Saving Elijah

brother’s grades versus my own, and yet another time my mother hit me.
    “I just don’t know what we’re going to do, Dinah,” my mother said later that night, when I went to apologize to her, at my father’s insistence. “I try and try, but nothing I do seems to help. My own daughter! I must be a complete failure, I might just as well kill myself. Then you wouldn’t have to look at me anymore.”
    Of course it would be my fault if she killed herself. Everything was about her.
    The next day, when I told Julie what had happened, she listened without saying anything until I was through, then she said, “What in the world does she want from you?”
    I shrugged. “She wants me dead. She wants me to just disappear, just kill myself.”
    Julie shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think she wants you to beg her not to kill herself.” She was eleven years old when she came up with that.
    As my difficulties with my mother worsened, Julie expanded her role in my life from mere constant companion, co-conspirator, and bosom buddy, to comforter, confidante, and counselor. She might have been called my savior. When I was working up to kissing a boy for the first time, Julie soothed me when he never called me again. When I was recuperating from my nose job, she arrived at the hospital with a huge stuffed bear on which she’d spent her entire savings. When I came off my amphetamine addiction at sixteen, she helped me, encouraged me, held wet compresses to my head. When I ranted or cried after yet another run-in with my mother, she listened without complaint.
    “Maybe you should just tell your mother you love her,” she said after a particularly upsetting episode with Charlotte in my junior year of high school, related to my weight gain.
    “What?” I said.
    “That’s what she wants, isn’t it? For you to love her.”
    “I don’t think so.” I didn’t.
    “Just try it. What have you got to lose? While she’s yelling at you, just say, ‘I love you, Mom.’ Can you imagine what she’d do if you stood there and told her you loved her? I’d bet anything she’d stop yelling at you.”
    I never put Julie’s theory to the test, but in retrospect, of course, it was an extraordinary idea for a sixteen-year-old mind to come up with. But then, Julie was an extraordinary person.

eight
    The short course. The next morning I made my way down to the department again, this time without an official transport and without Sam.
    He explained again. "It's too much," he said. "My son's brain? I just can't."
    "Our son," I said.
    The receptionist told me to wait for the doctor in the waiting room. I sat down, leaned my head against the wall, and closed my eyes. A new vision collected around me like water.

    *    *    *

    I am standing with Sam in a hospital room, not the NAR. Not even in the PICU. This is a regular hospital room, with a window. Outside, trees are flowering. It is no longer winter. A doctor we have never met comes halfway in, draws the curtain behind him. Tall, very thin and pale, back sagging.
    "I'm Dr. Angus, Mr. and Mrs. Galligan. I read the MRI." He shifts from one foot to the other. "There is nothing normal in your son's brain."
    "But Dr. Moore ..." Sam's voice cracks. "... said Elijah's MRI looked normal."
    "Sometimes it takes time for cellular damage to show up in the tissue so that it can be seen in an MRI. I'm sorry."
    That was what Dr. Jonas said.
    "How long will he live?" Sammy asks.
    "It's difficult to know. Theoretically, years."
    My mind has been wiped clean as a spotless counter.
    "How many years?"
    "Well. It depends on how aggressive you want to be."
    "What does that mean?"
    I already know what it means. I have been reading books on the subject. Grief has deprived me of the ability to read a magazine, a nursery rhyme, or a headline, but I can read articles with titles like "Ethical Decisions on the Removal of Life Support Systems in Encephalopathy."
    "Children in this kind of situation develop other problems," Dr. Angus says. "Secondary infections, for instance. We can treat them with antibiotics. Or not."
    "So what do we do now?" Sammy asks. "Send him to rehabilitation?"
    "There is nothing to rehab. I'm very sorry." The doctor sighs. "You could send him to a long-term chronic care facility. There's a good one in Connecticut. Isn't that where you're from? The Laurel Institute."
    And this too I already know.
    "If Elijah were your child?"
    "I can't really tell you that, Mr. Galligan. I can