Rescuing Julia Twice (9 page)

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.”

A shock rips through my body.

Barbara is considering leaving the baby behind. How could she? How cruel that seems. What would I do if I felt that way? I'm glad I don't. Those back-arching movements have scared me but not enough for me to reconsider my decision. Maybe Barbara's unstable. I don't know what to think.

We are ushered from the room and taken back to our apartment block. Barbara and Neal hurry up the steps and close their door.

“Wow, that's got to be torture,” I say to Ricky.

“Yeah, she seems a bit kooky.”

“You know what I think?” I say, not waiting for him to answer. “I think that Barbara is very happy with her family of three, and somewhere along the way she convinced herself she needs a brother for her daughter, and here she is, ten thousand miles away from her daughter, and she's miserable and wants to go home and has no interest in this child.”

“Could be,” Ricky says. “I just think she's a bit wacky.”

A couple of hours later, Vladimir returns to take us into the business district for lunch and free time. Only Neal comes downstairs.

“Where's Barbara?” I ask.

“She's lying down,” he says. “She's not feeling too well.” I'm not sure what to say. I don't know what I can say that would be at all helpful.

Happily, he's willing to talk. “She's concerned about the baby,” he says. “She's afraid he's not going to be able to bond with her.”

“Can she really know that from meeting him just one time?” I ask.

“Well, with our daughter, she fell in love instantly,” he says. “She just felt like her mother immediately, but this time it feels different.”

“Maybe it's because he's a boy?” I say, thinking but not saying I have not fallen in love with Julia either as of yet. She is beautiful and I'm not having second thoughts about taking her home, but my heart has not given way to some convulsive feeling of passion.

“Maybe,” Neal says, pausing.

“Barbara's done a lot of reading about Reactive Attachment Disorder,” he continues.

“What's that?” Ricky says.

“It's a syndrome that is not that uncommon among kids who've spent their early months or years institutionalized in orphanages. By the time they are adopted, they often have trouble bonding or attaching.”

“Oh, I'm sure that's the exception and not the rule,” I say. “It seems your first Russian adoption has been successful.”

“Yeah, Barbara bonded with our daughter Amelia right away.”

“I think everything will turn out fine with Brandon,” I say.

“Yes. I'm sure that most times things turn out fine. But there are many documented cases of Reactive Attachment Disorder, especially from Romanian orphanages, and from Russian ones, too. Sometimes it's okay. But sometimes these kids are not all right. They can be very difficult to live with. They have a lot of emotional problems, and it can be really disruptive for the whole family.”