Chosen (5 page)

“Mr. Nova?” The admitting nurse leans her bulk over the desk. “You can come on back now.”

Paul does not waste time on a long good-bye with Chloe Pinter. He needs to get this hand sewn up, needs to get home and get some rest so he can be ready for Eva, for their baby.

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17249

Posted: Fri, Nov 24 2000 4:24 am

In the predawn of Black Friday, Francie McAdoo’s burning eyes scan the boards. The most recent post is from
ANGIENMARK
4
EVER
, dated just minutes earlier.

Our CW just called, BM is in hospital with bleeding!!!!! BF told CW to tell us not to come yet!!!

What does this mean???? Hugs please!!!

Francie clicks New Message. First the obligatory; have to reply to everyone so you’re sure to get lots of attention when it’s your turn.

(((ANGIE))) Don’t listen to the CW!!! I would not trust anyone—I would go to the hospital myself! ((((hugs)))) and (((((prayers))))))

And now on to her stuff: Francie’s heart speeds up as she types, fingers flying. Her high school typing teacher promised a good secretarial career if she focused on her form. Look at her now! Sitting in her Portland Heights mansion, queen of the message boards, she unloads, sixty words per minute.

Bad news:

she begins, sure to grab attention.

Pottery Barn, where I purchased my crib, rocker, and changing table, has discontinued the nightstand in their “Thomas” line. (See photo in profile.)
My IRL friends thought I was crazy, buying out the Thomas collection after the fourth IVF failed, but you ladies supported me, promised there was a baby in my future. You knew it would be therapeutic to paint the room Caraway Seed (before you saw that color in every Starbucks downtown, LOL), and I loved assembling the crib, ordering the lighting, trying out rockers vs. gliders. But now there’s no nightstand and what do I do? Should I try ebay or—

Francie stops.

I.CANNOT.DO.THIS.ANYMORE.

The truth: CW called tonight, the baby has a crib, in the apartment with his parents. The worst part is, it is my fault.

One week ago, after our dinner meeting with BM and BF, John (DH) went to get the car, and BM asked CW to go with her to the bathroom, and I was alone (a setup, I see now!) with BF. He started talking about the pain this was causing BM, how hard it would be to give the baby up, how they needed $$$. I pretended not to understand, but oh, I do.

Give them money? On top of everything they have paid to the agency and invested in this? Do they buy this baby, the son of a criminal, a biracial thug? And the birth mother: ugly, scars all over her face, pores as big as pomegranate seeds, thank god it’s not a girl. The father is okay-looking, more than that, sinister, “dangerously attractive,” like Bruce Willis crossed with Samuel Jackson…

Francie has to be careful here. She had taken some heat on the boards and IRL for her posting earlier this month, when they were first chosen by Jason and Penny and she was freaking out a little over the race thing—how Chloe had shown their profile to biracial parents when their preferences were clear: white healthy newborn.

Eva told her that apparently some people think she’s a racist!

Her phone was ringing within minutes after she posted her rant against Chloe Pinter and the Chosen Child. It was Eva Nova, spouting platitudes about the hand of fate, the right baby choosing its parents.

“Not that we’re going to, but John says we could sue the agency for this.”

“But, Francie, it’s your baby…,” Eva had said.

“Oh, we’ve decided to go ahead and do it,” Francie said peevishly.

“You say it like you’ve resigned yourself to the hassle of changing long-distance phone carriers.”

In a whisper, Francie had confessed to Eva the most politically incorrect sentiment of all: “I didn’t want anyone to be able to tell, to know he was adopted. John and I just wanted to pretend that he was ours.”

I’m afraid this is our last chance,

she writes now.

I need for this to happen for me,

[BACKSPACE, DELETE]

, us.

The only thing worse than my own disappointment and pain, Francie thinks, is watching others experience it for me. There are women on the boards who love that attention, the pages of parenthetical hugs, whose signature line includes every Angel In Heaven’s due date, every Angel On Earth’s due date, all the babies that might have been theirs, wearing their sorrow like merit badges.

Francie used to do it too, but another disappointment, this potential rejection—from common criminals—is starting to feel personal, like there is something wrong with
her.

Now Francie types, hands shaking:

Do I buy this baby? Is this my last chance? What about genetics? What about bonding? What about—

What about John? Her husband was fifty-four, more luke than warm on the adoption option. How much further down this road can she expect him to follow, writing checks in silence?

They met nine years ago when Francie was the Realtor lucky enough to land the listing of an authentic turn-of-the-century Tudor mansion in Portland Heights. John was the newly divorced dot-com millionaire geek relocating from California. They drove to the address in his 700 Series BMW. He had a bottle of wine in the trunk that they drank on the dusty stairs, Francie trying to make her mouth dainty as she sipped straight from the bottle. He talked about architects and period pieces, and instead of his thinning reddish hair, his perpetual limp, Francie focused on his eyes, which, behind his glasses, were a lovely shade of blue.

Within the year, John had invited her to move into the house they carefully remodeled. He gave her a platinum card, didn’t blink when she bought a bedroom set that cost more than her ancient Jetta, then replaced her car with a Mercedes SUV, a two-carat diamond dangling from the rearview mirror.

That fall, Francie booked a table at a Greek restaurant that was meant to be festive, but was simply loud, for the first dinner with John’s grown daughter, Melinda.

“So, Lindy, tell me about college. What’s your major?” John had said, swallowing his drink.

“Women’s studies,” Melinda had huffed, blowing her hair up off her forehead and glancing around the restaurant. “I told you last year.”

She was wearing a huge plaid flannel shirt over a man’s ribbed undershirt, dark jeans that were not hiding her saddlebags and broad hips, and those clunky black shoes! Nineteen years old, all the time and money and opportunity in the world to exercise, to care for her looks, the burning metabolism of youth, and
that’s
how she chose to present herself? Francie made a mental note not to ask her to be part of the wedding party, as she had originally thought she might.

Melinda refused to stay at the house, told her father to drive her to the airport to catch an earlier flight. After they dropped her off, Francie said gently, “I’m sorry. I know you looked forward to this.”

“It’s all right,” John said, hands tight on the wheel as they crossed the Burnside Bridge.

“I won’t ever let our children treat you like that.”

There was a long pause, and then John had said carefully, “Is that very important to you, that we have children?”

“Yes! What? Of course!”

“All right,” John said evenly. Over the next seven years, he did not resist any of the process. He used those same two words,
all right,
with varying inflection, consternation, aggravation, and finally resignation, as they navigated the quest for parenthood.

When Francie underwent her third in vitro, John had surgery on the ropes of hideously huge, painful varicose veins that gnarled his calves. They convalesced together in the front living room, moss velvet drapes drawn, watching endless movies, passing pillows and pints of Dulce de Leche. They got rid of the authentic, horsehair-stuffed period couch and bought something squishy and leather—“and if chocolate milk or sticky fingers get on it, it’s wipeable!”—at City Liquidators.

Francie believed that the more still she was, the better the chance that her embryos would burrow. She was almost thirty-nine, one hundred and forty-five miserable pounds from the hormone shots. They had twin Mac laptops on their laps, John making connections in Asia, where his hobby microbrew had a strange but passionate following, Francie chatting on her seven message boards, filling online shopping carts with maternity clothes from Pea in the Pod, waiting to push “checkout.” She talked about their baby in a hopeful, superstitious whisper. And then Francie bled. Thank god for the wipeable leather couch.

John’s veins receded, and came back worse. Francie bought him diabetic hose to wear under his suits when he took those long flights to China and Singapore. He was overseas when their fertility doctor, a soft-spoken man who wore ties decorated with cartoon sperm and ova, told Francie that they had done all they could.

She had to wait to call John in Singapore until the next morning to share the news. “He thinks adoption is really our best option.”

A long pause, slight crackling over the thousands of miles that separated them, and then, quietly, “All right.”

I
N THE LAVENDER PREDAWN
of Black Friday, Francie reads over her post. Exhaustion, seven years of this ride, have worn her down, but sharpened her edges too. Sometimes she has flashes of recognition, of how she might be perceived, misunderstood.

[SELECT ALL, DELETE]

She types:

(((Angie))) Think positive—I am sure it will all work out. Trust your CW; she will keep you informed.

We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with friends from the agency who are due with a boy at the same time as our BM. Hard to believe this time next year our sons will be sitting between us eating mashed sweet potatoes at the same table!

But as Francie hits Post, she knows in her heart of hearts this is not true, that at least one person will be absent from the happy future Thanksgiving scene she imagines.

Quickly, she opens a new browser window and begins searching: “dark wood distressed nursery nightstands.”

I
t is 7:30 Monday morning, rain streaking down the windows of the bedroom. Chloe hears the shower cut off, watches from the bed while Dan walks in, naked, pulling on his gray boxer briefs, then jeans, then orange rainproof pants. He has perfect lines to his body, and as he stretches his arms over his head, just the right amount of muscle to his naturally skinny frame. He is pulling on his rain jacket when she says, “I can give you a ride to the MAX line, babe.”

“I didn’t know you were awake.” He startles; endearing. Sometimes she can see the little boy under the man, and it makes her heart lurch.

In his mother’s home in San Diego, the entire stairwell is an ascending tribute to her only child—from his twinkly-eyed infancy to chipmunk-cheeked toddlerhood, every beige-background school picture, his choirboy days, highlighted newspaper clippings that mentioned his high school soccer achievements, to the most recent, right before he left for Europe, a stint as an Abercrombie and Fitch model.

“Is this
you
?” Chloe had asked when he took her home for the first time. Standing in the middle of a sea of vacant-eyed, straight-haired, bored-looking women: Dan, naked, chest shaved and oiled, abs flexed, casually holding a T-shirt with one finger hooked in the collar to cover his groin. “When was this? You look—”

“Yeah, yeah, move along, folks, nothing to see here.” Dan had nudged her up the stairs with his duffel bag, and when they were in his old bedroom with the door closed, she pushed him flat on his back on his twin bed and pounced on top of him.

Now Dan crosses their bedroom and sits down next to her, feathering his fingers through her hair. “Where are you going this morning?”

“Southeast, for a birth mother’s doctor’s appointment. But I can drop you off.”

Dan strips off his crinkling orange rain jacket, lies down next to her, and rests his head on her chest, cupping her breast through her tank top.

“You know you’re my transportation queen, don’t you? Driving Miss Daisy.” He kisses her neck, and she thinks, Birth moms keep her waiting all the time, so what if she’s a few minutes late?

C
HLOE PARKS NEXT TO
the Dumpsters at the squat, stucco apartment complex in Southeast, an area of Portland known as Felony Flats. Last year she convinced Judith to pay Julio the landlord a flat five hundred dollars a year to accept any birth parents they cosign with, regardless of their record or lifestyle. So far they have had seven birth mothers living here, some with their husbands, boyfriends, other children, though they usually move on quickly. Only Heather and Penny are here now.

She checks around the car before she gets out as she gathers her file, cell phone, and purse. There is nowhere in the city where she is truly nervous for her safety, but this, and maybe a few sections of North Portland, are as close as it comes.

Heather and her son Michael live in 12, on the ground floor, across from Jason and Penny. Chloe glances toward their apartment, blinds pulled low, as she trudges through the muddy pathway in the courtyard, the mulch worn thin, littered with cigarette butts sucked into the quagmire.

Heather opens on her first knock.

“Chloe, you’re late!” she says as she buttons her son’s raincoat. “My appointment is at nine thirty, and we’ve got to get the car seat in and stuff.” She hands Chloe Michael’s car seat, covered in mashed granola bar bits.

“Sorry. Traffic, weather.” Chloe waggles her fingers at Michael, hiding behind his mother’s gray pilled sweatpants.

“Michael, honey, say hi.” Heather is flustered, brushing her hair back toward her dangling ponytail, and Chloe is once again taken with how beautiful she is, the sharp angles of her rosy cheeks, everything in her face fresh without makeup. You could open any magazine and see models, albeit with straight teeth, a team of stylists, and no kids, trying to look this good.

“You look great,” she says, and Heather harrumphs.

“Come on, honey,” she says, hiking Michael up to her hip, his thick toddler thigh riding over the top of her belly as they cross the courtyard. “God, the baby’s always so active in the morning.” Heather hefts herself into the passenger seat, her hand over her stomach, twisting to get comfortable under the safety belt.

“Did you eat breakfast?” Heather is too skinny. The rare times Chloe has seen her without her signature baggy gray sweats, her arms were like branches, her belly barely a volleyball.

“Michael had Cheerios, right, honey?”

“Ohs!” Michael cries from the back. Chloe checks him in the rearview mirror as she merges onto 205.

“Listen, we sent you a check for prenatal vitamins last week, and you cashed it. I hope you got them.”

“You know, I really meant to, but it was Michael’s birthday, and the prenatals make me sick. I’m eating really good, though, lots of salad. I swear.” Heather is seventeen, but she looks about twelve when she holds her fingers up in a Scout’s honor sign and grins.

“So, listen.” Heather changes the subject. “Not to be nosy, but the other people with your agency, in eight? Penny and Jason?”

“Yeah?” Chloe doesn’t know how she knows this, but she’s not surprised. Other clients in the building have had intimate knowledge of one another’s lives. Maybe the common walls are thin, or there is a local, grandmotherly gossip.

“So, did I look at their portfolio, the people they chose for their baby, I mean?”

“I don’t remember.” Chloe turns off the interstate.

“I mean, are they a nice family? Who they chose?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Can you just tell me who it is?”

“Heather…” Chloe sighs.

“Just tell me. I remember all the portfolios. God, I studied them for like
forever
.”

“It’s John and Francie,” Chloe says, though she shouldn’t.

“The rich old couple with the cheesy wedding pictures at the coast, the ones who put in there that he makes like half a million a year?”

“You think they look old?”

“He does. He looks like a grandpa, and she’s as old as my mom! She looks good, you know, like she’d be a young kind of mom, but I did the math. Their wedding date was stamped on one of their photos, and she said in her bio they met when she was thirty-three, so—”

“Yes, that’s them.”

“Oh.” Heather looks out the window as they pull into the parking lot at the clinic.

“What? Heather, what?”

“It’s nothing, really. I mean, you know that his brother moved in, right? And his girlfriend too, the Indian one who’s like twelve with all the crank craters?”

“What does this have to do with anything, Heather?”

Heather looks at Chloe, then in the backseat, where they both see Michael has fallen asleep.

“The brother, Jason’s brother? He’s a total candy man, and they say he pimps out that girl.”

“Really?”

“Don’t say I said. It’s none of my business. I just wanted to know if it was a nice couple getting their baby.”

“Does Penny do it?”

“Crank? I don’t think so. Nah; she’s no tweaker. I think she’s just like that.”

“Like what?” Chloe has cut the engine. Rain quickly covers the windshield, obscuring their view of the doctor’s office. It is so dark out, it could be night.

“You know,” Heather is peeling her fuchsia fingernail polish in wormy shards. “I think she’s just a little messed up naturally, you know?”

Chloe nods; she knows.

“Don’t say I said, okay? The guy, Jason? They say don’t cross him.”

I
N THE WAITING ROOM
, Chloe holds sleeping Michael, a chubby warm weight across her thighs, while Heather checks in.

“I can take him now.” Heather offers her arms when she comes back to sit down.

“On what lap? I’m not giving this up.”

Heather smiles and wraps her arms around her stomach bulge, tapping her wet gray sneaker on the industrial carpet, rubbing her arms with her hands.

“My mom thinks I’m totally crazy not to make Michael sleep in a crib. But I love to sleep with him, we both just curl up around the baby here.” Heather looks down, her voice breaks. “I just, I want him to know, the baby, that I’m doing this for him, you know? I’m holding him all I can now, on the inside, because when he’s out, I’m not gonna.” Heather sniffs, jiggles her leg faster, wipes at her nose.

“You could write him a letter, Heather, tell him—”

“No, I’m no good with letters. I don’t even write to Eric, and he’s supposedly my stupid fiancé. He’s always asking me to, but I sit down and I can’t think of anything to say, except, ‘You’re a stupid fucking
loser and I’m giving up our son, Michael’s brother, because of you.’ So I don’t write, you know?” Heather swipes at a tear, and Chloe wishes her arms were free so she could give her a tissue, or put an understanding hand on her wildly swinging leg.

“I know we’ve talked about this, but Nate and Gina, they would be okay with cards and letters, or even some kind of openness, visits or—”

“No!” Heather lowers her voice. “Because you think, Okay, it’s a baby. And I could see him and hold him, and it would break my heart, but in a good way, to see him happy with them, you know? But then the next year he’s one, and then the next year, he’s Michael’s age, and then Michael’s in freaking kindergarten, and they’re starting to ask questions and wonder, How come him and not me? No.”

Chloe doesn’t say anything; there’s nothing to say.

“If I didn’t have Michael,” she says quietly, “if it were my first, then I might want open, and visits. But if I didn’t have Michael, I wouldn’t be doing this. It’s for Michael, and of course Baby David, that I’m doing it.”

They had had this conversation the first time they met, in Heather’s apartment while Michael drove trucks and watched
Elmo
on the tiny TV with the rabbit ears. Heather had explained to her how, when her boyfriend, Eric, Michael’s father, got arrested for stealing and marijuana possession, and she had discovered that she was pregnant again, she had just assumed she would keep doing what she was doing. Michael would keep going to day care, she would keep on working as an aide at the nursing home, and they would go on like this until Eric got out of jail the following year.

“But then one night when Michael was sleeping, I stayed up and did the math, you know? I got out my little pink calculator and I started adding it up, two kids in day care, seven dollars an hour, no better jobs until I can get my GED and get to college or somehow get a car, and I realized I could almost make it,
almost.
But every month, with medicine for an ear infection here, or a lost shift there, or the baby
has the runs and we need an extra pack of diapers, and those are just the little things—God forbid I get fired, or Michael needs another set of ear tubes—I realized I would slowly have to sell everything that makes Michael’s life good. One month, it’d be the couch, or the TV, or the bed, or there’d be nothing for Christmas, and then he’d start to hate his little brother. And I don’t want my sons to hate each other, you know? So it’s just better this way, for Michael, and for Baby David.”

“H
EATHER
?” A
NURSE STICKS
her head around the door. “You can come on back.”

“You want to see him?” Heather turns to the nurse. “Can my friend come back for the ultrasound?”

In the closet-size exam room, Chloe finds a place to sit, settles Michael across her lap again, his Power Ranger sneakers banging one of the metal stirrups. They don’t look at each other while Heather shimmies out of her sweatpants, folds her plain pink briefs on top of them, and slips her arms through the paper gown. Then, like she’s in the fifth-grade locker room, she removes her shirt and bra through the sleeve, tearing the gown a little. She giggles, carefully placing her shirt on the pile.

“I don’t usually have to wear a bra. Unless I’m pregnant or breast-feeding, I’m like totally flat. Eric’s all pissed because now I have boobs again, and he doesn’t get the fun of them. By the time he gets out, they’ll be gone.”

There are so many things Chloe wants to know about Eric and Heather, how these kids are attempting something that has the bones, the weight, of an adult relationship. When she was Heather’s age, she was worried about the math score of her PSATs and whether she should lose her virginity to the senior lacrosse player who sort of liked her.

“So,” Chloe says to fill the silence, “is this your first ultrasound?”

“No, I had one at twenty weeks, you know, where we found out it
was a boy, but then he was really small. So Dr. Wilde wants me to come back every two weeks until my due date so he can be sure the baby is growing and everything.”

Chloe is opening her mouth to lecture Heather on nutrition, ask if they need to go grocery shopping on the way home, when the door opens.

The doctor is a fatherly type, and he ignores Chloe, but she is used to this from medical professionals. He has a smooth, deep voice, and he talks to Heather constantly as he performs a pelvic exam, keeping one hand cupped over her bony knee.

“Normally, we wouldn’t start pelvics until thirty-six weeks, but since your first baby was early, we like to make sure that your cervix is nice and long and closed, which it is. I’m very pleased with that.”

Heather nods, trying to close her knees with her legs still in the stirrups.

“Okay, then, now for the good part. We get to have a look at the little fellow. You can sit up a little, here, I’ll pull the table out and put these away….” He folds the stirrups into the table. “Now, let’s see how our little guy is growing here.”

The doctor pulls down the blinds, though it is hardly necessary with the sky storming outside, and flips on the ultrasound machine. He squirts some pale green jelly, like aloe vera for sunburn, on Heather’s tight mound of a belly. The screen flickers, snowy, and he moves the wand around until the baby’s face appears, a perfect profile, and Chloe inhales—he looks just like Michael. A miniature snub nose and a square chin, a smooth round forehead.

Heather laughs softly and says, “I know, total spitting image, right?”

When he is done taking his measurements and pronounces the baby in the fifth percentile, but growing well, he pops a tape out of the VCR under the sonogram machine, extends it to Heather.