Orphan Train

bag,
     and she picks me up and drives me there. I am in labor for seven hours, the agony
     so great in the last stretch that I wonder if it’s possible to split in half. I start
     to cry from the pain, and all the tears I haven’t shed for Dutchy come flooding out.
     I am overcome with grief, with loss, with the stark misery of being alone.
    I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means
     to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a
     strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over
     and over again.
    Lying in that hospital bed I feel all of it: the terrible weight of sorrow, the crumbling
     of my dreams. I sob uncontrollably for all that I’ve lost—the love of my life, my
     family, a future I’d dared to envision. And in that moment I make a decision. I can’t
     go through this again. I can’t give myself to someone so completely only to lose them.
     I don’t want, ever again, to experience the loss of someone I love beyond reason.
    “There, there,” Mrs. Nielsen says, her voice rising in alarm. “If you keep on like
     this you’ll”—she says “go dry,” but what I hear is “die.”
    “I want to die,” I tell her. “I have nothing left.”
    “You have this baby,” she says. “You’ll go on for this baby.”
    I turn away. I push, and after a time the baby comes.
    The little girl is as light as a hen in my arms. Her hair is wispy and blond. Her
     eyes are as bright as underwater stones. Dizzy with fatigue, I hold her close and
     shut my eyes.
    I have told no one, not even Mrs. Nielsen, what I am about to do. I whisper a name
     in my baby’s ear: May. Maisie. Like me, she is the reincarnation of a dead girl.
    And then I do it. I give her away.

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
    “Oh, Vivian. You gave her away,” Molly says, leaning forward in her chair.
    The two of them have been sitting for hours in the wingbacks in the living room. The
     antique lamp between them casts a planetary glow. On the floor, a stack of blue onionskin
     airmail letters bound with string, a man’s gold watch, a steel helmet, and a pair
     of military-issue socks spill out of a black steamer trunk stamped with the words U.S. NAVY.
    Vivian smooths the blanket on her lap and shakes her head as if deep in thought.
    “I’m so sorry.” Molly fingers the never-used baby blanket, its basket-weave design
     still vivid, the stitches intricately pristine. So Vivian had a baby and gave her
     away . . . and then married Jim Daly, Dutchy’s best friend. Was she in love with him,
     or was he merely consolation? Did she tell him about the baby?
    Vivian leans over and shuts off the tape recorder. “That’s really the end of my story.”
    Molly looks at her, puzzled. “But that’s only the first twenty years.”
    Vivian shrugs lightly. “The rest has been relatively uneventful. I married Jim, and
     ended up here.”
    “But all those years . . .”
    “Good years, for the most part. But not particularly dramatic.”
    “Did you . . .” Molly hesitates. “Were you in love with him?”
    Vivian looks out the bay window. Molly follows her gaze to the Rorschach shapes of
     the apple trees, barely visible in the light from the house. “I can honestly say that
     I never regretted marrying him. But you know the rest, so I will tell you this. I
     did love him. But I did not love him like I loved Dutchy: beyond reason. Maybe you
     only get one of those in a lifetime, I don’t know. But it was all right. It was enough.”
    It was all right. It was enough. Molly’s heart clamps as if squeezed in a fist. The depth of emotion beneath those
     words! It’s hard for her to fathom. Feeling an ache in her throat, she swallows hard.
     Vivian’s resolute unsentimentality is a stance Molly understands only too well. So
     she just nods and asks, “So how did you and Jim end up together?”
    Vivian purses her lips, thinking. “About a year after Dutchy died, Jim returned from
     the war and got in touch with me—he had a few small things of Dutchy’s, a pack of
     cards and his harmonica, that the army hadn’t already sent. And so it started, you
     know. It was a comfort to have someone to talk to, I think for both of us—another
     person who knew Dutchy.”
    “Did he know you’d had a baby?”
    “No, I don’t think so. We never talked about it. It seemed like too much to burden
     him with. The war had taken a toll on