Orphan Train

by Christina Baker Kline

She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose. Most

poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn’t know until we left how much we took those things for granted.

So I am learning to pretend, to smile and nod, to display empathy I do not feel. I am learning to pass, to look like everyone else, even though I feel broken inside.

Vivian has returned to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our most ordinary moments. They’re with us in the grocery store, as we turn a corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.

My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate. “SO?”

I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.

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.