PROXIMA CENTRAL ORPHANAGE
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28. 9:32 A.M.
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“Hello, Mirtha,” he greeted her, approaching the front desk.
Surprised, Mirtha Sandoval dropped the chocolate cookie she was eating as if she got caught red-handed committing a crime. And as she swallowed what was left in her mouth, she squealed with happiness. A few crumbs flew over the open packet of cookies.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
The woman came out of reception, fixing her hair. She still continued to wear it short and puffed, only that now she no longer bothered to dye her gray hair. Adam had known her all his life, and he’d never seen her with another hairstyle.
“Long time no see!” she greeted him and gave him a big hug.
Adam smiled, but gently, he let her go.
“Easy,” he said, and hastened to explain, “I just got out of the hospital yesterday.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Mirtha released him and looked at him in terror. “Hospital?! What happened?!”
“It was just a big little scare,” clarified Sarah Lanen, who was with Adam. “Luckily, now our patient here is just fine.”
Mirtha made a gesture of relief and then greeted Sarah; she was not half as effusive as she’d been with Adam, though.
“Hello, dear,” she said and turned her attention back to the young man. “You know? One of these days I’m gonna have to visit the hospital, too.” She rubbed her back with an exaggerated wince of pain. “My back. It’s getting worse and worse.”
Mirtha Sandoval had been working for decades at the front desk of the Proxima City’s Central Orphanage; the same number of years she had been complaining about her back pains, as Adam and Sarah recalled. However, truth be told, exaggerated comments about physical ailments always gained a more real nuance as age progressed.
A group of children scurried past them.
“Hey, you little devils! No running this way!” Mirtha scolded them without real anger in her voice.
The children continued as if no one had said anything. Laughing loudly, they hurried down the corridor and into the inner courtyard of the building.
Adam followed them with his eyes and, remembering the many times he had played in that same place, took a mental tour of the circuit that the children should be taking now. The hallway, the inner courtyard, then the basketball court, the bathrooms, and the classrooms. Everything was there, in his mind, and as far as he could see, so it was on the physical plane. Everything looked the same; painted with other colors, but still the same.
“What brings you guys here?” Mirtha’s question brought him back to reality.
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Adam put on the smile with which he always got a ‘yes,’ and spoke into her ear.
“I wanna see my admission papers to this beautiful place; if I may,” he said.
“Again?” she wondered. “Oh, honey; we’ve been through this a few years ago, remember?”
“I know, Mirtha, but it’s not just a phase this time. Trust me,” he excused himself. “C’mon, what do you say, huh?” He winked at her. “This will be our secret… Once again.”
Mirtha put on a serious face. Having her up close, Adam took notice that—despite leaving their trail, especially around her eyes—the years had been kind to her.
“All right. I’ll give you the key to the storeroom,” Mirtha whispered. “Juan must be fixing the air conditioning in Ward 5. If he sees you, you tell him you’re gonna get some things I asked for, okay?”
“You chill. I know how to treat that cranky old man.”
“And do it before the director arrives. You know how she gets when someone goes in there.”
Adam nodded.
Mirtha returned to her place behind the desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out a key. Before handing it over, however, she made a stop gesture as if she had remembered something.
“But first—” she said. Opened another drawer, withdrew the plastic card of a holo-magazine, which after a slight touch revealed to be one of the Loud copies that had Adam as a cover boy, and passed it to him along with a pen. “I’m gonna meet the girls and play cards this afternoon. I want your autograph to rub in their faces. That bunch of old ladies don’t believe that I changed the famous Adam White diapers when he was a kid, y’know?”
Adam blushed. Sarah had to look the other way to disguise her laughter.
‘To Mirtha, the most beautiful lady in the Central Orphanage, and the woman who most often gave me a flea in my ear in my life. Fondly, Adam. The diaper thing is also true.’ he signed on the opposite side of the card.
“I can’t wait to see Clotilde’s face,” Mirtha chuckled. “She’s got a poster of you from when you used to model… You know, in your skivvies. She says it’s her daughter’s, but it’s in her room.”
“Mirtha—” he interrupted her, and his tone of voice was so serious that it put a veil of shadows on the woman. “I know I’ve asked you a thousand times, but…”
Before he finished the sentence, the woman shook her head with a compassionate gesture that seemed to ask, ‘Why do you insist on this thing if you already know everything I know?’
“No, no, honey,” she said. “I’d only been here a few weeks when they brought you in, but I remember no one at the hospital could explain well how you got there. The nurse who found you was alone in the ward—or so she said—when she heard a baby cry and…”
“—And she went to see, and there I was, in one of the beds,” Adam finished.
Mirtha nodded as if to say, ‘See? You already know the story.’
“Even little things like this weren’t much help,” she said, referring to the security camera overhead.
“Hey! And do you know if any children from across the ocean have ever been admitted here? From Markabia, for example, or from some other part of Pannotia,” he asked. “I believe my parents could have come from there.”
Mirtha shrugged. There was genuine ignorance in that gesture; exactly what Adam expected, not what he needed or what he wanted. So, he didn’t insist, took the key, and along with Sarah, went to the storeroom.
After a while, they both got out of there with the same amount of information they had entered with.
They returned to the front desk and handed the key back to Mirtha, who again dropped the chocolate cookie she was eating as if it had been a red-hot iron.
“Remember what we’ve talked about controlling your glucose levels, Mirtha,” Sarah scolded her, albeit gently.
“I’m sorry, dear. It’s anxiety,” the woman excused herself. Then, she said goodbye to them with another hug, a softer one this time; and as if she were an extremely proud grandma of her grandson’s accomplishments, she raised the signed Loud card and laughed. She looked more like a little girl than a sixty-something-year-old woman.