Chosen (26 page)

S
ick. Chloe is doubled over by the Dumpsters, retching up tea and two coffees. She wants nothing more than to go home and crawl into bed, but first she has to figure it out: Where is Angus McAdoo? She starts the engine and drives northwest toward the city, crossing at the Burnside Bridge. She winds uphill toward Portland Heights, passing rain-laden cathedral pines in the failing light, squatting Craftsman bungalows and austere modern glass rectangles, stucco with neat chocolate-brown Tudor trim, a drive she could usually do in her sleep, but tonight she passes her own overgrown lawn and peeling-paint porch. She drives another three minutes uphill, turning streets, where was it? Somewhere on Patton, she remembers. Sweat prickles on her brow, slicks her armpits, as she turns up the steep street, the sidewalks here edged with thriving green moss. Big stone pillars, she remembers, gas lamps, near Vista…

Could this be it, with the Premier Properties For Sale sign? She pulls into the driveway. The Tudor is as closed as the face of an ornately carved, stopped grandfather clock. For sale—they’re gone. Chloe’s stomach clenches again; Heather was right! They gave the baby back, and they’ve fled! She grabs her cell phone, scrolls quickly
for Francie McAdoo’s number. It rings and rings. She clicks down to the next one,
FRANCIE CELL
. She presses Call.

“Hello?” Francie, agitated, sounds of a baby fussing lightly in the background. “Hello?”

“Hi, this is Chloe Pint—”

“I know, I saw you on caller ID. Can you hang on a minute?” She hears the ping of a car door opening, rustling of fabric, the baby quiets. “Sorry, we’re just arriving at the grocery store, and Angus lost his Binky. You were right about the pacifier; he loves that thing.”

Chloe snaps the phone closed in her hand. So they didn’t give the baby back. Heather must have been mistaken, about the crying. Chloe swallows again, nausea rolling her stomach. Maybe the baby she heard belonged to Jason’s brother and the crackie girlfriend. It could be any baby.

Sitting in Francie’s driveway, she replays the conversation with Heather, all the way back to the beginning. What is still bothering her? The thing about Heather and Eric, about Heather realizing she was trying to make Eric into something he wasn’t, about her being big enough to see that it wasn’t fair to him.
I boxed him in.

Chloe puts the car in gear, passing the street where Paul and Eva Nova live, the fluttering tails of a ragged yellow police tape straggling around a pine tree like a forgotten ribbon to bring the troops home. Paul, Chloe thinks, driving toward Strohecker’s. He is everything she wishes Dan would be.

Using her thumb on the keypad, before she can stop herself, Chloe sends Dan a text, sets him free:

CHANGE OF HEART, CHANGE OF PLANS. No Maui. Love you too.

I
NSIDE THE STORE, SHE
checks the coffee shop seating area, dark, empty, at five o’clock on Valentine’s Day, before she has to dash for the cold beverages, a Perrier, ginger ale, something bubbly and cold,
maybe Sprite. She knows Dan will accept her text without a struggle, maybe even relief (
Why do you keep hitting yourself with the hammer? ’Cause it feels so good when I stop
), and this makes her gag on her bile, slipping up and down her throat like oily salad dressing. Right in the aisle, she glug-glugs from the fizzy drink, the bubbles burning her nose, making her eyes water. She takes a shortcut down a side aisle and grabs a box of saltines too, a trick of the trade she learned from hanging out with forty-seven nauseated pregnant women the past two years, the only tip she may ever get from the job…

And then it hits her, standing by the dark coffee shop where she and Paul used to meet, chugging from a half-downed club soda with a box of saltines under her arm, desperate to quell the pervasive queasiness of the past few weeks…

Like paparazzi at a premiere, twin lightbulbs flash—one, and then another.

The baby!

A baby?

She flips open her cell phone, pushes the buttons to call 911.

But she doesn’t hit Send. She grabs a pregnancy test and heads for the checkout.

N
ight has fallen in shades of lavender and graphite, the end of Valentine’s Day in Portland. She cannot stop staring at the objects in her hands: the plastic stick with two lines and the blank face of her cell phone. In one hand, an answer to a very big question; in the other, no reply.

Then her phone rings, but it is not who she hoped.

“I saw you today, at the other apartment.”

It takes her a minute to place the woman’s voice; they haven’t spoken in months, and she sounds different, stronger.

“Who is this?”

“I think you care, and I know you got plenty of money. So I’m asking for help.”

“What do you mean?” But she knows.

“It’s about to get real bad. He thinks he can pull this off, but he can’t, and the baby, something’s wrong with it. It’s sick, doesn’t keep nothing down. And he’s, well, it’s bad. You know how he is…”

She does. She puts the plastic stick down, eyes on all the dark windows, showing nothing but her panicked reflection as she runs through the empty house to the front door, checking the locks.

She pulls the phone away from her ear, to hear if they’re still connected. No sound, no baby crying.

“Are you there?” she asks.

“Hurry” is the urgent answer.

I
t is pitch-dark now, and pouring rain, when she runs uphill through the quiet, moss-slick streets. The strands of police tape tied around the trees flash yellow as she passes breathless, sick. There is a light on downstairs, and his van in the driveway. A door is open on the side of the house, and she follows the cobbled path, pushing wet ferns and dripping hemlocks out of the way.

He is sweeping, the shushing of a broom, tinkling broken glass out the kitchen door, and there is blood on his hands.

“Vicious house cat?” she asks. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her.

“Steak attack.” He comes out into the night, the rain, closing the door to the kitchen softly behind him.

“Where’s your wife?” she asks, and he inclines his head toward the second story.

“You’re soaked. You must be freezing.” He cups her elbow in his palm, steers her toward his driveway. “I have some blankets in the van.”

In the stripped-down van, surrounded by neatly organized electrical tools and spools of wire, he wraps a quilted industrial blanket around her shoulders. She is shaking, fevered and nauseated. Her mind drifts back to the plastic stick and two little lines. It has to be wrong; pregnant doesn’t give you a fever. She’s just sick. When his hands hold her elbows, graze her forearms to grip her hot palms, she leans into him.

“You’re burning up.”

“I’m here to help you,” she says.

He whispers her name, and his lips bump her forehead, her cheek, and she tilts her face up before pulling away, her features perfect under the van’s dome light.

“No. I came for money. I can’t tell you the details—”

“But, how…” His face is heartbreaking to watch, a battle between shining optimism and guarded resolution.

“Please. I didn’t say you should be hopeful. I just need money, quickly, everything you can give me.”

He leaves her alone in the van and is back before the light times out with a navy Adidas bag.

“I knew you wouldn’t have a big enough bag,” he says, and they smile thinly at each other. She wraps her sweatshirt sleeves around the handles before she takes it from him, surprised at its weight. When she tries to count it all later, at red lights on the drive southeast, she won’t be able to.

“This isn’t easy for me,” he says, nodding at the bag, at her.

“I know.”

He moves toward the front of the van as she reaches for the door handle. They look at each other under the dome light.

“I have to go,” she says as he asks, “Where are we going?”

“No. I have to go alone.”

“I can’t in good conscience send you off into the night with—”

“Trust me?” She cuts him off.

“Yes.”

“Then just wait.” But she is afraid she is already too late.

She reaches for the van door again, but he grabs her wrist, spins her back to him, kisses her hard on the mouth.

“Please be careful,” he whispers, his breath hot against her ear. “I always knew it.”

“What?”

“That you were my angel.”

And you are everything I hope to have, she thinks, her footsteps echoing in the empty street.

“I
can’t stay long. You’ll have a few hours, six at the most.” The blinds are drawn, the small room chillingly quiet. It hurts to look at him in dim light, his face swollen and split, but she is afraid to look anywhere else. Despite the emptiness, the lack of personal belongings, the walls feel closer than the last time she was here. The stench, mold, and smoke are the same, and something else. Bleach; she sees the carton on the kitchen table. A faucet drips. Over one arm, she is carrying the navy bag; over the other, her small purse, jammed with a trial-size can of soy formula, the first thing she saw on the drugstore shelf, in case she was not too late, and a pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves. Also, a plastic stick with two dark blue lines, because she cannot believe it, had to keep the proof with her.

She puts the gloves on now before handing them the navy bag, before touching anything. She will wear them as long as she is in the apartment.

“I can’t give you a ride. You understand.” They nod; they do.

He nods at the bleach, the empty apartment behind her. “We were never here.”

“No,” she agrees.

She pulls open the door to the outside, wincing as the brass flashing screams. None of them want to be seen. They all exhale—silence. She extends the heavy bag toward him, but the woman intercepts it.

“Thank you very much,” she says firmly.

Then the woman leaves first, hunched in her duffle coat, the navy bag slung over her shoulder, a hat covering her short hair in the bitter rain. She is hugging another bag, a garbage bag, concealed like a pregnancy, under her jacket. Then their eyes meet, but it is just a moment, and neither of them says anything.

He steps out after her, but then ducks back under the light fixture. Together, their eyes drift to the still bassinet in the corner. He clutches her elbow, above the yellow rubber glove, in his palm.

“Thank you,” his voice rumbles, the growl of a dog.

“
Vaya con Dios
,” she whispers, and they disappear into the darkness and the rain. She closes the door behind them, locks it. In a matter of hours, she will call the police. But now, she straightens her rubber gloves and goes to take care of the baby.

E
verything is different; the orange-and-brown fabric, the shape of the seats, the stink of jet fuel and stale air spitting out from the vent overhead, the ladies in blue dresses walking around checking up on everyone like teachers during a test, and the little tables that go up and down from the seat in front of her. What is the same: the feeling of public transportation, of waiting for someone to take her somewhere, the weight of an arm draped over her shoulders like a fallen tree branch, and the emptiness about her forearms, thighs, and middle, where recently there had been the wriggling weight of a baby.

A missing baby is familiar, the scooped-out jack-o’-lantern feeling of her belly after Buddy, cramps like fists wringing out her hollowed womb. Oh, Buddy, she thinks as she looks out the window. She does not think of the other baby.

Penny tips her head to Jason’s shoulder, and he palms her knee. Like a rocking teeter-totter they have been banging up and down, jerking each other, only now peaceful, comfortable. Balance, no more see, no more saw, just two folks leaving on a jet plane, thousands of dollars in a gym bag at her feet. “I’ll carry it,” she’d told him, counting, in the airport bathroom, what was left after the tickets.

They have a blue blanket spread over their laps like pioneers in a
wagon. Underneath, Jason’s hand moves north up her thigh as the engines beneath their feet hum and vibrate, come to life.

She should be scared, first time in the air. Should be crying, or excited, worried about the garbage bag of their entire earthly belongings that the airport woman took from them, promising it would be there when they got to Mexico. Jason’s hand comes to clamp down over her crotch, tingling with the jiggling of the seat, and it stays there, comfortably.

She looks down at her own hands spread on top of the blanket on her thighs, stubby nails, no longer bloody with the picking. Clean hands. She pictures them, warm red dirt curling up under her fingertips. She turns to Jason, his broken face, ugly as hers now. Behind his scratched-up sunglasses his swollen eyes are closed, head tipped back against the seat as the plane tilts into the sky. She imagines the rich soil crumbling between her palms, sifting it, moist and dry as she digs holes.

She rests her head on his shoulder and whispers, “When we get there, I’ll grow things. We’ll have a garden.”

F
rom the minute you start the adoption process, the telephone takes on a special significance in your life. You anticipate The Phone Call the way another woman imagines the two blue lines appearing on an EPT stick. You fantasize about it, where you will be when it happens, what it will mean. You savor it, the fantasy of it, and for the first few weeks, it is like a sugar cube melting on your tongue, the waiting, the delicious possibility that any day could be the day that the phone rings, and you might think, “Oh, it’s probably my friend calling back with the answer to that recipe question, or my husband just calling to chat,” except maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s the agency.

It’s the call that every couple imagines with the wild unpredictability not present in a typical pregnancy. At least then you know that probably anytime within a six-week window, your Braxton Hicks contractions will stand up and demand your attention, or your water will break in the grocery checkout line, all setting into motion a fairly predictable chain of events. A trip to the hospital or birth center, and somehow or other, within a set amount of time, your baby will be born.

For adoptive parents, you can go from planning a romantic jaunt
off to Cabo for the weekend to dashing around buying an automatic bottle sterilizer. This call can take many forms, from “Hi, this is Chloe Pinter from the Chosen Child. I just wanted to call and let you know that one of our birth mothers has chosen your portfolio. She’s due in March,” to “Hi, this is Chloe Pinter from the Chosen Child. Grab your car seat and meet me at Good Samaritan in an hour. The hospital social worker just called with a woman who gave birth last night and wants to meet you and sign papers today.”

What this means is that you never, ever ignore the phone, not in the middle of a dinner party, your favorite TV show, or spontaneous sex. This means you interrupt your best friend’s ravings about a trip to Indonesia so that you can just, do you mind, check the call waiting, just one second, please?

And there are other phone calls. The ones where you see the agency phone number on caller ID and your heart pounds and you imagine a pink mewling newborn, mentally clear your calendar, only to have it be a routine update, or asking for last year’s tax returns to augment your file. Or worse, the call to let you know that the birth mother who had chosen you, whose baby you felt move through her stretched blue-white skin, after you had picked a name and lined up clothes on pink-and-white hangers upstairs, had changed her mind, she didn’t want you to be the parents after all.

It is the day after Valentine’s Day when the phone rings in the nearly empty carriage house in Portland Heights. Eva is in the bath, scalding herself under the burning straight-hot spigot, her winter-white Scandinavian skin blooming crimson, an agonizing inch at a time. The bathroom is filled with steam, the mirror obscured, condensation forms on the underside of the ceiling. Paul had pointed this out to her the other day, said blandly that she might try opening the window or wiping it down afterward, “Or else we’ll have mold.” And in reply she had glared at him with such scorn. How dare he even talk about mold, house maintenance, depreciation, now?

But the phone is ringing, so Eva gets out, dripping, because Magnus and Paul are out, lightheaded from the temperature change, naked, gripping the wall as she makes her way to the bedroom. She is breathless when she answers what will be remembered forever as the most significant call of her life, sending all the agency phone calls spiraling into obscurity. Two years since they first signed with the Chosen Child, and Eva realizes she is still waiting for a phone call to tell her if she is a mother.

“Hello, Mrs. Nova. This is Detective Haberman.”

And she sags into the bed, dripping, shivering, as his words wash over her in jagged fragments.

“A breakthrough…at Good Samaritan Hospital…need a member of the immediate family to come and verify the identity—”

Breathlessly she waits for the next word, just the difference between two letters means everything.

“…the identity of the baby.”

“The baby?” Her voice is a croak, a strangled whisper.

“The baby,” he repeats.
Baby, not body
.

And for the first time since the blue lines on the first of dozens of EPTs years ago, she feels the utter joy, the unbridled hopefulness, as the words “I’m going to be a mother” run through her head like ticker tape.

It is a full minute before she can steady her hands enough to call Paul, and she revels in this, replaying the conversation, rubbing over the facts like polished stones. A baby boy matching Wyeth’s description found alone in an apartment in Southeast, apparently healthy, medical staff keeping him for observation as a precaution. “I understand he’s taking a bottle right now,” Haberman had said with a smile in his voice, and Eva’s milk surged, dripped onto her thighs as she sat, running in rivulets onto the bedspread.

It has taken the most extreme of circumstances to shake her, to make her realize the pure preciousness of what was there all along. It
has taken the icy fear, the two-week sojourn to the edge of the abyss, to blow the bogging postpartum fog off her, and now, as she jerks on her clothes in frantic motions, she feels more alive than she ever has, running down the stairs barefoot, the phone in one hand, car keys in the other, as she gallops toward her son, her future.