Chosen (15 page)

“I
don’t give a fuck, yeah, road crew, whatever. I’ll turn a fucking sign. Just tell me where and when.”

Jason’s voice could wake the dead, Penny thinks as she wanders out of the bedroom. Brandi is spread out on the couch watching TV with her hair in a towel, stinking of fake flowers. Bitch carries all her products to and from the bathroom too, then puts them back in her suitcase, like she’s afraid Penny would be using her stuff. All a girl needs is some Dial soap, a Daisy razor, and some basic shampoo—do a little time, and you learn that everything else is just gravy. Clean’s clean.

Jason is pacing around the kitchen with Brandi’s pink cell phone. He meets her eyes with a question, like he’s testing the waters. Has she been that bad lately? She gives him a half-smile, trails her hand over his lower back when she passes him to get to the fridge, where of course there’s no orange juice. Jason covers the mouthpiece, leans over her shoulder, and says, “I’ll run to McDonald’s and get us a coffee.” His breath smells like cigarettes and toothpaste, familiar, and she rubs her cheek on his shoulder, jerks back when the pressure hurts another pus mound forming on her jawbone. Jesus, her skin, what Buddy did to her.

“Tell him I’ll turn a sign! I don’t give a shit. Just tell me where and when. Yeah, hang on, she’s right here.”

Jason crosses the room, drops the phone on Brandi’s skinny stomach, and walks away.

“’Morning,” he says, and he sounds so hopeful she wants to be better today. She wants to not start after him right away, but she can’t help it. Penny pulls a section of her cheek in between her back molars, on the good side, and holds it there. “Lisle’s talking to his boss again. Seeing if he can get me in on the project. Says I have to prove myself, pass a piss test, work the road crew on their project halfway to Bend, but he says I might be able to ride out with him next week.”

She can tell he’s blowing it up, making up what he hopes will happen, but okay. Before, every crumb of good news was something she grabbed and stuffed in her mouth. Now, it’s like everything he says comes to her on a lone rider across a flat stretch of desert, hard to understand, and all she sees is clouds of dust, and all she feels is as nothing as the dust when it settles.

“Okay.” She sits at the table and works the inside of her cheek between her molars, enjoying the slippery, meaty sensation of her trapped skin with the tip of her tongue.

“So you want me to run out and get you some coffee? Egg McMuffin?”

Dusty-dust-dust. What does it matter? The baby. She wants to ask him when, when can they go, but not yet, not in front of the Flaky.

Across the room, Brandi hangs up the phone, goes back to where she dropped the remote on the floor. When she bends over, her skinny jeans slip and you can see the olive dimples at the top of her ass, the hint of her crack, and the pink butt-floss elastic of her panties. Jesus, that girl. Doesn’t she know what dressing like that gets you? Penny knows. If she liked Brandi at all, she’d tell her.

But she feels Jason watching the girl’s every move, sees his eyes go to the panty T at the top of her jeans, and she swears the bitch gives it a little wiggle before she stands up, grabbing at her pants. Penny
digs her blunt, fleshy fingertips into her own thighs. Back in Drain, back when she was working, she had long acrylics, dragon-lady red. They made a nice clickety-clack when she pushed buttons on the register. Men buying ground sirloin and TV dinners looked at her hands, looked at her face, looked at her wavy brown hair.

“What, are my panties showing?” Brandi turns to Jason. “I need a fucking belt. We’re starving to death here, till Lisle gets back from Bend with some fucking money. The fridge is like ol’ Mother-fuckin’ Hubbard.”

“I said I’d go out and get you girls some breakfast!” Jason’s neck vein is out. “Nobody’s talking to me around here! What? What do you want?”

“Okay. I want a deluxe breakfast and some extra sausage. And a chocolate milk shake. Large.”

Penny can do the math for that in her head. More than six dollars for one breakfast, what does she think Jason is, an ATM machine? The girl’s got a job, minimum wage, but a job. Where does she think Jason’s cash comes from? Every nickel they spend on greasy food is money they can’t use for the things he promised, for Mexico, for the bus fare to see Buddy.

“I’m fine,” Penny says.

“You don’t want nothing?” Too loud, too close, big dust clouds billowing up around her, and Penny has to shout through them to get to him.

“You know what I want!”

By the time the dust has settled, he’s gone. Brandi looks over the back of the couch at her, whistles through her teeth, and goes back to
Judge Judy.

Penny fills a glass of water at the sink. It tastes like rust. Her fingers find the scar at the top of her underpants, her real cover-your-whole-ass underpants, trace its length.
Where and when?
she thinks.

When Jason comes back, he throws a bag of food at Brandi—“No milk shakes!”—and sits at the table with his. Penny wants to start
again. Tries to sit on his lap. He doesn’t shove her off, doesn’t squeeze her to him either. She sips from his coffee, scalding hot. It is black, tastes like metal too. Jason eats his dollar McMuffin in three bites.

“I just—,” she begins, and he gives her a look that normally would have stopped her cold. Before. Now, she keeps going in a whisper. “You shouldn’t have told me if you didn’t plan to take me there.”

“You let me handle it.” She can feel the rumble of his voice box against the back of her shoulder.

“Like you handled it—” She begins low, but squabbling on the television court show drowns her out. Underneath her, Jason’s leg starts to twitch, an electric tremor.

She just wants to look. If she trusted Chloe Pinter an ounce, she would call her up and ask how it was going with John and Francie. Once, on
Oprah
or some show, there was a couple that adopted a retard from Europe, and he was like a demon spawn, and they beat on him with wooden spoons until he died. She just wants to know it’s going okay.

“I hate this show. Judge Judy’s a bitch.” Now Brandi is up, prancing across the living room to get a drink. Jason’s eyes follow her like the family dog watching the hot dog platter.

“Don’t you have to work today?” Penny asks.

“Nope. I got moved to opening shift, so I’m off every other. Oh!
Jerry Springer
’s next! ‘My boyfriend cheated on me with my sister.’ I love this show.”

Penny often wondered, watching Maury and Jerry and the other daytime goons with their cheating shows, how these things got started. Was the boyfriend just walking in and “Hey, I bang your sister, want me to roll you too?” How did it all happen? It seemed impossible. But Penny let herself be sucked into today’s circus show anyway, the bouncers running onstage like strongmen, Jerry the ringmaster, her mind still humming from their conversation about Buddy, when Jason grips her shoulders with his hands and moves her off his lap as he gets up.

“Here,” he says, shaking his coffee cup to show that there is still a little liquid in it, for her. Then he crosses the room and sits next to Brandi on the couch, his ridiculous boots still wet from the walk to McDonald’s up on the coffee table as he lights up a smoke, offers the pack to little Flaky. Goddammit if he didn’t light her smoke too, and before the show is halfway through, they’re already play-wrestling over the remote, and Penny has the answer to her question. Just like this, late morning on a weekday, nowhere to go, bellies full and smokes smoked, TV suggesting it, and if she weren’t across the room trying to get up the energy to go take a shower, the wrestling and Brandi’s giggly “Get offa me” might have turned into something else.

Penny stands up. “I’m going to get dressed.” Surprise, Jason follows her into the bedroom and shuts the door. She can still hear the booing of the TV audience.

“Can I watch?” He sits on the bed, big hands between his knees. Her clothes fall off, a puddle on the floor, and it doesn’t take much, lying down with her knees up, he’s as predictable as Oregon rain, insistent as hunger. She’s thinking, while he’s ramming in and out, that she’s not doing this to keep him from Brandi. Penny doesn’t particularly care what he does with the thing between his legs, he can stick it wherever, but she knows that floating between his ears is a series of numbers and letters. She’ll wait, until afterward, to ask again.

Then, because after all these years with him, she knows exactly when, she raises her hands, idle beside her on the bedspread like corpse claws coming out of the dirt, to shove Jason off her.

“What?” Jason’s voice hovers above her, shaking.

“It’s not right, not yet,” Penny hisses. It’s like opening a gallon of milk before you finished the last one. Buddy is still unfinished business.

One slamming thrust of his hips, and he comes, shuddering inside her. His face right next to hers, he says in her ear, “Hundreds of babies.”

She turns her face to the wall. “Buddy first. Where and when?”

“Christ!” He shoves off her, and she can feel him leaving her, and then again as he slams the door.

Penny gets out of bed and studies her face in the mirror over the dresser. She doesn’t even see the scars anymore, a crescent shape up at her temple, the other along her right jaw where the skin split from the swelling after the fact. It’s just her face, the front part of her head, now, and she could have been almost pretty, even after what they did to her in Denver, but not anymore. Twenty-four years old, and she looks half dead, her hair growing in a nothing color from where those bitches on her cell block shaved it, her skin sallow and
wrecked
from the baby—wasn’t it a girl who was supposed to steal your beauty? There is a new painful welt of a pimple straining under the surface on her jawbone, desperate to get through. Penny flicks on the overhead light and pushes with the pads of her two index fingers, trying to free the pus, but there isn’t an opening, a hole. Penny finds a safety pin, licks it to clean it before she jabs it through the center, picking, digging, until it oozes blood. She lets it run down her chin, drip-drip-drip to the carpet.

She wanted things: wanted boys to want her, and look where it got her. Wanted a man, a baby, look where it got her. Maybe she shouldn’t want things anymore. But she does.

W
hen the sun is hanging low over the water, Dan and his friends sail in, pack up their gear, and load it into Kurt’s van. They drive to the converted inland garage where the guys are staying in the quiet exhaustion of exertion, none of them saying more than “Quality sesh,” or “You were laying down some sweet jibes, dude.”

“Okay.” Dan opens the passenger door for Chloe. “We’ve got the van for tonight.”

“But—” Chloe stands uncertainly on the prickly grass before getting back in, looking from Dan to Kurt and Paolo, who are hosing the sand off their feet by the garage. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Don’t you guys want to go out or something?” She had been picturing something festive, a beachfront bar, music, fireworks, hooded sweatshirts, beer, maybe a bonfire, other people to talk to.

“Nah,” Kurt says. “We’re bushed.”

“Yeah, we’re just gonna smoke a bowl, maybe watch a little
Bone-A-Rama 2000
, since Danny won’t be there to bitch at us.”

“What?” Chloe looks to Dan, who is jingling Kurt’s keys in his palm.

“Nothing.” His neck turns red. “Ready?”

“Pretty Boy won’t let us watch the
Bone
.” Paolo grins, showing the perfect gap between his square front teeth.

“I don’t have a problem with porn.” Dan’s voice goes up like a twelve-year-old’s. “I have a problem with low-quality porn. The girls on there, they’re always fucking
grimacing,
I want to help them out with their rent or something. I want to say”—he puts an arm around Chloe—“my girl here’s a social worker, give them one of her cards. Brutal.”

T
HEY DRIVE TO THE
place Dan has rented for them with his warm hand cupping her knee, a light smile on his cherry lips. He is humming along to Steely Dan, the tape jammed into the van’s player. The last of the afternoon light falls on his dark hair, almost dry, where it curls over the crest of his perfect profile, and she cannot believe he is hers.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She laces her fingers over his hand on her knee.

“You’re staring at me.”

“I’m happy,” she tells him. “You’re back.”

Dan grins as he pulls into their parking space, dried leaves crunching under their tires. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

T
HE RENTAL IS A
tree-house addition to a typical upcountry ranch home that overlooks the jungled green countryside. It is a single room built in the crook of two giant koa trees, connected to the main house’s garage by a long, open catwalk without guardrails. The three large windows are glassless, and guests are protected from pests by an ethereal mosquito netting hanging over the bed. A hose runs up through a hole in the Formica countertop, and cut into the counter, there is a stainless steel bowl, the perfect size for mixing a cake, with a rubber stopper that serves as a sink. There is no bathroom, just a toilet and sink in a closet back in the garage, and the shower is a cold-water hose attached to the bib at the garage end of the catwalk.

“I met the owner this morning,” Chloe tells him when they pull into their parking space, dried brown banana leaves crackling under
the tires. “She said they’re going to put a bathroom addition on the tree house, in that tree over there, splitting the plumbing off the main house. She said it’s going to be amazing; there’s going to be a big open-air bathtub, right in the trees.”

“I hope they run two pipes,” Dan says as he turns on the hose, running the water over his hand. “This is freezing.”

Chloe says, “I think
bracing
is the word you’re looking for. Let me feel.”

Without warning, he turns the hose on her, using his thumb to make it spray out in a fan-shaped arc.

He hoses her down, one hand clamped on her wrist to keep her in range, and she twists away from him, shrieking as he laughs. Then he surprises her by putting the hose in the hand of the wrist he is holding, says, “Careful.” He doesn’t let go of her hand, nods to the tangled green hillside that falls away six feet, then seven, then eight feet below the catwalk they are standing on. Beneath them it is verdantly wild and beautiful, sharp-tipped birds of paradise and hermaphroditic anthuriums with their hot pink petals like wax candy lips.

“Your turn.”

He pulls his sweatshirt over his head and throws it on top of his backpack, out of range of the cold water that is puddling around them on the planks, dripping.

The Velcro of his shorts rips as he opens them; those perfect diagonal muscles at his waist create an arrow:
Go south.
Dan has only to put his legs together for his shorts to drop down his straight hips.

Once, in their first year of dating, when Dr. Pinter flew Chloe home from Tarifa for Christmas, she had crept into her father’s attic library, pulled his
Gray’s Anatomy
from the shelves under the eaves, and studied the muscular man. What was the name of the part she missed most about Dan? She puzzled over the drawing—was it the
iliopsoas
, the top of his iliac crest, or the bottom of his
rectus abdominus
that made up the perfect angled shelf of muscles at the top of his hips? Perhaps it was not a muscle after all, but the inguinal ligament?
Without Dan there to compare with the text, it was impossible to tell. To cover her bases, she had sent Dan this brief e-mail from her father’s computer:

I miss your
iliopsoas
and
rectus abdominus
. XO Chloe

The e-mail that he sent back from the Internet café, which her father printed out and left on her Amish-quilted bed, read:

I don’t know what that means, but I miss your tits and ass. Come back!

Dan

N
OW
D
AN STANDS IN
front of her in the periwinkle twilight, a form to be sculpted, to be worshipped, hands casually at his sides, as the icy hose runs in hers.

“Your turn,” he says again, this time with the Abercrombie and Fitch model half-smile.

Chloe glances toward the main house—through the open lanai, just a few feet away, she can hear kitchen sounds, the clank of a drawer being opened, a pot being placed over flame. Anyone could see them.

“Do something for me?” Dan smiles.

“Anything,” she says, and she means it. This day, other than her windsurfing lesson, has been magic. Dan is back.

“Take your clothes off.” Dan throws down the gauntlet.

Chloe drops the hose, peels off her cold wet T-shirt, her silver bikini top, shimmies out of her shorts and bottoms.

Dan swallows. “Let’s go.” He turns off the spigot, and they run the length of the narrow catwalk, Dan’s white butt cheeks winking in the light from the main house windows as they dash past, Chloe’s hands cupping her bare breasts.

Dan pulls the tree-house door closed behind them and jerks back the blankets, diving under the covers. Shivering, Chloe follows.

“Here—” He tugs the blankets up to her neck. He runs his hands, jagged windsurfing calluses at the crest of his palms, over her body to create heat. “You’re freezing.”

Under the shimmering white mosquito netting, the woven cotton blanket and faded quilt, her chattering teeth still. Dan takes her face in his hands.

“Better?” he asks, and she nods.

“Good. I want you to be good. To be happy, here.”

“I am,” Chloe says, lying only a little. There are so many layers, implications, in this spare conversation of fragments.

“So I was thinking, while I was on the beach,” she begins. “When I get back, about making a proposal to Judith. See if she’d be interested in me running a domestic program out of Maui, a branch of the agency.”

“Really?” Dan smiles at her, cupping her elbows in his palms like they are something so precious, the eggs of a rare bird. He kisses her cheeks. “That’d be great. Or when things really take off with the kiteboarding thing, you can run the shop part-time too.”

“I’d have to stay in Portland through the spring, see out a few adoptions, train a replacement.”

“No worries. That would give me time to get things set up here too, no distractions.” Dan’s kisses move from her cheeks to her throat.

“It might take me a while to get our house emptied, a sublessor,” she says, and the words fall like litter around them, tumbling off the bed to the floor, but really, which does she want more?

I
N THE MORNING
, C
HLOE
wakes to the sound of her cell phone ringing. It takes a moment to orient herself to the tree house, an azure anole scampering across the magical mosquito netting above them.

“Hello?” she whispers so as not to wake Dan. It is Beverly, from work.

“Your birth mother Heather just went into labor. She says you’re on her birth plan as her labor coach.”

“I’m her backup, if her mom can’t.” Chloe is already out of bed, throwing clothes in her rolling suitcase. She has to go; it’s Heather. “She’s not due for three weeks.”

“Tell the baby that!” Beverly has info, a flight available at noon.

“I’ll be on it,” Chloe says briskly. Heather needs her.

“Work?” Dan lifts his head, bats the mosquito netting out of the way.

“Sorry. I need to be at the airport in an hour.”

“Okay.” Dan gets out of bed, stands at the window and studies the moving leaves, wind direction. “Looks like it’s setting up for a good sesh. I’ll have to pick up the guys and drop them at Ho’okipa first.”

He stuffs his boardshorts in his backpack, grabs his contact lens solution. Chloe is surprised that he doesn’t seem angry.

“Sorry,” she says again.

“It’s okay. I could only afford this place for two nights anyway, so we would have been sleeping in the garage with the guys or the van after today.”

“How much was it?” Chloe says. She had been thinking, last night as he slept and she watched the pops of distant fireworks through the open windows, that this might make a cute first place for them. If they added a bathroom and a shower, put up some screens, and a hot plate for her teakettle…

“I had to sell my old 5.3 sail just for the two nights.” Dan quotes local bumper stickers, “‘This ain’t the mainland.’”

And Chloe’s budding idea, starting an agency branch in Maui, withers and browns. Eleven dollars an hour would be eaten up here like nothing, and they would have to live like all the other surfers, eight people in a two-bedroom, blankets hung for privacy.

Chloe rolls her suitcase behind him slowly on the catwalk.
Now what?
she worries.

The wind picks up, turning the leaves of the koa tree over, and Dan whoops.

“Setting up for a perfect sesh! Come on, babe!” he calls, hustling
her so that she forgets her toiletry kit, makeup, hairbrush, birth control pills, on the back of the toilet in the tree-house garage.

O
N THE DRIVE TO
pick up Kurt and Paolo, Dan asks her to grab his backpack.

“Open it up. Something in there for you. Sorry about the atmosphere—” He gestures around at the inside of the van, the mildew smell of damp equipment. “I wanted to make it special, drive up to Haleakala Crater or something, but since you’re leaving…”

At the bottom of his bag, among Snickers wrappers, gas station receipts, a moldy towel, and his sunglasses case, there is a dark purple leather box in the shape of a heart. Inside, there is a real ring, a simple gold band with a small round-cut diamond. The fact that she’s been seeing nothing but platinum in the magazines doesn’t matter; it’s perfect.

“So, if you’ll still have me…,” he says as he cuts the engine outside the garage conversion and honks twice. “And we can set any date you want.”

“Oh, Dan, of course.” Chloe clambers out of her seat to his lap, kissing his beautiful face.
Now what?
she thinks again.

They are interrupted by pounding on the window.

“So it’s official?” Paolo sticks his head in the van, and Chloe realizes his friends were in on it. She climbs off Dan’s lap. “I may now kiss the bride?” Paolo, who has always treated her like a kid sister—60 percent tolerated, 40 percent adored—beams as he climbs in, genteelly kisses both her cheeks.

“I’ve got one for you guys,” Kurt calls from where he is throwing his gear in the back of the van. “How do you tell the wives from the girlfriends on the windsurfing beach?”

“I give up.” Dan sighs, knowing he’s walking into it.

“Easy; they’re all girlfriends, bro!”

And Dan’s friends laugh, Paolo showing every gleaming tooth.

“I’
M GOING TO MISS
you,” Dan says when they are alone again, after they have dropped Kurt and Paolo at the beach. “Don’t worry about your stuff, at the tree house. I’ll pick it up, and it will be here when you come back.”

He’s really staying, leaving it up to her if she follows. Dan wants her there, but he won’t insist.

“You’re not coming back to Portland,” she says slowly, and when Dan shakes his head, Chloe feels her options narrow, choices looming.

“I’m really stoked about this kiteboarding thing. You have no idea what it’s like to be a guy, how your sense of self is tied to what you do.”

Chloe thinks of her job; does it define her? She loves her coveted upstairs office, her families, her birth mothers. She thinks of the photo album on her desk full of happy endings. Who would she be if not Chloe Pinter, Broker of Babies? Could she be Chloe Pinter, Maui Waitress?

“What’s the first thing people ask when they meet you—‘What do you do?’” Dan continues.

“But I thought you didn’t care about that sort of thing.”

“I didn’t use to.” There is something hard in his tone.

“Then what…” She studies his face, the muscles moving in his jaw that mean he is grinding his teeth, something he does in his sleep.

“You.”

And before he has to turn his attention back to the road, their eyes lock.

“Me?
I
don’t care what you do!”

“I do.” He squeezes her knee. “You make me want to be better. God, I want this Maui thing to be a success, for us. You have no idea how badly.”