Saving Elijah

a trick is that?"
    His nod moved the air like a breeze. "Simple trick. Nothing to it."
    "How do you play the guitar with your hands all gashed?"
    "Doesn't hurt. Been dead a long time."
    "Where have you been since then? What does a ghost do?"
    He moved his mouth into a frown. "Help people, if he feels like it. I'm here to help you."
    I started to cry.
    He lay his guitar against the bench and held out his arms. He embraced me, then he rocked me, enfolded me within that swift current of air, and I barely noticed the odor and cold. Now he began to sing, softly, the lullaby that I sang to my son. He rocked me and sang it to me, and it eased me some. I was willing to take comfort from wherever it came.
    He was starting to dematerialize, and I felt myself falling, falling. I pulled away and sat up. "You are a ghost."
    "Well, duh!" he said. By then I had to squint to see him. He was now little more than a bright white haze, edged in pink and black.
    I stood up. "I'm going back to be with my son."
    He was filling in again with detail and color, fingers, blue jeans, boots. He positioned his guitar on his lap. "Good. Fine. Go back and be with him. While you can."
    I stared at him.
    The ghost laid his guitar down on the white linoleum tiles and smiled. "Hope is a snake that keeps slithering out of your hands. Is it not? And when you finally manage to catch it again, you just can't seem to hold on. No?"
    My blood seemed to stop moving through my veins. I was as still as inert gas. And it's really true that when you see a ghost, the hair at the back of your neck stands on end.
    "Tell me if you know something."
    "Why should I?"
    "Do you know if God plans to let my son live? Tell me!"
    He crossed his arms over his chest and made a psshing noise. "Do you think there is any creature on earth who knows the plans of God? Even a ghost?"
    I started to flee.
    "On the other hand, a ghost can see the future."
    I turned back. "You know the future? Then you do know if my son will wake up?"
    "Ha, ha, ha. Two roads in a wood ..."
    "Why are you deliberately trying to be cruel?"
    He made a sound in his mouth, between his teeth. "Me? Moi? Mi? Mich? Well. If you ask me, there's only one cruel One here. God is the cruel one. Innocent babies die, are even tortured and murdered, and this is supposed to be the will of a benevolent God! Free will?" He laughed that twittering sound again. "What a master gamester. I really don't understand why you humans don't realize it's a scam. God pulls this kind of stuff, and you still worship Him, you think He's going to help you. What a joke."
    I ran as fast as I could, and didn't look back.

three
    I suspect the demon had been stalking me for a long time, just waiting until I was weakened and confused and vulnerable before it moved in for the kill in that hospital corridor. Perhaps it was lurking nearby for the happy times, too: the morning Sam and I first made love; the birth of our children; the day I walked up to a rostrum to accept my doctoral degree after five long years of study. Was it perched beside my parents in the stadium that June day, playing riffs on the guitar, invisibly mocking them, mocking me?
    Charlotte was beaming. How could I ever forget that? We're talking about my mother here: tough, determined, rigid, narcissistic as a love-starved adolescent. Part Scarlet O'Hara, part Medea, all barracuda. She'd met my father at nineteen, when he came to do legal work for Allport Designs, where she was then working as a floor assistant, having quit her Atlanta family in a rage, resolved to make her own way in New York's garment industry.
    Charlotte purrs, flirts, sweet-talks, scrutinizes; she does not generally beam. But she'd beamed the previous January when my brother, Dan, graduated from medical school, and she was beaming that fine spring day. I guess it's in the rulebook, even hers. When not one but both of your children become doctors, beaming is required, even if you'd wanted your daughter to follow you into your business, a business having to do with women's clothing whose very content makes your daughter's eyes glaze over. Even if your daughter only became a psychologist, not an M.D., even if you are Charlotte.
    Had the demon always been hovering like a hawk, waiting until the season of absolute zero to pounce? How did it know such a season would come? Everyone has troubles, as Sam's mother always says. She says it even now, after everything. Plucky, she is, my Irish mother-in-law. She means it,