“I’ll feel better if you turn off that infernal noise,” I mumbled, the cotton in my mouth barely let me articulate. She disconnected the alarms, moving a knob on the apparatus that seemed to be the center of everything; and my ears stopped ringing. “Hilda? Is that you? How…? How have you been?”
“Do you mean lately, or in the last eight years?” she asked, with irony.
I shrugged my right shoulder in a gesture that it was all the same to me. Which was not true.
“Lately?” I asked.
“Hmm, fine. Trying to get over what happened to Dad, but fine.”
I lowered my gaze. She took my pulse at the wrist and placed the bell of the stethoscope on my chest. She stopped chewing her gum to hear better. She moved with confidence and professionalism. On the other hand, she looked just as always, with her b
