Rescuing Julia Twice Read online

  Olga picks us up after breakfast, and Vladimir drives to the orphanage. The sun climbs into the blue sky. But a sunny day doesn’t change the dull cast or the monotony of the section of town where Orphanage Number Two is located. Again we ascend the clean steps to the waiting area outside the baby room. The ruddy-cheeked caretaker hands me Julia, who is wearing clownish pajamas and mismatched socks. Her big toe pokes through a hole in the sock on her right foot. We three are sent to a large gym where we spend time with the baby crawling around on a giant rubber mat. A few young blonde girls, aged between three and five, skip into the room singing a tune. There is a piano at that far end of the gym, but the girls only stay for a few minutes and dance around before a caretaker seems to admonish them to leave. It is impossible to know why they were never adopted. They might have been brought here when they were two or three or older, and most adoptive parents want a baby. We have been told that there are half a million children living in Russian orphanages. Those who are “unadoptable” will stay in a place like this until they turn eighteen.

  The next day we will leave Novosibirsk without Julia. The Russian government requires adoptive parents to make two trips. Everyone tells us we will be called back in the next three to six months. I doubt she will remember us when we see her, so I savor our last moments with her. I nuzzle my nose against her skin. She doesn’t smell especially good, the way babies are supposed to smell. While sitting on the mat in the gym, I notice she is transfixed by the enormous ice-glazed windows high on the wall. I try to distract her with a big, bouncy ball, but she is craning her neck. She squints hard, staring intently at the burst of white light outside the room, a strange phenomenon. Julia has never seen daylight. The sun has never kissed her skin. She’d been transported from the hospital to the orphanage in October, when it was too cold for the babies to be taken outside.

  Three

  I cannot wait to escape Siberia, even though we are leaving a baby, our baby, behind. An American woman we met made an incisive observation about the city and the experience Americans have in it. She said, “You could take photographs in color, but when they get developed they’ll be in black and white.” We knew exactly what she meant. Everything about this place is harsh: the guttural sounds, the cold stares, the tight leashes adoption handlers keep Americans on. People dressed in masses of dark clothing getting where they need to go. Ammonia permeates every building, especially the tomb-like orphanage.

  My fanatical desire to leave Novosibirsk comes with a feeling of remorse, too. This is, after all, Julia’s place of birth. She might have grown up here. Somewhere in this city she has a mother, a father, and two siblings. Girls, I think. Maybe there are grandparents and cousins, too. We will never know. Someday we’ll want to tell her about this faraway city in the geographical center of Russia. We’re told it’s quite beautiful here in the warm weather, though I think if we ever returned with Julia, I’d want to do so in the heart of winter because I’d like her to know that she comes from people who endure extreme hardships. There’s something romantic about that history.

  I’m hoping when we come back—three to six months from now—Novosibirsk may feel more welcoming. Maybe flowers will be in bloom.

  When I arranged our trip to Russia, I built in a four-day diversion in Moscow.

  “Why not,” I’d said to Ricky. “We’re already there. Besides, the next time we pass through Moscow, we’ll have Julia with us, and I don’t think we’ll be in the mood for touring Red Square.”

  He agreed.

  The prospect of balancing this momentous journey with pleasure brought comfort. But when I mentioned our intention to our American adoption counselor, she balked.

  “Oh, no, that will not be permissible,” she said.

  “Not permissible? What do you mean?” I replied, thinking I must have misheard her.

  “Yes, no, um, the Russian government doesn’t want adoptive parents in Russia on their own,” she said.

  Now this was sounding farcical to me. Throughout the adoption process, we’d been shepherded through every step. In Novosibirsk our passports were kept by the hotel clerk until we left the city, and when we asked Olga why this was necessary, she shrugged. But now, being told we couldn’t travel at the end of our trip, was beyond what I could tolerate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have made plans, and I intend to keep them.”

  I could imagine the counselor putting a yellow sticky on my folder that said “Difficult client” or some such label. However, for reasons I’ll never understand, she backed off and said, “Okay then, do what you must.”

  I booked three nights at the Moscow Marriott. I’d had just about enough of feeling yoked.

  Everything about the adoption process puts you under a microscope. It starts when the counselor comes to conduct the “home study,” which is a vetting process that determines whether you’re suitable parents and whether you can provide a safe, loving home. Really, it’s a sham, though it still feels invasive when a stranger steps into your apartment and asks you where the baby is going to sleep and what kind of a relationship you have with your mother. The counselor is clearly ticking off questions from a checklist, but there is nothing about this interchange that feels genuine. As long as I give her the right answers, she’s satisfied. Then there are the fingerprints at the police station to prove you’re not a convicted felon or a child molester. And the financial disclosures and letters of recommendations and health declarations.

  Why isn’t every parent subjected to all this? Come to think of it, maybe that doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

  The Marriott Hotel on Tverskaya Street seems like a gleaming palace after doing time at the Centralnaya Hotel in Novosibirsk. There are marble floors and human-size elevators and obliging concierges who are only too happy to arrange tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet or make a dinner reservation. After arriving at our room, I stand in the shower for twenty minutes, washing away days of discomfort and compromised bathing. I rotate my neck and let hot water penetrate into my shoulders. I stay in the shower until I’m light-headed from the heat and steam. Everything about the heat and the lovely little complimentary shampoos and the marble tiles distances me from where we’ve been. Because I like to think in metaphors, I picture Novosibirsk as a labor pain. Birth mothers, of course, must go through excruciating pain to have a child. Is this process my equivalent? The pain I must experience to know joy?

  Right now, though, I don’t want to think about Novosibirsk or Olga or ammonia-scented orphanages or the fact that we’re going to have to come back and do this all over before we can bring Julia home. Right now I want to be a tourist. I want to read about Russia in the travel books I’ve brought on the trip and plan our days ahead.

  Ricky and I dress for dinner. It’s still necessary to wear layers because Moscow is cold, too. It’s about zero degrees, maybe ten degrees warmer than Siberia. Ricky is wearing lined cargo pants, a turtleneck, and a black sweater. He looks handsome tonight. I have put on a dab of makeup for the first time in forever, though I still feel laden because I’m wearing long underwear under my pants and three layers of wool on top. We put on our coats, hats, and gloves, and the concierge hails us a cab to take us just a few blocks to the restaurant. It is snowing.

  It is a trendy place, large and angular with abstract art on the walls and candlelit tables.

  “This is a step up from New York Pizza,” Ricky quips, referring to the pizza restaurant in Novosibirsk where we went every night seeking familiarity.

  I doubt there are places like this in Siberia. In fact, Ricky and I haven’t been to a hip restaurant anywhere recently because we’ve been living on an austere budget. This meal—in fact, this entire diversion to Moscow—is a treat that makes me feel uneasy, but Ricky has helped persuade me that the expense will not break us.

  One year ago, Ricky lost his job. He had been working for his brother Jeffrey at a Brooklyn company his father started in the 1960s that sells nuts and bolts. Ricky took the job, one he viewed as
beneath him, because he desperately needed to escape financial ruin and an ex-wife in Florida. When he arrived in 1998, he probably thought working for his brother would be a temporary respite from practicing law or at least a reprieve until he figured out what to do next. But when we got together in 2000, he was still there, bored, underutilized, and restless. He made decent money, and although he dreamed of one thing or another, he took no concrete steps to extricate himself. Jeffrey helped him along when he fired him in January 2002. We were shocked—but not really. Jeffrey offered to give him back his job at half the salary. Ricky and I agreed he’d refuse that offer and face the unknown. I knew I could continue to cover our meager expenses with my freelance writing work, and his unemployment checks would help. But we were still undergoing fertility treatments, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was unable to conceive because in my heart I didn’t feel like we could support a child. We were thirty-nine years old: ticktock, ticktock.

  Since August, Ricky has been building a tea business. He sells loose-leaf teas and herbals and tea-related accessories such as clay and iron pots on the Internet, and he goes to flea markets and corporate venues, too. He’s been working hard and the business shows promise, but it doesn’t feed us. I’ve been toiling harder than ever, though writing assignments have dried up since 9/11. It is not a time in our life or in the world at large that feels bountiful and open. It’s hard to relax and trust that all will be well, though that’s what Ricky says constantly.

  I eye the menu and wince. Ricky sees me.

  “Stop worrying,” he says. “We will never go without. Just order what you want.”

  At night, I have trouble sleeping. My body is so fatigued, but my mind won’t let it rest. Am I crazy? I think to myself in the dark. Should we really bring home a baby before we sort out our financial problems? We know the adoption agency is not really aware of our circumstances because the application process asked mostly about an earnings history, not current income.

  How does Ricky lie there, so sure that everything will be all right, that it will all work out? I have a solid track record of working, but still, what if something happens to me? I don’t want to ruin our time in Moscow, so I flick the thoughts away as though they were pesky picnic flies. Finally at 5 AM, still sleepless, I peel myself from under the covers and go to the hotel swimming pool.

  Swimming is my refuge from pain, physical or mental. I have learned that by going back and forth, thirty or fifty or seventy times, depending on the length of the pool, I can release whatever shackles me. I have noticed this works even in dire times, like when I got divorced in my early thirties or after my dog died. I don’t know if it is the repetitive motion or the muting of sound or the focus on breathing, but something about swimming rescues me temporarily from anxiety. The pool in the Marriott is cool and divine. I am alone. I knife through the water with purpose. I wonder if lack of sleep will make it hard to swim, but surprisingly it doesn’t. I keep going for thirty minutes. I find the energy, the purpose, the way one does when one must. Afterward, I lie down on a lounge chair. I try to drift into sleep, but I’m still unable to let go.

  I return to the room where Ricky wakes slowly. “Come back to bed,” he says.

  “No, I’m going to shower. Let’s get some breakfast.” This excites him, because the Marriott has a spread of smoked fish, herring, fruits, and egg dishes that makes him feel regal. He tosses the covers aside and joins me in the shower.

  After breakfast we head to the Metro. The escalator descends so deeply I feel like we’re entering a mine. My guidebook tells me that the deepest section of the Metro is 276 feet. I still have remnants of the head cold I had in Novosibirsk, and the deeper we go, the faster my sinuses drain. I’m blowing my nose furiously, but I’m distracted by scores of tattered, lobster-faced souls scattered everywhere in the Metro. Some are slumped over; others are begging with open palms and blank eyes. One woman is spitting and screaming. These are the people who have been lost in the collapse of communism or ensnared in Russia’s disease, vodka. Olga’s words float back up at me, as do the sorry characters we’d seen lying along the snowy roadside in Novosibirsk.

  We leave the Metro to go to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Afterward, we walk hand in hand around the Arbat, a cobblestone pedestrian street that is one of the oldest areas in Moscow. It dates back to the fifteenth century, when it was home to artisans, and where Russian nobility lived in the eighteenth century. Now it is lined with overpriced but alluring shops. Street vendors sell everything from Russian soldiers’ winter hats to fake KGB IDs to nesting dolls. This winter streetscape has a carnival atmosphere. I notice a lovely china shop. It is filled with the ornate designs Russians favor.

  “Let’s go in,” I say. “Look at this, Ricky.” I lift a blue and white teacup with gold accents and gently bring it to my mouth, pinky outstretched. “Isn’t this wonderful? Decadent. And look, look at the teapot that goes with it. How lovely! And the sugar bowl,” shaped like an elephant. “Aren’t elephants good luck?” I am not superstitious—at least I don’t think I am.

  I’m delighted by the Gzhel, Russian porcelain popularized in the 1830s. It is fancier that anything we own, but there’s something about being an adoptive parent that makes you feel as though you should bring back little pieces of your daughter’s heritage to her new home. My mind flits between a scene in which I’m serving tea from these beautiful objects and the running tab of what we’ve been spending. Again, Ricky encourages me, and the saleswoman wraps up four cups, a teapot, and the elephant sugar bowl.

  On our last day in Moscow, we go to the GUM (pronounced goom) department store, which is a famous glass-encrusted Victorian pile filled with expensive shops. It resembles the grand pavilion at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. A refuge from the near-zero cold, we walk up and down the nearly deserted mall. Like everywhere else in Russia, there are shops filled with fur hats. I go into one and try some on. When I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I feel ashamed.

  “That one looks nice on you,” Ricky says. “Buy it.”

  “Don’t even …”

  I grab his hand and we leave the store.

  On the way out of the arcades, I notice a children’s store. It is fancy. It has the look of the New York City Madison Avenue children’s boutique. I peer closer to get a look at a beautiful ivory-white quilted down jacket ringed with a fur hood.

  “That jacket is made for Russian winter,” I say. “It’s precious.”

  “Let’s go in and have a look,” Ricky replies.

  “Nah, I don’t think so. Let’s leave it.”

  I walk away with a pit in my stomach. I want this baby. I want to clothe and protect her, but I’m not ready. She’s not real yet. She’s in Siberia. I need more time.

  Four

  I’m thumbing through the newest nonfiction books at Barnes & Noble. The store on Broadway is crowded for mid-morning. I glance around at the mothers pushing strollers, legions of them passing time, filling the aisles and making them impassable. I feel an uncomfortable tug in my gut. That voice, that annoying voice in my head says, Shouldn’t you be buying parenting books? Or at the very least adoptive parenting books?

  Maybe I should. Maybe I should do a lot of things I don’t do, like floss more often or make peace with my mother, but I usually give in to my gut and my gut wants to read books on politics or the growing locavore movement. Because I’m thirty-nine, I’m the latecomer to parenting in my circle of friends and family. I never took much of an interest in other people’s children, not even my own relatives, but I have watched, with some horror, what I believe is an obsessive, off-kilter generation of parenting. Too many women I know have turned mothering into their life’s work. They’ve left behind careers. Dreams. Ways they were going to change the world. They are obsessed with stroller brands and sleeping schedules and the “right” schools. They are caught up in molding and shaping their children as though they’d all become sculptors and perfection is paramount. They treat the
ir children as though they are their partners—blurring the line between parent and child, vying to be their child’s BFF. They’ve read a lot of books on empowering their children. They bask in the light they hope will emanate from their offspring. I’ve not yet walked in their shoes, but to me it seems imbalanced. And it has caused me some ambivalence about child rearing. On the one hand, it’s been hard to watch women I know have one baby, then two, and sometimes a third, while I went through a divorce and had at times believed I would never have my own children. On the other hand, I wonder if I will fall into this parenting trap when and if I do become a mother. Part of the problem is groupthink. This helicopter parenting generation feeds off its peers, who read only the kind of books I’m standing here avoiding. They reinforce each other. They are establishing a new norm.

  But in the back of my mind I toy with the notion that even if motherhood doesn’t need a manual, maybe adoptive parenting does. During the adoption process, I’ve skipped around websites that advise and inform adoptive parents. I never spent too much time on any of them because they cause me anxiety. I’m already aware that when you adopt, you begin with a big black hole.

  You don’t know what your baby has been though. What has she eaten? Has she been loved or handled enough? What, if anything, has she been genetically predisposed to be or to do? In Russian adoptions you can’t get information about the physical or mental health of the birth parents. You start with a mystery. You accept that, and you go from there. Sure, I could load up on what ifs and psychological terms, but I’d rather not.

  I glance back over at the nonfiction books piled up in a pyramid, pull a couple to buy, and head over to the register.