He finds a funky, old-fashioned Clark station where he can pull right up to the washroom door. Two of them help her use the facilities while the other two lean against the van and smoke. Cheri has never been this freaked out in her life, and that’s saying something. One thing she’s learning is that it’s important to stay in the moment, not to leap ahead even fifteen minutes. Right now, she’s staring at herself in a shadowed washroom mirror; now she’s in the cold wind next to the car trying to get her gloves on. Now they slide the door open and she steps back, looks at her daughter’s face. Now she’s getting settled, taking the oxygen tube, returning the stare of the guy pumping gas. Frozen cornfields, a deflated barn, a looming underpass, and then the interstate. She drops her head down into the cool damp shell of her hands. Now the buffet and roar of semis, now a quavering sigh from somebody inside the van. The tires begin making a rhythmic clicking noise, passing over seams in the concrete.

Cheri opens her eyes intermittently and stares at her knees, just to stabilize and remember where she is. Lying down isn’t possible, although that’s why they got the van. Her lungs are full, and the nausea is overwhelming. Breathless and gasping, she runs down a twisting white corridor inside her head, the blat of a siren bouncing off the walls; suddenly the narrow hallway opens out onto a suburban backyard, the floor becomes grass, and she’s on a swing, knobby knees pumping, reaching toward the sky with her Keds. The chains go slack for a long instant each time the swing reaches its apex. She’s panting with reckless exhilaration.

“Do you need it turned up?” Linda’s voice, disembodied, and the monster inches away; Cheri’s breathing calms.

“Thank you,” she whispers into her hands.

The swing now has stopped, and, still seated, she walks herself around in a circle, twisting the chains, then lifts her feet and spins, body canted so far back that her hair brushes the dirt. She’s breathless and dizzy under the limp August sky until someone reaches out, turns up a radio, and cold invigorating oxygen flows into her nose. Another someone gently stabilizes her as the van banks onto an exit, takes a left turn, glides over a bump, ascends, descends, and stops. When she looks up from her cupped hands, they are idling under the canopy of a Quality Inn.

Thank God. She retreats into her hands again.