Orphan Train(26)

Sometime in the second week it becomes clear to Molly that “cleaning out the attic” means taking things out, fretting over them for a few minutes, and putting them back where they were, in a slightly neater stack. Out of the two dozen boxes she and Vivian have been through so far, only a short pile of musty books and some yellowed linen have been deemed too ruined to keep.

“I don’t think I’m helping you much,” Molly says.

“Well, that’s true,” Vivian says. “But I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

“So you came up with a fake project as a favor to me? Or, I suppose, Terry?” Molly says, playing along.

“Doing my civic duty.”

“You’re very noble.”

Sitting on the floor of the attic, Molly lifts the pieces out of a cedar chest one by one, Vivian perched on a wooden chair beside her. Brown wool gloves. A green velvet dress with a wide ribbon sash. An off-white cardigan. Anne of Green Gables.

“Hand me that book,” Vivian says. She takes the hardbound green volume, with gold lettering and a line drawing of a girl with abundant red hair in a chignon on the front, and opens it. “Ah, yes, I remember,” she says. “I was almost exactly the heroine’s age when I read this for the first time. A teacher gave it to me—my favorite teacher. You know, Miss Larsen.” She leafs through the book slowly, stopping at a page here and there. “Anne talks so much, doesn’t she? I was much shyer than that.” She looks up. “What about you?”

“Sorry, I haven’t read it,” Molly says.

“No, no. I mean, were you shy as a girl? What am I saying, you’re still a girl. But I mean when you were young?”

“Not exactly shy. I was—quiet.”

“Circumspect,” Vivian says. “Watchful.”

Molly turns these words over in her mind. Circumspect? Watchful? Is she? There was a time after her father died and after she was taken away, or her mother was taken away—it’s hard to know which came first, or if they happened at the same time—that she stopped talking altogether. Everyone was talking at and about her, but nobody asked her opinion, or listened when she gave it. So she stopped trying. It was during this period that she would wake in the night and get out of bed to go to her parents’ room, only to realize, standing in the hall, that she had no parents.

“Well, you’re not exactly effervescent now, are you?” Vivian says. “But I saw you outside earlier when Jack dropped you off, and your face was”—Vivian lifts her knobby hands, splaying her fingers—“all lit up. You were talking up a storm.”

“Were you spying on me?”

“Of course! How else am I going to find out anything about you?”

Molly has been pulling things out of the chest and putting them in piles—clothes, books, knickknacks wrapped in old newspaper. But now she sits back on her heels and looks at Vivian. “You are funny,” she says.

“I’ve been called many things in my life, my dear, but I’m not sure anyone has ever called me funny.”

“I’ll bet they have.”

“Behind my back, perhaps.” Vivian closes the book. “You strike me as a reader. Am I right?”

Molly shrugs. The reading part of her feels private, between her and the characters in a book.

“So what’s your favorite novel?”

“I dunno. I don’t have one.”

“Oh, I think you probably do. You’re the type.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Vivian spreads a hand across her chest, her pink-tinged fingernails as delicate seeming as a baby’s. “I can tell that you feel things. Deeply.”

Molly makes a face.

Vivian presses the book into Molly’s hand. “No doubt you’ll find this old-fashioned and sentimental, but I want you to have it.”

“You’re giving it to me?”

“Why not?”

To her surprise Molly feels a lump in her throat. She swallows, pushing it down. How ridiculous—an old lady gives her a moldy book she has no use for, and she chokes up. She must be getting her period.

She fights to keep her expression neutral. “Well, thanks,” she says nonchalantly. “But does this mean I have to read it?”

“Absolutely. There will be a quiz,” Vivian says.

For a while they work in near silence, Molly holding up an item—a sky-blue cardigan with stained and yellowed flowers, a brown dress with several missing buttons, a periwinkle scarf and one matching mitten—and Vivian sighing, “I suppose there’s no reason to keep that,” then inevitably adding, “Let’s put it in the ‘maybe’ pile.” At one point, apropos of nothing, Vivian says, “So where is that mother of yours, anyway?”

Molly has gotten used to this kind of non sequitur. Vivian tends to pick up discussions they started a few days earlier right where they left off, as if it’s perfectly natural to do so.

“Oh, who knows.” She’s just opened a box that, to her delight, looks easy to dispose of—dozens of dusty store ledgers from the 1940s and ’50s. Surely Vivian has no reason to hang on to them. “These can go, don’t you think?” she says, holding up a slim black book.

Vivian takes it from her and flips through it. “Well . . .” Her voice trails off. She looks up. “Have you looked for her?”