Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

Author:Yiyun Li
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2. Hypothesis

“No, no more story. It’s way past your bedtime.”

That conversation had taken place more than seventy years before. Dr. Ditmus did not remember the little girl’s name—Maude or Molly or Millie, something starting with M. She herself was fourteen then—old enough to be motherless, in the opinion of some of her practical-minded relatives; and old enough, surely, in the view of those same relatives, to be sent away to boarding school so that her father, a forty-two-year-old widower and a successful partner at a Detroit law firm, could work on the next chapter of his personal life. At Saint Mary’s Academy, Edwina excelled at all aspects of boarding-school life, which, according to the novels she read, was not a miracle but a responsibility, even an inevitability: orphans, to be deemed anything other than nonentities, were expected to triumph over their circumstances. Edwina played tennis and the piano with equal zest, and treated science and math and literature and theater and art as equal parts of her formation. She had friends but no confidantes—by her own design, as she did not yearn for a confidante, nor did she want to be one for another girl. She had enemies, too, whose petty scorn was nothing compared to life’s scorn, to which she was all but invulnerable. On weekends, she babysat the little girl who belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Silas. Belonging was how she had thought of everyone in her life back then: her classmates belonged to the school during the school year, and in the summer, to their parents; the teachers belonged to the school and to their families; some girls chose to belong to each other, some to their future marriages, husbands yet to materialize. Edwina belonged to knowledge and to herself.

Mr. Silas taught math and tutored Latin at the school, and Mrs. Silas was an art teacher. They went to the theater and to concerts on the weekends, and sometimes to parties off campus. “Just one more story,” the little girl would beg.

“But the train has gone. We heard it whistle.”

“Sometimes the train comes back. Like you come back.” The girl puckered her lips, trying to make a whistling sound, though she was too young to succeed.

“Never twice on the same night, remember?”

The train that came and went on those nights existed only in Edwina’s stories. In reality, the campus—three hundred acres of fairy-tale prettiness—was quiet at night but for the spring owls and autumn crickets, the raindrops on the sycamore leaves, and the low buzzing of the sodium-vapor lamps, whose globes scattered orange light across the lawns, along the crisscrossing paths, and outside the windows of all the buildings. The train must have had a name, but Dr. Ditmus no longer remembered it; its arrivals and departures must have had a story line, one repetitive enough for the four-year-old, but that, too, Dr. Ditmus could not recall. What she remembered was the whistle she would make, fainter and fainter, choo choo, choo … choo…, a ghost train

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