Finding Colin Firth: A Novel (25 page)

“Would you have kept me, do you think, if your grandmother had been alive?”

Veronica took a deep breath. “Maybe. I really don’t know for sure.”

“It’s crazy for me to think that I might have had a completely different life, a completely different childhood. A different mother.”

Veronica seemed relieved that the focus had switched from herself to Bea. She shifted her body slightly more toward Bea. “Did you used to think about that a lot as you were growing up?”

“Actually, I didn’t know I was adopted until a month ago. My parents never told me. My father died when I was nine, and my mother died last year. She’d arranged to have a deathbed confession letter sent to me a year after her death. She wanted me to know the truth she was unable to bring herself to tell me when she was alive.”

Veronica was staring at her. “Wow. That must have been some shock.”

“It was,” Bea said.

“What was your mom like?” Veronica asked.

“The best. The absolute best.”

Veronica smiled. “Good.” Tears shimmered in her eyes. “That’s what I always hoped, all these years. That you were somewhere safe and wonderful with loving parents.”

Bea’s parents’ faces flashed into her mind, the picture of the three of them when Bea was four, she up on her dad’s shoulders, her mother smiling up at Bea. God, how she missed them.

And yes, she had been somewhere safe and wonderful with loving parents all those years.

Bea stood up suddenly, wanting to leave. This was crazy, all of it. What was she doing here with this . . . stranger? And Victoria Russo was a stranger. A total stranger. Cora Crane was my mother. Keith Crane was my father.
That’s all I need to know.

Why couldn’t her mother have left well enough alone? Bea
wondered, that hollow pressure forming in her chest again. Bea would have gone on not knowing, blissfully ignorant that she was a different person entirely. That she was Italian and Scottish and not a bit Irish. That she’d come into this world because of the woman standing a foot in front of her.

She needed fresh air. A break. She needed to digest all this privately, not that she’d learned that much. She just knew that her skin felt . . . tight.

Veronica stood up too. “Are you all right?”

“I should get going,” she said.

“I hope I didn’t scare you away. Say too much. Or too little. I want to answer your questions. I just don’t want to overwhelm you.”

“With the truth?” Bea asked.

“Yes.”

“That way of thinking kept me from knowing I’d been adopted in the first place,” Bea said—too harshly, she realized. “Maybe if I’d always known, this would be a little easier. I would have had my entire life to lead me here one day.” Suddenly she didn’t want to have gone on blissfully ignorant. She had no idea what she thought. What she felt. She just knew she needed air. She needed to leave.

“I understand, Bea.”

Bea hated the concern in her eyes. You’re a stranger, Bea wanted to shout. A total stranger.

“When you’re ready,” Veronica said, “if you want, I’d like to meet again. I’d love to learn more about you.”

Bea tried to smile but she felt so jumpy and uncomfortable. “I’ll call.” She sounded like one of those noncommittal guys after a so-so date. “Thank you for the pie,” she added, grabbed
her bag, and headed toward the door. Veronica opened the door for her, and she hurried out, aware that Veronica was staring after her.

Oh, darn, she thought as she was about to say good-bye and then flee. She’d forgotten to tell Veronica about the Hope Home article. “I almost forgot. I found out about Hope Home from my original birth certificate, and when I went for a visit a few days ago, I met a reporter who’s writing a big article about the home’s fiftieth anniversary. I told her my story and didn’t give your name on the record, of course. But I wanted you to know that I did talk to her. She’s staying at the same inn I am. She got me a temporary job there, and it comes with a room.”

Veronica’s eyes widened. “So you’ll be staying in town for a while, then?”

“For a couple of weeks,” Bea said. Was Veronica happy about that? Worried?

“I appreciate that you didn’t give the reporter the okay to use my name. I’m pretty well known in town because I work at such a popular diner and because of my pie business too, but I’m a pretty private person. I’m not sure I’d want my personal history in the paper.”

“Are you upset that I let her interview me?”

“No, not at all.”

“I think she’s especially interested in the here and now where we’re concerned,” Bea said. “I know she’d love to talk to you too.”

“I’m not sure I’m up for that,” Veronica said.

“I can understand that. Well, good-bye then.”

“Good-bye,” Veronica said, and Bea could see tears shimmering in her eyes again, which she was trying hard not to show.

Veronica shut the door behind Bea, half wanting to go running after her and hug her tight and ask her to come back, half wanting to never have to answer another of Bea’s questions.

Bea looked so much like Veronica and Timothy. She had Timothy’s blond hair, and there was something about the shape of her face and the general expression that were all Timothy Macintosh, but the features were Veronica’s. The round, pale brown eyes. The straight, pointy nose. Wide mouth. She had the hint of a cleft in her chin, like Timothy. She was tall, like both of them. Fine boned, like Veronica.

You have my nose, Veronica had thought over and over while she’d been sitting so close to Bea, trying not to stare. And my mouth. I see myself in your face.

Every time Bea smiled, which hadn’t been often, she saw her own smile, with Timothy’s long, even, white teeth.

She sat back down on the sofa, staring at Bea’s teacup, the faintest bit of berry-colored lipstick on the rim.

The phone rang, and Veronica would have ignored it, but it might be Bea.

It was Nick DeMarco. Relief unwound the tight muscles of her shoulders.

“Just checking in,” he said. “I know you were meeting with your birth daughter tonight.”

Veronica burst into tears. She couldn’t stop. She sat there, clutching the phone and crying, unable to speak.

“Veronica, I’m coming over. Just hang on.”

She hung up the phone and buried her face in her hands. You’re just overwhelmed, is all, she told herself.

She went into the bathroom for a tissue and dabbed under her eyes, but when she looked in the mirror, all she could think about was how much Bea looked like her, that the young woman who’d been sitting on her sofa fifteen minutes ago was the same six-pound weight Veronica had held against her chest in the ambulance twenty-two years ago.

The doorbell rang, and when Veronica opened the door, the sight of Nick, in jeans and a dark green Henley T-shirt, almost obliterated all other thought. The look in his eyes—concern, curiosity . . . interest, Veronica thought—was everything she needed right now. She did have friends, and she did open up to Shelley often, but she mostly kept to herself and never talked about the baby she’d given up for adoption or her travels the past twenty-two years. But Nick knew; he knew her from high school. He knew Bea had called her. He knew they’d met for the first time tonight. And here he was, standing on her doorstep, strong shoulders and all.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had strong shoulders to lean on, and she was overtaken by the need for him to pull her into his arms and just hold her. He wouldn’t of course, that would be crazy, but she wanted him to—and that scared her. She relied on no one.

“The two of you got together tonight?” he asked.

She nodded and stepped aside for him to come in. “I could use some coffee. Maybe a glass of wine.”

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he said. “Leigh’s on a sleepover tonight at her friend’s and will be going to school straight from their house, so I don’t have to rush back.”

“How are things with her grandparents?” she asked as she led the way into the kitchen.

“They call Leigh every day—sometimes I think more to check up on me than because they want to hear that she has double-digit multiplication homework. God forbid she didn’t have eggs for breakfast—I’d never hear the end of it. And when she told them she was going on a sleepover tonight after having stayed at their house last night? They assume I pushed her into the sleepover so I could have ‘women over.’ ”

“Oh, Nick, I’m so sorry you have to deal with all that pressure. I figure it’s hard enough to raise a girl on your own.”

“Tell you the truth, it’s not that hard. Mostly because Leigh’s a great kid, but things are great at home. We have a routine, we have a great relationship. I give her what she needs, I’m there for her. But because I’m not her mother, because of the trouble between us when her mother died, I’ve been the enemy for two years, and now they’re keeping a list of my infractions.”

“Because of a Pop-Tart for breakfast? Or whatever wasn’t ‘eggs’?”

“She had a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of orange juice and that was too skimpy for them.”

In the cabinet Veronica found a bottle of wine that Shelley
had given her last Christmas. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she’d love some red wine right now. “I think we could both use a glass of this.”

He sat down at the round table by the window, and Veronica was struck by how the moonlight filtering through the curtains rested on his dark hair, on his green shirt. “Anyway, forget my crazy life. Tell me about meeting your birth daughter.”

“She’s exquisite,” Veronica said, handing him his glass of wine as she sat down across from him. “Lovely. She seems very intelligent, polite, kind. She had no idea she was adopted until just a month ago. She found out in a deathbed confession letter.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Are both her parents gone?”

She nodded. “I can’t imagine how shocking that letter must have been. She must have started questioning everything she knew about herself.”

“She must have had a lot of questions for you.”

“I had no idea how hard it would be to answer those questions, though. I don’t want to tell her how awful it was back then, how my parents treated me, how her father treated me, how completely alone I was.”

He took a slug of the wine and looked down at the table, then up at her. This time, she could read his expression: compassion. “Sixteen years old. You must have been so scared.”

She also took a sip of wine. “I was. Sometimes, when I look back on that time, I don’t know how I got through it.”

He shook his head and was quiet for a moment. “I remember Timothy telling us—a group of his friends—that his girlfriend was saying he’d gotten her pregnant and that there was no way it was true. I wasn’t sure what to think then.”

She felt that old familiar stirring of shame, of embarrassment in her gut. “Because of my reputation?”

“Because Timothy was my friend and I didn’t know you at all. He never brought you around us.”

Veronica nodded. “He used to tell me he didn’t want me to hang out with his friends because he hated what they thought they knew about me, he hated my reputation. He said he was never able to change it, make anyone think he was seeing me because he really liked me, not because I’d ‘go all the way.’ ”

“I wasn’t all that close with him; I was more a friend of a few of his close friends, but I remember how everyone would talk crap to him about getting lucky. God, I’m sorry, Veronica.”

“Well, then I got pregnant and confirmed everyone’s opinion of me. The slut got knocked up. I thought he’d stand by me, tell everyone that he was the only guy I’d ever been with, but I think he was so shocked, scared maybe, that he wanted to believe the worst so he could walk away, pretend it didn’t involve him.”

“So he told everyone he wasn’t the father, that he used condoms, that it couldn’t be his.”

Veronica nodded. “I never saw or heard from him again. Not a word. The day after I told him I was pregnant, I was sent away, to Hope Home, the home for pregnant teenagers on the outskirts of Boothbay Harbor. My parents washed their hands of me—they even filed emancipation papers on my behalf. And then after I had the baby, I left the state. How can I tell Bea all this?”

“The truth is the truth, isn’t it?”

Veronica shrugged and looked away. “When she was sitting right next to me, all I could think of was that she’d been that
six-pound baby girl I got to hold for two minutes. Completely innocent, having nothing—and everything—to do with how she was brought into the world. I don’t want her to know the truth. Even if she says she wants it.”

“You’re a good person, Veronica,” he said, reaching for her hand and holding it. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you back in high school. I’m sorry I wasn’t your friend.”

She started to cry again, and he was beside her in seconds, lifting her out of the chair and wrapping his arms around her, after all.