Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  Saturday morning Colleen sat down with Amanda to talk about the grant application. “I’m sorry. I got new ideas, some of them thanks to Ben, but I haven’t gotten much writing done. I’ve been helping my father organize my grandmother’s estate.”

  “Jason and I are finding it strange to be here without her. It must be a nightmare for you. Do you still expect her to sweep in the room and tell you what you are doing wrong?”

  “Actually, no.”

  In the first few days after Grannor had died, before they had gone down to Georgia, Colleen had felt that her grandmother was still in the house, but once she and Ben had returned, she hadn’t. She used paper napkins and set the ketchup and mustard out in their original containers without feeling that Grannor was watching her. Her shock over the will must have stifled her grief. That probably wasn’t healthy.

  “Her will caused a lot of hurt feelings,” she said to Amanda.

  “Oh?”

  Amanda was an English teacher; she liked stories. She would have liked to hear this one. But how could Colleen explain the will? Amanda didn’t even know that she was adopted, and with Autumn’s show coming on tonight, it was too complicated.

  Amanda was also a good friend, so when Colleen murmured something about her aunt and uncle being angry, Amanda didn’t push her. “Then can we talk about Ben?” Amanda asked.

  “What’s to say? We aren’t a couple. We are trying to be friends, but there is a lot of baggage.”

  “You haven’t been tempted to jump his bones?”

  “I certainly haven’t done it.”

  * * * *

  Cara and Libby were not the sort who indulged in holiday flings. They were only interested in something serious, and Colleen felt sure that Amanda had warned them that there was something complicated between Ben and herself, no matter how often she had tried to tell Amanda otherwise.

  “We’re thinking of him as a museum piece,” Libby said when the four women were alone Saturday afternoon. “Look, but do not touch.”

  “His mother did want him to become a priest,” Colleen said.

  “A priest? A Catholic priest? As in a poverty, chastity, and obedience kind of priest?”

  “Yes,” Colleen answered. “But I don’t think he would be good at any of those.”

  “I’d certainly start going to mass a lot more,” said Cara. “My mother would be very pleased.”

  “Especially if she started going with you,” Amanda added.

  Ben as a priest…going through his day, dressed in black with a touch of white at his throat, the white calling attention to the Irish beauty of his face; celebrating mass, wearing the white vestment, lifting the chalice overhead as he consecrated the Host, his robe rippling down from his broad shoulders.

  Colleen might well be in the pews too, but for all the wrong reasons.

  * * * *

  Finally it was eight o’clock on Saturday night. Ben and Jason moved the furniture a little so that they could all gather around the TV. In groups Colleen usually took a seat in the middle of a sofa. She was small; she didn’t feel cramped by having people on either side of her. And she liked being in the middle of things. Tonight she sat in a wing chair.

  What were the next ninety minutes going to be like? Would it be like a beauty pageant? Would confetti cascade from the ceiling when the winner was announced? Would there be a tiara and flowers?

  Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be Colleen who was crowned.

  She knew that either she was Ariel or she wasn’t. Nothing that happened Saturday night was going to change that. But she couldn’t help feeling that by not submitting an application she had lost her chance, that someone else was going to step in the place that was rightfully hers.

  People she had grown up with had been in touch with her since the search for Ariel had begun. She had always said that her father had said that it was impossible. That was the truth—he had said that—which was fortunate because she was no good at lying, but he had said it because he wanted it to be so, not because he had any evidence.

  A commercial began telling them about a weight loss pill that they could order directly from the manufacturer at a one-time special savings. The next commercial was again direct-marketing, this one for a set of inspirational songs from various country artists.

  “I would have expected better ads.” Jason said. “At least ones for her products.”

  “This could backfire on her brand,” Ben said. “The people in charge of the merch may have dug foxholes for themselves.”

  The cable channel’s logo came on the screen followed by a blandly handsome young man. “Welcome to Are You Ariel?” he said dramatically. “I am Brian Raines, and we are live!”

  “Okay, Colleen, you have an October birthday,” Amanda said, “this is your last chance to pretend to be adopted.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cara asked. “Are you adopted, Colleen?”

  Colleen could feel Ben looking at her. No, I didn’t tell them.

  So he rescued her. “I think Amanda said ‘pretend.’” His voice was deep.

  “I was born in October,” she said, “but I don’t think my dad would like me to emerge as the poster child for adoption.” That was certainly true.

  “We are here tonight,” the host continued, “in hopes that we can find the lost daughter of the beloved Autumn Chase. Autumn is backstage in a separate room.” The screen switched to a shot of her. Brian complimented her on how lovely she looked and asked her how she was feeling.

  “I’m nervous, I’m hopeful,” she said, her hand brushing against her chest as if she were touching her heart. With her was Bethany Ares, a “celebrity journalist.”

  “What’s a celebrity journalist?” Jason asked. “Does she write about celebrities, or is she a celebrity herself?”

  No one in the room knew. None of them had ever heard of her.

  Bethany took over the interview. At fourteen, Autumn explained, she had been the sole support of her extended family. Her parents, grandmother, and great-grandmother all lived in houses owned by the trust in which child-labor laws required her earnings to be placed. Her parents’ only source of income was the fees that they took for managing her career.

  “The fees were not inappropriate, but if I wasn’t earning, they weren’t either.”

  Her multi-picture contract was with a division of a squeaky-clean film corporation. The parents of her young fans would not have considered a pregnant teen to be an acceptable role model for their daughters.

  “Why didn’t you have an abortion?” Bethany asked.

  “My father expected me to. I couldn’t believe it.” Autumn blinked and tilted her head back as if even now she couldn’t believe it. “We were Catholics. I had grown up hearing that an abortion might sever my relationship with God. My father didn’t care about that, only about my career.”

  Her mother’s continued refusal to take her in for an abortion had been the breaking point in her parents’ already difficult marriage.

  “Did you want to keep the baby?” Bethany asked.

  “Of course. Of course.” She leaned forward, making a despairing little gesture, her hand near her chin, her fingers flicking open, her palm turning outward. It was a familiar gesture; Colleen recognized it as characteristic of Autumn’s TV character, M.J. “But my mother wouldn’t hear of it. She told me that neither she nor my grandmother would do a thing to help me raise it, and I would need to come up with a plan not only to take care of my child, but how I was going to replace the income that I would be losing.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a young girl.”

  “That’s why adoption felt like the only choice. Now I need to know where Ariel is and how she is doing. I need to know if I did the right thing. I want her to understand why I did what I did; I need to know if she forgives me.”

  The interview
er asked her what the search for Ariel had uncovered so far.

  “Not a great deal. I was apparently admitted to the hospital under a false name and my mother destroyed all our paperwork. My grandmother was the one who contacted her parish priest, asking him to find a good Catholic family, but both of them are dead and they left no records. Even the most experienced investigators haven’t found a trace of what happened to her.”

  The investigators had also examined all the registries where adoptees could express their interest in reuniting with birth families, but there had been no trace of Ariel on any of them.

  “The mother searching for her child,” Amanda said, “that’s the Demeter myth, Persephone being kidnapped and taken into the underworld, and her mother plunging the world into winter while she went looking for her.”

  Colleen spoke. “I don’t think adopting families would like to be compared to the underworld.”

  After a commercial break, the host came back onscreen to explain the format of the show. “The production staff has screened dozens of applications—”

  “Dozens?” Jason interrupted. “That’s not very impressive.”

  The others shushed him.

  “—and every person who had the slightest possibility of being Ariel has been investigated. Since the secrecy about Ariel’s birth was so important, we had to allow for the possibility that identifying information, including the birth date, may have been falsified. We accepted anyone with a birthday from September through January. In one case we have even been willing to entertain the possibility that Autumn was misled about the gender of the child.”

  He then introduced the first candidate. She was a lovely young woman with an astonishing resemblance to Autumn Chase. She was petite with the same thick chestnut hair, the same high cheekbones and balanced jaw, the same little nose.

  “She has to be Ariel,” Libby said.

  “No.” Amanda was confident. “They will save the most likely candidates for last. This one has to be a total non-starter.”

  Back on the screen, the candidate and Brian had moved to sit down in a pair of leather chairs. “You certainly look as if you could be Ariel.”

  “Yes, as long as I can remember, people have been telling me that I look like Autumn Chase.”

  “Do you think that you are Ariel?”

  “No. I’m not adopted. I know I’m not. My looking like her is a fluke…although I deliberately wear my hair like she does. I figured that if it looked good on her, it would look good on me.”

  “Even so,” Brian said, “the resemblance is extraordinary. Is it possible that you were switched at birth, that your parents brought the wrong baby home from the hospital?”

  “Ever since this started, people have been asking me that, but I was born in December in Akron, Ohio. No one in my family has ever been near Florida.”

  “If you are so confident that you are not Ariel, why did you come on the show?”

  “It was a free trip to LA,” she admitted honestly. “And I’ve never been to California. But also, my family’s been getting so many questions, people accusing them of lying about my not being adopted. Someone even suggested that my parents were lying because they had taken money to pass off Autumn’s baby as theirs. My mother was really hurt. It’s been horrible having people say these things about us. Coming on the show seemed like the best way to let everyone know for sure.”

  The second hopeful was a slender, young man in a remarkably tight version of an Oxford-cloth shirt. He had been a fan of Autumn Chase since he had been able to turn on the television himself. He had been adopted, and the dates weren’t too far off. He felt sure that the attraction he had always felt for Autumn must be genetic. She must be his mother.

  “You do know that Autumn’s mother and grandmother have said that they each saw a baby girl?” Brian asked.

  “Yes, but the hospital could have shown them the wrong baby. Or they could be lying. They’ve lied so many times. Why should we believe them about this?”

  “You do have a point. How would your life change if you found out that you were Ariel?”

  The young man spun out a fantasy about going places with Autumn, traveling with her. He had always been interested in fashion, and although he had had no formal training, he prided himself on his innate taste, taste that had been inherited from her, no doubt. Of course, she had professional stylists, but he could see himself supervising them.

  “Can you imagine what the professionals would think about that?” Amanda asked.

  The third hopeful was a ten-year-old girl whose adoptive parents had decided that she might be Autumn’s granddaughter. Her birth mother, the actual potential “Ariel,” had been sixteen. The family didn’t have her name, but knew that she liked to read books and sing in her church choir. She had a family history of elevated blood pressure similar to that of the Chases’.

  “That proves nothing,” Ben said. “Every decent Southern family has hypertension all over the family tree. We live on fried food and cream gravies.”

  Until the little girl turned eighteen, the parents would not be able to find out anything more about the birth mother, and admittedly, they had no reason to think that she had been adopted herself. But the father went on and on about how exceptionally talented his daughter was. If she was allowed to sing, everyone would know that she must be carrying Autumn’s DNA.

  The host started to ask the girl a question. She interrupted him, not letting him finish.

  “What a brat,” Libby said as soon as the commercial came on. “We have kids in the lower school like that. You always want to slap them.”

  “These three do seem like long shots, don’t they?” Cara said.

  “Does it matter?” Jason asked. “Isn’t this all about the publicity? Wouldn’t every forty-something actress kill for this publicity?”

  “Don’t be so cynical, Jason,” Cara admonished. “We’re supposed to care about this.”

  “The Nats are playing the Dodgers,” he answered. “The game’s out west. It might still be on. That’s what I care about.”

  As Amanda had predicted, the producers had been saving the two most likely candidates for the end. Both were within a few months of being the right age and had been adopted by Catholic families. The first one had been raised in Alaska, one of the few states that allowed adoptees easy access to their original birth certificates once they turned eighteen. The shows’ producers helped her get hers. It had been issued in Alaska. Her mother was “Jane Doe,” her father was unknown. This level of secrecy might have been promising if the original certificate had been issued in Florida, but this candidate seemed to have been born in Alaska.

  This candidate herself was the exact opposite of the annoying little girl. She was pathologically shy. She whispered monosyllabic answers and never looked at the camera or the host. It was painful to watch her. Fortunately the host treated her gently and got her off-camera quickly.

  The final woman was one tough cookie. Her spiky hair was dyed a flat, lifeless black; dense, dark tattoos spiraled up her arms. Her lip was pierced, and she had a ring through her eyebrow. Colleen’s mother would have sighed and called her “hard.”

  “She isn’t someone the shopping channel is going to want to be associated with,” Ben said. “From a marketing standpoint, this would be one bad outcome.”

  This candidate had, indeed, been adopted by a Catholic couple—“a fine pair of Christians they were,” she scoffed—but when she was five, they had gone to court to dissolve the adoption. She had spent the rest of her childhood being moved among foster homes, finally ending up in an institutional environment.

  She was so angry with her adoptive parents that she had never thought about her birth family. Now all she wanted from Autumn Chase was money. “She owes me. She abandoned me to them. You heard her. She dumped her baby to save her movie contract. It was all about money for her. I was th
e one who allowed her to go on making money. She owes me.”

  “You are confident that you are Ariel?”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about any Ariel. I just know that someone owes me.”

  “You have indeed had a difficult life,” the host said and after a few more platitudes, he cut to a commercial break.

  “There’s your underworld, Amanda,” Jason said. “That girl has been in hell for most of her life, but I don’t see how much a rescue can do.”

  “I guess we have to root for the one from Alaska,” Cara said.

  “I don’t agree,” Ben said. “At least that last one had her anger to sustain her. Can you imagine what would happen to Miss Alaska if she got caught up in the celebrity machine? She would be roadkill.”

  “Then we have to root for the guy. He wants to be caught up in the celebrity machine.”

  Colleen hadn’t said anything. So this was what it meant to be on national television. Perfectly nice people like Cara and Ben felt that they had the right to call you a brat or roadkill. What would people have said about her if she had been on the show? That she was boring, overprivileged, stuck up, too eager to please? That she needed to lose ten pounds or gain five? That her earrings were all wrong? They could say anything.

  The commercials ended. The first three candidates came onstage one by one. The lookalike who hadn’t been adopted, the young man, and the annoying little girl were each told that they were not Ariel.

  The final two hopefuls, the shy one from Alaska and the angry one, were brought out together, standing side by side. It was indeed as if this were a beauty pageant and the two women were waiting to see which one would be first runner-up and which one the queen. When Miss Alaska was told that she was not Ariel, a look of relief flashed across her face, followed by an expression that was weary. She had failed yet again.