Saving Elijah

dream—the nightmare. The part where my son dies."
    "I see."
    "So then, you see why I don't need your help," I said. "Because Elijah is going to live. His MRI is normal, the doctors say so."
    The ghost nodded. "All the same, I think I'll tell you just one little secret. There are some special exceptions to the rule about the Angel of Death, for mothers. Has to do with the flesh of the flesh, or something like that. If a mother stays very sharp and listens very hard, she can hear that monster Angel. She can't see it, but she can hear it. It comes between blinks, you know. Anyone who sees opens his mouth in horror. Which is the exact moment when the Angel unsheathes its sword and drops its poison into the mouth." There was a loud pinging sound, and he snapped his long fingers. "Takes less than a nanosecond."
    Such things the ghost told me. "How do you know all this? Because the Angel of Death came for you?"
    "Well. I wouldn't be wandering around this way if that one had come for me, now would I?"
    "But you're dead. Didn't the Angel come for you?"
    "Yes. And no."
    My ghost talked in riddles, and I was tired of being confused.
    "Well, I don't have to worry about that," I said. "Because it's not going to happen. Not to Elijah."
    "I know, I know, because you've seen your son at eight. In the Great Barrier Reef."
    The ghost took one hand off his guitar for a moment, and something materialized between his long fingers. What was that? Fat, small, brown. It was a cigar. He brought the thing to his black lips and drew inward, or seemed to draw inward anyway, as if he were drawing smoke into lungs that breathed. I even thought I could smell the cigar. The tip turned hot red, and smoke curled out of it and seemed to drift toward the ceiling.
    "Cohiba," he said, leaning back, eyeing me. "Finest there is. Want one?"
    My Grandpa Eli had said those same words to my father once, a very long time ago.
    The ghost put the cigar into his mouth again and drew inward again. He exhaled, and smoked languidly for a while. After a few more puffs, he leaned toward me, strummed a few strings with his other hand, this time a discordant sound.
    "Well, Dinah, you may have had a dream, as you so quaintly call it, of your baby in the Great Barrier Reef, but you've also had a dream of your precious baby in his hospital bed, one of several where he might be spending the rest of his abbreviated life. What did you think that was? Chopped liver?"
    "No, I just—"
    "Perhaps we should continue to review your life," he said, taking a contemptuous puff on the cigar, "to see which you deserve, door number one, or door number two."

nine
    Grandpa Eli was a huge man, totally bald, and the day I met him he was holding an enormous cigar between two of the largest, fattest fingers I'd ever seen. He greeted us in the marble front hall of the faux Tara-style mansion outside Atlanta where my mother had actually grown up. I was seven, my brother twelve.
    He kissed my mother on the cheek, shook all of our hands, apologized for not having had a chance to get out of his golf clothes, asked my dad about the plane ride. Dad said we got a little rambunctious (meaning me), and I wondered why Dan got away with only saying hello, while my mother had been nervously preparing me for this first-ever visit to her family for weeks.
    Grandpa Eli bent over and breathed in my face, suffocation by cigar breath. "Well, my, my, my, you must be Dinah. Aren't you the cutest thing? I'm your Grandpa Eli."
    But I wasn't a cute thing, I was fat, my brother called me Tubby Turd. And my mother called Grandpa Eli "the Bull." I'd heard her talking to my father in their bedroom. "If the Bull starts something, Martin," she'd said, "we're leaving."
    "Calm down, Charlotte," Dad said.
    Now that I'd finally met him, I wasn't sure whether he was a bull or not. He wore big, black glasses, but he had a twinkle in his eyes. His voice boomed, but the features on his wide face were so cherubic, the skin on his bald dome of a skull so smooth that I thought he looked like a giant overstuffed infant. On the other hand, everything was weird here. Everyone talked slow and easy like my mother when she wasn't mad, all of them purring contentedly like sunning cats with all the time in the world. The trees were different, a big black convertible with a driver had come to get us, it was warm in the middle of December, and this house was not a house but a castle.
    "Hello, Grandpa Eli, nice to meet you." It was what my