During the week, Tara hardly ever saw her parents. That wasn’t unusual. Her father worked long hours at the hospital. They are in the midst of government cutbacks, and he said it took everything in his power to come up with creative ways to keep the place in operation. Jenn (sic) knew that her father was a good guy, a man who liked to help people. He really cared. Sometimes, she thought he cared too much - about the hospital and the people in it. In her life he had become a ghost.

Hey, but she was Miss Independent. In the eyes of other kids, she had the freedom, she had it made.

Her mom had decided to take up photography. She gave up some of her volunteer work and tagging along with her husband on business dinners. She had always been home when Tara was in elementary school, her mother said she was “spreading her wings a little.” So the walls of the house were covered with dozens of framed black and white photographs of super close-ups of spider webs and dew on tree branches. She had a particularly haunting photo of Hell’s Hotel taken in the day when the building looked stark, eerie, dangerous.

Jenn’s stories of life at “the hotel” were quite bizarre. Of course, sometimes Jenn didn’t remember everything that happened. Those were the bad nights when she was hanging with the dopers or the crackheads. Looking at the photographs of Hell’s Hotel always made Tara think about how close to the edge some people lived.