Saving Elijah

can see God when he closes his eyes, maybe he doesn't need a church or a synagogue."
    Sam leaned over and kissed the top of my head. "You know, Dinah, that's why I love you."
    "Why?"
    "Because you say stuff like that. I admire you. The way your mind works. It's so ... I don't know, different. I really admire it, kiddo."
    I hugged him around his waist. "Well, thanks for the compliment, I think."
    "You're welcome, I think."
    It was one of the few conversations we'd had since it all began that we seemed like our old selves. An amazing feat, since I was already walking through my days as well as my nights in a constant state of panic.
    I took a deep breath and clasped my hands together. "Elijah is incredible, isn't he?" I said. If I could keep my focus on my daily concerns, and on Elijah, I could manage to sound pretty normal. "But Moore did say he still may have a seizure disorder."
    "I'd say it's hard to see how that's possible, given how well he's doing. And after all, they've got him on that medication."
    "You're so optimistic, Sam."
    "You're so pessimistic, Dinah."
    A familiar exchange.
    "I'm not pessimistic, I'm realistic. I think you assume these doctors know everything. Know what they're doing. Despite evidence to the contrary."
    "What evidence?"
    "I don't think they really know what happened to Elijah."
    He sighed. "If you're so concerned, we'll get another opinion."
    "Maybe that's a good idea. Maybe at one of the other big hospitals down in New York."
    "Tell you what. I'll ask Ed Larobina. He's really well connected, he'll know who besides Moore is good. And he's been really nice through this whole thing."
    "Okay."
    "Good. And promise me you'll consider seeing someone yourself. Okay?"
    "I'll consider it," I said.
    "I'll consider it." I had almost forgotten the demon was there, and now I turned and it was gone. Where was the sibilant voice coming from?
    Sam looked at the clock: nearly seven now. "I really have to get going, I have a nine o'clock meeting down on Wall Street." He grinned. "Last night was great."
    It was.
    He leaned over and kissed me again. "I've missed you. Hey, what do you say we do it again tonight?"
    The demon emerged beside me, under the quilt, sliding claws as cold as the fingers of death beneath my nightgown. It touched my body, my belly, my breasts, it felt like paper rubbing against paper, like rusted metal between my thighs. It had no weight, but I felt its fingers there on my skin. It did not attempt to possess me then, but pinned me there until Sam had gone into the bathroom.
    "Tonight you are mine," it cooed, and disappeared.

    *    *    *

    I had just gotten out of the shower when I heard a noise from the attic. I put on my robe and made my way through the hallway and up the creaky stairs.
    Elijah was sitting on the floor with Kate, she in her nightgown, he in his Big Bird pajamas, Tuddy between his legs. They were looking through one of the boxes of old pictures I kept up there, Elijah peering at them through his Coke-bottle glasses. Kate has a great sense of history; she loves to look through pictures. Most of the photos were rejects, the doubles and near-doubles, the ones of such poor quality or taste that they'd never make it into one of the albums. There were photos where my mother Charlotte looked a hundred and fifty years old (a serious affront to a woman who still plucks her eyebrows and dyes her hair red at the age of seventy); where Alex was blurry and the top of Sam's head was cut off; where Elijah looked particularly odd, the reflection of his glasses obscuring everything. He was a beautiful child, but only from some angles. From other angles he looked peculiar, with his wide-spaced eyes and the bulge in his forehead and his thick glasses.
    More than a few were pictures of Sam and me as children and teenagers and young adults, the fifties, sixties, and early seventies versions of the prized collection I kept in the albums downstairs. In becoming a parent your own life is eclipsed, subsumed within your children's lives, downgraded, in this case to a box in a dusty attic.
    Once, when she was in fifth grade, I tried to tell Kate about this process, this shift in which I becomes I and my daughter and my son and my son. The day she came home crying because Vanessa Van Dorn had told everyone she had bad breath.
    I said, "Let me smell." She breathed in my face. "Sweet as springtime," I said.
    She didn't believe me. Why should she? I'm her mother.
    "Are you sure?"
    I hugged