Saving Elijah

problems sometimes, he listened, but it never affected him. What was I doing with someone like him?
    "Oh. I never heard you mention her," Kate said.
    Kate was sitting by Elijah, stroking his hair. Alex was curled up in a corner, knees drawn up, staring out at the NAR where Jimmy had died. Now there was a teenage boy in there about Alex's age, a hemophiliac with AIDS, the result of a blood transfusion. I wanted to ask his mother how she went on living, knowing her son was going to die. Maybe there was some secret to this that I didn't know. Alex looked up.
    "She was your mom's best friend," Sam said, as if he and Julie hadn't ever met.
    I cut him off. "I haven't seen her in over twenty years."
    Kate shrugged. "Some best friend, if you haven't seen her in twenty years."
    "Please, Kate. I can't talk about this now."
    Kate went back to stroking Elijah's hair. Elijah slept on.
    "I suppose by now it has occurred to you, Dinah," the ghost said, "that this is all your fault."
    "I've tried to be a good person. I love my children, I love my husband."
    "Oh. Do you really?"
    "I try to help people in my work."
    "Well now, that last one is a total crock of elephant dung. You're a head-shrinker because your own head needs shrinking." For a moment I thought I saw his head shrivel and blacken, but I blinked, and he was back to the way he had been.
    "There is nothing you can hide from me, Dinah."
    I became afraid of him then, as he looked at me with eyes as black as a pair of tar pools and cooed, "Maybe your great and good God is punishing you after all."
    "For what? Please!"
    "Well," the ghost said, moving his mouth so that I could see the blackness within, "you did almost do away with your son once."
    I stared at him. Now very afraid.
    "But I wasn't going to do it. I was just thinking."
    "Thinking about aborting him? You didn't want him if he wasn't perfect."
    "What I wanted was for him to be healthy. I didn't want him to suffer."
    "You can't con me, Dinah," the ghost said. "Just like you couldn't con Julie."
    Poof. He was gone.

eleven
    Why had I let them drag me downstairs to the cafeteria? Sammy and Kate were still upstairs with Elijah, but there I was, sitting at a cozy table for nine in the hospital basement, a regular interfaith gathering. Marty and Charlotte, Mary and Tom, Alex, Uncle Lee and his partner George, and Dinah. And one ghost, lolling in an imaginary chair just behind Charlotte, patting the top of her head.
    "Stop that," I said.
    "Why should I?" said the ghost, who had leaned toward my mother, who of course didn't notice a thing.
    "Stop what?" Alex.
    "I was just thinking out loud. Sorry." And to the ghost: "Why does this keep happening, sometimes they hear me?"
    "How the hell should I know?"
    The ghost kept on patting, patting. I found myself remembering the first time I brought Sam home to meet my parents, something I hadn't done in the whole year we'd been seeing each other.
    "Galligan? That's an Irish name," Charlotte said after an excruciatingly long dinner only partially redeemed by the sight of my usually wisecracking fiancé offering some serious veneration to my mother, who presided over the meal in a way that reminded me of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. My father had taken Sam upstairs to see his collection of thirties and forties jazz records, and Sam, I supposed, was going to take the opportunity to ask him for my hand. "Anyone who's going to get me for a son-in-law," he'd said with a grin, on the way driving up from D.C., "has a right to at least be given the chance to say, 'Get out of here, you bum.'"
    "He seems a very nice boy," Charlotte said. "But darling, he isn't Jewish."
    "Well, thank you," I said. "I didn't know that."
    "There's no need to be sarcastic, Dinah. There might be problems, that's all. You're not going to kneel before a priest, are you?"
    "We'll probably have a justice of the peace. Or maybe a rabbi and a priest."
    "You know, Dinah," she said, with a sigh, "life is full of unexpected difficulties. Things happen that you'd never expect. Not in a million years. Now you think you can handle anything, but when two people come to very difficult problems with different viewpoints—"
    "What different viewpoints? Neither of us are religious."
    "You don't have children yet, Dinah."
    "Well, Charlotte, to suddenly get religion just because you have children strikes me as pretty hypocritical."
    "All I'm saying is that life is so much more complicated when you come at things from different ways