What followed was silence and her own emotional response. She cried for that absence, not taking her eyes from the screen, anxiously hoping for her mother to appear. When she recovered from that momentary lapse, the lack of response from the page generated hatred and shock.

For a few weeks there wasn’t a single new post. It was as if the page had fulfilled its purpose. Then one evening a long message appeared; a story that Pepa had written for a Cancer Society competition after her first operation. She’d kept that story, along with a silver paperweight in the form of a lizard, a gemstone ring and brooch inherited from her great grandmother, the only things of any value belonging to her mother that hadn’t been shared among her aunts. She began reading the story with the impression that her own bewilderment was merging with her mother’s.

I didn’t know what had happened to me or why I was there. All I could see were tubes.

The first thing I heard was a voice. Was it a man’s or a woman’s? It was asking me to move both my legs and raise them. I couldn’t lift the right one, and I carefully put my hand beneath the sheet to try to work out why. I touched a bandage that came up to my abdomen. There was nothing on the left leg. I vaguely wondered about the cause of that difference, if I’d been left paralyzed. I’d undergone surgery, but couldn’t remember anything about it. I don’t know how much time passed. I was often able to move my right leg and one day I noticed that the bandage had disappeared.

I made a supreme effort to take in my surroundings. I was still immobilized, hooked up to so many machines I thought I must be about to die. That seemed to be for the best; so much suffering wasn’t worth the effort. I went back over my life, feeling very strange. It was like a dream rather than anything real, and I was also very calm, which must have been due to the tranquilizers. Although I found it hard to think clearly, I did realize that there were more serious cases in the unit. Very close to me someone was fighting for breath. Coughing continuously. I had no consciousness of time. That same night or the next one—I figured it was night because of the dim light in the ward, and the dark outside; plus there were no sounds of people coming and going—another patient arrived, screaming all over the place because he couldn’t urinate. That really is painful. They gave him all sorts of medication, but he only quieted down for a few minutes at a time.

I was very surprised that none of this bothered me. In fact, I was curious to know what else was going on.