“I really listen to what a person is saying when I’m with them. Really give them their space to feel their feelings, you know what I mean?”

I nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”

4.

After the first exit-guide training with Bethanny, I was completely exhausted. I told Bobby I wasn’t feeling well and crawled into bed without eating dinner. I fell asleep without weed or Xanax, and I had a recurring dream, one that I hadn’t had in a few weeks. It was the kind that scared me into believing that I can see the future. And it always started the same way.

In my dream, my mother and father are staying with me and I am afraid my father will die and I don’t know what to do with the body.

I need to get my parents from Point A to Point B, where I live to where they live, in the middle of the Southwest. My father is starting to wane—he looks twenty years older than his age, beat up from wearing himself down, in pain all over his body. An oxygen machine assists my mother’s breathing, and she believes she will die without it. I help my father with the crutches he is using, and we set out into the L.A. traffic, pointed toward the desert. In my dream, I am in the car with these dying people and I am tasked with making sure they make it out of here alive.

We don’t speak for the first seventy or so miles, until we reach the wind turbines that dot the parched hills cascading toward signs for Palm Springs.

“They’re ugly,” my mother murmurs, staring out the window as the small portable oxygen machine we have plugged into the car lighter clicks and wheezes like she does when she breathes.

“I like them,” I say. And we have already found a divide. I look at my father in the rearview mirror to find an ally, but he only stares out the window at the sea of white turbines with his vacant eyes and doesn’t say a word.