Orphan Train (32 page)

Terry goes to the tall windows and pulls back the drapes, fastening the loops on each side. The light that floods in is hard and bright.

“For heaven’s sake, now I can’t see a thing,” Vivian scolds, shading her screen with her hand.

“Oh, sorry! Do you want me to close them?”

“It’s all right.” Vivian shuts her laptop. She peers at the newspaper as if the digits she printed on it are some kind of code.

“So what did you find out?” Molly asks.

“Her name is Sarah Dunnell.” Vivian looks up. “She lives in Fargo, North Dakota.”

“North Dakota? Are they sure you’re related?”

“They say they’re sure. They’ve checked and cross-checked birth records. She was born on the same day, in the same hospital.” Vivian’s voice quavers. “Her original name was May.”

“Oh my God.” Molly touches Vivian’s knee. “It is her.”

Vivian clasps her hands in her lap. “It’s her.”

“This is really exciting!”

“It’s terrifying,” Vivian says.

“So what happens next?”

“Well, a phone call, I suppose. Or an e-mail. I have her e-mail address.” She holds up the newspaper.

Molly leans forward. “Which do you want to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“A call would be more immediate.”

“It might startle her.”

“She’s been waiting for this for a long time.”

“That’s true.” Vivian seems to hesitate. “I don’t know. Everything is moving so fast.”

“After seventy years.” Molly smiles. “I have an idea. Let’s google her first and see what we find.”

Vivian makes an “abracadabra” motion with her hand over the silver laptop. “Fast.”

S
ARAH
D
UNNELL
,
IT TURNS OUT
,
IS A MUSICIAN
. S
HE PLAYED VIOLIN
with the Fargo Symphony Orchestra and taught at North Dakota State University until her retirement several years ago. She’s a member of the Rotary Club and has been married twice—for many years to a lawyer, and now to a dentist who is on the symphony board. She has a son and a daughter who appear to be in their early forties, and at least three grandchildren.

In the dozen or so photos in Google images, mostly head shots of Sarah with her violin and Rotary award ceremony groupings, she is slim, like Vivian, with an alert, guarded expression. And blond hair.

“I suppose she dyes it,” Vivian says.

“Don’t we all,” Molly says.

“I never did.”

“We can’t all have gorgeous silver hair like yours,” Molly says.

Things happen quickly now. Vivian sends Sarah an e-mail. Sarah calls. Within days, she and her dentist husband have booked a flight to Maine for early June. They’ll bring their eleven-year-old granddaughter, Becca, who grew up reading
Blueberries for Sal
and is, Sarah says, always up for an adventure.

Vivian reads some of the e-mails out loud to Molly.

I always wondered about you,
Sarah writes.
I’d given up hope of ever finding out who you are and why you gave me away
.

It’s exciting, this getting-ready business. A troupe of workers marches through the house, painting trim, fixing broken baluster shafts on the porch facing the bay, cleaning the Oriental rugs, and patching the cracks in the wall that appear every spring when the ground thaws and the house resettles.

“It’s time to open up all the rooms, don’t you think?” Vivian says one morning over breakfast. “Let the air in.” To keep the bedroom doors from slamming shut in the wind from the bay, they prop them open with old hand irons Molly found in one of the boxes in the attic. Having all those doors and windows open on the second floor creates a breeze that blows through the house. Everything seems lighter, somehow. Open to the elements.

Without asking Molly’s assistance, Vivian orders some new clothes for herself from Talbots on her laptop with a credit card. “Vivian ordered clothes from Talbots. On her laptop. With a credit card. Can you believe those words just came out of my mouth?” Molly tells Jack.

“Before we know it, frogs will be falling from the sky,” he says.

Other signs of the apocalypse proliferate. After a pop-up ad appears on her screen, Vivian announces that she plans to sign up for Netflix. She buys a digital camera on Amazon with one click. She asks Molly if she’s ever seen the sneezing baby panda video on YouTube. She even joins Facebook.

“She sent her daughter a friend request,” Molly tells Jack.

“Did she accept?”

“Right away.”

They shake their heads.

Two sets of cotton sheets are taken from the linen closet and washed, then hung to dry on the long clothesline beside the house. When Molly plucks them off the line, the sheets are stiff and sweet-smelling. She helps Terry make the beds, stretching the clean white sheets over mattresses that have never been used.

When is the last time any of them felt this kind of anticipation? Even Terry has gotten into the spirit. “I wonder what kind of cereal I should get for Becca,” Terry muses as they drape the Irish Wreath quilt on the girl’s bed, across the hall from her grandparents’ suite.

“Honey Nut Cheerios are always a safe bet,” Molly says.

“I think she’d prefer pancakes. Do you think she’d like blueberry pancakes?”

“Who doesn’t like blueberry pancakes?”

In the kitchen, while Molly cleans out cabinets and Jack tightens the latches on the screen door, they discuss what Sarah and her family might want to do on the island. Stroll around Bar Harbor, get ice cream at Ben & Bill’s, eat steamed lobster at Thurston’s, maybe try Nonna’s, the new Southern Italian place in Spruce Harbor that got a rave in
Down East
. . .

“She’s not here to do touristy things. She’s here to meet her birth mother,” Terry reminds them.

They look at each other and start laughing. “Oh yeah, that’s right,” Jack says.

Molly is following Sarah’s son, Stephen, on Twitter. The day of the flight, Stephen writes, “Mom’s off to meet her ninety-one-year-old birth mother. Go figure. A whole new life at the age of sixty-eight!”

A whole new life.

It’s a Maine postcard day. All the rooms in the house are ready. A large pot of fish chowder, Terry’s specialty, simmers on the stove (with a smaller pot of corn chowder, a nod to Molly, beside it). Corn bread cools on the counter. Molly has made a big salad and balsamic dressing.

Molly and Vivian have been roaming around all afternoon, pretending not to watch the clock. Jack called at 2:00
P.M
. to say that the flight from Minnesota landed in Boston a few minutes late, but the puddle-jumper to Bar Harbor airport had taken off and was scheduled to land in half an hour, and he was on his way. He’d taken Vivian’s car, a navy blue Subaru wagon, to pick them up (after vacuuming it out and giving it a good wash with dishwashing liquid and a hose in his driveway).

Sitting in the rocker in the kitchen, looking out at the water, Molly feels oddly at peace. For the first time since she can remember, her life is beginning to make sense. What up until this moment has felt like a random, disconnected series of unhappy events she now views as necessary steps in a journey toward . . .
enlightenment
is perhaps too strong a word, but there are others, less lofty, like
self-acceptance
and
perspective
. She has never believed in fate; it would’ve been dispiriting to accept that her life so far unfolded as it did according to some preordained pattern. But now she wonders. If she hadn’t been bounced from one foster home to the next, she wouldn’t have ended up on this island—and met Jack, and through him, Vivian. She would never have heard Vivian’s story, with all its resonance to her own.

When the car pulls into the driveway, Molly hears the crunch of gravel from the kitchen, at the opposite end of the house. She’s been listening for it. “Vivian, they’re here!” she calls.

“I hear,” Vivian calls back.

Meeting in the foyer, Molly reaches for Vivian’s hand. This is it, she thinks, the culmination of everything. But all she says is, “Ready?”

“Ready,” Vivian says.

As soon as Jack shuts off the engine, a girl springs from the backseat, wearing a blue-striped dress and white sneakers. Becca—it must be. She has red hair. Long, wavy red hair and a smattering of freckles.

Vivian, gripping the porch rail with one hand, puts her other over her mouth. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Molly breathes behind her.

The girl waves. “Vivian, we’re here!”

The blond woman getting out of the car—Sarah—looks toward them with an expression Molly’s never seen before. Her eyes are wide open, searching, and when her gaze alights on Vivian’s face, it is startling in its intensity, stripped of any pretense or convention. Yearning and wariness and hopefulness and love . . . does Molly really see all this on Sarah’s face, or is she projecting? She looks at Jack, lifting the bags out of the trunk, and he nods and gives her a slow wink.
I get it. I feel it too.

Molly touches Vivian’s shoulder, frail and bony under her thin silk cardigan. She half turns, half smiles, her eyes brimming with tears. Her hand flutters to her clavicle, to the silver chain around her neck, the claddagh charm—those tiny hands clasping a crowned heart: love, loyalty, friendship—a never-ending path that leads away from home and circles back. What a journey Vivian and this necklace have taken, Molly thinks: from a cobblestoned village on the coast of Ireland to a tenement in New York to a train filled with children, steaming westward through farmland, to a lifetime in Minnesota. And now to this moment, nearly a hundred years after it all began, on the porch of an old house in Maine.

Vivian puts her foot on the first step and stumbles slightly, and each person moves toward her, as if in slow motion—Molly, just behind her, Becca, nearing the bottom step, Jack at the car, Sarah crossing the gravel, even Terry, coming around the side of the house.

“I’m all right!” Vivian says, grasping the rail.

Molly slips an arm around her waist. “Of course you are,” she whispers. Her voice is steady, though her heart is so full it aches. “And I’m right here behind you.”

Vivian smiles. She looks down at Becca, who is gazing up at her with large hazel eyes. “Now then. Where shall we begin?”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The strands of this novel—Minnesota, Maine, and Ireland—have been woven together with the help of a number of people. Visiting my husband’s mother, Carole Kline, at her home in Fargo, North Dakota, a number of years ago, I read a story about her father, Frank Robertson, that appeared in a volume called
Century of Stories: Jamestown, North Dakota, 1883–1983
edited by James Smorada and Lois Forrest. The piece, “They Called It ‘Orphan Train’: And It Proved There Was a Home for Many Children on the Prairie,” featured Frank and his four orphaned siblings who were placed in foster care in Jamestown and eventually all adopted by the same family. Though they were not, as it turned out, “orphan train” orphans, my curiosity was piqued. I was stunned to learn about the breadth and scope of the orphan train movement, which transported a reported two hundred thousand children from the East Coast to the Midwest between 1854 and 1929.

In the course of my research, I spoke to Jill Smolowe, a writer and reporter for
People
, who thought there might be enough material on the surviving “train riders,” as they call themselves, for a
People
magazine feature. Though the story never materialized, the folder of material and contacts Jill compiled proved tremendously useful. Most significant, Jill introduced me to Renee Wendinger, president of the Midwest Orphan Train Riders from New York organization, whose mother, Sophia Hillesheim, was a train rider. At the Orphan Train Riders of New York’s forty-ninth reunion in 2009 in Little Falls, Minnesota, Renee introduced me to half a dozen train riders, all now in their nineties, including Pat Thiessen, a train rider from Ireland whose experience uncannily resembled the one I had sketched for my character. Throughout the writing of this novel Renee has patiently and generously offered her wise counsel in ways large and small, from correcting egregious errors to providing historical nuance and shading. Her book,
Extra! Extra! The Orphan Trains and Newsboys of New York
, has been an invaluable resource. The novel would not have been the same without her.

Other resources I relied on during my orphan train research were the Children’s Aid Society; the New York Foundling (I attended their 140th homecoming in 2009 and met a number of train riders there); the New York Tenement Museum; the Ellis Island Immigration Museum; and the National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kansas, a museum and research center with a vibrant online presence that includes many train rider stories. In the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library, I found noncirculating lists of orphaned and indigent children from the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling, first-person testimonials from train riders and their families, handwritten records, notes from desperate mothers explaining why they had abandoned their children, reports on Irish immigrants, and many other documents that aren’t available anywhere else. Books I found particularly helpful include
Orphan Train Rider: One Boy’s True Story
by Andrea Warren;
Children of the Orphan Trains, 1854–1929
by Holly Littlefield; and
Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains
edited by J. Sanford Rikoon (which I found at Bonanzaville, a pioneer prairie village and museum complex in West Fargo).

During my years as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, I was privileged to receive a Faculty Fellowship and a Fordham Research Grant, which enabled me to conduct research in Minnesota and Ireland. A fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts gave me space and time to write. Irish native Brian Nolan took me on an insider’s tour of County Galway. His stories about his childhood housekeeper Birdie Sheridan provided inspiration for Vivian’s grandmother’s life. In the village of Kinvara, Robyn Richardson ferried me from pubs to Phantom Street and handed me an important resource:
Kinvara: A Seaport Town on Galway Bay
by Caoilte Breatnach and Anne Korff. Among other books,
An Irish Country Childhood
by Marrie Walsh helped me with period and place details.