Saving Elijah

   *    *

    My own kitchen. Sam is standing at the sink, loading the dishwasher. The room is as dim as a murky pond, illuminated only by the small lamp on the desk in the corner. How odd it is that he's rinsing and loading in the dark.
    "Where were you?" he says, turning around.
    "You know I've been at the cemetery. Why ask?"
    He dries his hands, flings the dish towel at the counter, takes a sip from an ever-present glass of scotch.
    He stacks the last dish in the rack, shuts the dishwasher. "Ann Magill called. She and Jim invited us for dinner Saturday night."
    "Oh, please. After all this time she wants to be friends again?"
    "Come on, she's tried."
    "She called me last week, and she's babbling about Jim's hernia. I hate the babblers."
    The babblers are worse than the advice-givers, the pain-minimizers, and those who claim access to God's mind: "God must have wanted him." "Bear up for the sake of your other children." "At least he didn't suffer." And that old standard, "Time will heal." The babblers don't say these things. I'll give them that. The babblers want to talk about anything else.
    "It's hard for people, Dinah. Are you going to judge everyone we know this way forever?"
    "Yes. I am." I fall into a ladder-back chair.
    "Won't you please come to the grief support group this week?" Sam says. "Maybe it would help you, Dinah."
    "I don't want help." Sour bile rises at the back of my throat. I do not attempt to hide my bitterness. "What's the point of going there, communing like we're some kind of club that no one would ever want to belong to? No one can understand what I've been through, anyway."
    He sighs, tinkles the ice in his glass like bells, and downs the last of the scotch, to the very last drop. He's drinking all the time. "We've both been through it, Dinah."
    "What do you want from me, Sam? I'm doing the best I can. I'm still living, aren't I?"
    He stares at me for a few moments, then starts out of the room with his glass. "I want you to stop being a martyr." I hear him pouring a refill.

    *    *    *

    "Mr. and Mrs. Galligan?"
    I was back in the NAR. A PICU intern was standing in the doorway, holding a clipboard. "I need a history."
    "Another history?"
    My skin was burning hot, as if I had been scorched by the sun. What had I just experienced? How could another waking dream portend an outcome so opposite the first one?
    "I'm sorry," the intern said.
    "It's all right, come on in." Sam waved him in.
    Becky stood up. "I really have to go anyway."
    "Thanks for coming," Sam said.
    She kissed us both goodbye, and kissed Elijah again. The intern waited until she left, then pulled over the chair in the corner and sat down, his pencil poised.
    "Okay," he said. "Why don't we begin with the pregnancy?"

five
    We almost lost Elijah once before, before he was even born. I was two months pregnant, and started to spot during our vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Alex was nine, Kate, ten. The spotting continued through the weekend; I was petrified but didn't tell Sam until we were back in Connecticut. He took me in his arms and rocked me and told me it was going to be all right "no matter what." The same words he used when he asked me to marry him.
    We'd be a great team, he said, facing everything together, no matter what. We'd work out whatever problems that might arise from our two different religions, face whatever bad stuff came our way, illness, even our parents' deaths, which at the time seemed like the worst thing that could ever happen.
    We'd been looking forward to the birth of our third child, even though he wasn't exactly planned. I was already thirty-nine. We'd always alternated using condoms and a diaphragm because birth control pills made me fat and Sam thought the IUD was an unnecessary health risk. The condom broke. We had a laugh about it in bed that night, and when I turned up pregnant again, Sam joked, "When it comes time for your sex talk with the kids, you better warn them that it actually does only take once."
    "My sex talk?"
    He raised an eyebrow. "Well, you're the expert on human affairs here. I'm a mere maker of ads."
    I had amniocentesis a couple of days later. The doctor told us there were "no chromosomal abnormalities" when he saw us in his office.
    "Does the spotting mean there's something wrong with the baby?" I asked.
    He placed his fingertip on the bridge of his nose. "Many, if not most, women who have problems early in a pregnancy like this go on to deliver perfectly healthy