Chosen (18 page)

“I
’m sick to death of your hounding!” Jason had ripped her hands off him in the dark, shoved her. Not hard; he thinks back to her grunt as she hit the ground. She was the one grabbing at him, sweaty hands, ugly, pitted dark-mouth face. No wonder they didn’t get any money for their baby, her looking like that these days. No effort, picking at her face like Brandi, like a goddamn tweaker, mangled stomach, she’s lucky to have him. She’s got to leave him the fuck alone, let him work things out. It’s no use, her plans. Let it be!

He and Brandi get off the MAX line, stand under the shelter for the 51. It’s still dark, early morning, not raining but foggy, everywhere the air touches his bare skin, his head, it’s damp cold. He thinks of Mexico, burning sun, brown skin and the tang of tequila.
Leave it be,
he’d told Penny. They just need enough to get out of here, incognito.

“You know he’s not likely to come in.” Brandi squints up at him. The bus pulls up. They get on and sit down under the window, glaring yellow green bus lights, and Jason tips his head against the glass. “My boss don’t never come in on Mondays, usually.”

Jason doesn’t answer. He had to get out of that plaster-walled shoebox, away from her and her goddamn hounding. At the very least, he can bum another pack, skim a five or two off the register while Brandi’s out pumping gas. He has other plans too, ways to kill time
in Portland Heights. “You’re putting in the good word for me with the boss, though, right? You see I’m solid.”

Brandi snorts, looks past him out the window. “I see you’re running out of options, mister.” But she’s smirking like it’s a joke, so he lets it go. Bitch. She’ll be sorry too. He hates her, ugly little crank whore with her picking and her black teeth. He thinks of Penny, his girl, loyal as the day is long, and the anger of before melts like dirty snow.

The sun doesn’t rise, but it’s a lighter gray now, and the bus winds up Vista, through the reaching green of trees he knows from logging, money trees; Douglas and Fraser firs, hemlocks, silvers and Shastas. Up here ferns as high as his waist grow up along the roadside, layer with moss so that everything between these mansions is covered in green, in the color of money. He knows she lives up here, looking down on the city, in a house hidden from the street by big money trees. They’re all up here, John and Francie too. Just have to find out exactly where.

The bus stops on Patton, her stop, and Brandi nudges him.

“You getting off?” The door hisses as it opens.

“Not just yet,” he says evenly. “Just going to do a little sightseeing first.”

What he means is, shake these money trees, let some golden green rain down on his bare head.

E
ight thirty on Monday morning, Chloe is lying on her stomach on the thick, rose-patterned area rug in her dormered office, dog-earing a
Modern Bride.
Paul didn’t show up for their Strohecker’s coffee date, so she gave up, came into the office early, signed in with Beverly, starting her meter, and now she’s just using up time.

It has been exactly four weeks since she left Maui, and she is hungry for contact with Dan, logged in to AOL with the monitor off so that if Dan e-mails, the man will chirp “You’ve got mail!” How she loves her perfect little third-floor office, the hollow wooden staircase separating her from everyone in the international programs, jammed in their cubicle adjacent to Judith’s glass-walled office and eagle eyes. Some days, this is still almost her dream job.

The intercom beeps; Beverly, and Chloe hopes like always that it is a call from Dan.

“Chloe—line two.”

Chloe pulls the phone off her desk, drags it to the floor with her, her back propped against the sofa. “Hello?”

“Where are you? I waited for you.”

Paul?

“What?” They have crossed a line now, she thinks. They shouldn’t
be waiting for each other, but if they happen to be getting coffee in the same place at the same time, then—

“I banged on your door for a fucking hour.”

“Who is this?”

“You know who it is. You go in early today?”

“Hi, Jason.” She tries to sound casual, like Casey from the China program downstairs, who can be cheery-chatty when even the most irate couples call to rage about their dossier.

“Where are you?” he demands.

Chloe swallows, wants to ask him the same thing.
He was at her house?

“What’s up?”

“You tell me. Where’s our fucking money?”

Chloe glances at the new 2001 calendar over her desk, Oregon nature scenes. This month, January, is a stock black-and-white of Multnomah Falls. It is the twenty-ninth. She calculates in her head—Penny’s baby born at the beginning of December, the standard six weeks of follow-up support are over. Their accounting file is closed.

“What?” she says, to buy time. She knows he knows the policy; he has bitched about it from their first meeting.
He was at her house!

“I’ve got Julio hassling me for the rent, and I still ain’t got a job, Chloe. You still working on that?”

“Jason,” she starts, “our obligation to you, our financial obligation to you and Penny, is over at six weeks. It’s been almost two months.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is—you got what you wanted, now you want us to just go away?”

Well, yes, she thinks. That’s usually how it works.

“I can make referrals to other service agencies.” She kneels up off the floor, grabs her Rolodex off her desk. They have done this before, had this very conversation.

“I see how you operate. No fucking turkey and mashed potatoes now. Now you got our baby, you don’t give a shit about us.”

Chloe sits back against the sofa.

“Jason, you signed—”

“Penny’s not got out of bed in a week. She’s fucking crying in there, and I don’t see you coming around to check in on her, now that you got our baby.”

“Now those kinds of services you can have. Free counseling for a year. I gave you our counselor’s card, Justine Albright. Do you need her number again? I’ve got it right here.”

“And we’re hungry too. Fucking starving. WIC found out she gave the baby up, so we’re not getting our checks from them, and you don’t give a shit about us, now you got our baby.”

“Jason—”

“I won’t live like this! Penny’s got herself all locked up in the bedroom, and you with your goddamn SUV and your Portland Heights, getting rich off us! You’re a bottom-feeder! You took our baby—”

“You do realize
I
didn’t take your baby, right? I don’t have him here under my desk—” She hears a slam, cursing, a car honking. Could he really have been at her house? Where is he now? Standing in her kitchen? The phone booth outside Strohecker’s? “Jason, calm down.”

“I won’t calm down!”

“I will talk to Judith about a loan, or some groceries, there’s no need for anyone to be starving. But I also want you to call Justine Albright, for yourself. You have a right to your feelings, your grief and your anger—”

“Fucking right I do. You took advantage of us, and you took our kid,” he says, but his tone is settling, more sullen than angry.

“I don’t have your baby.”

“But you know who does.”

“Jason, I’ve got to go. But I will talk to Judith, and I really want you both to make some appointments with the counselor, okay?”

No answer. Chloe waits a minute, and is about to hang up when he says, “She just wants to see him.”

“What?”

“Just look through the window, that’s all.”

“Jason—”

“You’re gonna give me their address.”

And he hangs up.

It is so much easier when, after the papers are signed, everyone simply retreats, goes back to their corners, disappears. The adoptive parents into the all-consuming babyland, the birth parents drifting on, carrying their grief with them like battered travel trunks.

Chloe puts the phone back on her desk. Jason’s not dangerous, she thinks. He cried into her neck, afterward, outside Penny’s hospital room on the little couch. No reason to be afraid of him.

Chloe turns on her monitor to check for new e-mail from Dan. None. How can he go days without contact? Heather’s adoption is over, what is she doing here? Her hands shake, stomach clenches. Jason Xolan was at her house this morning!

“We’re grieving,” Jason had said; “is there a time limit?”
That’s all—he’s just grieving.

On the wooden stairs, heavy footfalls with long pauses: Judith, making the ascent. Chloe stuffs the bridal magazines under the dust ruffle of her couch and grabs the dry-erase board from where it is propped, uncaps a smelly marker as Judith comes in and flops heavily onto the couch.

“Good girl, you’re in early,” Judith says with a nod.

“Hi,” Chloe says casually, erasing all of Heather W.’s line with the pad of her thumb. Just like that. “Updating my board,” she says.

“Good.” Judith is still out of breath, and there are deep pit stains on her ballooning black turtleneck dress. “Catch me up to speed.”

“Well…” Chloe holds the dry-erase board away from herself, frowns at it like a child’s Impressionist painting. “As you can see, things are sort of slow…”

On the top half of the board it says
BIRTH MOTHERS
, underlined twice, and in neat rows beneath that are three names, due dates, and then check marks in columns that represent where they are in the process. Medicals done, drug screens, portfolios viewed or chosen, maternity/food/housing, counseling referrals, birth plan, legals reviewed.

“I’ve got Abby, Jade, and Marissa, but Marissa’s not calling me back, so I think I’d put her as a maybe.”

“And how about families?”

Chloe gestures to the bottom half of her board, littered with names. Sixteen prospectives, waiting. Following each is their date of entry, their date of deposit, the word
CHOSEN
.

Judith lets out a sigh. “Winter’s always slow,” she says unconvincingly. “But…” Chloe knows what’s coming. “I hate to do it, it’ll stir up the Boarders, but I’m closing the domestic program to new families for a few months.”

Chloe looks down at the floor. “Probably best.”

“And I think I won’t have you speak at our open house this month. I’m going to get Casey to write up something on the Marshall Islands program for the Web site, see if we can spin-doctor this. Do you think anyone from your list might be interested in coming over to international?”

Chloe scans the names. The six couples at the top of the list have been there more than three years, inherited by Chloe from the caseworker before her. They are older, often unattractive, and absolutely unwavering in their specifications: healthy white newborn, no prenatal drug/alcohol exposure, closed adoption. Further down the list, she offers up a few names.

Chloe looks out the window at the fog. She wants to be better, to do better, but short of getting knocked up herself, what can she do?

“We’ve weathered slower times than this.” Judith pats Chloe’s shoulder, leaving a damp sensation. “And look at all the names you’ve crossed off!” The dry-erase in the birth-mother column leaves ghosts of her handwriting: Heather W 1/1/01, Mandy&Dwight 12/16/00, Penny&Jason 12/2/00.

Chloe looks up. “Jason Xolan, from the McAdoo adoption, called here today. They want more money.”

Judith snorts, “Me too.”

“He was sort of threatening. I referred him to Justine.”

“Good girl.”

“I also told him I’d talk to you. He says they don’t have any food, that Julio is hassling them—”

“Now why did you do that?” Judith explodes. “We cannot give them any more money. Even if we could afford to, if I wanted to, which I don’t, we can’t. You hinting about it jeopardizes our nonprofit status, opens us up to a host of legal problems, should he decide to get all lawyered on us.”

Chloe’s face burns. “He won’t; he’s not that smart. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“You’ve been here too long to make these sorts of mistakes,” Judith huffs. “We are a private agency, not baby buyers.”

“I know. Sorry. He scared me. He said he knows where I live.”

“What? Why on earth would he know that? I’m sure he’s bluffing.”

“I don’t know. An operator like Jason could sneak a peek at my license when I had my wallet open to get out the agency card at dinner or something.” But Chloe is lying, covering her rookie error: once, before Thanksgiving, she wanted to make sure she beat Dan home. She had ordered a windsurfing harness for him, a Christmas present, and she wanted to get home to hide the package. She was driving Jason back from looking at the apartment in Southeast, heading to pick Penny up from a doctor’s appointment, and she had swung by the house. Stupid stupid stupid. Jason is not bluffing—he knows exactly where she lives.

“Well, tell your Danny he’s got to hit the gym. Jason’s a big guy.” Judith plants her hands on either side of her hips on the spongy couch, a sign she is about to get up. She stops when she sees Chloe’s face. “I’m sorry,” she says gruffly. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.”

Chloe puts the cap back on the marker, clips it to the board, pushes it across the smooth carpet away from her.

“What?” Judith asks. “Everything all right with you two? Wedding woes?”

Why, she doesn’t know, but Chloe blurts out, “Dan didn’t come back from Maui.”

“Oh.” Like a true social worker, Judith lets the silence build until Chloe is so uncomfortable she keeps talking.

“He wants to see if he can start a business there, a kiteboarding business.”

They both look at Chloe’s hand, where the new ring, the real ring, had received much attention in the filing room earlier this month when she came back for Heather’s adoption.

“You’re not leaving us,” Judith says firmly.

“Oh, no! We’ll just do the long-distance thing for a while until he realizes it won’t work out and he comes back.”

“Because this isn’t the kind of job where you can just, la-di-da, give your two weeks’ notice and skip off to Hawaii with your boyfriend.” Judith points to the board with a thick finger. “You’ve got three birth mothers there counting on you, and a stack of families who have put their faith in you to make their dream come true.”

“I know.”

“And the Chosen Child is a family,” Judith says. “It’s
your
family.”

Chloe thinks of the things she could tell Judith about her “family,” about Beverly on Instant Messenger all day with some biker guy in Reading, PA. About Casey from the China program, who tokes up before work, who goes home on her lunch hour every day to smoke a bowl, who is so addicted to the drug you’re not supposed to be able to get addicted to that every four months, when she travels to Guangzho to escort families and their new baby girls, she pads her bra with pot to get her through the two weeks overseas. “It really helps with the jet lag and the nausea, you know, because of all the strange smells over there,” she has told Chloe.

As if reading her mind, Judith says, “We may be dysfunctional, but we’re a family. You can’t quit family.”

“I know.”

“Okay, then.” Now Judith does put her fists down and punches herself to a standing position. “And Ken and I were just talking; we’re
going to have Beverly move you up to twelve dollars an hour at the next quarter.”

Just then, there is a ping:
You’ve got mail!

Judith raises one eyebrow, stares at Chloe long enough to make her squirm, and leaves.

W
HEN SHE IS GONE
, Chloe can’t turn the monitor on fast enough, click the red mailbox, and it is from Dan! She opens it, and already, before she even reads a word, her stomach sours, understanding from the shape, the horizontal sliver of space it takes up on the wide white screen, that it will be brief, completely unsatisfying.

Hey, babe. Just chilling here at the café while doing some wash. Sweet sesh this morning, light wind, not too intense. Missing you like always. Paolo’s honking, gotta jet, love you.