Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  Ben had to force himself not to swivel and stare at her over the car’s headrest. Where had that come from?

  Her grandmother’s will, he supposed. That must have made her think more about her adoption.

  “It was probably my idea,” his mother admitted. “I was just getting to know Mary Pat then. She was so happy with Sean, and of course, she wanted a bigger family, but she felt that her mother had called in every chit that she had. I thought it would be nice if we tried down here. But I didn’t do it. I was in the trenches with all those babies, so my mother-in-law, Ben’s grandmother, took it on.”

  Ben had not known any of this. Of course he had been one of the babies keeping his mom in the trenches.

  “But neither of us knew anything,” his father said. “My father told me when contact had been made with a family, but he felt it was best to keep everything confidential even though I was technically his partner. If you’re curious, I believe that in Illinois adoptees are now entitled to see their original birth certificate.”

  “Even though my birth certificate is from Georgia?”

  “It is? Really?”

  Ben glanced across the car. His father was frowning.

  “That’s unusual,” his father said. “I would have thought that since your parents were Illinois residents, that the legal work would have been done there.”

  “Some of the papers were signed by Judge Rutherford. Ben said that he was a family friend of yours.”

  “Yes,” his dad agreed. “My father did say that Judge Rutherford always did what was 100 percent right, but what was sometimes only 89 percent legal. If he and Dad took a shortcut, they must have been very confident that the adoption would never be challenged. Has anyone ever reached out to you?”

  “No.”

  That was all she said, but Ben knew the rest of her answer. Why would they? I was where I belonged.

  * * * *

  The flights between from Atlanta to Charlottesville were on small regional jets. A single cabin had four seats across, and those seats were even smaller and narrower than usual airline seats. On the way down, Colleen had sat with her father. Now she and Ben were side by side.

  Once they were airborne and the view from the little window beyond Colleen’s shoulder was of flat gray clouds, the flight attendant dimmed the lights. The blue-gray upholstery of the high seatbacks seemed to be a wall creating a little room for just the two of them in this narrow, pressurized world.

  “Ben.”

  He turned to face her, but she was looking at the blue-gray wall in front of her.

  “I know that you promised your parents that you would stay with me, and I also know that you say that you don’t mind—”

  Her tone was very controlled. She had rehearsed this.

  “—but I don’t want you to stay. This isn’t me being nice. This isn’t me talking in ‘nice code’ like you always said that I did. This is about me. I don’t want you there.”

  He had never before heard her be so definite about what she wanted. “Can I ask why? This isn’t because I didn’t tell you about the will, is it?”

  “No, I made too big a deal of that. I must have needed to make a big deal out of something just then.”

  Oh, shit. Was this where the emotional support business came in?

  “A lot has happened in the past two days,” she continued, “and I need to think. I can’t do that with you around.”

  “I’ll keep out of your way. You know I will.”

  “That won’t be enough. Grannor trying to fix us up over spring break was embarrassing and confusing. I didn’t know if that was what I wanted, and just when—I might as well admit this—just when I was thinking that maybe it was, you’d taken up with Leilah.”

  What she had wanted? What could he say to that? “Colleen, I’m really—”

  She held up a hand, stopping him. “No. Stop. You don’t need to say anything about that. It wouldn’t make any difference. I feel confused right now. I am having trouble making sense of things, and it is too hard to be around you. Right now I am not strong enough.”

  “Strong enough for what?” He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Strong enough to resist trusting you. I trust people, Ben. That’s my default. But I can’t let myself trust you. It would be crazy, given everything that has happened. I need to be on my guard with you. That’s new and strange for me, and I have enough on my plate.” She reached forward and pulled the airline’s in-flight magazine out of the seatback pocket in front of her. “If you stay, I’ll get all friendly and trusting because that’s what I do, and that seems really stupid right now.” She started flipping through the pages of the magazine. She was done talking to him.

  He watched her as she pretended to be reading. How ironic was this? The real reason he had stopped calling her after their summer together was that he had felt so crappy about himself, but he had also had his list of complaints about her. At the top had been the way she cared so much about everyone else’s feelings, what they wanted to do, where they wanted to eat. She never seemed to speak up for herself, say what she wanted.

  She seemed to have found her voice now. And how was she using it? To send him away.

  * * * *

  If there had been a return flight to Atlanta that night, he might have gotten right back on it, but the Charlottesville airport was too small for that. He also didn’t think anyone had thought to stop the mail or the newspapers at her grandmother’s house. The newspapers were left at the end of the driveway. Anyone driving by would know that the house was empty. The cable installers had also been working while they were gone. His parents had a point. He should not let Colleen go back to the house alone.

  “I hope you will let me go back with you tonight,” he said as they were landing. “I do need to get my stuff.”

  “I guess you do.” She spoke without looking at him.

  He had turned in his rental car when they had flown to Atlanta, but if he tried to rent another one—especially since the counters seemed to be closed—she would get back to the lake and the empty house long before he did, which would defeat the purpose of his going. He offered to drive her car, and she accepted his offer. She was probably too tired to realize that he would then have no way to get back to the airport.

  She fell asleep, waking up only when he stopped at the end of the driveway to get the mail and scoop up the Sunday paper. It was the only one there. As he drove up the long, curving drive, the car’s headlights swept across the open meadow, picking up the line of disturbed earth where the cable had been buried. The rest of the newspapers were tucked neatly next to a planter. One of the workmen must have done that.

  He walked through the house ahead of Colleen, turning on lights, checking the doors and windows for any sign of a forced entry. Nothing had been disturbed.

  “Do you want me to stay in the house?” he asked.

  “All the beds have been slept in.”

  “I was a snowboarder. We are not a fastidious lot.”

  She smiled in a vague way and told him to go on out to the boathouse.

  He stopped in the library and poured himself a drink. He dropped his bag in front of the boathouse door and sat down in one of the deck chairs, balancing the drink on its wide wooden arm.

  It was late enough that the moon, having risen in the east, was now over the lake, sending a glittering white ribbon across the dark waters. The light at the end of Mrs. Ridge’s dock was a dim mustard-gold. Some nights it glittered a bright white, but it was solar-powered. The skies must have been overcast the last few days.

  He was going to miss this place, the early morning silence, the fire-kissed colors of the sunsets, the wildflowers that were beginning to blossom in the front meadow, the deep green thickets running along the property lines down to the lake.

  But he wasn’t going to miss Leilah.


  At first he had thought that this was the ideal relationship for him. He never had to talk about his feelings, and she hadn’t wanted him to listen to her talking about hers because—he eventually realized—she really and truly didn’t give a crap about him. The relationship he thought was so perfect was actually empty.

  That was what he had hurt Colleen over. What a prince he had been, but the thought of Mrs. Ridge fixing him up with her had swamped him with guilt and regret. Guilt for what he had done to her; regret over what he had thrown away.

  Is she a Colleen? That’s what the guys had always asked when someone started dating a new woman. Colleen was the standard by which every other girlfriend was judged. Maybe he had been doing that. Even when he was consciously enumerating her faults—she had too many friends, she wanted to chat too much, she was too other-oriented, she didn’t respect other people’s boundaries—maybe unconsciously he too had been thinking that there had been something magical about her that he would never see again. Maybe he had been avoiding serious relationships because he secretly didn’t believe that anyone could measure up to her.

  But that didn’t mean they were right for each other.

  He got up and pulled the chair to the corner of the porch where the cell signal was strongest. He balanced his phone on the chair’s arm and went inside. Then he shoved the little dining table closer to the front wall and took his computer out of his suitcase.

  What a pain communications were. They were about to get better—the boathouse was getting its own network—just in time for him leaving. He waited while his computer found the signal coming from his phone. He scanned his most recent messages. Seth had sent him a rough cut of his latest snowboarding video, a promotion for Seth’s family’s company, Street Boards. Ben flagged it to open later. Downloading the file through this crappy connection would take too long.

  What would Seth and Nate say if he told them about Colleen? They knew that he was staying in the boathouse of one of his father’s rich clients. What if he told them that the old lady had been Colleen’s grandmother? They wouldn’t ask him if she was a “new Colleen.” She was the real thing.

  There was no point in telling them now. He was leaving tomorrow.

  He was deleting email after email when he heard a soft knock on the door. He switched on the outside light. It was Colleen, still in the clothes she had been traveling in. In the harsh light, she looked fragile and pale.

  “I was hoping you were still up,” she said.

  How beautiful she looked. Her skin had such a fine grain; her eyes were so soft.

  “What do you need? Why didn’t you use the intercom? I could have come to you.” There had been no reason for her to walk over here in the dark.

  “Actually I was hoping to use the internet for a few minutes. Mrs. Si—Genevieve called and said that there was something I should see.”

  “Of course.” Without sitting down, he exited out of his programs, then pulled out the chair for her. He went into the bedroom to unpack, wanting to give her privacy even though privacy was one thing she never seemed to need.

  As he was shoving his suitcase under the bed, it occurred to him if he was leaving in the morning, he probably shouldn’t have unpacked. He was wondering if he should reverse the procedure when he heard Colleen gasp.

  She was staring at the computer screen, her hand over her mouth.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Clearly something was. He pulled the other chair close to her. “Tell me. If it’s bad, we’ll deal with it.”

  What could be worse than her grandmother’s will?

  “My birthday is in October, October nineteenth.”

  Ben hoped that he had once known that. “And?”

  “She’s looked at her old call sheets and calendars and thinks from the notes there that my birthday would have been sometime between October fifteenth and twenty-second, sometime during that week.”

  “Colleen, what are you talking about?”

  She turned the computer toward him. It was open to the site for the actress Autumn Chase.

  “You know who she is, don’t you?” Colleen asked.

  He nodded. A couple of years ago, after the competition season was over, he had spent a week in Portland with Nate, who had—as usual—been in the rehab facility, recovering from one of his many injuries. Nate’s mom had asked him to keep Nate from overdoing the exercises. It was a hopeless mission—snowboarders overdid everything, the good, the bad, and the incredibly stupid—but Ben had gone anyway.

  During the mornings the TV in the exercise room had been set to reruns of M.J., Autumn Chase’s sitcom. The main character, a warmhearted, engaging young woman, had reminded him of Colleen in her inability to say no to other people. He supposed that was true of many women, but at that moment he’d had Colleen on his mind. Even though they had split six months before, he still had been thinking about her a lot.

  He clicked on the link. Autumn Chase’s site opened with a lovely wash of fall colors, cinnamon, honey, bronze, amber, and hunter green swirling into a vortex, then crystallizing into a kaleidoscope of autumn leaves that melted into letters forming Autumn’s name. Pictures of her came forward, then dissolved. Click here to get to know me. Ben did so.

  Can you help me find Ariel?

  “What’s this about?”

  “She says ‘Ariel’ is the name she would have given the baby. She wanted the two of them to have the same initial. There’s a tab.”

  The baby? What baby? Ben glanced at the tabs along the top of the page. They were the usual, Home, Bio, Appearances, etc. There was a tab for Autumn’s Lifestyle Collection—whatever that might be—and farthest to the right was one labeled Finding Ariel. It led to another interestingly designed page. It seemed to be a letter on stationery with feathery edges. The script was mocha-colored, but still readable.

  He scanned the letter. Teenage…movie contract…forced to give her away…Florida, October…would have called her Ariel…He was good at absorbing printed information quickly.

  “At first she only remembered it as being in the fall,” Colleen was saying, “but now she’s figured out that it must have been October.”

  This was huge. “When did you find out about this?”

  “Ah…yesterday, just yesterday. My sisters-in-law told me. One of my high school friends had texted me about it, but I didn’t see that message until today.”

  “So are you thinking you might be Ariel?” he asked. No wonder she had looked so pale. This was a lot to take in.

  “Those dates in October do increase the chances, but I don’t look anything like her.”

  Ben went back to the bio page to look at a picture. He couldn’t see a resemblance.

  “Plus the baby was born in Florida.” She was clearly trying to come up with reasons why this wouldn’t be her. “If your family helped find me, wouldn’t it have been in Georgia?”

  “My MeeMaw”—that was his father’s mother—“had cousins in Florida. If she was helping, she might have called their priests.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t been expecting that answer. “Do you know where in Florida?”

  “Not close enough to Disney World for us kids’ tastes, that’s all I know, but I can find out.”

  Underneath the letter was a link to a message board. It included an introductory message warning about respecting other people’s privacy. Its language suggested that it had been written by the lawyers.

  The first thread was from people encouraging Autumn to search for her relinquished child. The messages were smiley-face positive, unable to imagine anything except the rosiest of outcomes.

  But the later threads took on a darker tone. Those writers were birth mothers themselves, some of whom belonged to an online support organization. They were bitter; they felt that their children had been stolen from them. Adoptive families were the enemy. Their position had a strong undercu
rrent of class warfare. Adoptive parents used their financial, educational, and social privileges to scoop up babies from the less privileged, believing that their status entitled them to have however many children they wanted, whenever they wanted them.

  Their solution to everything was a reunion between birth mother and child. According to them, no one searching for a birth mother or a relinquished child needed to worry about what might be found. All troubles, whether substance abuse, legal problems, financial catastrophes, an inability to form healthy relationships, anything, were caused by the psychic trauma of the separation. After a reunion, healing would inevitably occur.

  Therefore, the most bitter women asserted, no one involved in the “adoption triad”—child, birth mother, adoptive mother—should claim a right of privacy, the right not to be reunited. Reunions had a healing power that no one could predict in advance. The person you were looking for would be grateful when you found them…even if they thought that they wouldn’t be.

  One day, wrote a woman who had been kept from stalking her underage birth child by a restraining order, my child will hate his second family for what they are doing.

  “Do you see that?” Colleen had been reading along with him. “Second family? Is that who my parents and brothers are? My second family?”

  “Not to you, they aren’t. Do you really need to be reading this?”

  “Yes.”

  One-word answers weren’t her usual mode of communication. So he sat with her while she read every post on every thread. As anger-filled as the rants were, Ben did feel a twinge of compassion. Some people had such difficult lives. When Colleen was finally finished, he reached over and closed the computer so that she wouldn’t start over. “Let me walk you back to the house.”

  She protested that that was crazy, she could walk herself, but he went with her anyway.

  * * * *

  Shit.

  Ben had to struggle to kick aside the covers and swing his feet to the floor. That had been a dream, hadn’t it?

  Of course, it had been. He had been out on the slopes, riding his favorite board. He had been launching off the wall of the pipe. It was a blur. He somehow turned into Nate, soaring through Big Air jumps, and then Seth, stunning even himself with an Olympic medal.