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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."

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."

The Blue Man nodded. "You couldn't know. You were too young."

Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched.

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."

"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."

"But now I gotta pay," he said.

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.

Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight.

"For my sin. That's why I'm here, right? Justice?"

"To pay?"

"What?" he said.

"Please, Mister…" Eddie pleaded. "I DIDN'T know. Believe me… God help me, I didn't know."

"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.

"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?

"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.

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.

"It is why we are drawn to babies…" He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals."

"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."

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.

"You lived," the Blue Man answered.

"But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger."

"I still don't understand," Eddie whispered. "What good came from your death?"

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."

"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."

"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.

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.

Then it was gone.