Page 29

Chicago

Emily stepped from the taxicab outside Union Station and reached for Dorothy’s hand. The morning was shrouded by granite skies and dim light, the dull palette of grays in the city’s downtown skyscrapers reflecting Emily’s pensive mood as she prepared herself for the long journey back to Kansas.

Union Station was as beautiful as Emily remembered when it had first opened, the beautiful domed skylight in the Great Hall flooding the space below with light.

But the benches where passengers had once waited for connections were now occupied by homeless men, asleep on newspaper bedsheets, the excited buzz of arrivals and departures replaced by the sobering pause of economic disaster.

Emily hurried past, leading Dorothy toward the platforms as she pointed out the Night and Day statues on the east wall as they passed beneath.

“Look, Dorothy. One holds an owl, the other a rooster, to mark the coming and going of passengers at all hours of the day and night. We have a rooster on the farm. You won’t believe the noise he makes to wake us all up.”

She kept the tone of conversation light, desperate to distract the child so that she wouldn’t dwell on what was actually happening.

She couldn’t bear a scene if Dorothy refused to board the train or decided she didn’t want to go to Kansas after all.

In the short time they’d spent together, Emily had seen what a pleasant, well-mannered child Dorothy was, admirably self-assured and forthright for someone so young, and yet she was acutely aware of how easily she could become upset.

Thankfully, the Golden State train was on time.

With the trunk loaded into the luggage car, Emily and Dorothy took their seats in the second-class carriage.

Dorothy pressed her toy lion and tin man to the window so that they could see out.

Emily sat stiffly beside her. She still wasn’t sure the child fully understood that she was leaving Chicago forever.

The months and years ahead seemed to spool at Emily’s feet like a thousand unraveled cotton reels.

She stiffened her shoulders as the last of the carriage doors were slammed shut. A wave of grief and trepidation washed over her, and something else, something shameful: an undeniable pang of resentment.

What had been asked of her wasn’t unusual or unconventional.

All across America, families were taking in their relatives’ children when they became too poor or ill or incapable of looking after them, but this had all happened so suddenly and shockingly that it somehow made it harder to accept.

And despite the attorney’s presumption that it was most likely due to the additional family connection between John and Henry, Emily still didn’t fully understand why Annie had named her and Henry as Dorothy’s guardian.

Nell was the obvious choice, having raised several children of her own, and in much better financial circumstances.

Was it Annie’s way of atoning for Emily’s fall that winter of Dorothy’s birth?

Was it a last act to somehow punish Emily for her outburst about Dorothy’s father, or was it simply an oversight that Annie had never changed her will after their falling-out?

Whatever the reason, she had to get on with it now, no matter how much she was dreading the days and weeks ahead.

The shrill blast of the whistle signaled their departure, and the locomotive strained to pull away from the station, making the carriage jolt.

Emily’s stomach lurched with it as Dorothy sat quietly beside her, engrossed in a book about Amelia Earhart’s Atlantic flight.

The book was called 20 Hrs. 40 Min. , the title being the exact duration of Earhart’s groundbreaking flight.

“She’s very brave, isn’t she?” Emily offered. “I’m not sure I like the idea of being up in the sky.”

Dorothy turned the pages, admiring the pictures of Miss Earhart. “I think it would be wonderful to fly. Mommy liked the aviators, too. She said she would take me up in a plane, one day.”

The pain of all Annie’s unfulfilled plans, and all Dorothy’s lost adventures with her mother, settled in Emily’s heart.

She thought about the long journey ahead for Dorothy, and how oblivious she was to the fact that the life she might have known was slipping away behind her while an uncertain future stretched out along the tracks ahead.

Emily’s hand strayed to her coat pocket, where her fingers found the small lump of rock she still kept there.

She remembered the feel of it in her pinafore pocket as she’d traveled toward a new life as a child, the tug and pull of its weight as their immigration cards were stamped.

That little rock tied her back to Ireland, to her granny and her mother, whose steady guidance and wisdom she longed for more than ever as the train picked up speed.

“Hold out your hand, Dorothy.”

“What is it?” Dorothy asked, inspecting the green stone Emily placed in her palm.

“Lift it up to the sunlight. See how it sparkles?”

Dorothy gasped. “Is it a diamond?”

“It’s Connemara marble. Irish Green, they call it back in Ireland. Those are crystals, millions of years old.”

“Is it really all the way from Ireland?”

“Yes, and every piece is unique,” Emily explained. “Each one different from the next. There’s no other piece like this anywhere in the world.” It was as precious to Emily as any of Annie’s glittering jewels.

Dorothy turned the rock over in her hands. “The only one in the world,” she whispered.

Like you , Emily thought as she looked at the child, her hair tied into bunches with powder blue ribbons. She was so like Annie it was as if she was hewn from her, like the piece of Connemara marble pulled from Ireland’s ancient earth.

She curled Dorothy’s fingers around the little rock. “Keep it. A piece of Ireland, to take with you to Kansas.”

Dorothy showed the little emerald stone to her lion and tin man. “We’re on the way to Kansas now,” she said, her voice small and quiet. “To our new home.”

Home.

Before her life in Kansas, Emily had always thought of home as a temporary thing: a place she stayed in for a while but would inevitably leave.

She’d never allowed herself to get attached, didn’t quite know how to get attached to a place.

Her mammy always said it was people who mattered, not places or things.

“It’s family that makes a home. The rest is just bricks and mortar, a plot of land, a pin in the map. ”

The only place she’d ever felt she truly belonged was Kansas, with Henry, and she couldn’t wait to get back to them both.

So why, as the locomotive picked up speed, did she have such a terrible sense of foreboding?