Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

“Then print up a second copy of the pictures,” Ben suggested, “put them in an envelope, we’ll both sign our names across the flap. Mail it to yourself and then don’t open it. The postmark will set the date.”

  “Would that work?”

  He shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

  She sighed. She was being stupid. “This doesn’t make any sense, does it? I’m wasting time, aren’t I?”

  “I think it’s good you are seeing the importance of protecting yourself.”

  She recognized that tone. “This is about Autumn, isn’t it? Protecting myself against the perils of the internet?”

  He didn’t deny it. “Have you seen the latest announcement on the website?”

  She shook her head. “That was one of the things I promised myself during mass, that I would stop checking every five seconds. What’s the news?”

  “Why don’t you finish up and we can sit down?”

  “No. I can put away jewelry and listen at the same time. My auditory skills are actually quite good.”

  She wasn’t usually this snippy, but between her awful relatives and Ben acting like she was six, some snippiness seemed in order.

  “There’s going to be a television show,” he said, “a cable thing called Are You Ariel?”

  “What?” A string of lapis lazuli beads slid out of her hand. “A television show? What are you talking about?”

  Apparently one of the entertainment-oriented cable television channels was going to air a live special for the purpose of identifying Ariel. Any young woman who thought that she might be Autumn Chase’s relinquished daughter could submit an application. If she seemed to be a likely candidate, she would send a DNA sample. The samples would be tested beforehand, and the results would be revealed during the show while Autumn Chase herself sat in an off-stage room.

  Colleen was sitting on the bed, looking up at him bewildered. “Like those shows where men find out if they are the dad or not the dad and end up throwing chairs? Like that?”

  “They say it will be very tasteful. But I am surprised Autumn agreed. Her public persona has always been well managed until now.”

  “Maybe some things are more important than public persona.”

  “But she’s not just an actress anymore. She is a businesswoman. There are probably a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on the sales of her products. She must be feeling urgent to be taking this risk.”

  Urgent? What did he know about the loss, the uncertainty, that Autumn might be feeling?

  He waited for her to say something. When she didn’t, he came to sit down next to her. He had to pick up the beads. “Don’t you see that this is good for you? If one of them does prove to be Ariel, then you are out of it without any fuss or publicity.”

  “So are you saying that my not being Ariel would be a good thing?”

  “No, I am saying that a lot of publicity that we can’t control isn’t great, especially if it is pointless. And these women turning over their DNA? That’s risky. The producers say that they are promising confidentiality, but there’s too much at stake.”

  “I don’t have anything to hide.”

  “You don’t know that. Who knows what tests they will run? This isn’t supposed to happen, but you could have some marker that could someday make you uninsurable.”

  She didn’t want to listen to him anymore. He was probably right, but she was a little tired of him being right. At least right about her life. He wasn’t doing such a perfect job of managing his own.

  She pulled the beads out of his hand and jerked open one of the drawers of the jewelry box. She shoved the rest of the pieces back in, and locked it. She needed to find out about this TV show herself.

  But as she waited for her computer to boot up, she knew that, however desperate she was to be doing something, she couldn’t fill out an application. It didn’t have to do with having a marker for strange, incurable diseases. It was her father.

  He might not have the right to tell her not to contact Autumn, but Colleen certainly owed him the respect not to do it on national television.

  She looked through the application on the website. They wanted a lot of information, birth certificate, height, weight, two pages of health history, a form that would allow them to access even more health records, previous addresses, Social Security number, and job history. If the DNA was going to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, why did they need all this? What if the actual Ariel hated filling out forms?

  She didn’t want to blame Autumn. Autumn was warm and generous, she was kind, she was funny. Autumn wouldn’t have had anything to do with designing this application. It had to be other people, not Autumn, never Autumn.

  Chapter 11

  Genevieve apologized for how much needed to be done before Grannor’s estate could be settled. The sorting, packing, and shipping would take Colleen the whole summer, but the estate would pay her.

  Pay? No, she refused the money. Nice girls weren’t paid for helping their families.

  And she was grateful to have the project. It kept her from thinking about Autumn and Ariel.

  The big second floor bedroom was so full that it felt like an attic. Colleen found three large flat white boxes, each labeled with a woman’s first name and a date. She opened the one from 1927. Beneath layers of brittle tissue paper was an ivory satin wedding gown. She lifted it out. Gorgeous in its simplicity, the dress was made of the glowingly liquid fabric that cascaded into a scallop-edged hem. The front of the dress below the waist was badly snagged; the bride must have caught her bouquet on it. Colleen held it up to herself. The bride must have been tiny. The dress was so narrow through the waist and hips that even Colleen wouldn’t have been able to wear it. The gown from 1905 had froths of beautiful lace, trimming the skirt and the lower part of the sleeves. The dress had been cleaned but was still stained under the armholes, and the fabric had rotten beneath the stains. Colleen looked at the date again. Yes, the wedding had been in the summer. This bride had gotten hot. The third one had an overdress of beaded chiffon, and the heavy beads had pulled and shredded the light fabric.

  The dresses must have been beautiful once. What a shame to put them back in the boxes. Surely a talented seamstress could have created something new from them. The first one could be made into a baptismal gown for a baby. The lace of the second was exquisite and attached to the dress by tiny hand stitches. It was as if someone had expected that the lace could be used again. Perhaps the beading on the third could be used as a trim.

  But these gowns weren’t hers. They were heirlooms and belonged to her cousins. She got fresh tissue paper and refolded the dresses.

  In a brass-studded, leather trunk, she found the military decorations that were to go to Will. The trunk also contained packets of nineteenth-century letters, each bundle tied with a narrow ribbon. Some of the handwriting was spidery, some of it cramped; all the ink was fading. Grannor had told her about these letters. Colleen eased a few out of their envelopes. She learned about the weather and how many jars of plum jelly the writer’s cook was putting up. Grannor had told her that there were some written from Johnson’s Island, the POW camp in Michigan for captured Confederate officers. They needed to be scanned, and the originals donated to a museum.

  Would Will, Jeff, or Kim ever bother to do that? Why would they? They didn’t care about the family legacy.

  What would Grannor have done if Will and Jeff had been adopted by their stepfather? Would she have left the family Bible to someone whose last name was Gunderson? Would Kim then be her only real grandchild?

  Two weeks ago she would have felt obligated to—she would have wanted to—look through the family trees and find more information about those brides. She would have written down their maiden names and their married names, noting the year that they died and where they were buried. But Grannor’s will told her that these women and their graves had nothing to do with h
er.

  Then who am I? She had always been the girl everyone liked; she had never lacked confidence. Now she felt like a stranger to herself.

  What if I am Ariel?

  Ariel was the name of the character in Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Except for the villainous sea witch and the leglessness-thing, it would be okay to be that Ariel. She was charming, spunky, and curious.

  But at the moment Colleen was a more of a Cinderella, wasn’t she? The unpaid, but oh-so-nice spinster packing up other people’s heirlooms.

  She might not know how she felt about being Autumn’s child, but she certainly did not want to be Cinderella.

  She called her father. “You and Genevieve were right. This is too much work. I need to be paid for it.”

  Her father was relieved, and when she told Ben, he was impressed. “You asked for money?”

  “They offered. At first I said no. But I could feel myself getting even more negative about everything, so why not at least get a really great trip out of it?”

  “Good for you.”

  As she had predicted, seeing Ben so often in such an easy way—she cooked, he did the dishes and the grocery shopping—left her treating him like someone she had grown up with, like a friend.

  Every afternoon he would come looking for her, offering to move heavy trunks or load up the car for a trip to the village dump. She could have done those things. She instead needed him to help her make decisions about what to throw away. Every check her grandfather had ever written? Six handmade, now-shredded, lace baby bonnets?

  “Why do people save stuff?” she asked him that evening. “Letters, I can understand. They add to the historical record. But I am saving the dress my mother wore to all three of our baptisms. It’s beautiful and it’s real silk. But it’s emerald. I look horrible in such bright colors, and of course it is way too big. A seamstress said it would ruin the lines if I had it cut down.”

  “Are you hoping that you might have a daughter who would wear it? My mom saved her wedding dress for Kate and Nina. My sisters weren’t interested so now she says she’s saving it for the little girls.”

  “At least there’s a chance that your mother’s granddaughters could wear her dress. How likely is it that I will have a five-foot-nine red-haired daughter? And why does the DAR care about biological connections?” Colleen didn’t know if she was exasperated with herself, her grandparents, or a lineage-based service organization. “Can’t you be proud of the country and the Revolution even if you’ve only been here for five minutes?”

  “I would think so, but that is a different question than saving physical artifacts.”

  “We—the Ridge family, that is—has a set of flatware and a tea service that a former slave owner hid from the Union Army. Does knowing that make them more interesting or valuable? Grannor couldn’t find the piece of paper that said who had owned some engagement rings. Why does that make the rings feel like orphans? Part of me wants to find out about the brides who wore the dresses so that people know who they were. Why does that matter? The past is past. Saving a dress no one can wear isn’t going to bring it any closer. So why?”

  “I have no idea, but—” He broke off and started to put his utensils on his plate as if he was going to clear the table.

  “You were about to say something, weren’t you?” Colleen could feel her shoulders go up and her neck tighten. This still happened to her, the tensing, the anxiety that he was about to criticize her. “You started; you might as well finish.”

  He wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t the boy next door. He was a man, a dangerous man, with broad shoulders and a long lean torso, with deep-set green eyes and knife-edge cheekbones.

  “I was just going to suggest”—his voice was mild, slowly and softly Southern, the voice she had known her whole life—“that if it would make you feel better, why don’t we look up the information about those brides and attach it to the dresses?”

  That wasn’t a dangerous answer. That was a friend’s answer. Why couldn’t he stay one or the other, her friend or her peril? “You don’t think that is a waste of time?”

  “Not if it would mean something to you.”

  * * * *

  Colleen was dreading the Fourth of July holiday. She wished her friends weren’t coming. She knew that there were people who had to give up on their own families, who created families from their friends, celebrating holidays together, planning each other’s funerals, but that wasn’t her. However focused they were on their wives, she would never give up on her brothers. She would move to Minnesota and risk freezing to death rather than live without family.

  Autumn’s Are You Ariel? show would be on over the holiday. It would be strange watching it with her friends. None of them seemed to know that she was adopted.

  “I didn’t think you ever hid that,” Ben said when she told him. The moments when he seemed to be her friend were coming more and more often.

  “No, not deliberately. I guess it never came up. It turns out that a lot of my college friends don’t know either. It’s never seemed very important before.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier on you if they knew? You don’t like secrets, do you?”

  That was certainly true. “I also don’t want to have to tell Amanda how little I’ve done on our grant application. I don’t like disappointing people.”

  “You probably don’t do it very often. Tell me more about the grant. What would the money be for?”

  “Partly so we would have time next summer. Developing a detailed curriculum is a lot of work, and we’ve always had to have summer jobs.”

  Ben looked at her, his head tilted, his eyes glinting. “It sounds like you don’t completely realize how much money you’re going to have when the estate settles.”

  That was true. She wasn’t thinking of herself as an heiress. The terms of Grannor’s will still hurt. If Colleen had been inheriting half of the jewelry and a sixth of the silver and china, she would be thinking about what she wanted. She would have tried on the pearls. She would have compared the cake forks in the different sets of sterling. But the money? Thinking about the trips she would be able to take, all the things she would be able to buy, made her feel as if she hadn’t really mattered.

  “This curriculum is something I care about,” she said. “Even if we can do it without the grant, we would still have to do this preliminary work. It isn’t a waste of time.”

  Ben knew a lot about how athletic kids learned. “There are kids whose teachers think that they are as dumb as a post because verbal instructions mean so little to them, but their motor memories and kinetic awareness are off the charts. They are whip smart, just not in the ways the classroom cares about.”

  He went on to say that sometimes you simply had to grab hold of a kid’s shoulders or hips and have them feel what they needed to do. Words, even pictures, didn’t help them, but once they felt it, they never forgot it. “Of course, it’s a bitch because you can’t touch the kids anymore. That’s right. Of course, it is, but it disadvantages some of them so much.”

  This was the real Ben, not the overly controlled, overly polite man of the last few months; this was the Ben she had once loved so dearly. Why wasn’t he trying to get back into coaching? He cared so much about how these kids learned. This was what he was supposed to be doing. That was the only way he would ever truly be himself.

  * * * *

  The Fourth was on a Friday. Two other of Colleen’s friends, Cara Hernandez and Libby Tyson, were coming to the lake with Jason and Amanda. They were arriving Thursday evening. From the kitchen window Colleen saw Jason’s car come up the drive. She called to Ben, and they went out the front door to greet the others.

  Colleen introduced Cara and Libby to Ben. Cara almost closed her finger in the car door, and Libby tilted the plate of cookies she was carrying. Ben’s reaction time was so quick that he steadied the plate before any of the c
ookies fell. This didn’t add to Libby’s composure.

  Amanda sent a teasing glance to Colleen. I didn’t warn them what he looks like.

  In the dusky shadow cast by the sprawling house, Ben’s hair looked black, its flashes of copper needing the sun, but the perfect symmetry of his features, the easy grace of his carriage, dazzled with its own light.

  It was a moment before Libby was sure enough of herself to speak. “I hope no one minds what I spent.” She loved to cook so she had taken over planning the menus and had brought a lot of the groceries with her. “Divided six ways it won’t be that bad.”

  Now it was Ben’s turn to send Colleen a look, this one pleading. He did not want to go Dutch when four of the others were teachers.

  She gave her head a slight shake. Her friends had come expecting to pay their own way.

  Was this what it would be like when Grannor’s estate was settled? Her friends would still have to budget for every little indulgence while she could easily treat them. Wouldn’t that be awkward? Would they start to expect her to pay? Would that make her feel taken advantage of?

  She supposed that there were worse problems to have.

  “Amanda told us that you got the internet a few weeks ago,” Cara said as they were carrying the groceries in. “What about cable TV? I hate to sound like the low-brow ditz that I am, but I am interested in watching Autumn Chase’s show.”

  This would have been a good time to tell everyone, that there was a chance, such a slight chance that it was hardly worth mentioning, that she might be Ariel. Everyone would be shocked. All the bustle of putting away the groceries would stop. They would want her to tell the whole story. They were smart, they would figure out that there was a whole lot more than just a slight chance that she was Ariel. They would want to know if she had had her DNA done, why she hadn’t said anything, she always told everyone everything, and on and on. She couldn’t face it.

  So only Ben would know.

  * * * *

  The Fourth was everything that the holiday should be. Ben wheeled around the old Weber grill, and they grilled hot dogs and hamburgers over the charcoal. At dusk, they crowded into the rowboat and watched the village fireworks from the lake. People with homes along the shore had turned off their lights, and the music from the open-air dock in the village carried over the water.