Orphan Train

and Molly looks away, annoyed at his passive aggression—“appearance of it, y’know?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “To Ma it might look a little like you’re taking advantage of the situation.”
    Molly looks down at her own sandwich.
    “I just know you’ll like it if you give it a chance,” Dina said breezily when Molly
     asked her to stop putting bologna sandwiches in her lunch bag, adding, “or you can
     make your own damn lunch.” So now Molly does—she swallowed her pride, asked Ralph
     for money, and bought almond butter, organic honey, and nutty bread in the health
     food store in Bar Harbor. And it’s fine, though her little stash is about as welcome
     in the pantry as a fresh-killed mouse brought in by the cat—or perhaps, being vegetarian,
     less so—and is quarantined on a shelf in the mudroom “so no one gets confused,” as
     Dina says.
    Molly feels anger rising in her chest—at Dina’s unwillingness to accept her for who
     she is, at Terry’s judgments and Jack’s need to placate her. At all of them. “The
     thing is—it’s not really your mother’s business, is it?”
    The moment she says this she regrets it.
    Jack gives her a sharp look. “Are you kidding me?”
    He balls up the Subway wrapper and stuffs it in the plastic bag it came in. Molly
     has never seen him like this, his jaw tight, his eyes hard and angry. “My mother went
     out on a limb for you,” he says. “She brought you into that house. And do I need to
     remind you that she lied to Vivian? If anything happens, she could lose her job. Like
     that.” He snaps his fingers hard.
    “Jack, you’re right. I’m sorry,” she says, but he is already on his feet and walking
     away.

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
    “Spring at last!” Ralph beams, pulling on work gloves in the kitchen while Molly pours herself a bowl of cereal. It does feel like spring today—real spring,
     with leafy trees and blooming daffodils, air so warm you don’t need a sweater. “Here
     I go,” he says, heading outside to clear brush. Working in the yard is Ralph’s favorite
     activity; he likes to weed, to plant, to cultivate. All winter he’s been like a dog
     scratching the door, begging to go out.
    Dina, meanwhile, is watching HGTV and painting her toenails on the living room couch.
     When Molly comes into the living room with her raisin bran, she looks up and frowns.
     “Something I can do for you?” She jabs the tiny brush into the coral bottle, wipes
     the excess under the rim, and expertly strokes it on her big toe, correcting the line
     with her thumb. “No food in the living room, remember.”
    Good morning to you, too. Without a word, Molly turns and heads back to the kitchen,
     where she speed-dials Jack.
    “Hey.” His voice is cool.
    “What’re you up to?”
    “Vivian’s paying me to do a spring cleanup of her property—get rid of dead branches
     and all that. You?”
    “I’m heading over to Bar Harbor, to the library. I have a research project due in
     a few days. I was hoping you’d come with me.”
    “Sorry, can’t,” he says.
    Ever since their conversation at lunch last week, Jack’s been like this. Molly knows
     it is taking great effort on his part to hold this grudge—it runs so counter to his
     personality. And though she wants to apologize, to make things right between them,
     she’s afraid that anything she says now will ring hollow. If Jack knows she’s been
     interviewing Vivian—that cleaning the attic has morphed into this ongoing conversation—he’ll
     be even more pissed off.
    She hears a whisper in her head: Leave well enough alone. Finish your hours and be done with it. But she can’t leave well enough alone. She doesn’t want to.
    The Island Explorer is nearly empty. The few passengers greet each other with a nod
     as they get on. With her earbuds in, Molly knows she looks like a typical teenager,
     but what she’s actually listening to is Vivian’s voice. On the tape Molly hears things
     she didn’t when Vivian was sitting in front of her . . .
    Time constricts and flattens, you know. It’s not evenly weighted. Certain moments
     linger in the mind and others disappear. The first twenty-three years of my life are
     the ones that shaped me, and the fact that I’ve lived almost seven decades since then
     is irrelevant. Those years have nothing to do with the questions you ask.
    Molly flips open her notebook, runs her finger down the names and dates she’s recorded.
     She