Rescuing Julia Twice (11 page)

“Don't worry,” he says. “We'll be back at the Moscow Marriott before you know it.”

I hook my mind on the marble lobby and the Marriott's serene swimming pool in an attempt to calm down. Olga leads us to the airport lounge, where we sit with Barbara, Neal, and Brandon, and Jo and her child.

Olga is speaking in a hushed voice to the agent at the desk. Then she turns and says, “The flight is going to be delayed due to the storm.”

“What?” I say. “We've flown through worse than this. I don't understand.”

By now Olga has become accustomed to my neurosis, but she is done with us. We have our baby. She says good-bye hastily and wishes us good luck.

I look at Barbara, who is holding Brandon on her lap. She must have gone through hell to get to this point of acceptance. She actually seems rather peaceful. She's probably counting down the hours until she can get back to New Jersey and her daughter. Jo doles out Cheerios to her little girl, who has thin black hair and a rash all over her face. I think to myself how brave Jo must be, a single mother, bringing home a child who looks like she's never had a day of decent care. But Jo is chipper and upbeat.

Ricky checks in with the desk about departure times, but he's not getting much information. He chats with a German businessman who is in Siberia to sell machine tools. His English is perfect. Julia sits on my lap. I feed her formula from a bottle. She seems to like it. Briefly, I feel like a mother. Then, a loud pop, followed by a putrid stench.

“Oh, my God!” I scream, feeling the hot ooze of diarrhea cover my lap.

Ricky leaps from his seat and grabs her. He knows what to do. He peels off the yellow jumpsuit. Barbara and Jo jump in to help, handing Ricky baby wipes and plastic bags to dispose of the soiled diaper. Barbara digs in her bag for a clean diaper. There is a veritable factory of baby care, but I am frozen solid. I can't change a diaper. How can I be this child's mother? Barbara's looking at me—probably thinking,
Now who's the crazy one?

“Don't worry,” Barbara says wryly. “Motherhood is a learning process.”

Throughout the diaper explosion episode, Julia never cries. Come to think of it, I have yet to see her cry. Don't all babies cry?

Two hours later, we are called to board. I'm glad to have Novosibirsk behind me.

The staff at the Moscow Marriott is accustomed to adoptive parents from the United States. They have made a makeshift crib out of a laundry basket for Julia. Julia sleeps through the first night. We wake on February 14, Valentine's Day. When Ricky and I started dating two and a half years ago, he told me he hated Valentine's Day because of his ex-wife. This woman, whom Ricky and I never mention by name, brought him to his knees financially. She spent the money he made as a criminal defense attorney faster than he could make it. On Valentine's Day she expected to be showered with flowers and jewelry. Ricky maintained the charade long after he'd realized he had married a gold digger. We treat Valentine's Day casually, writing love poems and staying home and cooking dinner. Here we are in Moscow, with our new baby, experiencing the living poetry of becoming parents. Ricky is wearing Julia in a sling. When I try her on, so to speak, I am shocked at how heavy she is around my neck. I can't support her because I have a weak back. At fifteen pounds, Julia feels like a solid sack of potatoes or a small bag of cement.

That morning, I run out to the drugstore for formula. It takes an hour to make myself understood, but the clerk is patient. In between a day of bureaucratic stops to fill out papers, we take Julia with us to lunch. Every time Ricky or I give her formula, I suck in my breath and wait for our modern-day Pompeii to rip. The last stop is another government compound where Julia is checked by a doctor. There are so many questions I'd like to ask. I try to explain the back-arching, but I know the doctor doesn't understand me or won't let on that he does. He examines her in five minutes, as though she were a piece of meat being inspected by a USDA official. Would these doctors ever reveal there was a problem if they had found one this far along in the process? I doubt it.

The next morning we have the lavish buffet breakfast the Marriott serves.

“Hey guys, how's it going?”

We haven't seen Robert and Laura since that first night in Moscow, but his melodic voice is familiar even before I see him. He is carrying
Noa, who has a full head of silk-black hair and a caramel complexion. She looks like a tiny gypsy. Robert tells us she's eleven months old, but she looks at least a year older than Julia, who is completely bald.

“Where's Laura?” I ask.

“She's upstairs on the phone to her mother,” he snorts. “She's emotionally overcome by this whole thing. She's a little upset because we were planning on adopting two babies, but it didn't work out.”

“We'll …,” he continued, hoping to keep talking. “We'll see you guys later at the American Embassy.”

“I guess this really is a tough thing for a lot of women,” I say to Ricky.

He tells me he's going to the buffet to refill his plate.

There are about fifty couples at the American Embassy, the next to last step in the adoption. They are sitting in rows of chairs with their newly adopted babies. I scan the room, across one row of chairs, then the next, and the next. Uncannily, it looks like the babies have been matched to the parents, like a scarf to a suit.

“How do they do that?” I say, in complete bewilderment.

I look at Julia.

No one would say she resembles me or Ricky, but she does have a small, scoop nose like mine and large, broad cheekbones like Ricky's.

“That's incredible,” I continue. “Look at the parents and the babies and tell me what you see.”

Ricky scans the rows.

“Wow, they look like the parents!” he says.

I'm not crazy.

“I guess that's why they ask for pictures of us when we fill out the dossier,” he says.

“This is like a science fiction movie.”

Russian children are easier to blend into their American families than their counterparts from China or Ethiopia. But flying now on the “Orphan Express,” it's easy to identify newly minted families. A woman is sitting across the aisle from me. She's traveling with a girl, about two years old. The child is inconsolable, rolling around on the floor, braying like a distressed donkey. There is nothing the woman can say or do to break the child's fit. Even the flight attendant, fluent in Russian, is powerless. I look at the woman sympathetically.

“She's been like this for three days,” she says. “I'm at my rope's end.”

I smile and debate whether to strike up conversation or simply say I understand when the captain comes over the intercom to tell us about the flight details. All around me I'm reminded of how daunting this process is. I can't say that anyone who was handling us during this adoption process gave us any warning. Sometimes these children are just not all right.

How many times have I returned to Kennedy Airport, thrilled to be back on American soil and looking forward to returning to my apartment to download the experience I've just had? It's not like that today. There's a baby in the back seat of our Honda, and it feels like we've returned with a little alien. As long as we keep driving, as long as this experience remains an adventure in motion, it remains just that, an adventure. But we are heading home, and everything that has defined home up to this point will be different. I have a daughter. I am a mother. I thought I might feel relief or elation, but I'm weighed down by the notion of permanence, intractability, commitment. I wonder if mothers bringing home their babies from the hospital feel like this.

It is a clear, bright day, and it is obvious a snowstorm recently pounded New York City. Mounds of whiteness are shoved aside and soiled. I think of the cold in Siberia. I can conjure it, as though it's been imprinted in my cellular memory. It's as intriguing as everything else was in that place at the end of the world. I fiddle with the radio stations. I land on NPR, but I can't concentrate. I settle on music.

“I'll drop you off in front of the building with the baby and our luggage,” Ricky says as we're weaving our way through Central Park to the Upper West Side. “Leave the luggage with Stan. I'll get it after I park.”

I want to scream,
No, don't leave me alone with the baby,
but I'm worried Ricky will think I'm a fruitcake. Instead I say, “Maybe you'll get
a spot close by and we can walk to the apartment together.” We both know that will never happen.

When Ricky does let me out of the car, my knees are wobbling. I need his help extricating Julia from the crazy car seat contraption, then twisting her past the folded-down seat of our two-door car.

“This isn't easy, is it?” I say.

Ricky is huffing. He rips off his wool hat and throws it on the passenger seat. Finally he lifts Julia and hands her to me as though she were a piece of glass. The transfer is awkward because she doesn't seem to have the natural instincts to hold onto my arm or lean close. I had noticed this several times in Moscow when I tried to hold her. It didn't feel the way I thought it would to hold a baby. There was a tension, a resistance. But I didn't think too much about it. Now it gives me pause.

“Okay, I'm going to look for a spot. Good luck,” Ricky says, pulling away from the curb. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I say.

What if he never returned? What if I were left alone right now and forever with this brand-new, newborn to me, child who seems as indifferent to me as I still feel for her? It's a terrifying, irrational thought—not too many people perish trying to find a parking spot in Manhattan. But it tells me that my mind is on high panic alert. I'm feeling unsteady. Alien in my new skin. I wonder if Ricky feels like this.

“Oh, my God, Ms. Traster!” says Stan the doorman in his typical staccato speech pattern. “She is absolutely gorgeous.” He pulls Julia's snowsuit away from her face to take a better look. “Oh, what a doll she is. Congratulations.” Then he pauses. Turns to me and says, “Her eyes. Those are not the eyes of an infant. They are the eyes of a very old soul.”