Saving Elijah

snorting like a pig, braying like a mule, bellowing like a cow.
    I closed my eyes. How did the ghost know? Yes. I hated my husband. And not just Sam. I hated everyone. I loathed every doctor in that hospital. Dr. Jonas and his blandness; Dr. Moore and his darting lying eyes; Dr. Reichert with his schoolboy innocence; Dr. Williston of the owl face; that resident, Dr. Laurentin, who was so far up the ass of Dr. Moore you could barely see his face for all the shit.
    I hated every nurse, too, these women who left their healthy children at home and came in here and hovered and thought, thank God this isn't me. And I hated my own parents, and Sam's parents. My mother was impossible, so what else was new? And Mary Galligan, the way she clutched her rosary, as if that might help, and talked in her chirping brogue, and Tom with his alcohol buzz. Even Lee, who'd come all this way. Even my other children. I was Elijah's mother! My grief was greater than any of theirs. My grief could swallow all their griefs put together, and still have room for a thousand more griefs.
    I reached over to untie Elijah's wrists.
    "I didn't mean you should go against the doctor's orders, Dinah."
    I uncoiled to face my mother. "Then what did you mean?"
    "I just meant it doesn't seem right."
    "Might as well untie them," the ghost whispered.
    "Me cousin Caleb Coyle's son had something like this," Mary said, "and he's just fine now."
    "Well, aren't we full of good cheer," the ghost said.
    I stared at Mary. Something like what? They hadn't even made a diagnosis. They didn't know what the hell was the matter with Elijah.
    "Caleb Coyle's son is a drunk," Sam's father said.
    "Well, Thomas Galligan, that's got nothing to do with the sickness. Nothing t'all." Mary had looked up from a pillowcase she was cross-stitching to make these pronouncements. She leaned over Elijah and gently rubbed her palm on his forehead. "There, there, wee man. Mother-o-God, he feels warm." She looked over at me, as if she expected me to know what to do about it.
    Both Mary and my mother had always been in denial about Elijah's problems, each in her own way. When Mary came to the hospital to see our newly born Elijah, tiny, sickly, skin loose on his bones, Sam had said, "Did you see our little plucked chicken, Mom?" Mary Galligan didn't even crack a smile. "Oh, my good Lord Jesus, Sam, he's not a chicken, he's just a mite skinny, that's all. A beautiful wee boy."
    Elijah was a beautiful little boy, who in time would be physically beautiful, but at that moment he looked like a plucked chicken. "It was just a joke, Mom," Sammy said. "Of course it was, dearie," Mary said. "I know."
    Charlotte was touching Elijah's head now, too. "He does feel warm."
    "His temperature has been going up and down," the nurse said. "I'm going to give him some Tylenol."
    " Why is his temperature going up and down?"
    The nurse shrugged. "I don't really know."
    "Liar!" the ghost said. "She knows. She's heard of cases like this. She's just never seen one. It's his central temperature, gone kerflooey!"
    "Central temperature? What's that?"
    "just the mechanism that controls human body temperature around ninety-eight point six," the ghost said. "It's already starting to fail. And once it does, only the more primitive temperature regulator will keep working, the one from deeper in the brain, so that his body will stay cold, like a reptile."
    "Reptile? What are you talking about?"
    The nurse was ripping a plastic tab from a medicine tube, pouring a clear liquid into the IV. My son got everything through tubes. Air through the tube in his throat, food through a tube in his nose, medicine through the tube in his arm.
    "Can't take it, can you?" the ghost said. "It's simple biology, that's all."
    Kate, standing next to Mary, had started to cry.
    Mary hugged her. "There, there, my girl. It'll be fine. Everyone is praying for him."
    "Yes, we're all praying," Charlotte chimed in.
    Well, didn't everything always come out fine when people prayed?
    Now came the infectious disease doctor, again. Dr. Williston. She nodded, Kate backed up like a car in reverse, my mother hovered. I wanted Sam to tell her to stop, but Sam didn't understand anything I thought or said; Sam was a stranger.
    The doctor listened to Elijah's heart and lungs, touched her hand to his forehead, looked in his ears. Elijah lay there like Sleeping Beauty, with the machine suck-hissing away while my hope was dying a cold death in my head.
    "Did you get the