Can You Keep a Secret? (17 page)

Besides that, there was one chair with metal legs standing in a corner, and an old bathroom with a showerhead over the bath, and a cracked mirror on the cabinet. The toilet paper was brown and hard. The fanciest thing in the bathroom was the tissue-box holder. It was gold lace.

I went to the window – they had lace curtains – and there was just a brick wall.

I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘It’s horrible.’

‘It’s only a few nights,’ said Colby.

We had an entire day to waste, so we went to Red Square, taking the photographs of those buildings with the onion tops to put in Benjamin’s adoption book, and we took photographs of Russian men in long fur coats. Colby asked Anatoly to take us to a money changer so we could change American dollars into roubles, and we were amazed at the rate we got: about five times more than we’d got at our bank in America. It was so cold that we decided to have lunch at McDonald’s – the Russian families had all dressed up to go there, like it was some kind of special occasion – even though I never eat McDonald’s and can’t stand the smell. Then we went back to the hotel and tried to waste the rest of the day.

We were a bit surprised when we got back as we found a woman sitting behind a desk on our floor. I hadn’t noticed that desk on the way up. She asked to see our key on the big block of wood, and
she explained with sign language and broken English that we were supposed to hand our key to her every time we went out. I couldn’t get my head around that: why should we tell them we were going out and give them the key to our room?? It sounded a bit suspicious. I’ve been reading other people’s websites for a long time, though, and I knew to expect some very strange behaviour.

We went into our room and lay on the bed after I’d put the bathroom towels down on the cover because it wasn’t clean.

‘How are we supposed to sleep in here?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer, which was that we had no real choice.

I was jet-lagged and thirsty but I didn’t trust the water, and Colby had finished the last of the cans of Diet Coke we’d brought back with us from our shopping trip. There was no TV so it was a long night. I kept waking up and complaining about the mattress and the dirty sheets, and Colby kept telling me to go back to sleep. I said to him, ‘I can’t really believe it’s going to happen.’

He said, ‘We don’t have to worry anymore.’

Finally morning came and breakfast was served in a room on the top floor of the hotel, which was only about twelve storeys high. When they’d told us that the night before I thought, ‘Okay, there’s going to be some kind of restaurant up there,’ but it was a room that was the same as the bedroom, except without the bed. There were four tables, each set with a lace cloth, and four vinyl chairs. The breakfast was buffet-style: hard bread with ham, cheese, coffee and tea. I couldn’t eat. Colby piled his plate up high.

At 8.30 am Anatoly was in the foyer, as arranged, for the long drive to the orphanage. It was still very cold, but probably no colder than a cold day in New York. We sat in the van, staring out the
window. Everything looked cheap and dreary, like housing commission. Colby couldn’t get over the buses, how they were so big and belching smoke. We recognised the orphanage as we got closer to it, from the pictures Laura had showed us and, I suppose, because it’s the same orphanage that so many of you have already been to! It was a concrete building with a chain-link fence around it, and those swings with rubber seats and heavy chains hanging out the front.

We walked hand-in-hand up the front path, stepping over weeds that were growing through the cracks. I had expected to see children running around but there weren’t any. The first person we actually saw was a very fat Russian nurse in a pink uniform who was carrying what looked like a pot of thin soup, with peeled potatoes floating in it. Anatoly spoke to her in Russian and she nodded and said,
‘Da.’

‘Come,’ said Anatoly, and led us to a room with a bench seat, like a pew, and vinyl-tiled floor. We waited for about fifteen minutes before the fat lady came back, not with the pot of potato soup this time but with our little boy.

That’s right, with Benjamin!!!!!

The way she carried him, under the armpits, he was facing her bosom, so we didn’t see his face straight away. Then she put him on the ground, and I was waiting for him to turn around, with my heart pounding and my eyes nearly popping out of my head. But he didn’t turn around, so the nurse took him by the shoulders and turned him towards Colby and me.

We were still sitting where we’d been told to, on the wooden pew, with our mouths hanging open. Benjamin looked exactly like the photograph: skinny, with a bad haircut, and those corduroy pants and purple stockings underneath. It was like he hadn’t even gotten
changed. His head was small, and he had a sharp nose, and small, dark eyes, and his nose twitched. And this is a BAD thing to say but I couldn’t help thinking of a rat!!

I know, I know! How bad is that! But that’s what I thought.

I was a bit concerned about his reaction to us, too!! I’d had a fantasy about the first time I saw the child we’d been allocated in the orphanage, of having him run into my arms, maybe saying ‘Ma!’ But we didn’t really get any reaction from Benjamin. I was a bit shocked. Colby said not to worry. He put his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘You were right about the haircut. It’s terrible.’

I couldn’t disagree with him!

‘I think that stuff in his hair is California Poppy,’ Colby said. ‘I remember my father used to use it. It leaves an oil slick on the pillow.’ I know that sounds a bit cruel, but we weren’t really worried about what we were saying because we were speaking in English and we’d been told that Benjamin only spoke Russian and a few words of English that the nurses had tried to get him to learn. We also knew that we could change his hair and his clothes and make him look more like a normal American boy as soon as we got him home.

The main thing was: this was our son. And after everything we’d been through – 9/11, and losing the baby, and Colby lecturing me all the time about my anxiety, and then seeming to go cold right at the last minute before we’d had a chance to adopt – finally we were a family.

The fat nurse clapped her hands and spoke in rapid Russian. Anatoly, who was standing by the door, listened, and then said a few things back and, whatever he said, the nurse seemed to agree
with him. Colby and I couldn’t understand a word of it. I said to Colby, ‘Hope they’re not talking about us,’ but of course they would have been.

I reached into my bag for the small Thomas the Tank Engine train I’d brought to give Benjamin, as a way of breaking the ice. It had wheels that turned when I switched it on. I held it up for Benjamin, urging him to take it, saying, ‘Go on, it’s for you.’

I pushed the train closer to him, and then – and what a moment this was – I took Benjamin’s hands in my own. It was completely thrilling. My son. My boy. But when I placed the train in his hands he didn’t make an effort to hold the train and it dropped to the floor.

‘Okay,’ said Colby, sweeping it up in his hand. ‘I guess we don’t like trains.’ He looked up at the nurse in pink, who was prattling away in Russian and said, ‘What does he like?’ But instead of answering, she said, ‘You take him now.’

You can imagine how shocked I was. I said, ‘Take him now? I thought we were just meeting him today. Do you mean we can take him with us back to the hotel?’ Because that’s not what we’d been told would happen. That’s never what happens! Everyone talks about how agonising it is: you get to meet your child and then you have to leave them there while they work out whatever paperwork is left, and you keep thinking, ‘Oh no, they probably think they’ve been abandoned a second time,’ because of course you can’t even speak to them in their own language. But that’s definitely what the nurse was saying: ‘Take him, take him now!’

I was so confused. She bustled out of the room and was soon back, carrying a small cardboard suitcase. She put it down on the floor near Benjamin’s shoes. ‘Take him now,’ she said, nodding.

Colby got up and I stood up beside him, and we were both in a bit of shock.

‘I don’t know about this,’ Colby said. ‘I’m sure it’s meant to be just a meeting today, so we can all get to know each other.’ But Anatoly had come into the room now, and he was saying, ‘No, it’s okay. This one you can take now.’

I said, ‘Well, if you’re sure, because our attorney, Laura, in New York, she said …’

‘Is okay, is okay,’ said Anatoly. He picked up Benjamin’s small suitcase from the ground, and put his other hand on the small of my back to guide me from the room. ‘The director here, she says paper is signed. You take the boy now.’

‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ said Colby, but I said, ‘If they want us to take him, we should take him. Now he’s here, I don’t want to let him out of my sight.’

Anatoly had already left the room, carrying Benjamin’s little suitcase, and then the nurse started pushing Benjamin along the corridor with the back of her hand, so I ran to catch them.

‘It’s okay!’ I said. ‘I can take him.’

I tried to take Benjamin’s hand, but he pulled away from me. Anatoly dropped the suitcase, picked Benjamin up, carried him out of the orphanage and basically just sat him in the van. He looked at us and said, ‘You go in, you go in,’ so I climbed up, using the hand rail, and sat beside Benjamin, hoping that he would start to warm to me. But he cringed away, towards the window of the van.

Colby got in the seat behind us, and Anatoly took the wheel.

Colby asked me, ‘Are you sure about this, Caitlin?’

I said, ‘I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do.’

‘Is all okay!’ said Anatoly. ‘This boy waits a long time for a family. This boy has no family until now. He upset now. He fine! All okay.’ He tried to make eye contact with Benjamin in the rear-vision mirror, but Benjamin did not look up, so he babbled in Russian into the mirror and Benjamin still didn’t look up.

‘We go back to hotel,’ Anatoly said, and put the van in gear.

I could hardly believe it. We had our son! But then Benjamin basically did not speak for the entire journey back to the hotel and it was the same when we arrived and put him in the room. He sat on the floor and did not say anything. I don’t know what I expected him to say, but something! I couldn’t understand it. We were his family! He was going to America! Hadn’t anyone explained that to him? I tried to tell myself, ‘Okay, it’s all a bit of a shock to him. Maybe in some part of his brain he thinks the orphanage is home.’ I thought, ‘Okay, let’s try to distract him. Let’s try to show him how great life is going to be.’ So, having just got in, we went out. We spent part of that first day at the famous GUM department store. You won’t believe what that was like. I was expecting a dazzling complex, and it was more like a shabby shop, with nothing much we wanted to buy, although Colby did get some Russian dolls. When I asked him who they were for, of course he said Summer.

Summer is a vice-president at Carnegie, where my husband works, and they’re pretty close – too close in my opinion. Anyway, I said, ‘Well, if you’re going to get one for Summer then I suppose we should get two sets: one as a souvenir of the time we came here to get Benjamin, and a second one for your friend.’ And maybe I was a bit sharp with him, but I couldn’t actually believe he was thinking
of Summer while we were in Moscow, with me holding Benjamin, who was heavy, and not all that happy. I let it go, though, because I didn’t want to have an argument, not on such a special trip.

We had about two days of appointments before we would be allowed to fly home. There was the usual one with the medical centre to have Benjamin examined before the US embassy would issue his visa; and then the court visit, so the adoption could be approved. We saw other children being carried into their medical appointments crying. One child was putting up so much resistance the parents had to slide his feet across the floor. Benjamin didn’t exactly look happy, but at least he sat placidly in the chair.

The doctor’s name was Andrei Votyakov – maybe some of you had the same doctor? – he had a grey goatee and for some reason a white hat, and I couldn’t help thinking he looked a bit like a grim Santa. He examined Benjamin’s chest with a stethoscope, and looked inside his throat and ears. He hit Benjamin’s knee with a little hammer and this really horrified me, but he also put a long piece of what looked to be wire down Benjamin’s nose, so it poked out his mouth.

His English was good and we felt confident when he said that Benjamin was in good health. I had been sitting there anxious and worried that something negative would turn up, because if it does it’s harder to get a visa. But the only maybe negative thing the doctor had to say was: ‘Okay. But a bit thin.’

I thought, ‘Well, he would be thin after being in the orphanage and it’s not like anyone wants a chubby kid.’

From there we went to see the judge, and Benjamin – bless him – slept through that whole thing. In fact, Colby had to carry him into the courtroom because he was already asleep in the van when
we arrived there. He carried him in like a plank, and lay him down over three plastic chairs and he didn’t stir. We had to show photographs of our house in Larchmont to the judge, and we had some extra photographs of the little harbour, of the old Larch trees, and the men racing their miniature boats on the lake. The judge was full of praise for us. She was wearing a black robe and looked like any other judge you’ve seen. Behind her there was some kind of gold double-headed bird on a shield. She came down from the bench and looked at Benjamin asleep on the chairs and said, ‘Good boy,’ because he was sleeping.

She also said, ‘Good luck to you,
Mal-chik.’

That was the first time I’d heard anyone use that word –
Mal-chik.
It means little boy in Russian and I think it’s so cute, and I remembered it from some other blogs I’ve read. The judge was touching Benjamin on the forehead, but he didn’t wake up. He was covered in sweat, which he always is when he’s sleeping. Colby carried him out of the courthouse back out to Anatoly’s van, and from there we went to the US embassy a few blocks away. There were other Americans there, chatting quietly and smiling at each other, and like us some of them had newly adopted children with them, and they were shaking car keys at them, and letting them play with their phones, and letting them chew on their new toys. One of them had one of those long-necked rubber giraffes for teething, and Colby told me he’d had one when he was little, and that was the first time I felt a bit of a pang that we had missed that part of Benjamin’s life – he was well past teething.