Orphan Train

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