Saving Elijah

changed and you're sorry?"
    Sam sighed. "I know it's upsetting. Of course it'll be a change. And of course it's hard for your mother and me, too. But the thing you have to remember, the important thing is, we're both still going to be your parents."
    Silence.
    "Come on, kids," he said. "What do you say I take you out for some dinner?"
    They wanted to go, even Elijah, who seemed more bewildered than angry or sad.
    After they left, I sank into the couch.
    "Dinah?"
    I looked up. Sam was back. "Where are the kids?"
    "In the car. Alex wants Chinese, Kate wants Mexican. I told them I'd be right back."
    "Sam, I want you to come home."
    "Dinah." He sat down next to me. "I don't know if I can ever come back. I've never gone near another woman, not even once—not that I haven't been tempted. I mean, I'm no saint. Last year a woman came on to me at a sales conference. I told her she was very beautiful—which she was—and I was very flattered, but that I was madly in love with my wife. That's what I said. Madly in love."
    I couldn't take my eyes away from him.
    "So she said that you didn't have to know, it would just be the two of us in that hotel room. I told her that wasn't the point. I would know." He looked out the window. "Now I feel like a real schmuck. Or is it schlemiel?"
    "I'm sorry, Sam. That's all I can say."
    "Please don't. I don't want to hear it. I came back because I wanted to say something else, say it again, even if I'm beating a dead horse. I really think you need to see a psychiatrist. Please. If you won't do it for me, do it for the kids."
    "The kids?" My heart started beating fast.
    He stood up and walked over toward the window, looked out into the backyard for a moment, then turned. "Dinah, think back to before all this happened. If I were all of a sudden talking about a resident demon, ghost, whatever, would you feel comfortable leaving me in charge of our children?"
    "You want to take the children away from me?"
    "Dinah, I just want you to get some help. I think you're having some sort of a breakdown and I just want you to get some help. That's all I want."
    I stared at him. The demon was taking everything in return for Elijah—my body, my husband, my work, my self-respect, my soul. This, then, was the last thing left, the only thing it had not yet taken, my children. And now, using Sam as its instrument, it would take them, too.

    *    *    *

    I called a shrink the next day. I decided not to use the psychiatrist I'd referred patients to when they needed medication and got the name of one in Stamford from a colleague in my building. I found it humiliating, more than I had thought possible, that Dinah-with-all-the-answers should have to do this. Worse, I had no conviction whatsoever that seeing a psychiatrist would, or could, help me. But I went.
    Dr. Evan Kessler was a large, burly man with a woolly beard who reminded me of a big blond bear. He stood up and shook my hand, then sat back down behind his desk.
    I sat down on the couch, trying not to cry, trying not to mind his being behind the desk, a dominant position I'd generally avoided with my own patients.
    "I'd feel more comfortable if we could sit here," I said, finally.
    "Sure." He stood up without saying a word and sat in one of the two chairs in the corner of his large office. I sat down across from him.
    "So. Why are you here?"
    I wanted to laugh because it was all so familiar, it comes so easily to the person on the other side of the desk. Had I really felt that way, that it was easy to listen unscathed to another person's pain?
    I told Dr. Kessler my story—Elijah's illness, my ghost, all of it. He listened, all the while writing on his notepad, speaking only to ask me a question to clarify a point. I told the story as quickly and economically as I could, as if I were recounting a patient's story. No doubt one of his notes was "flat affect."
    When I was through, he sat still for a long time.
    I used to do it myself, let the silence speak. Done to me, it felt false and arrogant. "I guess you've got a whole page of notes attesting to my delusions and hallucinations, right?"
    He stared at me for a moment, then asked, "What's your profession, Dinah?"
    "What's the difference?" I hadn't mentioned it. I was embarrassed to tell him, it seemed like just another of God's little jokes on me, that I should once have been the person to whom others told these kind of stories, to whom people looked for advice and counsel, even, hardest of all,