Autumn's Child

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  Oh, good, she didn’t want a car. He had been looking for an opening. “Remember if you’re fifteen,” he said lightly, “then I’m sixteen and have a license. I can run you home.”

  Sixteen... Memories suddenly started swirling in his brain, shapes in a snowstorm. Look up at me. Look at me with those dark eyes of yours and admit that you’re remembering too, remembering how great that third summer was because I could drive and we could go anywhere.

  What was going on in his brain? All this past stuff...he was a here-and-now kind of guy.

  But it was good stuff, wasn’t it?

  “It’s completely out of your way.”

  What? Oh, she was still talking about him driving her home. “All of ten minutes. And then maybe you will let me take you out to dinner.”

  He hadn’t been able to get a read on her. Was she going to agree to have dinner with him? He wouldn’t be surprised either way.

  “They are paying us a whole twelve dollars for our service today,” she answered. “I can buy my own food.”

  So it was a yes to spending the evening with him, but no to something that would make it seem like a date. He could live with that.

  The afternoon dragged on. People were talking to each other more, complaining. Seth looked at his email, then his social media accounts, watched a few videos that the up-and-coming kids had made and were always trying to get him to watch, checked on a couple of games he had going with friends, and then went back to his email.

  He could handle stress. Pressure, fear...bring ’em on. But boredom? He wasn’t so good at that. He wanted out of here. He’d take Caitlin with him if he could, but most of all, he wanted—he needed—to leave. Snowboarders weren’t supposed to be model citizens. They were rebels, outsiders, countercultural iconoclasts, not jurors.

  But Seth was the public face of his family’s company, Street Boards. It manufactured snowboards and skateboards. His parents, his sisters, and his brothers-in-law worked there; it supported all of them. So there was no way that Seth could be a jerk here in the jury assembly room. If the moms and dads of America thought Seth Street was an asshole, they wouldn’t let their kids put his poster up on their bedroom walls, and they certainly wouldn’t buy a Street Board to put under the Christmas tree. Seth had to act like a good citizen even if it was driving him nuts.

  There was a beverage station at the back of the room, just coffee and water. Seth didn’t drink much coffee, but he kept getting water just to have something to do. Caitlin was still working.

  By two thirty people were saying that if you didn’t get called for a trial on the first day, you weren’t likely to have to come back.

  At three o’clock there was activity in the front of the room. The clerk came back in and started talking softly to the jury coordinator. Surely they were going to be dismissed. A trial wouldn’t start at three, would it? People at the tables started to put away their stuff, clear up their trash.

  But when the jury coordinator stood up, she asked them to line up by the door as she called their names. She kept calling name after name until everyone in the room was standing in a line that snaked toward the back of the room. Caitlin’s name had been called before his. She was too far ahead in line for them to talk.

  And then they waited. And waited some more. Someone stepped out of line to get chairs for the older ladies. Seth winced. He should have thought to do that.

  At three thirty, the jurors were all told to sit back down. At four o’clock, they were excused for the day. They could go home as soon as they signed for the little brown envelopes with their twelve-dollar payment. But the coordinator emphasized that they had to call the hotline or check the website later in the evening to see if they had to come tomorrow.

  “But we won’t have to come back, will we?” someone asked. “If you don’t get a trial the first day, you’re done, right?”

  The coordinator said that that was not necessarily so and that they needed to check with the hotline or the website. Seth didn’t like the sound of that.

  “I came thinking that this might be kind of interesting,” Caitlin said as they walked to the parking lot. She was carrying her computer in a messenger bag crafted out of an old Cub Scout backpack and a worn leather bomber jacket. “It wasn’t.”

  “You got a lot of work done.”

  “It probably looked like it, but what do you know about the trajectory of bullets on a gravity-heavy planet?”

  “Me? Nothing.”

  “The guy who designed the game apparently didn’t either. Now it’s too early for dinner. Do you just want to get a cup of coffee or something?”

  No, he didn’t want to get a cup of coffee. He wanted to spend the evening with her. He had already made a plan. That was one thing about three guys hanging out together. Someone needed to have a plan, or you never got out the door. “You remember the lake?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  She was being ironic. Of course she remembered the lake. “Let’s pick up some barbecue and go out there. My parents have a lake house now.”

  “Their own place? So we don’t have to trespass and eat on someone else’s dock?”

  “No.” Or have sex on a blanket back among the trees.

  Except they hadn’t “had sex.” They had made love. They had been in love.

  That last summer he and Caitlin had been together, he had feelings for her that he had never felt again. Of course it was probably that your first love always did feel the most intense, the most consuming, but still...

  * * * *

  They had had three summers together from the time he had been fourteen and she thirteen, until he was sixteen and she fifteen.

  He had grown up in the High Country of North Carolina and had started snowboarding when his uncles still had to lift him over the drifts at the edge of the parking lots. He had been a little meat torpedo in those days, fearless about height and speed, clueless about danger. At fourteen he had already been competing professionally for a few years. At the time he didn’t—he couldn’t—appreciate what sacrifices his family was making for his snowboarding. His dad worked in the furniture factory; it was a nonunion shop, and there wasn’t ever any overtime. His mom had done alterations for the local bridal shop.

  He had developed so quickly and so early that a lot of doors had opened for him. His mother had been great at negotiating tuition-free deals for him, but there was still travel and living expenses for both of them. In those days, few programs were set up for unescorted school-aged kids, so his dad had outfitted a pickup with a camper, and she made endless long drives, preparing meals in the little camper while he worked his way through the homeschooling curriculum. Pretty soon she had started escorting Ben and Nate too. Nate’s mother was a schoolteacher; she couldn’t take off during the school year. Ben’s mother had five other children; she couldn’t leave either. So the arrangement helped a lot with the expenses and certainly made everything more fun.

  Although there was snow on Oregon’s Mt. Hood year-round, his parents drew the line at the summer programs. Seth’s two older sisters needed their mother too. So starting in April, Seth was back in North Carolina, attending regular school, trying to keep up his skills by skateboarding, while his mother turned her attention to the girls.

  Each year it was harder to connect with other guys at school. Seth wasn’t interested in ball sports, and this was a ball-sports kind of town. Of course he was better than the chumples, the slow, fat kids in glasses, but Seth wasn’t used to being in the middle of the pack. He liked being the best, and although his mom kept preaching about this to him, he just didn’t have as much fun when he was ordinary. What was so wrong with that?

  The county had built a little skateboarding park back when skateboarding was a hotter fad. In the summer Seth was there all day every day, riding his bike over, often providing free unplanned entertainment for the little-kid birthday parties
that were the main source of the park’s revenue.

  One day he noticed a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, on the other side of the fence. The kid was perched on his bike, with one foot on the ground and his helmet still on. Seth showed off for a bit—so what if this was an eleven-year-old kid, it was still an audience—then glanced over his shoulder to be sure that the kid was watching. The kid still was there, but he had taken his helmet off.

  And he wasn’t a he. He was a girl, slight in build but much closer to Seth’s age than Seth had first thought. Okay. That was a better audience. Seth showed off even more, finishing a trick close to the edge of the skate park.

  “Hi, I’m Seth,” he said through the fence.

  “Caitlin.”

  She was pretty with these really dark eyes. Seth wasn’t sure what to say next. It was kind of awkward for a moment, but she spoke. “That’s pretty amazing what you do. I suppose you’ve been doing it for a long time.”

  “Yeah, but some things aren’t that hard to pick up. Do you want to try? I am happy to show you how.”

  “I don’t have any of the stuff.”

  “That helmet will work. I’ll bring a board and pads for you if you want to come tomorrow. And you need to grab a waiver from the front desk. Your folks will have to sign it.”

  “I’m spending the summer with my grandmother, but I don’t suppose they’ll care if she signs it.”

  “They won’t notice.”

  They agreed to meet the next day. That night Seth started to have second thoughts. What if she were a major biff, a total Betty who couldn’t learn anything? And what if she kept coming back to the park day after day anyway? What then?

  He hoped it would rain, and the whole thing would fall apart. But it didn’t. She showed up right on time wearing the same sort of cutoffs and T-shirt that she had had on the day before. Then she took off her helmet.

  Oh. He had forgotten how pretty she was. Maybe this would be okay.

  She handed the waiver to the kid at the counter and then took some dollar bills out of her pocket. Behind her head Seth waved a hand, and the attendant told her to go on in.

  “How come I didn’t have to pay?”

  “Because you’re with me. I don’t pay.”

  “You don’t? Why not?”

  “They know me. I started here when I was four.”

  “Okay.” She clearly didn’t see how that added up. So she reached for the pads. “How do I put these on?”

  She was a quick learner. She had strong legs and a good sense of balance, and since his mom was also nagging him to praise other people more, he told her.

  She shrugged. “I’ve taken a lot of ballet.”

  “Really? Ballet?” She didn’t seem like the type.

  “My mom thought it would turn me into a lady.”

  “So how’s that working?”

  “Incredibly well. Can’t you tell?”

  He laughed and then showed her how to make a turn sharper. An hour later the park manager—an older man, a regular city employee—arrived, and he called them over to ask why “Mrs. Thurmont” had signed Caitlin’s waiver. He seemed to know who Mrs. Thurmont was.

  “She’s my grandmother, but my parents signed a bunch of forms so that she can take me to the hospital or whatever.”

  The man smiled. “Let’s not have any hospital trips from here, okay?”

  A while later he came out again. “Seth, she’s getting tired.”

  “No, I’m not,” Caitlin protested.

  Seth hadn’t noticed, but now that Mr. Kendrick mentioned it, yes, he could see that her ankles were wobbling and they hadn’t before. “Then we need to stop. Doing stuff when you are tired is the way to get injured.”

  How many times had he heard people say that to him? His coaches, his mom, they were constantly on him to stop practicing.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Really I am.”

  “No you aren’t.” How wack for him to be acting like the grown-up. “We’re stopping.”

  They met up every day for the rest of the week. He learned that her last name was McGraw and that her family lived in Norfolk, Virginia, but they had moved all the time because her dad was in the navy. He was a lawyer, a judge. Seth hadn’t known that the navy had judges. Caitlin had an older sister who also took ballet. She was a million times better than Caitlin, but no—and suddenly Caitlin had gotten a little awkward, sending out all kinds of “I don’t want to talk about this” signals—she didn’t think her sister would try skateboarding.

  She continued to improve, but it clearly bugged her that Seth was so much better than she was. She was pushing herself, and Seth didn’t need Mr. Kendrick to tell him that she was trying too much too fast. She was going to hurt herself. “You’re not ready for this kind of thing, not without a foam pit.”

  “Are you saying that because I’m a girl?” She looked pissed off.

  “No,” he lied. “I’m saying that I first got on a skateboard when I was four. And now snowboarding is, like, what I do. I am sponsored. That’s why I don’t go to school and shit.” So how can you think you could be as good as me? He didn’t say that last part.

  She glared at him for a moment. Then she stepped up on her board and started again.

  A second later he shouted at her. She was going too slow.

  But she wasn’t. She was so light that she didn’t need tons of speed, and when she took off in the air, she didn’t get much height, less than she had been getting, but she did something with her arm, letting it trail around her body, her eyes following her hand. Her fingers were gently curved, and halfway through she flipped her palm over. Her landing was soft, only the lightest sound.

  When you analyzed it, it was nothing of a move, but he hadn’t thought about it. He hadn’t thought about anything. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. That’s what it was like with the really epic guys, the top boarders. Whatever they were doing, even just their warm-ups, you had to watch them. You just did.

  He wanted to be like that.

  Long bike rides were a part of his summer training routine, and pretty soon she started to come. As long as she didn’t do the sprints—he would do one sprint forward and then another back to her—she could keep up even through this hilly country.

  The hills’ winding roads would be dark with the shade from the birch and ash trees until around a bend everything would suddenly be open and light, and they could see, below them, town and the two ribbony rivers that met there. Further on was a Christmas tree farm with its regular lines of carefully trimmed Fraser firs marching up the lower slope of a mountain where Seth had first snowboarded. They would ride until they reached the lake. They would bring towels and wear their swimsuits under their clothes. In shadows of trees he tried to kiss her once, and she shoved him away.

  Her grandmother, whom she called MeeMaw, lived in a big modern house on Pill Hill, which was where all the doctors lived. Caitlin’s grandfather had been a doctor before he died. On wet days Seth would ride his bike through the rain, and they would sit at her grandmother’s dining table, Seth supposedly catching up with schoolwork and Caitlin addressing envelopes for a benefit that her grandmother was running. She used special pens and had this major sick handwriting. Calligraphy, it was called. No one had taught her. She had learned it from a book.

  He hated learning things from books.

  One evening when he was at home, he heard his mother and one of his sisters in the kitchen talking.

  “Mom, Seth is spending a lot of time with Mrs. Thurmont’s granddaughter.”

  “I know,” his mother answered. “It’s usually the pregnant one who has to leave home, not the sister.”

  Pregnant? Was Caitlin pregnant? That couldn’t be right. Of course, she was a girl. She used the girls’ bathroom, and she wore a girl’s swim suit, but still...pregnant? A baby? That would have meant t
hat she had—

  He couldn’t think about it.

  “Apparently”—his mother was still speaking—“her parents felt like Caitlin wasn’t being supportive enough of her sister.”

  Oh, of course. Caitlin wasn’t pregnant. Her sister was.

  His aunt had been pregnant last summer. She already had three kids, and she was enormous. Her feet spilled over her shoes. She struggled to get in and out of a chair. Seth tried to imagine that happening to one of his sisters. He couldn’t.

  As soon as he saw Caitlin next, he asked her. It didn’t occur to him not to. “So your sister is going to have a baby?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “My mom and sister were talking about it.”

  “How did they hear?”

  Seth shrugged. “My mom seems to know everything. It’s a pain.” He started to put on his knee pads. They didn’t have to talk about it.

  “That’s why I’m here, because of Trina being pregnant. My parents are all about how we have to show the world that we love her and we stand behind her. And they say that I am ‘insufficiently supportive,’ that I’m being a spoiled brat.”

  Seth wasn’t sure what to say. “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen, two years older than me, and I get that it totally sucks for her. I get that. But I didn’t do anything wrong and yet everybody at school talks about me like I’m some kind of slut. I got invited to a rainbow party, and I don’t even wear lipstick, much less do that.”

  Seth was not about to admit that he didn’t know what a rainbow party was. That was the one bad thing about not going to school with the other kids. Sometimes you felt like a major stupid-ass dork. “Your folks...weren’t they mad at your sister?”

  “Who knows? My mom would go into their bedroom, she’d close the door and all, but I could hear her crying. And she kept asking my dad what they had done wrong. But they say that family problems stop at the front door. To the rest of the world we have to pretend that everything is okay, which is crazy because it’s not.”