Saving Elijah

laugh. He shoves his glasses up on his nose again and rests his elbows on the side of the boat, his chin on his hands.

    The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.

    The song, now coming from nowhere and everywhere.
    Elijah sits up again and looks around. "Who's singing?"
    This music has become all things to me now, a hymn, a dirge, a concerto, a symphony. Solemn and joyful, a reverie and a mazurka, both a major and a minor key. Liquid silk and rock and roll and razzmatazz, too. Debussy, the Fifth Brandenburg, the Rolling Stones, Art Garfunkel singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and Jobim on guitar. All of it, all at once. And the voice? A virtual choir that seems to contain every emotion, every sensation, lifting me up like a strong wind, soothing me like a tenor sax, rousing me like a bass, loving me like a violin, rocking me like a drum.
    "It must be God singing from the heavens." The secrets of the universe contained in every measure and chord.
    "Heaven is where dead people go?" My son lazily dips a finger in the water.
    I nod. "That's what they say, Elijah."
    "Is that where I almost went?" Back down to resting his chin on his hands, elbows on the side of the boat.
    "Yes, I suppose so."
    "It must be a very big place, to hold all the dead people."
    I laugh. My Elijah will become a child who speculates about such things, who imagines.
    "Yes," I tell him. "God's arms are very big. And isn't God's song wonderful?"
    He turns his head toward me without lifting his chin from his hands. "I don't know, Mommy. I kind of like Elvis." I laugh and laugh and laugh.

    *    *    *

    "Mrs. Galligan? Are you all right?" Dr. Jonas, bending over me. "Can I get you something?"
    Where was the azure sea?
    The world collapsed inward, and I heard a sucking sound as I crashed back into the place where I could not be, where I could not live, where Elijah, lying mute on a bed, entangled in tubes, might never reach the age of seven or eight.
    "Are you all right?" Young Dr. Jonas always had a bland expression, probably a good thing for a guy who watches children die. Of course Jonas also helped children live, I knew that. Some kind of genius, I guessed—I hoped—to be in charge, at so young an age in this New York City medical center where people came from all over the world, where they transferred you when your local hospital didn't know what to do. Or some kind of a lunatic. Or maybe he just had a God complex. Who else would seek this out day after day? I knew about lunatics and God complexes, being a psychologist.
    On the other hand, I liked Jonas a lot more than I liked Dr. Moore, the attending doctor, a tall, bulky, fiftyish neurologist who never looked you in the eye. When I mentioned Moore's eye-wandering propensity to Sam, he said he hadn't noticed. How was that possible? This guy's eyes darted everywhere but never landed on you. Or maybe it was only me.
    Now from the other side of the bed Sam was staring at me oddly, the dark circles under his eyes like bruises, punctuating despair. No wonder he was looking at me that way. I had been laughing maniacally in the PICU.
    It was a sign. God would never let me imagine my child as an eight-year-old if he would never get there.
    "I'm. All. Right," I said. There was that weird voice again. Ever since my son fell into this coma, the voice that came out of my mouth didn't sound like mine. There were out-of-place breaths between the words, no tonal inflections, no cadence or phrasing or beats. It didn't sound like a human voice at all. More like a machine.
    "Is there any change?" Sam asked Jonas, who had finished his examination.
    "We're scheduling him for an MRI tomorrow," Jonas said, as if that answered the question.
    "Why an MRI?" I asked. "Dr. Moore says he's going to wake up any day." Elijah was still conked out, Moore kept saying, because of all the medications they gave him at the other hospital to stop the seizure, before they transferred him here. A drug cocktail, Moore called it, disparaging what they'd done there, I thought. I was reminded of the time we remodeled the upstairs bathroom and the shower floor ended up looking like a sliding board. The tiler blamed the Sheetrocker, the Sheetrocker blamed the carpenter, the carpenter blamed the electrician, who blamed the plumber.
    "Sounds like he thinks they did the wrong thing," I said when Moore left the room after expounding his drug cocktail theory for the third time.
    Sam said I was being