That stupid fight—what was it about, anyway? I forgot already.”
Molly gets up from the rocker, goes over and stirs the oatmeal for no reason, puts her palm on the teakettle. Lukewarm. Listens for footsteps, but the house is quiet. “Hey,” she says, “I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Tell me what?” he says, and then, “Whoa, wait a minute, are you breaking up with me?”
“What? No. It’s nothing like that. Dina threw me out.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“She threw you . . . When?”
“Last night.”
“Last night? So . . .” Molly can practically hear the wheels turning. “Where are you now?”
Taking a deep breath, she says, “I’m at Vivian’s.”
Silence. Did he hang up?
Molly bites her lip. “Jack?”
“You went to Vivian’s last night? You stayed at Vivian’s?”
“Yes, I—”
“Why didn’t you call me?” His voice is brisk and accusatory.
“I didn’t want to burden you.”
“You didn’t want to burden me?”
“I just mean I’ve relied on you too much. And after that fight—”
“So you thought, ‘I’ll go burden that ninety-year-old lady instead. Much better than burdening my boyfriend.’”
“Honestly, I was out of my mind,” Molly says. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“So you hiked over there, did you? Somebody give you a ride?”
“I took the Island Explorer.”
“What time was it?”
“Around seven,” she fudges.
“Around seven. And you just marched up to her front door and rang the bell? Or did you call first?”
All right, that’s enough. “I don’t like your tone,” Molly says.
Jack sighs.
“Look,” she says. “I know this is hard for you to believe, but Vivian and I are friends.”
There’s a pause, and then Jack says, “Uh-huh.”
“We have a lot in common, actually.”
He laughs a little. “Come on, Moll.”
“You can ask her.”
“Listen. You know how much I care about you. But let’s get real. You’re a seventeen-year-old foster kid who’s on probation. You just got kicked out of another home. And now you’ve moved in with a rich old lady who lives in a mansion. A lot in common? And my mom—”
“I know. Your mom.” Molly sighs loudly. How long is she going to be beholden to Terry, for God’s sake?
“It’s complicated for me,” he says.
“Well . . .” Molly says. Here goes. “I don’t think it’s so complicated now. I told Vivian about stealing the book.”
There’s a pause. “Did you tell her that my mom knew?”
“Yeah. I told her you vouched for me. And that your mom trusted you.”
“What’d she say?”
“She totally understood.”
He doesn’t say anything, but she senses a shift, a softening.
“Look, Jack—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for putting you in that position in the first place. That’s why I didn’t call you last night; I didn’t want you to feel like you had to save my butt once again. It sucks for you, always doing me a favor, and it sucks for me, always feeling like I have to be grateful. I don’t want to have that kind of relationship with you. It’s not fair to expect you to take care of me. And I honestly think your mom and I might get along better if she doesn’t think I’m trying to work all the angles.”
“She doesn’t think that.”
“She does, Jack. And I don’t blame her.” Molly glances over at the tea service drying in the rack. “And I have to say one more thing. Vivian said she wanted to clean out her attic. But I think what she really wanted was to see what was in those boxes one last time. And remember those parts of her life. So I’m glad, actually, that I was able to help her find these things. I feel like I did something important.”
She hears footsteps in the upstairs hall—Vivian must be on her way downstairs. “Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’m making breakfast.” She flicks on the gas burner to warm the oatmeal, pouring a little skim milk into it and stirring.
Jack sighs. “You’re a major pain in the ass, did you know that?”
“I keep telling you that, but you don’t want to believe me.”
“I believe you now,” he says.
A FEW DAYS AFTER MOLLY ARRIVES AT VIVIAN’S, SHE TEXTS RALPH to let him know where she is.
He texts back: Call me.
So she calls. “What’s up?”
“You need to come back so we can deal with this.”
“Nah, that’s okay.”
“You can’t just run away,” he says. “We’ll all be in a pile of shit if you do.”
“I didn’t run away. You kicked me out.”
“No, we didn’t.” He sighs. “There are protocols. Child Protective Services are going to be all over your ass. So will the police, if this gets out. You have to go through the system.”
“I think I’m done with the system.”
“You’re seventeen. You’re not done with the system till the system is done with you.”
“So don’t tell them.”
“You mean lie?”
“No. Just . . . don’t tell them.”
He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, “You doing okay?”
“Yup.”
“That lady is okay with you being there?”
“Uh-huh.”
He grunts. “I’m guessing she’s not a certified foster care provider.”
“Not . . . technically.”
“Not technically.” He laughs drily. “Shit. Well, maybe you’re right. No need to do anything drastic. When’re you eighteen, again?”
“Soon.”
“So if it’s not hurting us . . . and it’s not hurting you . . .”
“That money comes in handy, huh?”
He’s silent again, and for a moment Molly thinks he’s hung up on her. Then he says, “Rich old lady. Big house. You’ve done pretty well for yourself. You probably don’t want us to report you missing.”
“So . . . I still live with you, then?”
“Technically,” he says. “Okay with you?”
“Okay with me. Give Dina my best.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” he says.
TERRY IS NOT PARTICULARLY HAPPY TO FIND MOLLY IN THE HOUSE on Monday morning. “What’s this?” she says, her voice a sharp exclamation. Jack hasn’t told her about Molly’s new living arrangements; apparently he was hoping the situation would somehow magically resolve itself before his mother found out.
“I’ve invited Molly to stay,” Vivian announces. “And she has graciously accepted.”
“So she’s not . . .” Terry starts, looking back and forth between them. “Why aren’t you at the Thibodeaus’?” she asks Molly.
“It’s a little complicated there right now,” Molly says.
“What does that mean?”
“Things are—unsettled,” Vivian says. “And I’m perfectly happy to let her bunk in a spare room for the moment.”
“What about school?”
“Of course she’ll go to school. Why wouldn’t she?”
“This is very . . . charitable of you, Vivi, but I imagine the authorities—”
“It’s all worked out. She’s staying with me,” Vivian says firmly. “What else am I going to do with all these rooms? Open a bed-and-breakfast?”
Molly’s room is on the second floor, facing the ocean, down a long hall at the opposite side of the house from Vivian’s. In the window in Molly’s bathroom, also on the ocean side, a light cotton curtain dances constantly in the breeze, sucked toward the screen and out again, billowing toward the sink, an amiable ghostly presence.
How long has it been since anyone slept in this room? Molly wonders. Years and years and years.
Her belongings, all that she broug
ht with her from the Thibodeaus’, fill a scant three shelves in the closet. Vivian insists that she take an antique rolltop desk from the parlor and set it up in the bedroom across the hall from hers so she can study for finals. No sense in confining yourself to one room when there are all these options, is there?
Options. She can sleep with the door open, wander around freely, come and go without someone watching her every move. She hadn’t realized how much of a toll the years of judgment and criticism, implied and expressed, have taken on her. It’s as if she’s been walking on a wire, trying to keep her balance, and now, for the first time, she is on solid ground.
Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
“You’re looking remarkably normal,” Lori the social worker says when Molly shows up at the chemistry lab for their usual biweekly meeting. “First the nose ring disappears. Now you’ve lost the skunk stripe. What’s next, an Abercrombie hoodie?”
“Ugh, I’d kill myself first.”
Lori smiles her ferrety smile.
“Don’t get too excited,” Molly says. “You haven’t seen my new tramp stamp.”
“You didn’t.”
It’s kind of fun to keep Lori guessing, so Molly just lifts her shoulders in a shrug. Maybe, maybe not.
Lori shakes her head. “Let’s have a look at those papers.”
Molly hands over the community service forms, dutifully filled out and dated, along with the spreadsheet with the record of her hours and the required signatures.
Scanning the forms, Lori says, “Impressive. Who did the spreadsheet?”
“Who do you think?”
“Huh.” Lori juts out her bottom lip and scribbles something at the top of the form. “So did you finish?”
“Finish what?”
Lori gives her a quizzical smile. “Cleaning out the attic. Isn’t that what you were supposed to be doing?”
Right. Cleaning out the attic.
The attic actually is cleaned out. Every single item has been removed from every single box and discussed. Some things have been brought downstairs, and some unsalvageable pieces thrown away. True, most of the stuff got put back in the boxes and is still in the attic. But now the linens are neatly folded; breakables are carefully wrapped. Molly got rid of boxes that were oddly sized or misshapen or in bad shape and replaced them with new thick cardboard boxes, uniformly rectangular. Everything is clearly labeled by place and date with a black Sharpie and neatly stacked in chronological sequence under the eaves. You can even walk around up there.
“Yeah, it’s finished.”
“You can get a lot done in fifty hours, huh?”
Molly nods. You have no idea, she thinks.
Lori opens the file on the table in front of her. “So look at this—a teacher put a note in here.”
Suddenly alert, Molly sits forward. Oh shit—what now?
Lori lifts the paper slightly, reading it. “A Mr. Reed. Social studies. Says you did an assignment for his class . . . a ‘portaging’ project. What’s that?”
“Just a paper,” she says cautiously.
“Hmm . . . you interviewed a ninety-one-year-old widow . . . that’s the lady you did your hours with, right?”
“She just told me some stuff. It wasn’t that big a deal.”
“Well, Mr. Reed thinks it is. Says you went above and beyond. He’s nominating you for some kind of prize.”
“What?”
“A national history prize. You didn’t know about this?”
No, she didn’t know about this. Mr. Reed hasn’t even handed the paper back yet. She shakes her head.
“Well, now you do.” Lori folds her arms and leans back on her stool. “That’s pretty exciting, huh?”
Molly feels like her skin is glowing, like she’s been slathered in some kind of warm honeylike substance. She feels a grin growing on her face and has to fight to stay cool. She makes an effort to shrug. “I probably won’t get it or anything.”
“You probably won’t,” Lori agrees. “But as they say at the Oscars, it’s an honor to be nominated.”
“Load of crap.”
Lori smiles, and Molly can’t help it, she smiles back.
“I’m proud of you, Molly. You’re doing well.”
“You’re just glad I’m not in juvie. That would count as a fail for you, right?”
“Right. I’d lose my holiday bonus.”
“You’d have to sell your Lexus.”
“Exactly. So stay out of trouble, okay?”
“I’ll try,” Molly says. “No promises. You don’t want your job to get too boring, do you?”
“No danger of that,” Lori says.
THE HOUSEHOLD HUMS ALONG. TERRY KEEPS TO HER ROUTINE, AND Molly pitches in where she can—throwing in a load of laundry and hanging it on the line, making stir-fries and other veggie-heavy dinners for Vivian, who doesn’t seem to mind the extra cost and the lack of living creatures on the menu.
After some adjustment, Jack has warmed to the idea of Molly living here. For one thing, he can visit her without Dina’s disapproving glare. For another, it’s a nice place to hang out. In the evenings they sit on the porch in Vivian’s old wicker chairs as the sky turns pink and lavender and red, the colors seeping toward them across the bay, a magnificent living watercolor.
One day, to everyone’s shock and amazement except Molly’s, Vivian announces that she wants to get a computer. Jack calls the phone company to find out how to install Wi-Fi in the house, then sets about getting a modem and wireless router. After talking through the various options, Vivian—who as far as anyone knows has never so much as nudged awake an electronic keyboard—decides to order the same matte silver thirteeninch laptop Molly has. She doesn’t really know what she’ll use it for, she says—just to look things up and maybe read the New York Times.
With Vivian hovering at her shoulder, Molly goes to the site and signs in on her own account: click, click, credit card number, address, click . . . okay, free shipping?
“How long will it take to arrive?”
“Let’s see . . . five to ten business days. Or maybe a little longer.”
“Could I get it sooner?”
“Sure. It just costs a little more.”
“How much more?”
“Well, for twenty-three dollars it can be here in a day or two.”
“I suppose at my age there’s no point in waiting, is there?”
As soon as the laptop arrives, a sleek little rectangular spaceship with a glowing screen, Molly helps Vivian set it up. She bookmarks the New York Times and AARP (why not?) and sets up an e-mail account (
[email protected]), though it’s hard to imagine Vivian using it. She shows Vivian how to access the tutorial, which she dutifully follows, exclaiming to herself as she goes: “Ah, that’s what that is. You just push that button—oh! I see. Touchpad . . . where’s the touchpad? Silly me, of course.”
Vivian is a fast study. And soon enough, with a few quick strokes, she discovers a whole community of train riders and their descendants. Nearly a hundred of the two hundred thousand children who rode the trains are still alive. There are books and newspaper articles, plays and events. There’s a National Orphan Train Complex based in Concordia, Kansas, with a website that includes riders’ testimonies and photographs and a link to FAQs. (“Frequently asked questions?” Vivian marvels. “By whom?”) There’s a group called the New York Train Riders; the few remaining survivors and their many descendants meet annually in a convent in Little Falls, Minnesota. The Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital have websites with links to resources and information about historical records and archives. And there is a whole subgenre of ancestor research—sons and daughters flying to New York clutching scrapbooks, tracking down letters of indenture, photographs, birth certificates.
With help from Molly, Vivian sets up an Amazon account and orders books. There are dozens of children’s stories about the trains, but what she’s interested in is the documents, the artifacts, the self-published train-rider
stories, each one a testimony, a telling. Many of the stories, she finds, follow a similar trajectory: This bad thing happened, and this—and I found myself on a train—and this bad thing happened, and this—but I grew up to become a respectable, law-abiding citizen; I fell in love, I had children and grandchildren; in short, I’ve had a happy life, a life that could only have been possible because I was orphaned or abandoned and sent to Kansas or Minnesota or Oklahoma on a train. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
“So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason—to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?” Molly asks when Vivian reads some of these stories aloud.
“It certainly helps,” Vivian says. She is sitting in one wingback with a laptop, scrolling through stories from the Kansas archives, and Molly in the other, reading actual books from Vivian’s library. She’s already plowed through Oliver Twist and is deep into David Copperfield when Vivian squeaks.
Molly looks up, startled. She’s never heard Vivian make that sound. “What is it?”
“I think . . .” Vivian murmurs, her face glowing bluish in the skim-milk tint from the screen as she moves two fingers down across the trackpad, “I think I may have just found Carmine. The boy from the train.” She lifts the computer from her lap and hands it to Molly.
The page is titled Carmine Luten—Minnesota—1929.
“They didn’t change his name?”
“Apparently not,” Vivian says. “Look—here’s the woman who took him out of my arms that day.” She points at the screen with a curved finger, urging Molly to scroll down. “An idyllic childhood, the piece says. They called him Carm.”
Molly reads on: Carm, it appears, was lucky. He grew up in Park Rapids. Married his high school sweetheart, became a salesman like his father. She lingers over the photographs: one taken of him with his new parents, just as Vivian described them—his mother, slight and pretty, his father tall and thin, chubby Carmine with his dark curly hair and crossed eyes nestled between them. There’s a picture of him on his wedding day, eyes fixed, wearing glasses, beaming beside a round-cheeked, chestnut-haired girl as they cut a many-tiered white cake—and then one of him bald and smiling, an arm around his plumper but still recognizable wife, with a caption noting their fiftieth wedding anniversary.