soaking up the delicious flavor of his cheerful mood, goes upstairs to shower.
While the water runs over her, she tries to remember the wording of that joke—“Why are you hitting yourself with that hammer? ’Cause it feels so good when I stop.” It perfectly sums up her life with Dan since they moved to Portland, lots of dark clouds injected with brief, brilliant sunshine.
Later, Chloe is speeding on the Banfield, her foot hitting the brake when traffic stops up at the 205 and her cell rings again.
It is Francie McAdoo. No greeting, just a hiss. “You deliberately kept it from us that Penny smoked.”
“Ummmm.” Chloe taps the brake, opens the file on the passenger seat, and is reading the Medical as fast as she can. She sees Penny’s answer to the question “Smoking?” in her own handwriting: “Not really, sometimes, smell makes me sick.”
“I’ve read about this on the boards,” Francie is winding up, “where agencies lie, hide things so adoptions go through, but I never thought the Chosen Child—”
“Hang on, Francie, I don’t think we kept this from you. You know Jason smokes, I just don’t think it came up.” Because we were all trying to talk you down from backing out based on his race and blowing the whole adoption. Rejection from potential adoptive parents always sent hurt birth mothers running to another agency, and between the apartment deposit, the motel for the days in between, the maternity clothes and food, they were already almost two grand into Penny and Jason by then.
“The nurse at the hospital warned us. She said that he is going to be really fussy for the next few weeks while he is detoxing. She couldn’t believe that we didn’t know he would be coming down off drugs, that you kept that from us.”
“What are you saying, Francie—that you wouldn’t have taken him if you’d known Penny smoked sometimes?”
Silence. Then, “You kept the information from us. You concealed this when we were trusting you—”
“Francie, I didn’t purposefully hide this from you. I just assumed, I mean, they practically all smoke,” Chloe falters.
“I’m calling Judith. I had no choice but to post on the boards about this. Other parents need to know that you conceal medical information about the birth mother—it’s our right to be prepared.”
And the line goes dead.
Chloe’s head throbs, and she thinks of Dan back at home, alive again. She has missed him; she didn’t realize how badly. She steers with her knee while she gets her wallet out, fingers her credit card. In the parking lot of the Chosen Child, she calls the airline, books her own ticket to Maui for December 30.
18
Smoke Signals
PENNY
When he comes home, she’s laid out on the couch, sucking down cigarettes off Brandi’s pack while she’s at work. Doc said smoking makes her heal slower, but what does Penny care? If she never gets off this couch, doesn’t matter. She could starve, dry up like a wrinkled old apple core left between the cushions.
“You want the TV off?” Jason asks. It’s Oprah, a show on postpartum depression, ha! Penny blows a circle of smoke his direction, wishing it would make words like in cartoons, N-O.
“Hurting, baby?” Her boobies ache, but in the old way, like she’s about to go on the rag, and her stomach, sawed open, sewn, and stapled, hurts too, but not that bad anymore. She blows more short puffs of smoke in his direction.
“Not talking to me?”
“Sending you smoke signals, Injun. Can’t read ’em?”
He gets up, paces a tight circle around the room. She knows him by his jingles; just agitated. Still, she should be careful. She wants him riled enough to act, let him think it’s his idea, but then there’s Des’ree Bonds outside of Cheyenne, blind and drooling in a retard home because she crossed Jason years ago.
“What do you want, Pen?” He stops in front of her.
I want him back, she thinks, but this is not entirely true anymore. Right after, she did. Today, she just wants to not feel empty and dried out, to feel something. And she wants Jason to move the hell out of her way so she can watch the show. She wants to know: Can you get it, postpartum depressions, even if you don’t still have the baby?
“I think we got to go back to Washington, maybe even the Makah res, stay with Selma-Wade,” he says.
The idea of crossing the river, of going north to the Peninsula, leaving Buddy in Oregon without ever having laid