The next morning, a new problem dawned on me. I had nothing to lend Tom for him to wear. What he was wearing the night before was already dirty from fighting against the thugs, and it wouldn't look so good if I present him to Phil like this. So first thing I did after ushering him to take a bath was knocking on my neighbor, good old Greg's door and ask to borrow a shirt or two. "Why?" was his first response, of course. "Don't tell me you picked up a stray man on the streets last night."
"No!" Let me be at least honest to my own mind; that's exactly what I did. "A friend of mine dropped by to say hi and I spilled coffee all over his shirt. I had nothing to give him, so maybe you have something you can let me borrow. Please?"
When I got back to my apartment, with a t-shirt and a button-down one in my arms, Tom was just coming out of the bath, wearing nothing but his black jeans. I'm not proud of it, but seeing a guy like him topless in my home was making me uncomfortable so I threw the clothing at him, which he fortunately caught in mid-air. "Get dressed. It's my turn to take a bath. And don't dare take a peak, I have a knife hidden somewhere inside there." I tried to threaten him. But he merely chuckled, "All right."
We arrived to the diner in time to find Phil opening the place. When he saw me walking with a guy, he immediately bellowed, "Got your new boyfriend there?"
"If you weren't my boss, I would've hit you in the head." I pouted at him, not daring to check Tom's reaction to the accusation, but I could feel he was grinning. "This is Tom. He's a friend of mine. Uhm, we grew up together in the orphanage." I eyed Tom and saw the confusion in his face. I shook my head hopefully to get the message to him to not contradict what I just said, at least until we're alone. Thankfully he understood.
"Well, having a better look at him, he's too good-looking for you! Sorry about that, Tom." Phil laughed and I was so close to actually hitting him. "What are you doing here, anyway? Your shift isn't until in the afternoon."
"I need to talk to you. And have breakfast." I added as we entered the diner, Phil flipping the light switch on. "You see, Tom here needs both a job and a place to stay, so..."
"How are your people skills, Tom?" Phil suddenly turned to him.
"I... uhm, I don't bite." Tom shrugged. Phil scanned him for a moment and said, "He's not bad in the eyes, we can pull more female customers with him around so I'm alright with giving him a job." I sighed in relief and saw Tom smiling at me. I never really thought of it, but I guess Phil was right about him being sort of attractive. He has a nice smile. And his green eyes look really nice.
Phil interrupted my thoughts, which I'm thankful for. "But if you're asking me to let him stay at Kyle's bunk bed in the back-"
"Don't you say no." I cut him off. "Come on, no one's using that bed since your nephew moved out. Okay, I use it from time to time when I'm feeling lazy here, sorry. But think of it. Someone will be a sort of security guard after hours. And you can cut his pay a bit if you want as his sort of rental fee. So you get a free security guard, and a new waiter you can underpay. Ain't that a sweet deal? Please, he's got no where else to stay." I tried my best to put a pleading face like what girls do these days when they want something. But Phil knows me enough to know I'm not comfortable doing that.
He scowled. "I'll fix you two something to eat. Can you start your shift right now, Tom?"
"Sure." said Tom.
"Alright." Phil turned to me. "I'll observe him first for today. If I like him, I'll consider letting him stay at least for tonight."
"Yes!" I exclaimed but Phil held out his hand. "But if that's the case, then you'll be staying for the night with him. Let me at least have the comfort of knowing there's someone I trust around here."
As much as I'm glad to hear Phil trusts me, I just had to argue. "Sorry, but I have a place to stay so that'll be unnecessary."
"That's my offer, take it or leave it. If he hadn't killed you by tomorrow morning then I'm okay with him." Phil said before disappearing into the kitchen.
I slouched on one of the booths, Tom taking the seat opposite to mine. "I guess we're spending another night together." I told him and the creep actually smiled as if enjoying my despair. "I look forward to that." he said and I softly hit him in the head which made him laugh even more.
The sweet smell of honey-glazed bacon started to seep in from the kitchen. We could hear Phil singing "Carry on, my wayward son" as he fries up our breakfast. Bless the man if he doesn't deduct this on my pay. "He seems to be an interesting fellow." said Tom.
"I've known Phil for years, he's beyond interesting. In fact, he's a very confusing man." I told him.
"So," his tone suddenly became serious, which meant he was about to ask what I'm expecting. "You grew up in an orphanage?"
I nodded. It's not something I feel like boasting about, but it's something I'm also not ashamed of. "That's where orphans like me end up, of course. I guess that's why I have a heart for someone who doesn't know the details of their identity." I stood up and went behind the counter. I plugged in the coffee maker and prepared the brew. "How do you like you're coffee?" I asked him and he shrugged, "I don't know."
Really now, getting an amnesia also makes you forget your preferences in food? "Fine. You like bitter, creamy or sweet? Or any combinations of the three?" He took a second to think and said, "Bitter and creamy, I guess." I fixed us both out coffee and went back to the booth. I watched as he took a sip on the coffee, glad when he smiled. "Thank you, it's delicious."
It has been more than a week since the day Mikaela found me, which I am still very grateful for. I had been staying in the backroom of the diner where a small bunk bed was placed amongst other things. And being a waiter wasn't so bad as a job. All I was required was to smile at people who come in, list down what they want to eat, hand the list to Mika or Phil, whoever is in the kitchen, and return to the customers with their ordered food and clean up after them when they leave. At first I had Mika and Jessie, a waitress in the diner like Mika, to guide me. But now I've become used to my routine. Phil, for one, has been happy for my work. But Mika tells me it had something to do with me pulling more female teenagers in the diner, which I am not certain how she meant as I don't believe I have forced anyone to come to our store.
Mika and I has still kept my amnesia a secret, she says it'll be up to me to divulge the information to others. But she has been trying to help me regain my memories. Over the weekends when we do not need to go to work, she had pulled me back to her apartment and asked me to do a few things that she believes might help. One of them was showing me images of places from her laptop, asking me to try to see if they all seem familiar to me. None of them were, except for the picture of New York City, which still felt utterly vague therefore I had not told her.
Another thing she had me do was tell her what I dream about in my sleep. This had me very confused as my dreams as they are were blurry. "A box with blue light?" she repeated when I told her about one dream where I held a cube that had a blue glow from the inside. "You're sure it's not a TV you're talking about?"
"I do not think so," I said. "It was much smaller than your TV. I remember the cube could fit in my palm."
"That could be anything. A mobile, a night light, a rubix cube..."
"Rubix cube?" I asked. Mika crossed the living room and pulled out a multicolored cube from her bookshelf. "Here." she said and she threw the cube at me, which I had caught. "That's a rubix cube, a puzzle where you're supposed to put all the colors together."
I stare at the intriguing object and began to twist the small cubes that make up the entire thing. "Have you solved it yet?" I asked her as I played with the cube in my hands.
"I managed to complete two faces. That's just about what I have done." she answers and throws herself back to the couch next to me. I notice how small Mika is. She was taller than Jessie, but her built was slim. She had tied her dark hair back, barely touching her shoulder blades. From how close I am to her right now, I could smell the sweet and tangy scent of the shampoo she had used earlier. For some reason, the scent was somewhat comforting to me.
"So, back to more important matters... What?" she suddenly asked suspiciously. I must've been staring at her. "Sorry. I was just... uh, recalling another dream." I told her.
"Okay... Spill." Mika said and I told her, "I dreamt of a room. It was very wide and open. I don't know where it is. But I do remember that it was full of gold. or at least the room was filled with the color."
This is when Mika inched further to me, her eyes staring at me which, to be honest, was quite unsettling. The scent of her hair was much stronger now, and fragrant. It was then that I realize that her eyes weren't purely gray, but slightly blue near the pupils. Finally she spoke, "Please don't tell me you're part of some sort of mafia."
"Mafia?" I repeated, feeling like a child, innocent about the things she speaks of.
"You know, a crime syndicate. A group of criminals driven by rich-as-frick families." she said.
"I don't feel like a criminal." I said and she leaned back on the other side of the couch. I don't know why, but I suddenly felt unpleased.
Mike groaned, putting her palm against her forehead. "Well, I don't know how else to explain your golden room. Unless it was just a dream, not some fragment of your memory. Or maybe a museum?" I wasn't sure then if she was talking to me or to herself, but she suddenly turned to her laptop that lay on the coffee table.
In the end, we could not find anything that could unlock my memories. The next few days went by much like the ones before. I wake to the sound of Phil opening the windows of the diner, I help him set up while he fixes breakfast for us. Jessie and I tend to the customers until noon when she gets off and Mika takes her place. I enjoy watching Mikaela work. She both entertains the customers and cook in the kitchen when Phil is resting. I wonder how she finds the energy to do all these while she also helps me in my condition.
"Hey, Tom." Jessie calls out to me from behind the counter one day. "Mika's not here yet. You should go take a break while I'm still here"
"Thank you." I say to her and I leave to the kitchen where Phil had left a ham and egg sandwich for me to eat. I nod him my thanks before I head out to the backdoor where I took a seat in the alleyway. Often, I had Mika with me during my breaks. Once she had bought a dessert called pudding for the both of us, which we ate after our meal. I enjoyed that well and when I told her, she promised she'd buy some again.
I had just taken a bite of my sandwich when I happen to notice a familiar shade of blue from across the street. I stood up and walked towards the end of the alley and find Mika across the street, wearing her midnight blue coat. She was not alone; a boy was with her, sitting on the sidewalk. Again, I felt annoyed for some reason, until I realize the boy seemed to be much younger. I watched as Mika opened her bag and took out a familiar looking cup and handed it to the boy. The boy smiled at her and opened the cup, that's when I realize it was the pudding she gave me before. Mika patted the boy on the shoulder and said something to him before crossing the street.
"Mika." I called her name when she neared. She was startled when she saw me. "Oh, Tom. Sorry, I'm late. You're having lunch already?"
"I just started. Will you be joining me?" I asked her. She looked back to the boy who had just ran off, then she opened her bag again and handed me another cup of pudding. "I had lunch already. Here. For you." Mika walked inside the alley and I followed. "You gave yours to the boy, didn't you?"
"What?" she turned and shrugged. "Well, yeah. It was no big deal. I can live without dessert for the day."
"Why?" I asked her. And she gave me a sympathetic smile, "He was hungry. So I gave him my pudding."
Before thinking twice, I suddenly began saying, "I don't understand. You seem to be helping complete strangers for no reason."
"You don't need a reason to help people, aside for the obvious reason that they need your help." she answered me bluntly.
"Have you ever considered if they deserve your help? What if they're unworthy of your hand?" I told her and I was suddenly afraid if I had said too much. But instead of being angry, she said something I should have expected. "Are you thinking of yourself, Tom? Are you thinking that you're not worth me helping you?"
I was lost for words. I stared down at the cup in my hand and tried to think of what to say to her. What came out of my lips was another question, "Have you ever considered the possibility that I was a bad person, before I lost my memories, like the men who attacked me the night we met? Would you regret having saved me if I was?"
Mika crossed the distance between us and placed her palm over mine, which I had not notice was shaking. When I looked up, she was smiling, yet her eyes bore sadness. "Yes, and no. Yes, I have thought that maybe you were a bad person before the night I found you. And no, I wouldn't regret helping you if that was the case."
It was too odd for me, how honest her words seem even though I find them hard to believe. Again, I didn't know what to say. So I just asked her again, "Why?"
Suddenly, her palm over my hand felt cold and she slipped them away. "Cause I believe even bad people suffer, sometimes even more than the rest. That's why they became who they are, because they've suffered so much it changed them and made them desperate to take their pain away." Mika said. She walked towards the door that lead to the diner and took a seat on its steps. She gestured for me to sit with her, and I complied. "Eat your sandwich, this is gonna be a long and depressing story." She warned me before beginning, "I've told you before that I'm an orphan. I never deny it because that's who I am. That's a part of me that I am sure of. But when I was little, it's something I wanted to run away from. And I did.
"I spent the first years of my life hoping that someone would want me. That someone would save me from the walls that had compressed me. One by one, the children that were in the orphanage with me were chosen by families that came. I thought it was unfair that I had been waiting longer than most of the other children, but no one saw anything special about me that made them want to take me. That's how I felt, that no one wanted me; not my real parents, not the couples that were desperate to have a child. I got scared that I would be stuck in the orphanage until I become an adult, and I had to be the one taking care of other orphans who, one day, would be taken to families as well.
"I was fourteen when I ran away from the orphanage. It wasn't the best decision of my life, I have to say. Then again, I didn't really think it through so it wasn't a promising decision to begin with. I ended up living in the streets, begging for food and loose change from strangers who mostly ignore me and think lowly of me. It wasn't enough for me to survive, even when I resorted to eating leftovers from food stalls and garbage cans. So I had to steal to survive. I would hang around a fruit stand and wait when the vendor isn't looking and I would run and take as many apples as I could. Or at times when I find these people who sell random trinkets in the streets. They often just leave their money in a can at their feet and it would be easy to take it from them when they're busy with haggling customers. I admit, I was never proud of what I was doing. But I felt I had no choice, it's either steal or die from starvation. But I forced to restrict myself to take only what I need and nothing more.
"The nights were tricky. I did my best to find a spot that would be too obscured that no one would bother me, or too public even in the middle of the night so that no one would dare do anything illegal with me. But just in case, I always had my favorite Swiss knife in my hand while I slept. I lived like that for about a year. Until one morning, when I fell asleep in a bench at a park, someone woke me up. I almost slashed her with my Swiss knife out of paranoia, thankfully I didn't. It was an old woman, old enough to have been my grandma. She asked me if I was hungry, I said yes. Then she handed me a sandwich. I took it, and asked her why she was giving it to me. She said I was hungry, and she wasn't. With that, she left me. The next day, I woke up in the same bench with her watching me. This time she gave a milk carton along with the sandwich, and she waited until I finished eating. Then she told me about her nephew, who had just opened a food stall and needs a helper. She offered to help convince him to take me, she said I'm better off working for her nephew than sleeping on the streets. And I can't believe I had to think it through and hard. She was offering me to turn my life around, to live a normal and decent life."
Mika paused and grinned at me. "By the way, her nephew was Phil. He was just starting in the food business and when he saw me, I knew he was tempted to yell no at his aunt. But he gave me a chance. Trust me; he was like a hawk watching my every move the first week I worked for him. Finally, he gave up the idea that I would take his cash register when he's not looking and run off. And I've been working for the guy for eight long years now."
"So, you believe that people who had done bad things just did it because of how much they suffered?" I asked her.
"Sort of." she stood up, stretching her arms. "But of course, that doesn't mean they can get away with the things they do. But everyone has gone through pain, Tom. It all depends on how we take it. Sometimes it makes us desperate enough to do bad things, but sometimes it makes us stronger and smarter. What I'm saying is, if I can help it, I don't want anyone to be as desperate as I was when I stole things. If I can help turn someone's life around like what Phil's aunt did for me, then I would. And helping people has it's variations. It can be saving their lives or just giving them your dessert." And with that, she disappeared to the back door.