Rescuing Julia Twice by Tina Traster Page A

the night, another time on a grassy knoll overlooking the lake. I had come home at the end of August, and I was in my mother’s bedroom looking in the mirror. I just knew, somehow, that I had a baby growing inside me. I wasn’t hysterical at first, but when the testsconfirmed my hunch, there was never a choice or a discussion. It was assumed this was a problem that had to be fixed, and my mother, who had always been my confidante, took care of all the details. David was a loving and sympathetic voice in the days leading up to “the procedure.”
    It was a late summer day. Hot and humid. My mother drove to the Manhattan clinic. She suggested I think of the procedure as a tooth extraction. I tried. I was stripped naked, my legs in stirrups. They injected my hand, and the pain seared through my arm. I woke nauseated and groggy. I cried, but I wasn’t sure why. I took painkillers for the cramps. David visited me the next day. My father could not look at him or at me. It never occurred to me I’d gotten rid of a baby I might have wanted. “Move forward” was always my mother’s advice. I was on my way to my sophomore year at college. Having an abortion is nothing like a tooth extraction. Having an abortion leaves a void you may or may not know about. It could take years, like when you’re near forty and unable to conceive, when the weight of the experience revisits, making you remember it as though it was recent. It can take twenty years to cry for that lost child. Infertility made me mourn the child I might have had and the one I will never have. I wonder what is worse, mourning an aborted baby or giving one life and then abandoning it to someone “more suitable.”

    I recognize Vladimir’s expressionless face right away this time. It is morning, but we are in Siberia’s postdawn darkness, back at the cavernous airport, driving again in his Volga. Déjà vu.
    This time around we are not going to the Centralnaya Hotel. When we had returned from the first trip, I’d called our adoption agency and told them I wanted to stay in Novosibirsk’s business hotel, which was down the street from the Centralnaya Hotel. I thought there might at least be toilet seats and hot water. Like so many conundrums in Russia, we weren’t allowed to switch to the better hotel during the first trip. Ricky’s guess was that every step of our trip was rigged to benefitsomeone who had a hand in the cookie jar. Nothing was flexible. Payoffs at every stop. But a loud enough fuss made back on US soil has landed us in an apartment building. We will be staying there with two other adoptive families: Barbara and Neal, who are adopting a boy, and Jo, a single parent who’s here for a girl. The five of us will be living in three apartments and traveling as a group.
    â€œOh, great,” I say to Ricky, as Vladimir’s car slows down in the courtyard of a Soviet-style block of multistory concrete buildings. “This time we’re staying in a tenement.”
    â€œShhh,” Ricky says. “Stay positive. Like you promised.”
    We lug our stuff up to the second floor. We hear a blood-curdling scream from behind an apartment door. Everyone is too stunned to say anything.
    Our flat is a two-bedroom apartment with a large living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. I notice the toilet doesn’t have a seat. The carpets and textiles are worn and drab, but the apartment is spick-and-span clean. It smells like ammonia. It reminds me of the orphanage. At least we have a refrigerator and a stove. There is a television with one station and a large clock on the wall.
    I pull up the shade in the living room window to let light in.
    Does Julia’s mother live in a grim apartment block like this with her husband and the first two children she gave birth to? Does she stay at home with the babies? Does she know people from the other side of the world are going to take her Yulia away