Chosen
Authors: Chandra Hoffman
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Family Life, #Adoption, #Adopted children, #Adoptive parents, #Social workers
A Novel
FOR CHERRY, WHO BELIEVED
Four Months Earlier
Red Flag
Thanksgiving
The Famous Chloe Pinter
In the Middle of the Night
Ultrasound
Encounter
After-Dinner Drinks
Penny for Your Thoughts
Blood Relations
The Vultures Are Circling
Gift Shop
No Intention of Living This Way
No
A Shepherd for the Lambs
Bar Talk
Paperwork
Monday, Monday
Smoke Signals
Inauguration by Urination
Cuppa Joe
Bus Number Seven
Business Plan
Waterbabe
Where and When
A Modest Proposal
First of the Year
Good Samaritan
Prankster
Coffee Shop
Sunday Dreams
Shake the Money Tree
Modern Bride
Everyone Knows It’s Wendy
Portland Heights Shell
Something Is Missing
Public Transportation
Cradle Will Fall
Dark Night
Time Enough for Counting
Disneyland
Three Options
Quitting Time
Saint Valentine
How Often Do They Give It Back?
Visitors
Change of Heart
Anonymous I
Anonymous II
Anonymous III
Aeromexico Flight 179
Phone Call
April
Four Months Later
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
C
hloe Pinter is trying to develop a taste for coffee. It’s Saturday morning, and sunshine pours through her dormered office windows, shines on her carefully organized desk, a stack of pink phone message slips and a mountain of empty sugar and cream packets. She sips, adds another sugar. Outside her window, a warm breeze is rustling the rich emerald evergreens. The summer sunshine is creating geometric patterns of light on passing cars and beyond them, sparkling on the Columbia River. Perfect weather in Portland, an oxymoron only to those not lucky enough to live here, Chloe thinks.
She slips from its crinkled bag the small keepsake album she bought while browsing Powell’s bookstore earlier this morning with her boyfriend. The album has the word
BABY
stitched on the front, as though the letters are the jet stream left behind by the dizzy diapered bumblebee grinning in the upper right corner of the pale blue cover.
There are photos in her filing cabinet, babies and their new parents, waiting to fill this album. She slides the metal drawer open and pulls the folder labeled
COMPLETED ADOPTIONS
. She pictures the next photo, due any day now: Chloe, in her “signing paperwork” charcoal suit, paired with the blissful Paul and Eva Nova cradling and beaming over Amber’s newborn daughter, set against a fluorescent-lit delivery
room backdrop. A photogenic happy ending worthy of the first page of her album, something to put out on the coffee table here in her office when she meets with prospective parents. She can’t wait.
Chloe smiles, remembering Dan’s adorably stricken face when the clerk at Powell’s this morning thought the album was for them; that they were expecting.
“Bless your heart—what a lovely thing you do, bringing babies to barren couples,” the Powell’s clerk had exclaimed when Chloe told her about her job, director of the Chosen Child’s domestic adoption program. The woman had nodded, eying Dan the way women always do—that endearing smile, those ruddy cheeks—putting his glossy windsurfing magazine in a separate bag.
“It’s an honor,” Chloe had continued, meaning it as she always does, “to be part of such an important moment in people’s lives.”
A
CAR HONKS IN
the parking lot below—Dan. She’d promised she would be quick, just pick up her files. Chloe grabs the stack of pink phone message slips, calls she should return. She folds them neatly in half and puts them in the pocket of her cutoffs. She waves to Dan from her window—
coming!
Next stop on their mutual day off: the Hatchery in Hood River, where Dan will spend the afternoon on a windsurfing board carving the cresting dark river water. Chloe will drink up the summer sun from a blanket on the hillside, returning phone calls for work with her cell phone, slipping photos in the new album, sipping sweet, creamy coffee. Afterward, unless she gets paged by one of her birthmothers in labor, she and Dan plan to eat dinner at the Hood River Brewery, followed by a rare uninterrupted evening at home.
Juggling her small purse, baby album, files, and half-full coffee cup, Chloe locks the office behind her and jogs across the parking lot toward her boyfriend and the perfect day stretching ahead of them. She thinks,
I am living the dream
.
T
hey’re in there. Chloe Pinter bangs on the metal door of the apartment, lights on inside, as freezing rain pelts down around her. The grocery bag sags off her arm, Thanksgiving turkey still warm against her thigh.
“Penny! Jason!” she calls out as she hammers with her free hand. She knows her clients are inside; she can see movement through the broken section in the slatted blinds.
At last the door is opened a crack; the loose brass flashing screams as it scrapes along the threshold. Penny’s eight-month-pregnant belly fills the doorway, and her shorn head pokes out, her first expression scowling, suspicious.
“Yeah? Oh, it’s you.” She doesn’t step back to let Chloe in. Behind her, in the apartment, Chloe hears voices.
“Hi. Happy Thanksgiving!” Chloe says, forcing brightness. “I brought you guys some dinner. A turkey, the works.”
Penny sticks out her hand to take it. Chloe grips the plastic handles, waiting.
“Is Jason home? Can I come in for a minute?”
Penny looks over her shoulder, yells, “It’s the social worker!”
From inside, “What’s she want?”
“She brang us dinner!” Penny calls back. She smiles apologetically
at Chloe, exposing the dark space along the right side of her mouth where there should be teeth.
The rain comes in earnest, hard-pelting, swollen drops that make audible pops as they hit the puddles in the muddy courtyard. As always, Chloe is wearing the wrong clothes, nothing but a jean jacket. The cardboard poster cylinder she has under her arm is getting wet, and she makes a show of pulling together the top of the food bag.
“Your dinner’s going to be soggy.” She smiles at Penny, waiting.
Then Jason appears, a head taller than Penny, and yanks the apartment door open.
“Jesus, Pen, you leave her out in the rain?” He jerks Penny out of the way so Chloe can duck inside. The apartment reeks of cigarette smoke and mold, dark spores collecting in the corner of the popcorn ceiling overhead.
A couple sits at the folding table in the kitchenette. She looks sixteen, crack-skinny, yellowish, pimpled complexion, the marks of meth around her mouth, and when she turns to Chloe her eyes don’t focus. The man—he’s older—takes the cigarette out of her hand, taps the dangling burn of ash into a Pepsi can, and takes a drag. He has dark hair pulled in a low ponytail, and he gives Chloe the long up-down, his black-hole eyes unblinking.
“That’s my brother Lisle,” Jason says smoothly. He does not introduce the girl. Jason is so tall he has to duck under the crooked brass light fixture in the entry, two bulbs burned out. “This is a friend of ours, brought us some dinner.”
“Thought Penny said she was a social worker.” Jason’s brother hasn’t broken his stare, just moved it to the bag of food in Chloe’s hands. He draws on the cigarette, blows smoke in his girl’s face. She blinks, slowly.
Jason doesn’t answer, and Chloe doesn’t either.
Confidentiality
, she thinks. She moves to the table, clears a space among coupon flyers, chipped saucer ashtrays, ketchup packets, and empty soda cans, and puts the Fred Meyer bag down.
“You might need to reheat the side dishes,” she says, and then notices there’s no microwave. “I sat in traffic forever. You wouldn’t think, on a holiday…”
And then Chloe sees it. It’s right there in the corner of the living room, and she feels their eyes on her as she looks at it. A bassinet; the kind that comes from Kmart, with scratchy white eyelet fabric cut cheaply and stretched awkwardly over a plastic frame. In the bassinet there’s a stuffed green bunny rabbit, its painted eyes fixed stupidly on the ceiling.
“What’s that?” Jason gestures at the cardboard tube still jammed under her arm.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I just remember the other day you guys said that this place didn’t feel like home, so I brought you some posters.”
They are old posters, ones that didn’t fit with Chloe’s scheme for her house when she decorated—she now has nothing but black-and-white photography, mostly Dan’s but some Helmut Newton, a few attempts of her own, the framed U2
Joshua Tree
poster that has moved everywhere with her since high school. Chloe had decided that in Portland, she and Dan would paint the rooms bright colors but let the art mimic the weather: stark contrasts of black, white, and gray.
“I mean, you don’t have to put them up. I just thought anything is better than bare walls.”
Jason takes the tube, pops the end off. Inside there are two posters: a reprint of Goya’s
Gatos Riñendo
, something she bought at the Prado’s gift shop when she was in Madrid three years earlier. The other is a dizzying photograph of the Palio, the horse race around the Piazza del Campo in Siena, where the towns people line the walls of the city center with their mattresses to protect horses and riders in the brutal dash to the finish. Since they left Spain two years ago, Chloe has wanted to go back, visit their old friends in Tarifa, and travel north to Siena for the Palio, but there have been babies due, adoptions to arrange, and summer is Dan’s busy biking season anyway.
While Jason unfurls the posters on the orange shag carpet, Chloe
takes a moment to inventory the apartment. Just the bassinet, and over by the edge of the sofa, next to a carton of Kools and a jumbo bag of sour cream and onion potato chips, there is a case of store-brand diapers, size N for newborn.
There is an exchange; Penny says something to Jason Chloe can’t hear.
“Let me handle it!” Jason hisses.
“Pardon?” Chloe asks; she should know now, if it’s all falling apart.
“I said, you better get on home. Roads are always dangerous on holidays.”
At the table, Lisle snickers. “Is that your idea of a threat, Tonto?”
Jason walks to the door and opens it for her. Chloe pulls the edges of her jacket close, gives a wave to the room.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she says with cheer she doesn’t feel. Penny waves back—she is picking turkey right off the carcass with her fingers, a piece of brown skin dangling between them.
C
ROSSING THE LITTERED COURTYARD
, Chloe glances across to the apartment where another birth mother, Heather, and her toddler son live. Chloe has six birth mothers right now, and eighteen sets of adoptive families in her pool. She can’t bring them all dinner, has to be choosy about the ones she needs to woo. Still, it would have been nice to stop by and surprise Heather with the turkey and sides. The lights are off; they are probably having a proper Thanksgiving dinner with Heather’s grandmother. Heather’s adoption plan is rock solid, the adoptive parents perfect, all the important meetings completed and checked off on the dry-erase board in Chloe’s office. Heather doesn’t need Chloe’s turkey or drop-ins; everyone is simply waiting for the baby now.
In the parking lot, she hears footsteps behind her, disturbing the rotting leaves that have collected by the Dumpster. Chloe reaches in her pocket, wishing she had put the pepper spray on her key chain instead of clipping it to her gym bag. She fingers her keys, adrenaline
flooding as the steps speed up behind her, along with the jingling, a sound like loose change in the pockets of whoever is following her.
At the side of her Jeep Cherokee, Chloe unlocks the door, hands shaking.
“Hey!”
She glances at the empty parking lot in front of her, spins around—it is Jason, his face barely visible, harshly shadowed in the epileptic flickering of the lone fluorescent light by the Dumpster. Rain is falling on his shaved head, his scalp skin a sickly green.
“Scared ya, huh?” He laughs. He has the cardboard tube in his hand, tosses it from one to the other. “Didn’t know it was me, huh? Gotta be careful out here in Felony Flats, Chloe Pinter.”
He takes a step closer to Chloe, so that she has to tip her head back slightly to see his two-tone eyes. Down by her side, Chloe sticks her ignition key out between the knuckles of her second and third fingers, the way she learned in her college Rape/Aggression/Defense class.
“About the crib and shit. My brother don’t know about the baby, that we’re giving it up.”
Making an adoption plan for
, or
choosing a family for
, Chloe should correct him, but she doesn’t. Pretending she is shifting her weight, she puts another four inches between them.
“Okay,” she says evenly.
“He and Brandi are staying with us awhile.”
If Judith, the director of the agency, knew this, she would insist on reducing their rental assistance. Chloe won’t mention it to her boss.
“Oh, and these?” Jason holds up the poster tube, inches from her jaw. “The walls aren’t really the problem here.”
“This is the best I can do. You’ve been incarcerated before; you know how hard it is to get a place with that on the application.”
“This place is a shit hole, full of dealers and shit. It’s no good for a baby.”
Chloe’s stomach lurches—great, another one going sour. She takes a stab—“But the baby’s not going to be living here, right?”
She swears Jason flushes. He shuffles from one heavy black motorcycle boot to the other.
“It’s no good for Penny.” He juts his chin out.
“It’s the best I can do.”
“Anyway,” he says, chucking the poster tube into the Dumpster behind her car, “we don’t need your
art.
”
“Okay.” Chloe opens the door. She would have kept the posters; he didn’t have to throw them out. She gets in the car, one hand hovering discreetly over the automatic lock on the door panel.
“Sometimes,” Jason says as he turns to go back in, hunching his black leather jacket onto his shoulders against the rain, “something isn’t better than nothing.”