Orphan Train

In the past
     nine years she’s been in over a dozen foster homes, some for as little as a week.
     She’s been spanked with a spatula, slapped across the face, made to sleep on an unheated
     sun porch in the winter, taught to roll a joint by a foster father, fed lies for the
     social worker. She got her tatt illegally at sixteen from a twenty-three-year-old
     friend of the Bangor family, an “ink expert-in-training,” as he called himself, who
     was just starting out and did it for free—or, well . . . sort of. She wasn’t so attached
     to her virginity anyway.
    With the tines of her fork, Molly mashes the hamburger into her plate, hoping to grind
     it into oblivion. She takes a bite and smiles at Dina. “Good. Thanks.”
    Dina purses her lips and cocks her head, clearly trying to gauge whether Molly’s praise
     is sincere. Well, Dina, Molly thinks, it is and it isn’t. Thank you for taking me
     in and feeding me. But if you think you can quash my ideals, force me to eat meat
     when I told you I don’t, expect me to care about your aching back when you don’t seem
     the slightest bit interested in my life, you can forget it. I’ll play your fucking
     game. But I don’t have to play by your rules.

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
    Terry leads the way to the third floor, bustling up the stairs, with Vivian moving more slowly behind her and Molly taking up the rear. The house is large and
     drafty—much too large, Molly thinks, for an old woman who lives alone. It has fourteen
     rooms, most of which are shuttered during the winter months. During the Terry-narrated
     tour on the way to the attic, Molly gets the story: Vivian and her husband owned and
     ran a department store in Minnesota, and when they sold it twenty years ago, they
     took a sailing trip up the East Coast to celebrate their retirement. They spied this
     house, a former ship captain’s estate, from the harbor, and on an impulse decided
     to buy it. And that was it: they packed up and moved to Maine. Ever since Jim died,
     eight years ago, Vivian has lived here by herself.
    In a clearing at the top of the stairs, Terry, panting a bit, puts her hand on her
     hip and looks around. “Yikes! Where to start, Vivi?”
    Vivian reaches the top step, clutching the banister. She is wearing another cashmere
     sweater, gray this time, and a silver necklace with an odd little charm on it.
    “Well, let’s see.”
    Glancing around, Molly can see that the third floor of the house consists of a finished
     section—two bedrooms tucked under the slope of the roof and an old-fashioned bathroom
     with a claw-foot tub—and a large, open attic part with a rough-planked floor half
     covered in patches of ancient linoleum. It has visible rafters with insulation packed
     between the beams. Though the rafters and floor are dark, the space is surprisingly
     light. Levered windows nestle in each dormer, providing a clear view of the bay and
     the marina beyond.
    The attic is filled with boxes and furniture packed so tightly it’s hard to move around.
     In one corner is a long clothes rack covered with a plastic zippered case. Several
     cedar chests, so large that Molly wonders how they got up here in the first place,
     are lined up against a wall next to a stack of steamer trunks. Overhead, several bare
     bulbs glow like tiny moons.
    Wandering among the cardboard boxes, Vivian trails her fingertips across the tops
     of them, peering at their cryptic labels: The store, 1960–. The Nielsens. Valuables . “I suppose this is why people have children, isn’t it?” she muses. “So somebody
     will care about the stuff they leave behind.”
    Molly looks over at Terry, who is shaking her head with grim resignation. It occurs
     to her that maybe Terry’s reluctance to take on this project has as much to do with
     avoiding this kind of maudlin moment as avoiding the work itself.
    Glancing surreptitiously at her phone, Molly sees it’s 4:15—only fifteen minutes since
     she arrived. She’s supposed to stay until six today, and then come for two hours four
     days a week, and four hours every weekend until—well, until she finishes her time
     or Vivian drops dead, whichever comes first. According to her calculations, it should
     take about a month. To finish the hours, not to kill Vivian.
    Though if the next forty-nine hours and forty-five minutes are this tedious, she doesn’t
     know if she’ll be able to stand it.
    In American History they’ve been studying how the