Chosen (14 page)

T
he bus lurches, throwing Penny’s slack body against his shoulder. She is like a used prison pillow, not even trying to keep herself upright. Jason puts his arm along the back of the bench, cups her shoulder and steadies her.

“How’s my girl?” he says in a low voice.

“Mmm.”

It’s the same fucking nothing response she gave the doctor today, but when he asked if she was depressed, she said no.

“I can write you a prescription,” he’d said. “Antidepressants.”

“I don’t do drugs,” Penny had said, her eyes on the toes of her shoes, black with pink polka dots, picked out from the donation box at the adoption agency.

“Why’d you lie to the doc?” he asks her, squeezing her shoulder as the bus bumps over the trolley line in the road.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you take the slip?”

“Why should I take a pill to make me feel like everything’s okay? I gave our baby away to some fuckin’ rich strangers. I
should
feel bad.”

Jason tries to think of something to say, but she beats him to it.

“And don’t tell me it was the right thing to do. Now if things start to change for us, get better, I won’t want them to, because that makes
it worse. If Brandi really gets you a job or the doc says I’m all healed and I can go back to looking for work, then it’s like, why’d we give him away?”

Jason can’t remember what Lisle said, so he makes up the statistic. “Ninety percent of life is timing, Pen. The timing was wrong.”

“Is that what we’re going to tell him? ‘Sorry, Buddy, you came at a bad time.’”

Jason wonders what she means, when she thinks they’ll be talking to Buddy, when they’ll be offering up excuses. He looks out the window at the leftover Christmas decorations, tinsel shaped into a wreath hanging from the light posts, and the way they droop is enough to make him cry, sign
him
up for the fucking Prozac. Why had he looked forward to this appointment so bad—because he thought the doc was going to give them the green light to do it again? Every night he has to listen to Lisle banging Brandi, the springs on the sofa bed screeching, her yelping, his Penny’s cold back to him, the ache in his balls so bad he had to lock up in the bathroom and yank on it for an electric shock, a sliver of pleasure, a ghost of an orgasm, and finally, it would settle down and he could sleep.

God, his dick couldn’t feel any limper than it does right now. The dick that fucked the girl that made the baby that they couldn’t keep that broke the girl’s heart.

“I regret it, that’s all I’m saying.” Penny butts her forehead against her shoulder to get his attention. “I just want to see him, hold him, you know?”

“You want him back?” Jason says it slowly, rolling words in his mouth. What he wouldn’t give to be having this conversation somewhere other than on a MAX line bus, so he could be sucking off a smoke at the same time. Thinking.

“You know in the cartoons, when Yosemite Sam gets shot with a cannon, and the ball passes through, and leaves a big hole in his gut? That’s how I feel since we signed those papers, and Buddy”—her voice breaks—“and they walked out the door with me never seeing him.”

She starts crying into his armpit, his sweet Penny—the lady across from them staring at his girl’s pain, fucking public transportation, can’t even cry in private, God, they need a car, he needs a job…

Jason bends his head down and whispers, “Shhh. I know where they live.” It is an exaggeration, so he downgrades to the truth. “I know their car.” Silver Volvo Cross Country, SPR-NVA license plate. There are other things he knows; won’t be hard to find out where they live.

“What?” Penny tilts her face up to him; even with the scars, such a pretty face before the pimples ran wild over it, then he thinks, Dammit, they forgot to ask the doc about that, when those would go away. The last thing he wants to do is cause her any more embarrassment or pain.

“John and Francie. I was in the garage at the hospital having a smoke when she got in her car.”

When she smiles at him, Jason feels like the painting where the sun is breaking through the clouds, and you’d swear it was Jesus himself peeking down from heaven.

“Okay,” Penny says, sniffing hard. She straightens her backbone, holding her own self up as she wriggles back into his armpit, her hand over his.

OREGON OPEN ADOPTION
—
A place for all mothers

FRANCESCA97201

Joined: 26 Jun 1998

Posts: 17299

Posted: Mon, Dec 25, 2000 4:39 pm

Happiest Christmas Wishes! I can’t believe I’m so late getting on the boards today! It was a whirlwind of presents, eggnog, and bliss. DH flew home the morning of Christmas Eve—I wish I had a photo to post, the three of us in front of the fire, but when we tried to take it, there was nobody to hold the camera.

“John, look at this!” Francie waves the striped bumblebee teether in front of Angus beside her on the floor, and he grins, his mouth a perfect U, an upturned umbrella. John is on the couch, dripping ice packs on his calves, his laptop open. He looks up, the twinkling Christmas lights reflecting off his glasses.

“He’s getting more alert,” she says. “Watch how he tracks this.”

John watches, and Francie feels a surge of pride when, like a trained seal, Angus performs in the brief spotlight of his father’s attention.

“Sure is.” John goes back to his keyboard. His computer pings softly, regularly; it takes Francie a few minutes to recognize it as a live online chat.

“Who are you chatting with?” she asks.

“Nobody. Work people. Contacts.”

On Christmas? And then he turns the sound off, and Francie rolls back toward the baby.

Angus is dressed in the most adorable three-month-size Polo outfit, a cabled navy sweater and coffee-colored corduroys that match
his skin. The saleswoman at Nordstrom’s couldn’t believe how big he was for three weeks, had remarked, “You’re so petite and fair; he must look just like his daddy!” Francie had nodded, picturing Jason’s smooth skin and expressive eyebrows. Already Angus can give her a skeptical scowl that perfectly matches his birth father’s, reminding Francie of their awkward encounters.

ANGIE—glad things are going well!

EvaSuperNova—come out, come out wherever you are!

Francie frets; her IRL friend hasn’t seemed like herself recently. Her posts have been boring and self-centered, obsessively seeking information about nipple thrush and soothing techniques, void of Eva’s trademark perkiness. She is also not doing a good job of replying to others, which can mean death, total obscurity on the message boards. There is room for controversial, for outrageous, but not for egocentric. If they were good enough friends, if Francie knew her passwords, she could get on there and post for her. Just a few replies, even a general Merry Christmas, or a Season’s Greetings, if she wants to be PC.

John has fallen asleep, head lolling back against the brocade cushion. He has a flight back to Singapore in two days, and while she feels better, safer, with someone else in their dark, cavernous house, she and Angus are finding their groove, so John leaving doesn’t bother her as much as it probably should.

They stick close to home, Francie and her kiddo, never going much farther than Portland Heights. They get organics at Strohecker’s on Saturdays, gas at the Portland Heights Shell every other Monday, and once she took him to the shops on 185th, but came home quickly when she saw the riffraff that frequented the outlets.

Those two are out there in this city, probably among the unwashed who wander Burnside, maybe panhandling at the I-5 on-ramps, and Francie has no intention of bumping into Jason and Penny with her son in tow.

Francie scoops Angus up and settles onto the comfortable couch, near enough to the fire to feel it, but not so hot she’ll have to get up and move. She exhales, lets his warm weight push the last of the air from her lungs. When she breathes in deeply, she can smell the Douglas fir of the tree, the trio of Yankee Candle Co. gingerbread candles dancing on the coffee table, the boutique baby wash she uses on his perfect curls. If Dr. Richard Ferber, author of her sleep guru book, knew about this, he would be tsk-tsking.
Don’t let the baby fall asleep in an environment you don’t intend to replicate every time they wake
. But it’s Christmas, and Angus feels as warm and forgiving as the Florida sun on her chest.

W
hen his ability-to-soothe ratio slips under the 20 percent mark, Paul takes it as a sign to stop trying. This morning he’d set his alarm for five, slipping out of the house before it was light, even though it is New Year’s Eve. He worked three jobs alone, stayed late, and it is dark now as he sits in traffic on the Sunset Highway.

“Maggie’s plane is coming in this afternoon,” Eva reminded him dully from the bed this morning. Paul wanted to joke about how they should charge her brother rent, as often as he’s been around this month, but thought better of it. For one, Magnus generously bank-rolled their honeymoon, their adoption application fees, not to mention half the down payment on their house. And for two, Eva’s sense of humor is shot these days. Paul wishes he knew someone he could call to ask about this, if his wife’s moodiness is normal. He thinks about the woman in Africa who gave birth in a tree during a flood, and wonders if Eva isn’t milking the hormone thing a little much. He wonders, after their morning in the coffee shop, about calling Chloe Pinter. She’s a social worker, but…what would she know about motherhood?

He thinks of Berit, Eva’s mother. Wyeth is almost a month old, and she’s made no effort to come out and see him. She has sent boxes of thrift-store clothes, ridiculous things: a frog costume, size 4T, and
a snowsuit with spit-up stains on the neck (the Post-it safety-pinned to this suggested OxiClean in her flowery script), but it was size 6–9 months,
perfect
for a Portland summer.

Eva rolled her eyes and excused her mother’s absence. “You know Berit. She’s got a business to run. She said the thrift store is undergoing a critical audit. They think someone’s stealing.”

P
AUL MERGES AT THE
light meter, his mind shifting from home to work, work to home. His place in this is becoming clear to him. Like Ward and June, the lines are drawn, roles defined. He will be the Provider, Eva will be the Nurturer. Paul has tried and failed to be a modern father, so he needs to focus on his area of expertise. It is time to take SuperNova to the next level, to move beyond simply electrical to lighting design. It makes his dick shrink back, just considering it.

The problem with the electrical side always has been the shallow pool of quality labor force. Men who will do all the things Paul Sr. valued, who will change into house slippers for the Korean client down in Lake Oswego, who won’t rifle through the Coach handbag the woman in Beaverton boldly leaves on her dining room table. And here’s the balancing act—training them well enough that he, Paul, doesn’t always have to come in and do the job himself, but paying them well enough that they don’t buy a used van, spray-paint a logo on the side, and do their own thing. All this while keeping the overhead low enough that his clients feel happy, and he doesn’t have to stress when Eva orders her nine-dollar roast beef sandwiches. Always a dance, a delicate balance, and Paul struggles with vertigo as it is.

Another trick: how not to become his father at home. Paul Sr. would take a stopwatch and a single crisp twenty-dollar bill with them to the state fair each year. Then he would time the rides, deciding which was the best value for your ticket. “Nah, Ritchie, you don’t want to go on the planes. He’s giving you a minute for three tickets! Go for the boats—that guy gives a minute forty-five for the same amount.” And then he’d heckle the ride operators, “Hey! I could ride
the ducky boats twice for the amount of time you give, let ’em go around again!”

Paul Sr. assigned a monetary value to everything. The tomatoes from the garden that his mother cultivated and canned didn’t taste good because they were homegrown; it was because they were free. Paul Sr. was incapable of letting anyone else do any part of the job. His accounting department had been a cracked leather-bound checkbook and ledger, a pair of drugstore reading glasses, and late nights at the kitchen table with his adding machine, checking, rechecking. If growth means feeling a little off balance all the time, desperate and dependent on others, if it means putting your faith in people and dusting yourself off and starting fresh when they let you down, then this was going to be a tense few months.

And back at home, another mouth to feed. Right now, the baby feels like a money-gobbling parasite. He thinks of a joke that was going around e-mail recently, “So you wanna be a parent? First, go to the grocery store. Arrange to have your salary paid directly to their head office.” Ha ha ha. Of course he knows it won’t always be like this, that Wyeth will start to give back in some way, be more than a drain on their energy and finances. But as he pulls into his driveway, Paul wonders: When, in his entire life, has he done anything that resembles giving back to his parents?

“C
hloe!” the Intro to Windsurfing instructor yells in his heavy German accent. “You are jibing too late. That is why the wind is pushing you, back sail, into the water.” Chloe stands up in the waist-deep Pacific Ocean, wiping the salt water from her eyes, suffering her humiliation in the shallow cove near Kanaha that she heard Kurt and Paolo refer to as the Kiddie Pool. They’re sitting under the flags at the adjacent kiteboarding cove with Dan, waiting for the wind to pick up.

Frustrated, Chloe grabs her board, prepares to get back on and uphaul the sail for the millionth time. Tacking is easy; but she cannot make the stupid downwind turn, with its jazz-stepping fancy foot-work.

“Chloe, wait.” Jesper, the instructor is beside her, one hand on the shoulder of her mandatory life vest. Chloe squints up at him, the ravines of his cured leather face, his eyes impossible to read behind the orange iridescent Oakley mirrors. “Too late,” he murmurs. “Feel the wind.” He draws out the phrase like a yogi. “Trust that it will tell you when.
Mach schnell
, we have only”—Jesper checks his watch, the blue nylon straps streaked white with dried salt water—“thirty-five minutes more.”

Sweet Jesus, she thinks.

Later, Chloe wraps a towel around her Portland-white body and plunks down in the shade next to Dan.

“Well, that was fun,” she lies gamely.

“I think I just found our first Windsong instructor,” Dan says, his eyes on the adjacent kiteboarding cove. “See that girl, in the white rashguard?”

“Yes.” Chloe doesn’t have to look to find her; she is carving the water in front of them with singular concentration.

“Her name’s Mischa, and she just moved here from Tenerife. She’s only been kiteboarding four months, but she’s busting moves none of the guys are even trying. Look at that! Christ! Did you just see that?” Mischa had been sailing in against the sideshore wind, jibing at the beach, and then on the way out, against the waves, she catches air and does a skateboarder-type trick, grabbing the board, bending her knees behind her, twisting her body. Chloe is sure, from how hard it is to even stand up on the plank of a board and control the tiny handkerchief of a sail, that this is very hard. But it all looks rather…pointless. Back and forth, in and out, jump up, grab your board, spin around, stick your landing? She has seen girls half Mischa’s age bear down and flex unseen muscles to squeeze out babies with heads the size of pomelos, and what’s more, hours later, they sign papers that sever the connection between them and the human being they have been growing inside them for months.

“Amazing,” Chloe says.

“Yeah.” Dan exhales. “Anyway, she’s bartending right now.” Of course she is, Chloe thinks, and she’s probably got an adorable mutt dog that licks at the wind and wears a pink bandana around its neck when she drives around in her battered old Jeep. “But I told her about the kiteboarding business, and she’s totally stoked to get in on it. She said she could start whenever we need her. Mischa and Paolo can bring in the clients, and you and I will run the business.”

Ah, vacation talk, Chloe thinks. The kind of thing you say when caught up in the beauty and isolated moment of time on vacation.
She is prepared to indulge Dan for now. In a week she’ll be back in Portland, and before long Dan will come back too. She’s sure of it.
I’m nothing without you.
She’s got Heather’s adoption coming up, three potential birth mothers, and she wants to make some visual aids, photo collages, for her Prospective Parents presentation. Chloe wishes she had brought a pad of paper to jot down ideas.

“Look at that wind, girlie!” Dan grabs her shoulders, steers her body toward the horizon, points out to the trees on the point, bowing under a gust, the flag next to them cracking now. She can feel the excitement, an electricity in the muscles of his shoulders. “It’s not steady yet, but I’ll take it!” All this for wind—she wishes she felt it too.

While Dan whoops off to get his gear, Chloe wades into the shallow water of the cove where Jesper’s next lesson is starting and pees, tries to surreptitiously wriggle the sand out of the bottom of her bathing suit.

“Chloe!” Jesper calls. “I have an extra rig, if you want to practice. No charge.”

“Oh…” Chloe looks out at the water; the wind
is
picking up, whipping it into little white peaks, the kind you try to achieve in a mixing bowl when making meringues. They look like nothing from the shore, but Chloe knows once she is on a board she will feel like a weak-kneed lumberjack on a rolling log.

Jesper wades to her, casting a glance over at his next batch of hapless students.

“You live here?”

“Uh, no. My boyfriend wants to.” She looks toward the beach, where Dan is unrolling his kite. “He wants to start a kiteboarding business.”

Jesper inclines his head, smiles indulgently, and says, “Ahhh. Him and everyone else on this lava rock.” Chloe takes this as a sign. Thank god, it won’t work out; Dan will come back to Portland, to their life.

“You know what your problem is, if I may?” Jesper says, and for a
moment she is stricken, afraid of what he will say, until she realizes he is just a middle-aged windsurfing instructor who has only known her for ninety minutes.

“Let me guess; I’m not strong enough, right?”

“No. You are fine, plenty strong.” Jesper takes her upper arms in his callused hands, shakes them out like a wet blanket. “Your problem is that you are fighting nature.” Jesper nods sagely and smiles again as he says, “And, Chloe, you will never win against the wind.”