Rescuing Julia Twice (13 page)

When seated and sipping tea, I realize it's hard to make conversation. My relationship with Jack and Judith has always been about mutual helpfulness, so time spent together has always been fleeting moments filled with plans and logistics, not lingering conversations.

“Thanks for coming by,” I say, sheepishly.

“Oh, it's our pleasure,” Judith trills, maintaining the baby-glow effect. “She's adorable.”

Silence.

“So how was the trip?” Jack asks.

He's thrown me a lifeline. I'm comfortable telling stories. I re-create the images of the flat we lived in, whisking Julia away from the orphanage that last night in Novosibirsk. Julia is getting restless.

“Can I hold her?” Judith asks.

“Sure,” I say, lifting the baby into Judith's lap.

It seems as though Julia can be handed over to anyone without a fuss. Judith bobs her on her knee. Julia giggles. I hadn't noticed the dimples near the corner of her mouth before.

She likes the motion.

“Look at the size of her legs,” says Judith. Julia squeals with delight.

“I know,” I say. “Definitely a future Olympian.”

Biting my lip, I decide to tell them about Barbara's meltdown and how ambivalent she was when she met her son.

Judith, who is a psychotherapist, is listening intently, nodding.

When I finish, she says, “Well, sure, many foreign adoptees suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder. It was a major problem with the Romanian orphans back in the 1980s.”

I'm perturbed Judith is so readily familiar with the syndrome. It makes it all the more real. Something I should know about. Or have learned about before we started this process.

“But don't worry,” she says. “Julia is young. You got her early, and that's a good thing.”

Tension hangs in the room.

“Well, we've got to be going,” Jack says.

When they are gone, I look at Julia and wonder if we are going to have trouble bonding. We've been together five days. We are still strangers.

It's 11:00
AM.
The whole day lies before us. I have no plan. Bright sunlight filters through the kitchen window. I eye the stroller near the door.

“C'mon,” I whisper to myself. “Millions of mothers do this every day. This can't be brain surgery.”

I dress Julia up in warm clothes and the yellow snowsuit. Manipulating the stroller does prove to be an occupational hazard, as though you need some kind of advanced degree to get the thing to stay open. As I struggle I'm worrying about Julia overheating. I think about calling Stan for help, but finally, triumphantly, it kicks into the open position.

“Victory,” I say to Julia.

“How's the little princess this morning?” Stan says, as he greets us at the elevators and bumps the stroller down the three stairs that lead from the lobby to the street.

“Good,” I say. “We're going for a walk.”

For years and years and years, I'd walk up and down Broadway, romanticizing the image of mother strolling baby. It became an iconic vision in my mind, like baby Jesus and Mary. I always imagined the mother was completely and blissfully at peace while the child gazed around at the milieu of marvels on every sidewalk. I ached to be that mother who felt so at one with herself and her child. In my twenties, I was jet-setting. After my divorce, I was preoccupied with dating and my journalism career. Strolling a baby down the avenue looked like the antidote to my hectic, pressured life.

Here I am, strolling a baby. I am not peaceful. I'm terrified. How does one spend the day with a baby? Will I know for sure when she's hungry? Will she nap? How am I going to juggle caring for her and getting my work done?

As I start walking down Broadway, I realize I have no particular destination. It's brisk outside, and snow is caked up along every curb. At the crosswalks, I struggle to navigate the stroller up onto the sidewalk. People flow by without offering a hand. Julia is not content to sit back and relax. She keeps moving forward in the stroller—almost the reverse action of the back-arching we had seen at the orphanage. I can't figure out if she's uncomfortable or trying to tell me something. I hand her the bottle with formula, which soothes her briefly, but she continues to
lean forward and thrust, over and over. After several blocks, I decide to accept that this is what she is going to do, but I keep walking. Eventually Julia falls into a slumber, and I feel the most relief I have felt all day.

Three hours later, I return to our apartment building.

“Oh, my,” says Stan. “Looks like someone's cheeks are chafed.”

“What? What do you mean?” I say, rushing around to look at Julia under the hood of the stroller.

“Oh, my God,” I say, covering my mouth. “What have I done to her?”

“Calm down, Ms. Traster. Her cheeks are just a little red from the wind.”

“Oh, my God,” I keep saying, embarrassed, mortified, upset. “I've ruined her,” I say, on the verge of tears. “Ms. Traster. Go put Vaseline on her cheeks. She'll be fine.”

We get in the elevator. Julia's face looks like a giant overripe heirloom tomato.

I'm panicking.

How am I going to explain this to Ricky?

Inside, I keep her in the stroller and run to the drawer for Vaseline.

She doesn't appear to be in any sort of discomfort, but she looks freaky. I begin to rub circles of petroleum jelly on each of her cheeks, realizing I should have done this before we went out for a walk on this brisk February day. Julia has not had any exposure to wind or sun or rain. Before we took her from the orphanage, she had never been outside, and when we were in Moscow, we were in and out of cars, driven from one destination to another. Three hours of wind was like a chemical peel for her face.

I take her out of the snowsuit and plunk her in the playpen.

I sit down in the stuffed blue chair, shredded from our cat, and wonder if or when this is going to get easier.

We are driving down the New Jersey Turnpike on a raw Sunday morning in March. Julia is snuggled in her car seat asleep, her chest rising and falling gently. Her papery eyelids flutter. Finally, some peace for her. For me. For Ricky.

When Julia's awake, she's a constant symphony of sound. Not words, of course, but an ongoing emission of verbal fragments. Her mouth is always open. She is never pensive. She doesn't lounge with a faraway look in her eye. Transitioning from motion to stillness requires relinquishing control, but to do so, Julia would need to fundamentally believe the world is a safe place. Something in her wiring has taught her that relaxing her defenses is dangerous. When I'm in a high state of anxiety, I fear sleep, too. Staying awake tricks me into believing I can ward off danger or control the outcome of whatever is plaguing me simply by turning the issues over in my mind a thousand times. It's a fallacy, but that's how you think when you believe you are alone, that the world is a quickly shifting, unreliable place where bad things happen. I know how
I
got there, but why does my baby behave like that?

It's painful to watch Julia wage a daily battle against rest and relaxation. When I put her down in her crib after lunch, she immediately springs back up and sways back and forth with a crazed look in her eyes. I try to stroke her head or sing to her, but it agitates her. She won't look at me. Eventually I leave her in place to fight it out with herself, and after
fifteen to twenty minutes or so, she does succumb, but only because she's out-of-her-head tired.

There's even more drama in the stroller. When she gets groggy, she leans over the stroller's safety bar, the way Kate Winslet does in
Titanic
at the ship's prow, as forward propelling as she can get without doing a flip out of the vehicle. She rattles the bar with her clenched fists as though she is shackled to it, resisting the pull of sleep.

But the car is another story. The vibration and continuous movement, especially when we're driving on the highway, is as irresistible as an undertow at sea. She bangs her head against her car seat to keep herself awake, but it's futile. The motion is hypnotic. Her head flops onto her shoulder or forward onto her chest. She's transported, but to where? Does she dream? Do people in her dreams speak Russian? Is she back in the orphanage where it smells like ammonia and cooked cabbage? Perhaps she's in the comfort of one of her caretaker's arms, someone whose scent is more familiar?

She looks peaceful. Beautiful, really. She usually rests for exactly one hour, like clockwork, as though she's been rigged like a bomb waiting to go off. She does not whimper or fuss or appear to be in discomfort. But then, like a scene in a horror movie, she will wake as though someone were coming at her with a gleaming knife. Or she's seen a ghost, which perhaps she has.

Ricky has a theory about why this happens. He thinks when she's asleep, she slips back to her early days in the orphanage, and when she comes to from napping, she has no idea where she is or who we are. She's in an unsettling state of disorientation, a fugue.

We're still motoring along the turnpike, fifty minutes into her nap, when I get the Pavlovian stomach clench, knowing she'll wake in ten minutes. I lower the radio and twist around toward her. I extend my arm and cup my hand around her knee, hoping the warmth and pressure might make her feel more grounded and secure. She stirs. I hold my breath and stand ready with a bottle of formula in my other hand. Her eyes bat quickly. She crinkles her brow and then, on cue, she emits a keening howl. “It's okay,” I coo. “It's okay. You're here with Mommy and
Daddy. Here's your bottle.” If that doesn't work, I offer her the
abaye,
the mysterious word she uses for her pacifier. Either way, her eyes never meet mine. Today, she takes the formula from me and sucks down every last drop of liquid like a desert-thirsty nomad. Then she tosses the empty bottle beside her on the seat. She sits up tall and strikes up her one-man band of sing-song sound.

“We'll be there soon,” I say, guessing my words, or the assuring tone, mean nothing.

I shift back around in the passenger seat. Ricky can sense my discomfort.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, you know, I don't know,” I say. Then I add in a hushed voice, “She's
so
not at peace. It's upsetting.”

“She'll get there,” he says. “She just needs time.”

“Maybe, but that spooked look in her eyes worries me.”

Ricky puts his hand on my knee, and I lean back and close my eyes. What a gift it is to receive comfort from another person. My mind drifts and I think about something that happened a few days ago in the playground.

It was a dank, dull day like this one, but I was going stir-crazy in the apartment and couldn't stand the thought of another trip down Broadway to Barnes & Noble. I bundled Julia into a snowsuit, and we set off to Riverside Park. This was both mine and Julia's maiden voyage to a playground. I'd been to the Hudson River park countless times but never to the part with the swings and slides and jungle gyms. I don't recall seeing a playground at the orphanage, and if there was one, Julia would have been too young to have seen it. I felt a mixture of hope and fear bubbling in my chest. I left the building and walked toward the river. At the entrance, I bumped the stroller down a set of massive stone steps and looked around. It was desolate. The sky was flat. I could see joggers in the distance against the backdrop of the roiling silver river and a few scattered homeless people piled under ragged woolen coats on benches, but Julia and I were the only souls on the playground. A chill coursed through me, but I resisted the urge to turn back. It wasn't snowing or
raining or terribly windy; what could be the harm of giving this a go? I parked the stroller at the base of the metal slide and wrestled Julia in her bulky snowsuit out of the belted contraption. I lifted her as high as I could midway up the slide and eased her down with a big, squeaky “wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee.” She was agreeable, so I repeated this exercise a few times. Then I looked around thinking,
okay, what else?