Orphan Train

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