Saving Elijah

constant. You could hear the   mother-prayers under the din of the machines, rising crescendo sempre agitato toward the fluorescent lights.
    "Do you hear that, Sam?"
    My husband, sitting at the other side of Elijah's bed, had been crying before Dr. Jonas came in. Wailing, really. The man I loved, with whom I had three children, the man I'd seen cry maybe once in twenty-four years of knowing him, was making a sound in his throat like lowing into a megaphone. I wanted to go to him, but my body felt so heavy, bloated and stinking with fear and despair. I couldn't move, not a muscle, not a finger, not a toe.
    That is what happens. You want to comfort each other, but grief is everywhere, even inside your mouth. You are flailing about, swallowing water, it's filling every organ and cell, and you are going down for the last time, glub glub. How do you offer a husband—anyone—a lifeline when you're drowning yourself?
    The voice, the song. My lifeline. I grabbed hold with everything I had. I wanted Sam to come with me.
    "The singing," I whispered. I had not spoken in perhaps an hour.
    "What are you talking about, Dinah?"
    "Shhh. Listen."
    He listened. "I don't hear anything."
    No matter. I heard it. I closed my eyes and let the song carry me. Just a lullaby I sang to Elijah every night before he went to bed. I'd help him get into his Big Bird footed pajamas, then I'd sit on the bed and sing to him and Tuddy, the Day-Glo green puff-a-lump with a huge funny turtle face and orange bow tie he carried everywhere. My singing voice isn't great, but Elijah wouldn't even try to sleep unless I sang. Loud. If I didn't sing loud, he nudged me.
    When I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the PICU. Blue sky and ocean and sea air had somehow materialized around me, replacing the sight and smell of that hospital room. I was with Elijah in a glorious place. I even knew where I was, though I'd never been there. There is a spot on the eastern coast of Australia, where swimming fish and sea creatures flash by in a kaleidoscope of color and design, where endlessly varied coral formations rise high from the ocean bottom, where anemones and sponges undulate to the music of the gently swaying sea. Behold: the future in a waking dream. When Elijah turned seven or eight, we were going to travel thousands of miles together on an airplane to see the city of coral. A vacation, perhaps. Or maybe Sam, a copywriter for an ad agency, would have a client there, and the whole family would go with him. And my pain? Gone—the PICU but a dim memory of a nightmare I had once, a long time ago.

    *    *    *

    We are on a small boat in a great azure sea, bobbing above the Great Barrier Reef. The expanse of water spreads for miles in every direction. We're still wearing our swimsuits after swimming with the fish. So. Elijah will learn to swim after all, he has always been so afraid of the water. Our skin has dried now, drenched in the warmth of the noon sun. His skin has darkened, his hair lightened from its normal reddish color to a lustrous golden-blond. Our snorkel masks and fins lie on the boat deck, and Elijah is sitting on my lap while we examine apiece of coral together. I am so proud of him, he has learned so much. He still can't read very well, but he talks in sentences and he makes up stories, and I love him more and more. God granted him great progress after his recovery from the coma, an additional gift.
    I kiss Elijah's fingers—he has scraped the skin on his fingertip against the rough, pocked surface of the coral.
    "Look, honey, do you see all these little holes? In each of these tiny holes there used to be an animal."
    He pushes his glasses up on his nose. "An elephant?"
    I'm about to tell him about tiny sea creatures, but he looks so hopeful that I say, "Well, if you want elephants to live in each of these holes, then that's what lives there. Tiny little elephants with funny little trunks smaller than toothpicks."
    He laughs and peers at me from behind his glasses. "You're silly, Mommy."
    "You're silly, too." Beneath the surface of the rippling water, I can see brain corals, stag corals, honeycombs. Tall and fat, tiny and towering, reds, whites, greens. And crevasses between the coral for brilliant fish, electric blue multitudes, yellow schools, resting places. We all need resting places, do we not?
    A giant turtle swims right by. "Look, Elijah!"
    With a smile, Elijah puts his hands up at his shoulders and flaps them, imitating the turtle. I