Rescuing Julia Twice (26 page)

“So did we. It's not an easy thing.”

He's looking at me. Waiting for me to continue.

“It's just that … I don't know what it's like for you and your wife, but Julia is, let's just say, difficult. She's got issues. We don't really know anyone with adopted Russian children.”

I wait with hopeful eyes.

Slowly, he warms.

“It's true. These guys are a handful. My wife and I are exhausted all the time. They're hyper and insatiable. They really thrive on chaos.”

“I know, I know,” I trill. “I know exactly what you mean. Chaos. The perfect word.” I look at Ricky.

He's nodding.

“They run rings around us,” Jim continues, “and they're difficult in school too, but we're doing our best to cope. What else can we do?”

“We're in the same boat,” I say. “It's like there's never any peace …”

“Daddy.” “Daddy.” “Daddy.” “Daddy.” “Daddy.”

Jim's head whips around. The two wiry boys are scaling him like he's their favorite backyard tree. Ricky shoots me the
See what I mean?
look. I do. These boys have that same feral look in their eyes as Julia. They are relentless and demanding and determined to ingest Jim's marrow. Jim apologizes and says, “Gotta go. We should talk more some other time.”

Though it's nearly Memorial Day, the nights are cold in our old-but-renovated wooden farmhouse. In the city we lived in a prewar building with thick plaster walls. We had no control over the radiators, which pumped out heat through June. Even in winter, we'd keep the windows cracked open. Now I'm walking through the house wrapped in a sage-green alpaca blanket when Ricky shrieks, “Come here, come here.”

He's propped himself up from the couch, staring in disbelief at the television screen.

“What is it?”

“Just come here, hurry.”

A woman in orange-issue prison garb is telling her story to a female reporter. Natalia Higier is spending a year in prison for involuntary manslaughter of her two-year-old son adopted from Russia. The adoptive Massachusetts mother is recalling how she originally said her son, Zachary, who died from massive brain injuries, had fallen out of his crib and hit his head. And that she later changed her story, saying she threw him in the air—a game he loved—and he slammed his head on a coffee table. She is telling the dewy-eyed reporter she was lambasted for waiting two hours to take him to the emergency room. She was alone when all this happened. Tearfully, Natalia Higier concedes she did the wrong thing and she's paying for it. The boy, her son, was difficult to care for, she explains. She never really felt like his mother. Her husband was constantly away on business, and when she'd tell him how difficult it was to manage the child, he didn't believe her.

Natalia Higier was alone in the world. She had no one to confide in. She didn't even know how to ask for help.

If I were watching this interview four years ago, before I became Julia's mother or before I started down the road of adoption, I'd see a twisted monster on my television screen. I'd say this woman should have been better screened and, had that been the case, she never would have been allowed to adopt a baby boy. But this is not four years ago. This is May 2006, three years since Julia came home, and I understand this woman's plight. I know what it's like to have a child who doesn't feel like he or she is yours. I know what it's like to have a child who resists you, who never takes your hand or looks you in the eye or listens. I know this woman's daily struggle between the desire to love this blond boy and how difficult that is when what is returned amounts to indifference. I get how a woman who is forty-seven years old, who ran a business, and loved her dog, could become so inconsolable that she becomes unhinged. How too many consecutive days of relentless isolation and despair can lead to violence. How there's nothing left to lose.

When the program ends, Ricky and I hold each other. I'm shaking.

“Could that ever be me?” I ask, tearfully.

“Of course not,” he says.

“That's because I have you,” I say. “That woman was all alone in the world.”

“It's true,” he says. “It sounds like she was struggling by herself and snapped.”

“The world condemns a woman like that. Which I understand. There was a time I would have been scornful too.”

“Yeah, but now you—we—know what this woman's life was probably like. This is a problem. I bet many parents with Russian children are struggling behind closed doors. There's so much shame around this.”

“Exactly,” I say, stabbing my finger in the air. “Nobody can fathom that a child may be unlovable. It's got to be the parents who are damaged.”

“Well, maybe a program like this shows people a different side to the story, though I doubt it. They probably air stories like this because they are sensational. Anyway, let's go upstairs. It's getting late.”

“I need a few minutes,” I say.

I walk to my desk and type in “Natalia Higier and Russian adoption” on my keyboard.

As the pages load, Ricky leans over my shoulder and says, “I bet there are more cases like this. A lot more cases.”

“Oh my God,” I gasp.

“What is it?”

“Well, for one thing the Higiers used the same adoption agency as we did. Look here. It says, ‘The state Department of Child Care Services will investigate to make sure that the Frank Adoption Center used a Massachusetts-licensed adoption agency to conduct the home study and background.'”

“Whoa. What else?”

“According to this story, the couple had a home study, and everything checked out. But listen to this. There's a lawyer from the adoption agency quoted here saying, ‘This family was very well suited to adopt a child.'”

“What else?”

“Hang on…. Okay, listen to this. This is from the director of the Center for Family Connections in Cambridge, the people who did their home study. They say, ‘Often parents who adopt foreign children may not be prepared to take care of a child who may have been abandoned or malnourished or lived in an orphanage.'”

“Yeah, well, they certainly don't tell you that when you're plonking down $40,000 to adopt a child,” Ricky says. “Let's go upstairs.”

I toss and turn all night, imagining what it's like to accidentally or maybe intentionally be driven to the point where a mother kills her child. It makes me ache. I picture Julia, across the hall, sleeping in her bed. Julia, Zachary. Unwanted children who are severed from a mother's love and sent to live in orphanages like dogs and cats to the pound. Only their absolute needs are met—and not necessarily in a timely or loving way. And we adoptive mothers believe we can cure them with our love, but it's not a medicine they're willing to swallow. Poor little Zachary. Unwanted. Disconnected. Dead. A footnote in history.

I tiptoe downstairs, trying not to wake Ricky or Julia. I cinch my robe tightly because the heat hasn't kicked on yet and the house still feels like a meat locker in early June. I rarely have time for myself in the morning. Julia rises at the crack of dawn every day, like a rooster. I raise the kitchen shades and stare into the milky light. I cannot stop thinking about Zachary or Natalia. I saw the clock every two hours last night, tossing like a fish gasping for air in a waterless bucket.

I flip on the kettle and spoon loose-leaf tea into a cup. The three cats mewl at my ankles, pressing up against me to fill their food and water bowls. Their sweet faces deflect my dark thoughts for a fleeting second, but then I am again picturing how Natalia must have panicked when she realized Zachary was unconscious. What was it like for her in the moment she understood the situation had gone too far? Was she scared? Remorseful? Relieved? In some dark corner of her mind, I wonder, was she relieved she would not have to be Zachary's mother anymore? Was living with the child a worse prison sentence than the one she's serving now? The kettle's wet plume of steam fogs the window. I pour boiling water into my cup and carefully carry it into my office.

I type “Russian Adoption” and “Death” into Google. I hesitate, fortify myself with a sip of tea and hit “Enter.” I cup my hands around the hot mug to warm me. I'm chilled inside and out. Scary words appear in
a long list on my screen. Russian adoption and death are not strangers. I suck in my breath as I click on a link titled “Russian Child Murder Cases.”

Someone has published a list—
a list!
—of twelve Russian adoptees who've, as the list says, “died at the hand of their US adoptive parents.” The list is arranged in paragraphs, each citing the child's name, age at the time of death, legal words about the crime, and how long the child had been living in his adoptive home. I look at the names and ages first. They're American names mostly, changed, but in some cases their former Russian name is cited. There's “David, age 2,” “Logan, age 3,” “Viktor, age 6,” “Luke, age 18 months,” “Jacob, age 5.”

Then I come to Zachary. Natalia's son. It says, “Zachary, age 2, of Braintree, Massachusetts, died of severe head trauma. Zachary sustained a bilateral skull fracture, strokes, brain swelling, and detached retinas.” The paragraph concludes with, “Natalia pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and is serving jail time,” as I already know. My heart breaks for the baby and for her, too. I see her in my mind's eye with a child who is as wild and depraved as a rabid raccoon. She's supposed to love this little boy, but she can't. In lucid moments, she assuages herself by believing things will improve with time. He'll calm down. Zachary will let her be his mother. But in a cold, stark, unbearable moment, where she is just as out of control as the baby, Zachary ends up dead. What actually happened? Only Natalia knows. It doesn't matter now.

I hear Julia and Ricky stirring upstairs, but I'm frozen stiff in front of my computer screen. Emotional rigor mortis has set in. I should start making breakfast, but the revelations on the screen chain me to my chair. I scroll again to the top of the page, this time to read the actual story of each and every child: David and Logan and Viktor and Luke and Jacob. I skip past Zachary's story to Maria's, Jessica's, Liam's, Alex's, Dennis's, and Nina's. Horrific, unimaginable deaths. There's something unfathomable about a tiny child being killed.

How is it that we have been through the adoption process and no one whispered a word of this dark underbelly to us? Is it a coincidence that this many cases of Russian adoptions turned bad?

These adoptive parents who stand accused and convicted went through a rigorous, exhaustive, and expensive process to adopt a child from Russia. Did any of them start off with malice in their heart? Did they sit down and say, “Hmm, let's forfeit our life's savings and spend a year drowning in bureaucracy and travel to Russia twice so we can abuse a child”? Did home study guidance counselors miss telltale clues about these people as prospective parents? They couldn't see these folks would have a predilection to harm children? I don't buy it. There's more to this. I think Irma and Donna and Peggy and Kimberly were drowning in confusion and despair and feelings of unbearable inadequacy. At some point that lethal cocktail of emotions led to a strike or a blow that couldn't be taken back.

If you're standing back from a cool, objective distance, you might think,
Well, if I had a child like that, I'd get her help.
I'd think that too. But I understand
The Twilight Zone
of Russian adoption because I live it. Being unable to bond with a baby isn't the same as having an adolescent who is experimenting with drugs or running away from home and deciding it's time to seek help. An adoptive parent with no prior knowledge of this down-the-rabbit-hole world doesn't understand how a baby can be so disturbed. A mother figures enough love and time will fix the problem, that the slate's still blank. She doesn't believe a baby can be so damaged—or evil. There is Renee Polreis, who was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to eighteen years in prison for the death of David Polreis Jr. In the paragraph on her case, she said her baby's cuts were self-imposed and due to severe RAD. Reading the acronym “RAD,” I wonder if she knew what that was at the time or whether it was a phrase she learned when she was mounting a defense.