Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “Are you doing okay?”

  “I’m fine. I only have three more people to call.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I was asking about Leilah leaving.”

  His expression froze. “I’m fine. I’ve had relationships end before.”

  “But surely not like this.”

  “No,” he admitted. “Now, what can I do for you? Do you need something? The internet?”

  Clearly he was not going to talk about Leilah. “No, I need your mother’s phone number. I have to figure out how to feed people after the funeral, and I have no idea where to start.”

  “She’s the right place for that. And let me give you my sisters’ numbers too, in case Mom isn’t around. Do you want to go inside? The chair to the left of the table is where you can get a signal, but it’s stronger out here.”

  She shook her head. It was good to be outside, away from the sharp light and rasping smells of the hospital. She handed him her phone and let him key in the numbers. Then he showed her the best place to stand.

  “Colleen, you darling girl.” Marianne Healy’s voice was full of soft sympathy. “Ben told me. What can I do?”

  “Don’t be so nice,” Colleen told her. “You will make me cry.”

  “Oh, dearie, it’s fine to cry. You need to cry.”

  “Not until I get this squared away.”

  Mrs. Healy told her that for the kind of elegant reception that the Ridge family traditionally put on, people would need to drive halfway to Atlanta. “This may not be what you want to hear, but I think you should do it in the church. You are going to have some very elderly people coming. Why make it any harder on them?”

  Colleen imagined that Aunt Laura would want people to drive halfway to Atlanta, but she no longer cared what her aunt thought. She was all in favor of making it easy on the old people, especially when that also made it easier on her.

  Mrs. Healy offered to track down the name of the volunteer in charge of the church’s fellowship hall. “And my advice is to do exactly what has been done at the last three funerals. Don’t kill yourself or spend a lot of money to try and make it nicer. This way people can blame the church ladies, not you.”

  Colleen liked the sound of that.

  * * * *

  So, indeed, the reception was in the basement of the church. A check to the women’s circle had produced country ham on slightly stale biscuits, macaroni salad, and bar cookies made from cake mixes. Colleen was too tired to care.

  The church had been built for a much larger congregation, and its grand vaulted sanctuary made the mourners seem like a huddle of refugees. Some of Norton, Laura, and Ned’s high school friends, men and women in their sixties, drove in from Atlanta and even Charleston, several bringing their own aging mothers. The Healys sat together, and near the back of the church was a cluster of older working people, mostly African Americans, the men buttoning their shirts at the neck in absence of suits and ties.

  They were there, not for Grannor, but for Colleen’s father.

  “Your daddy…if anyone was in trouble with the law, he saw them first. He said prison dentists just pulled teeth. Doc Ridge, he would save your tooth.”

  “I was so scared, but I guess it was your mama, the one with the pretty hair, she was there, and she watched my little brothers so my mama could come back with me…”

  “I bet you didn’t know that my granddaughter finished her schooling, and she’s a dental hygienist working in the nicest office in Macon, all due to your daddy. We’re so proud of her, like to bust with it we are.”

  Colleen wished that she could help her father as much as he had helped these people.

  Norton delivered the eulogy, talking about his mother as one who bore a standard for a different time, a time that had vanished even when she was a girl. It was formal, even labored, lacking warmth or affection. At least he had gotten his sons to come. Aunt Laura’s daughter had refused.

  Colleen had asked her father if he wanted them to take communion. Her Sunday school had taught her to take the Holy Eucharist only at a Roman Catholic mass, but when they were in Georgia attending this church with their grandmother, their mother had shepherded the three of them up to the altar, even participating in the ritual herself. Clearly Mary Pat thought that God was a great deal more forgiving than her mother-in-law.

  Not surprisingly her father told Colleen that he didn’t care what they did. So when Patty looked at Colleen questioningly, she signaled that they could stay in their seats.

  But as she watched the few congregants straggle up to the altar, she suddenly asked herself why she had let her father decide. He wasn’t Catholic. She should have thought about it and made her own decision. Taking communion in this church had been a bit of a sacrifice for her mother. She should have decided for herself what would honor that sacrifice.

  The Healys, also Catholic, didn’t take communion either. Colleen was surprised by how many of them had come. Of course, Tim and Marianne came, and Ben had flown down from Charlottesville on the same plane with her family. But his three brothers and two sisters were there as well, the married ones accompanied by their spouses. There were even some school-aged children.

  The Healys and her father’s former clients…their coming was far more comforting than Norton’s eulogies or the priest’s prayers.

  Even more comforting was Colleen’s increasing suspicion that Patty was pregnant.

  She, Ben, her father, her aunt, and her uncle had all come down together on Wednesday. Her brothers and Genevieve had come in on Friday. Aunt Laura had insisted that they all drive twenty miles so that they could have dinner at a restaurant with proper tablecloths.

  Uncle Norton ordered wine. As the salads were arriving, Colleen happened to see Sean discreetly switching his empty glass for Patty’s full one. Norton soon refilled that glass. Patty picked it up twice, but set it down without having any. Later in the evening, Liz also switched glasses with her, something Colleen had noticed only because she was watching.

  A young married woman not drinking alcohol often meant one happy thing, and when Patty, who had never had a princessy bone in her body, frowned at the menu and took a while to decide, Colleen felt confident that come next year sometime she would be an aunt.

  A baby…how happy that would have made her mother. Grammy O’Connell was going to be thrilled. Of course, she already had fifteen—or was it sixteen?—great-grandchildren, but Sean had a special place in her heart because she had worked so hard to find the Bannings.

  With Norton and Laura at the restaurant, of course Patty and Sean had said nothing. Colleen had stopped by their motel room later that night, hoping that they would tell her then. They didn’t. She rationalized her disappointment. Perhaps they were waiting to tell her father and her together. And Genevieve too, of course. But at breakfast the following morning, nothing was said.

  Finn and Liz knew. Liz had helped Patty hide that she wasn’t drinking.

  Patty and Liz had been best friends since they were five. Their families lived across the street from each other, and neither one of them had a sister. Colleen had been a bridesmaid in both of their weddings, but they had been each other’s honor attendant.

  Can’t I be your sister too? She could understand couples keeping a pregnancy private during the first trimester, but if they were telling Finn and Liz, why not her? We don’t have secrets. That’s what her mother had always said. This was a big secret.

  She felt left out. She couldn’t help it, but she did.

  The two-story motel had been built shortly after the chicken plant opened. While not luxurious, it was clean and had everything they needed, including free wi-fi. The rooms opened directly onto a walkway that ran around the small swimming pool. Outside each door was a pair of white plastic chairs with a low table between them. Colleen sat down in one of the chairs, opening her laptop, angl
ing the screen so that she could read it outdoors.

  She again felt overwhelmed by the number of personal messages that she had. Why did she make such an effort to keep up with so many people? She looked up when one of the room doors opened. It was Patty and Liz; Patty was carrying her laptop. Patty sat down next to her while Liz pulled up another chair. They both looked as if they had a secret…but it couldn’t be about the baby. Sean would want to be a part of sharing that news.

  “Have you been following this thing with Autumn Chase?” Liz asked.

  “Autumn Chase? The actress?” Colleen remembered her. “The one who has all those things on the shopping channels?”

  “Yes, she was in a lot of movies as a child,” Patty confirmed, “and then had the sitcom for a long time.”

  Colleen remembered the sitcom. It was called M.J. and featured Autumn Chase as a relatively sane young woman surrounded by absurd friends whose antics she kept accommodating because she was too softhearted to do otherwise. It ran for years while being cute, but not a whole lot more.

  The actress now had a lifestyle brand that sold a big range of fashion and home decoration products. Colleen had the impression that it was quite successful. “What’s going on with her?”

  “You really don’t know?” Her sisters-in-law exchanged a look. After Colleen shook her head, Patty moved the laptop toward her. “Here, look.”

  Patty clicked on a link, and a video appeared, five women sitting on a large curved sofa. It seemed to be from a daytime talk show, and three of the women were talking at once.

  “I’m sorry,” Colleen apologized. “I don’t think I can concentrate. Can you summarize it for me?”

  “Autumn was guest-hosting on this show, and they were talking about adoption. Apparently when she was fourteen and still under contract to a Disney-like studio, she had a baby. Her parents made her give the baby up and they kept it all very hush-hush because of the film contract. She says that she totally went along with it, that she repressed all her feelings, but the baby will be twenty-eight sometime in the autumn. She always says ‘autumn,’ not ‘fall.’”

  Colleen’s birthday was in October. That was in the autumn. She was twenty-seven. She would be twenty-eight next autumn.

  And, yes, she was adopted.

  But it didn’t matter. God had put her in her family. That’s what she had always grown up believing.

  “So we had to wonder,” Patty said, “if there was a chance that you were that baby.”

  “It would be so amazing,” Liz gushed. She was livelier than Patty. “One of my cousins got a set of her sheets for a wedding present. I love her handbags. If she’s your mother, you have to get me that blue one. I’ve wanted it for ages.”

  “You were born in the fall,” Patty said. “So it is possible.”

  “Fall covers a lot of time,” Colleen said. “A quarter of the year. I’m sure a lot of babies were put up for adoption during the fall.”

  “But how many of them were perfectly healthy baby girls in completely closed adoptions?” Patty asked. “Do you know any other adopted kid who knows as little as you do?”

  Colleen acknowledged that the circumstances of her adoption, while once very common, had become increasingly unusual.

  “But it is exciting, isn’t it?” Liz exclaimed. “I used to fantasize that Princess Diana was my mother, and there are pictures of me with my parents when I was twenty minutes old. What do you think? Is there a chance?”

  “I know as much as you do. Let me watch the video.”

  The show had three regular hosts and a weekly guest host. In addition there was also a daily guest who had an issue for the other four to discuss. Apparently on this episode, the daily guest was speaking about her experiences of having relinquished a child to be adopted by others. The other four were listening with equal sympathy. Colleen leaned forward to get a better view of the computer screen.

  Autumn Chase was a lovely woman. Her thick chestnut hair fell to her shoulders in graceful waves; her eyes were shimmering green. She wasn’t pretending to be a girl. There was the slightest hint of wrinkles at the edge of her eyes and on her forehead, and her face was mobile and expressive; it hadn’t been frozen by a lot of plastic surgery. She seemed warm and vibrant; she had the kind of personality that made people want to buy necklaces and tea towels on the shopping channels.

  “She doesn’t really look like you,” Patty said, “although that’s probably not her natural hair color and she may be wearing tinted contacts. But she’s tiny like you.”

  So were lots of women.

  Patty ran the next few frames in slow motion. Even though Autumn wasn’t in close-up, you could see her leaning forward, her eyes narrowing. The camera was moved to focus on the guest, but suddenly cut to show Autumn slumped back in her chair, her hand over her heart.

  The video hiccupped. Whoever had posted it had deleted the commercials. In that interval Autumn had composed herself, and the lead host had obviously been cued to ask her about her own story.

  Autumn apologized, saying that she had never considered telling her own story. “And I might not tell it very well.” She had gotten pregnant while on location shooting Cards. She had been barely fourteen. “No, no,” she said in answer to a question about who the father was, “I don’t know if I am ready to say that. I wouldn’t even tell my parents. But it wasn’t Zachary.”

  Colleen paused the clip. “Who’s Zachary?”

  “Zachary Forbes,” Liz said. “He was the kid who costarred with her in Cards.”

  Colleen pressed the play button. “But you were fourteen,” the lead host was saying, “way below the age of consent. That’s rape.”

  Autumn shook her head, her beautiful chestnut hair swinging lightly around her shoulders. “We were filming in Canada. Their laws have changed, but at the time fourteen was legal.”

  Autumn continued her story. To her father, she was the family cash crop. He wanted her to have an abortion, but they were Catholic. Her mother and her grandmother said she would have to endure her shame and disgrace.

  “My mother said that she would not raise the baby for me, that everyone already did everything for me. I was under contract to start Winter Splash in Italy in December. All I remember is her yelling at me about gaining weight.”

  “Maybe that’s why you are so short,” Liz said. “You weren’t properly nourished as a fetus.”

  A fetus? Colleen frowned. Had she once been someone’s fetus? Well, obviously. Of course, some woman—some girl—had carried her for nine months.

  Autumn was still speaking. “Once I knew that I couldn’t keep the baby, I suppose I went into denial. I couldn’t let myself care. All I thought about was how much I wanted to go to Italy and work on the new film. I suppose that makes me sound very self-centered, but I was under so much pressure. My entire family relied on me to keep working.”

  Her cohosts murmured sympathetically. Autumn then asked the show’s guest how one went about searching for a relinquished child when she wasn’t sure the name of the hospital. She wasn’t even sure of the date. She just remembered it being in the autumn.

  “That’s really all there is,” Patty said, closing her computer. “The rest is just the guest talking about how you start on a search.”

  A search? A search for what? For her? “Will you send me the link?”

  Patty nodded. “Haven’t you ever been curious about this before? I did ask Sean about it once. We have so much contact with the Bannings that I thought it seemed odd, but he didn’t seem to think so.”

  “It’s the way it has always been. We never questioned it.”

  “Being related to a celebrity could be a lot of fun. She must travel first class all the time.”

  “Or even on a private plane,” Liz added. “Wouldn’t that be amazing? Forget the purses, Colleen. Go for your own plane.”

  “I can’t i
magine myself going for anything.”

  Another door opened. She looked up. It was her father and Genevieve, coming out of the room next to hers. “What’s going on, girls?”

  Patty looked at Colleen. Go ahead, Colleen signaled. We don’t have secrets.

  “A famous actress”—Patty was realistic about her father-in-law not knowing who Autumn Chase was—“just announced that she gave up a baby who would be about Colleen’s age. So it’s hard not to wonder if it is Colleen.”

  “That doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “Not on the face of it,” Liz said, “but when—” She stopped, clearly not liking what she was seeing on his face. “No, maybe not.”

  “Would you please excuse us?” Her father’s voice was formal.

  “Sure…of course…” Patty and Liz scrambled out of their chairs, scooping up the laptop, disappearing into one of the rooms.

  “Dad, I don’t want to have secrets from them,” Colleen said. “They’re family too.”

  “Shall I leave?” Genevieve asked.

  “No, no,” Colleen said. “Of course not.” Genevieve was her father’s wife; she was as much a part of the family as Patty and Liz.

  Her father remained standing, looking down at her. He sat down only after Genevieve did. “Colleen, this is a wild goose chase. It is not possible that you are connected to this actress.”

  “How do we know that?” What if they’re right? What if she is my birth…no, no, mother isn’t the right word. I only have one mother.

  But her mother, her own mother, had not given birth to her. That was the way it was. Mary Pat had never pretended anything different.

  How extraordinary this was. Fifteen minutes ago, she had been thinking about how many emails she had, and now she was talking about having a birth mother. A celebrity. A movie star.

  “What actress is it?” Genevieve asked.

  “Autumn Chase. She did a lot of movies.”

  “Oh, the one with all the products,” Genevieve exclaimed. “I don’t know much about her acting career, but she has done a very good job of branding.”