Chosen (3 page)

Eva is silent, the car filled with the sound of her breathing. She yawns open her mouth and wiggles her lower jaw back and forth like an anxious mare, and while Paul knows she is so congested she is trying to clear her ears, he feels a deep stab of annoyance. He keeps going.

“I’m just so sick of talking about birth mothers and agencies and caseworkers and babies and birth and placentas—”

“Nobody said ‘placenta’ tonight.”

He pulls into their driveway and they sit in the running car, neither one making a move to get out.

“I just remember that night when we were in Costa Rica at your brother’s and we went outside, and the sky was thick with stars. Remember? Everything seemed so clear, so simple. I felt like you and
I were all that mattered in the universe, and I wonder, sometimes, how we went from that to this.”

Eva doesn’t respond. She takes her index finger, slightly greasy from turkey skin, and traces her signature swirls and paisley doodles on the condensation of the passenger-side window. Months later, after the unthinkable has happened, before the police impound her car, Paul will sit in this same seat, in his own driveway, nowhere to go but desperate to unzip out of his skin, his life, and the morning dew will make the pattern reappear. He will wonder how he ever thought things were anything but perfect on this Thanksgiving night.

But now Eva breaks the silence and says, “Rock paper scissors for who gets to give Henry his shot.”

They both throw rock, three times in a row, and then simultaneously, five pairs of scissors.

“Great minds…” Eva giggles.

“I’ll stab the cat.” Paul sighs, and she tips her head onto his shoulder, and they laugh, friends again, one of a hundred, a thousand, little repairs they do to the fabric of their relationship.

Earlier that month, Eva had told him she was doing an evening prenatal yoga class at their gym, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a man reflected in the studio mirror, coming in from the parking lot through the gym’s glass doors.

“And I got this incredible rush of, of
attraction
just from this partial glance, and it was so strong, so visceral.”

“Uh-huh,” Paul had said, shoving his hands in his pockets in an attempt to be casual but thinking, Why are you telling me this?

“I was almost embarrassed to look, but the feeling was so intense that I couldn’t
not
look, so I turned all the way around, and it was you.”

P
AUL UNLOCKS THEIR FRONT
door, his hand on her elbow as she goes over the threshold in the dark. They are greeted by the tangy stench of cat piss—Henry, the diabetic cat, is ruining their hard
wood floors, one dark stain at a time. Paul tells her to go to bed, he’ll handle it, but then he can’t find either the tabby or the puddle.

Upstairs, Eva is sitting up in bed trying to hold her nostrils open with her fingers. Paul suggests a Breathe Right strip, and she nods. He brings her one, and she tilts her face up to him like a little girl, asks him to put it on while she holds her nose in the right position. Afterward, he kisses her forehead.

“Okay?” he asks.

“No, I’m miserable!” She starts to cry.

Paul opens his hand, lets the heavy boots he is carrying crash to the floor from hip height. He undresses slowly, debating if he should ask what’s wrong. He does, thinking, Ticket for one on the Hormone Coaster, please.

“It’s Amber. And the baby. I wonder about them.”

The baby that had almost been their daughter, a year earlier. Amber, a pudgy thirteen-year-old birth mother, her own mother only twenty-eight, had chosen the Novas as the adoptive parents for her baby. Chloe Pinter had arranged their first meeting at a Red Lobster, an obese pair of slow-blinking, loud-chewing women. Paul’s tongue-tied comment, “You could be sisters,” had offended them equally. They had strung the agency along for six months, huge expensive meals, dragging Chloe through the grocery store for hours. Chloe told Eva and Paul that Amber and her mother had each pushed a cart filled with Doritos, jumbo boxes of Froot Loops, doughnuts, crumb cakes.

“Doesn’t the agency do nutritional counseling, or anything?” Eva had asked, and Chloe had sighed, said it was a really delicate situation.

“I won’t lie to you guys,” she had told them one chilly October evening as they sat on Chloe’s overstuffed floral couch, rain pounding on the dormered windows of her cozy Troutdale office. “This one is not rock solid. Let’s just wait and see. They say they are still on for our meeting at Pizza Hut next Thursday, and we’re supposed to work
on the birth plan. Who’s in the delivery room, who cuts the cord, who holds the baby first, all that jazz.”

And then a week before her due date, Amber’s mother had called Chloe to say they were keeping the baby, would raise it themselves, thanks for the food and everything.

“Yes.” Paul doesn’t say more now, peeling back the covers. It had surprised him how quickly he had gotten on board with the concept of adoption. Selfishly, he relished the idea of bringing a baby home like a puppy—no, that’s not fair, something more difficult and precious, a baby monkey, maybe—and adjusting only to one new variable without having to factor in Eva’s recovery, the waves of hormones, and her changed body (how he loved her old flat stomach with the soft, fine blond hair around her perfect oval belly button!). But when adoption was presented in the specific, in the form of the gum-smacking Amber, Paul can admit to himself that he was shaken. He had felt such relief when it was over, no longer worried about their half-wit, sleepy-eyed Baby Huey of a daughter who would be knocked up at age twelve herself, nature’s triumph over nurture.

Paul gets into bed, wraps around his wife’s back, rubbing the bumpy landscape of their baby, their son, growing in her belly. “Shhh…” is all he says. Somewhere downstairs, Henry the cat lets out a plaintive meow. “Shh,” Paul whispers.

T
he Cherokee’s engine whines as Chloe drives uphill toward home, a run-down former fraternity annex house she and Dan rent in Portland Heights. Beside her on the seat is the second cooling Fred Meyer bag with mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, and green bean casserole. She flips her cell phone open, no messages, her stomach queasy from her trip to the apartment complex. Her boss will hit the ceiling if Jason and Penny fall through, after all the money the agency has spent on them. Chloe puts the phone back in her purse but leaves it turned on. It may be Thanksgiving, but as the Chosen Child’s only domestic case manager, she’s still on call.

Chloe looks at her hands on the steering wheel, the loose ring with its fake diamond slipping around her left ring finger. They stopped shaking when she crossed the Burnside Bridge, her heart rate evened out once she turned south on Vista. They have no car—what’s Jason Xolan going to do, follow her by bus? Despite the assault charges on his record, she’s not afraid of him. Yet. He is simply a man cornered by circumstances, dependent on a woman, and that can be a dangerous sort of animal. This is familiar territory to Chloe; there is one of these waiting for her inside at home.

Inside the dark living room, Dan is sulking in front of ESPN, bundled in a DaKine sweatshirt and thick fleece socks. Last week he
put clear packing tape along their old windowpanes, complaining of the draft, but he still walks around hunched over like he is bracing against an icy draft as he scales Everest.

“Hi, babe.” She takes off her coat and drapes it over the arm of the couch he is curled on.

“It’s fucking freezing in here, and I’ve got the thermostat turned all the way up.” Dan doesn’t have a car, has to ride his bike home from the bus line, almost four miles uphill, every night.

“You should have called me—I could have picked you up tonight.”

“I thought you said you had to do a dinner thing with someone.”

“I did. I’m done.” Chloe squints at the thermostat, walks over, and holds her hand over the register. “It’s blowing cold; did you check the pilot?”

“Yes,” he snaps.

“Well, did you call the landlord?”

He doesn’t answer.

In the breakfast nook she sets a table, tries to pry him away from the TV. “Honey. Dinner.”

“No turkey?” He walks in and leans against the doorframe, purposefully lifts his sweatshirt in a stretch to expose his delicious rows of sinewy abdominals.

“I got this on the agency credit card when I was getting a dinner for some birth parents—thought Beverly would question more than one turkey.”

“We can’t have Thanksgiving without turkey!”

Chloe’s face burns. She didn’t think he cared, thought he liked being frugal more than traditional. Whenever she makes an effort to cook, he has already eaten, or isn’t hungry. He’s lost twenty pounds since they left Tarifa. “I have a chicken in the freezer.” Chloe gets it out, and it thunks on the counter like a brick. “I can thaw it out, I think.”

“Forget it,” Dan says gently, taking her plate to heat in the microwave. “This is fine.” He picks up the freezer-burned chicken. “Good
to know we have this. I could use it if we need to prop a door open, maybe, or if it gets windy, it’d be great to hold some papers down.” He smiles when she laughs at his joke, kissing her head before sliding into the seat across from her. Her stomach unfurls for the first time since seeing the bassinet at the apartment. The candlelight dances its reflection on the rain-smattered window by the breakfast nook, and their plates of side dishes send up steam. His feet brush against hers under the table.

“Poor McAdoos. I was just at their birth mother’s, remember Penny and Jason?”

“The ex-cons?”

“Yes, who I finally got set up in the apartment complex in Southeast. I went to take them Thanksgiving dinner—”

“So they have our turkey?”

“Or we have half their sides, however you want to think of it. When I got there, Jason’s brother and girlfriend had moved in, and they had filled the place with baby stuff.”

“Oh. Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. The birth father said they just hadn’t told the brother about the adoption yet, but it seems like—”

“A red flag?” Dan offers, serving himself more stuffing. It tickles her when he uses adoption lingo. She rubs the arch of her foot over the top of his fleecy sock.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Who’re the adoptive parents?” Dan does this sometimes, acts like he is listening, then carelessly reveals he wasn’t.

“The McAdoos.”

“Ah, Francie Much Ado About Nothing. Serves her right, calling here twenty times a day.”

Dan is exaggerating; Francie calls several times a week, Chloe’s mistake for giving her their home number. In the boss’s eyes, though, keeping the McAdoos happy is critical. Francie is a Boarder, a client who frequents the adoption message boards and has the capacity to
make or break the agency reputation with a handful of posts. Francie’s entries have been more positive than negative since they got a placement, bringing in a dozen new referrals, over twenty thousand dollars in nonrefundable application fees. It is a wonderful thing, except that Chloe is solely responsible for getting and then keeping the birth mothers for all these high-profile, edgy Boarders. Sometimes it is all Chloe can do to stop herself from approaching young pregnant women on the street, business card in hand. Her most recent stroke of genius was to put flyers up in Portland Heights, at the swanky grocery store and the gym—not for potential birth mothers, but to hook adoptive parents who want to believe that there are birth mothers up here in the Heights, nice college-bound white girls who “got in trouble.”

Her boss Judith had actually kissed her forehead when Chloe told her what she was doing. “Brilliant! And then once we get them in here, we’ll direct them toward China, something more stable. Nonrefundable application fees! Put some flyers up in Lake Oswego too—see if we can get them into Starbucks!”

“H
OW WAS YOUR DAY
?” Chloe asks Dan as she carries their dishes to the sink. He is behind her, putting the leftovers in the fridge. Their elbows and shoulders bump comfortably in the narrow galley kitchen.

“Shitty. I need a new job. I need a car.”

Chloe nods; this is an old conversation. In the four years they have been together, two in Tarifa, two here in Portland, Dan has never had his own car. “What kind of job were you thinking, for the winter?”

“One of the guys does mountain bikes in the summer, then teaches snowboarding up at Mount Hood.”

“But it’s practically winter now. Don’t you think those jobs are snatched up early on?”

“God, why are you always so negative?”

They never argued in Spain; here it seems like every week.

C
HLOE HAD STUMBLED ON
Dan in a wind-whipped town in southern Spain at the end of her backpacking tour around Europe after college graduation. Sipping sangria at an adjacent table in the Intercontinental Café, in sun-bleached Birdwells and a hulking Bull jacket made of windsurfing sails, he was the most edible thing she’d ever seen. When he opened his beautiful mouth and spoke casual, perfect, California-grown English, she leaned over and kissed it, so tired of mangled, deeply accented pickup lines over the past three months.

He was a bit of a pothead, she thought, but so were they all, back then. He was older, twenty-five, and had lived in Tarifa for several years, teaching windsurfing, working part-time at the Bull sail shop, banging everything from cute tourists to skinny-legged local goat-herd girls. He fell hard for Chloe too.

Her friends left, bored with Dan’s surf buddies, longing for serious relationships, convenience, fast food back home, but Chloe stayed on, renting an efficiency at El Beaterio, a former thirteenth-century convent. Dan joined her, moving out of the grungy grotto of rooms down by the fish factory where he lived with Kurt and Paolo from the shop, hanging his damp surf shorts over the towel bar by her curiously small square bathtub.

Chloe took a job training horses for a beach riding operation by the hotels. She never got used to the rats that ran underfoot like cats or the rudeness of the German girls who led the tours and treated her like a stable mucker instead of a trainer.

A year passed. During the windy season, even her eyebrows were being blown into disarray by the
poniente
wind. Chloe went to the Internet café more and more, browsing social work jobs back in the U.S. She attended the Escuela Hispalense on the edge of town and learned enough Andalusian dialect to give tours at the stable. The German girls laughed nastily as she lisped her way through the monologues about the wind farms, Guzman El Bueno, pointed out the coastline of Morocco across the straits.

That February, the wind changed direction for a week. Just as the verb conjugations in her second semester were getting complicated and she thought the way the relentless
levante
wind blew her hair against her cheeks might make her crazy, Chloe bought a
tarjeta telefónica
and called her father from the pay phone at the edge of the cobbled town square.

“I’ve applied online for a position at a small adoption agency outside of Portland,” she told him, and as she spoke, she loved the way the English language tumbled out of her mouth, tasting like a home-cooked meal, like mashed potatoes and roasted chicken.

“Might be good to put your degree to use,” Dr. Pinter agreed, his toddler twins from his new marriage screaming in the background.

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said, smiling, and she wanted to tell him more, how she would be the director of the entire domestic program, but he excused himself to help put the twins to bed.

Two weeks later, she was in an Extended Stay America outside Portland, loving American shopping (“J.Crew has stores now!”), Starbucks coffee, and, more than anything, her brand-new job at the Chosen Child. A month after that, Chloe had found her dream house, and Dan sent her an e-mail with his attached flight itinerary from Madrid to Portland and four words:
I’m nothing without you.

A
LOT CAN CHANGE
in two years, Chloe thinks, washing the leftovers off their plates. She figures if they are fighting tonight, they might as well fight about something that matters to her. She follows Dan into the living room.

“I’m only asking because I want to know what our plans are, if we’re going to get married, and how that fits, timewise, with—”

“So now we’re going to fight about setting a wedding date again? Woo-hoo! I can’t wait!” He turns on the TV, a period of punctuation; they’re done.

Chloe hates how they go at it in sound bites, thinks they could solve more if they just had it all out, but they are both haters of conflict.
As usual, they will go to bed in silence, Chloe first, pretending she doesn’t hear him when he comes upstairs, and in the morning, it will be as though none of it happened.

Only tonight, Chloe falls asleep easily and is surprised to find Dan beside her when her cell phone rings at 2:17 a.m.

“Hi, this is the answering service. You have a birth mother named Mandy? She said she’s bleeding and needs a ride to the hospital.”

Chloe is in her closet now, pulling out a long-sleeved black T-shirt, a pair of brown velvet overalls. Mandy is more than a month from her due date; this is too early. From Portland Heights, it will take Chloe at least forty minutes to get to Mandy and Dwight’s apartment complex in Gresham. Her boss Judith lives ten minutes from the complex, more like eight at this time of night. But of course she can’t get out of bed and go get her—this is the difference between owning the agency and working there for eleven dollars an hour, no health benefits.

Chloe sighs and hangs up.

“Work?” Dan asks softly, and Chloe thinks from his tone that they are ready to make up.

“Yeah, a birth mother is bleeding, needs a ride to Good Sam.” She is poised to leave, her hand on the doorjamb. She tries again. “Earlier, I was only saying there are things involved in planning a wedding, things you have to book in advance.”

There is a long silence. From the hallway light shining on Dan’s perfect profile, she can see his eyes are closed, but it is a feigned sleep face. She continues, “Look, babe, you’re the one who mentioned getting married in the first place. I never brought it up, you asked me. All I need to know is when.”

“Honestly, Chlo”—he doesn’t open his eyes, addressing the ceiling—“the way you’re acting about this makes me sorry I asked.”

She leaves the room without answering, letting his own words echo in the silence of her wake. It is a little trick she learned from him.