Chosen (4 page)

I
t’s 3:23 a.m., and Paul Nova is driving himself to the emergency room with blood running down his arm. Goddamn cat. Eva had reminded him about the insulin shot when she got up to pee around two, and Henry, sleeping on the dryer in the basement, would rather she hadn’t remembered. The scratches on his forearm were nothing new (“You’ve got to wrap him in his blanket like I do!” Eva always said), but the bite along the back of his hand had split the skin open to his knuckles. Paul had tried to butterfly it one-handed; no luck.

Now at Good Samaritan’s ER, Paul sits in the empty waiting room with a battered two-year-old
Car and Driver
magazine. He looks up when the automatic door opens and a couple comes in. The guy is short, a Ducati cap riding high on his scowling forehead. He has his arm protectively around the back of a woman with stringy hair, her shirt hitching up over a tight, mounded stomach to expose her bulging belly button. Paul thinks how now that Eva is finally pregnant, he sees watermelon bellies everywhere. Like when they were shopping for a new car, suddenly every third vehicle on the road seemed to be a Volvo Cross Country. The pregnant couple hangs back, and Paul has returned to his magazine when he hears a familiar voice.

“Hi, I’m Chloe Pinter. I’m a social worker for the Chosen Child,
and my client here, Mandy, is thirty-five weeks and having some bleeding.”

“Well, then I need to speak to
her
,” the admitting nurse says, and beckons for the woman to come forward. The man behind her seems attached; they move toward the triage counter in perfect unison, shuffling as she hunches over slightly. Chloe steps back, hand possessively gripping a manila folder. Paul notices her blush, embarrassment maybe from having been dismissed, but it makes her look lovely, fresh from bed. There is still the slightest crease from a pillow on her cheek, the strap of her overalls slipping off her shoulders as she takes the seat closest to the admitting desk.

“Hey, stranger,” Paul says as he slips into the seat next to hers.

“Paul Nova! Oh, my goodness, how are you?” Chloe side-hugs him, awkward with them both sitting down. Though she keeps her head turned slightly, listening to the conversation between Mandy and the nurse, Paul swears she looks genuinely excited to see him.

“I’m good. You look great for the middle of the night.”

“Ha! Thanks. Is Eva here? Baby time?”

“No, we’ve got about two weeks to go. Attacked.” He holds up his bandaged hand. “Vicious house cat.”

“Ah.” Chloe nods.

There is a pause in the conversation, and they can both hear Mandy answer the intake nurse softly, “Yes, we’re giving her up.”

Chloe frowns slightly, whispers to Paul, “You’re supposed to say, ‘We’ve chosen a family for her’ or ‘We’re making an adoption plan for her,’ or ‘placing her for adoption.’ You’re not supposed to say ‘giving her up’ anymore.”

“It’s all about the semantics, huh?”

“Well, for the baby. Who would want to know that they were ‘given away’?”

“I see your point.”

“I should go call the adoptive family,” Chloe says, standing up. She stretches her arms over her head, and the bib of her overalls slips
to one side, showing her cupcake breast under her tight black shirt.
Down, boy
.

“Okay.” Paul clears his throat. “Can I get you a coffee from vending?”

“Really? That would be great. Regular, lots of cream and sugar. I think I’m going to be up awhile.” She glances at the couple by the counter.

Paul watches as Chloe steps into the hallway to use her cell phone. It’s not the right time to be thinking about this, but he always got the sense that there was a little something—low-voltage, but something—between him and the social worker. Hard to know if what she liked about Paul had anything to do with him as a man, or the fact that they were great bait for potential birth mothers. The chances of him ever knowing exactly are slim. After tonight, he thinks, he’ll probably never see her again. He is wrong.

With his good hand, Paul feeds wrinkled bills to the vending machine and gets them two coffees, grabs a pile of creams and sugars. Chloe is talking to the pregnant couple at the triage station.

“Do you want me to come with, or are you all right?” Chloe asks, her hand resting gently on the woman’s upper arm.

“We’re okay.” The man speaks for the first time, his voice gravelly. “You aren’t leaving, are you?”

“Um, no…,” Chloe says, and Paul checks his watch. Jesus, it’s almost four thirty. Here’s to hoping Eva doesn’t go into labor before he gets a decent night of sleep under his belt.

“Good.” The birth mother nods. “If we don’t get admitted, we’ll need a ride home. One of the neighbors is with the kids, but I’ve got to get to Kohl’s in an hour. Black Friday.”

“Okay. I called the Byrnes and told them what’s going on. They want to know if they should come in; they’re worried about you.”

“Not yet,” the man says firmly. “Tell them don’t come yet.”

When he has gone back with the nurse and the birth mother, Chloe sits down next to Paul, punching numbers in her cell. She nods thanks and takes the coffee from him.

“Hi, Angela, it’s Chloe. I just spoke to Dwight, they’re going back to see the doctor now, but he says he doesn’t think you need to come yet…. No, no, I think everything’s fine…. No, I’m staying right here, don’t worry. I’ll keep you posted, I promise, the second I hear…Well, if it makes you feel any better, I won’t sleep either.” She laughs softly. “Really, it’s no problem. It’s an honor to be a part of this.”

I
T WAS EXACTLY WHAT
she had said to Paul and Eva when they met at the agency picnic almost two years ago, that it was “an honor to be part of such an intimate and important part of people’s lives, the creation of a family.”

Following their New Year’s resolution to pursue other options, Eva and Paul had borrowed five thousand dollars from her brother Magnus toward adoption agency application fees and attended an informational picnic for the Chosen Child. They arrived at the park near the Sandy River, a risky choice for January, but it was brilliantly sunny and mild, a warm Chinook wind blowing. Balloons bobbed, and flags representing the international adoption options snapped in the wind.

“A good sign,” Paul had said encouragingly to Eva, who was still bleeding from her twelfth miscarriage.

Within the first five minutes they’d been cornered by Francie McAdoo at the dim sum cart under the China flag.

“You’re new,” she pounced. “Against my better judgment, I’m going to introduce you to Chloe Pinter.”

“Why against your better judgment?” Paul had asked with a polite smile.

Eva explained it later: She and Paul were twenty-eight and thirty, physically fit, attractive, in love, and childless. They were a birth mother’s dream—and stiff competition to every desperate forty-and fifty-something couple milling around the domestic adoption booth, inhaling hot dogs and stuffing information packets into their purses.

Eva and Francie exchanged infertility war stories (Francie and John: seven failed rounds of in vitro, six figures in specialists) and e-mail addresses. Francie also got Eva hooked on the message boards: Oregon Open Adoption, TTC (Trying to Conceive), and Infertility and Loss.

As promised, Francie introduced Eva to Chloe, praising the program, even though the McAdoos had not been chosen in two years. Bitterness hung yellow-green around her like mustard gas.

Paul had remarked to John as they watched Chloe and their wives talking, “Does she have to look like that too?”

“What?” John seemed bored with the whole picnic, an agency-sponsored world’s fair of foods and cultural stations representing all of the countries where the agency conducted adoptions. A Chinese adoptee, five years old, ran past them, stiff-legged in her straight cheongsam with her Oregon mother in her dirty Keens running after her calling, “Grace!” They all seemed to be named Grace, Paul noticed.

“A farce,” John said coldly as they passed.

“What?”

“This picnic. The international program. ‘Let’s celebrate the heritage of our twenty-thousand-dollar status symbol!’ Dress her up in honor of the country that sells their baby girls, the ones they don’t kill, that is.”

Paul didn’t answer, slipping the brochure he’d picked up on the China program into his hip pocket.

“What about her?” John prompted. “You were saying, about Chloe Pinter?”

“Oh. Well, she’s already got this goddesslike status, the Woman Who Can Bring Us a Baby, and then she has to look like one too. I thought social workers were supposed to be ragged and homely.”

And both of their eyes traveled to the founder of the agency, Judith Duvall, who was operating the electronic bubble blower in her purple caftan and multiple neck skin tags, surrounded by a rainbow of children.

“T
HANKS FOR THE COFFEE
.” Chloe snaps her phone shut and places it in her purse.

“Anytime,” Paul says, and he means it. “Hey, what’s this?”—Paul catches her left hand. “A sparkler, huh? Your boyfriend, what was he, the mountain bike guy?” Is he really feeling a pang?

“Oh, yeah. It’s not the real ring. It’s cubic zirconia, until, you know—”

“Well, congratulations!”

“Thanks, but it’s no big deal.”

“No big deal? What? When’s the happy day?”

“We’re sort of playing it by ear. Anyway, we’re both pretty busy with work. Hey, how’s the hand?”

Paul remembers Eva, after they became engaged, the way the impending wedding, the band’s playlist, the color of the Jordan almonds in their little tulle bags, consumed her. There is no doubt about it; Chloe Pinter is fucking
cool
.

“So, you still loving the job? You’ve been with the agency, what, two years now?”

“Yeah. It’s good.” Chloe dumps all four sugars and three creams into her coffee.

“Must be crazy, though, babies popping out during the holidays, middle of the night. Seems like you never get a break.”

Chloe shrugs. “I’d hate to work anywhere else. Like Catholic Charities, they have separate case managers for birth parents and adoptive parents. I like knowing both sides. When Amber asked if you were nice people, I could honestly say yes, I had been to your house, I patted your vicious house cat. Really, it doesn’t get much better.”

Paul sips his coffee and nods.

“Hey, are you and Eva still friends with the McAdoos?”

“John and Francie? We were at their house for Thanksgiving dinner tonight, in fact. Did we live in Portland Heights when you did our home study?” He knows they didn’t, but he can’t help himself.

“No, you were in Sellwood. That cute little house, right next to the diner where we had lunch.”

“Right, that’s right, we bought the new house after Eva got pregnant this last time. We live right up near John and Francie now, just a few streets over. We got this great mini Tudor, a Tudorette, used to be a carriage house.”

“Really? So we’re practically neighbors too.”

“You live in the Heights?”
Too loud, Paulie, settle down
. “I mean, wow, the agency must be doing pretty well.”

“Ha! No, it’s a rental. This crazy great-aunt of a friend of mine used to rent it to a fraternity. It was a total dive when Dan and I moved in. Instead of paying for tags to put their garbage out, the frat boys just piled it in the basement. It took months to get rid of the smell. But we’ve done a ton to it, painted it and everything, and we love the neighborhood. I mean, we’d love to buy it someday, but you can’t beat living in a two-bedroom for six hundred a month just uphill from Northwest. We love walking around down there on the weekends.”

We love this, we did that—
whatever. Paul’s hand is throbbing. He wonders how much longer he will have to sit here, making polite conversation with her.

“What’s your favorite place to eat?” Chloe asks.

“Hmm.” Paul looks at his watch: 4:49. “I guess I would have to say Papa Haydn’s.”

This is a lie—in his opinion, everything in Northwest is overpriced or overspiced.

“Us too! I can’t believe we’ve never seen you there. Dan and I go there for dessert all the time.”

They both sit back, sipping their coffees. So she sounds happy, though Dan looked like a pouty pretty boy when Paul met him briefly as he sulked outside Chloe’s office waiting for a ride home last year. He’s about to ask if her boyfriend has a car yet when she says, “So then I guess you heard, tonight, at the McAdoos’. About their birth parents.”

Paul nods.

“God, this is when I hate the job.”

“So you think things don’t look good?”

“I don’t know. Their birth parents are really”—Chloe pauses to take a sip—“unpredictable. They called me from jail, for a ride, that was how I met them. I think it was check fraud for her, but he has some other things on his record, aggravated assault, battery of another woman, sex with a minor, though to be fair, he was nineteen and it was supposedly his girlfriend. But since then, it’s been money money money, get the agency to cosign on an apartment, get him a job, which is nearly impossible with his criminal record and Megan’s law, then when I finally get him one he has a fistfight with the manager, so then it’s food money and new maternity clothes for her and a nice pair of pants for him for an interview, and on and on. It’s a bad sign when your birth parents want so much money, and they choose the parents with the biggest income without even
considering
the other profiles, and then you go to their place and they have baby stuff.”

“It’s like Amber,” Paul says.

“Yeah, there were some red flags with Amber.” Paul is quiet, and after a moment, Chloe continues. “One time, I took her shopping for maternity clothes, and her mom held up a big yellow T-shirt with the word
BABY
in big letters, and an arrow pointing down. Most birth moms don’t want to draw that kind of attention to being pregnant. But all’s well that ends well, I guess, except for Amber’s baby.”

“We still think about her.” This is not a lie; he does think about her. “I don’t suppose you ever hear from them?”

Chloe shakes her head, stands up to throw away her empty coffee cup.