Orphan Train (31 page)

“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.

T
HE HOUSEHOLD HUMS ALONG
. T
ERRY 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.

Carmine’s story has been written by his son, who clearly did lots of research, even making the pilgrimage to New York to scour the records of the Children’s Aid Society. The son discovered that Carmine’s birth mother, a new arrival from Italy, died in childbirth, and his destitute father gave him up. Carmine, it says in a postscript, died peacefully at the age of seventy-four in Park Rapids.

“I like knowing that Carmine had a good life,” Vivian says. “That makes me happy.”

Molly goes to Facebook and types in the name of Carmine’s son, Carmine Luten Jr. There’s only one. She clicks on the photo tab and hands the laptop back to Vivian. “I can set up an account for you, if you want. You could send his son a friend request or a Facebook message.”

Vivian peers at the pictures of Carmine’s son with his wife and grandchildren on a recent vacation—at Harry Potter’s castle, on a roller coaster, standing next to Mickey Mouse. “Good Lord. I’m not ready for that. But . . .” She looks at Molly. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?”

“At what?”

“Finding people. You found your mother. And Maisie. And now this.”

“Oh. Well, not really, I just type in some words—”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day,” she breaks in. “About looking for the child I gave away. I never told anybody this, but all those years I lived in Hemingford, anytime I saw a girl with blond hair around her age, my heart jumped. I was desperate to know what became of her. But I thought I had no right. Now I wonder . . . I wonder if maybe we should try to find her.” She looks directly at Molly. Her face is unguarded, full of longing. “If I decide that I’m ready, will you help me?”

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011

The phone rings and rings in the cavernous house, several receivers in different
rooms trilling in different keys.

“Terry?” Vivian’s voice rises shrilly. “Terry, can you get that?”

Molly, sitting across from Vivian in the living room, puts her book down and starts to rise. “Sounds like it’s in here.”

“I’m looking for it, Vivi,” Terry calls from another room. “Is a phone in there?”

“It might be,” Vivian says, craning to look around. “I can’t tell.”

Vivian is sitting in her favorite chair, the faded red wingback closest to the window, laptop open, nursing a cup of tea. It’s another teacher-enrichment day at school, and Molly is studying for finals. Though it’s midmorning, they haven’t yet opened the curtains; Vivian finds the glare on her screen too strong until about eleven.

Terry bustles in, half muttering to herself and half to the room. “Jeez Louise, this is why I like landlines. I never should’ve let Jack talk us into cordless. I swear—oh, here it is.” She pulls a receiver out from behind a pillow on the couch. “Hello?” She pauses, hand on her hip. “Yes, this is Mrs. Daly’s residence. Can I ask who’s calling?”

She nestles the receiver in her chest. “The adoption registry,” she stage-whispers.

Vivian motions her over and takes the phone. She clears her throat. “This is Vivian Daly.”

Molly and Terry lean in closer.

“Yes, I did. Uh-huh. Yes. Oh—really?” She covers the receiver with her hand. “Someone matching the details I submitted had already filled out a form.” Molly can hear the voice of the woman on the other end of the line, a tinny melody. “What’s that you say?” Vivian puts the phone to her ear again and cocks her head, listening to the answer. “Fourteen years ago,” she tells Molly and Terry.

“Fourteen years ago!” Terry exclaims.

A mere ten days ago, after rooting around on the Internet for a little while, Molly located a cache of adoption registry services, narrowing her search to the one rated highest among users. The site, described as a system for matching people who want to establish contact with their “next-of-kin by birth,” seemed reputable and aboveboard—nonprofit, no fee required. Molly e-mailed the link for the application form to herself at school, where she printed it off for Vivian to fill in, a scant two pages, with the names of the town, the hospital, the adoption agency. At the post office Molly made a photocopy of the birth certificate, which Vivian has kept in a small box under her bed for all these years, with the original name—May—she gave her daughter. Then she put the forms and the photocopy in a manila envelope addressed to the agency and mailed them off, fully expecting to hear nothing for weeks or months, or possibly ever.

“Do I have a pen?” Vivian mutters, looking around. “Do I have a pen?”

Molly hurries into the kitchen and rummages through the junk drawer, pulling out a handful of writing implements, then scribbling on the closest paper at hand, the
Mount Desert Islander,
to find one that actually has ink. She brings a blue ballpoint and the newspaper back to Vivian.

“Yes, yes. All right. Yes, that’s fine,” Vivian is saying. “Now how do you spell that? D-u-n-n . . .” Setting the newspaper on the round table next to her chair, she writes a name, phone number, and e-mail address above the headline, laboring over the “@.” “Thank you. Yes, thank you.” Squinting at the receiver, she clicks the off button.