Saving Elijah

second.
    "This is me, Dinah. Julie." She dropped down on her bed. "I don't believe this."
    "We couldn't help it, Julie. I never meant for this to happen." I started to cry, and sat down on my own bed.
    "Dinah!" She glared at me from across the room. "You are such a devious shit. How could you do this?"
    "You're so important to me, Julie, you're the last person on earth I want to hurt. You've been my friend through everything."
    "You know what, Dinah'" She came over to my bed and hovered, her pale, freckled complexion mottled with rage. "I've been your friend, but you have never been mine. Not since high school, maybe not even before that."
    "That's not true, I love you."
    "Oh, right. Seth Lucien comes along, and it's bye-bye, Julie. So then I finally meet someone really great, someone I really fall for, and along comes Dinah, and it's bye-bye, Julie again, tough shit, Jules. Never mind that we've known each other since we were six years old. Never mind that it was your idea that we go to the same university. If this is your idea of friendship, I feel sorry for your friends."
    "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'd never do this if it weren't so ... it's just that what Sam and I have is ... a once-in-a-lifetime thing." I wasn't sure it was a lifetime thing. I thought it was. I hoped.
    "Once in a lifetime? Excuse me? You've already been to bed with him, haven't you?" Her eyes were on fire, as hot as her hair.
    I got up, I couldn't bear it.
    "When? Tell me when"
    "Only once. What's the difference?"
    "You know what?" she said. "You're right. There is no difference."
    Our third roommate, Sally, had walked in during this last round. Only a few weeks ago she'd been devastated by a breakup herself. Julie looked at Sally, then back at me.
    "I just hope you know who not to go to when he drops you, too, and moves on to the next." She walked out, and Sally followed her.
    Julie stopped speaking to me. Sally wouldn't speak to me, either, and she told everybody who'd listen what a shit I was. As soon as the university found me a new room, which seemed to take forever, I moved to another dorm, Sam's dorm, in fact, and we were together constantly from then on. Whenever I ran into Julie on campus she turned away. Our college graduation was the last time I laid eyes on her.
    Sam had graduated the previous year and gotten a job with a D.C. political ad agency. He and I were already engaged and, much to my parents' consternation, living together in blatant sin (as often as possible) in a small Washington apartment.
    After the graduation ceremony, Sam, my brother, my parents, and I, in my cap and gown, were walking out of the stadium when we passed Julie with her parents and brother, posing for photographs in her cap and gown. It was a hot day, and Julie's hair was longer and wilder than ever, two fire and frizz puffs sticking out of either side of the mortar cap. Working up my nerve, I moved toward her to wish her good luck, but she saw me coming and spun around, giving us all a full view of her back. This little interchange didn't escape Charlotte's rapier eye.
    "What in the world is wrong between you two?" Charlotte asked. My father, with his sixth sense for trouble between my mother and me, retreated, mumbling something about confirming our restaurant reservation.
    I wasn't about to tell my mother that I'd betrayed and hurt the most important person in the world to me. "I don't want to talk about it, Charlotte."
    "I was just asking. You and she were always as thick as thieves." She sighed. "Well, I guess that's what happens when you fall in love."
    Now this was a typical Charlotte comment. My childhood had been punctuated by a litany of her cliches: "You don't wear white before June or after September"; "Men don't buy the milk if they can get the cow free"; and "Fabrics should be natural." (Except in recent years she'd amended it to "—unless they're one of those new fabulous polyesters.")
    I would never have thought Charlotte might be right about one of my life's turns, certainly not about anything important, but I knew that Julie and I would never see each other again, and it was all because I had fallen in love.
    I made a choice between my best friend and the man I hoped would be my husband. For all these years, it had seemed like the right choice.

sixteen
    The children need you," Sam said when he came back to the hospital. He was sitting in the chair next to me. He'd slept at home, and I'd folded up the reclining chair when the clock told