Saving Elijah

course, but I took a deep breath, and went back to the table, where Becky and Julie were still covering the basics: our children (Julie had three, one starting college that year); our husbands (Julie's was "the best," a middle-school principal, a computer whiz, a lover of classical music); our jobs (Julie was a social worker for a Jewish family service clinic). The waiter was moving toward us again, and we finally ordered in self-defense.
    Julie asked how Becky and I had met. I told her how Sam and I had been living in D.C., and Sam's about-to-be boss suggested Westport as a place we might want to live. The town may well have the distinction of being home to more advertising executives than any town in the nation. We fell in love with the place.
    It was Becky's alliterative ad that found us our house: "One acre, updated 1890s clapboard cream puff near Compo Beach columns, character, charm and 4 bedrooms. Call!" I showed up at her office on the Post Road not far from where I eventually opened my psychology office, hugely pregnant with my first child, holding the ad.
    "I don't know how to resist at least looking at a something called clapboard cream puff," I told her.
    She glanced at my swollen belly and said, "Honey, one more cream puff for you, and we're through!"
    Becky had finished the story for me by quoting herself. Julie was laughing. "A woman with a sense of humor. All right!"
    "How did you two meet?" Becky asked her.
    I was finishing the last bite of my salad.
    "Believe it or not," Julie said, "we were brought together by a frog."

    *    *    *

    Halfway through dessert, well after three o'clock, I went outside to the street, to feed the meter. And ran into Ellen Shoenfeld—again. "Do you live near here?"
    "What's that?"
    "DO YOU LIVE NEAR HERE?" I said.
    "I live right over there." She pointed to one of the side streets off Main, then turned her right ear toward me so that she could hear better.
    "Ellen," I said, "maybe an aid would help your hearing."
    "It wouldn't help."
    "Why not? There are new kinds of hearing aids nowadays, fit right in the ear."
    She made a little sound between her teeth. "I tell you, a hearing aid won't help." She pointed to her left ear. "They did this."
    Of course.
    "They did it with a club," she said. "A long wooden club." She demonstrated the length of it with her hands. Then she shrugged. "So you see, I do not want to hear better. I want to keep it this way all the time. The same with my hair." She touched her chignon of white. "They shaved my hair, and it was white when it came back in. They did these things to me, and this is how it will be forever."
    I touched her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Ellen," I said. "I don't know what to say."
    Another shrug. Then, "Even my children don't really want to hear. They want me to get over it. As if you could get over something like what happened to me, can you imagine? And I haven't even told them the worst of it. But they think, 'Enough already, Mother.'"
    Maybe so. Maybe Ellen had buried her pain so deep within her that she really had never spoken of what happened to her. Yet if this were true, it was likely that she had played out her pain in so many ways that her children didn't even have to hear her story to know it.
    And maybe Ellen has told her story over and over, so often that her children can no longer bear to hear it. Still. Isn't that what we have to do with our stories, tell them in different ways and at different times throughout our lives, changing our perspective and perhaps even our interpretation as we continue to learn and grow? If we don't tell our stories to each other, how can we find our common humanity, how can we move on?
    I would not presume to speak for Ellen Shoenfeld, I can only speak for me. It's not a matter of getting over it. It's more a matter of going forward, holding it.
    "No one wants to hear," Ellen Shoenfeld said.
    "I do," I said.

epilogue
    The seizures have left him this way now. Kept alive by machinery. No hope he will ever recover, the new doctor says. Never dance. Never walk. Never eat. Never see you, hear your voice, even know you're here. Never smile. Could he smile? With damage like this? Never seen it.
    I'm sorry. Miracles are not my business.
    His eyes are doing the rotating thing again. I never stop hearing the sound of the whoosh-pumping machine. The parallel lines on the monitors are inching their way across the screen, phantom-bright lines under my eyelids even when my eyes are closed.
    He