She felt desperately unclean, not only the stickiness between her legs, but the dirt of the city, of being smothered under his jacket, of those people pounding on the car. She wanted to throw herself in the lake, feeling the dark natural waters. She would keep her blouse on and let the water plaster it against her skin.
What a failure this had been. Trying to reach out to him, trying to soothe herself, left her feeling more alone than ever.
“Well, I guess I need to go take a shower,” she said as if that’s what she always said, as if having bad sex, horrible horrible sex, was routine for her.
She couldn’t walk through the house wearing only her blouse and bra, not this house, not her grandmother’s house. But there was no easy way for her to cover herself. He was still wearing his shirt, sweat having glued it to his legs. She had to stand up and untangle her panties from the leg of the pants. He was fastening his trousers, straightening his shirt. She forced herself to walk out of the room slowly with dignity. Is this what it means to be a Ridge, Grannor? Would you approve of this?
What a mistake this had been. He had been angry; she should have accepted it, but she had felt desperate…and of course it hadn’t made any difference. The sex—no one could ever call it “lovemaking”—had been full of his anger and her blank desperation.
Her overnight bag was still in his car. She had forgotten about it. She had to take a toothbrush from the little basket of toiletries that Leilah had provided.
Leilah…he had said that he had known he could never love Leilah. What about me? Could you love me?
Even if he could, it would do no good, not as long as neither one of them believed that that love would be enough.
It wasn’t even six o’clock when she finished showering, but she dreaded going downstairs. She couldn’t imagine facing him. What would she say? She had no experience with having had bad sex with someone. She supposed that most people could simply avoid seeing each other again, but that wasn’t going to work for them.
She couldn’t stay in the attic until morning. She hadn’t had enough to eat during the day. Her attic room was at the front of the house, facing the sunrise. She went across the hall to one of the rooms that faced the lake. The boathouse lights glistened through the rain. He had already gone there.
Gingerly she went downstairs, listening, dreading that he might have returned. She heard nothing. When she opened the refrigerator, she saw that he had taken one of the leftover containers. He was going to eat at the boathouse. He didn’t want to see her either.
* * * *
She lay awake that night, planning what she was going to say. We’re friends. Let’s talk about this as friends, a pair of friends who made a mistake…a sordid, nasty mistake. She would put out her hand. Handshakes were a sign of trust and goodwill, weren’t they?
The house was quiet when she went downstairs the next morning, and on the kitchen counter was a note.
A note? She glanced out the kitchen window. Grannor’s car was gone.
Oh, no, Ben Healy, you don’t get to walk away leaving just a note. A note is what a coward does. You can’t be a coward, and you can’t be Leilah. You can’t whisk yourself away as if none of this mattered.
Except what would she do if he had?
The note was folded. She took a breath and opened it. Took your grandmother’s car to Staunton to get a new phone. Text me with a grocery list.
So he hadn’t left. This afternoon he would come home with a package of deboned chicken breasts and a bag of kale salad. What was wrong with her, assuming that he had? That was the way he thought, not her. It was like they were trading personalities, she becoming the worst-case pessimist.
She went to work on the grocery list. They needed everything. Before she had made much progress, the landline rang. “Colleen, this is Ryan Healy.”
“Oh, Ryan, hi. I’m sorry Ben’s not here, and he had an accident with his phone. That’s why he didn’t answer.”
“I did try him, but it’s you I wanted to speak to.”
“Me? What about? Did Ben tell you about what happened yesterday? Us trying to meet Autumn and then the thing with Gary Vogel?”
“I’m calling about Autumn naming Ariel’s father.”
“Ariel’s father?” Father? Dear Lord in heaven. Ariel had a father? It had been hard enough to think about one other person being involved in bringing her to life. But two? This was too much.
But, of course, a man had been involved…although since Autumn had only been fourteen, hopefully it had been a boy. “I haven’t been online this morning. What did she say?”
“Actually, believe it or not, she said it was Gideon Forbes.”
Ryan had said that as if accompanied by a trumpet fanfare. “I’m sorry,” Colleen apologized. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“It doesn’t? Really? You don’t know who Gideon Forbes is? I guess you were living up north and were a little kid when he died.”
“Died? He is dead?”
“Let me start over,” Ryan said. Gideon Forbes had been a singer-songwriter in the Southern rock tradition. His younger brother Zachary had been Autumn’s costar on Cards, the movie she had been making when she got pregnant. Gideon was very talented and very successful, but troubled. He had died of a drug overdose.
“Oh, great. So he’s dead and a drug addict.”
“But so gifted. The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, all those guys, said that he was a better songwriter than anyone except for Tom Petty.”
“That’s something,” Colleen murmured.
“His estate is probably still generating a bit of money, but if you are involved, your adoption terminates any inheritance rights.”
Had he honestly thought that he needed to say that? “I don’t want to hear anything about inheritances ever again. I don’t want anyone’s money.”
“We know that. But this changes everything about the search for Ariel. Gideon’s fans are a cult. They are obsessed.”
“More than Autumn’s?” How was that possible?
“In a different way. Autumn’s fans are nice people who maybe don’t have enough to do. Gideon’s fans are seriously weird.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Hold tight. Let’s see what happens. I’ll talk to Ben and we’ll figure something out.”
“I need to be a part of this figuring,” she said.
“Of course, of course. That goes without saying.”
In Colleen’s experience, when people said that something went without saying, it usually needed to be drafted into a treatise and nailed to the door of a church somewhere.
But getting annoyed with Ryan Healy would accomplish nothing. She agreed that she would call him or his father if she needed anything. She said goodbye politely and hung up.
A druggie and a child molester. Colleen didn’t care what the age of consent had been in Canada then. Many of her students were fourteen. They needed to be protected against older men. She was repelled by the thought.
But she still didn’t know for sure, did she? She might not be Ariel. For the first time that uncertainty was a comfort.
She went to the computer and opened a search engine. She started to enter Gideon Forbes’s name, but she hadn’t even finished with the “Gideon” when his name popped up in the auto-fill box right under “Gideon v. Wainwright.” Apparently Gideon Forbes was searched for almost as often as a landmark Supreme Court decision.
She clicked on the images tab. A grid of pictures appeared. She enlarged one. It was of a skinny blond man, his head bent over his guitar, his arms curved around it. She couldn’t see his face. She clicked on the next one.
He was looking straight at the camera, a wary expression on his face. He looked gaunt. His cheeks were sunken, and he had heavy bags under his eyes.
She couldn’t see any resemblance. His light hair was strai
ght, much straighter than hers. She clicked through more pictures. He had nice teeth, but that could have been orthodontics. She tried covering different parts of his face, putting her thumb over his eyes, then his nose, then his mouth, but she still saw nothing.
When the search for Ariel had started, her sisters-in-law had looked at pictures of Autumn’s family, checking for resemblances there. So Colleen entered “+Gideon Forbes +family.” Another grid popped up. Again she clicked on the first picture, but it was a group of motley-dressed young people in front of a bus. It must have been his touring ensemble. The next three pictures were similar. “+Gideon Forbes +mother” yielded nothing.
What was his younger brother’s name? Zachary. “+Zachary Forbes +mother”. A few thumbnail pictures appeared. She clicked on the first.
A teenage boy was standing between three petite women, two of them more or less his age, one clearly older. They were lined up in front of a Christmas tree. “Zachary Forbes,” the caption read, “with mother Donna, sisters Becca and Mary.”
Colleen enlarged the picture as much as she could.
She didn’t need to cover anything. It was so clear. There were her eyes, the shape of her forehead, her nose, her hairline, sometimes in one of the women, sometimes in two. All three seemed to have her lips.
She had never looked like anyone before. Never. “Colleen looks just like herself,” her mother had always said. Her mother had been wrong. Colleen looked like these women.
She was Ariel. Now that she didn’t want to be, she was.
She went back to the pictures of Gideon. His eyes were distant and blank. Are you my father?
No, God, no. Edward B. Ridge, DDS, was her father.
It was hard enough to have been thinking about a birth mother, but suddenly a “bio dad”? That’s what some of the websites called the man who had produced the sperm, the “bio dad.” The term sounded dismissive as if he didn’t matter as much as the “first mother.”
But in terms of genetic makeup, the sperm and the egg were equally important.
She started reading about this man whose mother and sisters she resembled. She first did the math. He would have been twenty-two, six years older than Autumn. Then she looked at a list of his songs. She actually had heard a number of them; they had been covered by other artists and had been used in the soundtracks for movies. She hadn’t known that they had been written by the same person.
There was a hopelessness about the songs that Colleen couldn’t imagine connecting with. Gideon Forbes might have spoken to many people, but she was not one of them.
She read more. He had posed as the voice of the Southern underclass. He sang about people trapped in marginal jobs, driving rusty cars, longing for a country life but being forced to live in the outskirts of big cities.
Some of his fans were indeed strange. There were persistent rumors that he was still alive despite a detailed coroner’s report. Over the years a number of people had claimed to be his offspring. One or two had based their claim on the spiritual connection that they felt with Gideon, just like the connection the young man on the TV show said that he had felt with Autumn. The rest of the claimants seemed to be after money.
There wasn’t much about his family on the sites associated with him. She learned more when searching on Zachary. Gideon had been the oldest of five children. Despite his songs about working people, the family was comfortably middle-class, living in Charlotte, North Carolina, the father owning an insurance agency, the mother giving piano lessons. They had been a musical family; even Gideon had sung in the church choir until he began to rebel.
Zachary, the youngest brother, had quit acting after only a few films. He had settled in Hollywood and become a sound editor. He had been nominated for several Academy Awards and had won once. There was a third brother, Jonathan, the middle one. He was a professor of linguistics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, specializing in anthropological linguistics.
Music…sound editing…linguistics…this was a family who could hear. This was where her gift for learning languages had come from.
Were the parents still alive? Yes, apparently they were. What about the sisters? She couldn’t find much. They must have married and changed their names.
Colleen kept trying one set of search terms after another. “+Jonathan Forbes + linguistics +Duke”. As long as she was searching, she didn’t have to think. “+Jonathan Forbes +anthropological linguistics”.
Wouldn’t the offspring of Autumn Chase and Gideon Forbes be glitteringly special, bursting with talent, a shooting star across the genetic sky? That wasn’t her. “+Zachary Forbes +actor +choir”. She was an ordinary person. She taught French and Latin at a Catholic school.
Four years ago, she had marveled at the drive and ambition Ben and his friends had. She didn’t have that. “+Gideon Forbes +estate”. Yes, she wanted to be a good person and make the world a better place; she wanted her students to learn and to love learning, but she didn’t want to be famous or reach the top rung of some success ladder. “+Gideon Forbes + estate +intestate”. Surely the offspring of Autumn Chase and Gideon Forbes would want to be a star. “+Gideon Forbes +estate + lawyer”.
It didn’t feel right. “+Donna Forbes +Charlotte +church”.
Finally she had to admit that there wasn’t much else to learn about the family. Apparently they managed to protect their privacy despite Gideon’s rabid fans. Then suddenly a new entry appeared in the search results.
It was a new article, published seven minutes before. “Forbes Family Denies Autumn Chase Claim.”
A reporter for an online site had attempted to call Gideon’s family. A lawyer had issued a statement for them. To the best of their knowledge…died without issue…claimants…disproven…respect privacy…difficult time…serve no purpose…
The message was clear. The Forbes family wanted nothing to do with her. They didn’t know her, they didn’t know anything about her, and they were already rejecting her.
Chapter 15
She needed to talk to her father, her real father. She looked at the time on her computer screen. It was quarter to one already, quarter to twelve back in Chicago. This was the time each day her dad set aside for emergencies. If he didn’t have a patient, he would be at his desk, doing paperwork.
She was connected to his line immediately. “Dad, it’s me.”
Sean and Finn sounded so much alike on the phone that they had to identify themselves even to their parents. Only one female on earth called Dr. Edward Ridge “Dad,” and it was her.
“Colleen, is everything all right?”
“Yes, it’s fine.” But his voice was so full of warmth and concern that she started to cry.
Dentists made your pain go away. They made it easier for you to eat. They made your smile prettier. They fixed things; they made things better.
So did dads. At least the good ones did, and her father had been a good one.
“Are you calling about the jewelry?” he asked. “Believe or not, I heard from someone this morning.” The appraisals had barely been started, but Seth Robbins had wanted to alert the estate executor how valuable some of the pieces were. “You should start thinking if there are some pieces you want.”
“But Grannor wanted Kim to have it all.”
“My sense is that Kim may sell a lot of it. If there is something you think you would wear, it would keep us from having to raise the cash. But only if it’s something you want. Don’t take something because you think it will help your cousins.”
Colleen couldn’t think about jewelry right now. “Actually, Dad, I was calling about the other thing.”
He cleared his throat. He knew what the “other thing” was. “Genevieve tells me that the actress hasn’t found her daughter yet.”
“She released the name of the father, and Dad”—this was going to be hard for him to hear—“his mother and sisters, t
hey look a whole lot like me.”
“Oh.”
Even in that single syllable Colleen could hear his most professional voice. I strongly advise an immediate consult with an oral oncologist. Dentists couldn’t fix everything.
“He sounds awful, Dad.” She knew her father would be able to hear the tears in her voice. “He’s dead, a drug overdose. He was years older than Autumn, an adult when she was a girl. I don’t want to be connected to him, and his family, they don’t want to have anything to do with me. They think I’m after their money.”
“Oh, Colleen, my girl…my dear, dear girl.” This wasn’t his professional voice. This was a father, a daddy, aching for his little girl. “You don’t have to have anything to do with these people. You have us. We love you. Your mother, Genevieve, your brothers, Patty and Liz, we all love you.”
“I know.” Now Colleen didn’t try to hide her sobs. “We tried to meet Autumn yesterday, Dad, and it was so horrible. We couldn’t even get out of the car. There was a mob of her fans. We were trapped.”
“Trapped by a mob?” He did not like the sound of that. “I think you should come home. You’ll be safer here.”
Home. Home was the big white house in Kenilworth. The yard had been fenced in, and it had a swing set and Colleen’s little princess playhouse. She would go there if she could, if her mother with her flaming red hair and flashing Irish smile would be waiting there, asking Colleen if she wanted to have a tea party in the playhouse. But to her father and Genevieve, home was a beautifully renovated, hundred-year-old row house on the north side.
Her father would stand up for her. But she knew what the Find Ariel website would say about him. He would be demonized as a baby buyer, a heartless thief who believed himself entitled to three perfect babies because he was white and rich.
If he found himself in the middle of a gang of amateur paparazzi, he would come across as stiff and authoritarian. It was hard to think of him as a Baby Boomer. Because he had grown up in such a formal home and had gone to college in the South, he seemed more like a member of the Greatest Generation. He had gone to fraternity mixers in a navy blazer while others even older than him had been burning their draft cards and going to Woodstock.
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