Saving Elijah

me!"
    "The grooviest," she said.
    I handed the picture back to her.
    "Who's the girl in the kitchen?"
    "Oh, that's Julie," I said.
    "The friend you mentioned. Where is she now?"
    I did not want to tell her.
    "Tell her!" the demon whispered.
    "I haven't seen or heard from her in twenty-two years."
    "But Dad said she and you were best friends."
    "We were, Kate," I said. "When we were six, she showed up at my door with a frog she'd found under her house. We put it in Grandma's car."
    My daughter giggled. "Wish I could have seen it. Grandma Charlotte trapped in a car with a frog!" Then, "So what happened with you two? You just drifted apart?"
    "It's a long story, Kate. I'm not exactly proud of it."
    "Why?"
    "Well, if you must know, Julie had dated your father first."
    She stared at me. "You stole him away from her?"
    "Well, they had broken up recently. But I suppose you could look at it that way."
    "I'll bet Julie did."
    I started to defend myself. "Your father used to hang around a lot. We started getting to know each other. Julie and some other friends and I all went on a ski trip. I ended up skiing with your father, only I fell, and sprained my ankle. He took me to the hospital. We couldn't help it."
    "Jennifer Megan did that to Lisa Pell a few weeks ago. Lisa and Gary Rothman had a date for a concert, but Lisa had to go to her grandma's house that night, and she told Gary to take Jennifer. So now Jennifer's dating Gary, and no one's talking to her."
    I hugged her. Well, it was something like that.
    "You know what your father said to me when we realized what was happening between us?" I was still defending myself. "He said that even if Julie forced me to make a choice between him and her, I should trust him. Because he just knew we were each other's one."
    My daughter stared at me for a few seconds. Then she said, "That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard, Mom."
    The demon made a psshing noise in my ear. "Romance?" it said, as it shimmered into the room. "I could take you right now."
    Oh, please. Not again. Please not again.
    Elijah walked into the kitchen just then, dragging Tuddy. He stopped, blinked.
    "I gotta get to school," Kate said, grabbing her book bag from the kitchen chair. "See you later." She kissed me, kissed Elijah, and left.
    I heard the door slam, Elijah was sniffing at the air. The demon moved toward him, laughing.
    "Stay away from him," I said.
    Elijah was staring right at the place in the kitchen where the demon occupied space.
    The demon just went right on laughing. "Who are you to make demands?" it said to me. "You are nothing, you are no one, you are mine."
    Elijah blinked rapidly, several times in succession. Then he wrinkled up his nose, and sniffed again. Was it possible he was seeing the demon?
    "Elijah? Do you see something?"
    The demon disappeared, instantly vanished like smoke in a gale.
    Elijah stood there for a moment without speaking. I noticed that his eyes seemed particularly crossed, the right eye looking in an entirely different direction than the left. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and that seemed to help him focus better.
    "Did you see something there?" I pointed to the place where the demon had been standing.
    He smiled. "He doesn't see me."
    "Who doesn't see you?"
    He put his chubby finger in front of Tuddy's mouth and said, "Shhh. Zipped lips."
    Zipped lips? Where in the world had he heard such an expression? It certainly wasn't something I would ever say. Miss Stanakowski? Not with a classroom full of handicapped children, some of whom could barely talk.
    "Where did you hear that saying, Elijah? Zipped lips."
    He pursed his lips together and made a fish face. "I'm a fish, Mommy. Look at my lips." He pursed his lips again, released them, then pursed, then released. Again and again. I couldn't help laughing at his antics, and I dropped the subject of lips—fish lips, zipped lips, any kind of lips.
    The demon didn't return that night, as promised, and I half-wondered whether Elijah had somehow scared it away.

twenty-two
    Mommy, can I have a pet fish?" Elijah asked. It was the day after the zipped lips incident. I tried to discourage him on the grounds that his hamster and Poppy might not like it, but Elijah said they needed some friends. So two days later, fish having become Topic #1, we went to the Everything Under One Woof Pet Shop to check out the fish.
    Elijah marched up to the tank full of brilliant orange fish, took his glasses off, leaving them dangling on