Orphan Train(91)
“What?”
“A national history prize. You didn’t know about this?”
No, she didn’t know about this. Mr. Reed hasn’t even handed the paper back yet. She shakes her head.
“Well, now you do.” Lori folds her arms and leans back on her stool. “That’s pretty exciting, huh?”
Molly feels like her skin is glowing, like she’s been slathered in some kind of warm honeylike substance. She feels a grin growing on her face and has to fight to stay cool. She makes an effort to shrug. “I probably won’t get it or anything.”
“You probably won’t,” Lori agrees. “But as they say at the Oscars, it’s an honor to be nominated.”
“Load of crap.”
Lori smiles, and Molly can’t help it, she smiles back.
“I’m proud of you, Molly. You’re doing well.”
“You’re just glad I’m not in juvie. That would count as a fail for you, right?”
“Right. I’d lose my holiday bonus.”
“You’d have to sell your Lexus.”
“Exactly. So stay out of trouble, okay?”
“I’ll try,” Molly says. “No promises. You don’t want your job to get too boring, do you?”
“No danger of that,” Lori says.
THE HOUSEHOLD HUMS ALONG. TERRY KEEPS TO HER ROUTINE, AND Molly pitches in where she can—throwing in a load of laundry and hanging it on the line, making stir-fries and other veggie-heavy dinners for Vivian, who doesn’t seem to mind the extra cost and the lack of living creatures on the menu.
After some adjustment, Jack has warmed to the idea of Molly living here. For one thing, he can visit her without Dina’s disapproving glare. For another, it’s a nice place to hang out. In the evenings they sit on the porch in Vivian’s old wicker chairs as the sky turns pink and lavender and red, the colors seeping toward them across the bay, a magnificent living watercolor.
One day, to everyone’s shock and amazement except Molly’s, Vivian announces that she wants to get a computer. Jack calls the phone company to find out how to install Wi-Fi in the house, then sets about getting a modem and wireless router. After talking through the various options, Vivian—who as far as anyone knows has never so much as nudged awake an electronic keyboard—decides to order the same matte silver thirteeninch laptop Molly has. She doesn’t really know what she’ll use it for, she says—just to look things up and maybe read the New York Times.
With Vivian hovering at her shoulder, Molly goes to the site and signs in on her own account: click, click, credit card number, address, click . . . okay, free shipping?
“How long will it take to arrive?”
“Let’s see . . . five to ten business days. Or maybe a little longer.”
“Could I get it sooner?”
“Sure. It just costs a little more.”
“How much more?”
“Well, for twenty-three dollars it can be here in a day or two.”
“I suppose at my age there’s no point in waiting, is there?”
As soon as the laptop arrives, a sleek little rectangular spaceship with a glowing screen, Molly helps Vivian set it up. She bookmarks the New York Times and AARP (why not?) and sets up an e-mail account (DalyViv@gmail.com), though it’s hard to imagine Vivian using it. She shows Vivian how to access the tutorial, which she dutifully follows, exclaiming to herself as she goes: “Ah, that’s what that is. You just push that button—oh! I see. Touchpad . . . where’s the touchpad? Silly me, of course.”
Vivian is a fast study. And soon enough, with a few quick strokes, she discovers a whole community of train riders and their descendants. Nearly a hundred of the two hundred thousand children who rode the trains are still alive. There are books and newspaper articles, plays and events. There’s a National Orphan Train Complex based in Concordia, Kansas, with a website that includes riders’ testimonies and photographs and a link to FAQs. (“Frequently asked questions?” Vivian marvels. “By whom?”) There’s a group called the New York Train Riders; the few remaining survivors and their many descendants meet annually in a convent in Little Falls, Minnesota. The Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital have websites with links to resources and information about historical records and archives. And there is a whole subgenre of ancestor research—sons and daughters flying to New York clutching scrapbooks, tracking down letters of indenture, photographs, birth certificates.
With help from Molly, Vivian sets up an Amazon account and orders books. There are dozens of children’s stories about the trains, but what she’s interested in is the documents, the artifacts, the self-published train-rider stories, each one a testimony, a telling. Many of the stories, she finds, follow a similar trajectory: This bad thing happened, and this—and I found myself on a train—and this bad thing happened, and this—but I grew up to become a respectable, law-abiding citizen; I fell in love, I had children and grandchildren; in short, I’ve had a happy life, a life that could only have been possible because I was orphaned or abandoned and sent to Kansas or Minnesota or Oklahoma on a train. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.