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44 Treatment Each May, often two and three times a night, they woke to my terrible lapsing breath, and helped me down the hall into the opaque light of the bathroom, where slowly, out of his sleep, my father instructed me to sit on the toilet, hold myself straight and breathe, while Mother reached into the glass lung of the shower stall and turned the HOT chrome star that sent water beating hard against the tile. They stayed with me until the air, atomized with steam, choked off the light reflecting in the mirror and blurred the doorknob with silver beads. I was alone, though I knew that Mother sat in darkness in the hall and waited for the breath to enlarge in me, filling each lung as if it were the hand and fingers of a rubber glove. And as if my parents will always be there, sleep-disturbed and waiting in the dark, I often sit up in my bed at night and holding in myself some unbreathable pressure, I listen for the quiet shuffling of their feet outside my door, for now I know that love is little more than a constant waking up to something harsh and almost dying, and that it simply calls, not merely to attend but also to cure and heal and wait, or fail, as I thought I failed them each time I'd lose in steam my father's shaving robe that hung blue and empty of its barrel chest behind the door. ...

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