Finding Colin Firth: A Novel (36 page)

Late Tuesday night, close to midnight, Gemma left Veronica Russo’s house with a bag containing two boxed pies, one fudge and one lime. The streets were still teeming a bit with Fourth of July tourists even though the Fourth had come and gone, the decks of restaurants jutting out on piers still lit up and full of people. She couldn’t wait to get back to the inn and finish her article. Veronica’s story, all she’d shared, had moved Gemma to the point of tears more than once. Now her article would come a beautiful full circle.

She crept into the inn, worried about waking anyone up, but the newlyweds in the Osprey Room were right behind her, waving an unopened bottle of Champagne and asking Gemma if she thought Isabel would mind if they raided the refrigerator for some of that incredible pie she had available every day. The couple was clueless but sweet, so Gemma gave them the fudge pie Veronica had sent her home with, keeping the Key lime Confidence Pie for herself.

As she headed upstairs and passed Bea’s door, she was so tempted to knock and tell Bea everything Veronica had said, but of course, she wouldn’t.
All these years, twenty-two years, I thought I was running away from my past. I thought I’d come back to Boothbay Harbor to face that past. But it turns out my past—the
pregnancy, reactions from my family, from the baby’s father, all that paled in comparison to what I was really running from: how much I loved that baby girl I held for two minutes against my chest. How much I love her now, even though I barely know her. You can love someone without knowing them much, did you know that? I fought against it all these years. But not anymore. Regardless of whether my birth daughter wants me in her life or not. I’ll always love her
.

Maybe that was what maternal instincts were all about, Gemma thought, unsettled in a good way by all Veronica had told her. She slipped on her noise-canceling headphones to block out the laughter coming from the newlyweds’ room and got to work, her fingers flying over the keyboard of her laptop as she worked on the long middle of her article, the personal stories: a birth mother reuniting with the daughter she’d given up for adoption. A teenage girl determined her baby be raised by a wealthy couple, then discovers that money alone wouldn’t satisfy her—only a loving heart would. A birth mother, now remarried with children, who’d never told her husband of the baby she’d given up for adoption seventeen years earlier. Two women, now in their sixties, who’d been pregnant teenagers back when Hope Home had first opened fifty years ago, had shared their stories with Gemma by telephone and Skype, stories that had made Gemma cry. A lot had changed in fifty years. And a lot had not. Gemma wrote until her eyes started to water from exhaustion.

At just after two in the morning, the article was done. She sat back, expecting to feel sad, bereft that it was over, but all she felt was proud—and never so sure she was doing what she was born to do.

One of the women she’d interviewed, a prospective adoptive
mother, had used exactly that phrase.
I feel like I was born to be a mother, but I’m not sure it’ll ever happen . . .

You’re so lucky
, she remembered another interviewee, fifteen-year-old pregnant Hope Home resident Chloe Martin, saying to her when Gemma had revealed that she was pregnant.

When would she ever figure this out? she wondered. What if she never did? How was she supposed to go home this week to a life she couldn’t imagine? If only she had a solid job as a reporter, she could be both—a reporter and a mother. A working mother, like so many other women. But without a job, without even a lead—and she’d applied online for nine staff reporting jobs since she’d been in Maine—she would go home and slowly morph into Alexander’s mother and sister, this article just her last beautiful hurrah.

In the morning, with the sun shining bright into her window, Gemma woke up from a strange dream in which she couldn’t get her baby out of a baby carrier on her chest, but the baby wasn’t an infant; she had a woman’s face and looked scarily like Gemma’s mother. Gemma sat up, trying to shake the remnants of the dream from her memory. That wasn’t even one she wanted to look up in the dream dictionary.

She supposed it meant she worried she’d be like her mother. Or that she was carrying her worries about being a good mother and it was all tied into her own feelings about her mother. Maybe a lot of both, she knew.

She lifted up her tank top and put her hands on her belly, still only slightly beginning to round. “Hey, little one,” she said,
tears stinging her eyes. “If you’re listening, I want you to know that I will love you. The minute I meet you, I’ll love you. How could I not? That is not even a question. I’m just missing some synapse, some switch that’ll get turned on when you’re born. I think I’ll feel like Veronica Russo does—that I always loved you. Even if I didn’t know it.”

A note was slipped under her door, and Gemma got out of bed to pick it up:

Today’s breakfast special is crepes—chocolate and/or strawberry! xo Bea

Bea was such a sweetheart. Right now, she knew Bea was unsure how she’d proceed with Veronica, what she and her birth mother were to each other, how—and if—to forge a relationship going forward. But with Bea’s big heart and how alone she was, and Veronica’s strength of hope, Gemma had a good feeling they’d work it out.

She reached over onto her dresser for her laptop and proofread her article, just under three thousand words, proofed it again, then sent it by e-mail to Claire at the
Gazette.

She wasn’t in the mood to eat breakfast with her fellow noisy guests, so she skipped the crepes and headed out to Harbor View Coffee for a decaf iced mocha and a scone, then took a long walk around the pretty side streets of the harbor. She’d miss this place. She’d have to go home by week’s end; she had no other reason to be here. There was talk that Colin Firth was coming to town on Saturday to film his scenes, but there’d been rumors before and not a sign of him. She wasn’t getting an interview with Colin Firth. It was time to go home and face her future.

As she walked down Meadow Lane, she watched a father
push his toddler on a tire swing hung on an old oak tree in the front yard of their house, and she smiled at them, imagining Alexander doing the same thing. This was Alexander’s dream, she realized, to be doing exactly that. Her husband’s dream. All she’d been thinking about these past few weeks was her own dream, and maybe now that one dream had gone belly up, it was time to dream another one, as Meryl Streep had said in the movie
Heartburn,
an old favorite of Gemma’s. Dream another dream. She was going to have a baby. It was time to accept that wholeheartedly. If it turned out she didn’t have maternal instincts, well, then she’d learn how to be a mother.

Her head and heart a bit more settled, Gemma was about to turn back to the inn to call Alexander and let him know she’d sent in her article when she noticed the cutest house a few doors down. The yellow craftsman had a widow’s walk and a quaint porch with a rocking chair, and between the sweet scene with the tire swing and that rocking chair, Gemma could almost see herself sitting on that porch, rocking her baby back and forth. Becoming someone new, someone she didn’t know but could grow into.

She touched her hands to her belly. A little over a week ago, she’d been on a hospital cot, wondering if it was over before it had begun for her, before it had a chance to begin.

She took a picture of the house, making sure to get in the widow’s walk and the porch, and texted it to Alexander:
A: maybe you could find something like this for the three of us in Dobbs Ferry. I love the widow’s walk—and a porch with a swing is a must. xxG

In a few minutes he texted back:
I’m thrilled, but are you telling me that my meddling mother actually changed your mind?
Sorry she got on you. She told me about it, and I told her she had to back off.

Wasn’t your mother. It was me. I want to do the right thing for us, for the three of us.

I love you, G.

Facts faced.

By the next morning, Gemma still hadn’t called Alexander to tell him she’d finished the article, that she was coming home . . . soon. She lay on her bed, her hands on her stomach,
Your Pregnancy This Week
next to her. She’d had dinner last night with June and let it all come out, and even June had said that for all she knew, Gemma could love suburban life. After all, she loved Boothbay Harbor, a tiny town.

But Boothbay Harbor was different. Boothbay Harbor had always been a saving grace, a harbor in itself to Gemma, the place her father had taken her for a month every summer after her parents’ divorce. She’d always been happy in Boothbay, the vibrant coastal town a constant ray of sunshine. She had old friends here, wonderful memories. And she loved the old wooden piers and boats in the bay, the cobblestone and brick streets lined with one-of-a-kind shops and every imaginable cuisine. She’d talk to Alexander about vacationing here next summer. Maybe every summer.

Her e-mail pinged and Gemma went to her laptop, hoping it was from Claire, who’d say she loved the article and had another story for Gemma, not that Gemma would do that to Alexander, as much as she’d want to.

It was from Claire:

Gemma, your piece was beyond fabulous! My boss loved it. He wants you on staff—that’s how impressed he was. I’m prepared to offer you a full-time job as a senior reporter, covering human interest and your own column, with full understanding that you will take maternity beginning late December . . .

Gemma burst into tears. A job offer. One she couldn’t accept.

She imagined herself living here in this sweet small town she adored, working on stories like Hope Home, having her own Sunday column. Spending time with old summer friends who’d blossom into everyday friends. Making new friends, good friends, like Bea. Watching her belly grow, month by month, and spending weekends decorating the nursery in a house like that old yellow craftsman, a house she could live in, breathe in, become a mother in. Coming home after work to Alexander, where they’d learn to be parents together.

Living three hundred miles away from her mother-in-law.

For all that, she’d leave New York City in a heartbeat.

The offer was almost cruel, considering she couldn’t call Claire and scream “
Yes!
” at the top of her lungs, which was what she wanted to do. So instead she called Alexander. “Claire—knowing I’m pregnant—offered me a full-time job as a senior reporter with my own Sunday column. At a decent salary too, well, not by New York standards, of course. I wish I could take the job. Why can’t any of the New York City papers I sent my résumé and clips to see in me what she sees?”

“Gemma, you’re a great reporter and a great writer. Between the economy and newspapers shutting down, you’re caught in the crossfire. But you had a great last assignment, and now you’ll come home and embrace your new life.”

“I know, I know,” she said.

“And listen, I’ve been thinking. If it’s Dobbs Ferry in particular that bothers you, we don’t have to move so close to my family.”

That was something, at least. “I guess that would help.” But she knew he was thinking a town over, not a county away. “I’ll drive down Saturday morning, okay?” she said, unable to keep the tears out of her voice. “I have some great people to say good-bye to up here.”

“I’ll see you Saturday night, then. Listen, sweetheart, you’re going to love your new life. It’s our next step.”

If only Gemma could believe it.