Saving Elijah

other NAR.
    "How is your son?" How (breath) Is (breath) Your (breath) Son (breath)?
    "Jimmy's in God's hands, Jimmy's in God's hands," he said.

    *    *    *

    When Dr. Moore came in for his rounds a few hours later, I forced myself to watch him examine Elijah. I hated everything about the man, the way his eyes darted, the rough way he touched my son, the way he shouted in his ear, and adjusted the respirator to see if he would breathe on his own, and thumped on Elijah's thin chest with the side of his hand, as if he were a butcher pounding meat.
    When he finished, he stood back. "In a few days he'll wake up and wonder where he is." Dart. Dart.
    He'd been saying that for days.
    Sam grabbed onto it. "You think so?"
    "Oh sure," he said between darts. "When he wakes up he'll probably be as mad as hell and probably wiggle and fall right off the bed."
    "You should see him wiggle," Sam said. "If you put on some Elvis music, he'll wiggle like crazy. Right, Elijah?" He squeezed Elijah's hand, then said to Moore, "He loves Elvis."
    A half-baked smile appeared and disappeared. "We'd better tie his wrists to the sides."
    "What?"
    "You don't want him to fall off, do you?" Dart-dart.
    "I guess not," Sam said. Such passivity. I was seeing certain qualities about my husband that I had never noticed in twenty years of knowing him.
    "What's he going to do?" I managed to get my mouth to say. "Fling himself over the bar?"
    "Dinah," Sam said, "if the doctor says we should tie his wrists, we'd better tie his wrists."
    The nurse was already tying Elijah's wrists to the metal bar. Moore was gazing out into the PICU.
    "He'll have his MRI today," the doctor said. "It's a special picture of the brain."
    Why was he so damned condescending? Did he think we didn't know what it was? "Why does he need it, if he's going to wake up soon?"
    Moore shrugged. "Just to see."
    "When?" Sam asked.
    He shrugged. "Sometime today."
    They never told you when. It was like some sadistic little game, you hanging onto their every word, they being as imprecise as they could.

    *    *    *

    The MRI department was deep in the bowels of the hospital. It was a good thing they had official transports who knew how to get there; they couldn't very well have distraught parents pushing comatose children on gurneys up and down the corridors, asking directions every other step. When we got halfway down the first hall, I made them wait while I went back for Tuddy. I draped Elijah's arm around the stuffed creature as if he'd decided to hug his Tuddy, and there it stayed all the way into the MRI tunnel chamber. The machine made a lot of loud knocking noises. Sam and I sat there and watched, and I kept thinking that it was yet another bad sign that Elijah was sleeping through all that noise.
    I wasn't sure what time it was, but many hours later, we had a white coat convention. Nothing formal, where they invite the social workers, the head nurse, and the chief resident, and everyone sits down in chairs with their hands folded on the conference table. This was impromptu. We were all standing up, right in the middle of the PICU. A pair of nurses, and doctors by the dozen: five neurologists—Moore, the big cheese, and his entourage of four residents; Williston and her two infectious disease residents; a guy from RAD, whatever that meant; a cardiologist; and Jonas, and his three PICU residents. Elijah sure was going to be pissed off when he woke up and found he was in white coat land.
    "As of right now," Moore was saying, "his MRI looks completely normal."
    My heart felt as if it might drop onto the linoleum floor. I decided Moore must know what he was doing, even if he didn't look you in the eye. He hadn't gotten to be the head of neurology there without knowing something. I had no real basis on which to judge the competence of the doctors, since I wasn't an M.D., but a Ph.D. I did know a little something about medicine from my own training, but even if I had at one time learned something useful, my sluggish mind couldn't have retrieved it.
    Sam reached for my hand. "The MRI is good, then. Right?"
    "It might be good news, he could make a full recovery." Dart-dart.
    Three out of four in the neurology camp nodded in agreement. Yes. Yes. Yes.
    "Really? It's normal," Sam repeated.
    Dr. Jonas exchanged a look with Dr. Moore. Jonas seemed annoyed, and Moore looked around, as if he didn't care what Jonas thought.
    "I feel it's better to err on the side of caution when we talk to