Chosen (6 page)

“Oh, thanks.” Heather blushes again. “But we don’t have a VCR or anything.”

Before Chloe can say anything, and before she even thinks of it, Heather says, “Do you think Gina and Nate would like to have it?”

Actually, Chloe realizes as they walk back toward the waiting room with the tape sticking out of her purse, her first thought had been how to justify buying Heather a VCR.

“T
he way I see it, it’s like a puzzle,” Jason tells Brandi, his brother’s girlfriend. They’re sucking off smokes outside, ’cause Penny’s trying to quit.

Brandi stares bug-eyed up at the sky, scratching at her arms. The rain’s on a break, steel-colored clouds blowing past. They’ve been here a week, and Jason can’t figure out if she’s constantly high, or just stupid. Jason stretches his legs out in front, trying to ease the pain in his back, so bad sometimes it travels down to his heel even.

“Every piece is a fact; I store them up here,” he goes on, taps his freshly shaved head. “Fact: Dried-up rich lady wants to buy our baby so bad you can smell it on her, Eager Beaver, stink of desperation. Fact: Social worker wants it to happen, probably gets a fat piece of the action.”

Fact (he thinks to himself): They have sixteen dollars to get them to the end of the month, and Penny’s making him nervous, talking too much about the baby.

“Smoke outside!” she’d yelled, waving the carton warning in his face. “It’s no good for Buddy.”

Fact: He has no idea how to pull this off. Doesn’t even know what he’s trying to do, only to make it right. Penny’s the best thing that happened to him. He owes her.

“I’ve fucked up in the past,” he says to Brandi, who flicks her stubby butt into the mud at their feet and scratches at her legs through her pants.

The three biggest mistakes of his life:

• The DUI that cost him his trucking license in ’96
  
• Getting mixed up with Des’ree and that crank crowd in Wyoming
  
• Letting Penny take the fall for the check thing in Drain
  

He does not count the baby in this list.

“But this,” he says, lighting Brandi another smoke; it’s her pack. “I won’t fuck up. Just got to wait, study the pieces, figure how to get me and Penny what we deserve.”

He sees her then, Chloe Pinter, coming from the parking lot across the way.

“Speak of the devil,” he says, rubbing his palms together. Brandi looks down to his bare forearms, where the dragon tattoos twist. He’s going to show her how it’s done.

“Hey!” he yells. Chloe jumps, skitty little thing, drops the folders under her arm into the mud so she has to scramble to pick them up. Jason smiles. But then she looks at him, nods, and disappears into the place across the way. Like she couldn’t be bothered with the likes of him.

Brandi makes a bleating noise beside him, like a question. Stupid bitch, picking at her arms, meth mites no doubt.

“It’s all part of the plan,” he tells her. “Agency bitch in her fancy SUV.”

Behind Chloe it’s the hot blonde from across the way with the kid, and shit, he’d never noticed before under those clothes, but she’s fucking pregnant too. How many of them has Chloe Pinter got out here? Now he sees it: they’re all her ponies, and Felony Flats is her little play stable, she stops by to feed them turkey and stuffing, takes
them out to exercise, to the vet, but in the end, she’ll take the money and run.

Jason jumps up, jerks Brandi with him. She stumbles, laughs like a coyote, high as a ponderosa pine; he knew it.

“Come on.” He lifts her by the arm—she couldn’t weigh a hundred pounds even, but the pain shoots on down his back, his hip, his leg. “I got to use your phone.”

A
t home, Chloe finds the house dark, though Dan’s bike is chained to a peeling post on the front porch. In the spring, she thinks, they should paint, give the house a face-lift from the street, poor old girl. Years of frat-boy abuse had left her damaged, but you could see what a gem she used to be. Chloe had spent every spare moment working on her, scrubbing and retiling the downstairs bathroom (if a little lopsidedly) and painting every room, from their red dining room to the neutral khaki master bedroom. One day, after they’re married, she and Dan will buy the house from the landlord, fix up the little nook at the top of the stairs for their own baby, paint it pale periwinkle, a shade so pale it almost looks white, perfect for a boy or a girl.

The dining room just off the front hall is bright, bloodred, with titanium white high-gloss trim on the windowsills and molding, a perfect contrast to the dark wood table and scuffed hardwood floor. It is Chloe’s favorite room in the house, and she stops here now, admiring a $200 oversize silver mirror she splurged on, dropping her files, purse, and keys on the table. She takes the sunflowers she bought at Strohecker’s, the upscale, overpriced grocery store just around the corner, puts them in a tall blue glass vase, and sits at the table, drinking in the colors.

This is what you have to do in Portland in the winter, she tells her friends who have never been there. You have to fill your inside with color so that the gray, the record-breaking forty-two days of low cloud cover and drizzle, don’t make you want to drive off the edge of the steep, winding road that leads to your perfect little house in Portland Heights. This is what you have to do when you have a sort-of fiancé who huddles in front of ESPN in the dark, who takes his cell phone into the other room when his friends, extreme sports bums who dream of Maui, of Telluride, call. This is what you do when you have a house you have fallen in love with, and a job that you can’t leave, when you have birth mothers, clients, who want you to hold their hands when they scream and push out a baby they will give away, no, correction: will make an adoption plan for.

“Hey, babe.” Dan startles her, coming from the dark living room to lean against the arched doorway. He has been asleep, prints of the corduroy couch on his rosy cheek, so lovely with his dark hair standing spiky above his dear face. He smiles sleepily. Okay, she thinks, we’re in a good mood. Okay!

“Hi!” She wraps her arms around his waist, checking her watch behind his back. It’s only just five thirty, and he has been home long enough to take a nap? “I thought you were going to call for a ride. I tried to call your cell a few times…. How was your day?”

“Shitty.” But his tone is light. “But we closed the shop early, so I have that going for me, a smaller paycheck this Friday.”

“Well, but it looks like you got a nice nap in.”

Dan shrugs, difficult again, and wanders through the dining room to the kitchen, stretching. A few years ago, before they moved to Portland, Chloe would never have used the word
optimist
to describe herself. Now, because she must balance the scales, it is the front-runner of her personality traits; Little Miss Sunshine.

“I’ve got at least two births coming up; I’ll get overtime for sure,” she offers, following him.

“It’s okay, babe,” he says, his mood swinging as wildly as their
empty birdfeeder in the gusty rain outside the kitchen window. “It’s no big deal. Can I pour you some wine?” he offers, and suddenly there is nowhere she would rather be on this stormy night than sitting in their perfect red dining room, the trio of bright white pillar candles flickering between them as they make short work of a bottle of bargain merlot. He has one of her hands casually in his, tickling the underside of her wrist absentmindedly, though he knows it drives her mad, the best kind of mad. She can see them reflected in the silver mirror and, in that, the reflection of their images on the paned window, and on and on, endless rectangles of diminishing size, their silhouettes, the wineglasses, the glow of candlelight. Conversation is easy and light, bantering that will lead them quickly to the bedroom at the top of the stairs.

Until the cell phones ring, first his, and he takes it into the dark living room from where she can make out phrases: “next month,” “talk to Chlo about a plane ticket,” and “take some time off.”

She is bracing herself for his reaction to her questions when her own cell rings and she switches places with him, taking it into the other room as he sits back at the table, pouring the last of the wine into his glass.

“Hey.” The deep voice startles her, the pause that follows.

“Hello?”

“You heard me. I said hey.”

“Who is this?” she asks, but she recognizes the voice.

“You know who this is.” He laughs sharply, and Chloe has to fight the urge to look out her window—he could be anywhere, because there are things he knows about her, things a birth father with a criminal record shouldn’t know.

Jason Xolan had called the Chosen Child four weeks ago from outside the Women’s Correctional Center in Salem, where Penny had just completed a sentence for check fraud. Jason had been released from a facility on the Washington side of the Columbia River on a parole violation four days earlier, had hitchhiked to Salem to be
there when Penny got out. Chloe had driven the hour to Salem with a yellow informational folder and the top four portfolios off the adoptive parent stack.

“We’re hungry,” Penny had said as soon as they were in Chloe’s car. “Freakin’ starving.” In between sentences, she was kissing all over Jason’s stubbled neck, and he had one hand up under her droopy, clay-colored sweater. Penny’s hair was buzzed—“Prison joke,” she’d said—and her pasty cheeks were covered in angry red cystic acne.

Jason, on the other hand, was attractive in a bad-boy, sinister-hot way. Chloe finally stopped at a Denny’s halfway between Salem and Portland, when Penny’s whining about being hungry and Chloe’s anxiety that Jason was going to mount her in the backseat won over her desire to get back to home territory and complete this meeting in her office.

“Okay,” Chloe said, sipping from her diet Coke, centering the lemon yellow folder in front of her. “So, Penny, you’re pregnant, and you’re considering placing your baby with a family.”

“Ya think?” Penny jumped up and jerked her ratty sweater up, exposing a blue-white belly crisscrossed in zebra stripes of stretch marks, a dingy sports bra that barely held the breasts resting on her stomach. “I’m ready to pop!” She plopped down on Jason’s lap, grinding into him, and he glanced around the restaurant, gripping both her shoulders before moving her off him like a boisterous preteen daughter.

“Okay, baby,” he said, “
enough
.” And something in his tone whipped Penny’s head up and she sobered, nibbling at her nails while Chloe started with the Preliminary.

As she took their general information, Chloe learned that Jason was from a logging family in northern Washington, with a white father and a mother who was “half black, half Indian, full-time drunk.” He lifted his sunglasses to the top of his head, showing one blue eye and one brown. There were hints of swelling, a yellowed bruise under his left one.

“Heterochromatic,” he said, and Chloe nodded like she understood. Later, she looked it up at home.

“Always got one foot in each world,” he said.

When Chloe asked about his time in jail, he said, “I trusted the wrong people. Story of my life, baby. Put my eggs in the wrong fucking basket.” He rubbed his blunt hands together, tattoos of Chinese dragons curling up the backs of them to his thick forearms, as big around as Chloe’s calves.

“I
S THIS
J
ASON
X
OLAN
?” she asks in her dark living room.

“I saw you today with that girl, Heather,” he says. “Can’t say hello? Can’t speak to me in public?”

“I’m trying to be respectful of people’s right to privacy.”

“Do they like her better?”

“Who?”

“Because she’s blond, right? She dyes it, I bet. I bet the carpet don’t match the drapes. Bet they don’t know that.”

“Who?” Chloe asks again. She leans against the dark living room wall, feels the burlap wallpaper, recently repainted a deep plum, dig into her cheek.

“John and Francie. Because I have a picture of Penny, before. She had this long hair, good skin—”

“We’re an agency. I have more than one family waiting for a baby.” You have no idea, she thinks.

“So what, now, you got a bidding war going? Do they want her kid or ours?”

“That’s not how it works,” she says. She remembers Jason and Penny in the Denny’s, how he plunked his finger right down on the spot on the McAdoos’ profile where Francie had put in John’s salary. “Jason, you picked them.”

He’s quiet. In the other room, she can hear Dan rummaging around, heating up something in the microwave.

“What do you want?” she asks Jason.

“Money.”

“I can’t just give you money.” Chloe takes a deep breath and tests the water. “Especially not when I’ve seen the bassinet, when it looks like you’re taking us for a ride.”

“It’ll go through,” he says, so quietly and ominously that Chloe feels the hairs on her neck tingle. Two years ago, this would have been deplorable to her, a red flag, duress! Now it just means there needs to be more money. Like a parrot, she goes through her speech.

“Look, we got you groceries last week, all of your rent is paid, which we aren’t even supposed to be doing since your brother and his girlfriend are living there—”

“I need a job,” he says softly. Something in his voice strikes a chord with Chloe. Here is a man who is out of control of his own life, dependent on his girlfriend’s pregnancy to provide for them for the next few weeks. This is familiar, stepping gingerly around the easily bruised male ego, rushing home to quietly intercept and pay the bills, then letting Dan gallantly whip out a wrinkled ten when they go out to breakfast at McDonald’s.

“So you gonna do that for me?”

“Pardon?”

“You gonna get me a job, or am I gonna take this baby and Penny and find ourselves another agency?”

“Jason,” Chloe fumbles, “I have tried to get you a job. It doesn’t work, and it’s actually not even my job to find you—”

“You’re gonna make it your job, though, right?”

“What?”

“You understand me? You’re gonna make it your job. You’re gonna get us money and get me a job, more than minimum wage, and no fucking construction either.”

“Jason, I can refer you to Americorps or VOA or something, but I don’t really have the resources—”

“I know all about your resources, Little Miss Portland Heights.
You’ll do it, or nobody is gonna like what happens. Not with the baby, or Penny, or nobody, understand?”

And then he hangs up.

When Chloe and Dan go upstairs and undress each other, they don’t talk about their phone calls. He will only insist that she quit her job, say that she doesn’t make enough money to be threatened by thugs. She will tell him that she’s not leaving, not moving to Hawaii or Colorado to be a surfer’s or a snowboarder’s wife. What she has never said: that she’d rather be an adoption social worker, even if that means she may not be a mountain bike mechanic’s sort-of fiancée with a cubic zirconia ring and no set wedding date.

In the morning, she will drop Dan and his bike at the MAX line, and on the way to work she will detour by her bank, continuing south to Felony Flats. Remembering the loose flashing on their apartment door, she will slide the envelope, $100 in cash, easily underneath.