Chosen (20 page)

I
t is an empty No. 51 that Jason gets on at SW Talbot and Patton, coming out of the fog and ferns with his boots and the legs of his jeans wet. The commuter rush is over, should be quiet, he thinks, nodding to the bus driver like nothing’s wrong as he drops the coins he snagged from the register into the slot. He rides in the back with his eyes shut, hammering heart, jiggling his leg, for it or for him he doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Goddammit, he just might pull this off!

In fifth grade, Sappho Elementary had a new teacher, an intern from the community college with droopy pancake tits and tinted glasses and breath like tuna fish, but she read to them after lunch every day,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
God, he’d loved that book, listening with his cheek against the cool of his desk, the boy and the Golden Ticket, one in a million, chance of a lifetime. Jason looks down at the fleecy bundle in his arms. He may just have won the lottery himself.

A quick change at Salmon, walking with it under his arm like a sack of potatoes, sucking down another cigarette from the new pack—thanks, Brandi, for everything! At the MAX station, he hops the line toward the airport and is relieved to find only one stooped-over black-dressed granny holding her pocketbook on her lap, and
she clutches her claws over the top of it the way women do when she sees him get on, then smiles as he turns and exposes the parcel under his arm. Money in the bank, baby, he thinks to himself. Two more transfers, and home free.

He gets off the MAX and barely has to wait for the No. 10 that will take him home. Ahh, right on time, there’s his bus. Two people get off the 10 as he gets on, the baby almost forgotten under his arm by now, just a dull ache in his right bicep from the flexing. God, he’s getting out of shape if lugging a kid tires him out. The one good thing you can say about the inside, always plenty of time to pump up, and Jason always did, came out this time in the best shape of his life. Now he’s getting soft, too much sitting around, too much worrying over bitches and babies and money, money, money.

Jason takes a seat with his back to the window, tries to settle it on his lap. It’s soft as a bread loaf, and it sags back against him. It’s been a dilemma, hide it or act casual, made extra difficult by the fact that Jason has had zero time to think this through. He bends his arm, a relaxed angle, and tucks the baby in the crook of his elbow. It has been asleep, but it opens its eyes, looks left and right, as though it knows this is a bad scene.

“Shhh,” he says, tucking his head down toward it. Thank god the bus lurches as it leaves the station toward Foster, and soon both the dirty spic drunk in the back and the baby have their eyes closed again.

Jason sniffs at its scalp. Aren’t babies supposed to smell sweet? This one doesn’t, a sickly smell, like popcorn with rancid butter, the ammonia of piss taking him right back to his first time in a holding cell, seventeen years old, stupid night of drinking and brawling with his little bro and Jason hauled in, but not Lisle. Oh, no, not sweet, precious, swift-legged Lisle. (“Shoulda named him Running Deer,” their mother used to say, as time and again he would outrun an ass-whupping by turning on the afterburners.) No, lily-white Lisle had never once spent a night locked up.

“Get used to this smell, Tonto” (Jason had had braids back then and a turquoise belt buckle, trying to find his self, his people). The deputy had laughed when he shoved a still-drunk Jason so hard he fell into the cell, his cheek against the damp cement, smelling that piss smell. “Your kind just can’t keep their noses clean. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.” Which in fact turned out not to be true. As soon as Jason was released, noon the next day, he hitched home and packed a duffel bag, stole the pile of cash from his old man’s top dresser drawer, and left Clallam County. He went back to Sappho once for his mother’s funeral, thanks to a “fall down the stairs” of the one-level trailer where he grew up. Never again. And after this, it’s got to be south all the way. Mexico, if they can make it. Safer there.
Incognito
.

The bus stops at Halsey, and a fat woman and little girl get on. God, the woman’s superfat, stuffed into her jeans in a way that says her Doughboy suburban husband is too, that they care more about Supersize Me and BBQ than the fact that the rest of the world has to look at them. Christ, Penny just had a baby, stomach sawed in half, and she looks a million times better. He misses his Penny, as he does whenever they’re apart, even though it’s only been a few hours, even though she’s in a bad state these days. There’s no explaining it—when she’s all backed up into him, her head on his bicep, his face in the back of her neck, he’s home.

The bus lurches; no one else gets on. He scans the car, surprised to find he’s enjoying the soft weight in his lap. Mrs. Fatty’s eating a taffy and reading a supermarket rag. Little girl’s cute, big bug eyes staring at him, and then he sees her perfect straw-straight Sunday-go-to-church hair pulled into fucking butterfly clips like Brandi’s, which reminds him of the bathroom and this morning—god, was it really just this morning, what was he thinking, little cokey-whore’s probably going to tell his brother and she sure as shit isn’t going to give him no glowing recommendation to her boss. Not to mention she full-on freaked out when she saw him with the kid under his arm,
ducking behind the gas station. Brandi was still all glassy-eyed, repeating herself like his retard cousin Jo-Jo, “What’re you doin’, Jay, what’re you doin’, Jay?” When he disappeared over the wild hillside behind the brick building with it tucked under his jacket, she yelled hoarsely after him, “What the fuck have you done?”

He wonders now, looking down at it. Of course now he knows it isn’t Buddy; it’s some cross-eyed, chicken-skinned one hundred percent Caucasian. This is one blue-eyed white loaf of dough that even Hitler wouldn’t shove in an oven. But an ugly little fucker. Jesus. Definitely not his kid, so now-fucking-what to do? He was so sure he had the right car, the one those two got in at the hospital, but if he thinks back, the bitch who went inside at the gas station was too tall, too bootylicious, to be that flat-ass Francie.

Before they got on all these buses and connections, before all these people saw him with it, he had been thinking about maybe bugging out—bad idea, chalk it up to not thinking straight with his balls and back aching—leaving it on the bench of the MAX line, like this morning’s newspaper, read and done with. Now he can’t. With his free hand, Jason pulls his sunglasses out of the inside pocket of his jacket, drugstore aviators with scratches on the mirrored lenses, and he puts them on, even though it’s gray out, even though now there are hash marks messing with his vision. What to do, what to do?

“What’s his name?” It’s the little girl, with a voice like a cartoon kid, high-pitched and corn syrup sweet.

“Buddy.” Conviction, no hesitation. Nice. He can’t help it; he allows himself a pleased smirk.

“Oh.”

“He’s cute,” the fat woman says. When she smiles, the corners of her mouth push her cheeks up against the sides of her nostrils. He wonders if she could suffocate herself, smiling. As if in answer, she stops, snuffs hard, and he can practically taste the snot sliding down the back of his throat. He looks away, back down at the top of its head, hair with no color, not brown, not yellow, just dull, slicked
straight down. White babies could be so homely! He pictures the real Buddy’s thick black hair and eyelashes, a gift from Jason to his son, lady-killer eyes.

Still, he thinks, it’s somebody’s baby. It means something to somebody. Something to somebody driving a brandy-ass-new Volvo worth fifty gees. Or did it? Bitch just left it in the car, never looked back. Got to get a bottle of water, too good to drink tap. Dumb bitch, it’s the same stuff. And too stupid to lock the fucking doors of the car, that’s for sure. Nausea rolls in his stomach and the soles of his feet inside his leather boots prickle with sweat. What the fuck has he done?

But, okay, even if the parents didn’t want this one back,
somebody
would want a brandy-ass-new one hundred percent white baby. Lots of options, just keep his head on straight, keep thinking. Jason’s leg starts to jiggle, sewing machine leg, they call it on the inside. Jiggle-jiggle, his jacket buckles jingle in time, like a one-man band.

Problem: seven tours of different jails and detention centers and lockups, and somehow, he hasn’t managed to make the connections a guy would need to find a person to buy a baby. Victor’s the biggest shithead he knows, but he’s Catholic, wears his six kids’ names in loopy script on his gold chains.

And then it wakes up, shit, he’s bumped it. It’s screaming now, red-faced, eyes closed, and he can’t help it, he holds it out away from him, out on his knees, here ya go, kiddo, jiggle-jiggle-jiggle. “Come on, Buddy,” he says, eyes darting around the bus.

Mrs. Fatty smiles thinly at him, a been-there-done-that look, and even in the chaos, the storm of the screaming, he marks this as good, that he’s pulling this off.

Christ, how does anyone stand this noise? He can’t wait to get to the apartment and be rid of it, pass it off to one of the girls and go stand under the shower for some peace. Then he remembers that Brandi won’t be home, will still be at work…. God, she wouldn’t give him up, would she? He hadn’t kept fucking her, had he, once she started with the whining? And he hadn’t been unclear. “I got a little
proposition for you,” he’d told her that morning as they waited to open up the gas station at eight for all the good citizens of Portland. He’d waved the baggie, and she’d grinned and practically ran ahead of him to the bathroom. So it was fair. He’d given her the blow, and she’d given it to him, close enough. He’s still jiggling the screaming kid, its head waggling back and forth, maybe he shouldn’t bounce it so hard, but the fucking screaming’s got him all jangled.

Christ, two more stops, and then only a few blocks, maybe the fresh air will shut it up. He pictures Penny’s face when he plops it down beside her in their bed, all warm and dark. She won’t mind the crying, he doesn’t think. And he takes mental stock of the apartment—they’ve still got the diapers Lisle bought, he can run out for some milk, see if he can use one of the expired WIC checks on that dumb-ass red-dot Indian at the minimart on the corner. It’ll all be all right.

Still screaming. What’s the fucking problem! Not even pausing for a decent breath, all wound up. No wonder Mrs. Volvo left it in the car—the lungs on this thing. Mental privacy glass, he thinks, like a limo driver, just put up the window and you won’t hear it.

And then it chucks all over him, all down the front of his jacket like a freak film, spewing hot across his lap, all over the leather, white and curdled, reeking of bile. Jason jumps up, and it takes all he has not to drop it right on the floor of the bus.

“Do you need a wet wipe?” Mrs. Fatty asks, and at first he’s grateful—his jacket will be saved—but then it’s clear she’s laughing at him. Bitch. Whorebag.

“Uh, yeah.” He wants to smash her fat face in, push that pug nose right back in between those silly putty cheeks, watch her implode like a rotten tomato, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he smiles his charming smile, his “I-know-you-know-you-want-me-to-bend-you-over-like-the-bad-girl-you-are” smile that works so well. He looks down, then up at her through his black lashes—women always love that. “I, uh, forgot the bag.”

“My husband won’t carry one either. I even got him one without the duckies and bunnies.” She digs around in hers, pulls out a crinkly yellow pack of wipes. “Here.”

He puts the kid on the seat, sideways so it won’t roll off while he swipes at his jacket, facing her, his cock level with her head, her sitting down, the bus swaying. He could grab a handful of that drugstore-dyed hair, pull her to him, finish. Before she ate the whole goddamn Krispy Kreme factory, she was probably hot. Hell, last call, liquored up, he’d fuck her now, fat ass and all. His dick jerks, and he smiles down at her, I’ve-gotcha-where-I-wantcha…

But she’s looking around him, behind him, to the baby who’s like a tick on its back, waving arms and legs, hasn’t shut up yet.

“You shouldn’t leave him like that. He could roll off.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He turns away, face hot. Know-it-all bitch. He changes his mind as he puts it back under his arm, eyes out the window on his stop. He wouldn’t fuck her, not even in the dark. He knows her type, all bossy and telling him “little to the left, harder, slower” and all that shit. He feels the pull toward the apartment and his Penny, the warm bed, the happy reunion, any one of their many Golden Ticket futures. Without a backward glance at Mrs. Fatty Know-It-All, he hops down the two steps into the morning damp, leaving the wadded-up wipes on the seat.

W
hen he first sees them coming up the walkway, Eva between two police officers, a third trailing, Paul thinks, from the way one has a hand on her elbow, that she is in handcuffs—what has happened? But then it is clear that she is unsteady, and the men are holding her up. She looks like a fish-eyed stranger; if not for the hair, like a bowl of boiled rotini dumped over her head, he’s not sure he would know her. She stumbles, stops, staring at her running shoes, and there is something spilled on her shirt. She looks so defeated Paul wants to run to her, gather her in his arms, how could this have happened?

But he can’t move, feels like the treads of his boots are affixed to the front hall floorboards with a fast-drying adhesive. The cluster, Eva and the officers, are passing the side yard, where behind them, the slope that gives Portland Heights its name falls away, a seventy-degree angle of tangles and jagged overgrowth. Paul has a flash—taking Eva by the shoulders and shoving her backward, letting her bounce between the ferns, the stubbled juvenile pines, treacherous, thorny wild blackberries, disposing of her as he did this year’s decomposing, black-speckled Halloween pumpkin.
How could you let this happen!

The phone call had come less than an hour ago, 9:43, while Paul
was on his hands and knees in the office hallway, blotting at the industrial mottled red carpet with guest towels he had grabbed from home. He had just realized that the merlot of the berber was bleeding into Eva’s ivory Egyptian cotton.

Paul Nova. This is Detective Haberman. We have your wife here. She’s pretty upset. Seems she thinks she’s lost your son.

As they come up the last three brick steps, Paul pulls the door open, lifting each foot like he’s wearing cement shoes, and he grabs Eva by her shoulders, pulls her over the doorjamb to him, puts his face into her hair, which smells faintly of Wyeth’s baby shampoo. He pushes her away. She is talking, a mumble of nonsense. In the air that swirls between them, Paul breathes what is smattered on her shirt in chunks and flecks—vomit—and it has transferred, a dampness on his chest, from her to him.

“What?”

“I locked the door, I thought I locked it, I thought I locked it.”

“What door?” Before she answers, Paul has a panic, feeling the police officers’ eyes on his face. What door? Had Wyeth been here, at the house? Is this his fault too? Had she left the baby with him this morning, imagining she had passed the baton, thinking she locked the front door before she left? But if that was true, then was Wyeth right upstairs, still sleeping in his bassinet?

“What door!” he yells, hope flaring in his chest, desperate to be the first to thunder upstairs ahead of her and see him, curled on his stomach, all a terrible mistake, something they will laugh over with him when he’s older, family folklore—
You guys left me home alone when I was two months old!

“I thought I locked it, I’m sure…” She is still going, and Paul has an urge to slap her. He knows there is no hope—Wyeth has never in his life slept more than half an hour alone in his bassinet—but he has to hear her say it.

“What door!” he roars again, and she looks up at him, desperately, the ink of her pupils like a slick at the bottom of an old plumbing problem.

“At the gas station,” she says plaintively, and he feels first sharp relief, a pinprick in his chest, so that the flood of vindicating blame can well up beneath it: She left their newborn baby in the car at the gas station.

“I locked the door, I thought. I think…” She is looking over Paul’s shoulder into the living room, her eyes darting, taking it all in, as though she wonders if she might have left him here too, somewhere on a pile of laundry, in the square of weak light under the bay window.

“Let’s go on in.” The tallest officer, with red, pebbled skin at his neck like a buzzard, the one Paul will come to know as Detective Haberman, shepherds them both past the staircase into the living room. Eva stumbles onto their green corduroy couch. The question-and-answer session begins, and Paul wants her to sound…better, smarter…say something that will make Haberman, with his sharp nose and buzzard neck, look satisfied.

Paul’s head throbs—all he can smell is the stomach acid, Eva’s vomit, wafting up off his shirt, like when the cologne spritzers got him at the mall. He can’t focus on her answers, which have given nothing of substance anyway.

“So I’m trying to get this straight,” Haberman says. “You know you left the car unattended at the Portland Heights gas station—”

“But I thought I locked the door,” she interjects.

“You mentioned that. But then, it wasn’t until you got to the parking lot at the fitness center that you first realized the car seat was empty.”

Eva looks down at her knees. Paul squeezes her hand, hard, feels the knuckles pop and buckle to accommodate the pressure—answer them! He needs to get alone with her so that he can know the truth, what and who he should be protecting.
Susan Smith, two boys strapped in their car seats, dead at the bottom of a lake while the world searched for a hysterical woman’s version of the kidnapper.
How far gone has Eva been? Why hasn’t he noticed?

“Excuse me.” Paul jumps up, jerking his hand free of hers. “I’m, I’m going to change my shirt.”

All eyes snap to him. One of the other two officers, the one pacing by the fireplace, touching their things, picking up their wedding photo, shifts his eyes to Haberman and raises the edge of a bushy brow. Paul stops with his foot on the bottom stair, taller now than the rest of them in the room, his hand on the banister. The dickhead is ogling Eva’s tits in their wedding photo. (What had her dressmaker said about the excessive hardware under her strapless dress?
To put zee girls on za balcony!
)

“I’ll be right back down.” Paul means for it to come out stronger, but it sounds like he is asking their permission to go change his shirt in his own house.

“Pretty nice zip code for an electrician,” the tit-starer says to the third officer on the phone by the window, loud enough for them all to hear.

I have my own business!
Paul wants to shout as he runs up the stairs, boots and heart pounding, his fingers fumbling over the sick-slick buttons of his dark blue SuperNova shirt. He wonders if they need a lawyer. He clamps down on this, a worry he can stomach, the well-being of Paul and Eva Nova, because he cannot think about the blinding, bright-white horror of Wyeth’s fate. It is too hot, too glaring, for him to even consider,
statistics, milk cartons, cults, atrocities, pedophiles, man’s inhumanity to man
—

Eva! Think of her. Downstairs, they’re working her over like dogs on a shredding rawhide. Their questions, poking around, tearing into everything they have built, the home, the business, the blossoming family. Suddenly Paul feels a shedding, a lightness, a divestment of all the trappings, until what, what is left? Without all of this, the baby, the wife, the house, what is left? He looks at the dormered window in their bedroom—could he fit out the window? What is left? Answer: simple human survival. Self-preservation. Oh, Eva, what have you done?

He is conscious of his footfalls above them as he crosses to the window. Will they follow him up here, to his own bedroom, the sanctum sanctorum, demand his discarded, soiled shirt to be tagged and bagged? Paul shucks it to the floor, grabs another off his dresser. He glances down at his pants—wrinkled khakis he put on in the dark this morning. The knees are damp, stained red from the waterlogged carpet where he was kneeling this morning, scrubbing, the cheap red fibers bleeding. (Why hadn’t he gotten beige, a neutral color, for the office hallway? Because he had a vision, a showroom with modern Tech Lighting monorail pendants, the transition to design.)

But now his son is missing, there are raised eyebrows among the officers in his living room, and his pants are stained a damning red. He yanks the belt open, lets them fall to the floor, panic coloring his movements. Paul is halfway to the window seat, eyes scanning the room for an escape from all of this, when he sees it: Wyeth’s bassinet. A rare shaft of winter sunshine stabs through the window and shines on the white fabric hood, as if the sun itself is pointing a golden finger, illuminating the cradle’s emptiness.

There was a baby, his son. A baby that, when it was not screaming, when it
did
sleep, curled against Paul’s chest, the fontanel pulse thrumming against the hollow under Paul’s chin.

Paul stumbles into the window seat, among diapers and washcloths smaller than his palm, a handful of toys that rattle. He rests his head against the cool glass and watches them come. A dark swarm of them on the front lawn, a van with lights flashing blocking off the end of the street, and Paul cannot draw a breath. Somewhere past them, in the vast wide world, someone has his son. They are all in the wrong place.

He leaves his shirt on the windowsill and runs, crossing the room in three strides to the top of the stairs, hurtles himself down, the downstairs air cool on his bare legs and chest, bellowing, “Get out of here! Get away from her! Get out there! Get my son!
Get him!
”