Chosen (11 page)

“C
ute kid; sure he’s yours?” Lisle asks as Jason puts the hospital Polaroid of Buddy carefully back in his wallet.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jason feels like meat that has been pounded with a steel hammer, and here comes his brother with the salt and lemon juice.

“I’m just messing with you. The hair. You’re going bald, and he’s got a big ol’ bushy fro like Grandpa Jack.”

“I shave my head.” Where the hell are the beers? Jason scans for the waitress.

“Cute kid,” Lisle says again. “Fuckin’ shame.”

“It’s just timing,” Jason says.

“Fifty percent of life is timing,” Lisle says, and Jason knows he pulled the number out of his ass, but still, he’s trying. And he’s buying the beers that can’t come fast enough.

“They’re keeping Pen looped,” Jason says.

“It’s better that way.”

“Yeah.” Jason stoops forward in his chair. Feels like his jacket is weighing him down, so tired he can’t even sit upright.

“This your first kid?”

Jason nods, stretches his legs out under the table, trying to get where the fire-hot ache in his back doesn’t make the one leg numb.
“We were set up too. Sort of even planned for it. At least, weren’t trying not to have one.”

Lisle nods.

“Penny was checking at the Sav-On, I was at the car wash, temporarily, and we had a place in Drain.”

Lisle laughs like a donkey, hee-haw. “Drain?”

“Yeah, little town, south of Eugene, partway to the coast.”

“What the fuck were you doing in Drain?”

“I told you, shithead! Working, making a living, doing what folks do.”

“No, I mean, how’d you end up in a place called Drain?”

“Oh. We were on our way out to Coos Bay. I’d fucked up, did some things to make me an unwelcome citizen in the state of Wyoming, and a friend of Penny’s from Casper was set up out that way, Coos Bay, talked up how beautiful and friendly it was. So we were on our way, last summer, seems like a hundred fucking years ago, had a little Ford, and the engine seized. Ended up in Drain, ended up pregnant, and then I get this genius idea, checks come to the old person who used to have our PO box. Blank checks, from one of those credit card companies. So I tell Penny…”

They are silent while the waitress sets down two sweating bottles of Coors in front of them and Lisle makes a circle in the air with his finger, says, “Keep ’em coming.” Jason can see from her eyes on Lisle’s ponytail and muddy jacket that they are not the usual customers of this bar, but it’s close to the hospital. Jason glances around for a clock.

“Brandi said she might be able to get me a job up there.” Jason jerks his head out the bar window south toward Portland Heights, the rich neighborhood where Brandi pumps gas.

“Yeah, I don’t know.” Lisle’s eyes drift away from his; his hand wraps around the neck of his bottle. “You don’t have any references, man.”

“You’d do it.”

“But I’m your brother.”

They tilt their beers.

“I know a guy who does hardwood installs,” Lisle says. “I could hook you up with him.”

“Take a lead pipe to my back while you’re at it. I can’t be on my hands and knees hammering in floors all day. Back is fucked as it is.”

Lisle nods—they’d been logging together that summer with their old man when Jason fell. Lisle had half carried him the quarter mile in the rain to the access road, tried to crack him up the whole two-hour ambulance ride when they thought he’d be paralyzed.

“Got anything else?” Jason doesn’t look at Lisle when he says it.

“You don’t have the best track record, J.”

“It’s not the worst. I’m clean, I don’t drink.” Lisle does his hee-haw laugh as Jason pauses to slug from his beer. “Much. These are special circumstances.”

“Penny said last job, you punched out the boss on the road crew.”

Bitch. “I can’t work a road crew.”

“And no logging, no ‘fucking construction,’ no car wash, no landscaping. I’ve heard the list.”

“I can’t be the guy who stands out there freezing my balls off turning the sign for all the gear-jamming aces going places. I used to be the guy who sprayed eighteen wheels of gravel on those poor fuckers.”

Lisle looks at his watch. “I’ve got to go get Brandi.”

Jason’s stomach feels hollowed out, like beer bubbling at the bottom of an empty jug. He burps into his fist, thinks he should order a burger, quickly, since Lisle will pick up the tab, today of all days.

“What about you—anyone hiring out your way?” Lisle had just started work for a bridge engineering company near Salem, hired the first day he showed up with his hard hat and harness. Must be fucking nice.

“Man,” Lisle says, wiping his hand down his face, and Jason knows what’s coming. “I told you about Nick. Nobody with a record. Policy.”

“Fucking discrimination. I might as well be back on the inside.”

“We’re hanging from steel cables a hundred feet up in pissing-down rain—there’s a trust that’s got to be built. A team’s only as good as its weakest link.”

“Chain,” Jason spits at his prick of a brother.

“What?”

“The word is chain. Or team and player. Get it right.”
Put it on a fucking poster and shove it up your ass
. Jason goes to get up, and his back twangs, a rod of fire down his leg to his boot; he slumps back into his chair.

“Sorry, man. About today,” Lisle says.

Jason can feel Penny’s arms around his neck this morning, a strangling chokehold, begging him not to make her sign those papers.

“T
HEY’RE GOING TO BE
sorry,” Jason accidentally thinks out loud, and it brings him back, to the bar, to the beer, to now.

“Who?” Lisle snorts, like Jason’s nobody to be afraid of. He doesn’t know the half of it.

“All of them.” But Jason isn’t sure who he means. He thinks about Chloe shoving paper after paper in front of them, the address in Portland Heights he committed to memory, about the shiny silver Volvo Cross Country with his son inside, Blondie’s alligator purse,
Keep the change; that’s all you’ll ever see from me.
“All of them.”

“Brandi’s had an abortion, back in August,” Lisle says, out of nowhere.

“Your kid?”

“So she says.”

Jason nods, drains his third beer. It’s good not to feel his leg or his back anymore.

“Can’t really picture either of us with a…” Lisle can’t even say it.

“Guess not.” But Jason thinks of the promises he made to Penny this afternoon,
hundreds of babies.
And he thinks, why not? Why the fuck not him? Who says he doesn’t deserve his shot at happily ever after? The states of Washington, Oregon, and Wyoming? Lisle’s fuckhead of a boss? Chloe Pinter and her piles of papers?

“I should go.” Lisle stands, and Jason jumps up with him, swinging his leg out to the side so that it won’t jack his back—no way he’s getting stiffed with this check and no ride home. “Oh.” Lisle smiles, but you can see through him like a cheap envelope, and he sits again. “Right; the bill.” He says it smugly, and signals to the waitress as he peels a twenty and ten off a thick wad of bills, folds his wallet back in half like a fat roast beef sandwich. Jason knows the exact contents of his own wallet—eight soft, crumpled singles, the change from the smokes in the gift shop, a receipt for five dollars and nineteen cents, Snapple peach tea and newspaper in the hospital cafeteria, and the photo of Buddy.

“You giving me a ride?” Jason hates the need in his voice.

“Not sleeping up there?” Lisle nods his head toward the hospital. This afternoon with Penny had been like his time in the Clallam County facility with the new guy bawling and moaning into his pillow all night, the pain of Initiation. Her pain, body and mind, nothing he can do about it. Is it even his fault?

Did he blow it? Jason has been wondering this all day. In the gift shop, had Blondie’s hands had the shakes when she picked up her wallet? He was worn down, that’s all. So fucking tired he couldn’t think right. Tomorrow, he’ll make his plan. They’ll all be sorry.

“What are you doing?” Jason asks his brother.

“Enh,” Lisle says, winking at the waitress as they leave, “Brandi wants to go to this club. Probably blow a couple hundred bucks on cristy and drinks, and when we get home, she’ll ride me like a pony.” Lisle grins. “For a change.”

That sounds about perfect to Jason. Instead, he and his brother part ways, and Jason walks down NW 22nd to the brick building. Jason squints up at it, swaying from the beers. Five stories up, his son entered a world where he was not unwanted. It was just a matter of timing.

C
hloe has been home for one hour—enough time to shower, change, and get into a door-slamming fight with Dan—before she is called into the agency office in Troutdale to sign the paperwork with John McAdoo before he leaves for Singapore. Driving east, away from the city, late afternoon on a Friday is woefully slow, but the Cherokee’s wheels find the grooves in the highway, and Chloe can almost rest her eyes as her car shimmies, the setting sun a sparkle in her rearview mirror.

“They either need to pay you more or quit acting like they own you!” Dan had huffed when Chloe, wrapped in a towel, took the call to come in to work.

“It’s flextime. It’s supposed to work better for everyone involved. Babies don’t always come during the workweek.”

“Maybe you should take one of the desk jobs, like that chick Casey. She sounded pretty nine-to-five, and we’d at least get to travel. I miss that.”

“Casey runs the China program. She has to go there twice a year to escort families. I like this better.”

“Oh, me too! I love seeing my girlfriend for five minutes every week.”

The slam of their heavy front door was the perfect reply. Sometimes, she thinks, they don’t need to worry about setting a wedding date.

Dan’s ring, the fake ring, lists to the side on her left finger, catching the late-afternoon light. It wasn’t really an engagement, more a promise of a promise, an understanding that when he can get it together, he wants her to be the woman by his side.

And he will, Chloe thinks. Dan has already grown so much in the years they have been together, morphing from a going-nowhere Euro sports bum back to the States, to the trappings, the vestiges of a life that is more familiar to Chloe: a house in a fabulous neighborhood (albeit a rental), a Smith & Hawken doormat, dinners and wine together, a shared existence, an adult existence. It was not, Chloe thought, that she and Dan
had
to sit down to eat, as Chloe and Dr. Pinter had done every night, but really, he’s nearly thirty. It’s certainly time that they act like the grown-ups they are becoming, that Dan swears he wants to be.

She has replayed a conversation they have had so many times that if it were on cassette, it would have worn out by now. It was Spain, the first year they met. Chloe and Dan, his surf buddies Kurt and Paolo, sitting down to a steaming cauldron of paella at the Intercontinental Café in Tarifa on American Thanksgiving. In the copper pan, the shrimp were still intact, beady eyes staring, legs dangling. Chloe, Dan, and Kurt all American expats, celebrating their holiday without the traditional turkey and trimmings; local Paolo a fascinated observer, trying to understand the holiday.

“So what do you do now? If this were Thanksgiving in America, the meal is on the table, your giant turkey and your what? What else?”

Kurt and Dan and Chloe debated for several minutes the absolute essentials of Thanksgiving dinner. Did you have to have green bean casserole with the crispy onions? Were roasted pureed chestnuts really worth the effort? Sweet potatoes with or without Marshmallow Fluff? Didn’t everyone have some sort of a Jell-O salad?

“Well, obviously there are variations,” Chloe had said. She was
wearing a baby-doll sundress and her red Hot Stick sweatshirt with black hiking boots. Her hair was wild with the wind that blew up through the narrow streets. Dan tucked a strand back out of her eyes, his gaze warm on her face, mixing with the Chianti flush as she talked. “But then you go around and say what you are thankful for. Actually, we wrote it on these little paper leaves my mother had cut out, and she and I would go collect a branch, make a Thanksgiving tree, and somehow get it to stand up straight on the table. It was always a bit of an engineering trick, getting it to stand up as we got bigger and bigger branches each year….”

Chloe saw Kurt’s attention drifting; he was pouring himself more wine from the decanter, amber eyes roving the café for someone more interesting than her.

“Heh,” Kurt snorted. “We chowed down, popped some beers, and watched the Bowl game. Then had some pumpkin pie.”

“Oh yeah, pumpkin pie!” Dan chimed in, his hand massaging Chloe’s shoulder. They shared a look; it was only recently that Chloe had told him how much holidays made her miss her mother.

“This is fascinating.” Paolo’s shining grin passed from face to face. “So many traditions, but so different.”

Dan kept rubbing Chloe’s shoulder until he realized they were all waiting for his version of the holiday.

“Oh, my mom’s a caterer. She was always working, so we never celebrated on the actual day. We’d feast on ridiculous amounts of leftovers on Black Friday.”

“Hmm.” Paolo sipped his beer. He was the only Spaniard they knew who refused red wine, which he insisted would stain his teeth. “I think I like Chloe’s version best. Let us play her way. How do we begin?”

“Okay, it started with my dad. He’d say the grace, the blessing on the food.”

Everyone’s eyes drifted to Dan, sitting at what would be the head of the table.

“Father—” Paolo’s eyes twinkled. He reached for Chloe and Kurt’s hands. “In my family,” he said, “we hold hands for the
bendición.”

“Yes, Father, lead us in the blessing,” Kurt said, and then he stuck out his tongue at Chloe. When she did it back, he reached across the table and smacked Chloe across the cheek, wailing, “She started it!”

“Did not!” Chloe said, confused but a shade pleased that Kurt’s obnoxiousness didn’t exclude her, for once.

“Oooh, Daddy’s going to lay the smackdown!” Paolo laughed, always trying out jargon in his thick accent.

“That’s exactly the kind of dad Pretty Boy will be too,” Kurt said, dropping their hands and reaching for the large wooden serving spoon resting beside the steaming paella. “‘Do you want the belt or the switch, son? Don’t let me catch you smoking all my weed again, you hear?’”

Chloe had laughed along with Kurt, serving herself some of the rice, avoiding the staring shrimp.

“No, I won’t.”

She turned to Dan, who was not digging in with the rest of them.

“I won’t. I’m going to be a good father. That is the one thing I won’t fuck up. I’m going to be a good father,” he repeated quietly, for Chloe only, their eyes locked.

“You don’t know that.” Kurt split the spine-shell of a shrimp with the pad of his thumb, tearing off the exoskeleton and legs in one jerk. In Honolulu, Dan has told her, there is an exotic dancer with an eleven-year-old girl named Leila, Kurt’s daughter. Kurt’s parents send money on his behalf, a carton of gifts at Christmas.

“No, I do. Because my dad was a shithead.” Dan reached for the spoon, put some food on his plate. “I’m going to be a good father, and I picked my girl Chloe here because I could just tell, she’s a nurturer. Look how well she takes care of me.”

“All of Tarifa knows how well she takes care of you,” Kurt said, his continued juvenile ribbing from the one night he had crashed on the couch at Chloe’s, and Dan had let out the softest of sighs while they
were trying to pull off the silent fuck. Kurt never missed a chance to bring it up.

And the moment was gone, but for Chloe, never forgotten. She filed this conversation away and broke it out, polishing it whenever she found herself wondering what their future held.
Dan would be a good father.

I
NSIDE THE AGENCY, IT
is mayhem. Judith and her husband, Ken, and most of their nine adopted children are jostling through the narrow reception area, fluxing in and out of the conference room, where three bottles of Kristian Regale sparkling cider and two of Asti Spumante are open. A two-pound bag of peanut M&M’s is spilled out on the large fake wood table where they usually hold staff meetings, where Chloe was planning to sign paperwork with the McAdoos.

“Chloe!” Kenneth calls, his glassy, taxidermied-weasel eyes twinkling in that way middle-aged men who don’t normally drink get when suddenly, at the odd wedding reception or holiday party, they do.

“What’s all this?” Chloe gestures around the office, where Leon, Judith and Ken’s Guatemalan son, is photocopying his cherubic profile. Judith is hugging Beverly in the reception area, adjacent to the large room of international program cubicles. Casey has Snoop Doggy Dog on her tinny desktop speakers and is dancing with Ayisha, the Duvalls’ five-year-old, in her arms.

“We got Marshall Islands approval! The agency can start placements in January. Judith has Beverly making tickets for our first group now.”

“Oh, Ken, that’s great news. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” He beams, patting his paunch absently, as though he has been congratulated on a pregnancy. “What are you doing here this late on a Friday?”

“I have to do paperwork with John and Francie McAdoo. Their birth parents just signed.”

“Oh.” He looks past her as Judith bursts into the reception area, her arm around Beverly’s narrow shoulders.

“Did he tell you? Marshall Islands!”

“It’s wonderful,” Chloe says, looking past them to the conference room. Leon and Ayisha are on their stomachs on the table, making V-shaped shovels out of their hands and plowing M&M’s into their mouths. “Congratulations.”

“So, birth mother signed?” Judith says blandly, as though she hasn’t been barking at Chloe every hour the past two days about making sure the McAdoo adoption goes through.

“Yes, this afternoon. Can I get one of you to notarize?”

Judith has the gall to sigh. “I’ll send Casey up before she goes home. Beverly really deserves to celebrate.”

“Can’t I use the conference room?” It is where they always sign paperwork. All of their eyes converge on the open doorway just as Ayisha and Leon, squabbling over a large bottle of bubbly, tip it over on the table.

“Never mind,” Chloe says. “They can come up to my office.”

Upstairs, in her haven, she finds Marius, the Duvalls’ Romanian son, curled up on her couch, stimming, flicking his fingers in front of his eyes, while Chien is coloring devil’s horns and fangs on every model in the December issue of
Elegant Bride
Chloe had tucked behind the sofa cushion.

“Chien!” she yells, snatching it away. Chastened, Chien grabs Marius’s hand, jerking him off the couch like a rag doll, and they are both clattering down the stairs like horses on a trailer ramp.

Her cell phone rings, and she grabs it, hoping it is Dan.

“Hello?”

Long silence, but in the background, she can hear the bustle of people, and someone paging Dr. West. Great—a hospital call the day after an adoption. She knows who is on the other end of the line. There are things she should say now; at the very least she should refer them to the agency’s grief counselor.

“Penny?” she says instead. “Jason?”

No answer.

Chloe waits a moment, then presses End and folds her phone in half.

When it rings again, it is Dan, and Chloe can’t help but smile. Even if they have just argued, she still hopes every phone call is his.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” His voice is gravelly, but he draws that syllable out like honey over granola. “I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean for you to leave.”

There is a long silence.

“I think I have SAD,” Dan says soberly.

“What?”

“Seasonal affective disorder. I think I’m depressed because of the weather here.”

Chloe doesn’t answer, turning on her computer and printer.

“Or it might be SRS,” he says.

“SR-what?”

“Sperm retention syndrome. I miss you. I’m sorry I’m being such a dick these days. I’m working on a plan to make it better, to be better. You’ll see. Are you coming home soon?”

“They’re not even here yet. God, I’m so tired of being the agency’s redheaded stepchild. My program’s application fees pay all of their salaries when these foreign governments get finicky and shut down their approvals. Guatemala just closed down for six months! And I’m in here on a freaking Friday night, taking care of their cash-cow client—”

Her office intercom buzzes, amplifying the noise downstairs that had been partly muffled through the wooden floorboards.

“Chloe, Casey’s on her way up,” Beverly drones.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Hurry home. I want to talk to you, and I have plans….” There is something delightfully wicked in his tone.

A flurry of feet on the stairs, Casey’s clogs, and she appears in the
doorway. “Hey. Beverly sent me up with your most recent press clippings.” She waves a handful of computer printouts from the message boards. These boards are not supposed to be read by agencies; they are for waiting families to share information and experiences, grief and joy. But every morning, Judith has Beverly and Casey cull all the open adoption boards searching for mention of the agency, her own system of marketing research follow-up.

“Sooooo”—Casey scans the papers in her hand—“Angie still raves about the famous Chloe Pinter when a newbie asked about the domestic program at the Chosen Child on the Oregon Open.”

“That’s it?” Chloe asks. Judith won’t be happy.

“Yeah, one domestic newbie query today.” Casey plops down on Chloe’s couch.

“God, I just bet she and Ken come back from Marshall Islands with another kid.” She crosses her legs in worn brown corduroys, jiggles her clogs. Casey’s job is at her desk, receiving dossiers and referrals for the China program; some weeks she wears the same outfit days in a row.

“Really? I thought they were done.”

“You’d think. Nine kids is e-freaking-nough. But new program, they’ve got to bring home a souvenir. It’s so retarded. How about some attention for the ones they’ve got? Marius is at my keyboard playing Pong again. Poor kid.”

Marius is the Duvalls’ third son, eleven years old, autistic, from an orphanage in Brasov. Judith and Ken live in a sagging Victorian a few blocks from the agency. At least half of their nine adopted children are being “homeschooled,” which translates into underfoot at the agency, coloring on the walls of the conference room or using up all the cone cups at the watercooler.

“You know why they keep adopting all these kids, don’t you?” Casey leans forward, lowers her voice. “Judith had an abortion, back when they were in college. She was in law school, and Ken was getting his master’s, and he made her have one, and it wrecked her so
she couldn’t get pregnant. So now they’re so riddled with guilt that they go running all over the world adopting orphans. It’s really pretty sad.”