mickey to hurt him, perhaps even to kill him. But in the end, he couldn't. He knew who Mickey was. He knew his shortcomings. He knew he drank. He knew his judgment faltered.

"But many years earlier, when your father was looking for work, it was Mickey who went to the pier owner and vouched for him. And when you were born, it was Mickey who lent your parents what little money he had, to help pay for the extra mouth to feed. Your father took old friendships seriouslyu"

"Hold on, lady," Eddie snapped. "Did you see what that bastard was doing with my mother?"

"I did," the old woman said sadly. "It was wrong. But things are not always what they seem.

"Mickey had been fired that afternoon. He'd slept through another shift, too drunk to wake up, and his em!ployers told him that was enough. He handled the news as he handled all bad news, by drinking more, and he was thick with whiskey by the time he reached your mother. He was begging for help. He wanted his job back. Your father was working late. Your mother was going to take Mickey to him.

"Mickey was coarse, but he was not evil. At that moment, he was lost, adrift, and what he did was an act of loneliness and desperation. He acted on impulse. A bad impulse. Your father acted on impulse, too, and while his first impulse was to kill, his final impulse was to keep a man alive."

She crossed her hands over the end of her parasol.

"That was how he took ill, of course. He lay there on the beach for hours, soaking and exhausted, before he had the strength to struggle home. Your father was no longer a young man. He was already in his fifties."

"Fifty-six," Eddie said blankly.

"Fifty-six," the old woman repeated. "His body had been weakened, the ocean had left him vulnerable, pneu!monia took hold of him, and in time, he died."

"Because of Mickey?" Eddie said.

"Because of loyalty," she said.

"People don't die because of loyalty."

"They don't?" She smiled. "Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?"

Eddie shrugged.

"Better," she said, "to be loyal to one another."

AFTER THAT, THE two of them remained in the snowy mountain valley for a long time. At least to Eddie it felt long. He wasn't sure how long things took anymore.

"What happened to Mickey Shea?" Eddie said.

"He died, alone, a few years later," the old woman said. "Drank his way to the grave. He never forgave himself for what happened."

"But my old man," Eddie said, rubbing his forehead. "He never said anything."

"He never spoke of that night again, not to your mother, not to anyone else. He was ashamed for her, for Mickey, for himself. In the hospital, he stopped speaking altogether. Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.

"One night his breathing slowed and his eyes closed and he could not be awakened. The doctors said he had fallen into a coma."

Eddie remembered that night. Another phone call to Mr. Nathanson. Another knock on his door.

"After that, your mother stayed by his bedside. Days and nights. She would moan to herself, softly, as if she were praying: 'I should have done something. I should have done something.'

"Finally, one night, at the doctors' urging, she went home to sleep. Early the next morning, a nurse found your father slumped halfway out the window."

"Wait," Eddie said. His eyes narrowed. "The window?"

Ruby nodded. "Sometime during the night, your father awakened. He rose from his bed, staggered across the room, and found the strength to raise the window sash. He called your mother's name with what little voice he had, and he called yours, too, and your brother, Joe. And he called for Mickey. At that moment, it seemed, his heart was spilling out, all the guilt and regret. Perhaps he felt the light of death approaching. Perhaps he only knew you were all out there somewhere, in the streets beneath his window. He bent over the ledge. The night was chilly. The wind and damp, in his state, were too much. He was dead before dawn.

"The nurses who found him dragged him back to his bed. They were frightened for their jobs, so they never breathed a word. The story was he died in his sleep."

Eddie fell back, stunned. He thought about that final image. His father, the tough old war horse, trying to crawl out a window. Where was he going? What was he thinking? Which was worse when left unexplained: a life, or a death?

HOW DO YOU know all this?" Eddie asked Ruby.

She sighed. "Your father lacked the money for a hos!pital 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 yousaw 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 sting!ing 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 re!turn to my younger years, a simple but secure life. And I wanted all those who had ever suffered at Ruby Pieruevery accident, every fire, every fight, slip, and falluto 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 light!ness 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 lifeua "could have been" lifeuthat 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, un!til 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 foodubreads 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 win!dow, 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'tknow 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.

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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 mainte!nance 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 locationuthe one nearest the pieruas 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."

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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 brownuas plain as shipping wrapuand 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 didthis 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 hap!pened 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 arch!way 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 for!eign. 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 againuhe couldn't help ituand 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 re!ception, where firecrackers were lit before cheering attendees, then another doorway to something elseumaybe French?u where the couple drank together from a two-handled cup.

How long does this go on? Eddiethought. 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 ap!pear 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 get!ting the faded suit out of the closet and putting on the col!lared 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 lan!guage, 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 withhim .

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 playeduflutists, violinists, guitaristsu 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.

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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 sad!dle shoes. Eddie thinks his brother looks too fancyuand fancy means phonyubut Joe is a salesman for a hardware company now and Ed!die 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 posi!tion. Eddie had wanted to answer, "If it's so great, why don'tyou take it, and I'll take your job?" But he didn't. Eddie never said any!thing he felt that deeply.

"Helloo? Anybody in here?"

Marguerite is at the door, holding a reel of orange tickets. Ed!die'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 angryuespecially 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 lified by her easy connec!tion to them and dampened by her inability to bear them. One doc!tor said she was too nervous. Another said she bad 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 chil!dren 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.

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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 tick!lish. She knelt down beside him.

"It's not you," he said.

"Itis me," she whispered.

Hooheyy!

"It's not you, it's not you, it's not you," Eddie mum!bled, 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 receptionuroast 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 hid!den by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is acertain 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 rememberedumore 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 hap!pened. 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.

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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,u 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 move!ment. 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"uthe one Eddie and Marguerite are planning to adoptu 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 an!swers. 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 behav!ing 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 closinguNoel 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 influx. 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.

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LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drench!ing couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nour!ish 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 ex!pecting went to someone else. The unspoken blame for this never found a resting placeuit 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 tracksuthey twisted at severe angles unachiev!able with wooduand 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 any!thing 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 Mar!guerite said it reminded her of when they were kids, and she liked to see the old carousel out the window. Suddenly, with!out warning, the fingers of her right hand stretched open un!controllably. 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 mo!ment at this hand with the locked fingers that appeared to be!long 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 ques!tions, they nodded sympathetically, as if their nods were med!icine 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 pur!chased lamb chops the day before, and that night he bum!bled 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, theca-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.

"Home."

BECAUSE HE HAD not slept in heaven, it was Eddie's perception that he had not spent more than a few hours with any of the people he'd met. Then again, without night or day, without sleeping or waking, without sunsets or high tides or meals or schedules, how did he know?

With Marguerite, he wanted only timeumore and more timeuand he was granted it, nighttimes and daytimes and nighttimes again. They walked through the doors of the as!sorted weddings and spoke of everything he wished to speak about. At a Swedish ceremony, Eddie told her about his brother, Joe, who had died 10 years earlier from a heart at!tack, just a month after purchasing a new condominium in Florida. At a Russian ceremony, she asked if he had kept the old apartment, and he said that he had, and she said she was glad. At an outdoor ceremony in a Lebanese village, he spoke about what had happened to him here in heaven, and she seemed to listen and know at the same time. He spoke of the Blue Man and his story, why some die when others live, and he spoke about the Captain and his tale of sacri!fice. When he spoke about his father, Marguerite recalled the many nights he had spent enraged at the man, con!founded by his silence. Eddie told her he had made things square, and her eyebrows lifted and her lips spread and Ed!die felt an old, warm feeling he had missed for years, the simple act of making his wife happy.

ONE NIGHT, EDDIE spoke about the changes at Ruby Pier, how the old rides had been torn down, how the pennywhistle music at the arcade was now blaring rock 'n' roll, how the roller coasters now had corkscrew twists and carts that hungdown from the tracks, how the "dark" rides, which once meant cowboy cutouts in glow paint, were full of video screens now, like watching television all the time.

He told her the new names. No more Dippers or Tum!ble Bugs. Everything was the Blizzard, the Mindbender, Top Gun, the Vortex.

"Sounds strange, don't it?" Eddie said.

"It sounds," she said, wistfully, "like someone else's summer."

Eddie realized that was precisely what he'd been feeling for years.

"I should have worked somewhere else," he told her. "I'm sorry I never got us out of there. My dad. My leg. I always felt like such a bum after the war."

He saw a sadness pass over her face.

"What happened?" she asked. "During that war?"

He had never quite told her. It was all understood. Soldiers, in his day, did what they had to do and didn't speak of it once they came home. He thought about the men he'd killed. He thought about the guards. He thought about the blood on his hands. He wondered if he'd ever be forgiven.

"I lost myself," he said.

"No," his wife said.

"Yes," he whispered, and she said nothing else.

AT TIMES, THERE in heaven, the two of them would lie down together. But they did not sleep. On earth, Marguerite said, when you fell asleep, you sometimes dreamed your heaven and those dreams helped to form it. But there was no reason for such dreams now.

Instead, Eddie held her shoulders and nuzzled in her hair and took long, deep breaths. At one point, he asked his wife if God knew he was here. She smiled and said, ''Of course," even when Eddie admitted that some of his life he'd spent hiding from God, and the rest of the time he thought he went unnoticed.

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The Fourth Lesson FINALLY, AFTER MANY TALKS, Marguerite walked Eddie through another door. They were back inside the small, round room. She sat on the stool and placed her fingers to!gether. She turned to the mirror, and Eddie noticed her re!flection. Hers, but not his.

"The bride waits here," she said, running her hands along her hair, taking in her image but seeming to drift away. "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a wonderful moment."

She turned to him.

"You had to live without love for many years, didn't you?"

Eddie said nothing.

"You felt that it was snatched away, that I left you too soon."

He lowered himself slowly. Her lavender dress was spread before him.

"Youdid leave too soon," he said.

"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 rea!son? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best per!son 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, ig!noring 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 mar!ried 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 be!neath 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.

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Friday, 3:15 P. M.

Dominguez pressed the elevator button and the door rum!bled 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 hatuit was stuffy, and he was sweatinguand 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 cookingugarlic and fried potatoes. The superin!tendent had given them the keyualong 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 Vet!erans 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 con!gratulated 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.

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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 ex!haled, 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 flu!ids 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 some!thing altogether different.

The tremor of noise came again, louder now, and Ed!die, 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 yel!lowish. His bare legs carried the reddish rashushinglesu 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 rumbleuthe sound of a running riveruand 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 ca!cophony 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 some!thing 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.

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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 birth!day," 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 ordi!nary, 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 at!taches 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 walluRIDE 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.

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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 Ed!die 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 shoesu"bakya"uthen the iridescent seashells by her feetu"capiz"uthen a woven bamboo matu"banig"uthat 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 ourinas 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 mem!ories, 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 smiledua 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 thenipa . My ina say to hide."

Eddie lowered his voice, his words slow and deliberate.

"What. . . were you hidingfrom , 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. . ."

"Thenipa . 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 dark!ness that had shadowed him all those years was revealing it!self 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. Hehad seen something! That shadow in the flame! Death by his hand!By his own fiery hand ! A flood of tears soaked through his fin!gers 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 utter!ances, every word expelled in the breathless surge of confes!sion: "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.

"You wash me," she said again, holding out the stone.

Eddie dragged himself into the river. He took the stone. His fingers trembled.

"I don't know how...." he mumbled, barely audible. "I never had children...."

She raised her charred hand and Eddie gripped it gently and slowly rubbed the stone along her forearm, until the scars began to loosen. He rubbed harder; they peeled away. He quickened his efforts until the singed flesh fell and the healthy flesh was visible. Then he turned the stone over and rubbed her bony back and tiny shoulders and the nape of her neck and finally her cheeks and her forehead and the skin behind her ears.

She leaned backward into him, resting her head on his collarbone, shutting her eyes as if falling into a nap. He traced gently around the lids. He did the same with her drooped lips, and the scabbed patches on her head, until the plum-colored hair emerged from the roots and the face that he had seen at first was before him again.

When she opened her eyes, their whites flashed out like beacons. "I am five," she whispered.

Eddie lowered the stone and shuddered in short, gasp!ing breaths. "Five . . . uh-huh . . . Five years old? . . ."

She shook her head no. She held up five fingers. Then she pushed them against Eddie's chest, as if to sayyour five. Your fifth person .

A warm breeze blew. A tear rolled down Eddie's face. Tala studied it the way a child studies a bug in the grass. Then she spoke to the space between them.

"Why sad?" she said.

"Why am I sad?" he whispered. "Here?"

She pointed down. "There."

Eddie sobbed, a final vacant sob, as if his chest were empty. He had surrendered all barriers; there was no grown!up-to-child talk anymore. He said what he always said, to Marguerite, to Ruby, to the Captain, to the Blue Man, and, more than anyone, to himself.

"I was sad because I didn't do anything with my life. I was nothing. I accomplished nothing. I was lost. I felt like I wasn't supposed to be there."

Tala plucked the pipe-cleaner dog from the water.

"Supposed to be there," she said.

"Where? At Ruby Pier?"

She nodded.

"Fixing rides? That was my existence?" He blew a deep breath. "Why?"

She tilted her head, as if it were obvious.

"Children," she said. "You keep them safe. You make good for me."

She wiggled the dog against his shirt.

"Is where you were supposed to be," she said, and then she touched his shirt patch with a small laugh and added two words, "Eddie Main-ten-ance."

EDDIE SLUMPED IN the rushing water. The stones of his stories were all around him now, beneath the surface, one touching another. He could feel his form melting, dissolving, and he sensed that he did not have long, that whatever came after the five people you meet in heaven, it was upon him now.

"Tala?" he whispered.

She looked up.

"The little girl at the pier? Do you know about her?"

Tala stared at her fingertips. She nodded yes.

"Did I save her? Did I pull her out of the way?"

Tala shook her head. "No pull."

Eddie shivered. His head dropped. So there it was. The end of his story.

"Push," Tala said.

He looked up. "Push?"

"Push her legs. No pull. You push. Big thing fall. You keep her safe."

Eddie shut his eyes in denial. "But I felt her hands," he said. "It's the only thing I remember. Icouldn'thave pushed her. I felt her hands."

Tala smiled and scooped up river water, then placed her small wet fingers in Eddie's adult grip. He knew right away they had been there before.

"Nother hands," she said. "Myhands. I bring you to heaven. Keep you safe."

WITH THAT, THE river rose quickly, engulfing Eddie's waist and chest and shoulders. Before he could take another breath, the noise of the children disappeared above him, and he was submerged in a strong but silent current. His grip was still entwined with Tala's, but he felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory.

He was nothing now, a leaf in the water, and she pulled him gently, through shadow and light, through shades of blue and ivory and lemon and black, and he realized all these colors, all along, were the emotions of his life. She drew him up through the breaking waves of a great gray ocean and he emerged in brilliant light above an almost unimaginable scene:

There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and childrenuso many childrenuchildren from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, because of the simple, mundane things Eddie had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, Eddie heard their voices, more voices than he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before. He was free of Tala's grasp now, and he floated up above the sand and above the boardwalk, above the tent tops and spires of the midway toward the peak of the big, white Ferris wheel, where a cart, gently swaying, held a woman in a yel!low dressu his wife, Marguerite, waiting with her arms ex!tended. He reached for her and he saw her smile and the voices melded into a single word from God:

Home.

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Epilogue THE PARK AT RUBY PIER REOPENED THREE days after the accident. The story of Eddie's death was in the newspapers for a week, and then other stories about other deaths took its place.

The ride called Freddy's Free Fall was closed for the season, but the next year it reopened with a new name, Daredevil Drop. Teenagers saw it as a badge of courage, and it drew many customers, and the owners were pleased.

Eddie's apartment, the one he had grown up in, was rented to someone new, who put leaded glass in the kitchen window, obscuring the view of the old carousel. Dominguez, who had agreed to take over Eddie's job, put Eddie's few possessions in a trunk at the maintenance shop, alongside memorabilia from Ruby Pier, Including photos of the original entrance.

Nicky, the young man whose key had cut the cable, made a new key when he got home, then sold his car four months later. He returned often to Ruby Pier, where he bragged to his friends that his great-grandmother was the woman for whom it was named.

Seasons came and seasons went. And when school let out and the days grew long, the crowds returned to the amusement park by the great gray oceanunot as large as those at the theme parks, but large enough. Come summer, the spirit turns, and the seashore beckons with a song of the waves, and people gather for carousels and Ferris wheels and sweet iced drinks and cotton candy.

Lines formed at Ruby Pierujust as a line formed someplace else: five people waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her question answereduwhy she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

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The author wishes to thank Vinnie Curci, of Amusements of America, and Dana Wyatt, director of operations for Pacific Park on the Sant Monica Pier. Their assistance in researching this book was invaluable , and their pride in protecting fun park customers is laudable. Also, thanks to Dr. David Collon, Of Henry Ford Hospital, for the information on war wounds. And Kerri Alexander, who handles, well, everything. My deepest appreciation to Bob Miller, Ellen Archer, Will Schwalbe, Leslie Wells, Jane Comins, Katie Long, Michael Burkin, and Phil Rose for their inspiring belief in me; to David Black, for what agent-author relationships should be; to Janine, who patiently heard this book read aloud, many times; to Rhoda, Ira, Cara, and Peter, with whom I shared my first Ferris wheel; and to my uncle, the real Eddie, who told me his stories long before I told my own.