Chosen (24 page)

The truth, ladies: My husband left me for a 19-year-old whore in Singapore. And I have everything I need, everything I have ever wanted. We should all be so lucky. Prayers for the Novas…

“W
ell, that one was real helpful,” Penny says as the Martinezes’ borrowed VCR starts rewinding. The baby is sucking down another bottle in her arms, and she starts talking to it, which he hates. “What he hasn’t figured out, after stealing five baby-snatcher movies, is that nobody gets away with it. All we see is bad guys busted or shot full of holes. You want a Swiss cheese daddy?”

“You don’t watch them to see what to do—you watch for what not to do.” His voice is thick with patience he doesn’t feel. Seven days locked in the house with her and this kid, and he’s about ready to turn himself in. Every time it’s time for a milk run to the all-night gas station, he’s the eager beaver, running out with the old WIC checks, if for nothing more than a gulp of cold black air, quiet.

“We’re wasting time,” Penny says. “We’ve seen the parents boo-hooing all over the TV. They want him. Either let’s just set it up or bust out of here and take him with us. I’m getting kinda attached. He could be Buddy.”

That had been a problem the last few days—what to call him. Felt wrong to call him It when he was curled up in the towel against Jason’s chest each night (only way to keep him quiet) but disloyal to call him Buddy. Of course they know his name now—Wyeth Nova—but neither of them so much as whispers it.

“JJ?” Penny says like she can read his thoughts.

“What?”

“Jason Junior? Come on, let’s just take him with us.”

“Take him with us what? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You said motor home, Mexico. Burning sun. Brown-skin babies. I’m sick of sitting around here. I’m ready.” She’s perched on the couch, baby across her knees, and Jason looks at her. Could she really be so stupid as not to realize that for all of that to happen, first they need to pull off the ransom? Next to her is the dim lamp that makes the pocks of her skin like moon craters, the way the light hits. The lamp’s ugly, but real brass overlay, heavy, came with the place, long brown cord. And today didn’t he just see a half-full box of garbage bags under the sink? He could kill them both—it wouldn’t take but a few minutes. Smash the other half of her mouth in with the metal stand, knock her out so it wouldn’t be so bad to wrap the cord around her neck. She might not even come to. Done. And then the baby, what? Snap its neck like a rooster? Barbaric. Bathtub? Facedown, he could probably hold it under. Less than a minute. Wash them all with Clorox from the laundry room, and done. Walk away, run, as far as he could go. He tallies the contents of their fridge, feels where his fat gut is folding in on itself right at his belt. It would do him good to go without for a few days. He pictures himself crawling through woods and rivers, walking along mountain ridges, south south south. How long would he have before someone found the bodies? They still have the Martinezes’ VCR—she might come knocking. Drop it off first then, tonight. And then what? Julio comes around every three days or so, threatening, “End of the month, Xolan!” So what, kill him too? “
Jefe
, I got something I need you to look at under the sink,” and then WHAM! back of the head with the heavy wrench from the toolbox. But Julio has a wife, a thick-waisted, slit-eyed rectangle of a woman who’d come looking in hours. So just Penny and the baby, then, and put the baby in the freezer, and Penny, what, take out the racks of the fridge, crank it to Cold? What would that get him, a week? And
a free body he might be, a lifetime in sunglasses and hats and layers of lies, but what about his soul? Would they haunt him?

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“What?” He almost forgot; they’re in the room. Penny gets up and puts the sleeping baby in the bassinet. Above it, there is the bare nail where Brandi’s dream catcher hung. Jason shivers, has to clench his ass cheeks against a spasm of diarrhea. The cramp passes.

“You’re just figuring it all out, aren’t you, Einstein?”

“What?”

“That we’re right back where we were when I found out I was pregnant with Buddy. Same-old same-old three options.”

He waits; she ticks them off on her fingers.

“We can kill it, keep it, or try to turn it into cash. We didn’t abort him ’cause I didn’t want to, and we didn’t keep him ’cause you didn’t want to, and option three didn’t work out so good for us because you chose a piece-of-shit agency that kept all the money for themself. All we got for Buddy was fat clothes, some food, and three months’ room and board in this shitbox.”

She stands by the bassinet, jiggling it—best way they have found to get him into a deep enough sleep that they might have a few hours themselves. “If you had listened to me from the get-go, you might remember me telling you about my roommate at the Salem Women’s Summer Camp”—this is what she calls her lockup after his check fraud plan went wrong, because of their mandatory arts and crafts program—“said a lawyer is the way to go. Venita called him, he told her about a family, she had the baby, never even looked at it, didn’t even know if it was a he or a she, and she walked away with nine grand in cash, no questions asked. She never had to meet them or see how old or gimpy or phony they were, never had to worry”—Penny sniffs—“that they’d be fuck-ups. Just a transaction. But you get your get-out-of-jail-free card first, and you go and choose the first agency in the phone book with the hot little social worker and her
shiny silver Cherokee, and you don’t even think, How does she get that money? Who pays for that nice SUV?”

Okay, Jason slumps back against the couch, let her get it all out. Two months of solitary in the bedroom—the girl has a right to say her piece.

“Della Martinez got dial-up, so I go over the other day and I looked up Chosen Child Adoption Agency on the Internet. Twenty-five grand for a U.S. baby. They paid twenty-five grand for Buddy. That’s it.” She’s crying now, and she wipes at her cheeks. “He makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but a chunk of my heart, that I carried and felt inside me every minute, that I get sawed in half for, that I never even get to lay my own eyes on, my firstborn son. He’s just a cool twenty-five gee.”

Jason waits.

“So—” She draws a shaky breath. “So this time, Einstein, I’m driving the train. It’s tricky now. Option A, kill it. You know I won’t let you, so you’d have to kill me too.” She says this so casually his stomach knots. “And keeping it would be fine, ugly little bugger’s growing on me, except we have no fucking money. Which leaves C, turning it into cash”—she waves her hand toward the Martinezes’ VCR—“which is looking to be a little trickier than we thought. Even if you didn’t fuck it up, if we could get to the ransom money, in every one of those movies the bills are marked, so as soon as we buy our Airstream and head south, we might as well spray-paint a bull’s-eye on top of it.”

Penny stops and peers inside the bassinet.

“He’s out cold now.” She crosses the room and stands behind the couch, puts her hands on the back of it, near Jason’s head. He feels her breath on his bare neck. Tries to take inventory of the room—the lamp, the cord, the toolbox out by the light by the door that he’d been messing with, he’d have heard her pick up anything heavy, the clink of metal. He stares straight ahead, waiting, feeling her behind him.

“So do you or don’t you know where Chloe Pinter lives?”

“What?” It comes out like a gasp.

“I heard you. On the phone. Do you know where the bitch who took my son, who has all our money, lives?”

“Um, I, I…,” he stammers.

“Do you know where Chloe Pinter lives?” She says it slowly—he can feel each breath on the top of his shaved head.

“Yeah, I know.”

Jason turns and looks up at her, the light from the brass lamp casting up on her face, her nostrils deep holes, her mouth black and gaping; she looks like a gargoyle.

“What do you want me to do?” he says. It comes out like a whimper.

“Make this right. Get our money, get our wheels, get us out of here.”

She is walking toward the bedroom when she calls back over her shoulder, “If you pick Option A, have the goodness to do it without me waking up. I don’t want to feel nothing no more.”

She closes the bedroom door, and with the click of the handle, the baby wakes up. Jason gets to his feet, half expecting his liquid guts to run down his legs, and he picks up the thin towel on the corner of the couch, knots it at his heart, puts the baby in. He clicks off the brass lamp and starts wearing their nightly track in the rust-colored carpet: up to the bathroom, back to the kitchen, around the couch, up to the bathroom, back to the kitchen, around the couch…

It’s warm where their bodies touch. Jason’s throat itches, like a panicky trapped bird he can’t swallow, and its name is Desperation.

C
hloe wakes up on Valentine’s Day gasping—a bad dream, a man in her doorway, but as the first watery light fills her room and Chloe catches her breath, she sees it’s just clothes piled on a chair, her dark jacket hanging on the handle of the white door, nothing more. She is alone.

She clutches her cell phone off the nightstand for any missed calls or messages. None. She gets up, and though she has to pee badly, stops by the computer at the foot of the bed and taps the space bar to wake it up. No e-mail. It has been three days since she and Dan last communicated, and it is starting to affect her physical well-being.

Chloe drives to the café at Strohecker’s and orders a bagel and two coffees, waiting, but of course he doesn’t come anymore. She drinks them both and feels nauseated from the overload of cream and sugar.

At work, she pulls into her parking space and takes the stairs to the agency slowly, despite the misting rain. The wind is blowing from the Camas pulp factory, and the air is putrid with its stench. Inside, Chloe tries to get past Beverly, but she’s waving slips of pink paper. “And Heather wants you to call her,” she adds. “She left a message on the service.”

Chloe’s feet sound like a steelworker’s as she trudges up the wooden stairs. She is wearing her black Tarifa hiking boots, a pair of
Dan’s left-behind Lucky jeans, and her Hot Stick surfer sweatshirt—she’s only doing paperwork today, but she thinks of the saying “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”

Upstairs, Casey is stretched out on Chloe’s couch, dirty Nikes crossed on the arm, flipping through an old
Rolling Stone.

“Do you know Johnny Depp wants to have a second mouth grafted on so he can smoke while he’s talking or eating?” Casey says.

“Would you put your feet down?” Chloe says peevishly. Her eyes dart toward her computer screen, already turned on (
grrr!
) and she sees it, the red flag above her AOL mailbox, the one that wasn’t there this morning before she left home. She calculates the time change in her head—could it be Dan?

“Testy!” Casey swings her feet down, sits up. “And did you know you have your own thermostat, which means that you have your own vent system up here, which means you could totally blaze up at lunchtime, and they would never know it downstairs?”

“Except I don’t smoke.” Chloe puts her purse on the floor by the dry-erase board, her eyes darting back to the red mailbox flag.

“Really?”

“Not for years.”

“Wow. Sometimes I want to quit for like, four, maybe two months, just so I can start up again. Nothing like that first-time high.”

Chloe stands by her desk, flipping the message slips in her hand with her thumb.

“Oh!” Casey gets up. “I thought we could cruise the boards together up here for the morning report. You want couch or chair? You take couch, it’s your office.” Chloe sits in the warm indentation Casey left, dusting the floral twill for crumbs.

“Okay, we’ve got no mention on Portland AP, and nothing on International. Mmm, OregonMoms, nothing…” Casey clicks another link. “Oh wait, we’ve got a Francesca97201 on Oregon Open Adoption! This should be classic. Where’s my popcorn?”

Chloe waits while Casey scans the thick block of print.

“Holy shit!”

“What?” Chloe asks, only to be polite. It’s Valentine’s Day; at the very least Dan would send her an e-mail, right? She doesn’t care about flowers, she just wants contact.

“She says her husband left her for a teenage whore in Singapore!”

Chloe is thinking of Paul Nova, in his van outside her house, driving around looking for his lost son, and Dan, on the beach at Ho’okipa, perfecting his forward loop.

“What?” she asks. She can actually smell Casey, a mix of powdered parmesan and patchouli, from across the room. The coffee from earlier swirls in Chloe’s uneasy stomach.

“Whoa. So Francie and John split? Do the birth parents know? Didn’t you do their follow-up home study?”

“Yeah.” Chloe pushes at her cuticles.
By phone
, she thinks but doesn’t say. Chloe had gotten sloppy these last few weeks, hadn’t gone out to their house, had literally phoned it in and made up a report based on her original home study.
The adoptive parents are adjusting well to parenthood and have all the appropriate safety features installed.
None of it matters.

“Judith’s going to shit when she finds out.”

She will, Chloe realizes, and finds she doesn’t care as much as she should.

“Huh.” Casey closes the browser window and stands up. “Crazy. I’m starving, you want any Doritos or anything?” Casey stands in her doorway. Chloe shakes her head, exhales when Casey finally leaves. She pounces on her computer, hands shaking to open her AOL, and it’s from Dan!

To the other lost soul swimming in the fishbowl…You know the rest. I’m nothing without you.

Wish you were here.
Pink Floyd postcard sentiment. Her intercom beeps, and Beverly announces Heather on line two with enough annoyance in her voice to indicate that Chloe should have called her
back before she had to call again. Chloe hits the line without answering Beverly.

“Hello?”

“Hey.” Heather’s voice is small and flat.

“Heather! How are you?”

“I don’t even know why I’m calling. I don’t need anything. Things are fine. We’re fine. Michael’s fine.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear it.”

“I really don’t even know why I’m calling. I just got used to talking to you all the time, and then, it’s like nothing. I’m just calling to say hey, I guess.”

“I’m really glad to hear from you.”

“So do you ever do, like, a follow-up visit?”

With the adoptive parents
, Chloe thinks, but says, “Sure, I can come out.”

“Really? That would be great. Michael totally misses you.”

“Sure. I can come out today, if you want.”

“Okay. I don’t work till five, so we’re just, you know, here.”

“I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Okay, great. Thanks, that would be great.”

There are feet on the stairs, and Chloe hangs up as Casey barges through the doorway. “Hey! I forgot to tell you my great idea for the domestic program.”

“What?”

“Chosen Child restructure. No more mom-and-pop rinky-dink agency. I’m thinking revamping the domestic program so we have one caseworker for families and another one for birth moms, like Catholic Charities does. Ken said they’re thinking about hiring someone else for China, so I’d come up and do the birth moms, and you could do the families, or either way, whatever. I don’t care.”

Chloe feels like she has been punched.

“We’d be in totally regular communication, but I could put my desk over here.” She points to a space by the window. “I was just
talking to Judith, and she thinks it’s brilliant. Won’t it be great? I can move my stuff up today.” With that, Casey leaves.

Chloe rereads Dan’s e-mail. He wants her there, he’s “nothing without her.” She rereads the e-mail again. It’s enough. She grabs her purse and her day planner and phone, stops in the doorway, and looks around. She picks up her album, the one she bought last summer, filled with photos of smiling parents and newborns, Chloe a lonely bookend to the blissful cluster.

She runs down the wooden staircase, two at a time, and straight into Judith’s office.

“I quit.” The calm in Chloe’s voice surprises her. Where her hands clutch the leather of her small purse, sweat is forming.

Judith stands up, her face purple, and slams the glass-paned door to her sunroom office, which does nothing but muffle her yelling for everyone in the international office. Over Judith’s heaving shoulders when she stops to take a breath, Chloe can see Casey, Kenneth, and Maria glancing at her, a mixed bag of expressions on their faces. From her office in the entry, Beverly has to stand and lean over the desk to get a good look.

“You have to give me two weeks!” Judith roars.

Chloe shakes her head but says nothing, afraid what will happen if she opens her mouth. Soon, with no fuel for Judith’s fire, it burns into frosty fury. Judith opens the door for Chloe, gestures that she should leave.

“I hope you know how many people you are letting down right now,” she hisses. “Worst of all, you are letting yourself down, Chloe.”

Go to Maui
, Paul Nova had said….