Saving Elijah

can't expect him to start talking right away," he warned.
    "We understand," Sam said.
    I realized that Dr. Jonas had not really met him. "This is Dr. Jonas, Elijah," I said.
    "How do you do, Elijah?" Dr. Jonas said, putting his hand on Elijah's shoulder.
    "How ... do ... I... do?" Elijah said, his voice as husky as a cough.
    The young doctor looked utterly stunned.
    Elijah just gave him a big smile, as if he'd never even been afraid of doctors. There were Sam's dimples. I hugged my son again.
    "You were sleeping," I told him, burying myself in his hair, breathing his smell, his skin as tender as a newborn.
    "Night, night," Elijah said.
    Now Dr. Moore joined us, eyes dart-darting, his mouth proclaiming he had been right all along. A massive drug cocktail had caused the coma.
    "I heard singing," Elijah said after a while. His voice was as raspy as sandpaper, and he was speaking tediously and with great effort, but he was speaking.
    "Singing?" Sam said.
    He looked up at me with his bright blue eyes. "Lullaby."
    "Who was singing?" Sam asked.
    Elijah closed his eyes, then quickly opened them again. He shrugged both shoulders. "Someone."

    *    *    *

    "It seems like a miracle," I told Dr. Moore when I met with him a few days later. They had moved Elijah to the regular pediatric floor, and we were standing outside the playroom, looking in through the glass window. Elijah was sitting on the blue rug, playing with one of the female therapists.
    "People do come out of comas," Moore said. "Especially young children. Even after twenty-two days. His MRI is normal. It's not all that unusual."
    "But look at him," I said. "Look at the way he's playing with that puzzle." Elijah was, indeed, attempting to put together a ten-piece farm animal puzzle. Not only would he have been unable to work it before, he would have lost interest long ago. Now, slowly but surely, he was getting it. I wanted Sam to be there to see it, but Sam had gone into the office that day for a meeting, his agency's biggest account. He said he was going to get fired if he didn't start showing up again. (That couldn't be true. His boss, Ed Larobina, had come to visit several times. Ed understood.)
    "It's almost as if he's—I mean, doesn't the patient usually need to do some relearning?" I knew that much.
    "After brain trauma, the patient is often left with some lasting effect." Dart-dart. "Motor or speech dysfunction, memory losses, hearing, sight. Not always."
    "Is it possible the seizure altered some original miswiring of his synapses or something, the ones that were responsible for his developmental deficits?" Not to mention that he used to be able to smell a doctor at fifty yards and he was walking around here like he owned the place.
    "I doubt it." He moved toward the door. I stared after this man, this neurologist, who showed not the slightest curiosity about Elijah's new capabilities, then I followed him into the playroom. Once inside, he curtly dismissed the therapist, who said goodbye to Elijah and walked out. Elijah waved to her, smiled, then waved to me, and went back to the puzzle.
    "Well," I said. "Elijah seems like a miracle to me."
    The doctor glanced out the window at a nurse passing by in the corridor. "I have no problem with that."
    I stared.
    The doctor looked back at me, but even then he wasn't really looking at me. His eyes were dart-darting all over the place. "After three weeks is when we might have started to worry."
    Why hadn't he told me that before, this Dr. Narcissus? All I wanted was not to be condescended to.
    Elijah suddenly jumped up, and dashed over to stand between the doctor and me. There. His new talents were just like that. Everywhere Abner Moore's eyes darted, Elijah's eyes followed. Wall. Glass window. Ceiling. Floor. At first Moore seemed confused, but then he realized that Elijah was mimicking him. He cleared his throat and flushed as red as a beet.

    *    *    *

    Elijah remained in the hospital for two more weeks while they did tests. Given the intensity of the seizure and duration of the coma, Moore said, it was likely that the fever had unmasked some underlying seizure disorder—even if there was no evidence of seizure in their tests, at least none that he mentioned. He put Elijah on an anticonvulsant, and on a snowy mid-February morning they sent us home.
    There were already five or six inches of snow on the ground by the time Sam and Elijah and I pulled up our driveway. Though I'd come home once during the