”ĭina works as a dispatcher at the Spruce Harbor police station, and as far as Molly can see there isn’t much to stress over - a few drunk drivers, the occasional black eye, petty thefts, accidents. “I have enough stress at work,” Dina says, her voice rising.

It didn’t help that before Molly they’d had a boy who tried to set the elementary school on fire. But Dina was suspicious of Molly from the start. Long ago, in his youth, when he’d been a “troubled teen,” as he told her without elaboration, a social worker at his school had signed him up for the Big Brother program, and he’d always felt that his big brother - his mentor, he calls him - kept him on track. He’s the one, Molly knows, who wanted to be a foster parent. “If I’d known she had this many problems, I never would’ve agreed to it. “This is not what we signed up for,” Dina is saying. Through her bedroom wall Molly can hear her foster parents talking about her in the living room, just beyond her door. The ghosts whispered to me, telling me to go on. I could take solace in their presence or I could fall down in a heap, lamenting what I’d lost. No substitute for the living, perhaps, but I wasn’t given a choice.

Now she is eighty-four to my ninety-one, and with me still. Eighteen months to my nine years, thirteen years to my twenty. And my sister, Maisie, ever present, an angel on my shoulder. Maybe I am lucky - that at the age of nine I was given the ghosts of my parents’ best selves, and at twenty-three the ghost of my true love’s best self. I’ve come to think that’s what heaven is - a place in the memory of others where our best selves live on. The bitterness and alcohol and depression are stripped away from these phantom incarnations, and they console and protect me in death as they never did in life.

My gram, with her kind eyes and talcum-dusted skin. They fill silence with their weight, dense and warm, like bread dough rising under cloth. Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. I am ninety-one years old, and almost everyone who was once in my life is now a ghost. Many times in my life I have felt them around me, observing, witnessing, when no one in the living world knew or cared what happened. They’re the ones who haunt us, the ones who have left us behind.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline