“You see?” the Blue Man whispered, having finished the story from his point of view. “Little boy?”
Eddie felt a shiver.
“Oh no,” he whispered.
He is eight years old. He sits on the edge of a plaid couch, his arms crossed in anger. His mother is at his feet, tying his shoes. His father is at the mirror, fixing his tie.
“I don’t WANT to go,” Eddie says.
“I know,” his mother says, not looking up, “but we have to. Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen.”
“But it’s my BIRTHDAY.”
Eddie looks mournfully across the room at the erector set in the corner, a pile of toy metal girders and three small rubber wheels. Eddie had been making a truck. He is good at putting things together. He had hoped to show it to his friends at a birthday party. Instead, they have to go someplace and get dressed up. It isn’t fair, he thinks.
His brother, Joe, dressed in wool pants and a bow tie, enters with a baseball glove on his left hand. He slaps it hard. He makes a face at Eddie.
“Those were my old shoes,” Joe says. “My new ones are better.”
Eddie winces. He hates having to wear Joe’s old things.
“Stop wiggling,” his mother says.
“They HURT!” Eddie whines.
“Enough!” his father yells. He glares at Eddie. Eddie goes silent.
At the cemetery, Eddie barely recognizes the pier people. The men who normally wear gold lame and red turbans are now in black suits, like his father. The women seem to be wearing the same black, dress; some cover their faces in veils.
Eddie watches a man shovel dirt into a hole. The man says something about ashes. Eddie holds his mothers hand and squints at the sun. He is supposed to be sad, he knows, but he is secretly counting numbers, starting from 1, hoping that by the time he reaches 1000 he will have his birthday back.
“Please, mister …” Eddie pleaded. “I didn’t know. Believe me … God help me, I didn’t know.”
The Blue Man nodded. “You couldn’t know. You were too young.”
Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight.
“But now I gotta pay,” he said.
“To pay?”
“For my sin. That’s why I’m here, right? Justice?”
The Blue Man smiled. “No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you.”
Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched.
“What?” he said.
“That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.”
Eddie shook his head. “We were throwing a ball. It was my stupidity, running out there like that. Why should you have to die on account of me? It ain’t fair.”
The Blue Man held out his hand. “Fairness,” he said, “does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.”
He rolled his palm upward and suddenly they were standing in a cemetery behind a small group of mourners. A priest by the gravesite was reading from a Bible. Eddie could not see faces, only the backs of hats and dresses and suit coats.
“My funeral,” the Blue Man said. “Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?
“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
“You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
“It is why we are drawn to babies …” He turned to the mourners. “And to funerals.”
Eddie looked again at the gravesite gathering. He wondered if he’d had a funeral. He wondered if anyone came. He saw the priest reading from the Bible and the mourners lowering their heads. This was the day the Blue Man had been buried, all those years ago. Eddie had been there, a little boy, fidgeting through the ceremony, with no idea of the role he’d played in it.
“I still don’t understand,” Eddie whispered. “What good came from your death?”
“You lived,” the Blue Man answered.
“But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.”
The Blue Man put his arms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”
With that, the Blue Man pulled Eddie close. Instantly, Eddie felt everything the Blue Man had felt in his life rushing into him, swimming in his body, the loneliness, the shame, the nervousness, the heart attack. It slid into Eddie like a drawer being closed.
“I am leaving,” the Blue Man whispered in his ear. “This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet.”
“Wait,” Eddie said, pulling back. “Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?”
The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. “Then my death was a waste, just like my life.”
“No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
He stepped back toward the gravesite and smiled. And as he did, his skin turned the loveliest shade of caramel—smooth and unblemished. It was, Eddie thought, the most perfect skin he had ever seen.
“Wait!” Eddie yelled, but he was suddenly whisked into the air, away from the cemetery, soaring above the great gray ocean. Below him, he saw the rooftops of old Ruby Pier, the spires and turrets, the flags flapping in the breeze.
Then it was gone.
Sunday, 3 P.M.
Back at the pier, the crowd stood silently around the wreckage of Freddy’s Free Fall. Old women touched their throats. Mothers pulled their children away. Several burly men in tank tops slid to the front, as if this were something they should handle, but once they got there, they, too, only looked on, helpless. The sun baked down, sharpening the shadows, causing them to shield their eyes as if they were saluting.