Saving Elijah

her. "Positive."
    She started to cry. "Then why did Vanessa say that?"
    "She probably thinks that if she says bad things about you, everybody will like her instead." I leaked a few tears myself. Kate saw them.
    "Why are you crying? I'm the one Vanessa said has bad breath."
    "What makes you sad makes me sad."
    "Why is that?"
    "Your children are part of you." I moved her bangs off her forehead. "It's in the cells, in the molecules."
    "What's a molecule?"
    "The smallest, tiniest piece of something."
    "What about all those bad mothers?"
    "Their children are in their cells, too, they just don't know the right way to show it."
    Now Elijah reached into the box and hauled out a handful of photos he promptly tossed up in the air like confetti. He laughed as the pictures floated down and scattered across the floor around them.
    "Don't do that, little guy," Kate said, "you'll make a mess."
    They did not see me, standing there. Elijah turned around to peer at Kate through his glasses, then moved in for a second handful.
    "No. No, I'm serious now," Kate said. "Help me pick these up."
    For a minute I thought he was going to have a tantrum. He didn't. He seemed so much happier and more content than he used to be, so much less frustrated. He picked Tuddy up and pressed him into Kate's face, with a little dancing turn of his wrist. She laughed, then sighed deeply. Her expression turned serious.
    "Elijah?"
    Sitting amidst the litter of photos, he looked up at her.
    "When you were sleeping in the hospital? Do you remember?"
    He nodded, slowly.
    "Did you know we were there?"
    He didn't respond, just stared at her with a cocked head and a puzzled expression.
    "Were you scared?"
    He raised his eyebrows. "Scared like on the merry-go?"
    When he was three, Sam, Kate, and I took him on a Saturday outing to a local amusement park. He loved the place; he loved just looking. When Sam took him on the carousel, he loved it for about one revolution, then started to scream bloody murder. The operator had to stop the thing.
    "Yes, like that."
    "I like to go on the merry-go. Round and round. I like the blue sky and the horsies. And the song. I really like the song."
    She looked at him for a moment, then she reached over and wrapped her arms around him, drew him to her chest. "Listen, little guy, you scared me. Much worse than the merry-go. Don't do that again. Okay?"
    "Okay, Kate," Elijah said, his voice muffled by her fuzzy robe. She wiped her eyes and kissed the top of his head.
    "It'll be okay, Kate," Elijah said.
    "Yes, of course it will. And we're not scared, right?" She took a deep breath. "Well, that sure is good news. Now, what do you say we—you, me, and Tuddy—pick up these pictures?" She showed him how Tuddy could help pick up the photographs, too. With Tuddy helping they put all the photos back except for one I saw Kate slip into a pocket of her robe, then she closed the box, and they started downstairs.
    "Mom! How long have you been standing there?"
    "Long enough to see how much I love you both."

    *    *    *

    Later, when I was making breakfast, she showed me the photograph she'd pocketed. It had been taken at Killington, Vermont, the day before Sam and I made love for the first time. I am nineteen years old in the snapshot, and my leg is in a cast. Sam is just twenty. He and I are lying on a sofa, our heads at either end. Sam has no shirt on; his body is lanky, boyish, not so different than it is now, all these years later. I am wearing a peasant blouse with crudely stitched red embroidery edging around a scoop neck. Sam has his head resting on the side arm but he is looking at me, only at me. Our bare feet are touching, one of his to my one good foot; we are playing footsie. We were already in love, though we didn't yet know it. We had yet to make love, but we had to touch each other in any way we could, hands, feet, bodies; it was as necessary as breathing.
    A doorway leads into a kitchen, where you can see a tall slim girl with a mass of frizzy red hair tending something on the stove. Julie. On the coffee table in front of the sofa are three burning candles, an ashtray full of cigarettes, a water pipe. Some of our group, including Sam and me, had been smoking just before the photograph was taken; you can just make out a faint white trail of smoke rising from the bowl. Julie had been steaming mad, at both of us.
    "Well, hey, man," I said, trying to make light of the evidence of drug use, "we really were groovy, your father and