Orphan Train Read Online Free

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 awake: Dominick and James, six-year-old twins, huddled together for warmth on a pallet on the floor.
    Sitting on the cot with my back against the wall, I held Maisie the way Mam had shown me, cupped over my shoulder. I tried everything I could think of to comfort her, all the things that had worked before: stroking her back, running two fingers down the bridge of her nose, humming our father’s favorite song, “My Singing Bird,” softly in her ear: I have heard the blackbird pipe his note, the thrush and the linnet too / But there’s none of them can sing so sweet, my singing bird, as you . But she only shrieked louder, her body convulsing in spasms.
    Maisie was eighteen months old, but her weight was like a bundle of rags. Only a few weeks after she was born, Mam came down with a fever and could no longer feed her, so we made do with warm sweetened water, slow-cooked crushed oats, milk when we could afford it. All of us were thin. Food was scarce; days went by when we had little more than rubbery potatoes in weak broth. Mam