The tattooed one was looking grimly smug. The host repeated some of her story, dwelling on how rare, but how tragic it was when an adoption failed. “And you are…not Ariel.”
Not…Had he really said ‘not’? Colleen wasn’t sure that she had heard right, but the woman’s expression was hardening into unreadable sullenness. No confetti fell; Autumn wasn’t rushing onto the stage.
So it wasn’t over. She could still be Ariel.
“Yuck,” Libby said. “I feel as if I need to take a shower. That was horrible. Why did we watch that?”
The camera cut to Autumn. “Of course I am disappointed, and I feel so badly for some of those people.” She made the little M.J. gesture again. “But this only makes me feel more urgent about finding Ariel. What if she, too, ended up in institutional care?”
This doesn’t mean that it’s me. The real Ariel could be in the Peace Corps, serving in a village cut off from American celebrity gossip. She could not know that she was adopted. She could be dead.
Onscreen a woman from one of the radical birth-mother organizations joined Autumn and Mia, and the journalist began to question her about what else could be done to find Ariel.
“Why isn’t anyone asking about the father?” Jason said. “No one has mentioned him. Doesn’t he have a role in this?”
“Autumn won’t name him,” Cara said. “She said that he never knew that she was pregnant and that his family has a right to privacy.”
“And Ariel and her family don’t?” Ben asked.
Chapter 12
Libby wanted a nine-by-thirteen pan for breakfast in the morning. Colleen got one out. Jason asked if he could look in Grannor’s room for another lamp to use at the jigsaw puzzle. She told him that he could.
When Libby had everything she needed and the other three were settled at the jigsaw puzzle, Colleen went through the French doors and across the patio. She didn’t try to make up an excuse. Let people think what they wanted.
The door to the boathouse was ajar. Ben was sitting at the table with his computer open. Next to him were a bottle of wine and two glasses.
You knew.
Genevieve, Patty, and Liz had been very helpful during the search for Ariel, Genevieve reassuring Colleen’s father, Patty and Liz keeping track of everything being said in magazines and on social media. But she hadn’t talked to them about how she felt, how confusing and bewildering this had been.
Ben had understood, and he knew that she would need to talk to someone. He had been waiting with a bottle of wine and two glasses because he got it. Quietly observant, he understood what she was going through better than anyone else.
While she was waiting for him to open the wine, she saw that he had paused his screen on an image of a snowboarder. “Is that Seth?” She knew that he was still making promotional videos for his family’s company.
“Lord, no.” Ben grimaced and reached forward to close the computer. “Seth’s form is a million times better. It’s one of the newer kids. He needs help.”
“Are you going to give it to him?”
“You know I’m not.” He handed her a glass. “But that’s not why you are here.”
He was right about that. “After the show tonight, don’t you think that it’s even more likely that I’m Ariel?”
There she had said it. I am Ariel. Or almost said it.
“A lot of other doors are closing. And I understand that you must be wanting to come forward, but with the publicity from—”
She knew where he was going with this. She stopped him. “There will always be a reason to wait. I am done waiting.”
“What about your father?”
“He and Mother promised that they wouldn’t look, and I’m not looking. Autumn started it. I’m doing this. I’m going forward. I don’t need your permission or my father’s. I just wanted you to know.”
“How are you going to do it?”
She paused. He wasn’t arguing. He was asking her questions. Her girlfriends shared her feelings; they were sad when she was sad, outraged when she was…but she didn’t need Ben to be her girlfriend. She needed him to do this even if she didn’t always like it. “What do you mean, how?”
“You can’t apply through the TV show anymore. Are you going to go through the message boards?”
She hadn’t thought through this. “In the long run it probably doesn’t matter how I do it.”
“It sure as hell does. Post on either one of the message boards tonight and there will be people going through our garbage tomorrow morning. You don’t have to go crawling to her like everyone was doing when this first started. You have leverage now. That show tonight has to change some things. It’s bound to have hurt her brand.”
“Maybe she doesn’t care about her brand.” Autumn might be her birth mother. Who would want to think that their birth mother cared so much about money? “Maybe this is more important to her than sales.”
“You can’t know that.”
He was right; of course he was. Autumn was a celebrity, a personality. What people saw onscreen wasn’t necessarily what she was like. She was an actress. She could be playing a part.
“Colleen, you need to stay at arm’s length at first if you are going ahead with this. Do you want to be harassed like that woman in San Francisco? Will you please let me handle it? If not me, then my brother or my father.”
“Why? What could any of you do that I can’t?”
“Keep your name out of it. Insist that you control the DNA comparison, not them.”
“How’s anyone going to do that? Autumn has all these people, agents and publicists.”
“So do I,” he said bluntly. “My agent hasn’t heard from me in ages, but she’s still making money off residuals. She’ll be able to find out who Autumn’s agent and manager are. She can work with them for a while without anyone knowing my name, much less yours.”
Oh, right. With the two of them so isolated here at the lake, it was easy to forget that Ben had been a public figure. He had access to a world that she didn’t. Once again he was right. He needed to take the lead on this.
She didn’t love that. It made her feel like a child, naïve and helpless, when she wasn’t. It wasn’t like he was making such perfect choices about his own life.
But there was another difference between Cinderella and Disney’s Ariel. Cinderella sat around waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her; Ariel had saved Prince Eric from drowning. Ben Healy could use a little rescuing.
“I will accept your help on one condition.” Hadn’t he made a deal with her when she told him not to crash the Find Ariel site? That’s why he was still here—because he had said he wouldn’t crash the site if she would let him stay at the lake.
“Name it,” he said.
“While you’re working on this, I will find you a coaching gig for next winter even if it is just for a week.”
He drew back. “Colleen, what does that have to do with approaching Autumn?”
“Everything. You always seem to think you know what’s best for me. Maybe you need to accept that I might know what is best for you.”
He was shaking his head. “The politics are more complicated than you understand.”
“I think you are letting them be that complicated. Here’s what I do understand—whenever you get close to something great, you go out of your way to screw it up. That’s what I meant when I talked about your self-destructive impulses. You screwed up with me four years ago, you screwed up your coaching opportunities, and last spring the minute you saw me again, you made sure nothing could happen by running off with someone else.”
“I won’t dispute that pattern, but I still believe everything I said, the high-powered programs are taking advantage of kids and their parents.”
“Then we won’t go to a high-powered program. I’ll find one where the kids are just having fun on wee
kends. That’s how all three of you started, by having fun. You don’t mind working with little kids, do you?”
He shook his head. “I take the nieces and nephews out. But why do this right now? It’s July. You’re talking about something months away. Why not wait?’
Where had she heard “please wait” before? “Because—to quote you—right now I have leverage with you, and I am going to use it.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Not right now, but I will soon. Finding the right people and connecting with them, I’m good at that.”
“I don’t want you to call Nate or Seth. I am not putting them in an awkward position by asking for favors.”
Colleen thought that was nuts. She had no problem asking people for favors. If someone asked for something reasonable, she tried very hard to do what they had asked. Wasn’t it arrogant to assume that other people weren’t equally generous? But she agreed not to ask his friends for help.
“And I can’t sign anything without clearing it with my agent.”
“Give me her name.” Colleen felt confident that his agent would love to hear that he was getting back into coaching, even if it was only for a week. “Do you agree that if I trust that you want the best for me, you will agree to trust that I want the best for you?”
He nodded.
“So we have a deal?” She put out her hand.
He took it. His grip was warm and firm. “We have a deal.”
* * * *
Colleen was sure—completely, 100 percent, down-to-her-bones sure—that this was going to be easy; Ben had to be wrong about his reputation in the snowboarding community. It had been more than two years since his flame-out. Surely he was being typically Ben, always expecting the worst to come walking through the door, even to the point of extending a helping hand to help the worst cross the threshold.
Sunday morning she made up an excuse to get Amanda alone. Without mentioning that it had been a two-sided deal, she explained that Ben was going to let her find him a foothold back into coaching.
“Just what were you doing when you got him to agree to that?” Amanda wanted to know.
“I had my clothes on, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Of course it was,” Amanda said cheerfully. “But are you really that sure about Ben being wrong? He doesn’t seem like he’d misjudge something like that.”
“He makes plenty of mistakes, believe me. I am actually more concerned about selling him short, that I will get him a week at a dinky little resort when one of the big sports academies would have hired him for the whole season.”
“Doesn’t he have people who would do this and do it much better than we ever could?”
That was a good point. Colleen had to take a moment to think. “He probably agreed because he thinks we can’t do it.”
Like Ben and his friends, Amanda was a competitive athlete; she took that as a challenge.
Together they made a plan. The sports academies were residential schools where talented young athletes went to get intensive training in their sport as well as a scholastic education. Colleen and Amanda knew from their research that the foreign language instruction was limited to teaching English to the speakers of other languages. Nonetheless they had already thought that it would be useful to talk to those teachers because all their students would be extremely active kids.
Amanda was going to make some calls. She would start with the tennis academies, as they would be in session. Once she got comfortable with the conversations, she would get in touch with the winter sports places. When she was talking to the administrators, she would work Ben’s name into the conversation.
“How are you going to do that?” Colleen asked.
“I’m a better liar than you. I know that’s a pretty low hurdle, but I take my wins where I can get them.”
Amanda promised to start on this Monday, but it would take her some time. The calls would have to be made during business hours. With her job in their school’s summer sports camp, she didn’t have a lot of free time during the day.
If they didn’t get the grant for next summer, Colleen could probably fund the development of the curriculum herself. Ben was right about that. But how would she go about doing it? Write Amanda a check every pay period?
It was raining in Charlottesville. Amanda was able to turn over the indoor drills to her assistants. She had more time than expected. By Wednesday she had set up weekend calls with the ESL teachers at the tennis academies to discuss their teaching techniques. By Friday she had spoken to a few of the winter sports academies.
“I wish I had better news,” she told Colleen. “He cost some of those places a lot of money. They defend themselves—it’s a risky sport, there will be injuries, and they aren’t going to tell the parents of a hard-working, motivated kid to stop investing in the kid’s training even if the coaches aren’t sure of the kid’s basic ability. The bottom line is, while they say nice things about Ben’s abilities, they feel betrayed. He benefited from this system. He shouldn’t have criticized it.”
Colleen had not expected this, not at all. “So he was right?”
“It isn’t as bad as he thinks it is; it isn’t as good as you think.”
Colleen sighed. “He and I do sometimes live at the opposite extremes.”
“Then you need to find a middle. He could try apologizing, coming out publicly and saying that he was wrong.”
“He won’t do that. He doesn’t think he was wrong.”
Colleen was not going to give up. If the academies weren’t an option, she would try the resorts. She spent the weekend researching them. She ruled out the high-powered ones where big-time coaches held expensive weeklong sessions. She looked instead at the family-oriented resorts. It surprised her that the group lessons for skiers started at a much younger age than those for snowboarders. She did a little more research. Apparently skiing was easier to learn than snowboarding. Little kids had trouble getting the hang of standing sideways until they were around five, and their center of gravity was in their heads, not their core. Group snowboarding lessons often didn’t start until children were eight.
But Ben and his friends had all started much younger than that. Nate’s mom had said that Nate had started before he was reliably potty-trained. Of course the three of them had each had one-on-one instruction from an uncle or a family friend. So why not approach a resort and suggest that Ben offer individual lessons to the younger kids?
It sounded like a good plan to her…but that didn’t mean much. It was fine to let her natural optimism inspire her, but at some point, caution needed to be a guide. That was part of what Amanda meant when she said that she and Ben needed to meet in the middle.
Monday morning she called his agent. The agent’s assistant, Chloe, returned her call. Chloe was new to the agency, so she’d never met Ben, but she was interested enough in proving herself to her new boss that she was willing to take on the long shots.
“A coordinated little one can start young if they have individual instruction,” Chloe agreed. “But anyone crazy enough to pay for private lessons for a four-year-old is going to go for skiing. The short-term return on the investment would be better.”
Colleen was teaching in a nice Catholic school with, for the most part, nice Catholic parents, but she had friends at the elite prep schools, and she had a pretty good idea of just how crazy parents could be.
“Does he want to go back to Endless Snow?” Chloe asked. “Or Almost Heaven is just across the mountains from where you are now.”
Neither of those was an option. Colleen had promised that she wouldn’t trade on Ben’s friendships. Endless Snow was Nate’s family’s resort, and Nate himself was currently affiliated with Almost Heaven in West Virginia.
“Then let’s try Mountain Ash,” the agent suggested. “It’s even closer to you, and they are having to up their
game because of losing business to Almost Heaven.”
Clearly Chloe was intending to make the call. Colleen supposed that made sense.
On Tuesday Chloe reported that Mountain Ash had not dismissed the idea. “But they know that we are coming to them because of the big black mark by his name. They are going to try to get him cheap.”
“He doesn’t care about the money.”
“Good, because they may only agree to pay him when he actually has a client, and they aren’t going to invest in any promotion. He may only have one or two kids a day, and he might have to spend the whole session trying to get them to keep their hats and gloves on. Some little kids hate hats.”
A few days later Chloe said that the contract was ready. “You’re really sure that he will sign this? It’s not the kind of deal he used to get.”
“He’ll sign it. He gave me his word.”
“I hope so. It was amateurish of me to do this without actually talking to him. I see that now.”
Genevieve had had Colleen get an inexpensive fax machine for dealing with estate business, so when Ben came back from his workout in the little gym in the basement of the historic inn, she tapped on the kitchen window, encouraging him to come in the main house before going back to the boathouse.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“You need to re-up your CPR.” She handed him the contract. “I got you the gig, one week of teaching little kids, although their not liking their hats might be an issue.”
“You’re kidding.” He took the papers. “Does Kristen know about this?”
Kristen was his agent. “She knows about it, but her new assistant did the work. There’s an agency clause in the contract, but no one’s going to be making much money.”
“That’s not a surprise.” He was skimming through the contract.
She wanted him to be more excited. She wanted him to lift her off her feet, spinning her around, singing “She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” She wanted him to think that she had Saved The Day.
But as long as he was going to give it an honest try, as long as he wasn’t assuming that it would end terribly, that could be enough.
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