Saving Elijah

on my body, a cold membrane searching, searching. And then it was inside me, swarming.
    So be it. My son was after all in his bed down the hall, sleeping peacefully.

    *    *    *

    In the morning I told the children that their father was away on a business trip, just as he had suggested. I made breakfast, Alex caught the camp bus to his counselor job at a local day camp, I dropped Kate off at CVS for her job, I took Elijah to his nursery school summer program, I went to my office. My practice was practically gone, but I'd been holding on to what was left like a woman clinging by one hand to a twentieth-floor window ledge.
    Danielle O'Connor was the first patient of the morning. Halfway through the hour she admitted that although there hadn't been a violent incident in months, she knew it was coming, she felt it.
    "How do you know?" I asked.
    "I can't really explain. I mean there aren't any words to describe it. There's always a look in his eyes, it's not anger, more like sadness."
    "You feel he's sad when he hits you?"
    She nodded. "He can't help himself."
    "Why do you think that?"
    She sighed, folded her hands on her lap. "He just had such a hard time growing up, his father left his mother when he was three, then his stepfather used to beat him and his sister with a leather strap."
    "Did Jaime deserve to be beaten that way?"
    "No, of course not, he was a little kid."
    "Do you?"
    She started to cry. "I know I should leave him."
    I saw the pain and fear in her face and felt myself tear up. And what was I thinking? I wasn't empathizing, that's for sure. I was thinking that she should just pull herself together and get the hell out of there. I was thinking that her suffering wasn't like mine. My suffering would never leave me.
    I looked away from my patient's face, from her tear-filled eyes.

    *    *    *

    What convinced me finally to give up my practice wasn't that I was afraid the demon would show up, play cheap and nasty tricks, speak in my mother's voice. It was the hard truth that my own pain and fear and self-absorption were too great for me to have room for anything else. Each day my inability to empathize became more overwhelming and obvious.
    I told Danielle I was very sorry but I had to take another leave of absence. I hadn't yet alienated her in some way, and so she was shocked. I gave her Grace Atkinson's name. Grace was perfect, I said. She ran a domestic violence group for women every Thursday night, they could do individual, group therapy, a one-stop deal.
    When Danielle left, I called Grace. She said she had some free hours, would take as many of my patients as she could, and refer the rest on. She didn't ask too many questions, for which I was thankful. The rest of my paltry patient list I abandoned the cowardly way, by telephone, then left a message with Grace's number on my answering machine.
    Peter had called the office several times since our afternoon together. The first message he left had been merely confused: "Dinah, what happened? Please call." I hadn't called him back. The latest, recorded while Danielle was there, represented a new tactic: "Dinah, I'm beginning to worry. At least send smoke signals to let me know you're okay."
    I didn't. I took a last look at my office, its shelves stuffed with books, its bright blue walls and comfy couches and box of tissues on the coffee table. Then I turned off the light and closed the door behind me.

    *    *    *

    I was like one of Pavlov's dogs. I came to know when it was nearby, and would start shivering in the moments just before it appeared, at the smell of it. When I felt the touch of its claw at the curve of my back, at my breast, at my neck and my throat, I would cower and cringe, but I would acquiesce. I was as benumbed as a woman captured in war and brought to the enemy camp for the sport of her captors, so deadened to her own brutalization that she no longer thinks of the body being raped every night as her own and she simply spreads her legs.
    Afterward, I felt as if the contents of a grave had been emptied into me, had taken up residence inside my skin. Something always seemed to be crawling inside me, as if maggots were feasting on my organs. Perhaps it thought it could make itself alive again by using my tissue and my flesh as a host, but the opposite was happening. My body was physically deteriorating, food became nauseating, just as it had when Elijah was in the hospital. I had less and less energy each day, felt