Chosen (21 page)

S
undown. Jason lifts the broken blinds again, the streetlight flickering by the dark parking lot like always. Landlord’s El Camino, banged-up Taurus of the Martinez family, the Dodge Caravan of the alkie mom of the hot little piece with the kid across the way. Nothing new. Good, good.

Jason’s stomach is a mess, all worms-writhing and bloated, anxious. Eight hours, and Brandi’s still not back. Has she called Lisle, told him about the bathroom or the baby, or both? Because Jason knows his brother would call him in. Plenty of times when their father was looking to beat on someone, Lisle cheerfully gave Jason up. Just as many times, Jason pointed the finger at his little brother too. Half the time their own ma would meet the old man by the door with the belt in her hand, tattle on them, and then hold him or Lisle by the hair so he could administer their licks,
That’ll teach you!

No loyalty, not even for the dog.

“Get off your asses, I’m going to teach you boys how to shoot right,” the old man had said, and Lisle had followed him outside warily. Age ten, Jason wouldn’t have put it past the bastard to give them each one of the canvas-strapped, scratched-up rifles he had slung over his shoulder, pit the boys against each other, let the best son win, survival of the fucking fittest. But it wasn’t; it was Pancho Villa, the dog, getting
old, had a hard time getting up when it was time to go out for a crap. He was tied to a leafless piece of scrub in the yard, and the old man stuck a rifle in each of their hands. “Pancho has shit his last,” he said, and then grinned at Jason and Lisle. “So, who’s gonna go first?”

L
ISLE COULD HAVE CALLED
him in. Right now, the cops could be sitting in ambush. Sex with a minor (no point in pointing out Lisle fucked her first,
or
that she was a rotted-mouth crank-whore), breaking parole, not to mention in the bedroom, the little problem-that-he-thought-might-be-a-solution. Christ, he could go away for life!

Fuck! Now the kid’s been screaming for two hours straight, walls thin as rolling papers around here, someone’s got to notice. They’ve got to get it some milk, but he’s scared to go out. No wheels, he’s a sitting duck. For all he knows they’re all lined up just past the parking lot waiting for him. He jerks the bedroom door open—it’s like cardboard and flies in his hands, twanging his shoulder.

Jesuschrist she’s got her shirt up and trying to stuff a flappy-floppy tit in his open mouth!

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” And because he’s agitated, he cuffs the back of her head, not
hard
, but it breaks their rules. That’s the thing of their relationship, an agreement of bodies: Penny doesn’t open her legs for anyone, and he doesn’t lay a hand on her. She wears her loyalty to him like the coat of an Irish setter, glossy and auburn. Never once, in all their years, have even her eyes walked away from him. And he won’t do to her like those guys outside Denver.

“Aw, Pen,” he says, but it’s too late, and the baby’s still screaming.

Like a flash, her hand winds up and comes down open and flat,
smack!
across the baby’s cheek, leaving red. It stops, stunned, and Jason’s stomach turns. The baby throws back its head and lets out an anguished scream, and Penny winds up again,
smack!
same red cheek, and the baby stops, silenced mid-wail. It looks big-eyed and shocked at Penny, cheek flaming, a tear spilling out of its eye. Jason knows this feeling, cell memory, salty hot water on burning
slapped skin. The baby hiccups. Jesus. He runs a hand over his own stubbled face.

“That’s enough of
that
,” Penny says, and she turns her eyes to Jason like a little girl who brought home straight As. But she reads him—Penny may be dumb, but she’s not stupid—and she juts that ugly stubborn pocked-up Popeye chin out.

“I wouldn’t ever do that to Buddy,” she says. “Never.”

Like he said, his girl’s dumb but she’s not stupid. He tries to keep his face plain, but she mugs at him, pushing past to the living room. He follows, and she’s trying to set it up on the sofa, but it keeps folding in on itself like a half-empty bag of laundry.

“I know this isn’t Buddy. A mother knows.” Penny reaches over and tries to straighten the baby, then gives up, lets him sag like a rotted fence post. “Besides, Buddy’s not this homely. Whoever this baby is”—she hefts herself up off the sofa—“snatching him was either the dumbest thing you did, or the smartest.”

“What?” He doesn’t know what to say.

“You tell me, mister.”

The baby whimpers. Penny gives it one wild horse-eyed warning glare before going into the bedroom and slamming the hollow door.

Jason knows what he has to do. He looks at the baby; can’t leave it here with Penny and her quick slaps—kid’s face is still glowing, outlines of three fingers in white like a tribal tattoo. But he can’t be seen with it either. He leaves it bobble-headed on the couch and goes into the bathroom, finds the largest, most threadbare of the towels. His aunt Selma-Wade, back in Sappho, used to wear her retard boy like a bandolier. Jason tosses the towel over one shoulder, ties the two ends together in a thick knot, guessing at the length.

Back in the living room, he struggles to stuff the baby into the swath across his chest. He misjudged; the thing nearly drops out the bottom. The second time, he holds the towel in his teeth, presses the baby against his chest with one arm, and reknots the towel, lashing the baby to him. He can slide on his leather jacket, shrugging into
it like a friend, first thing he ever bought with his first trucking paycheck, five hundred eighteen dollars, this jacket and the Frye boots. The leather of them stank like money, the weight like nothing he’d ever worn. Usually he leaves it open, but this time he does up every buckle and zipper, nobody the wiser.

Jason takes a few practice steps around the living room. His back twinges, always paining him. The brass flashing screams as he opens the door, but the baby doesn’t startle. A thought occurs to him: if they’re waiting for him, pistols pointed, all he has to do is open up the jacket—human shield.

O
UTSIDE, THE NIGHT IS
wet, but not raining. Leaves blow through the parking lot, nothing else. Hugging the side of the building, Jason plows through the dripping, scratchy bushes at the border of the parking lot, taking a shortcut to Foster. He walks along the inside of the sidewalk, farther from the curb, toward the strip mall where there is a drugstore, about a mile.

It seems to have fallen asleep. If Jason lifts the neck of his jacket, the dome of the blue-white head glows like the rounder end of a soft-boiled egg. He thunks it with a thick finger, as if testing for a good watermelon. It stirs a little, moves its head away from his tapping, still breathing in there.

He wonders what’s happening with the real Buddy. Is someone holding him, walking him, chest to chest? Is Francie or John looking down on Buddy’s vulnerable skull with tenderness? Or would John be like his own father, sap-stained hands, cracked leather belt, coming down on him and Lisle with the regularity of a workweek?

Walking along Foster, Jason thinks of something: This could be broken. His son could grow up in Portland Heights, where parents aren’t clouded in cigarette haze and indifference, where dads play ball with their sons. Maybe not ball—the old man had looked gimp-legged—but maybe read him the stock report, let him cut his first teeth on Daddy’s fat leather billfold. They’d be the kind of people to
send their son to one of those schools where bullying is not allowed, not like Sappho, where even the principal jeered them on from the sidelines of dusty playground brawls.

His son could be popular; who didn’t like the rich kids? Everyone’d be clambering around Buddy to be invited over for video games, soda, and brownies. And his son could grow up with a set place in this world, not scrapping for it, but already decided for him.
This
is who you are, with the sun shining on your face as the team hefts you onto their shoulders at the end of the football game (because Buddy would be doubly blessed, Jason’s physical talents, John and Francie’s status).

And because of this life, and a good, classy woman, and having enough, Buddy would be a Law-Abiding Citizen, and would never know the inside and all its intricacies, the politics of bend over or be bent. Buddy would never think that even at six-four, just keeping your head down and quiet would be enough to get you ignored the first time the bars slammed shut behind you.

The cycle could be broken. They could grow old together, his son and the wife, and beautiful children, and not one of them would ever feel the sting of a hand in anger. Jason smiles to himself, his jacket jingling as he walks, the buckles clinking. It’s bitter, this gift he’s given his son, this future, but it’s good.

Jason checks under his jacket; still breathing.

F
IRST THINGS FIRST
. H
E
stops in at the convenience store. Milk is $3.49 a gallon, but a coffee is only $.69, so he goes to the coffee station and lets the hissing brown liquid spill out into the drain, one eye on the clerk, then empties the pint of cream into his cup, caps it. He pays for the coffee and another pack of Camels—no surprise he’s on his second pack today—with his last five dollars and leaves the convenience store with his head down as he passes the camera.

Next stop, drugstore. He goes straight to the baby section and lines up two boxes of diapers, like he can’t decide which. He fakes a sip of his coffee. Behind the boxes, he opens a pink plastic baby
bottle, jamming the packaging behind the diapers. A freckled man comes into the aisle, short, square, wearing pointy shoes that squeak as he hurries past Jason.

“I never remember what I’m supposed to get.” Jason is pleased with how even and low his voice comes out. The man looks over, offers a pale smile.

“I know.” The man nods, rifling through rows of lotions, creams.

Quickly, working behind the diapers, Jason tips the cream from the coffee cup into the bottle, caps it, and wedges it in his back jean pocket. The whole thing takes eleven seconds; he loves shoplifting. Something for nothing. He pretends to sip from his now empty coffee cup, nods to the man holding two brands of lotion, his cell phone jammed in his shoulder, “Hon, do you want the lavender or the regular?”

First thing he’ll buy with the money: cell phones for both of them. Then a car, or a motor home, for the drive south, and he’ll fix her teeth, so he doesn’t have to look at the blackness in her mouth and think about what they did to her in Denver. Makes his stomach hot, swallowed rage. He’s hot anyway, he thinks as he walks smoothly out of the drugstore, back twanging, the full, brand-new bottle bulging his hip pocket.

Outside, cool air, relief—sweat is building between them. Is it breathing? Check. Last stop, the video store, where two teenage girls look at him and then back at their hands, tug the necks of their T-shirts lower.

Not much time left; it’s wriggling, going to wake up any second now. Jason heads to the drama section and scans.
Ransom.
He never saw it, but Mel Gibson’s decent. Jason will never forget the way he faced his savage end in
Braveheart.
The night they showed it on his cell block, everyone was quiet on the walk back at lights-out, and then finally, little Tino just said quietly, “Man has some
cojones.
” For once no one gave him shit, just nodded in agreement.

Jason does a quick scan of the back of the
Ransom
case; tells him
what he needs to know, kidnapping plot, ransom offered, blah-blah-blah. He’s been busted before, in plans that were simpler than this, with lower stakes. Not this time. This time: recon.

Inside his jacket, it writhes, and he checks the girls at the front. The one with the lopsided tits meets his eyes, and he thinks of Brandi—was it really just this morning?—staring him down in the bathroom mirror. Casually, he puts the tape under his left arm, the side that will be opposite them when he walks out. Loppy Tits watches him do this, and he gives her a wink. “I’m looking for the Adults Only section,” he calls out in his “just say the word” voice, extra rumbly.

She laughs, whispers something to the other one. Hopes the tape won’t be alarmed, but nobody gives a shit about VHS anymore, it’s all about the DVD. He walks to the door; feels like it is digging its toes into his belt, pushing off, head’s going to pop out the top of his jacket any second.

“Evening, ladies.” His voice is smooth like Vermont genuine maple syrup, god he loved that stuff when his dispatcher sent him up into those foggy green woods. Maybe he and Pen could go there, miles of wild to disappear into. But it’s cold, damp like here. The girls at the counter wriggle, twist for him, one biting her nails as he walks right past out into the night, and he is around the corner and slipping into the darkness of the alley, toward home. Fucking beautiful.

P
aul gets into his van in his own driveway in the dark, the parking space beside him where the Volvo should be as hauntingly empty as the bassinet in the bedroom upstairs. Haberman had said they would be dusting her car for prints, but everyone had touched the car by then. He didn’t sound hopeful. This morning, before going to get Magnus at the airport, before the tow had come, Paul had gotten in, driver’s side door, and sat there, trying to imagine if he could have gotten out, could have not noticed the car seat in his periphery—how distracted, how far gone, would she have had to be to leave their son?

Before this, he’d characterized these early days of parenthood like the throbbing beginnings of a dental problem—coloring every aspect of their lives, days measured in good or bad, the way one speaks of chronic pain, arthritis. Some days better than others, but the condition never able to be totally forgotten.

And as he sat there, thinking about this, the morning dew made Eva’s doodles reappear on the passenger side window, from the Thanksgiving night at the McAdoos that felt like years ago, and Paul had put his head down on the back of his hands and howled until his throat was raked raw.

But now he has given Eva over to Magnus, a passing of the baton.
This is good. Another moment of her weeping, her obsessive pumping and labeling and storing of her breast milk, her frenetic flyer printing at the computer, and he wouldn’t have been able to control the urge to smash her head against the nearest hard surface.

Haberman agrees with Paul; the new flyer is better. It is Wyeth’s most recent photo, a vulnerable little worried primate face. The first flyers Eva had printed used a ridiculously generic photo of Wyeth, from the side, sleeping on his stomach, tiny bum in the air, and Haberman nixed it.

“We really want a photo with his eyes open,” Haberman said. “We want people to see him with his eyes open,” he had repeated so emphatically that Paul felt the implications of this like stones in his stomach.

Before Paul left, Eva had cornered him in the living room, away from Haberman and the other officer making notes in the dining room.

“I think we need to call that guy, the leather jacket guy, America’s Most Wanted? The one whose son got—” She stopped. “We should call him.”

One look at Haberman, picking up their photos, rifling through the mail in their dining room, cell phone to his ear, and Paul said quietly, “I think we need to call a lawyer.”

And then Magnus had come down from their bedroom with a navy Adidas gym bag, dropped it on the wooden living room floor with a heavy thud, and waited expectantly for one of them to ask what it was.

“I’ll bite,” Paul finally said. “What’s in the bag, Mag?”

“It’s your ransom fund.”

“We don’t need your money,” Paul said tightly, but they do.

Now Paul puts the van in reverse, backs slowly three feet out of the driveway, his eyes trained on the illuminated windows of the house in front of him. He can see Magnus pacing the living room, phone to his ear, giant hands gesticulating, and he wonders if he told him not to leave her alone. Suicide watch, Haberman had said. “Don’t need
a double tragedy,” he’d said, and Paul took this as a bad sign, that Haberman was already thinking of Wyeth as a tragedy.

Paul drives, slowly, staying on the spaghetti loops and dead ends and U-shaped streets that make up Portland Heights, eyes scanning, head swiveling. As though Wyeth is a lost dog and Paul might spot him, might catch his attention if he rolls down his window and does a special whistle. Paul considers going door-to-door, knocking, explaining, asking people if it would be all right if he just, well, searched their home for a bit. How would he have reacted if some red-eyed, unshaven crazy guy in a two-days-unwashed electrician shirt asked to search his house for his missing son? And what would that get him? The silence at the opened door would be his answer—Wyeth was never quiet at this time of night unless Eva or Paul or Magnus had him up over their shoulder, walking the halls.

If he did hear a baby crying, then what? “Mind if I just inspect your baby, ma’am? Check and be sure you’ve got the right one there?”

And for how long would this be feasible? For how long would he even be able to recognize his own son? There were hundreds of houses in this neighborhood alone. It could take him weeks, door-to-door, and with each passing moment, Wyeth would already look less like he did the two nights ago when Paul came home late after the sprinkler incident.
The last time he saw his son
.

What would it be like to have his son, the boy who carried half his DNA curled up with Eva’s inside him, being raised by another couple, calling another man “Daddy”? (Because this is the only path down which it is safe to let the mind wander: a crazy, possibly bereaved, maybe barren couple so desperate for a child of their own to shower with their misguided love and affection that they took advantage of the critical lapse in Eva’s attention. There is no other possible explanation. Period.)

Paul wonders anxiously how long this will go on, alarmed to find that what he is most worried about is that this feeling, the Unknown,
will drag on and on. Disturbed to realize that if he digs, he will discover a complete lack of faith in Wyeth’s return. (
They didn’t take the car seat. Why didn’t they take the car seat?
) How long until, like a soft-eyed George Clooney on
ER
, he can be the one to gently suggest that it is time to call it? Paul looks at his dashboard clock: 8:02 p.m.

Paul is taken back to a moment outside his father’s hospital room, when the hot Asian doctor, her hands so softened from endless scrubbing he was afraid her skin would slough off when she took his big callused one in her satin palms and said softly, “You know your father isn’t going to leave this hospital now.” And Paul recalls having to contract his muscles to keep from wetting himself, so complete was his flooding relief that she had said it. That she had said, Soon it will be over, and they could move on. Eva in there prattling on to his dad about plans for the summer—“And I’ve got some new tomato plants started, ponderosa pinks, just in the flats in the kitchen window, but Paulie and I are going to need your expertise”—as the ventilator hissed and fell in answer.

So grateful to this doctor for saying it like it was. Because Paul Nova knows, the very worst thing you can be in these kinds of situations is hopeful.

D
RIVING PAST THE OVERGROWN
lawn of a small run-down cottage off Upper Drive, Paul spies a familiar SUV on the curb and, lugging her trash bags down from the porch, the famous Chloe Pinter. He depresses the brake, glides to a stop.

“Hey,” she calls out when she sees him, “shouldn’t you be at Good Sam?”

Paul’s stomach flips—he has been gone too long; there is news!

“What?”

“This isn’t our usual venue—we’re supposed to be running into each other at the hospital. Or Strohecker’s, but you’re standing me up these days.” Chloe drops the recycling bin to the curb with a clatter, walks over to his open window. “Where were you yesterday?”
She is smiling at him in a way that lets him know she hasn’t seen the news, and it is nice, for a moment, not to be the man whose wife lost their baby.

“Busy. Hey, how’s the wedding plans?” he asks, blows on his hands against the cold air.

Chloe grips her own elbows; she’s wearing a thin, long-sleeved T-shirt and striped pajama pants. In the streetlamp light, a wisp of disappointment passes over her face, like wind on water.

“No plans, really. Dan moved to Maui.”

“What?” So she’s here, alone? How come she never told him, all those mornings at the coffee shop? “You’re moving?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The job, I’m busy, babies due. It’s complicated.”

“Doesn’t sound that complicated to me. Your boyfriend moves to paradise, and you’re going to stay here because of work obligations?” As if on cue, a wind blows up from the valley below, he can hear it in the trees before its icy breath reaches them. Chloe ducks beside the van, closer to him so their upper arms brush on either side of the open window, and she doesn’t move away.

“Do you want to come in?” she asks at the same time he says, “You should go.”

“What?” Did he hear her right?

“Where?” she asks, “Go inside, or to Maui?”

It has been a nice respite, these few moments, but he remembers again, an ache in his throat like the beginning of the flu: Wyeth.

“Maui.” Paul takes his hand off the door handle. “I didn’t. I got married young, took on the business at twenty. Struggled. Had a kid. Look where I am now.”

“Where you are now?” Chloe stands beside the driver’s door as Paul clicks his seat belt into place. Her fingers curl over the open window; she is still wearing the ring. “You’re everywhere I want to be. The marriage, the house, the baby, the life.”

“You should go,” he says, and closes the door, puts the van in gear.