Katy and Sarah stare at her, unblinking, forks suspended.

“No, I didn’t,” Sarah says finally.

So much for dinner. The girls clear the table without a word and adjourn to the living room and the evening news. Cheri stays in her spot, chewing ice cubes and waiting for Linda, who has taken to stopping by each evening. Pills would probably be the best, but whenever you hear suicide attempt, it’s pills, and whenever you hear suicide, it’s something more decisive—a bullet, a rope, a long sparkling plunge from a bridge.

The cough begins its slow ascent, giving her time to brace for it. Rattling and chaotic, it sounds like a paint can filled with gravel and rolled across the floor. By the time it’s over—the gravel slowly diminishing to sand, shifting, allowing her to breathe again—Linda is beside her and the girls are in the doorway. Ursa moves from one to the next, offering a rawhide bone.

“You eat?” Linda asks, eyeing the dishes in the sink.

“I’m eating water,” Cheri tells her, holding up the glass of ice.

In the living room, Vanna White prowls the row of letters in a dress as gauzy and form-fitting as a shroud. The television is always on now, one show melding into another, nobody really watching and nobody able to turn it off. As the evening progresses, they stare into the muted flickering light, first Sarah and Katy, then Sarah and Cheri, then just Sarah. At eleven o’clock the phone rings, a man asking for Cheri Tremble.

“She’s in bed,” Sarah tells him, “but she might still be awake.”

“No, no,” he says. “Let her rest if she can.”

Cheri had written the letter outlining her situation, her intention, and asking for his help only a few days before. He plucked it out of his stack of appeals and responded immediately—the impending paralysis and her inability to tolerate painkillers were the deciding factors. If the medical records support her account of what’s going on, Kevorkian is willing to help.

It’s all true, Sarah whispers.

The living room is dim, lit only by the moonglow of the television. It all looks unfamiliar suddenly, and temporary, like a movie set. Kevorkian sounds just like a regular doctor, only sympathetic. He asks Sarah several questions—about Cheri’s support system, how much care she needs, what her pain levels are like right now. Before hanging up, he explains that his patients have to come to him; he can’t go to them.

He laughs at this, ruefully, and Sarah laughs too. She has no idea why.

In the dark bedroom at the end of the hall, Cheri is floating, unaware. The sleep train is just leaving the station, tracks unspooling like a grosgrain ribbon. The familiar Amtrak scenery rocks past: sparse woods, long brilliant flashes of water, the ass-end of a Delaware town, row houses with garbage bags taped over the windows. A neighbor from her childhood hangs sheets on a line wearing a housedress and men’s shoes; as the sleeping car passes, the neighbor turns, watching its progress, shielding her eyes from the sun. A farm dog, running too close to the tracks, and then the face of someone she may have known once, an uncle, perhaps, gaunt and shadowed, telling her something she can’t quite hear.