Orphan Train(95)
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?”