Adopting a child may be as painful as giving birth. That sentiment expressed by Elayne Klasson author of the novel The Earthquake Child captures the complexity of an adoption which neither devotion nor love would resolve.
Alone in her beautiful home in California, Eleanor Russell felt, “The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, a violent collision of tectonic plates in a previously ignored section of the mighty San Andrea’s Fault.” Ron, Eleanor’s physician husband was away at a medical convention in Atlanta. Eleanor’s two teenaged children, from a former marriage, also at a safe distance from the disaster. Eleanor feared she would be buried under the quake’s devastation. Amid the terror, watching the plaster walls crumbling before her, a solid bronze sculpture swinging off its marble base, the piano rolling from one side of the floor to another, an armoire almost crushing her, Eleanor had “a powerful and surprising thought. She longed to have another child-- to affirm life.”
Ron was a great stepfather to Eleanor’s two kids, though at first reluctant to add to their perfect family. Eleanor persisted. After five years of marriage and several failed attempts at fertility, adoption was an alternative to expand the family for the forty- something couple. They consulted an attorney and placed an ad in several newspapers. And Kelly responded.
Kelly had her first child at fifteen. Baby Sean was a “perfect little boy” whom Kelly adored. Kelly’s mother, Ruth, a cold unaffectionate woman exasperated by Kelly’s entanglement with Esa, “that useless kid who got her only daughter pregnant” begrudgingly agreed to house Kelly until nineteen-year-old Esa could support them. Kelly kept her second pregnancy secret. When she picked up a newspaper on a park bench Kelly saw, “advertisements from people who wanted a baby to adopt.”
The stars aligned for Eleanor and Ron. Kelly gave birth to a beautiful boy. She named him Chris. After adoption Eleanor and Ron renamed the baby Joshua at the bris in Los Altos. Kelly did not keep in touch with her second son.
Joshua was a gift, a bright boy, a good student, a treasure for his adopted parents. One day Joshua exclaimed, “Daddy is sick”. Six months later Ron died of aggressive metastatic cancer. Joshua’s behavior changed drastically. He began experimenting with ecstasy, stole a car and a gun, bolted from a therapeutic boarding school.
Without remorse, he robbed his adopted mother. Throughout his aberrant behavior, Eleanor loved her son unconditionally. Joshua however, begged Eleanor to detach from him, to leave him alone. Resistant to bond with her, Joshua ran away from home. Was it only the premature death of his adopted father that so transformed Joshua? Or a longing for something that Joshua’s adoptive parents could never satisfy?
