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A soft noise drew her attention away from her paperwork, and Rachel glanced down at the bassinet on the floor beside her desk, and the tiny infant inside. The baby boy squirmed but didn’t wake.
She sighed, pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes. The orphanage would never turn down a child in need, but it was another mouth to feed, and they were already stretched so thin. The baby seemed healthy, at least. Good color and weight.
Rachel turned back to the forms on her desk. Intake paperwork, responsible for establishing an identity of the child in question. She’d filled out the portions she could – overall health, sex, how he came to the orphanage – but there were two important pieces of information that she just didn’t know.
Name and date of birth.
The baby appeared to be around six to eight weeks of age. It was hard to tell without a visit to the pediatrician, but it would likely be several days – at least – before a doctor could come to the orphanage or one of the care takers could leave to take children to the doctor. And the sooner Rachel got the forms submitted, the sooner the orphanage got the extra government funds it so desperately needed to care of the children in its care.
Rachel made note of the current date on her desk: April 11, 2154.
She inputted the date on the forms. A good a date as any.
The child cooed from his nest of blankets, and Rachel reached down to stroke the brown curls on his head, staring at the blank spot on the forms where his name should be.
The gentleman that dropped the child off gave no name for him, but that wasn’t unusual. Typically, the care staff would come up with names for the newcomers, but it was the middle of the night, and the facility was on a skeleton crew.
“We’ll make sure he’s taken care of,” Rachel had told the man that dropped the baby off earlier that night. “Mister…”
“Shepard,” the man had replied. “Eric Shepard.”
He looked haggard and worn, but also quite young. Rachel didn’t ask if Mr. Shepard was the child’s father; she likely wouldn’t get an answer from him, and it didn’t really matter anyway, in the end.
Rachel inputted Eric Shepard into the blocks for the child’s name, signed the bottom, and sent the forms off to the proper agency.
Glancing down at the bassinet, she was met by a pair of wide, hazel eyes.
“Let’s get you settled in, little one,” she told the baby – Eric – and scooped him up in her arms.
He squealed, clutching onto Rachel’s finger with a tiny hand. She smiled, a little sadly. The children of the orphanage usually led mediocre lives. Too many of them, too few people to care for them. Rachel tried, and she would continue to for the tiny baby in her arms, but at the end of the day she was vastly outnumbered, and the pasts that haunted these children constantly closed in on them.
Eric was too young to have any bad memories, and maybe that would work in his favor. Still, Rachel had seen far too much to think that little Eric Shepard’s life would turn out any differently.