Saving Elijah

were filling out a little. One thin arm cradled his head, the other hung down off the bed, fingertips brushing the floor.
    His face was turned toward the window, hidden in shadow; a wedge of moonlight streamed across his torso. Someday the feel of that lanky body would give a young woman pleasure, just as his father's had given me, and that young woman would wind herself around my son and cling to him and hope and trust that he would be able to make everything all right. Until something like this. No. There was nothing like this.
    Alex rolled over now on his side and drew his knees up to his chest, the floor and bed creaking under his weight. Without his blanket he looked skinny and adolescent and cold. I moved to cover him with the quilt but was stopped by a new vision.

    *    *    *

    I am sitting in the kitchen. It is morning. I am still in my bathrobe, drinking coffee. Alex appears in the doorway. He is several years older, he has filled out, he looks more like his father than ever. "When is it going to get better, Mom?"
    "When is what going to get better?"
    He shrugs. He turns away.
    "You know when it'll get better, Alex?" I say. "It'll get better when I'm dead, too."
    I say things like this, even to my son. I seek out the drop in the jaw, the white-lipped stare, need people's shock and dismay. I want them to have just the tiniest glimmer of this grief. Martyr. Martyr. Sam is sick to death of me. So am I.

    *    *    *

    "Mom!" In his room, back in the present, Alex sat up in his bed. "What are you doing?"
    "Watching you sleep." Checking for life in the middle of the night. Imagining inconsolable grief.
    "That is weird, Mom. Very weird."
    I ended up sitting on the floor in the den, going through picture albums. I'd already gotten through most of them when I decided to put together an album of Elijah's life. Yes. I'd bring it to the hospital. If the nurses and the doctors had some idea of the way his smile lit up a whole room, maybe they'd try harder.
    I took all but three baby pictures out of his album, which had red and green and blue blocks painted on the cover and ELIJAH stamped underneath the blocks. It held only twenty pictures, and I chose the remaining seventeen carefully: Elijah sitting on Alex's shoulders in front of Lake Winnipesaukee; Elijah standing in front of the piano, banging away; Elijah with his pants bunched around his ankles—he was two, he hadn't noticed his pants had fallen down.
    I took the album to Elijah's room, sat in the rocking chair, and rocked and cried. Eventually I slept, in the same bed where I had found my son seizing. Someone had changed the sheets, Mary probably.
    When I awoke, I went into my bedroom, opened the overnight bag, took out the last batch of clothing Kate had brought to the hospital, replaced it with clean things. It occurred to me that I had not washed my hair in seventeen days, though I'd used the shower in the parents' room outside the PICU. Now I got in my own shower and washed my hair. When I came out, the phone was ringing. I grabbed a towel and looked at the bedside clock. Seven a.m.
    "Dinah? This is Lucia Orsini. Your daughter has been part of some gang behavior I think you ought to know about."
    "Kate?"
    "Yesterday morning, one of the girls threw a bucket of water in Allison's locker and soaked her gym clothes."
    "Kate did this?"
    "One of them did."
    "I'll talk to her, Lucia. But maybe the kids should work things out for themselves. They're almost sixteen."
    "Dinah, this is gang behavior. Last week they all threw snowballs at Allison."
    "Maybe she's been doing something the others haven't liked."
    "Allison would never do anything unless someone did it to her first. Allison is always telling me about something Kate did to her."
    "Like what?" My knees gave out from under me and I sank into a chair.
    "Like Kate is always calling to get homework from Allison. Then one time Allison called Kate for homework."
    "Allison always calls here, Lucia."
    "Not for homework. And this one time Kate gives her the homework, and then she says, 'You owe me big time.'"
    I waited for a punch line that didn't come. "All the kids talk that way," I said finally.
    "Well, we don't talk that way in my house."
    What universe was she living in?
    "Lucia," I said, "do you have any idea what's going on in my life?"
    "Yes. Well, I'm very sorry about your son. But I thought you'd like to know."
    "Fuck you, lady." I slammed the phone down.
    "Mom, who was that?" Kate was standing in