Chosen (13 page)

W
hen he comes home, she’s laid out on the couch, sucking down cigarettes off Brandi’s pack while she’s at work. Doc said smoking makes her heal slower, but what does Penny care? If she never gets off this couch, doesn’t matter. She could starve, dry up like a wrinkled old apple core left between the cushions.

“You want the TV off?” Jason asks. It’s Oprah, a show on postpartum depression, ha! Penny blows a circle of smoke his direction, wishing it would make words like in cartoons, N-O.

“Hurting, baby?” Her boobies ache, but in the old way, like she’s about to go on the rag, and her stomach, sawed open, sewn, and stapled, hurts too, but not that bad anymore. She blows more short puffs of smoke in his direction.

“Not talking to me?”

“Sending you smoke signals, Injun. Can’t read ’em?”

He gets up, paces a tight circle around the room. She knows him by his jingles; just agitated. Still, she should be careful. She wants him riled enough to act, let him think it’s his idea, but then there’s Des’ree Bonds outside of Cheyenne, blind and drooling in a retard home because she crossed Jason years ago.

“What do you want, Pen?” He stops in front of her.

I want him back, she thinks, but this is not entirely true anymore.
Right after, she did. Today, she just wants to not feel empty and dried out, to feel something. And she wants Jason to move the hell out of her way so she can watch the show. She wants to know: Can you get it, postpartum depressions, even if you don’t still have the baby?

“I think we got to go back to Washington, maybe even the Makah res, stay with Selma-Wade,” he says.

The idea of crossing the river, of going north to the Peninsula, leaving Buddy in Oregon without ever having laid eyes on him, doesn’t sit with her. She sucks on the cigarette, the last drag, and blows two puffs straight at him.
N-O.

“Play by the rules for a time.” He keeps going. “For one, my parole.”

Penny taps the last smoke from Brandi’s pack—call it her contribution to the rent, she thinks.

Jason slumps next to her feet, back to normal, and picks them up off the couch, holds them in his lap, rubbing.

“I miss him too,” he says, so soft she has to turn down the TV.

“What?”

“You heard me.” Jason makes a pain face like his back is acting up, twists on the couch. “And I failed the piss test at Home Depot. Forgot I smoked a bowl with Lisle and Brandi while you were in the hospital. I couldn’t sleep without you.”

Fuckin’ idiot, she thinks.

“I hitched my wagon to the wrong star,” she says at last.

“What?” His eyes—she picks one to look at, the brown one, softer—bore into hers.

“You heard me.” She gets up, goes to the bathroom.

“You could lie,” Jason calls out. “Your turn to call Chloe Pinter. Say I made you give it up. Duress. Pretend you left me. Then we’d get him back.”

“Not much of a lie,” Penny says, running her tongue over the smooth space of her gums.

Jason comes up behind her in the bathroom, wraps his arms
around her waist from behind. She looks at their faces, stacked on top of each other like a totem pole, in the mirror.

“I’ll handle it, okay?” he says, and because she can’t look at her own ugliness any longer, she turns away from the mirror.

“Done great so far,” she sneers, and pushes past him to the bedroom.

Let him stew. She wants him pissed enough to do something. She just didn’t think he’d do the fool thing he does.

T
he first week home passes in a milky haze, day and night running together, curtains closed against the December rains, the master bedroom lit only by the peach-toned lullaby crib light clipped to the rim of Wyeth’s bassinet. Dr. Woo had told Eva no stairs, so they camp out in the master bedroom, Eva’s brother Magnus running out to Pizzacatto for dinner, to Strohecker’s for Eva’s favorite exotic cut fruit platters. If she could come downstairs, Eva would see that the mantel in their wood-walled living room is covered in vases; sunflowers from the staff at SuperNova, a mixed bouquet from his aunt, roses from the McAdoos, and in the kitchen, an ostentatious basket of gourmet goodies from Eva’s mother back east with a scripty card promising to come out to visit after the Christmas rush at the thrift store is over.

Downstairs, the trash cans overflow with folded pizza boxes and gritty coffee filters. The mail mounds on the dining room table; three UPS boxes addressed to Wyeth Edward Nova wait to be opened.

Upstairs, all is peach-hued cocooning, the buttery-popcorn smell of Wyeth’s soiled breast-milk diapers filling up the wastebasket, since Paul has discovered that you need a mechanical engineering degree to operate the damn Diaper Genie. There are black maternity pants,
gigantic white nursing bras, and boxes of breast pads and diapers on every surface.

Somewhere in this brave new world, Paul finds himself falling headfirst into love with the baby that sleeps on his chest wearing little glowworm sacks with mittens folded over his hands, since neither Paul nor Eva has the courage to cut his absurdly long fingernails. Paul’s Successful Soothing Ratio hovers just above the 50 percent mark, but he knows it will get better as he learns his son’s cries, can anticipate his needs. When the houseful of grown-ups fails to figure it out before Wyeth comes undone, they’re rewarded by a monster temper. Magnus swears Eva was the same as a newborn. He tells a bit of family lore—the afternoon their mother, so fed up with Eva’s screaming, parked Magnus in front of
Sesame Street
with a box of crackers and left baby Eva in her crib with bottle-feeding instructions pinned to her chest for Ed when he arrived home from work. She didn’t come back for three days.

T
HE DAY
W
YETH TURNS
eight days old, Paul decides it is time to go back to work, to deal with clients who want to add extra circuits in their homes to accommodate holiday light displays, technicians clamoring to take the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, a new file girl who hasn’t mastered the alphabet. He and Eva get in bed around eleven that night, the baby swaddled and asleep in his bassinet.

“You going to be okay tomorrow?” Paul asks as Eva lays two nursing pads inside the open flaps of a bra with straps over an inch wide.

“Sure,” she says flatly as she rubs a honey-colored, waxy-smelling cream into her brown nipples. When they first met, Paul thought he would never tire of the sight of her perfect breasts, a handful and a half each. Now he thinks sometimes maybe less is more.

“I saw Francie at Strohecker’s today,” Eva says. “She thinks Angus’s nicotine addiction is wearing off.”

Paul makes a good-natured grunt; he feels a new softness toward Francie, another new mother doing this, and alone, with her workaholic husband traveling.

“He’s a beautiful baby,” Eva says, and Paul realizes she is talking about Angus McAdoo, not their son.

“Not as handsome as our slugger.”

“Do you think there is something funny,” Eva asks, “about Wyeth’s nose?”

Paul leans over her side of the bed, peers into the bassinet.

“I look at him,” Eva continues, “and I think, what about Psych 201 and
storge
? How come I don’t immediately feel more connected to the baby I carried and birthed? I think about adoption: Could I have taken Angus home just as easily as Wyeth? Could we have taken home Amber’s baby? Would we have loved her the same, more?”

Paul has wondered these same things, but what’s the point? Wyeth is their son now. Still, this is the most Eva has talked all week. Why all the psych babble now, though, when he’s got to get up early and go back to work?

“I feel like, when I look at Wyeth, we’re bonded through adversity, that horrible birth, through the cognitive dissonance theory of love. I think, I must love you to have gone through all of that for you.”

Paul doesn’t know what to say, so he turns out the light by his side of the bed. The room is bathed in the night-light’s flesh-toned glow, which allows him to lift his head a hundred times a night and see the sleep-slackened miniature features of the bundled baby in the quilted bassinet by Eva’s side of the bed.

At 2:34 a.m., Paul hears the
ack-ack-ack
, Wyeth’s hungry cough, he calls it, and Eva is on it, moving more quickly now. She’s getting better, Paul thinks through a sleepy haze.

“Hey”—she nudges him a few minutes later—“he’s done feeding.” And Paul regrets crowing about his prowess as a burper as he struggles to sit up enough to prop the burrito-baby, warm and sour-sweet milk smell, over his bare shoulder. He pats the back, watching the clock as
minutes tick by with no burp. A few nights earlier, they had forgotten to burp him and the trapped gas fueled an unparalleled scream-a-thon, so Paul doesn’t dare give up.

Pat-pat-pat, he checks the clock that will go off in less than three hours, his first day back, pat-pat-pat. Paul thinks about work, about a shipment of pendant lights that got broken in their Hillsboro warehouse, pat-pat-pat, would his father have taken it out of the forklift operator’s paycheck two weeks before Christmas? Pat-pat-pat, Paul Sr. never would have gotten this far, never trusted anyone but himself to do a job, balance the books, write a bid, pat-pat-pat. Did his father ever sit up at night with Ritchie and him over slightly rounded shoulders, pat-pat-pat? Probably not, pat-pat-pat, it is a modern father thing to do. But do we all do it? Paul wonders, pat-pat-pat. Would John McAdoo sit up in his palatial Tudor wearing what, pat-pat-pat, oxford-striped pajamas, patting the back of that scowling little oaf? Probably pays someone to do it, pat-pat-pat, do they even have those kind of people anymore? What were they called, anyway, pat-pat-pat, Paul looks at the clock: 3:14, where would you find one, pat-pat pat, and how much would one actually cost?

There is still no burp, but in the palm of the hand that cradles the business end, a telltale rumble. Paul looks at Eva in the soft light to see if she heard it, but her eyes are closed, REM flickering. He gets up, careful not to jostle the baby, and walks on the creaky oak floorboards to the window seat where Eva has made a makeshift changing area. Funny; across the hall, adjacent to the room where Magnus is staying, there is a perfectly outfitted nursery with apple green walls, a solid wood crib made up like a bedding catalog, and a matching changing table, but the only time anyone goes in there is to get a fresh onesie or another sleeve of diapers from the giant Costco box by the rocking chair. Wyeth has never, will never, sleep in that crib.

Paul lays Wyeth on the master bed by Eva’s legs, half hoping she will wake up and take over. He does not immediately stick the paci in when Wyeth fusses as the cold air hits his bare bottom, and he is
rewarded by Eva’s eyes flying open, her struggling upright onto her elbows. After all, he has to go to work in the morning!

“Hey,” he says as he wipes the baby’s bottom, “just got a little diaper situation here. Nothing too serious. I’m going to give it a two-wipe rating.”

Eva watches as he gets another diaper under the baby, expertly closing the tabs, wriggling the sleep sack over his pumping legs. The baby is wide awake now, and Paul swears Wyeth smirks as he lets fly with another enormous rumble.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Paul smiles at Eva as he reverses the process, and sure enough, there is another mustardy load in there. Eva watches, bemused but idle, as he gets a second diaper, gets it all cleaned up again, and has the baby clean and bundled, about to complete the handoff to Eva, when there is another explosion. It’s 3:40 now. There is a giggle from his wife, the first he has heard all week.

“You’re a handy guy to have around.” She laughs as Paul prepares the third diaper, positioning it under his son before opening the dirty one.

“Okay, now are we done here, mister?” he asks Wyeth. He opens the diaper and is met by a golden arc of pee that hits him square in the chest, runs in a warm rivulet down to his belly button. Eva bursts out laughing, a sound as familiar to him as the hum of electricity, and Paul joins her. He hadn’t realized until this moment just how much he was holding in, worrying, waiting for signs of his old wife—and finally, here was one, her beautiful, throaty laugh.

“Baptism by fire, Daddy-O,” she says.

They can do this, he thinks. She loves him, they love the baby, business is booming…It’s all going to be okay.

C
hloe hangs up her cell phone as she walks into Strohecker’s for a coffee. It’s not as good as Starbucks, she thinks, but it’s marginally cheaper and on her way to the highway. In line ahead of her is a familiar set of shoulders in a navy blue uniform shirt, the back crisscrossed by the straps of a baby carrier. In the hip pocket of his jeans there is a brown fleece infant hat with fuzzy bear ears and friendly eyes.

“Two American coffees and a cinnamon raisin bagel, toasted, walnut cream cheese, please.”

“Paul Nova,” she says. “Out with baby to pick up coffee and breakfast for your wife?”

He turns, smiling. There is shadowy stubble on his cheeks and she never knew he wore glasses; they look nice on him.

“Hey.” He rubs his jaw, then runs his hand over the head of the baby nestled in the carrier. “I was just thinking about you the other day.”

“You were?” It is Chloe’s turn to order, and she scans the chalk-board, trying to remember what she came for. She would like steaming water and a teabag but coffee feels more appropriate.

“Um, coffee, lots of cream and sugar.”

“Here or to go?” the teenage barista drones.

“Do you have time to sit?” Paul asks.

Chloe checks her watch; she’ll be late, but why not?

They sit, and she waits for him to tell her what he was thinking about her, but he just sips his coffee, one hand rhythmically tapping the back of the baby nestled in his front carrier.

“So, how is it?” She nods at the peachy mound covered in dark blond fuzz, all she can see of his sleeping son.

“The truth? It’s really hard. Harder than I thought, and on Eva, in more ways…” He trails off. “I mean, I get to go off to work.”

Chloe nods, tearing open pack after pack of sugar; she still doesn’t have the taste for coffee.

“The other night, I was trying to keep him while she took her millionth bath of the day—”

Chloe looks at him curiously.

“That’s her thing, how she copes when she’s stressing. If you want to know Eva’s mental well-being, just check our water bill.”

Chloe laughs, starts dumping cream in her coffee.

“Anyway, I’m trying to handle the little guy, and her brother’s visiting, and we’re trying to watch the game, and it’s the final forty seconds, and the Vikings are down by three, and Wyeth’s screaming, so I’m trying to put the paci in, plug the hole that makes the noise. She comes down in a towel, looking at me and Magnus like, How come two grown men can’t handle one baby? and I guess I was missing.”

“Missing?”

“I was trying to put the pacifier in his ear.” Paul chuckles. “My eyes were on the game. And I say to her, a little snappy, ‘Nothing’s working!’”

“And?”

“And she takes him from me, and immediately he’s quiet, like he knows the milk is coming, like he can smell it. And Eva gives me and Magnus this look, and she says, ‘
Nothing
never works, boys. You have to try something.’”

“Ouch.” Chloe laughs.

“Yeah.” Paul shakes his head. “She’s right, though. And most often, what he wants is her. I feel responsible; she’s exhausted. On so many levels. It was me; I dropped the dime in this jukebox.” Paul chuckles and pats Wyeth’s bottom ruefully, shaking his head as he says, “Some days it feels more like a pinball machine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Having a baby, way back when—it was my idea. As soon as we were settled, married, I was the one who said it was time to have kids. I’m the only one left in my family.” He waves his hand dismissively in the air between them, and she can see the mists of lingering tragedy hang over him. “It was important to me, to connect with someone, make a life, start a family.”

Chloe catches herself leaning forward in her seat, hasn’t touched her creamed and sugared coffee.

“Sometimes,” he continues, “I think it’s not so much about the right person, more just the right time. When I met Eva…” He trails off.

“What do you mean?”

“My wife walked me through what turned out to be the hardest year of my life. No, she carried me. And all because she saw my last name on the class list and liked the way it sounded with hers. It’s the kind of thing that makes you believe in the hand of fate, God, whatever you want to call it.”

Chloe thinks of friends of theirs, in less-than-perfect relationships, whom she and Dan watched get engaged the past year, and how Dan had scoffed that they were just doing it because of peer pressure, some societal timetable.

“But that’s not us,” they had said to each other.

“So you don’t believe in soul mates?” Chloe asks Paul now, sipping her coffee, thinking, here they are, a man and a woman, talking about relationships and drinking coffee in a Portland café.

“I believe in being the best partner you can be. The rest follows.”

“You mean, ‘Love the one you’re with’?”

Paul chuckles, pushes his chair back, checking the bill the barista dropped on their table. “That makes it sound unpleasant. That’s not exactly what I meant.

“Anyway—” He stands up, digging in his hip pocket for a wallet. “Sorry to go on. Let me pay for your coffee.”

“Please, no!” Chloe fumbles in her little purse.

“I should pay you for the session as well.” He takes the tiny hat shaped like a bear and tugs it down over Wyeth’s head. “You’re a good listener; comes with the job, I guess.”

“Not at all,” she says. They stand uncertainly, both wallets open, and Chloe does not really want it to end. There is so much more she wants to ask him.

“I should get going.” Paul smiles. “The gesture is sort of lost if the coffee I bring my wife is cold.”

“It’s miserable out; can I give you a ride?”

Paul reaches under the baby carrier and produces a small folding umbrella.

“You’re full of surprises.” Chloe laughs.

“I came prepared. Boy Scouts, and a lifetime in Portland. I’m a handy guy to have around.”

“Still, it’s cold.”

“Fresh air’s good for us. And you don’t have a car seat. Hey, would you check, does he have both socks?” Chloe looks at the skinny, fleece-clad legs coming out of the baby carrier; one of Wyeth’s navy socks is dangling dangerously. Paul is saying, “I have new sympathy for pregnant women; I can’t see his feet, let alone my own.”

“Here.” She reaches to tug the loose sock back on his tiny foot, and her knuckles brush against the mounded button fly of Paul’s jeans.

“Oh! Sorry!” she says when Paul takes a half-step back, her cheeks flaming. They both laugh to cover the awkwardness. “Oh my gosh, so sorry, I didn’t mean to, like, grope you.”

Paul starts a joke, something about a cracker for a starving man, and stops himself.

“I should probably get to work,” Chloe says at the same time he offers to walk her out.

At her car door, Paul holds the tiny umbrella for her while she unlocks the Cherokee.

“Nice to see you, and thanks. You really are a good listener.”

Chloe is in the tunnel on her way to the Banfield before she realizes that in the final moments, neither of them had left money for the coffee.