Saving Elijah

on, Mary. A diamond might be brilliant. An essay, a professor, Einstein. But a sandwich?
    "Good idea," my father said. "Dinah?"
    I'd seen that cafeteria, hadn't eaten a meal anywhere else since we got here, but I'd stopped going. Everything tasted the same. A donut might as well have been a rancid turkey sandwich.
    "You have to eat," Sam said.
    I motioned toward the sandwich on the table. "Becky brought me something."
    "You haven't touched it," Charlotte said. "Really, Dinah. You must eat."
    This really was quite odd coming from the woman who took me to a diet doctor at the age of thirteen, who came into his examination room and told me to get undressed.
    "Completely?" I was horrified. I'd just gotten my first bra, and had begun my periods only a few months before. But I remembered my mother saying to be a good girl, not to argue, and to do what the doctor said.
    There was a little curtained area, and I stood there crying, looking at the sheet folded on the bench, trying to figure out how to disappear into the walls or fit through the tiny barred window that looked out on the brick building next door. When I came out clutching the sheet around my body, he was waiting none too patiently, his arms folded neatly over his chest. I lay down on his exam table, let him put my feet in the stirrups.
    I do not remember anything about that man's face but I remember his hands, big and meaty, inside me.
    "We'll fix her up in no time," he told my mother when the three of us met afterward in his jumbled office. He prescribed amphetamines.
    I dropped almost fifteen pounds that year. By the age of fourteen I could leap tall buildings. At fifteen I was taking five black beauties a day, and Charlotte bullied me into modeling in one or two of her runway shows. At the time, she had ten stores.
    By sixteen my periods had stopped and I had almost lost my teeth. Odd for such a young person to get trench mouth, the dentist said when he took a look at my gums. When he told Charlotte they were rotting from all the speed I was taking, she threatened to sue that doctor Glick. I stopped speaking to her until she withdrew the threat. That was when she went to work on my nose—a Rosenberg nose, not a Blake nose, she liked to say. Within a year my nose was fixed but I was fat again. That was the year I started to call my mother Charlotte.

    *    *    *

    "Are you sure you don't want something to eat, Di?" Sam had an arm around Alex and was heading out the NAR door, his parents in tow.
    I shook my head. Was eating suddenly the most important thing in the world?
    "What about you, Kate?"
    "I want to stay with Mom and Elijah," Kate said. Charlotte put her hand on my shoulder. "If Dinah is staying, I'll stay, too."
    No. I couldn't think about eating, nor about diet doctors who give thirteen-year-olds internal exams. I couldn't even think about ghosts. I had to concentrate on not screaming.

    *    *    *

    I sleep a little that night, although a dream I have is worse than the reality. In the dream I am walking through a department store so bright it's blinding. Shiny perfume bottles on counters flash around me like strobe lights, well-groomed women in smocks hold out gaudy bottles and tubes. I haven't put on lipstick in a very long time. A chic black suit shoves a bottle in my face. "Giorgio of Beverly Hills?" Her voice lilts up at the end, as if she is asking me a question.
    "Coma of Connecticut." My humor has curdled like sour milk.
    The well-groomed saleslady rears back like a frightened horse.
    I move on. I make my way to the boys' department, collect five pairs of sweatpants, three sweatshirts, five T-shirts, stretchy fabrics, elastic waistbands.
    "Easier to pull over steel-hard joints and muscles and limbs."
    The saleslady is staring at me.
    "When muscles atrophy," I tell her, "limbs wither from lack of use, they become as hard as steel."
    The saleslady punches a key on the cash register. Bbbbrrrrring!

    *    *    *

    I woke, back by Elijah's side in the PICU with that word a taint on my lips: Atrophy.
    Five a.m. The PICU was quieter at night, the din hushed, the parents settled into reclining chairs next to their children, perhaps sleeping, perhaps not. The nurse who was always in the room gave me a little smile, a nod.
    I stumbled out into the PICU for some coffee. Jimmy's father was there at the coffee machine. I made a special effort to say something to him, I guess because of what the ghost had said, or because his son was in the