Orphan Train(32)

Molly is gazing at the old hardcovers on the tall bookshelves when the door to the kitchen opens and Terry bustles in.

Molly turns. “Hi there.”

“Ack!” Terry shrieks, clutching the rag she’s holding to her chest. “You scared the hell out of me! What are you doing here?”

“Umm, well,” Molly stammers, beginning to wonder the same thing, “I rang the buzzer a few times and then I just let myself in.”

“Vivian knew you were coming?”

Did she? “I’m not sure that we settled on an exact—”

Terry narrows her eyes and frowns. “You can’t just show up when you feel like it. She’s not available any old time.”

“I know,” Molly says, her face warming. “I’m sorry.”

“Vivian would never have agreed to start this early. She has a routine. Gets up at eight or nine, comes downstairs at ten.”

“I thought old people got up early,” Molly mumbles.

“Not all old people.” Terry puts her hands on her hips. “But that’s not the point. You broke in.”

“Well, I didn’t—”

Sighing, Terry says, “Jack may have told you I wasn’t crazy about this idea. About you doing your hours this way.”

Molly nods. Here comes the lecture.

“He went out on a limb for you, don’t ask me why.”

“I know, and I appreciate it.” Molly is aware that it’s when she’s defensive that she gets in trouble. But she can’t resist saying, “And I hope I’m proving worthy of that trust.”

“Not by showing up unannounced like this, you’re not.”

All right, she deserved that. What was it the teacher in her Legal Issues class said the other day? Never bring up a point you don’t have an answer for.

“And another thing,” Terry continues. “I was in the attic this morning. I can’t tell what you’re doing up there.”

Molly bounces on the balls of her feet, pissed that she’s being called out for this thing she can’t control and even more pissed at herself for not convincing Vivian to get rid of things. Of course it looks to Terry like Molly is just twiddling her thumbs, letting the time slide like a government worker punching a clock.

“Vivian doesn’t want to get rid of anything,” she says. “I’m cleaning out the boxes and labeling them.”

“Let me give you some advice,” Terry says. “Vivian is torn between her heart”—and here she again holds the wadded-up rag to her heart—“and her head.” As if Molly might not make the connection, she moves the rag to her head. “Letting go of her stuff is like saying good-bye to her life. And that’s tough for anybody to do. So your job is to make her. Because I promise you this: I will not be happy if you spend fifty hours up there shuffling things around with nothing to show for it. I love Jack, but . . .” She shakes her head. “Honestly, enough is enough.” At this point Terry seems to be talking to herself, or possibly to Jack, and there’s little Molly can do but bite her lip and nod to show she gets it.

After Terry grudgingly allows that it might actually be a good idea to get going earlier today, and that if Vivian doesn’t show up in half an hour maybe she’ll go up and rouse her, she tells Molly to make herself at home; she has work to do. “You’ve got something to occupy yourself with, right?” she says before heading back to the kitchen.

The book Vivian gave Molly is in her backpack. She hasn’t bothered to crack it yet, mainly because it seems like homework for a job that’s already punishment, but also because she’s rereading Jane Eyre for English class (ironically, the teacher, Mrs. Tate, handed out school-issued copies the week after Molly tried to pilfer it) and that book is huge. It’s always a shock to the system to reenter it; just to read a chapter she finds she has to slow down her breathing and go into a trance, like a hibernating bear. All her classmates are complaining about it—Brontë’s protracted digressions about human nature, the subplots about Jane’s friends at Lowood School, the long-winded, “unrealistic” dialogue. “Why can’t she just tell the freaking story?” Tyler Baldwin grumbled in class. “I fall asleep every time I start to read it. What’s that called, narcolopsy?”

This complaint evinced a chorus of agreement, but Molly was silent. And Mrs. Tate—on alert, no doubt, for the slightest spark in the damp woodpile of her class—noticed.

“So what do you think, Molly?”

Molly shrugged, not wanting to appear overeager. “I like the book.”