Chosen (9 page)

I
t’s easy to find her, look for a place to spend money, and there’s Blondie. Jason takes a breath and pushes the glass door open, the bell jangling in his ears. She’s at the card section, sideways to him, opening every single one of them, reading, then putting them back. Upstairs, his girl’s writhing on the bed, nothing he can do about her pain, and she’s down here fucking
browsing
. It’s easy to picture her with a Starbucks in one hand, her foot jiggling one of those strollers that cost more than a month’s rent, baby unattended. Jason liked the way the ancestors did it,
dikkinagun
, the way his aunt Selma-Wade carried her retard son for years, crisscrossed to her heart. But you’d have to be strong. He watches Blondie, a walking hunger strike, couldn’t carry a gallon of milk, let alone a baby. Not like his Penny, strong.

Still, his eyes go to the crocodile purse dangling off Francie’s elbow.

Easy, Jason tells himself. Just ask for what’s yours. The ache in his back is a steady pulsing of pain, better if he keeps moving, so Jason circles the magazine rack, shaking his legs, thinking how to start.

The clerk, a folded-over granny with brown teeth, is watching him, sour-eyed, suspicious.

“Can I help you?”

Francie looks up, sees Jason, the card slips out of her hand, flutters to the ground.

“Jason! Is it time?”

“No manners? No ‘nice to see you’?” He crosses the gift shop in three strides.

“No, I mean, yes, but I thought you were here because it’s time.”

“It’s not. But I like to see that you’re eager.”

She bends down, her head level with his cock, as she picks up the greeting card.

“Congratulations on the birth of your son!” it says, a stick-figure baby in a diaper.

“I sure as shit hope that’s not for Penny.”

“No,” she says, her voice shaking. She steps back, tucks the card into its envelope.

“’Cause you’re causing my girl a lot of pain. Nobody should have to go through what my Penny’s gone through.”

“I’m truly sorry.” You know what? Bitch sounds like she might be.

“I can think of ways to ease that pain.”

“Mmm, then I’ll leave that to you.” She looks him straight in his eyes, and even though she’s skinny like a stick, he realizes she’s green inside, won’t snap easily.

He moves so he is blocking the way to the granny running the register. “You’re not understanding me.”

“I think I am,” she says, backing away.

He doubles back, one giant stride of his to three of her trot-trot pony steps. He’s making her nervous. He blocks the way again.

“In a big hurry to get to that baby, huh? Means an awful lot to you? Precious to you, right? Precious to us too. We have our rights, twenty-four hours. Rights to our own flesh and blood. Never know what might happen once he’s born.”

She swallows; a bobbing in the razor-thin lines of her throat skin.

“There are plenty of unwanted babies out there, waiting,” she says, and pushes past him to the register, places the blue card carefully on
the counter. “All of them precious, all of them wanting everything John and I have to give. You didn’t think you were the only ones who chose us, did you?” She opens her wallet, thin with cash, stacked with plastic, and pays for the card, carefully zipping the change into a slit in the middle.

“Do you smoke, Jason?”

He makes a noise, and she asks for a pack of Marlboros, not his brand but he can taste them already.

“Here.” She puts down a crisp twenty-dollar bill. “For my friend here,” she tells the granny.

He picks up the cigarettes, the cellophane crinkling in his palm.

“Keep it; the change or anything else. That’s all the money you’ll see from me.” She picks up the plastic bag with the card inside and starts to walk away. “Not that it matters now, if you’re not going to sign. But just so you know,” she tells him as she shoves open the glass door, the bell on the handle ringing wildly, “we would have given him the world.”

W
hen the orderlies are wheeling the dinner trays, meat loaf with gravy that smells surprisingly good, down the hallway, Chloe calls Dan, who wants her to come home, then calls the agency, catches Judith before she leaves for the day.

“No baby yet…. Yeah, we’ve been here almost twenty-four hours…. John’s catching a plane back from L.A., should be here sometime tonight…. Yes, I’ll stay to the bitter end.”

Chloe walks back toward Penny’s room and is intercepted by Nurse Pat outside the curtain.

“I think the epidural isn’t working,” Pat tells her. “Anyway, I’m back to being a ‘motherfucker,’ so something’s not right.”

Then Pat’s shift ends; her replacement is surly, anti-adoption. Chloe sends Francie home to rest, with a promise to call when they are getting ready to push. She goes to the gift shop and buys a toothbrush, unable to stand the way her teeth feel any longer. She is about to call Dan again when the new nurse finds her in the hallway and says, “You know, even vultures have to stop circling eventually.” Chloe knows she got the line from Jason, that they’re all riled up in there. Great. She snaps her phone closed.

“Pardon?”

“I hear you’ve been here for more than twenty-four hours. Maybe
you should go home,
get some rest
.” But she doesn’t say it like she’s concerned for Chloe’s well-being.

“Yeah, well, I wish I could.”

“You can’t stop them from changing their minds. By law, they have twenty-four hours after the birth to change their minds. It’s their right.”

“Of course it is, and lots do. And this is my job. If my boss wouldn’t jump down my throat, if I could go home and watch
Friends
and
ER
and drink wine with my fiancé, don’t you think I would?”

“You don’t make these things happen; God does. It’s in God’s hands now,” the nurse says ominously. “You obviously don’t have children.” Later, these words will come back to haunt Chloe.

“What?” she says now, manners slipping.

“I said, you obviously don’t have any children. You won’t be able to do this job once you do.”

“But I’m making a
family
,” Chloe protests. She feels the exhaustion, the wear and tear of the last two days on her, a sandpaper burn behind her eyes. She sniffs furiously.

“Whatever you need to tell yourself to get to sleep at night, honey.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with things left in ‘God’s hands’!” Chloe replies.

W
HEN
C
HLOE WAS TEN
, her mother died of a brain tumor, shattering the sweet trio that had made up the Pinter family. There were only three slim months between diagnosis and her death on the Fourth of July. Chloe can still picture her father that night, silhouetted against the red explosions of light, the familiar swing of his simian arms as he walked across the baseball field to where Chloe sat on a soft tartan picnic blanket, shoulder to sunburned shoulder with her best friend. The day’s humidity lingered so that when her father touched her arm, her skin felt wet, though she’d been out of the community pool for hours.

“I won the swim race for ten and under!” she crowed as they walked toward his car, her hand damp in his. She can remember
how long it took to cross the parking lot, the flickering orange of the goosenecked overhead light, her stomach twisting at her father’s silence, the steamy, tarry smell of the humidity-saturated blacktop. She knew before he said it.

“Your mother died this morning.” Dr. Pinter opened the passenger side door for her. “It was peaceful, she didn’t suffer, and I was”—his voice broke—“I was holding her hand when she went.”

Chloe closed the car door and watched as her father collapsed against her side window, his long arms wrapped around his middle, hunched over, shaking.

When he got in the car next to her, she had pressed her knuckles to her mouth, hating the way the two of them didn’t even use all the spaces of the front seat of the nine-passenger station wagon.

We’re not a family anymore, she thought.

She said simply, “We need a smaller car.”

“I’
M DOING SOMETHING GOOD
. I’m making a family!” Chloe calls again after Penny’s nurse, but the answer is just the disapproving squeak of her white clogs.

Chloe’s cell phone rings. It is Dan, but all she can hear are lyrics from the Counting Crows song “Raining in Baltimore.” Accompanied by a mournful accordion and sad, somber piano chords, Adam Duritz wails to her in his distinctive whine,
You get what you pay for / But I just had no intention of living this way.
There is a glitch in the CD, or perhaps Dan means it to, but the line is repeated,
I just had no intention of living this way.
And then he hangs up. Chloe has a sinking feeling that the message is in the final lines, a purposeful repetition—Dan had no intention of living “this way,” as grown-ups, in Portland Heights, making the rent and grocery lists and dinners for their wallpapered breakfast nook. She could spend more time thinking about this, wondering what he wants from her, but she doesn’t. She wraps the thin flannel blanket around her shoulders and lets his call go unreturned.

I
T IS JUST AFTER
midnight. The McAdoos are home in their lovely, warm, clean bed while for the second night in a row Chloe is chasing sleep on the love seat in the seating area outside Penny’s room. She wakes up with the sensation of being watched—Jason is sitting on the sofa opposite her, his blue/brown eyes staring.

“How are things going in there?” Chloe croaks, surprised by the scratchiness of her voice.

“I don’t know how they’re going to get that thing outta her. Doc just went in there now.” He sounds anxious. “They’re coming back, Francie and John?”

“Yeah, yes, why?” They had all agreed, around eleven, that nothing was happening, and that the McAdoos should go home and wait for a call. Chloe sits up, wide awake now. “Why?”

“You think they really want this kid?” Jason stretches out his legs, his enormous motorcycle boots thumping the floor, rubbing his face with his hands. The dragon claws on the backs of his hands dance as his veins roll.

“Of course they do. They’ve wanted a baby for years.”

“Yeah, but you think they want
this
kid? A kid of some dumbass broke ex-con and his girl?”

“Jason,” Chloe says gently; her heart aches for them.

“What if it grows up to be like me? My own blood dad liked to beat the shit outta me; I tried him so much. My own ma—”

“They have a lot to give a baby.”

“Yeah. That’s why we picked ’em. Figured at least with money, he’d have a chance. I hope you know this is hard—it’s not like I don’t want it. And Penny, you have no idea…” He doesn’t finish.

“They have a lot of love too. They want this baby.” Chloe is leaning forward. She can see the whole adoption as if she’s lying on her back watching clouds on a windy day. This is the moment when it all becomes clear—“Oh, yeah, I
do
see a dolphin!”—or when the whole shape dissipates, turns into wispy streaks of white against blue.

“Yeah?” There is an animal wail from the room behind them. Jason jumps to his feet, the moment broken. “Then why the fuck ain’t they here?” And then he slams into the room, Chloe standing uncertainly, before she decides not to follow.

Surly Nurse bustles out on her way to the nurses’ station, fixes her beady eyes on Chloe.

“The baby’s heart rate is dropping,” she says, as though this is Chloe’s fault. “Dr. Andrew’s going to do a C. The dad’s changing into scrubs now.”

“Okay.” Chloe checks her watch, reaches for her phone. “Thank you.”

In the end, Chloe doesn’t call the McAdoos. She could, could tell them hurry, it’s time, jump in the car, but she knows they will miss it anyway. She waits because there might not be anything to miss. Chloe has seen so many adoptions disintegrate in those fateful seconds when the baby’s first wails fill the room. If it is bad news, she can let them sleep, at least, before calling.

The minutes pass.

Then Jason is standing in front of her, mashing the paper mask and hat between his huge hands, and Chloe knows, just by the defeated way his shoulders sit on his body, the adoption will go through.
Thank god
.

“That them?” He nods at the phone in her lap.

“Pardon?”

“Did you call them?”

“They’re on their way,” she lies.

“Okay.” He sighs, stumbles to sit down next to her, yanks the booties off his feet. “He’s here.”

J
ason is sitting with his Pen afterward, waiting for her to wake up, her snores as steady as the tide, about to put him to sleep too, if he weren’t so agitated, right foot jiggling. He rifles around the tray beside her bed, finds the foil-wrapped ibuprofen they left for when she woke, rips it open and gulps them down dry. His back is twanging, a looping rhythm of pain like a kiddie train set, down his back to his hip to his leg to his heel and back again clackety-clack. Forty minutes ago, he saw a doc up to his elbows in his girl’s guts, lift out something bloody and purple, yowling, and he had closed his eyes like Penny’s, let his head sink to the white sheet beside hers, the hiss of the air hose running into her mouth drowning out his son’s first cries.

It’s done. He doesn’t want to see him, wants it to be over, never thought the plaster shoebox back in Southeast would feel like home, but he can’t wait to get out of here, with the jittery lights and bossy women and Blondie and Chloe and the just-born son he will never know. As soon as she’s better, he thinks, they’re leaving this frozen city of bridges and buses and rain and fog. Mexico.

Then the nurse rolls in with a trolley, and inside it, Jesus, it’s right here, he jumps up, backing toward the corner. In a white bundle of blankets, his son.

“Get out!” he yells, and Fatty gives him a raised eyebrow look, like
Don’t you yell at me, you’re in my world, mister.

Jason has been thinking: Better that Penny never see him, that they both don’t look at it. “Please. Take it out.” His jaw pops in time with his back shocks.

“You have twenty-four hours,” the nurse says. “When she wakes up, she needs to make her decision based on—”

“OUT!” Jason roars. “You as thick in the head as you are in the ass? We don’t want him in here!” There is an ugly painting by the door, scrubby yellow sunflowers in a blue vase; he fixes his eyes on it, not wanting to look—

“No.” It is Penny, behind him, more a moan than a word. “Nooooo.” Her eyes open, and Jason plants himself between her and the plastic trolley. He grabs the edge with his hands, tugs it away from Fatty, his eyes fixed on the wilted sunflowers.

Then Chloe shows up, phone in hand.

“What’s wrong—,” she begins, and Fatty tries to get between them, but—

Umph! With a shove, Jason sends the trolley flying across the eight feet that separate them, but it has a bum wheel and veers, a wheel catching, and the bundle inside rolls, thumps against the side, tiny skull against thick plastic.

“No!” Penny’s screaming behind him.

Chloe makes up the distance, grabs the edges, steadies it.

“I want it out of here!” Jason yells.

Fatty’s over at the phone by the bed, lifting it to make a call.

“Stop.” For as small as she is, Chloe can command a room, and Jason thinks of the best teacher he ever had, the third-grade substitute who read them
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
in a scratchy, hypnotic whisper.

“It’s okay. I’m going to put him over here,” Chloe says quietly, the wheel on the box squeaking as she crosses with it behind Jason. “Over by the window, for now. And then”—he notices for the first time,
underneath the dying sunflower painting, a thick stack of papers she has left on the chair by the door—“we have to talk.”

Then it’s Eager Beaver Blondie popping her head in the doorway, all clown makeup and gold jewelry, her eyelashes like smashed spiders, and she stage-whispers, “Is this a bad time? Have they signed?”