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compassion, that Jesus was love, that Jesus was forgiveness, still somewhere I thought that maybe a dad who loved me crazy but still drank himself to death would offer forgiveness of a different sort.
    So, I prayed to my dad. Pop, I fucked up. Pop, I’m sorry I did this to me. Pop, can you help save his teeth, can you help save his hands? I didn’t mean to be this. But we’re not just this. You should see us in our dreams. You should hear him when he plays. I’m unforgivable but forgive me, forgive me.
    In my peripheral vision I saw a nurse come in and stop in her tracks, hovering there, unsure of what to do. Hadn’t she ever seen anyone pray before? I looked at his trembling body then turned to her.
    â€œHe’s cold.”
    â€œNo, he isn’t.”
    â€œHe’s shaking. Can we please have another blanket?”
    â€œHe’s not cold.”
    I put my hands to his bare chest and could feel against my wrists where my bandages ended that he was warmer than I was. I was so cold that furious goose bumps covered every exposed inch of my flesh. I placed one hand to his heart and one on his belly like I was a preacher with healing powers. Like I had seen work a hundred times before back home. You may doubt it; you may think it was some kind of a sham, but you’d be wrong. I know what I saw was real. Anyone could be a healer.
    The nurse left the room.
    The fourth thing I did was that when I was done praying to Jesus and my pop I talked to Aaron. I told him that I was just kidding what I had said. I told him that God was going to give us another chance. I told him that I would learn how to love better, that I wasn’t sure how I had gotten it so wrong.
    His thin frame shook and his rib cage moved up and down to the mechanical rhythm. Up and down. I can still hear it sometimes when I’m trying to sleep. I shake my head to make it stop. When I start to hear the ventilator, I get up, go downstairs, and turn on the TV.

    After the strokes that stopped his brain, it was Aaron’s mother who signed the paper to turn the machines off. She didn’t speak much to me, but we sat together. We sat together with him when he died but that’s the part I’d rather not get into now because that’s the part that lives like an overhead projection superimposed over all of my days. When I first sobered up I actually tried banging my head on the wall to get rid of it, but the folks at the detox threatened to put me in a whole different level of lockdown if I didn’t get a grip and anyway it didn’t work, it just added a headache layer on top of the firebrand memory. Eventually what I figured out is that I can nudge it out of the way for a minute here and a minute there by pressing the rewind button and seeing instead the moment when I was on the pool table and my alive boyfriend stood in front of me and reached out his arms as if to say go ahead and fall. Fall and I’ll catch you. And that was all I had ever wanted—someone to catch me.

Two
    I was almost saved once, when I was baptized in the waters of the Maumee River on the outskirts of Toledo. I thought that the cold dip would do the trick but almost isn’t enough. Look away for a minute and your faith will be gone and you may not get a second chance at it. That is what I think as I sit outside of Serenity in my shitty pinkthat-used-to-be-red Honda with the sun-bleached hood and the busted passenger-side door. Not so much about faith but about second chances.
    Serenity House is on the back slope of a hill in Echo Park. It is one of two state-sponsored halfway houses located in neighboring restored Victorians. I park the car on the steep grade and hope like I always do that the emergency brake will live up to its name. I got my beater car cheap from a lady whose son parked it out by the ocean and slit his wrists. She wanted it gone fast. She had it cleaned real good, though. You can only see a couple of the stains if