Orphan Train

ninety-one, but she
     doesn’t have much basis for comparison. Her father’s parents died when he was young;
     her mother’s parents never married, and she never met her grandfather. The one grandparent
     Molly remembers, her mother’s mother, died of cancer when she was three.
    “Terry tells me you’re in foster care,” Vivian says. “Are you an orphan?”
    “My mother’s alive, but—yes, I consider myself an orphan.”
    “Technically you’re not, though.”
    “I think if you don’t have parents who look after you, then you can call yourself
     whatever you want.”
    Vivian gives her a long look, as if she’s considering this idea. “Fair enough,” she
     says. “Tell me about yourself, then.”
    Molly has lived in Maine her entire life. She’s never even crossed the state line.
     She remembers bits and pieces of her childhood on Indian Island before she went into
     foster care: the gray-sided trailer she lived in with her parents, the community center
     with pickups parked all around, Sockalexis Bingo Palace, and St. Anne’s Church. She
     remembers an Indian corn-husk doll with black hair and a traditional native costume
     that she kept on a shelf in her room—though she preferred the Barbies donated by charities
     and doled out at the community center at Christmas. They were never the popular ones,
     of course—never Cinderella or Beauty Queen Barbie, but instead one-off oddities that
     bargain hunters could find on clearance: Hot Rod Barbie, Jungle Barbie. It didn’t
     matter. However peculiar Barbie’s costume, her features were always reliably the same:
     the freakish stiletto-ready feet, the oversized rack and ribless midsection, the ski-slope
     nose and shiny plastic hair . . .
    But that’s not what Vivian wants to hear. Where to start? What to reveal? This is
     the problem. It’s not a happy story, and Molly has learned through experience that
     people either recoil or don’t believe her or, worse, pity her. So she’s learned to
     tell an abridged version. “Well,” she says, “I’m a Penobscot Indian on my father’s
     side. When I was young, we lived on a reservation near Old Town.”
    “Ah. Hence the black hair and tribal makeup.”
    Molly is startled. She’s never thought to make that connection—is it true?
    Sometime in the eighth grade, during a particularly rough year—angry, screaming foster
     parents; jealous foster siblings; a pack of mean girls at school—she got a box of
     L’Oreal ten-minute hair color and Cover Girl ebony eyeliner and transformed herself
     in the family bathroom. A friend who worked at Claire’s at the mall did her piercings
     the following weekend—a string of holes in each ear, up through the cartilage, a stud
     in her nose, and a ring in her eyebrow (though that one didn’t last; it soon got infected
     and had to be taken out, the remaining scar a spiderweb tracing). The piercings were
     the straw that got her thrown out of that foster home. Mission accomplished.
    Molly continues her story—how her father died and her mother couldn’t take care of
     her, how she ended up with Ralph and Dina.
    “So Terry tells me you were assigned some kind of community service project. And she
     came up with the brilliant idea for you to help me clean my attic,” Vivian says. “Seems
     like a bad bargain for you, but who am I to say?”
    “I’m kind of a neat freak, believe it or not. I like organizing things.”
    “Then you are even stranger than you appear.” Vivian sits back and clasps her hands
     together. “I’ll tell you something. By your definition I was orphaned, too, at almost
     exactly the same age. So we have that in common.”
    Molly isn’t sure how to respond. Does Vivian want her to ask about this, or is she
     just putting that out there? It’s hard to tell. “Your parents . . .” she ventures,
     “didn’t look after you?”
    “They tried. There was a fire . . .” Vivian shrugs. “It was all so long ago, I barely
     remember. Now—when do you want to begin?”

New York City, 1929
    Maisie sensed it first. She wouldn’t stop crying. Since she was a month old, when our mother got sick, Maisie had slept with me on my narrow cot in the small
     windowless room we shared with our brothers. It was so dark that I wondered, as I
     had many times before, if this was what blindness felt like—this enveloping void.
     I could barely make out, or perhaps only sense, the forms of the boys, stirring fitfully
     but not yet