Chosen (12 page)

“Wow,” Chloe says flatly. She has heard this before, from Beverly, after too many mai tais at the company picnic, only in that version, they had placed a kid of their own for adoption. Meaningless gossip.

“I guess anyone working in this business has to have some kind of issues. Look at you: Your mom dies, only child, you lost your sense of family, so you have to run around making ‘happily ever after’ for everyone else.”

“It’s really not that simple,” Chloe begins.

Casey rips open a mini bag of Funyuns. Every two weeks she brings in a jumbo case of snack packs, the kind you put in a child’s lunch-box, and parks it by her desk, tearing into bag after bag of Cheetos and Doritos. Her thighs spread the wale of her brown cords wide. She tosses a few onion crisps into her mouth and misses. She reaches down to pick them up off the carpet and spies the corner of Chloe’s bridal magazine.

“What’s this?” She pulls it out. “Naughty-naughty!” And then in the same breath, “God, what I wouldn’t give for the upstairs office! Not that I’d want your job—thank you very much.” Casey munches on Funyuns, flipping through the pages of Chloe’s
Modern Bride
. “They offered it to me, after they fired Marcy, and I was like,
noooo!
But this, this is what you do up here all day?” She waves the magazine. “Pretty freaking cushy.”

Yes, Chloe thinks, I just slept on a hospital love seat for the past two nights for eleven dollars an hour. Cushy.

Dan being her closest friend, her only Portland friend, really, Chloe feels out of practice, off balance, when Casey is around. She’s like the brash, dangerous older sister Chloe cannot trust. Casey stands up and surveys the room again, her eyes narrowed. She crumples her foil bag of Funyuns, tosses it in Chloe’s trash can. It stinks up her office; Chloe switches to breathing through her mouth.

“It’s nice up here,” Casey says thoughtfully. “Private. You have good Internet?”

Chloe’s intercom beeps again—“The McAdoos are here”—and Chloe can’t wait to get this over with.

Downstairs, John and Francie McAdoo stand at the doorway like underclassmen at the senior dance, unsure of their place.

“Hey there,” Chloe says, holding on to the banister as she swings into the entry. A crumpled ball of paper sails past her head, thrown from one of the Duvall kids in Beverly’s office. The international staff peer through the arched doorway. Judith has the phone between her ear and shoulder, sipping from a plastic cup of champagne. She makes eye contact with the McAdoos and coolly raises her glass to them. Ken is on the phone at his desk too, his cheeks flushed, and they can hear him saying, “Yes, thank you, this has been a long time coming. We’re very pleased.”

Casey’s speakers are playing the ubiquitous “Mambo Number 5,” and Maria is doing the jitterbug with Chien.

“I’m sorry,” Chloe says to the McAdoos. “Celebrating. We’re all a little excited here.”

John McAdoo winces expectantly as he straightens his gimp leg, puts a tentative arm around Francie. She swivels her wrist so the car seat she is carrying faces out into the living room, reaching in to pull the blanket back to show the baby off.

Oh no. Chloe realizes that they think, that they believe, that all of this is for them, for John and Francie and their domestic baby.
A long time coming.

Quickly, she mumbles something about the Marshall Islands and “so much good news in one day!” and hustles them upstairs to her office to sign the paperwork.

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17271

Posted: Fri, Dec 2 2000 10:24 pm

Post Subject: (45233 of 45258)

Thank you, ladies, for all the congrats! I am home, a single mother LOL!!!

DH is somewhere over the Pacific—

She remembers this evening, the parking lot behind the adoption agency. The sky turning pewter, and somewhere, someone in Troutdale burning leaves. The smoky scent, the charcoal sky, were hallmarks of Oregon autumn, so different from where she grew up in Florida, where the only change was ten degrees, more or less rain and mosquitoes.

John had stopped as the driver of the shiny black town car held the door for him, lifted his hand to her, a wave. She jerked her head forward, a nod to show, yes, she saw him, but her hands were clutching the handle of the bulky new car seat—god, how did anyone carry those things! Why did everything have to be so goddamn
safe
? Didn’t she and her brother survive, childhood years spent astride Aunt Helen’s lap behind the wheel of that boat of a Buick? It’s a conspiracy, devised by the car seat people to prey on the anxiety of new parents. Francie fell victim too, top-of-the-line car seat, highest safety rating, two hundred and thirty-nine dollars. It’s probably as good as the fifty-dollar one, but you never know. And her SUV is a Mercedes—a German-engineered tank. For all the atrocities of the Holocaust, nobody can say the Germans don’t make a hell of a good luxury car.

A sudden question mark: Had John kissed her under the cover of the agency porch? Funny how the kiss of someone can be so many things; initially anticipated, then carefully analyzed, later expected, and finally overlooked. She remembers that John did reach down and run a hand over Angus’s blue-capped head, and that she had thought this was a good thing. This is the relationship she is cheerleading, breaking out her pom-poms for now.

My baby

My
baby
!

is asleep, swaddled in his Pottery Barn crib in his perfect nursery across the hall. He is an angel, an excellent sleeper. I am the luckiest woman on earth!!!!

Back when she turned thirty-five, before she met John, Francie had boldly spouted (after three appletinis on a girls’ night out), “If I’m not married and knocked up by thirty-nine, I’m looking into sperm donors and single parenthood.” But it was just something she said, she didn’t really believe it could happen. But now here is the poor baby (Angus! still not 100 percent on John’s name choice), who in the course of two days and sixty-two pages of legal documentation has gone from having four possible parents to a single mother.

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17272

Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 2:37 am

So much for my first night—he’s been crying over an hour. Help!

Typing with one hand is nearly impossible, pathetically slow.

Francie stands up again, pacing, the baby cradled, jiggling, her
arms throbbing but it gets worse, louder, if she puts him down. Top-of-the-line swing and bouncy seat? Two hundred and sixty-five dollars wasted—he hates them!

“Shhh, shhh, SHHH!”

She knows the dimensions of the nursery, eighteen by twenty-four, but it feels like a jail cell as she does her forty-third lap; the three dormered windows that usually display the verdant view are now showing nothing but close darkness. God, she’s exhausted. John’s return ticket is eight days away, but she knows there is always one more meeting, a tour of the brewery, a potential distributor; he never flies home on his original itinerary date.

Then, mercifully, as suddenly as he began, the baby stops, staring up at her with wide eyes, unblinking. Francie freezes, every muscle twitching.

“So,” she says in a low voice, strange to be talking to someone who can’t understand her. “So, it’s just you and me. Just the two of us, kiddo.” She sounds completely ridiculous. Has she ever used that word in her life? And then it comes back to her: Francine, her mother’s mother who she was named after (because she is not a Francesca as she pretends), Francine, the Florida diner waitress with orange hair and a pocket full of butterscotches, who died of emphysema when Francie was twelve, used to call her that. “Kiddo,” she tries it again. “Just you and me.”

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17273

Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 4:22 am

Up again. Crying. Calling the hospital to find out what is wrong with him.

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17274

Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 6:32 am

Sunrise. Baby sleeping. Coffee.

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17275

Posted: Sat, Dec 3 2000 8:19 am

Hospital calling back woke baby. Crying. Outraged.

Thank you so much,

Let them interpret this however they want!

Angie and ELLE and StellaRose’sMommy, for your sympathies, soothing suggestions and sentiments that baby’s crying might be “normal newborn behavior,” but I can assure you it is NOT. After threatening to speak to her superior, I got the nurse on the L&D ward of Good Samaritan to pull the baby’s file for an answer to his tortured crying. And now I have one: my baby is suffering from withdrawal, nicotine!

CW lied to us, concealed the information that BM smoked while pregnant!!!!

Surprise, CW is not answering her phone! She got what she wanted from me, $$$ and now

Francie stops, reads the last sentence.

[BACKSPACE, DELETE]

He drank one 4 oz bottle and is asleep in the swing. Off to research nicotine withdrawal.

Francie opens a new browser window, goes to check her history to find an article titled “Prenatal Substance Abuse—The Effect on the Fetus.”

She had just looked at it that morning, was showing it to John to reassure him about the health of their baby. The history has been cleared. Her entire history, cleared. John must have done it, but he was only on her laptop for a few minutes. “Need to check my flight status,” he’d said, and Francie had gone to inventory the new diaper bag.

She feels a prickle of sweat underneath her cashmere shell sweater. Why would he clear the history?

Francie gets up and crosses the room to gaze at the baby, who has been awake for ten of the last fourteen hours, crying for three and a half of those. Her biceps throb, her lower back aches, her eyes burn. Somewhere in this city, in the rosy dawn, there is a woman who is mourning his loss, who howled as Chloe Pinter carried him off the ward to the room where Francie would sign her documents.

In the early-morning light, Francie wills herself to feel more for this unhappy baby (Angus! she thinks, his name is Angus!), and there is a flutter, a word that rises up in her chest:
mine.

D
an walks into the kitchen Monday morning as Chloe is calling the office answering service, letting them know she will be using her flextime from the McAdoo adoption and staying home, but they can call if needed. She has tea brewing and a stack of bridal magazines, a deliciously empty morning stretching out ahead of her.

“Why do you do that? You basically gave her permission to call you at home.” Dan startles her, appearing in the doorway in nothing but his dark blue track pants. “She shouldn’t call you at home when you’re using flextime. Eleven bucks an hour—I’d make more than that at the car wash.”

Then why don’t you? she wonders.

A few months ago, before he got the job at the bike shop, she had asked Dan why he didn’t try modeling again, and he had said simply, “It takes a certain type of man to be a model.” End of conversation.

She looks at the clock on the microwave. “Not going in today?”

Dan fakes a yawn, sits at the table in the breakfast nook, flips through the paper to uncover the sports section. “I told you about that,” he says vaguely.

“About what?”

Dan doesn’t answer.

“Babe?”

Dan looks up. There is a flush on his cheeks, the boy whose mother is brandishing the
Playboy
she found under his bed. “Sorry, what, babe?”

“Work. What’s going on?” She feels emboldened by his blush, his darting eyes. She places her hand over his newspaper, her left hand, the one with the cubic zirconia winking in the weak morning light.

He sighs. “Look, I’ve wanted to talk to you about this for a while. This whole Portland thing. It’s not really working out for me.”

Chloe feels a rush of adrenaline, fight or flight, flooding her extremities. The hand on the newspaper shakes. She brings it back to her lap.

“I mean, I know you love it here, and you’re crazy about your job, but I’m just not cut out for this. I need to be closer to the world of extreme sports, and I’ve found something really cutting-edge, really—”

“Wait a minute.” Chloe’s voice grows stronger. “We chose Portland because of its proximity to a huge variety of extreme sports. You’ve got the gorge, the coast, Mount Hood, I don’t know what more you want.”

“Hear me out.” Dan squares his shoulders. “The boys from Tarifa have something we’re looking into, and it’s in the States, so it works for your career and everything. Have you ever heard of kiteboarding?”

“Where is it?”

“It’s like windsurfing, but so much better. You’re riding this thing that looks like a wakeboard, like a snowboard, and you’re attached to a giant, inflated kite, a wing, that’s like thirty meters above your head, so the wind is much cleaner, less gusty up there. It’s a much better ride, and it’s totally new, cutting-edge. I’ve seen videos where guys are catching huge air, like
fifty feet
of air. If we could get into it now, become sponsored riders, a distributorship in Maui, start our own kite surf shop, the boys and I could teach lessons, maybe you could do something with horses again, and we’d be back to the ocean, back to our old life…”

“Oh, honey,
Hawaii
?” Chloe looks out the window. It is starting to rain, tiny silver pellets zinging against the glass, pooling in the last brown leaves of the rhododendron outside.

Dan deflates, just a little. “Yeah. It’s where it’s at. I’ve been looking into this for a while.”

“But my job, the birth mothers? It’s so expensive, so far away.”

“It would be the U.S., so no work permits. We’ve already got a business plan, the guys and me—hang on, let me get my laptop.”

Chloe sinks back into the ladderback of her chair. She picks up her tea, sips. Hawaii? Above her, she can hear Dan thumping down the stairs, and he comes back with his laptop. He squeezes her to his side, puts it down on the table, kisses the top of her head.

“It’s just warming up, babe, hang on.” He rubs her shoulders vigorously.

Chloe puts her mug down next to the computer. She knows he thinks he is winning her over, and her heart breaks for them both. For the first time in months he is energized, practically hopping around. This is her boy, her Dan, the surfer, the dreamer, the one she fell in love with on the wind-whipped beaches of Andalusia.

“What about my job?” Chloe says quietly.

Dan opens a Word document, Windsong Kiteboarding Business Plan. “I’m sure there’s agencies in Hawaii. People get knocked up everywhere.”

“But…” Chloe tries again. “What about my dad, and the girls?”

A
FTER
C
HLOE’S MOTHER DIED
, Dr. Pinter did all the right things—staying in the shuttered white house in Akron where Chloe’s friends used to devour her mother’s hot maple scones and pots of milky herbal tea in the sunny kitchen. He hired Martha, a homely woman with a penchant for crosswords whom he concluded would be a constant in Chloe’s life, would not be whisked away to marriage or exciting jobs like the college girls he interviewed. Martha moved into the room over the garage, quietly shuttled Chloe in her dented Olds-
mobile sedan to riding lessons, flute ensemble, dentist appointments, summer day camp. Dr. Pinter kept his hours at the pediatric practice rigid, was always home at six o’clock for dinner so Martha could go to Scrabble club or choir practice. He sent Chloe to a therapist when the riptide of anorexia and substance abuse claimed several of her classmates. He took her skating every Saturday afternoon in the winter, and they played tennis at the swim club on Sunday mornings in the summer. He didn’t date, didn’t move from his evening armchair and the British television comedies that Chloe tried to suffer through just to sit next to him until she went to college. But he was going through the motions—“Making the best of it,” he often said when people asked how he was, before he’d look off at a point in the landscape, the periphery that nobody else could see.

And then her sophomore year, Christmas break, Dr. Pinter suddenly sold the house, following Ann, a forty-year-old doctor he had met at a rotavirus conference, to her practice in Seattle. Chloe’s stepmother is six feet tall, chestnut-haired, and horse-toothed, medically brilliant and socially awkward. But she adores Dr. Pinter, and their twins seem to keep him frenetically busy. If Chloe never feels at home in their McMansion outside Seattle with its carpeting of pink plastic toys and half-dressed dolls, if she poked around enough to realize she resents Ann and Alice and Abby just a little bit, she is also happy to think of her father there, up to his eyeballs in Pull-Ups and adoring females.

When she called her father from Tarifa two years ago, the fact that the adoption agency job was in Portland, driving distance from Seattle, hung unspoken in the air. The next day he sent a fax to her apartment at Beaterio, a photo of a Jeep Cherokee with a For Sale sign on the windshield, the subject line: “For the drive between Portland and Redmond (183 miles). Happy Birthday. From Dad.”

E
VEN IF SHE COULD
leave her job, if they moved to Hawaii, Dr. Pinter would never come. Chloe saw her vague back-burner plans for
a new, adult relationship with her father and his family disintegrate. They can’t leave Portland, she thinks, sipping her tea. Or at least, she can’t.

“Can you imagine the twins on a six-hour plane ride?” she says, but Dan doesn’t answer. He has left her to review the business plan and is humming a Jamiroquai song as he cleans the kitchen, the tune mixing with the clinking of him washing the mountain of dishes that has piled up during the McAdoo adoption.

“When would you want to go to Maui?” she asks, louder.

“I already bought a ticket. I’m leaving the week before Christmas.”

“What? How?”

“Kurt loaned me some cash; that’s how confident he is. It’s going to be huge, Chlo.” He puts the cloth down and crosses to her. “I really hope you’ll come.”

Thankfully, Chloe’s cell phone rings. When she answers, the line is connected, but there’s nobody there. In the background, she can hear daytime television, the faintest breathing. She hangs up.

It happens again.

“Wrong number,” she tells Dan when it happens the third time, but she can’t concentrate on the business plan she had been pretending to read anymore.

“So what do you think?” Dan grins at her; he is now cleaning the underside of the inside of the microwave.

I wish we’d talked about this…, Chloe thinks, but she knows this has always been Dan: impulsive and enthusiastic when he’s getting his sporty fix, sulky and miserable when he’s landlocked or rained in.

When her phone rings again, she jumps, ready to call Jason Xolan out.

“Hey, Chloe, I’m so sorry,” Beverly from work drawls, “but Judith is freaking out in here. She wants you to come file the paperwork for the McAdoo case this morning, in case the birth parents start up any trouble.”

“Mmkay,” Chloe says to Beverly, the phone tucked in the crook
of her shoulder. “Tell Judith to hold it together. I can jump in the shower and be there in about an hour.”

“And you’ve had four calls on the service from our favorite Francie McAdoo. She hasn’t called yet this morning, but I’d bet my candy jar it’ll be ringing any minute.”

“Okay, thanks, Beverly.”

When Chloe looks at the history on her cell phone from the previous day, a day she spent mostly sleeping, waking only the one time Dan had spooned up behind her, the hands around her waist sliding purposefully north and south, she sees that there are indeed voice mails she hasn’t listened to from Francie.

Dan has moved on to whistling and taking apart the stove burners. “So you have to go in?” She is amazed he refrained from a told-you-so about them calling her on her day off; that’s how good his mood is.

“Judith wants me to file the paperwork for the McAdoo adoption before things get hairy with Penny and Jason.”

“Have you heard from them?”

“No,” Chloe lies. “Not since I left the hospital. But apparently Francie’s been using up some tape on the machine at work, and I see she called my cell a bunch of times yesterday.”

Dan rolls his eyes good-naturedly, and Chloe, much as she is soaking up the delicious flavor of his cheerful mood, goes upstairs to shower.

While the water runs over her, she tries to remember the wording of that joke—“Why are you hitting yourself with that hammer? ’Cause it feels so good when I stop.” It perfectly sums up her life with Dan since they moved to Portland, lots of dark clouds injected with brief, brilliant sunshine.

Later, Chloe is speeding on the Banfield, her foot hitting the brake when traffic stops up at the 205 and her cell rings again.

It is Francie McAdoo. No greeting, just a hiss. “You deliberately kept it from us that Penny smoked.”

“Ummmm.” Chloe taps the brake, opens the file on the passenger
seat, and is reading the Medical as fast as she can. She sees Penny’s answer to the question “Smoking?” in her own handwriting: “Not really, sometimes, smell makes me sick.”

“I’ve read about this on the boards,” Francie is winding up, “where agencies lie, hide things so adoptions go through, but I never thought the Chosen Child—”

“Hang on, Francie, I don’t think we kept this from you. You know Jason smokes, I just don’t think it came up.”
Because we were all trying to talk you down from backing out based on his race and blowing the whole adoption.
Rejection from potential adoptive parents always sent hurt birth mothers running to another agency, and between the apartment deposit, the motel for the days in between, the maternity clothes and food, they were already almost two grand into Penny and Jason by then.

“The nurse at the hospital warned us. She said that he is going to be really fussy for the next few weeks while he is detoxing. She couldn’t believe that we didn’t know he would be coming down off drugs, that you kept that from us.”

“What are you saying, Francie—that you wouldn’t have taken him if you’d known Penny smoked sometimes?”

Silence. Then, “You kept the information from us. You concealed this when we were trusting you—”

“Francie, I didn’t purposefully hide this from you. I just assumed, I mean, they practically
all
smoke,” Chloe falters.

“I’m calling Judith. I had no choice but to post on the boards about this. Other parents need to know that you conceal medical information about the birth mother—it’s our right to be prepared.”

And the line goes dead.

Chloe’s head throbs, and she thinks of Dan back at home, alive again. She has missed him; she didn’t realize how badly. She steers with her knee while she gets her wallet out, fingers her credit card. In the parking lot of the Chosen Child, she calls the airline, books her own ticket to Maui for December 30.