Chosen (2 page)

P
aul Nova checks his reflection in the leaded floor-to-ceiling windows across the well-laid Thanksgiving table of their hosts’ formal dining room and takes stock of his life. Thirty-one years old, moderately attractive, full head of hair, reasonably fit—not as regular to the gym as he’d like to be, but the physical demands of Paul’s line of work keep him in decent shape. He is the owner of an inherited, steadily growing electrical contracting business, transitioning somewhat smoothly from the middle to the upper middle class. He recently purchased a carriage house, albeit a fixer-upper, in one of Portland’s most prestigious zip codes. Fortunately, Paul is adept, ticking his way through the honey-do list of projects for their home. “Handy guy to have around,” his wife always says.

He is happily married to the woman sitting beside him, her head level with his in the reflection, though this is mostly because she has a long torso. (Paul stopped growing at a respectable five foot nine inches, but in bare feet he still has an inch on his wife, and that’s including that hair of hers.) He meets her eyes in the glass, and she gives a quirky, half-cocked smile.

Eva is the blond, bohemian college sweetheart who plucked Paul, working-class guy at a state school trying to get his business degree to help the old man out, from the boredom and irrelevance of Anthro
101, inserting herself permanently into his life twelve years ago. Now they are perched on the precipice of parenthood, expecting for the thirteenth time, Lucky Number Thirteen, they call him, their first child, due in two weeks.

So why, Paul wonders to his reflection, is he not the captain of this ship, carving his own turkey in his own cozy, if slightly dated, last-on-the-list-to-be-remodeled dining room three blocks away? Why is he stuck, like a gawky preteen at the kids’ table, at an obligatory holiday dinner listening to conversations bounce around him without a shred of interest?

You owe me so huge
, he wants to hiss to his wife, who accepted this invitation without asking him. They are in The Zone, the homestretch! Eva’s thirty-eight weeks pregnant, could go at any time! This meal could be their Last Uninterrupted Supper, and they are sharing it with John and Francie McAdoo, mere acquaintances. Their only common threads: that they both live in Portland Heights (though the difference in square footage between the McAdoos’ house and the Novas’ could be the answer to a long-division problem) and that once, when they had suffered a dozen miscarriages, Paul and Eva were briefly clients of the Chosen Child, the same adoption agency where John and Francie connected with their current birth mother.

But though Paul wants to tell his wife how miserable he is, he doesn’t. He already pissed her off and got a tight-lipped look by snarking about their hosts on the short drive over.

“Don’t the McAdoos just
look
like infertile people?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Her bristly answer should have stopped him, but Paul sometimes doesn’t know when to quit.

“John’s old enough to have had his balls shot off storming the beaches at Normandy, and Francie just looks…dried out.” He’d had the good sense not to tell his wife about the one accidental sex dream he had had about Francie McAdoo after they first met, not an inconceivable thing until you got to know her; a decent body, if you
go for that type, average face, but in the dream, when he had tried to put it in her, she was so dry he got paper cuts.

Now, stuck at the McAdoos’ dining room table, because he is not always so challenged in knowing how to say the right thing, Paul leans over into Eva’s mass of spring-loaded blond hair and whispers, “Next year, our house. Just you, me, and Junior.”

Eva methodically spears a piece of turkey, a rolling cranberry, and a fluff of stuffing, swipes her fork through gravy, and turns to their hostess. She chews her perfect bite, nodding as Francie McAdoo yammers on about back-ordered Pottery Barn furniture, but Paul knows she heard him. With her right hand, she reaches under the table and strokes Paul’s knee like it’s the head of an obedient golden retriever.

“So, Paul, you’re still with Nike?” John McAdoo asks him. It is the first he’s spoken since they all loaded up their plates at the cherry sideboard after a stiff half hour of cocktails, salty Costco hors d’oeuvres, and strangled small talk.

“Mm”—Paul wipes his mouth—“I’m actually not.” He does not add, “I have my own company,” though he does. His father would have taken this opportunity to dig in his pocket for a business card, “S
UPER
N
OVA
E
LECTRIC
—a super company with service you can trust!” But Paul is not his father, in so many ways. “Maybe you’re thinking of someone else from the agency. What was their name, honey, the Nike people?”

Eva, whom he has seen successfully attend three conversations at once, doesn’t miss a nod for Francie but says, “The Severins, Nate and Gina, both with Nike.”

Francie veers erratically off topic; she abandons distressed wood nightstands and jumps into the husbands’ conversation. “They’re getting a baby soon too—January, I think. I heard they got the most wonderful birth mother, really desirable, your absolute dream—Heather W. She’s white, blue eyes, bright, a college student, I think, or maybe she wanted to go to college, remember I told you about her, from the message boards, John? They say she has that adorable little boy?”

John swirls the ice cubes in his drink, and there is silence. Paul wonders if John also resents these all-consuming adoption and infertility message boards. At first Paul had humored Eva’s obsession, even enjoyed coming home to the sagas of her online world, rolled his eyes when she had to get a wrist brace because of carpal tunnel syndrome from hours at the keyboard. These days, it was taking her ninety minutes twice a day just to keep up with her posting.

“John,” Francie repeats, “remember me telling you about that perfect birth mother, Heather W.?”

To Paul’s relief, John finally raises his eyes to his wife’s piercing pigeon glare and nods. Though they have known each other casually for two years, Paul is sure he wouldn’t be able to pick John McAdoo out from one of a dozen puffy, rich, Scotch-ruddy, fifty-something executives sagging around a boardroom table. The guy made his money in the Silicon Valley dot-com world and is now semiretired, doing some hobby brewery, the Soaring Scotsman. His beer, offered to Paul before dinner, sits full, bitter and undrinkable.

“Oh, that’s nice. Good for the Severins.” Eva comes to the rescue, still constructing the same perfect bites; turkey, berry, stuffing, swipe.

In the quiet that follows, the clinking of silverware against plates, Paul puts his fork down and looks around the dining room. Hanging over the table is a chandelier that he recently saw in a trade magazine for $2,600, wholesale. It has feldspar finish with three loopy tiers, amber shell shades, and clear crystal trim. If a client asked his opinion, and more often now they do, Paul would never recommend it for an authentic period Tudor dining room like this.

By accident, Paul meets John’s eyes in one of those awkward, mid-chew, looking-around moments that he hates at dinner parties when the conversation doesn’t come easily.

“So—” John swallows his bite, though not quite all the way; Paul can still hear the mashed potatoes in his throat when he garbles, “Did you two ever get a baby?”

“John!” Francie’s neck flares red. “Eva is due at the same time as our birth mother.”

John puts down his napkin, swallows harder, and addresses her in low tones, though there are only four of them in the room—everyone can hear. “I can see that. I meant, before they got one the natural, old-fashioned way, did they—”

“How a child joins your family is irrelevant, and I hope you won’t say anything about natural or old-fashioned with all your implications when our son arrives.” Francie never raises her voice, but her hand has a tremble to it as she reaches for her water glass.

“I thought I remember you saying, last year, they got picked…” John falters on, genuinely confused, and Paul feels for him. These can be tricky waters.

“We don’t. We didn’t,” Paul jumps in. “I mean, this will be our first.” He reaches over to palm Eva’s round, warm belly, coated under one of his thick cabled wool sweaters, and is rewarded by her own squeeze to his knee,
Thank you.

“It didn’t work out,” Eva says breezily, as though Amber’s baby was a weekend trip they were going to take that had been canceled. Paul remembers the reality, like living underwater: dark, rain-soaked days, chronic crying, Eva’s endless baths. It wasn’t the first baby they had lost, and tragically, it would not be the last, but when Amber’s adoption fell through, Eva took it on the chin. Not that it didn’t hurt Paul too. Sometimes he pictures their lost offspring like a heartbreakingly pathetic, underdog baseball team striking out, twelve little batters in a row. But now, late in the game, his hand still on her belly, he feels the roll of lucky number thirteen, their hopeful home run.

“You were picked very quickly,” Francie says. “You and Paul had just joined the agency, after they hired Chloe Pinter. You never had to deal with the case manager before her. Remember her, John? She was awful! She let our portfolio sit, languish, for a year before telling us we weren’t getting good feedback from birth mothers. They thought we looked old!”

“Terrible,” Eva murmurs.

“Oh, well, all’s well that ends well,” Paul says, glancing surreptitiously at his watch just as the phone rings. John jumps up, a marionette jerked to life.

“I’ll get it.”

“Chloe Pinter has been a godsend, though.” Francie starts fresh, smoothing the red napkin in her narrow lap. “John always says someone had their thinking cap on when they hired that girl. I don’t know where the domestic program would be without her. This calendar year alone they have done fourteen U.S. adoptions. It’s unprecedented.”

“Well, and good news for you too,” Eva says from where she is piling more cranberry sauce on her plate at the sideboard. “We can be mommy friends.”

Francie sniffs, and Paul is horrified to see she’s almost crying. “You know”—she sniffs again and makes two little circles of emphasis with the thumb and forefinger of both hands, sharp points, as though she is shaking out a wet T-shirt by the shoulders—“this has been the
hardest
thing in my entire life. I have wanted this more than I have wanted anything, and to have it be so difficult to attain—”

John comes back into the dining room and doesn’t sit down. He clears his throat like he is about to make an announcement, then changes his mind, and sits. He picks up his orange napkin, shakes it out, crumbs flying. Francie has dropped her hands and, to Paul’s relief, stopped emoting.

“Well?” she pounces.

“That was Chloe, Chloe Pinter. From the agency.”

“Ah, the famous Chloe Pinter,” Paul says, full of warm expectation.

“Is it time?” Francie’s words tumble out on top of one another. “But the baby’s not due for two weeks! What? John, is it good news? Is it time?”

“It’s not news.” John’s words march out, scrubbed clean, careful. “Penny is not in labor. Chloe just wanted to let us know that, tonight,
when she went to take Thanksgiving dinner to them, at the apartment, there were some baby items.”

“Wh-what do you mean? What kind of baby items? Did she say?”

“She wasn’t very specific, but she did mention a crib.”

As much as he dislikes the McAdoos, Paul feels in his gut where this news hits them.

“She did say,” John continues dully, “that they had an explanation, but—”

“What?” Francie’s head snaps up. “What did they say?”

“They said Jason, the birth father,” John explains, “that Jason’s brother and his girlfriend have moved into the apartment as well, and that they aren’t aware of the adoption plan.”

“Oh my god,” Francie whispers. “Oh my god.”

“It could be nothing, Francie.” Eva lays her hand on Francie’s forearm, thin as a cashmere-wrapped golf club. “It could be exactly what she says.”

“It’s a classic red flag. I should never have gotten my hopes up.”

From the kitchen behind him, Paul can hear one of the McAdoos’ two whisper-quiet Whirlpool dishwashers change cycle.

S
EVEN EXCRUCIATING MINUTES LATER
, the evening has limped to a close and Paul is warming up the car as Francie and Eva stand in the doorway of the McAdoos’ looming Tudor. Eva leans in to hug Francie, her enormous belly an intrusion between them. She walks slowly, backlit by the golden glow of the replica 1800s gas lamp in their breezeway. She settles beside him in the brand-new Volvo Cross Country, a splurge for the safety of the baby, and snuffles as she strains to buckle her seat belt.

“Well, let’s put
that
on our calendar for next year,” Paul says.

“Oh my god, it was brutal. Poor Francie.”

“Yeah.” Paul drives out between the stone pillars with more replica gas lamps. They are made of copper, oversize. He could probably get them for $1,200 each, wholesale. Retail, they’d run about two
grand, and the McAdoos have four of them sprinkled on the pillars, all the way down here by the street, like it’s nothing.

“And you! Honey, you could have made more of an effort with John.”

“What?” Paul has just remembered that they abandoned Eva’s fabulous pumpkin cheesecake, the one potential bright spot in this miserable evening, in the McAdoos’ Sub-Zero.

“Come on, honey.”

They drive the few blocks in silence, winding through Portland Heights. Against his better judgment, Paul lets the thoughts in his head tumble out into the charged air of the car, unfiltered.

“I can’t wait for this to be over.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

“No, I’m sorry,
you
can’t wait? I weigh ten pounds more than you, I can’t breathe, I look like an elephant, I’m never comfortable, I have to pee every five freaking minutes, I am about to have hemorrhoids hanging out of my ass, and
you
can’t wait?”

“I meant, I can’t wait for us to have our baby, cross the finish line, and be out of this psychotic parallel universe.”