Behind the registration desk is a holiday wreath and a mirror; in the mirror is the face of a crazy person who looks only marginally like Sarah. She pulls it together as best she can—tucking in the migrating strands of hair, straightening her jacket, clearing her throat—before meeting the eyes of the clerk. He’s a man in his fifties, white-haired, wearing glasses.

“My mother reserved a room,” she tells him. “Cheri Tremble?”

He stares at her, assessing. “Where is she?” he asks.

“I’m getting the room,” Sarah answers slowly. “She’s in the car, with a headache.”

He continues staring at her for a moment, then steps into an office and calls someone, speaking low but keeping an eye on the desk and the young woman shifting from foot to foot, zipping and unzipping her coat.

Sarah deliberately turns her back on him. The lobby is awash in a franchised gloom—couches here and there, glass coffee table with an extravagant arrangement of silk flowers, and a breakfast station with a do-it-yourself waffle iron and plastic bins that dispense cornflakes. The clerk steps up once again to the desk; the wreath behind his head is decorated with spray-on snow and sparkling plastic fruit made to look like marzipan. He knows what’s going on.

“I’m sorry, I can’t give you a room,” he tells her.

“Why not?” she asks, incredulous.

“We’ve had some problems with Dr. Kevorkian,” he says. He looks pleased, which frightens Sarah. She thought he was calling his boss, but it could have been the police. He has the excited and pious expression of a man capable of making a citizen’s arrest.

“This is crazy,” she answers, backing away. “We have a reservation.”

“Huh-uh,” he says loudly. “Nope.”

And then Sarah’s back in the van, telling Wayne to drive, get out of there; Cheri’s struggling to breathe, unable to make a decision, all of them thrown into a panic that propels them out of the parking lot and back into the early-evening traffic. They drive around in circles for a few minutes until they find a pay phone and Linda leaves a message for Kevorkian’s assistant, Neal Nicol. They wait as long as they can, motor idling in the cold, rainy twilight, oxygen tank dwindling, Cheri suffering wave after wave of anxiety. The fear of dying tonight is nothing, she realizes, compared to the fear of still being alive tomorrow morning. She leans forward and then back, rocking herself slowly, trying to calm down. No one returns the call, and after a while they pull away reluctantly and drive a few blocks more to an Office Depot.

Linda, Katy, and Sarah go inside and compose a fax to Kevorkian, explaining their predicament in all caps:

TO: DOCTOR
FROM: CHERI’S FRIEND