Mitch Albom - The Five People You Meet in Heaven

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 sadness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he cannot 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 traveling. 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 Eddie 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.”

“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 entrance 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 July—a holiday. 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 carousing. The workers got ahold of some of the smaller fireworks. 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 companies. 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 minimal 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 possible, 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 affect 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 time—we 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.