Chosen (25 page)

W
yeth has been missing for sixteen days, which makes today February 14. To Paul, this means nothing. He only noticed it when the secretaries were oohing over each other’s giant arrangements that perfumed the front office in that sharp tang of roses, reminding Paul of his mother’s Tea Rose that she spritzed on the back of her nyloned knees before Sunday church. It means Haberman was out to lunch with his wife when Paul checked in at noon, and heading out to pick up his girlfriend for dinner when Paul calls him a second time a few minutes ago.

“Nothing to report,” he had said. “Couple of calls on the hotline that I chased down and debunked.” He didn’t add, as he used to, “You wouldn’t believe how many crazies there are out there.” Because yesterday Paul had snapped at him that yes, his son was snatched by one of them, and so he actually would believe that.

Paul is sitting in traffic on the Sunset Highway, and every car he inches past seems to have a well-dressed couple in it. He wonders how many of these are parents, and who is home watching their children. He wants to jump out, pound on their rain-spattered windows, and scream, “Go home! Hold your children!” Who’s the crazy now?

At home, the house is quiet, late-afternoon light shining through the kitchen window, a blue glow of television in the living room. It
is par for the course, third night in a row, since Francie McAdoo left them with her baby for the afternoon, and that night, Magnus’s girlfriend, Genai, called from Los Angeles to tell him she was pregnant but doubted it was his. There is a bag of groceries sitting on the kitchen counter, two empty wine bottles on the floor by the back door to go out to recycling—well, at least they’re being civic-minded, Paul thinks. At least they’re not junking up our landfills.

On the counter, a bloody steak is defrosting, and the water is running over a colander of Bibb lettuce. Paul shuts it off, pulls open the grocery bag. A heart-shaped Whitman’s sampler of chocolates and three dirty baking potatoes roll around in the bottom next to a cellophaned box of herbal tea. Paul pulls it out: “Mother’s Milk—for promoting lactation.” Christ.

In the living room, he finds Eva and her brother in a familiar scene. Magnus is in the glider, his head thrown back, mouth open; Eva curled on the couch, her arm stretched out to rest on the coffee table where a third bottle of red sits, two empty, stained glasses both within reach. The five o’clock news is on, there’s the
NO NEWS
status under the photo of Wyeth, the footage of Paul and Eva and Haberman from two weeks ago. Magnus’s eyes fly open, try to focus, when Paul shuts off the TV, crosses to flip on the lamp by the stairs.

“You’re back early.” Magnus’s voice is as thick and garbled as a stroke patient’s.

Paul ignores him, goes to his wife, and bends, sliding an arm under her neck, not caring when his watch strap snags on her hair. He gets the other under her bent knees and, lifting with his legs, not his back, as he learned moving shipments in the warehouse, hefts her into his arms. She is lighter than he expected, and as he swings her to make for the stairs, one of her bare feet sends Magnus’s empty glass to the floor, where it shatters musically.

“I’ll get that,” Magnus says, his voice more clear. Paul does not look at him as he passes. Accidentally, Paul knocks Eva’s head against the doorframe to their bedroom, and her eyes fly open. She flings
an arm around his neck, her breath sour like a frat house floor after Bacchus week, mumbling she is sorry, so sorry. Paul’s neck, where she is kissing, feels like a three-inch northwestern slug has crossed it, leaving a slime.

In their bedroom, Paul pushes the door shut with his foot, and for a brief second has a savage flash:
Dropping her to the floor like unwashed laundry, using his heavy boot to kick her, the stomach, so she folds, first, then a bash to the head, to the face to open it up, teeth shattering to the wood floor like the wineglass, then around behind, where the ribs would splinter like kindling under his steel-tipped boots.

Shaken, he lays his wife on their unmade bed, pulls the covers up over her legs. She is wearing one of his old basketball shirts, and there are two giant wet spots where milk has leaked through. He goes to the bathroom and runs water on a washcloth, wrings it out, fills a glass, taps two Tylenol into his hand. By the time he is back, she is snoring softly. He wipes her forehead, smoothing the hair back, leaves the other items on her bedside table.

“Magnus—” He walks back into the kitchen, where his brother-in-law is wiping at the bloodstained Corian with drunken deliberation. “I know you love your sister, and I know you’re trying to help her out the only way you know how, but—” He loses his voice, swallows hard, finds it strong and deep. “But if you care at all about us, stop this. I’ve lost my son, maybe for good, and I can’t lose Eva to—”

“I apologize,” Magnus says carefully. His eyes are those that Paul has come to hate in his wife, plaintive, speaking of an agony so deep you can see in them the slimy black bottom of the abyss. Magnus picks up the wine bottle and glass, shuffles past Paul to the breakfast nook. With an unsteady hand, he pours the last of the wine into the glass. Paul feels a surge of heat in his face, has to step back so he doesn’t break Magnus’s jaw with the pulsing fist clenched by his thigh.

“Yeah, well, whatever your problems are, your mother was a cold-hearted bitch or your girlfriend’s banging other guys, or because your nephew got snatched, we’re up to our eyeballs in our crisis here, so I
can’t be babysitting you too.” Paul hears his voice shout, “I’m trying to be the guy who puts things back together!”

Paul swings, knocks the full wineglass out of Magnus’s hand. He picks up the plate with the steak and throws it past him toward the kitchen door—blood and ceramic shards and a fifteen-dollar hunk of meat litter the floor. God, but it feels too good to throw and scream and shatter the quiet in their house.

I
t is late afternoon on Valentine’s Day, the light just weakening when Chloe arrives at the complex in Southeast. She hurries through the squelching courtyard, footsteps echoing at the other end. She turns quickly, expecting the ominous figure of Jason Xolan in his clunking boots, his jingling jacket, but it’s a short Puerto Rican woman, slamming out of the laundry room with a rose-colored basket of wrinkled clothes on her hip, a waft of powdery fabric softener gusting toward Chloe.

Chloe knocks on the door to Heather’s apartment, waiting. It’s not raining yet, but the air is raw, threatening.

“Hey!” Heather pulls the door open on a wide smile, Michael behind her jumping on the couch cushions. Heather holds up two mugs of tea, and though Chloe’s stomach is still swirling over what she has done, she takes the steaming mug. They settle on the couch, Michael knocking over blocks as they talk.

“So…” Chloe takes her tea bag out of the mug, lays it on a piece of paper towel. “How are you doing?”

“Okay.” Heather looks out the window, and her eyes fill with tears. She crosses her arms over her stomach, which already only makes the smallest of telltale folds. “I broke up with Eric.”

“What?”

“I just realized I was trying to make him into someone he isn’t. You know, husband, dad type of thing. It really wasn’t fair to him. I boxed him into a corner, you know?” She’s crying and smiling at the same time. She wipes her nose on the sleeve of her shirt. “I know I’m crying, but it’s okay. It feels, like, really free. Sad, but free.”

Chloe swallows down a throat-dollop of bile.

“How about you? How’s your honey?”

“Um, things are okay.”

There is silence, then the beep-beep-beep of Michael’s truck.

“So, have you heard from Nate and Gina?”

“What?”

“The Severins.” In an unprecedented show of faith, in the middle of signing the paperwork for the closed adoption, Gina had written their full names, adding phone numbers, even their street address, on a piece of paper and pressed it into Heather’s hand. “I just wondered how things are going. If they’d called the agency or anything.”

“Oh. I haven’t heard, but their follow-up home study is next week.” Chloe pictures Casey doing the job in her stead, going through the motions, half-assed, half-baked, in the Severins’ Lake Oswego home, and she has to swallow again. What has she just done?

“Will you call me, after you see them, and let me know how things are going?”

And Chloe would have, if she hadn’t just quit, if everything wasn’t about to come crashing down.

“I hope they like him, Adam David,” Heather continues. “Michael was a real easy baby, but you never know.” As Michael passes, Heather grabs him around the waist, pulls him to her chest. “C’mere, you.” She rubs her cheek against his, and Chloe sees him go soft in her arms as she kisses his curly hair.

“I’m sure they’re loving him.” Chloe thinks about Francie McAdoo, who is not the first new adoptive mother to call in the early days, surprised, taken aback by the incessant care a newborn requires, the transition from what they envisioned to the relentless reality.
I just
wanted to tell you, this baby cries all the time…
as though Chloe had picked it out, gave them the One That Cries.

“So…how often do the parents give a baby back?”

“What?” Chloe’s voice is sharper than she means for it to be.

“You don’t have to talk in specifics.” Heather looks down at her hands. “I just wondered.”

“
Never.
Heather, never! These are babies, not, not pound puppies that don’t housebreak quickly enough, and whoops, back you go, it didn’t work out.”

Beep beep, crash!
Michael knocks over a tower, jams the truck into Chloe’s ankle.

“Ouch! Never,” she says again emphatically.

“But what about Penny?”

“Penny?”

“Jason and Penny, from over there.”

“What about them?”

“Nothing. Just, the parents gave it back, right? I mean, I can see why; he’s a little screamer.” Heather laughs nervously.

Chloe barely makes it to the narrow bathroom to throw up, wipes her mouth on a damp
Sesame Street
towel. An excuse, a hasty good bye, briefer than she had meant for it to be with Heather, and she is standing back out in the courtyard. Should she go to Jason and Penny’s? Would they really have Angus McAdoo in the bassinet instead of that plastic-eyed bunny?

Francie and John would be just the type of people to give a baby back, write some fat check to keep the birth parents quiet, pay off a lawyer to lose the records—but what about the post on the message board, about realizing she is truly a mother, and what had Casey said, John left Francie for a teenage whore in Singapore? But these are message boards—anyone could make up a story for the online world.

Giving back a baby would be impossible to pull off, normally, because of the follow-up home study. But Chloe hadn’t actually gone to the McAdoos, had literally phoned it in. Jesus. And Francie had
seemed relieved not to have Chloe come over, and Chloe realizes now that not once in the whole twenty-minute conversation last week did she hear a baby cry.

Maybe she should go straight to the airport, leave now, before the shit really hit the fan? Forget the sublessor, forget packing her belongings? How delighted would Dan be if she showed up in Maui tomorrow with nothing but the clothes on her body, without a suitcase or her purple kettle? What if she revamped herself, became the type of girl who didn’t need to make a happy home everywhere she went, didn’t dream of weddings and families, their happily-ever-after? What if she could live out of a backpack, her first priority in the morning merely checking the palm fronds for movement, wind direction? What if she took a job that didn’t involve the messy creation of families, but was simply refilling tourists’ ice waters, bringing them shrimp cocktail, smiling for a fat tip that could go toward her new 5.3 sail? What if she became Waterbabe?

Standing in the raw air outside Heather’s, Chloe swallows down another surge of bile and crosses the courtyard.

A
knock at the door,
bang-bang-bang
. Nobody ever comes around except Julio, hassling them for money. Jason’s wearing the baby—when
isn’t
he dragging around the little backbreaker?—and Penny’s holed up in the bedroom.

“Keep him quiet!” she’d ordered, only thing she’d said to him all day.

Bang-bang-bang
.

Jason zips his jacket over the baby, wide-eyed but not screaming, for now.

He opens the door a crack, and you could knock him over with a feather, but it’s Brandi, pushing the door back in on him before he can close it.

“Hey, Jay,” she says, poking around the living room like she owns the place, searching.

“Hey.” He slams the door behind her. Two thoughts: Can Penny hear her? And where’s Lisle? “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” She comes too close, right against him so he’s sure she can hear it breathing under the leather. She runs her little hands up the front of his thighs. “You left me wanting more. That’s no way to treat a girl. How’s Penny?”

So fast her head swivels, Jason has her by the armpit and drags her out the door. Both of them tripping over the loose strip of metal, he
jerks her like a puppy on a string across the courtyard to out by the Dumpsters.

Walks right into their fucking trap.

“Hey, brother.” It’s Lisle and that motherfucker Victor leaned up against his truck. Inside Jason’s jacket, the baby digs its feet into the waistband of his jeans, pushes up. With Jason worrying that the head’s going to come poking out the top of his jacket like he sometimes likes to, the first blow catches him off balance.

Clean hit, something pops in his jaw, a sound like a lightbulb breaking, mouth filling with iron, and Jason stumbles back, tries to catch his balance before he falls right on top of it. Lisle grabs him by the arm and hisses, “That’s for fucking my girl.”

Jason rubs his jaw, two thoughts: Lisle hits harder than he remembered, and is it over? His ears ringing, he blinks twice. Might have broke his jaw, he thinks.

Crack! Victor gets him from the other side while Lisle holds him up, and his right eye goes red, blood flooding.

“That’s for shutting us out of your little deal.” Lisle twists his arms through Jason’s, threading them behind his back, exposing his stomach for a pounding.

“Wait,” Jason cries just as the baby squawks.

“What the fuck? You still got it stuffed in your jacket?”

Human shield, Jason thinks.

Except Lisle holds his arms, tight, while Brandi unzips his jacket, her ugly brown teeth smirking up at him.

“You should have had her suck it, ya know,” Lisle says. “She gives fantastic head.”

“What do you want?” Jason’s words are muddy with blood, and he has to spit, something red and hard, before he says it again. His pulse is pounding in his jaw and his eye while Brandi unties the towel, but she’s not holding on, and the baby falls straight off him. Jason’s arms jerk against Lisle’s to catch it but he’s too slow, and it falls, facedown, on the wet leaves and gravel at Jason’s feet.

“Jesus, don’t break the billion-dollar baby. Pick it up, shut it up!” Lisle snaps, and Brandi does, wrong, holding it out from her while it screams.

“Should I put it in the truck?”

“Hold it while Victor and me convince Jay to cut us in on this little thing he’s got going with Mr. and Mrs. Paul Nova,” Lisle says.

The baby’s screaming. If they were anywhere else, the sound might get someone’s attention, but here in Felony Flats, a baby sounding off means nothing. Jason could have got away, if not for Victor. If Lisle hadn’t brought backup, Jason thinks, he could’ve taken him. But then what? Run? And what about Penny? What about the kid?

Jason slumps back against his brother, who says, “Straighten up! Take it like a man, ya pussy, so I don’t feel like a shit for what Victor’s got to do.”

Jason doesn’t have it in him. A sound comes out of his mouth, like a dog’s whine. He just wants it to be over; he pushes his thighs together so he won’t piss himself.

Lisle rattles him again. “Man up, ya pussy!”

“Lisle!” Brandi’s eyes are wide, baby still crying at arm’s length, and she shakes it, skinny legs ringing like clappers on a bell. “Hurry the fuck up.”

“We want the money.” Lisle puts his mouth right up against Jason’s head; he can feel the bristle of his brother’s stubble, the edges of his teeth when he talks.

“Fuck you,” Jason exhales.

Victor comes at him again, and Jason braces, holding on to the knot of comfort that he’s still smarter than his idiot brother. This time Victor hits halfheartedly, a thump on his ribs.

“How do you think I got the money if we still got the kid?” Jason says, and you can practically hear the creak of the gears turning in Lisle’s fool head.

Umph!
Air is knocked out of Jason’s mouth, blood spraying, when Victor slugs him in the gut, and then Lisle’s pounding around his ears
and jaw.
Umph!
again and again, until his eyes go black and all he can hear is a dull ringing and, faintly, the familiar wailing of the baby.

“Ya can’t shake it like that, ya flaky!” Lisle yells at Brandi.

UMPH!
From the front, fucking Victor again. Jason sags, let Lisle hold all two hundred and twenty pounds of his ass up, break his own back for a change.

“Someone’s coming!”

“Shut it up!” Lisle’s got him around the chest now, breathing hard, and Jason’s boots scrape up gravel and leaves as they drag him under his armpits behind the Dumpster, throw him to the ground.

“We’re coming back,” he hisses, close enough that Jason can smell the liquor on his breath, and then, “Leave it be!”

Footsteps, running, an engine starts, sprays gravel, pinging against the metal sides of the Dumpster, stinging his bare head like shrapnel.

More footsteps, slower, a car door being opened.

Help
, he wants to say, but his jaw won’t open right.

On the other side of the Dumpsters, someone gags, and then the slap of vomit hitting the ground. A car door closes, another engine starts, and the car crunches slowly over leaves and gravel.

Jason’s eyes burn as he opens them, lids swollen like slabs of bacon, blood flooding in, breathing hard and shallow, gulping air, sweet cold air.

His eyes focus. Thank god; they left it. Next to him, flat on its back, sickly quiet in the raw air. Their eyes meet, and for the first time Jason notices something, a triangle of bright blue at four o’clock in the baby’s brown left eye. Jason lifts his right arm, pulls himself carefully across the gravel. He’s not in bad shape from his fall, just a scrape on his nose. Jason dusts the cinders and shreds of leaves off his forehead, then scoops him to his pounding chest and holds him there, his hand palming the small head.