Chosen (22 page)

C
hloe has arrived at La Carreta Restaurant before her lunch appointment, carrying her canary yellow folder, the medical forms, and the stack of portfolios.

“You’ll recognize me by my fat gut,” Debra, the potential birth-mother client, had said on the phone the day before. In turn, Chloe told her she would be wearing a lavender button-down under a black suit, but this morning her suit pants had felt too tight, a casualty of too many meals out on the agency’s credit card. Judith had warned her that when it was just Judith and her husband, she did all the birth-mother meetings at restaurants, “and look at me now!” she had har-har-hared, gesturing to her barrel-shaped body under a billowing black silk overshirt.

But Chloe is starving, so she orders herself a large plate of nachos, going to the toppings bar for a towering pile of jalapeños; she picks at them while she waits. She looks out the window, and for once it isn’t raining, a day that hints of spring, which will lead to summer, where the weather couldn’t be more sparkling and perfect than in the Pacific Northwest. Even Dan had said it their first year here; summer in Portland pays for all those gray months. Now it is bright out, but she can see by the snapping flags at the car dealership across the parking lot that it is still windy, icy cold. This feels like the first time she has
even noticed the world outside in days; all she does anymore is work and fall into bed, too tired to even turn on the TV.

Chloe half hopes this Debra won’t show, like so many of them. She would be happy to eat her lunch on the agency card, killing time before she is back at her desk and clicking on her empty e-mail folder. It is hard for Dan to get to the Internet café with no car, he has told her; he has to either bum a ride into town or wait for one of the guys to be heading in that direction. She offered to ship him his laptop, but he said there’s no connection in the converted garage where he and Kurt and Paolo are holed up.

“It sounds awful,” she told him on their weekly Sunday-night phone call.

“We’re never here, really,” Dan had said. “We’re just out on the water or we’re making contacts, getting the business thing going.”

“How is that going?” she asked, and instead of answering he launched into a complicated explanation of a kiteboarding trick he was mastering.

“A
RE YOU
C
HLOE
P
INTER
?” She is standing beside the table in a neon T-shirt and jeans, mid-thirties, curvily overweight, and all Chloe can see are gigantic eggplant boobs, stretching the hot pink cotton of her shirt. She has a fried blond perm—“Top Ramen hair,” Dan would say—with dark roots, the remnants of sloppily removed mascara under her brown eyes.

“I am,” Chloe is saying as the waitress arrives, plunks down the Sprite Chloe had ordered to settle her stomach.

“I’ve been sitting at the bar for half an hour. You aren’t wearing a purple shirt and a black suit.”

“Yes, sorry about that.” The waitress steps back, and Debra plunks into the seat across from her. “Well, you,” Chloe says politely, “don’t exactly look pregnant either.” Trying to get things off on the right foot.

“Right, I’m at the phase where I just look fat.” Debra snorts, and
the waitress smiles uneasily at them, tucking her hair back into her ponytail, shifting her weight.

“I’ll have a Corona,” Debra says, unrolling the paper napkin from her utensils.

“Okay, and your friend has already ordered. Do you want anything to eat?”

“You did? What are you getting?”

“Nachos,” Chloe says.

“They’re huge,” the waitress offers.

“Okay,” Debra says, but it’s not clear to Chloe or the waitress what she means; the waitress taps her pen against her teeth for a second, then walks away.

“So—” Chloe opens her folder, takes out a preliminary and a medical, pushes a brochure of a feathered-hair pregnant woman who looks to be from the 1970s toward Debra. She has been telling Judith that they need to update their material, put something more striking and modern on their cover. She has something she is working on in Photoshop, a black-and-white photo of Dan’s of a mother and child walking along the Pacific Coast, their backs to the camera, their gaze toward the setting sun.

“So?” Debra prompts, and Chloe can feel the vibrations from Debra’s leg jiggling under the table.

“Okay.” Chloe smiles at her, clicking her pen open. “First of all, what’s your due date?”

“June.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Didn’t figure it out till it was too late for the other option—found you guys in the phone book right away. My period’s always fucked up.”

“Okay. Is this your first pregnancy?”

Debra snorts. “I’ve got two kids at home, two adopted out, and a couple I knew early enough about to take care of. I suck at birth control.”

Chloe writes quickly, switching between the preliminary and the medical. She can tell this isn’t a meeting where they will linger, become girlfriends, pore over the portfolios together. At best, though, it still takes an hour to get all the information.

The waitress returns with the Corona, puts it down in front of Debra, adds a plate of limes. Debra tears the top off a pack of sugar and dumps it on a lime wedge, sucks on it. Chloe pointedly looks away when she takes a swig of the beer.

“So how do you guys do it?” Debra starts. “I mean, now you know I’m a veteran. Do you cut the check for rent and food and clothes and stuff direct to me, or do you pay it for me, or what?”

“Well,” Chloe says, “typically we don’t cover anything until the third trimester—”

Debra holds up her hand. “Let me stop you right there. I’m a dancer, you know? And I can’t be working in my line of work much longer—nobody’s going to pay to see my fat ass jiggling up there. So we’re a unique case, see? We’re going to need some assistance starting a little earlier. Like, now.”

“Okay, well, obviously I’ll connect you with all the public services that you’re eligible for, your medical expenses, WIC—how old are your kids?”

“Seven and five.”

“Okay, so we’ll get services for everyone eligible, school meals, that kind of thing.”

“Hang on, are you or aren’t you a private agency?”

“We are,” Chloe says.

“So how much are the people paying you for my baby, and what percent of that is mine?”

Thankfully, the waitress arrives with the nachos, smothered in real melted cheddar cheese, not Velveeta, and extra black olives and jalapeños, a whopping side of guacamole. She puts it in the center of the table, and Chloe feels a small primitive hunger panic at the back of her neck, inching her shoulders up. She picks up her fork.

“Damn, that looks good!” Debra grabs her fork and stabs into it from her side of the table.

Chloe takes a moment to swing the conversation. “Have your other pregnancies been healthy? Any problems?” She switches her fork to her left hand, still holding her pen to write an answer on the medical.

“There’s nothing wrong with my kids!”

“But you’re drinking during your pregnancy, which is known to be potentially—”

“And I’m doing crystal to keep my weight down too! I’ve done it before—they all turned out fine. And if this one don’t, it’s not my problem. Like I said, I would’ve got rid of it before if I could’ve.”

Chloe makes a note on the medical, her handwriting sloppy in her haste. Debra is tucking into the nachos, and Chloe puts the pen down to get a few bites in before they’re gone.

“But so how does the money thing work? I know with this other agency, they just cut us a check for ten grand, right off the bat, and it was good ’cause I just put us on a budget, and then after the baby, I took the kids down to Disneyland for a treat.”

“I can tell you right now, we aren’t buying babies. We don’t write checks for anything but regular expenses that are incurred during the pregnancy, and any reputable agency is doing the same.”

“But you’d still put enough in there so I could take the kids to Disney, right? I already told them.”

Chloe stands up. “I’m just going to go use the ladies’ room. I’ll be right back.”

Once in the stall, she calls Beverly back at the office. “Hey, it’s me. Can you pull the active files and check out prefs, let me know which parents will take prenatal meth and alcohol?” She can hear Judith in the background, asking who it is, and then her boss is on the line.

“Chloe? I thought you were at lunch with our new birth mother.” Judith has a voice like an aggressive, medium-size dog’s bark.

“Yes, I’m in the bathroom. She drinks and uses crystal meth, so I just asked Beverly to see who was accepting that before I show any
portfolios.”
I don’t want to make another mistake like the McAdoos
, Chloe doesn’t say, but she knows they are both thinking of the message board crisis after Francie and John found out they’d been shown to and picked by multiracial birth parents when their preference was white.

“Don’t worry about that; who’ve you got with you?”

“I just brought our best three to show,”
like you taught me, leave them wanting more.
“I’ve got Brighton, Dunwoody, and Switzer.”

“I thought Switzer was coming over to our Marshall Islands program?”

“Their domestic home study is good for another month, so she said she wants me to keep her active until they get all their international paperwork done.”

“Is the baby Caucasian?”

Chloe is about to answer that it is, when she realizes that she doesn’t know about the father.

“Not sure, but I don’t think she’s ready to pick yet anyway. She seems sort of tenuous.”

“Get back out there and show them all, but tell her she can’t pick for sure until she’s seven months. And we’re not covering any expenses until six.”

“What if she falls in love with one of the families?”

Judith snorts. “We don’t have the Novas anymore; she won’t lock onto Brighton and Dunwoody, and I want Switzer to be our first Marshall Islands, so leave them out.” Chloe can hear pages turning. “I’m looking through the office copies right now—
these
are our Thoroughbreds? We should get Dunwoody to redo their portfolio, tell her to have some shots with her wearing some makeup. I’m all for natural, but she looks like she’s about to be embalmed. Brighton’s not bad. I’m going to call the Brightons right now and let them know their portfolio is being shown. Beverly saw Amanda Brighton on the Oregon Open Adoption board this morning talking up how many birth mothers she heard Catholic Charities has. Chosen Child hasn’t been mentioned in a week.”

“Bad press is better than no press?”

“Bring back Francie McAdoo—at least she was prolific! Jesus, look at Eugenia Switzer—does this woman know nothing about loose and flowing fabrics? I can actually see her cellulite through her pants in this one.”

While Judith is talking, Chloe looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, wishing she had brought her purse, something to combat the circles under her eyes. She hasn’t been sleeping well in the empty house.

“I don’t know that Eugenia could make it through two weeks in the Marshall Islands, though a bout of food poisoning or some tainted water might do her good. What the hell—show them all!”

“But what about their preferences? I don’t know the race of the baby’s father, and the mother’s back at the table downing a beer right now. She told me she’s doing meth to keep her weight down so she can dance.”

“Meth? So the baby will be small, might have some attention problems, no worse than coke. I’d worry more about the alcohol. Ask her about AA. How far along did you say she was?”

“About four months.” Chloe braces herself.

“Four months!” Judith explodes. “Why are you even meeting with her?”

“I didn’t know this until now.”
And we haven’t had a new birth mother call in more than a month.

“Always ask the due date on the phone! What have I taught you? I hope you were clear that we don’t start financial assistance until the third trimester.”

“Well, she said”—Chloe rummages through her tiny purse for something cosmetic to reacquaint her with the girl in the mirror, comes up with Chapstick—“she needs to start earlier, since as a dancer she’ll be unemployed soon.”

Chloe can hear Judith sighing. “We need birth mothers, yes, but we need them to actually make us some money.” Chloe knows that
the adoption fee for her program is $26,000 for a healthy Caucasian baby, but with reductions for mixed races and prenatal substance abuse, that number can be whittled down as low as $13,500.

“Okay, go back and show her the portfolios, but don’t let her pick anyone. Find out if the father of the baby is white, and what other harm she is causing the baby. Try to get her to stop drinking. I won’t stir up the hornet’s nest by calling any families yet. And do
not
promise to start paying anything now.”

They say good-bye, and Chloe hangs up, feeling sick to her stomach. By the restroom door, she sees the back exit for the restaurant and has a brief fantasy of slipping out to her car and driving away, but to where? There’s a lot of ocean between Portland and Maui…

When she gets back to the table, all the good crispy chips are gone, the nacho pile reduced to soggy, bean-saturated tortilla crumbles. Still, she stabs them with a fork.

“So I just want you to know,” Debra says, as she slugs from her Corona, “you’re not the only agency I’m meeting with.”

Chloe chews.

“I’ve got an appointment with Cascade and some other one, Heart something, later this week.”

Chloe looks out the window at the parking lot again, to her car. She picks up her pen, wonders what Dan is doing.

“What do you know about the father of the baby?” she asks mechanically.

“What are you saying?” Debra scowls at her, flips her crimped hair defensively. “You think I don’t know who it is?”

The waitress is passing, and Chloe flags her, signals for the check. All she can think of, like a heavy, magnetic pull, is her bed, the white baffled down comforter, the clean six-hundred-thread-count sheets, her memory foam pillow and mattress topper. She will call in sick, go home and pull the shades, finally get a good solid sleep.