Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (7 page)

Meg’s face turned hard and masklike. Josie had seen this transformation whenever Meg took business calls at home. She seemed ready to launch into an offensive strike, but Josie squeezed her hand. And, surprisingly, this subdued her.

Artur outlined their schedule for the next two days, explaining the process of “approving” the child and putting the paperwork in motion. If all went as planned they would come back in six to ten weeks for a final adoption. The six-to-ten-weeks part sounded like a mail order promise. Josie tried not to dwell on it.

Artur wasn’t paying much attention to her anyway. He addressed all his comments to Meg, only glancing at Josie from time to time out of politeness. Meg was the official adopter, after all. Russian law didn’t give kids to gay couples, so although they would both become legal parents in the States, in Russia Josie was supposed to pretend she was merely a traveling companion. It had been easy to agree to this in theoretical terms, before the trip, when it seemed she could sacrifice anything for a baby. And Meg’s life looked much better than hers on paper: She earned three times as much as Josie. She had a long history of stable jobs and residences. It was because of her savings that they could afford to do this at all. What judge would look at Josie’s résumé—a slew of brief, poorly paying jobs followed by eight years of toiling on an art history PhD that she was beginning to admit she might never finish—and grant her custody of a child? She couldn’t even conceive one—six miscarriages in two years. Her failure seemed written across her forehead. She understood why the adoption had to be done this way, but on the ground now, this role of silent partner, secret parent, chafed at her: Meg, the official parent, when Meg had to be talked into all this.

“It’s nice that you came to help Meg,” Artur said to Josie, maybe picking up on her distress signs. “This can be quite a difficult time.”

Josie smiled wanly back. She was a terrible liar. Meg had said it was all merely formality, that obviously the people in the Russian agency would see them for what they were. Only on paper, in front of the Russian judge, would they need to uphold this lie. But now, with Artur’s gaze upon her, Josie didn’t feel so sure. A silence fell over the car. She took back her hand and shifted her thigh away from Meg’s.

“We’ve been friends since childhood, like sisters,” she announced suddenly, lying. “We met at summer camp.”

Artur nodded up at the mirror and smiled again. “Do you have children yourself?”

“Not yet,” Josie blurted, then glanced with panic at Meg, feeling she’d turned the conversation all awry.

“Do
you
have any kids, Artur?” Meg asked quickly.

“Not yet.” He winked. Josie didn’t know how to take it. He seemed slightly effeminate, but maybe that was just how Russians were. A silence settled over the car, and in time they passed from the downtown streets on to the smoother, more orderly highways leading out of town. Josie sat quietly, trying not to imagine the orphanage, hoping it would take a very long time to get there.

She had read the Human Rights Watch reports. She had seen pictures and documentary films of twisted, forlorn babies lying half naked on plastic mattresses. The photos showed cold metal cribs lined up in rows, almost like cages. She had seen one film about an orphanage that had no electricity and sometimes even lacked heat and running water. The children, even the healthy ones, were said to be dazed and indifferent for lack of interaction. They were rarely held; they might not know their own names. Some of them would have even given up crying.

The agency’s booklet said nothing about these things, except to mention in the back end of a paragraph that some children might suffer from sensory integration disorder or have difficulty making the transition to a “forever family.” And maybe it was true; maybe Human Rights Watch reported from orphanages much worse than those near the capital. Maybe the steady feed of adoption money made this orphanage heaven compared to the rest. That’s what Josie told herself as they moved farther from the city and off onto quieter, narrower country roads. She watched the green fields and forests rushing past the car windows, the little dachas appearing in clusters now and then. Every so often Artur would point out some landmark or tell them which famous Russians had houses nearby. But before she felt ready, the car slowed down and turned onto a rutted dirt road, approaching a small guardhouse. There was no one inside it to stop them, so they drove past.

At the end of the road, beyond a few withering shrubs, stood a building that had once been pink but was now faded to white near the top and saturated with gray filth along the bottom. There were grates on all the windows, and no traces of children in the yard. No swing sets. No bicycles. The entrance stood under a small portico, held up by four large, peeling white columns, and in black letters above the entry hung the words
. Baby home.

Artur got out of the car; Meg and Josie stayed frozen in the backseat.

“Well, this is it,” Meg said, feigning ease.

“Yeah,” was all Josie could say. The air around her hummed.

They collected their bags of gifts from the trunk, shouldered up their purses and video camera, and mechanically followed Artur up the stairs. Inside, the foyer was austere and clean, with high ceilings and deeply worn parquet floors. The air smelled of cabbage, and there seemed to be no one, no voices, no sounds, anywhere. Artur went down the hall and came back a few minutes later with a short, heavyset woman wearing a white lab coat over her dress. She led them to a large office, where Josie and Meg set down their bags and waited. The woman collected Meg’s dossier of documents from Artur, and sat studying them at the desk for several minutes. Josie started to worry. She nudged Meg and glanced at the gift bags.

Meg nodded. “We have these gifts for the orphanage.”

The woman held up her hand to quiet Meg.

When she finished with the documents she said something to Artur that surprised him. “Apparently,” he said, translating, “they actually have two children who are, ah, eligible for adoption, that you can meet today.”

Two children. It struck Josie suddenly as incredible good fortune: two children to choose from, not one. There was an abundance. But glancing at Meg’s already dismayed face, the implications sunk in: How did one choose between two children? And what about the little boy in the photo? Was he one of them?

Meg said, “I can only afford to adopt one child.”

“Of course,” Artur said. “Of course. But if you would like to meet them both—”

“Is that common?”

Artur shrugged.

To be summoned across the ocean to meet one desperate boy seemed almost a heroic mission. To sit in an office and have babies paraded for your approval was something else. A shopping trip.

Meg made hesitant, disapproving sounds, but then she consented. The woman went out into the hall with Artur and they were left alone waiting for a long time.

“Maybe this—” Meg whispered.

“What?” Josie hissed back, trying not to lean too close to Meg. She had the unlikely sensation that they were being watched.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Could this have been a bad idea?” Meg’s eyes were flashing from side to side, scanning the bare walls.

“It’ll be okay,” Josie said. “This is natural. I mean, the nerves.”

“But what if—”

The door opened and the woman in the lab coat came in, walking backward to hold the door with her shoulder. In her arms, they realized as she turned, was a baby. No blanket, just a gray sweater and tights, and a shock of coarse, platinum hair.

It was seated in the crook of her arm, and when it saw Josie and Meg, it neither cringed nor smiled. It glanced at them with vague disinterest, then let its gaze land on the blank wall behind them.

“This is Sveta,” Artur said. “She is seven months.” Josie stood up, then remembered her role as bystander and nudged Meg forward.

“Hello, Sveta,” Meg whispered at the baby. She was very tiny; Josie would have guessed she was only three or four months old. The woman jiggled the baby a little, trying to make her smile. Instead, the baby lunged at Meg’s red bangs and clamped on, pulling them back and forth with a ferocity that stunned them all.

“Ostorozhno!” The woman slapped Sveta’s little red hand away, and Josie braced for tears. But the baby just stared back, revealing nothing.

“It’s OK,” Meg said, trying to hide her alarm. She leaned forward to let Sveta take her hair again if she wanted. But Sveta drew back, and then lost interest entirely, staring at the wall again.

Josie stepped into her line of sight. She was wearing a dark green sweater with white trim, and the baby stared at the contrast in colors for a long time but wouldn’t look at her face.

“Hi.” Josie nudged one finger against Sveta’s fist, waiting for her to latch on. “Privet, Sveta!”

Sveta looked from one person to the next without emotion.

“Look at her little eyebrows,” Meg cooed. Josie took away her finger, for the baby refused to grab it.

They smiled and waved; they made funny noises. They shifted Sveta around from knee to knee, bouncing her, tickling, rubbing her warm, knobby head. They didn’t think of head lice. She smelled very clean. She seemed, in fact, flawless but for her indifference. They took pictures of her, and then they got to the business of the videotape. They’d been advised to video the child and show the tape to a pediatric specialist at home. There were certain behaviors, apparently, that might reveal something important. Josie and Meg didn’t know exactly what to look for. Sveta’s eyes moved in tandem when tracking objects, and though she didn’t respond in any way to her name, she seemed to notice sounds around the room. The woman in the lab coat demonstrated this, going off in a corner behind Sveta and making different noises—clapping, whistling—to illustrate Sveta’s response.

“She has some mild hearing loss in her medical records,” Artur explained. “But you can see that she hears quite well.”

After a while they took Sveta away, and Artur and the woman went over the baby’s medical records with them. She had tested negative for hepatitis, syphilis, and HIV. She had been suffering from malnutrition when she first arrived, but she had plumped up nicely since then, they thought. They offered no information about her birth parents.

“If you want to,” Artur said when they were done, “you can also meet the boy, Nikolai.”

Meg sighed. “It feels like a lot to take in.”

Josie put down the video camera. The picture of Nikolai was just inches from her feet, in her purse. And somewhere, beyond that thick, sterile door, he was off in a crib, in his thin pajamas, waiting. The girl had seemed perfectly fine, it was true. She would be good enough for anyone. But Nikolai, Nikolai, Josie felt obliged to him.

“Maybe you should at least see him,” she said. “While we’re here. I think you should meet him.” She tried to sound casual—
just a travel companion
—but her eyes fixed on Meg desperately.

“I don’t know.” Meg looked away. Josie sat helplessly in her separate chair, nearly two feet away. “Maybe—could we meet him tomorrow?” Meg said.

Artur talked with the large woman a moment, then nodded his head reluctantly. “It’s possible,” he said.

And they began to shuffle together the papers, to collect their things as if the visit were over.

“Wait, wait,” Josie said to everyone, wishing she could remember the Russian word for this. And then, though she knew they would all hear her, she whispered, “I think you’re making a mistake.”

Artur glanced from Josie to Meg and back again.

“We still have tomorrow,” Meg said to Josie. “This is all very overwhelming.”

Josie widened her eyes at Meg, then covered her mouth with her fist and said, in a rapid mutter she hoped would be difficult for the others to decipher, “If you do this to me…”

“OK,” Meg said at last. “OK. You’re right. I’d like to see the boy.”

The woman in the lab coat seemed disappointed, as if she had already gotten used to the idea of being done with them for the day. She sighed and shuffled heavily out of the room. They sat waiting with Artur, not saying anything. After twenty minutes, through the silence they heard a baby’s cries coming closer and then receding, muffled by the voice of the woman trying hard to calm him down.

At last the door opened. He was clinging to the woman’s shoulder, clenching up and then kicking his little bare legs in her arms. She turned around so they could see his face over her shoulder. It was flushed and distressed. He stretched his neck up as if fighting to get free, then dug his face into her shoulder to hide. There was no other way to say it, he was writhing. “This is Nikolai,” the woman said in heavily accented English.

He was scarcely bigger than the baby girl, although they said he was eleven months old. His hair was red and wispy, growing in splotches. He wore a dingy cotton onesie with no diaper underneath, and had little pink plastic sandals strapped on to his feet.

The woman bounced him against her shoulder awhile and Meg hesitated, then reached out and touched his back gingerly, as if she thought he could hurt her. “Hi, Nikolai,” she whispered. “I’m Meg.”