Rescuing Julia Twice (25 page)

Miraculously, the badgering and persistence pays off. We leave Ellenville on Halloween and drive through a riot of autumn splash along the Palisades Parkway, before pulling into our driveway. Our driveway. I can't believe it!

Julia's little girl bed looks like dollhouse furniture in her spacious, freshly painted pink room. Ricky had to slide a shim under her wooden dresser drawers because the hardwood floors slope. Gallons of light pour through four large windows. We bought Julia a painted toy chest that Ricky assembled and filled it to the brim. She has a little table with chairs. A surge of regret sears through me—
maybe if Julia had had a proper room from the start and I could have sat in a rocking chair and read to her.
I stop the thought. We are here now.

Day after day I walk around the house in a reverie, amazed at what I've built. This old farmhouse, which was left to rot, is resuscitated and handsome. It holds my DNA. It is something I gave birth to. My genetic material resides in every tile, faucet, finish, light fixture, and shade of paint. This is how it feels to have something around me that reflects me. This is how a birth mother must feel when she arrives home from the hospital cradling her newborn.

“Who were you on the phone with?” Ricky says, as he plops groceries on the glittering green granite counter.

“That was Julia's teacher Craig, again!” I say, with a frown.

“What's wrong this time?” he asks.

“Same old thing. Julia is acting up. She won't take instruction. Blah blah.”

“What'd you say?” he asks.

“I just said, ‘I see. I see.' But then he said something disturbing.”

Ricky pauses from putting the groceries away and waits for me to continue.

“He asked if I wanted to have someone from the county come down and evaluate her. To see if she needed, I think he said, special services.”

“What kind of special services?”

“I don't know. It didn't get that far. I was taken aback. I said I'd talk to you and get back to him.”

We both recoil at the notion of letting some county bureaucrat “evaluate” Julia. Throughout the adoption process, we tolerated intrusion from home-study counselors, adoption workers, and the police who pressed our fingers in inky pads to capture our fingerprints to assure Russia we were not criminals. For months and years after the adoption, the agency would call from time to time, urging us to file reports. We never did. I was no longer willing to parent en masse.

Ricky thinks a visit like that ends up as a permanent record that will follow Julia through her life. He is skeptical a county counselor would have the skills to deal with our situation. So the uncomfortable thought hangs in the air, dangling like a phone receiver that bleeps annoyingly over and over off the hook.

His dinged jalopy kicks up dust in the driveway. He sticks his hand out the rolled-down window to open the car door, which is attached by the grace of duct tape, and then he springs from the car like a jack-in-the-box.

“Hi, I'm Christian,” he says, extending his hand while a Cheshire cat smile spreads across his face.

I pump his hand.

He reaches into the car for cameras, a tripod, and lighting equipment.

He's instantly familiar from my decade spent with reporters and photographers in newsrooms. I recognize that boundless energy, the twinkle in his eye, an insatiable hunger to see inside people's souls. He's probably taken a million photographs during his career, but he shows up at my house with so much sunshine and gusto, you'd think this was his first assignment.

I lead him down the path to the house.

“This is quite the place you've got here. Wow!”

“It's my muse,” I say, tossing that thought over my shoulder.

“We'll start inside,” he says. “Then we can take some outdoor shots.”

The
New York Post
has sent Christian to take photos of me and my family for a column I've begun writing. “Burb Appeal” is about the trials and tribulations of a hard-boiled city girl adjusting to life in her rural-ish suburb. It's about shock and awe. It's about leaving what is familiar and
finding out who you really are. The first column will run in a few weeks with photos. This is a high point in my writing career.

Christian transforms our house into a studio. He tests lighting. He raises shades; he lowers them. He moves furniture. He stages. He suggests a mock tea session in the living room. “Can you add a book to that scene—pretend you're reading?” he directs. He talks to our cats when they wander by. He snaps me on the couch. “You've modeled before, right?” he says to flatter me, to cajole my come-hither glint. He's good. He photographs me in the kitchen handing Julia apple slices. She grabs them with delight and mugs for the camera in her pink stripy shirt and flared pink skirt that looks like a cheerleader's. Her socks have gone AWOL. Upstairs Christian captures Julia rolling around on her new wrought-iron bed under the pink-petaled floral comforter. He gets one of her pretending to serve food on plastic dishes from her make-believe kitchen and another of her lifting up her purple alphabet caterpillar. She likes this a lot. It's interesting to see her engaged in something. Then we go outside. Early spring flowers are muscling through the earth. Christian lines us up, one behind the other, sitting on a stone bench like a human caterpillar.

We are a caterpillar in its cocoon, hiding from the glare and scrutiny of the world. We cocoon ourselves because it's too hard to explain to others what we are. I don't speak to my mother. Or my father. Or my sister. We barely speak to Ricky's mother, and when we do we are careful to keep our troubles private. Old friends are far away, disembodied voices that have no real connection to my life. I don't tell them how disconnected I feel from my child or how devastating motherhood is. Or how I doubt that my relationship with Julia is ever going to fuse into something I don't think about on a philosophical level. Instead I talk about the house and the newspaper column, the things that work for me. I project a happy face to the world—just like my mother taught me to do. “Never let them know you're weak,” she'd say. The people I see now are acquaintances from Julia's preschool or women from yoga class. I wait for a breakthrough, to be that caterpillar that pushes his way from the cocoon and becomes a brilliant flash of light and color. I gaze skyward
while Christian checks his camera's digital monitor, and I speak to that invisible force out there who has some inkling as to how this is all going to play out.
Is it going to get better?
I ask silently.
When?

Three hours glide by in the wink of an eye. As Christian walks up the driveway to his hopeful hunk of junk on wheels, we wave good-bye. I feel like we've spent a day with an old friend. Maybe it's the intimacy of being photographed? Maybe it's Christian's infectious nature?

A couple of weeks later, a CD arrives in the mail. Christian has sent me fifty pictures from the shoot. I scroll through the staged version of my life. What is real? What truths does the camera tell? What does it hide? In most of the pictures, Julia appears to be an adorable almost-four-year-old despite the bad bangs chop, which is my fault. She is giggly and expressive. There's even one where I'm at the kitchen counter cutting fruit, Ricky is standing two feet away, and Julia is balancing herself on a little white stool in between us, one hand holding Ricky's, the other resting on my knee. Did Christian ask her to do that? Would she have leaned on me if he hadn't? But then I spot a couple of disturbing photos. In one, Julia is looking up at the camera from her bed, and her face reminds me of children I've seen at the orphanage, children who will never leave because they have fetal alcohol syndrome or other neurological issues. What brings them to mind is how thin her lips look and the way her eyes seem too widely spread apart.

“That's him,” Ricky says.

“That's who?” I ask.

“Timmy and Kenny's father. You know, the Russian brothers I told you about.” It's Friday afternoon. We've just pulled into the preschool parking lot to pick up Julia to go out to dinner.

“Let's talk to him,” I say.

He's an imposing man, suited and groomed. He's talking on his cell phone. He looks like he sells things. Ricky and I hang back until he stuffs his cell into his pocket.

“Hey, Jim,” Ricky says.

“Oh, hey.”

“Jim, this is my wife, Tina,” Ricky says.

“Nice to meet you.”

“Waiting for your boys?” Ricky says.

“Yup,” he says.

He furrows his brow.

Because we have to get Julia shortly and because he'll soon be distracted with his boys, I brazenly jump in.

“I don't know if you know this, but Julia is from Russia. Ricky tells me your boys are also from Russia. Adopted, like Julia.”

He hesitates for a minute.

“Uh, yeah.” He recovers smoothly. “We adopted the boys at the same time. They're not biological brothers, but we wanted two children.”

“Did you have to make two trips to Russia?”

“We did,” he says.