Rescuing Julia Twice by Tina Traster Page B

uphill back to the apartment, stunned. What had just happened? What baby doesn’t like a gently swaying swing? I always thought children are in thrall when they swing. Even adults like to shoehorn their bottoms into a malleable rubber swing and take a ride down memory lane. I kept thinking about the sensation of being on a swing. It’s a way to lose yourself. Then, in a flash, I realized something. Abandoning control is the last thing in the world Julia wants. Being suspended in a little chair, high above the ground with someone arbitrarily pushing you from behind is tantamount to torture. There’s no way to resist or brace herself, the way she does in the stroller. What she must have felt was the panic of a free fall, the absolute loss of whatever control she constantly fights for.
    At home, I changed her diaper and slotted her into her high chair. I shook some raisins onto her tray, then grabbed a jar of Earth’s Best baby food. I tried to feed her, but she wanted to feed herself. She’s been doing that more and more. I watched her closely, analyzing my mysterious child. She’s not daunted by the high chair, which is also confining and high off the ground, but she can see the ground and there’s no motion. I gazed at her face for a moment and inhaled a deep, heavy breath. After lunch, I put Julia in her crib for a nap, and though she struggled, the excitement of the day took her under. I tiptoed into the other room and called Ricky.
    â€œThe weirdest thing just happened,” I said.
    â€œWhat was it? Everything okay?”
    â€œYeah, we’re fine, I think. I took Julia to the park, to the playground.”
    â€œIt wasn’t too cold?”
    â€œNo, that wasn’t an issue. I put her on the slide and the dinosaur.” “The what?”
    â€œThere’s this dino—never mind. Just listen. When I put her in the swing, she freaked out. I mean freaked out like you’ve never seen.”
    â€œHow so?”
    â€œShe howled, like she was being attacked,” I said.
    â€œMaybe she was hungry or cold or wet?” he said.
    â€œNo, it wasn’t that. She reacted viscerally to the motion of the swing. She was fine before and fine the second I extricated her,” I said. “But she couldn’t stand being in that swing when it was moving.”
    â€œWell, don’t put too much stock in it,” he said. “There are a lot of things that don’t feel natural to her because she’s never experienced them before. One day she’ll love swings.”
    â€œAnd me? Will she love me one day?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’ll call you later.”

    We are riding along the final section of the New Jersey Turnpike to a friend’s party in Pennsylvania. This ribbon of road is a vessel of memories. In 1992, I took a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper in New Jersey. I worked the late shift, more than an hour from my apartment. My marriage was disintegrating. My career sustained me. A decade has passed, but the turnpike churns up those days. The most vivid memory I have is working on a story about Gail Shollar. She was a thirty-four-year-old mother, walking with her three-year-old from a food store to her car in a shopping center parking lot. She was carrying groceries in one hand and holding her daughter’s hand with the other. A man with a gun crept up behind her and forced her and her toddler into her car. The next day, her toddler had been found, cold and crying, dumped in front of a day care center. Four days later I was deployed by my editor to a drainage ditch behind a local lumberyard where I waited a couple of hours before police recovered the mother’s raped and stabbed body from a ditch. For months, I could feel Gail Shollar’s spirit. I’d picture her on that night, in her car, a prisoner, unable to protect herself and her baby. I was haunted by the thought of the small child’s confusion. Her mother was