Chosen (16 page)

She looks out the window; palm trees dancing in the wind.

“I’m never going to be a doctor,” he warns.

“I don’t want a doctor.”

They are both thinking of Anson Park, the intern who works in her father’s practice. Dr. Pinter never misses a chance to work his career accomplishments or single status into their phone calls. “I don’t want a doctor,” Chloe says again, emphatically. “I want you.”

“Well, you’ve got me, babe. I’m not going anywhere.” Dan smiles over at her as they pull up to Departures.

S
he’s got two good legs, Penny thinks. Good enough to get her out, taking matters into her own hands. Her legs still pain her, first thing in the damp mornings ten years later, but they’re good enough to get her to the MAX line. She looks down at them, the scars covered in black slacks, haven’t seen the light of day since what happened outside the Flying J back in Denver when she was fifteen.

Penny tilts her head against the bus window. She’s having one of her firecracker headaches, the kind where it feels like someone’s mowing down the center of her brain with a circular saw. Seven operations and therapies and then, when she was finally let out, her legs were good enough to get her the fuck out of Denver, because after something like that you can’t exactly go back to smoking under the bleachers and quizzes on Christopher Columbus. Got her on the first bus and then a job at Stuckey’s in Wyoming, serving the Truckers Luv It breakfast to Jason eight years ago when he first jackknifed his rig and was laid over in Casper for a week.

N
OW
J
AY’S HOME SLEEPING
one off, New Year’s Eve last night, and he and Lisle and Brandi got lit up—won’t even notice she’s gone.

No idea what time it is, gray sky, no sun, she got up and left without peeing even. She can go when she gets there, maybe. Threaten to
go on the floor if Chloe Pinter doesn’t do what she wants, and this makes her snicker to herself all the way to Troutdale.

Except when she gets there, the windows are dark, and the little street that runs in front of the shops is empty. Does the whole city have a hangover? Penny wonders. Is she the only one in Portland smart enough to know what drinking gets you?

Just for the hell of it, she tries the door handle and is amazed when it turns, gives, and swings open. It’s a sign, a miracle. Now she won’t have to beg; she’ll just take. For too long she’s been taken from, but now—

“Hell-o?” Singsong, from the office to her right. The woman flicks on a little lamp on her desk, puts her purse down by the computer.

Shit. There’s a tall skinny redhead secretary wriggling out of her raincoat, looks every bit like a Muppet.

“Hi.” Penny’s voice comes out strangled; when was the last time she used it? She coughs, tries again. “Chloe. I’m looking for Chloe Pinter.”

“And you are?”

“Penny.”

“Oh, right. Chloe’s in Hawaii. We’re not open today; I’m just here to do some legals. We have a birth mother in labor.”

Hawaii. Bitch takes their baby and vacations in Hawaii. Penny’s headache is starting to make a sound, a roaring. She stumbles to a chair by the desk to sit down, pushes against the pain with the pads of her fingers.

“Are you all right? Can I help you with something?”

Just then the front door clicks open again. A woman comes in carrying a baby in an infant seat, hood up against the rain.

“Sorry, I really should have locked the door,” the secretary calls out. “We’re not open today. Oh, hi, Angie!”

“Hey, Beverly.” Doubled over in the shadows, the woman doesn’t see Penny, crosses straight to the desk. “Sorry to bother you today, I was just passing by and saw the light, and I wanted to drop these off
for Mandy.” Penny looks through the hands cradling her face—the woman is handing over a large, fat envelope. “We’re so grateful to her; Kaelynn is the best thing that ever happened to us. I know they said they only want it once a year, but it’s the first of the year, so I thought, if Mandy calls, here it is. I wanted them to be here if she called.”

“Thanks, I’ll put it in their file. Sometimes they surprise you. The birth mother who swore she didn’t want photos and letters is the first one to call for them.”

Now Penny is confused. What is in the envelope? Money?

The two women coo over the baby for a minute, and when it makes a noise, the mother says she’d better get going.

“She likes it if we keep moving.” She bounces the car seat in her arms. “Really, she’s the best thing that ever happened to us. We’re so grateful to Mandy and Dwight, and Chloe, to all of you.”

After she is gone, Penny can hear Beverly rifling around in the file drawers by her desk.

“What is that?” Penny asks, standing up and leaning over the desk. “Money?”

“What?” Beverly looks up as if she had forgotten Penny was there.

“They come and leave money? For the other mother?”

“What? No. They’re photos, and letters, for the birth mother. It’s part of their arrangement. Once a year, they drop off photos and letters, and if the birth parents want them, we keep them here.”

“Do I have any?” Penny feels it like a bubble in her chest: hope. Somewhere in those giant metal boxes there are pictures of Buddy. She should have come here sooner!

“I don’t think so. What are the names of the parents?”

“Jason Xolan and Penny Marks.”

“No, the other parents.”

“Oh, John and Francie.”

“Oh, right, I remember
them
,” she says, and it’s hard to get her meaning. Beverly slides a long metal drawer out, and her fingers, long
red acrylics, tick-tack down the tabs of the files, sliding toward M, for Marks, Penny thinks, until she sees her pull out a folder, “McAdoo, John and Francie / Marks, Penny (and Jason Xolan).”

“Hey!” Beverly says sharply, and snaps the folder closed. “This is confidential.” She spins in her desk chair and scans the file, her back blocking Penny’s view. “No, it’s a closed adoption. No cards or letters in the agreement. There’s nothing here for you.”

That’s what you think
, Penny hums to herself all the way back to the bus stop in the light drizzle.
John and Francie McAdoo
.

C
hloe takes a cab from the airport to Good Samaritan, calling Gina Severin on her cell phone as they lurch in stop-and go traffic.

“Well, it’s been a long night and day, but Heather’s almost ten centimeters now, so we’re close.” Gina sounds exuberant; Chloe can imagine her with an encouraging hand on Heather’s shoulder, squeezing it as she says this. Gina works for Nike, in marketing. She has had a different, trendy hairstyle every time Chloe sees her and is an absurd mix of chipper and genuine.

“Okay, tell her I’m coming—I’m trying my best to be there in time.”

“Hang on, she wants to talk to you.”

“Chloe?” Heather sounds faint, like a little girl. “Are you close?”

“Yes, I’m almost there. I’m on the Banfield, I guess maybe fifteen minutes at the most.”

“Okay, can you hurry?”

And then the phone goes dead. Chloe feels a panic in her chest. How can she have left Heather for Maui? How could she have thought that just anyone could go to the hospital in her stead with a folder full of legals? Because she wasn’t thinking of Heather; she was thinking of Dan, humming and cleaning their kitchen as he planned his escape.

It is forty-six minutes before the driver pulls up in front of the brown brick hospital. She pays the cab fare and runs, without waiting for a receipt for Beverly, flip-flops slapping up the stairs to the maternity ward, not bothering with the elevator.

She pulls out her ID when she reaches the nurses’ station, and they hand her a folder that Beverly has dropped off, the prepared legal forms folded in a neat manila rectangle, just waiting to be dated, signed, and notarized. She finds Heather’s room just as the doctor, the silver-haired man from the ultrasound, is coming out, peeling off his gloves.

“Hi,” Chloe says, “is she—”

But he keeps walking, as though she isn’t talking to him.

Inside, the baby is screaming as a broad-bottomed pediatrician attends to him at the isolette. Gina and Nate are hovering, Nate with the video camera running, while Gina calls stats over her shoulder to Heather, who sits alone in the bed, quietly adjusting and readjusting the sheets over her lap. Heather’s nurse flushes her IV and takes over at the isolette as the pediatrician pronounces him perfectly healthy.

“Oh, he’s beautiful, Heather!” Gina crows. “He’s got lots of dark hair! Six pounds even, eighteen inches, a little peanut!”

“That’s good, good,” Heather murmurs. When she sees Chloe, her face breaks into its crooked, crossed-teeth smile. “Hey, you missed it!”

“I’m so sorry.” Chloe drags a chair over to the side of Heather’s bed. She leaves her purse and the legals over by the door, but she sees Heather’s eyes dart to the folder.

“That’s okay.” Heather looks down. “Gina was great, a great coach.”

“
You
were great!” Gina calls over her shoulder. “Really! Chloe, she was amazing.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“They told me you had to come home from vacation. I didn’t know that you were going away. I’m sorry you had to come back, but I—”

“It was a last-minute thing; it’s not a problem.” Chloe pulls her
chair closer to Heather, looking over her at the cluster around the baby, who is now quiet. The nurse’s arms move in an expert flurry, wrapping him, flipping him, wrapping him again.

“He looks just like Michael,” Gina blurts, and Chloe can see she thinks better of it, worrying about what that means to Heather. “I mean, he’s so beautiful.”

“I knew he would. We saw him on the ultrasound.” Heather looks at Chloe. “We knew he would, remember?”

“Okay, we’ve got him cleaned up here, let’s give Mom a chance…,” the nurse says, though everyone in the room knows that the birth plan strictly states that Heather does not want to hold him, that Gina will be first.

I should say something, Chloe thinks. I should say something now. But she doesn’t.

Then the nurse pushes past Gina and hands him to Heather, and everyone stands frozen. Gina’s arms are curled hopefully, she is already rocking, shifting her weight from side to side, ever so slightly, in anticipation.

“Gina, do you…,” Heather begins, but trails off as she settles the baby into her own thin arms.

“It’s okay, honey, go ahead.” Gina is openly crying, not bothering to wipe away the tears. They fall on the robin’s-egg-blue sheet that covers Heather’s legs.

“You forget how little they are,” Heather murmurs. She undoes the bundle of hospital blankets at his feet to examine the ink-blacked soles. “Oh, oh my, look how tiny.”

The nurse, an old-school type with huge owl glasses and pancake makeup and a steely halo of a perm, bustles around the room, adjusting Heather’s IV again, changing the blankets in the isolette.

“When Michael was born, I didn’t know they did that ink thing to the feet. So when I was alone with him, I was checking to see if he had all his fingers and toes, and I saw his black feet and I freaked out. I was thinking, Oh my, my baby has this horrible disease.”

Gina titters nervously, sniffing on her tears.

“And I was all alone with him and I just remember thinking, ‘It’s okay, my diseased black-footed baby, I’ll love you anyway.’” Heather rolls her eyes at herself.

Chloe thinks she should say something now—she can feel Gina’s anguish like waves, vibrations across the bed. She meets her eyes briefly, and everything in Gina’s expression begs,
What is happening?

“Gina, would it be okay if I…” Heather asks even as she undoes the snaps at the top of her hospital gown. “I mean, just today. Just for now.”

“No, of course not. I mean, of course I don’t mind, it’s better for him…”

“I know. I read that. I nursed Michael till he was one and started biting.” Heather smiles. “After that I was like, No way, mister….”

The room is so silent, even the nurse pauses as the tiny mouth roots and immediately finds Heather’s perfect mocha-colored nipple. Chloe can hear him gulping, grunting in the quiet. Heather, who is usually so modest, huddling around her belly in oversize sweatshirts, lets the top of the gown fall completely down, both smooth full breasts exposed as she nurses her son. He has perfect features and a bristle of brown lashes as long as his mother’s. Heather’s eyes close, and she sighs. “So tired.”

“You don’t want to do that,” the nurse says, snapping into action, fiercely bundling the soiled linens of the isolette into a tight ball, “if you’re really giving him up. Your milk’s gonna come in, you’ll get engorged.”

“It’s okay, just for today.” Heather’s eyes flutter open; her voice is barely a whisper. She reaches out her hand, the one that isn’t supporting the baby’s head, to Gina. Gina sob-hiccups as she rushes forward, grabs Heather’s hand. Inside, Chloe feels her stomach muscles un-clench; it’s going to go through.

“So what are you going to call him?” Heather asks Gina, looking up at the older woman, both of them with tears running on wet cheeks. They are still holding hands.

“Well”—Gina takes a shaky, ragged breath, sniffs hard—“we were thinking of Adam, since he is the beginning of our life. Adam David, if that’s okay.”

“That’s perfect,” Heather whispers, her eyes closing again. “Adam.”

Chloe looks up as Gina’s husband, Nate, follows the nurse out of the room, a lurching six-foot-five-inch man moving awkwardly, desperately. Chloe leaves her purse, the manila folder, goes after him.

Nate Severin hasn’t gone far. Chloe finds him tilted forward just outside the door, his forehead slowly pounding against the wall as he chokes on his sobs. He sees Chloe, straightens, wipes his cheeks furiously. She reaches behind her and gently closes the door to the delivery room where his wife, and the mother of his child, are watching him breast-feed for the first and last time.

“God.” He exhales, wiping again. “I want to adopt her too. And Michael. We could move into a bigger house, or remodel the garage, or I don’t know, it’s totally crazy, and it would probably never work…”

“She has a mother, Nate,” Chloe says gently, doesn’t add that Heather’s mother is in and out of rehab, “and a convicted felon fiancé.”

“I know, I just…” Nate turns, slumps his gangly height against the wall. “What do we do? Chloe, tell me what to do.”

“It’s intense.” Chloe lays a hand on his arm. “You come on back in and sign papers.”

A
LONE AT HOME THAT
night, the papers signed, Chloe sips tea to calm her twisted stomach. Two years ago, this was her dream job. Two years ago she held a baby not thirty-six hours old as the prop plane from eastern Oregon bounced down at PDX, and she walked off the jetway with a satchel full of signed legals, the birth mother back in jail, no father named, and placed a baby with thick black hair and cherry-red lips in the arms of a couple who had waited seven years for this moment.

“Here’s your son,” Chloe had said, letting herself cry with the gray-haired new mother, the father wiping his glasses on the hem of
his flannel shirt. Their three heads had touched over his tiny one, and Chloe was a part of something so wonderful, the creation of a family. That’s when she started saying it, that it was “an honor to be a part of such an important moment in a family’s life.”

But these moments are few and far between, and Chloe thinks now of the birth mother in that case, whose name she cannot recall. The phone call came on a slow Wednesday morning. Then it was rush to the airport, get on a prop plane, bring profiles of people willing to accept Native American newborns with prenatal substance use, a forty-three-year-old incarcerated alcoholic birth mother already in labor and ready to sign. It happened so quickly that Chloe forgot to bring a newborn outfit or the agency’s car seat—she had to stop at a Wal-Mart on the way in her badly aligned rental Taurus.

She saw the baby first through the nursery glass, a gorgeous seven-pound boy with a strong forehead and skin like oiled cherrywood, thick, straight hair. Then down the hall, the birth mother, old enough to be Chloe’s mother, gray threading her black hair, face hash-marked with lines, meth teeth small and black, who answered the questions on the agency’s forms so quietly Chloe often had to ask her to repeat them, the woman’s eyes darting to the khaki-uniformed guard at her door.

The whole thing took less than twenty minutes, a handful of questions for the medical, the birth mother flipping through the three portfolios so fast she couldn’t have even read the captions under the photos before she tapped the red binder on top and said, “This one,” then set about deliberately signing the documents with a half-dry pen in front of Chloe and a silent, spectacled notary Chloe found in the phone book.

So even the happy endings that she refers back to when wondering at her hours or salary, defending the job to Dan, aren’t win-wins. She thinks of birth mothers who have called her, desperate, heartbroken, threatening.

“I’ve changed my mind,” one said, after the paperwork was signed
and filed. “I’ve got to see her. I’m pumping and saving my milk, I know where they live, I have to see her.” This one ended in a restraining order and court-ordered counseling, but worse, it rattled the new parents so badly that despite their previous assurance that an open adoption arrangement would work for them, they now refused all contact with the birth mother.

Chloe thinks of the Whitings, who backed out when she called to tell them that the amnio confirmed Down’s syndrome in the baby that Kelli, their birth mother, carried. How this triggered a mother-bear protectiveness in Kelli, who thought originally she couldn’t have a baby alone, now raising a special-needs daughter.

“I don’t know,” she had drawled to Chloe on the phone when she called her from the hospital three months later, the baby in her arms. “It’s just meant to be, I guess. I guess God had to do something drastic to make me realize I was meant to be her mother.”

The Whitings sued the agency, and lost, for their nonrefundable application deposit.

And now, Chloe thinks, sipping her tea, there is Heather. A wonderful mother whose only fault was getting pregnant too young two times by the wrong guy. Chloe rubs her hands over her eyes.

Her cell phone rings. Hoping it is Dan, she grabs it.

“Hello?”

Silence.

“Hello?” She is conscious of the emptiness of her house, of Dan thousands of miles away.

“You’re going to be sorry for what you done,” a deep, muffled voice says, and the line goes dead.