“Okay, okay, Dina, look.” Ralph has his hands out, patting the air like a conductor. “I think this has gone a little far. Can we just take a deep breath and calm down?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dina practically spits.

Ralph looks at Molly, and in his expression she sees something new. He looks weary. He looks over it.

“I want her out,” Dina says.

“Deen—”

“OUT.”

Later that evening Ralph knocks on Molly’s bedroom door. “Hey, what’re you doing?” he says, looking around. The L.L.Bean duffel bags are splayed wide, and Molly’s small collection of books, including Anne of Green Gables, is piled on the floor.

Stuffing socks into a plastic Food Mart bag, Molly says, “What does it look like I’m doing?” She’s not usually rude to Ralph, but now she figures, who cares? He wasn’t exactly watching her back out there.

“You can’t leave yet. We have to contact Social Services and all that. It’ll be a couple of days, probably.”

Molly crams the bag o’ socks into one end of a duffel, rounding it nicely. Then she starts lining up shoes: the Doc Martens she picked up at a Salvation Army store, black flip-flops, a dog-chewed pair of Birkenstocks that a previous foster mother tossed in the trash and Molly rescued, black Walmart sneakers.

“They’ll find you someplace better suited,” Ralph says.

She looks up at him, brushes the bangs out of her eyes. “Oh yeah? I won’t hold my breath.”

“Come on, Moll. Give me a break.”

“You give me a break. And don’t call me Moll.” It’s all she can do to restrain herself from flying at his face with her claws out like a feral cat. Fuck him. Fuck him and the bitch he rode in on.

She’s too old for this—too old to wait around to be placed with another foster family. Too old to switch schools, move to a new town, submit herself to yet another foster parent’s whims. She is so white-hot furious she can barely see. She stokes the fire of her hatred, feeding it tidbits about bigoted idiot Dina and spineless mushmouth Ralph, because she knows that just beyond the rage is a sorrow so enervating it could render her immobile. She needs to keep moving, flickering around the room. She needs to fill her bags and get the hell out of here.

Ralph hovers, uncertain. As always. She knows he’s caught between her and Dina, and utterly unequipped to handle either of them. She almost feels sorry for him, the pusillanimous wretch.

“I have somewhere to go, so don’t worry about it,” she says.

“To Jack’s, you mean?”

“Maybe.”

Actually, no. She could no more go to Jack’s than she could get a room at the Bar Harbor Inn. (Yes, I’d prefer a water view. And send up a mango smoothie, thanks!) Things between them are still strained. But even if things were fine, Terry would never allow her to stay overnight.

Ralph sighs. “Well, I get why you don’t want to stay here.”

She gives him a look. No shit, Sherlock.

“Let me know if I can drive you anyplace.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says, dropping a pile of black T-shirts in the bag and standing there with folded arms until he slinks out.

So where the hell can she go?

There’s $213 left in Molly’s savings account from the minimum-wage job she had last summer scooping ice cream in Bar Harbor. She could take a bus to Bangor or Portland, or maybe even Boston. But what then?

She wonders, not for the first time, about her mother. Maybe she’s better. Maybe she’s clean and sober now, with some kind of steady job. Molly’s always resisted the urge to look for her, dreading what she might find. But desperate times . . . and who knows? The state loves it when biological parents get their shit together. This could be an opportunity for both of them.

Before she can change her mind, she crawls over to her sleeping laptop, propped open on her bed, and taps the keyboard to nudge it awake. She googles “Donna Ayer Maine.”

The first listing is an invitation to view Donna Ayer’s professional profile on LinkedIn. (Unlikely.) Next is a PDF of Yarmouth city council members that includes a Donna Ayer. (Even more unlikely.) Third down is a wedding announcement: a Donna Halsey married Rob Ayer, an air force pilot, in Mattawamkeag in March. (Um, no.) And finally, yep, here she is—Molly’s mother, in a small item in the Bangor Daily News. Clicking through to the article, Molly finds herself staring at her mother’s mug shot. There’s no question it’s her, though she’s wan, squinty, and decidedly worse for wear. Arrested three months ago for stealing OxyContin from a pharmacy in Old Town with a guy named Dwayne Bordick, twenty-three, Ayer is being held in lieu of bond, the article says, at the Penobscot County Jail in Bangor.

Well, that was easy enough.

Can’t go there.

What now? Looking up homeless shelters online, Molly finds one in Ellsworth, but it says that patrons have to be eighteen or older “unless with a parent.” The Sea Coast Mission in Bar Harbor has a food pantry, though no overnight accommodations.

So what about . . . Vivian? That house has fourteen rooms. Vivian lives in about three of them. She’s almost certainly home—after all, she never goes anywhere. Molly glances at the time on her phone: 6:45 P.M. That’s not too late to call her, is it? But . . . now that she thinks about it, she’s never actually seen Vivian talking on the phone. Maybe it would be better to take the Island Explorer over there to talk with her in person. And if she says no, well, maybe Molly could just sleep in her garage tonight. Tomorrow, with a clear head, she’ll figure out what to do.

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011

Molly trudges up the road toward Vivian’s from the bus stop, her laptop in her backpack, red Braden slung over one shoulder and Hawaiian Ashley on the other. The duffels are knocking into each other like rowdy patrons at a bar, with Molly stuck between. It’s slow going.

Before the blowup with Dina, Molly had planned to go to Vivian’s tomorrow, to tell her what she found at the library. Well, plans change.

Leaving was anticlimactic. Dina stayed behind her shut bedroom door with the TV blaring while Ralph lamely offered to help Molly with her bags, loan her a twenty, drive her somewhere. Molly almost said thank you, almost gave him a hug, but in the end she just barked, “No, I’m fine, see ya,” and propelled herself forward by thinking: This is already over, I am already gone . . .

Occasionally a car lumbers past—this being the off-season, most cars on the road are sensible Subarus, ten-ton trucks, or clunkers. Molly is wearing her heavy winter coat because, though it’s May, this is, after all, Maine. (And who knows, she might end up sleeping in it.) She left behind heaps of stuff for Ralph and Dina to deal with, including a few hideous synthetic sweaters Dina had tossed her way at Christmas. Good riddance.

Molly counts her steps: left, right, left, right. Left right. Left right. Her left shoulder hurts, strap digging into bone. She jumps in place, shifting the straps. Now it’s sliding down. Shit. Jump again. She’s a turtle carrying its shell. Jane Eyre, staggering across the heath. A Penobscot under the weight of a canoe. Of course her load is heavy; these bags contain everything she possesses in the world.

What do you carry with you? What do you leave behind?

Gazing ahead at the dark blue sky striated with clouds, Molly reaches up and touches the charms around her neck. Raven. Bear. Fish.

The turtle on her hip.

She doesn’t need much.

And even if she loses the charms, she thinks, they’ll always be a part of her. The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin. People get tattoos to have a permanent reminder of things they love or believe or fear, but though she’ll never regret the turtle, she has no need to ink her flesh again to remember the past.

She had not known the markings would be etched so deep.