Orphan Train(83)

Molly and Vivian have been roaming around all afternoon, pretending not to watch the clock. Jack called at 2:00 P.M. to say that the flight from Minnesota landed in Boston a few minutes late, but the puddle-jumper to Bar Harbor airport had taken off and was scheduled to land in half an hour, and he was on his way. He’d taken Vivian’s car, a navy blue Subaru wagon, to pick them up (after vacuuming it out and giving it a good wash with dishwashing liquid and a hose in his driveway).

Sitting in the rocker in the kitchen, looking out at the 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?”