Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Page 6

  “God, I hope so.”

  In the morning they would drive west, to an orphanage outside of town, which the Russians called a baby home, where they would see the boy with their own eyes.

  “And then, just imagine—”

  Meg stopped her. “You said you wouldn’t get your hopes up like this.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.” Meg stretched out her legs, effectively pushing Josie off the bed. “I’m sorry.” She shifted to make room for Josie again. “But you have to keep in mind all the things that could go wrong.”

  Josie crossed the room and sank into the other little bed beneath the window. For months now Meg had been enforcing restrictions on their optimism. No plans, no painting the spare bedroom, no shopping for clothes or car seats. Not yet. Josie told herself this was just the businessperson in Meg, the part of her that believed that if you made your desires public you would get screwed by everyone. She brokered deals for a big real estate developer for a living, scooping up and pawning off office buildings and industrial parks. It was a world of poker faces, where nothing turned out as it seemed.

  “Don’t pout,” Meg said. “Please.”

  “Well, we’re here, aren’t we? Hasn’t everything gone just like the agency promised?”

  “Wow, they picked us up at the airport. Wow, we’ve been sheltered and, let’s not forget, fed. Remarkable. Let’s sign our lives over.”

  “You act like this is some elaborate con, like all of Russia’s conspiring to take your money.”

  “Our money,” Meg said.

  Josie pressed up to the window again and watched the strange little cars racing by around the corner. A whole world of Russians was out there, and she might never get out and meet any of them.

  “I just want to protect us,” Meg said after a while. “You.”

  She was right, of course. Even if the agency did everything perfectly, they would still have to wait months before coming back to pick up the child, and there was an awful lot of potential for failure along the way. The boy’s health might be too problematic, the courts might not approve the deal, or he could get whisked away by any Russian couple stepping in at the last minute. And then there was the strange possibility that they might meet the boy and somehow, somehow…not feel the right thing.

  “Sometimes,” Josie said, “you’ve just got to make a leap.”

  A brittle knock came from their bedroom door, and Josie realized that after all her studying she didn’t even know how to say “come in” in Russian. What good was she? She walked over and opened the door to find Sana’s daughter, Natasha, struggling under the awkward weight of a large tea tray.

  “Chai,” the little girl said, her face twisted up with effort.

  “Come in, come in.” Josie rushed to clear a space on the desk for the tray.

  Natasha began a flurry of words in her beautiful, singsong voice, but Josie understood nothing. At last the girl reduced her comments to one word, enunciating it over and over. “Sakhar? Sakhar?”

  Josie and Meg looked at each other, baffled, until finally Josie thought to say, “Spasibo.”

  With great ceremony Natasha put two spoonfuls of sugar into each small cup and poured tea to the brim. Then she smiled and launched into more incomprehensible prattle. Josie thought it sounded as though the girl was asking permission for something, and they nodded, thanking her again and again. Finally she gave up and opened a drawer under the bookcase to retrieve two ragged Barbie dolls and a handful of crayons, seeming to apologize for invading what was now, temporarily, their space. Then she excused herself and rushed out the door.

  “This must be her bedroom,” Josie said. They looked around at the drab, fuzzy wallpaper and the tidy, sterile surfaces everywhere. There were no traces of children’s things, no toys or primary colors or drawings tacked up on the walls. Everything was brown or forest green. But in the corner by the window, under a folded blanket, they discovered a wooden cradle so small and feeble looking that it had to have been made for dolls.

  “That’s got to be a toy,” Meg said.

  “I should hope so.” Josie pushed at it gently, and it rocked to and fro with an uncertain, antique creaking.

  They stood staring at the tea, suddenly dazed and tired beyond words.

  “You want to push the beds together?” Josie said.

  Meg stepped out of her pants and folded them neatly over her briefcase on the desk chair. She gestured toward the door, toward the family beyond their rented room. “I don’t think we should.”

  Josie watched Meg undress and tuck herself into the bed until she became only a faint lump under the covers. She tried her own matching low, narrow bed, but her feet hung over the end and her arms flopped down to the floor. She felt monstrous in it. She lay still for a while, pressing one palm against the low mound of fat between her navel and pelvis, where she could feel the grumbling machinery of her digestive tract and, underneath that, a faint, premenstrual throb.

  Finally, unable to sleep, she got up and fished the adoption agency’s handbook out of her shoulder bag, then sat leaning against the window to catch the little bit of light from the streetlights. The cover of the booklet featured a black-and-white image that Meg had dismissed long ago as embarrassing: an adorable, gender-ambiguous baby in nothing but disposable diapers, crawling innocently across an artfully rumpled American flag. The pages that followed told little of the immense bureaucracy and expense of it all, of the social worker visits and weekend classes, the thousands of dollars spent with no guarantees, the fear and doubt and growing desire filling these many months. The book was promotional, devoted to testimonials and photos of satisfied customers. The husbands and wives in these stories had great posture and carefully ironed clothes. They thanked the Lord. They were certain the kids they brought home—miracles, gifts—would know nothing but health and prosperity in their new world.

  When they’d first gotten the booklet in the mail, Josie and Meg had smirked at these pages, feeling daunted and excluded by the strange confidence of those parents. “We’re not going to do this matching Disney outfits thing,” Meg had said, pointing at one family photo. “That’s not mandatory, right?”

  Over time, though, Josie found it hard not to get swept up by the pictures. The stories, the babies, pierced through her skepticism, made her previous life seem small.

  She glanced over to make sure Meg was still sleeping, then pulled from the pages the snapshot they had been sent of the boy, their boy. Nikolai.

  His eyes were small and set far apart, divided by a nose that seemed uncommonly flat. It was hard to get perspective on him, since he was posed alone in the photo, but he seemed small. That was common, they’d been told. He weighed, they said, only fifteen pounds, at eleven months. He wasn’t standing up or walking. He wasn’t smiling. He was sitting in the corner of a metal crib looking away from the camera. The neck of his t-shirt hung low, revealing the ridges of rib bones across his upper chest. Josie ran one finger along them, wanting to plant baby fat right there.

  “You know,” Meg startled her, “I wish you wouldn’t get so attached to him yet.”

  Josie closed the book guiltily. “I know. I know.” But she didn’t need to look at the picture anyway. The boy’s face was wallpapered inside her mind. She had sketched backdrops behind him too: Nikolai under the Christmas tree; Nikolai in the bathtub, surrounded by boats; Nikolai asleep in the car seat with a bottle tight in his mouth.

  What she liked about these images, too, was the picture of herself and Meg they implied: focused, permanent, purposeful. A family was a thing that stretched out beyond where you left off.

  The following morning their guide, Artur, came by after breakfast to take them to the orphanage. He was a tall, pockmarked young man who spoke excellent English, each phrase perfectly enunciated, as if there were a computer in his bulging throat stringing together separately recorded words. He helped them collect their paperwork and their bags of gifts for the orphanage, and they said good-bye
to Sana and the little girl and headed downstairs in the narrow, dimly lit elevator. In addition to the agency fees and the three thousand dollar “donation” to the orphanage that were itemized on their Good Hands bill, they were advised to bring gifts for everyone in Russia, including the kids at the orphanage. They had fulfilled this charge dutifully, stuffing their suitcases with diapers and clothes, toys and baby formula. This was how things got done in Russia, they were told. What they didn’t understand, though, was how and when to offer the gifts. Did they pull out a sweater right now for Artur, or give it like a tip upon departure? Either way, it smacked of condescension.

  Artur had a rickety little red car that was inexplicably missing the front passenger seat, so Josie and Meg sat together in the back, tensed up and wondering at everything they saw. They careened through the crowded streets of Moscow, swerving and screeching to a near stop every time they encountered another pothole or obstacle. Josie was relieved to find that not all the buildings were like the mysterious gray, Soviet-looking behemoths she’d seen from the apartment window; many were beautiful old stucco buildings, painted pale yellow and burgundy and pink, with elaborate porticos in front. The sidewalks were wide and crowded with people, and on every corner there seemed to be little makeshift markets with piles of fruit and vegetables. When Josie aimed her camera at them, she realized that at the edges of the markets stood rows of people holding out dresses and coats for sale, their arms spread wide like scarecrows. She took a blurred picture. Within a few minutes they were on a bridge over the Moscow River, and off to one side, in the distance, the gold domes of the Kremlin churches shimmered in the sunlight like a fantasy.

  Artur offered to take them to Red Square, and Josie nodded eagerly, but Meg cut her off. “We will meet the baby today, right?”

  “Most likely,” Artur nodded casually, without looking back at them. “If everything goes well.”

  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 abundanc
e. 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.