The Five People You Meet In Heaven

At 51, Eddie begins treating his birthdays like regular days after Marguerite’s death. On his 82nd birthday, he takes a taxi to the cemetery where he visits both his parents, his brother, Joe, and Marguerite.

The girl is five or six and tells him her name is Tala. Tala tells him that she was hiding in a building at the prisoner of war camp when Eddie and his fellow soldiers burned it down. She is the shadowy figure Eddie saw, the figure he was trying to rescue when the captain shot him. Eddie cries in regret. Tala becomes covered in burned flesh and asks Eddie to wash it away. He does. Tala tells him that he spent his life keeping children safe at Ruby Pier and that makes up for what he did to her. Eddie asks Tala about the girl he was trying to save the day he died. She tells him he pushed her out of the way, but the hands he felt in the final seconds of his life did not belong to Amy or Annie. They belonged to her. “I bring you to heaven. Keep you safe” (191).

Eddie leaves the river and is taken back to Ruby Pier where Marguerite is waiting for him on the Ferris wheel. This, he knows now, is “home” (194).

Ruby Pier reopens three days after Eddie’s death. Freddy’s Free Fall is reopened the following year under a new name and generates huge business. Eddie’s apartment is rented to someone new. Dominquez places the contents of Eddie’s locker in a box with other artifacts of Ruby Pier. Nicky, the boy whose key caused Eddie’s accident, brags that his great-grandmother is the woman the amusement park is named for. In heaven, five people wait for Amy or Annie to grow and die so that they can answer her questions, including Eddie who waits for her at the Stardust Band Shell.