The retired Dr. Warren was not intending to visit the abandoned St. Mercy’s Hospital that ordinary Tuesday, but the powerful force of nostalgia drew him toward the ghost from his past. The hospital looked dilapidated, with the weeds climbing up the crumbling walls and the windows all boarded shut. The silence of the empty hallways was oppressive, and his footsteps echoed as the broken tiles crunched beneath his shoes. Memories flooded back to him: the hurried shouts of the nurses, the metallic scent of the antiseptic, and the unforgettable newborn cries. Following an unexplainable pull, he wandered into the west wing, which had been spared from the damaging fire, and found his old locker, number twenty-eight, waiting for him. Inside, beneath his charred lab coat, he discovered an envelope.
The ink on the envelope, addressed directly to Dr. Warren in shaky handwriting, was faded, but the words were unmistakable. Opening it carefully, he read a heartbreaking letter written by a young former patient named Layla. She explained that she did not know how to tell him this to his face, so she was leaving the message for him to find. By the time he was reading the words, she would have been gone, and her newborn baby would be at the orphanage in the town. Layla revealed that she was very sick and lacked the necessary strength to raise the baby. She desperately pleaded with the doctor not to judge her too harshly, hoping the boy would have a much better life than she could have ever given him herself.
The fourteen-year-old words in the letter struck Dr. Warren like a severe punch to the chest. He clearly remembered the young woman, Layla, with the wide, tear-filled eyes who arrived all alone. He had delivered her beautiful, squalling miracle child, whom she named Thomas. The doctor also remembered the subsequent devastating abandonment by her boyfriend and her own father, who was named Grant. That baby boy, Thomas, would be a teenager now. Driven by an urgent sense of purpose, Dr. Warren immediately drove out of the crumbling hospital and went to Grace’s Home, the local orphanage. A kind but abrupt receptionist there, after checking her files, informed him that Thomas had been placed with a new foster family six months earlier.
The receptionist gave Dr. Warren the address, and the doctor soon found himself at a neglected, derelict house on the edge of the town. The yard was entirely overgrown, and a rusted, abandoned car sat in the driveway. When the door opened, a lanky boy with Layla‘s own blue eyes stood there. “Dr. Warren is my name. I knew your mother,” the doctor began gently. The boy, Thomas, was cautious and his eyes flicked to the ground, but he allowed the doctor inside the bleak home. Sitting at the scratched kitchen table, Thomas finally asked what his mother was like. Dr. Warren told him the painful truth: she was brave and loved him, but she was very sick, suffering from a severe postpartum hemorrhage and debilitating depression exacerbated by the abandonment of his father and grandfather, Grant.
When Dr. Warren asked Thomas about his life, the boy confessed that the system never seemed to like keeping him. He sadly told the doctor that he had never lived in the one place for a period longer than just six months. His current foster parents were simply “away” on their holiday, having decided not to take Thomas, but they had taken their two other biological children. The boy was truly alone in the decaying house. Despite the hardships, when the doctor asked about his dreams, Thomas‘s face lit up. He confessed that he wished to become a doctor, or maybe a vet, because he loved learning about the body and greatly wanted to help people who were in need of care.
Thomas‘s genuine words and dreams struck a profound chord within Dr. Warren. The doctor found the necessary conviction to offer an immediate lifeline. “You deserve so much better than this life, and I am personally going to help you,” he stated firmly. The subsequent few weeks became a frantic, grueling blur of court appearances and numerous social worker meetings. The current foster parents barely even fought the doctor’s action, having long since completely stopped caring about the boy. Despite the skeptical gaze of a social worker who questioned his ability to take on a teenager at sixty-five years of age, Dr. Warren was resolute. He was determined to keep the promise that Layla had originally asked of him in the letter from fourteen years ago: to check in on her son and give Thomas the much better, stable life he truly deserved.
