Saving Elijah
bright, blue sky and a strong winter sun that glistened on the sidewalks and streets. I drove over to Main Street, the tres chic Westport drag where you could pick at a four-course lunch at Cafe Christina, pick out a $600 decorative pillow at Lillian August, pick up a $28 Gap T-shirt better left to your daughter, an $800 little black skirt from Henry Lehr.
I found a parking space just as I turned the corner off the Post Road, and spotted Becky right away, gazing at a black silk sheath in the Henry Lehr window. She's hard to miss, this tall, exotic-looking mother of three. She's always reminded me of a movie star from the 1920s named Louise Brooks, partly because Becky also wears her ink-black hair in a short swingy bob with cropped bangs. She was skeptical until I dug out a film book and showed her Louise Brooks in Love 'Em and Leave 'Em. We had a good laugh over the film's title, and Becky agreed there was a certain resemblance.
"I'm buying," she said as we walked to Cafe Christina. "I actually made a sale today. Just a condo, but the commission is thirty-five hundred."
I congratulated her, then teased her about the bite that little black number at Henry Lehr would take out of the $3,500. While we munched on our grilled veggie salads, Becky complained about her daughter's new boyfriend.
"He comes to pick her up last Friday," Becky said, "and he's got an earring in his eyebrow and a skull tattoo on his arm. Jennie swears he's a good student, but I thought Mark was going to lose it." She grinned. "Hey, maybe you could make a column out of it."
I laughed. "I could call it 'What to do when Satan shows up at your door for a date with your daughter.'"
I'd begun the column on a lark, really, to amuse myself during my difficult pregnancy with Elijah, which had me spotting until the sixth month, fighting world-class nausea all the way through, and feeling utterly bovine. I'd been a chunky kid with a mother obsessed with thinness. Bovine was not a good way for me to feel. In my seventh month I wrote two hundred words about various little pregnancy humiliations, hormonal imbalances, my appalling increase in sentimentality, a sudden fondness for Hallmark cards and cows. I sent it to the Connecticut Star. The features editor liked it and invited me to write another. The "Agitated Observer" was born.
"I'm going to start charging you if you don't watch it," Becky said.
She had, in fact, been the inspiration for the piece coming out in the paper that afternoon.
"So," she said, "how's Elijah?"
"Doctor says he has to have heart surgery." In addition to his many other physical and developmental problems, Elijah had a small hole in his heart. We'd known surgery was coming, but just last week we'd gotten the news that the doctor wanted to do it soon.
"God, I'm sorry," Becky said.
"He says it's not that big a deal. They make this kind of repair all the time."
"It'd be a big deal if it were his child."
She had a point. "I feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Every time we plug one leak, another spurts. That poor kid has more specialists than a barrel of eighty-year-olds."
"Maybe so, but you're amazing about it, Dinah. Really."
"You just do what you have to do, right? He is frustrated, though. Me too. I just wish I knew how to help him. At least the tantrums have eased up, and he's been doing a little better in school lately, but when they do circle time, he still wanders over to the window. They paste pictures, he's at the sandbox. He needs so much one-on-one help. I suppose all the kids in the class do. I guess I should be grateful he can walk in the first place. Three of the kids in that class are in wheelchairs."
Her son Brian and Elijah were the same age, but Elijah was in special ed, and his class was full of children with handicaps, most far more devastating than his collection of relatively minor physical ailments and developmental disorders.
She nodded, touched my hand. "As I said, you're amazing."
"Thanks," I said. "Now, of course, my mother doesn't think so. Good old Charlotte. She's been campaigning for some special school she knows about out on Long Island. They're the only ones who know how to work with kids like him."
Becky laughed. "I doubt there are many kids like him. Elijah is unique."
"That he is," I said. "Even if he won't be a rocket scientist."
I would never have made such a comment to anyone other than Sam except Becky. I was much too defensive. But she'd been incredibly
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