Chosen by Chandra Hoffman Page A

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 fuckingloser 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 babyhas 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