Rescuing Julia Twice

by Tina Traster

  Some are carrying strollers.

  “Ricky, look. They’re carrying strollers. We don’t have a stroller.”

  Ricky cranes his head over the newspaper he’s reading.

  “Hmm, I don’t think we’ll need a stroller. We’ll be with Julia for three days in Moscow. We’ll use the Snugli.”

  I sink back into my chair.

  Julia is only seven months old. A Snugli should work. Robert had told me the baby (or babies) they’d be adopting were thirteen months old. It is still a mystery how we were able to get such a young infant. We’d been told from the start that most babies adopted from Russian orphanages were, at minimum, a year old. Of course we wrote in our application we wanted the youngest female baby possible, but still, it seemed like an anomaly to be getting such a young child. Was there something to be suspicious about, or were we incredibly lucky?

  Robert bounces over to us. He is a wiry, balding man with deep chocolate eyes and a come-hither smile.

  “Hi,” I say. “Robert, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right, good memory. This is Laura,” he says.

  Laura smiles weakly. She lets Robert do the socializing.

  “This is Ricky,” I say.

  “So, are you guys ready?” he asks.

  “Ready as one can be,” I say.

  “Yeah, this is nerve-racking,” he concedes.

  “Where are your seats?” he asks.

  The plane begins to board.

  “See you on the plane,” he says, waving his airline ticket as he walks away.

  While waiting for the plane to lift off, I wonder what kinds of anguish these prospective parents have gone through to get to this place. We are sitting on what is dubbed Delta’s “Orphan Express.” I look around at the faces. These women are the women we all know. They’re thin and fat and attractive and plain and thirty-five and forty-two. All of them, I’d bet, have taken a swipe at fertility treatments. Robert had told me that Laura had undergone five rounds of in vitro fertilization, and although they conceived twice, they lost the baby each time. By the time you’re traveling on the Orphan Express, you don’t imagine much else can go wrong because you’ve meticulously filled out paperwork, you’ve been vetted, and you’ve shelled out a fortune, sometimes your life savings, to make this happen. If you’re like me, you’re thinking: I just have to get through this trip and, well, somehow we’ll make it work.

  Throughout the adoption process, I’d felt alone, except for Ricky’s support. When we first received the grainy videotape of Julia, we shared it with friends and family at Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone cooed and cheered. But in the months that followed, the process of readying myself to become a parent was solitary and lonely. No one suggested a baby shower. No one asked how I was feeling. No one told me I was glowing. Our tales from the first trip to Siberia amused friends and family as a travelogue or a magazine article, but I wasn’t embraced by a tribe of female relations who would have treated me like a newly enrolled member if I had been pregnant. I wasn’t surrounded by mama bears wanting to dole out advice. I didn’t get the key to the club, like my younger sister did, each time she’d announced she was pregnant.

  Shortly before the end of the ten-hour flight, Robert walks down the aisle and stops. Breakfast has just been served.

  He leans in and asks, “How are you guys doing?”

  “Long flight,” I say. “How are you guys doing?”

  “Laura slept most of the way. I got a little shut-eye.”

  “I can’t sleep on planes,” I say.

  “Well, maybe we’ll need to get used to not sleeping,” he says, chuckling, but I can see the fear in his eyes about the change that will soon occur. Robert is nearly fifty. He’s had a long time to become accustomed to living without children.

  As the plane makes its final descent, a group of Russian men sitting in front of us stand up and open the overhead storage bins to get their carry-ons. The flight attendant implores them to sit down, but they won’t listen. They are not terrorists—just arrogant and lawless.

  “Typical Russians,” my husband says.

  “They’re crazy,” I say.

  “It’s a reaction to living under communist rule for too long,” Ricky says. “They’re throwing off the chains of oppression.”

  This makes me wonder again about Julia and her genes. What are her birth parents like? Will she be genetically inclined to break rules, to flout authority? I’d never given too much thought to the nature/nurture argument. Would she necessarily be like me or Ricky if she carried our DNA? Come to think of it, we were both a bit antiestablishment. Maybe Julia’s deck is stacked. A future rebel.

  We are driven in a van to the Moscow Marriott and will be leaving for Siberia later this evening. Some of the adoptive parents who are traveling to closer cities will spend the night in Moscow. When we get to the hotel, there is a mixup. They don’t have a room for us to use for a few hours. I’m about to cry because I know how hard the journey gets from here—a harrowing six-hour flight to Siberia on a Soviet-era plane that makes the insides of your stomach fall like jet-fuel flotsam. I was counting on a respite before the next leg. “Moscow Olga” is trying to arrange something with the clerk at the desk, but it seems hopeless. The hotel is booked. Then a woman from our group steps forward.

  “Why don’t you guys take our room for a few hours?” she says. “We’re not leaving until the morning.”

  Before Ricky could say something like, “We can’t possibly,” I squeal, “Oh, my God, thank you, thank you so much! That is so nice of you—are you sure?”

  “Sure, here, take the key. You can leave it at the front desk. My husband and I are going to go out and sightsee for a few hours.”

  Moments like this make you wonder if angels are put in your path to help you believe you’re on the right road. Ricky doesn’t believe in angels. He believes in the kindness of strangers.

  We ride the elevator to our borrowed room. I shower. Ricky lies on the bed.

  When I come out he says, “Let’s order some porn. They’ll be pretty shocked when they get the bill.”

  I crack up because I know he’s kidding. To the outside world, Ricky appears so straight, but I know better. Life has blessed him with a very dark sense of humor.

  The flight to Novosibirsk is much like the first one. It’s snowing. The plane is creaky and old. The bathrooms are unusable, the food inedible. Knowing what to expect helps a bit. At least I’m not sick as a dog this time. But again I’m not sure I won’t end up a statistic of Russian aviation.

  My mind drifts. I can’t sleep. I’m eighteen, learning I’m pregnant after a summer at sleepaway camp. I was in love for the first time. My hippie boyfriend David and I had sex a few times. Once in a motel, where we stayed the night, another time on a grassy knoll overlooking the lake. I had come home at the end of August, and I was in my mother’s bedroom looking in the mirror. I just knew, somehow, that I had a baby growing inside me. I wasn’t hysterical at first, but when the tests confirmed my hunch, there was never a choice or a discussion. It was assumed this was a problem that had to be fixed, and my mother, who had always been my confidante, took care of all the details. David was a loving and sympathetic voice in the days leading up to “the procedure.”

  It was a late summer day. Hot and humid. My mother drove to the Manhattan clinic. She suggested I think of the procedure as a tooth extraction. I tried. I was stripped naked, my legs in stirrups. They injected my hand, and the pain seared through my arm. I woke nauseated and groggy. I cried, but I wasn’t sure why. I took painkillers for the cramps. David visited me the next day. My father could not look at him or at me. It never occurred to me I’d gotten rid of a baby I might have wanted. “Move forward” was always my mother’s advice. I was on my way to my sophomore year at college. Having an abortion is nothing like a tooth extraction. Having an abortion leaves a void you may or may not know about. It could take years, like when you’re near forty and unable to conceive, when the weight of the experi
ence revisits, making you remember it as though it was recent. It can take twenty years to cry for that lost child. Infertility made me mourn the child I might have had and the one I will never have. I wonder what is worse, mourning an aborted baby or giving one life and then abandoning it to someone “more suitable.”

  I recognize Vladimir’s expressionless face right away this time. It is morning, but we are in Siberia’s postdawn darkness, back at the cavernous airport, driving again in his Volga. Déjà vu.

  This time around we are not going to the Centralnaya Hotel. When we had returned from the first trip, I’d called our adoption agency and told them I wanted to stay in Novosibirsk’s business hotel, which was down the street from the Centralnaya Hotel. I thought there might at least be toilet seats and hot water. Like so many conundrums in Russia, we weren’t allowed to switch to the better hotel during the first trip. Ricky’s guess was that every step of our trip was rigged to benefit someone who had a hand in the cookie jar. Nothing was flexible. Payoffs at every stop. But a loud enough fuss made back on US soil has landed us in an apartment building. We will be staying there with two other adoptive families: Barbara and Neal, who are adopting a boy, and Jo, a single parent who’s here for a girl. The five of us will be living in three apartments and traveling as a group.

  “Oh, great,” I say to Ricky, as Vladimir’s car slows down in the courtyard of a Soviet-style block of multistory concrete buildings. “This time we’re staying in a tenement.”

  “Shhh,” Ricky says. “Stay positive. Like you promised.”

  We lug our stuff up to the second floor. We hear a blood-curdling scream from behind an apartment door. Everyone is too stunned to say anything.

  Our flat is a two-bedroom apartment with a large living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. I notice the toilet doesn’t have a seat. The carpets and textiles are worn and drab, but the apartment is spick-and-span clean. It smells like ammonia. It reminds me of the orphanage. At least we have a refrigerator and a stove. There is a television with one station and a large clock on the wall.

  I pull up the shade in the living room window to let light in.

  Does Julia’s mother live in a grim apartment block like this with her husband and the first two children she gave birth to? Does she stay at home with the babies? Does she know people from the other side of the world are going to take her Yulia away and become her parents?

  Russian adoptions are closed. We will never know Maria G. I wonder if the name on our documents is even real. I wonder whether her birth mother feels our presence. Will she mourn Yulia on the anniversaries of her birth?

  Barbara is pale and middling. She comes alive when she talks about Amelia, her little girl who is back home with her grandparents. She likes to show pictures of the girl, who is blonde with big blue eyes. She looks nothing like Barbara or Neal, who is thin with dark hair and dark eyes. The couple adopted this child three years ago from Russia. Barbara loves this child. Amelia sustains her. The couple decided to adopt a second child, this time a boy. Neal traveled alone to Russia on the first trip to meet Boris in Orphanage Number Two. He’s nearly ten months old. Barbara stayed at home with their daughter, but both of them have to be here for the final adoption in a Russian court. Barbara is uneasy. Her eyes shift back and forth nervously. She sweats a lot, which is not easy to do in Siberia. Only talking about her daughter eases her. She tells us the first adoption went smoothly, and her daughter is a dream. We are sharing stories in a ground-floor room in our apartment block that seems to have been set up for traveling Americans. Women in babushkas are serving us toast and overcooked hard-boiled eggs. We are refueling before Olga and Vladimir come to take us to Orphanage Number Two.

  Jo, who lives in Washington, DC, is here to adopt a girl. She has an adopted daughter back in the states who is originally from India. Jo’s Russian child, who’s almost two years old, is at a different orphanage, so she will be taken in a separate car.

  In the company of these women, I am the little sister. Ironically, I feel like the pregnant woman being thrown a baby shower. They’re only too happy to dole out mothering advice. This is as close as I’ve gotten to a communal experience around motherhood.

  We are traveling through stark, monotone streets to Orphanage Number Two, which is less than five minutes away. No one is chatting. Will Julia remember us? I imagine it must be unnerving for babies to be handed off to a pair of strangers who make entirely different verbal sounds from the ones they are used to.

  Boris is a fleshy baby with a large head. Barbara and her husband will rename him Brandon. He is clutching his caretaker ferociously, wailing, when Barbara tries to hold him. Barbara makes cooing sounds, but the baby screams louder and louder. She is growing increasingly agitated. Eventually the baby is soothed enough to be placed in Barbara’s open arms. This is the first time she is meeting her baby.

  “Here’s Julia,” Ricky says.

  I spin around and see her in another caretaker’s arms, smiling just the way she was the first time I met her. She reminds me of a tiny beauty queen flirtatiously winking at admirers. She doesn’t make a fuss when she is placed in my arms.

  “Maybe she remembers us?” I say to Ricky.

  “Hello, baby Julia,” I say in a hushed voice. “Do you remember us? We are going to be your parents. I hope you’re okay with that. I have bought you the most beautiful yellow snowsuit.”

  She doesn’t cry or resist being held. She also doesn’t cling or clutch.

  “Do you want to hold her?”

  Ricky bends down and lifts her off my lap. He does everything with ease. There’s no continuous reel of dialogue looping through his head. Things just are what they are. I envy his cohesiveness.

  We are led, along with Barbara and Neal, to the large gymnasium.

  We sit on the mat with Julia, who cannot sit up by herself. “Don’t worry, that’s normal,” Olga tells us. Boris’s new parents are fifteen feet away. The room is enormous and spare. Ricky is supporting Julia’s back to keep her in a seated position. I’m trying to tempt her with a ball. Once again she seems most intrigued by the large window filtering in light. When we let her relax backward, we notice she is strangely contorting her body, arching her back over and over.

  “What is she doing?” I ask Ricky, feeling panicky.

  “I’m not sure,” he says. I notice he looks uneasy, which is unusual.

  We watch her do this again and again.

  “Pick her up,” I say to Ricky.

  I get up and look for Olga. I ask her to come and watch what the baby is doing.

  Olga comes to the gym, a little peeved. She stands over the baby, her lips pursed. Ricky lets Julia back down on the mat, and she arches her back again.

  “Oh, this,” Olga says. “This is nothing. Sometimes children in orphanages have this kind of trouble. They’re stretching because their muscles are tight because they don’t get enough activity. They spend too much time in the crib, you know. It’s perfectly normal.”

  Ricky and I look at each other. Olga is our only conduit to explanations. We have to take it or leave it.

  Over my left shoulder, I hear a fuss. Barbara and Neal seem to be arguing over something. We shift our attention over there. Barbara is squatting behind a bench, poking up and down like a meerkat, playing peekaboo. The baby is unresponsive. Barbara beckons Olga.

  “This baby doesn’t seem to be responding,” she says. “He won’t make eye contact. He won’t play peek-a-boo.”

  “We do not play peek-a-boo,” Olga says in a stern response.

  Barbara looks like she’s about to collapse.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We are in The Twilight Zone. Everything is surreal.

  Just then, a bevy of little girls drifts into the gymnasium. Some are wearing dresses. They are blonde, and they range in age from three to five. They look like a nursery school class. They dance around in a circle. They have large foreheads, thin lips, and eyes set wide apart. They suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome
and other ailments because their mothers drank through pregnancy. This is what Olga explained when I asked what will happen to these children. From the look in her eyes, I know these are the “damaged” children—the ones who never end up in grainy videos sent to adoptive parents.

  I remember what the pediatrician had said when she saw Julia’s tape and medical records. She was one of those pediatricians who specializes in evaluating the health of foreign adoptees based on records and videos. They are a cottage industry in America. There’s a whole crop of these doctors, and they know adoptive parents hang on their every word because the Russian medical records are indecipherable, even though they are translated in English.

  “This is as good as it gets,” she had said over the phone.

  “What does that mean?” I’d asked.

  “From what I can tell, she looks healthy, and the good thing is she’s very young so you’ll have a chance to reverse any of the negative consequences of her early months.”

  Are we to believe we can reverse these early damages? Yes, yes, we tell ourselves. Yes, absolutely, we have enough love to compensate for what they’ve lost. We will undo the damage, wipe their slates clean, as though they are Etch A Sketch pads. We will love and adore them and make them feel as though they were born the moment we took them away from the ammonia and tiny cots where they are virtually imprisoned with swaddling blankets and left to suck on cold-tea concoctions. We will replace these first memories with the aroma of fresh-baked apple pie and a crib with a spinning animal mobile.

  After we’ve returned the babies to the caretakers, Barbara is crying hysterically. Neal is trying to soothe her. Olga is attempting to hush-hush her. Disruptions in the orphanage are frowned upon.

  I ask Olga what’s wrong.

  She curtly says Barbara is upset and walks away.

  We hear Neal say to her, “Take your time. If you don’t want to bring him home, we won’t.”