Finding Colin Firth: A Novel

by March, Mia

  “Jesus, Gemma, what career? You were laid off. There’s no job. You have no career at the moment. You’re chasing some fluff piece for a summer tourist-town newspaper that gave you a column when you were eleven. Please. If you’re leaving me, just say so. But don’t leave me hanging while you ‘sort out your feelings’ and interview teenagers over ice cream.”

  God, he could be infuriating. She paced around the small room, her heart beating too fast. Calm down, Gemma, she told herself. Just calm down. Look at this from his perspective. He wants what he wants just as much as you want what you want. “Alex, I’m just trying to . . .” Find my way through this new normal, she finished silently, one hand on her stomach again. Find myself in this.

  “Just trying to what?” he barked. “What the hell are you trying to do besides screw things up between us? I want to know what the hell is—”

  “I’m pregnant!” she shouted, then started to cry.

  Oh God.

  There was silence for a moment. “What? Gemma—what?”

  “I’m pregnant, Alex.” She could barely believe she’d said the words aloud to him.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, the tone of his voice changing—dramatically. Instead of anger, there was . . . wonder.

  “Two positive pregnancy tests and positive blood test results yesterday.”

  “Oh my God, Gemma. This is amazing! We’re going to have a baby! Wait a minute,” he said, the voice changing again, growing hesitant. “How long have you known?”

  “I took the first pregnancy test last Wednesday. It was positive. I was so shocked—as you can imagine. I thought maybe my cycle was off because of the stress of losing my job. I only took the test to rule out the craziest reason why my period would be late. We’d used a backup plan when I was on those antibiotics.” She closed her eyes and sat down on the edge of her bed. “But there it was, a pink plus sign.”

  He was quiet again for a long few seconds. “Gemma, you’ve known you were pregnant for a week and didn’t tell me? You left for Maine and didn’t tell me? What the hell, Gemma?”

  “It’s a loaded topic, Alex.”

  “Loaded?” he repeated, his voice full of disdain. “So you’re not happy about it? Is that what this is all about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” he repeated. Flatly. “And were you going to tell me during this call if it hadn’t just come out?”

  “I don’t know that either. I don’t know anything except that I don’t want to move to Dobbs Ferry and live next door to your parents. I don’t want a part-time job at the local paper if I insist—as you called it—on working. I don’t want this life you’re trying so damned hard to force me into.”

  “Well, guess what, Gemma, you’re pregnant. It’s not about you anymore.”

  “Who the hell is it about?”

  “The baby. Me. Us. Our marriage, our family.”

  She suddenly felt very, very tired. “I don’t know how I feel about any of this, Alex. I need time to—”

  “Gemma, you’re not fifteen and pregnant like one of the girls you’re interviewing. You’re a grown woman. Act like it.”

  “I’m going now, Alex. I need to go.”

  Click.

  She dropped her head in her hands and cried.

  Gemma checked the address of the woman she was due to interview in three minutes. Caitlin Auerman, 33 Banyon Road. The small white cape halfway down the street with the tricycle and Big Wheels out front was the place.

  The director of Hope Home had called Gemma as she’d been out on Main Street, needing to be alone in a crowd. The conversation with Alexander had drained her, and she couldn’t stay cooped up in her small room. She’d gotten an herbal iced tea and a bagel with cream cheese and was sitting on a bench, trying to calm herself down and eat a few bites, when Pauline Lee had called with the news that a woman who’d lived at Hope Home fifteen years ago, as a fifteen-year-old, and had placed her baby for adoption was interested in speaking with Gemma for the article, but only had a two-hour window. Gemma had been grateful for somewhere to go, to have something to focus on besides her marriage.

  Gemma pressed the doorbell, and a woman who could only be described as weary opened the door. She looked like she hadn’t slept well—or perhaps in days. There was a baby swing in the living room, and lots of kid paraphernalia around the room.

  “You must be Gemma Hendricks,” she said. “I’m Caitlin Auerman. I forgot to mention to the Hope Home director that I have to insist on anonymity—that you won’t use my name in the article. Hope Home was good to me, and I have only positive things to say about it, but if I’m going to be truthful about how my life has been since, I don’t want my real name used.”

  “I can assure you I won’t use your name. I’ll make up a name and use your real age and time frame that you were at Hope Home, but I can assure you I’ll protect your identity. I appreciate your willingness to sit down with me.”

  Caitlin led Gemma into the living room, full of toys, and they sat down on the sofa. Gemma pulled out her recorder and her notebook, and the woman started talking before Gemma could even get out her pen and ask a question.

  “Everyone said: you’ll ruin your life if you have a baby at fifteen,” Caitlin said. “You have your whole life in front of you. Put the baby up for adoption. It’s the right thing. For both of you. On and on. I even agreed to go live at Hope Home so that no one in town would know I was pregnant, so that it would stay a family secret. Well, here I am, thirty years old, and I did everything everybody told me to do—I went to college. I went to law school. I got all the ‘see, you listened to us, and now look at you.’ Well, fifteen years later, I have three kids under ten, I can forget about my career, and I can’t even hear myself think ninety percent of the time. I’m not saying I could have achieved everything I did with a baby at fifteen—who knows, maybe I could have. I just know that it all added up to me sitting at home with three kids, a husband who’s never home, and a career that’s basically over. Why the hell did I work so hard? To be treated like the invisible woman at my husband’s business functions? I’m suddenly a stay-at-home mother so I have nothing of value to say? I hate this.”

  This will be me, Gemma thought, her head spinning for a few seconds. I don’t want this to be me. Focus on the interview, she reminded herself. “Can I ask a personal question?”

  Caitlin let out a harsh laugh. “I think I’ve made it clear you can.”

  “Did you plan to get pregnant with your first child?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “It was an accident. Twins. I wasn’t really ready, but I was excited. I thought I could do it all, be superwoman, even though everyone said it was impossible. I thought I could work full-time and be a great mom and take cooking classes and learn to speak Italian and take yoga. Boy, was I in for a rude awakening.”

  “So you had a plan, but life didn’t go accordingly?” Gemma didn’t want to hear the answer. Clearly, Caitlin had had a big plan, big plans for herself.

  “Exactly. One of the twins was sick a lot with ear infections, and the other would wake up every couple of hours, and my husband would argue with me endlessly about quitting the firm and staying home with the boys. I know it sounds awful, but I didn’t want to. I loved my job, loved the office environment, getting all dressed up every day. I didn’t want to stay home with the twins, as much as I loved them.”

  “But then both worlds started suffering,” Gemma said, more statement than question.

  “Exactly. Home and work. My marriage was a wreck. I blamed my husband for not helping more; he blamed me for being selfish and not agreeing to quit when we could swing it financially if we were careful. The pressure won and I quit, and suddenly I had three kids and had been out of the game so long I couldn’t see ever finding my way back to who I used to be.”

  Who I used to be. That was exactly what Gemma was afraid of: waking up one day and wondering what had happened to the person she used to be.

  “I know I�
��m not that woman,” Caitlin said. “I’m not twenty-five and childless and a rising young associate. But sometimes I hate who I am now. That my life feels like it’s not my own. That’s how I felt at fifteen and pregnant. Like my life wasn’t my own. It wasn’t.” She shook her head. “Maybe it’s just me, though. I know two other attorneys at my old firm who have two kids and manage to put in their hours and be great moms. They make it work. I couldn’t.”

  Gemma also could think of several working mothers who seemed to have great balance—exactly what she was hoping to achieve. “I really appreciate your being so open and honest. I think many women will be able to relate to how you feel.” Not Gemma’s sister-in-law, who’d had a very similar experience to Caitlin’s, minus the pregnancy at fifteen. Lisa Hendricks gave up a high-powered job to stay home with her baby and loved her life, every moment of it. I was meant to be a mother, Lisa said all the time. My whole life has been leading me to this, she’d say, wiping her toddler’s runny nose while patting her seven-months-pregnant belly.

  “Do you have kids?” Caitlin asked Gemma.

  “Not yet.”

  Caitlin nodded. “I didn’t think so. You don’t look exhausted enough.”

  Gemma smiled, but she wanted to cry.

  “You remind me so much of who I used to be,” Caitlin said. “Here you are, conducting an interview, writing for the paper. Living your life, the one you probably imagined when you were a teenager.”

  The sound of a car pulling into the driveway had Caitlin leaping up to peer out the window. “It’s my mother with the baby.” She glanced at her watch. “She’s a half hour early coming back. Lana must be fussing up a storm.”

  Gemma stood up. “I won’t keep you then. Thank you so much for your time, Caitlin. And I just want to say—maybe you can find a happy medium for yourself.”

  The front door opened, and an older woman came in, carrying a beautiful baby, who was indeed fussing up a storm. “She’s been crying nonstop.”

  Caitlin took the baby and bounced her a bit. “Right,” she said to Gemma with a roll of her eyes. “A happy medium.”

  Gemma thought she might ask Caitlin’s mother a few questions about what it was like fifteen years ago when her daughter had been a teenage resident of Hope Home, but the woman was already rushing out the door, calling over her shoulder that she’d call Caitlin later.

  “I can’t even sit down to a half-hour interview,” Caitlin said, shaking her head. “There is no happy medium.”

  Gemma wished she knew what to say to make the woman’s resentment, the way she looked at her life, abate some. But what she’d said hit so close to home that all Gemma could do was wish Caitlin well. She’d send her a little something tomorrow, maybe a gift certificate to a restaurant in town where she and her husband could go if her mother or a sitter would watch the kids. Something to take her away from her life for a little bit.

  Why was it this way for some women and not others? she wondered, thinking of herself and Caitlin in one dreary category and women like her sister-in-law, and her neighbor in New York City, Lydia Bessell, in the other. Mindset? You chose this or that because of this or that, though sometimes, of course, you had no choice whatsoever, and then there you were, in your life. There was another category, though. Mothers with full-time jobs who made their lives work—because they had to, because they wanted to. Gemma would be in that category. She would, she assured herself. Despite how much Caitlin had wanted her life to work. Everyone was different.

  Gemma didn’t even have a job. Or a baby yet. She had no idea what she was talking about, how anything would be. And that might be the scariest part of all.

  After a long day of research and two more interviews—one with a current resident of Hope Home and another with a woman who’d adopted a baby from a Hope Home resident five years ago, Gemma arrived back at the inn at around five o’clock, desperate for a hot bubble bath and the new chapter of Your Pregnancy This Week.

  A man sat on the porch swing, and from the distance of the driveway he looked so much like Alexander that for a moment, her heart swelled with such longing for her husband that she had to draw in breath. Despite everything happening between them right now, she missed him. She wished she could turn to him with all her fears, her worries, the way she’d always been able to. But she couldn’t in this case.

  I do love you, Alexander, she thought. I do. So much. I just wish—

  The man on the porch stood up. It was Alexander.

  Gemma gasped as he came toward her without a word and wrapped his arms around her. She fell against him, holding him tight, so relieved to have him standing right here. Just let everything fall away and let your husband hold you, she told herself.

  “I should have known you’d fly up here,” she said. “My head is in so many different places that I didn’t think of it.”

  “No kidding.” He offered a half smile and put his arm around her and they walked up the short stone path to the steps.

  “We’re having a baby,” he whispered.

  “I’m scared to death.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  She led him into the inn, quiet on a sunny late afternoon. They headed up the stairs to the third floor, and Gemma unlocked her door.

  The two of them barely fit in the room together. She drank in the sight of him; with all their arguing, she’d forgotten how attracted she was to Alex, how easily his face, his body, could overwhelm her. In her frame of mind and exhausted, she’d have to be careful around him. She needed a hot bath and her husband’s strong arms—but she couldn’t let him strong-arm her.

  She closed the door behind him. “I can learn how to be a mother, I know that. But I can’t learn how to want what you want. I don’t want to move to the suburbs and be a stay-at-home mother. It’s wonderful for those who do want that, and yes, I get that it’s a blessing that we can afford it in the first place. But I want to be a reporter. I want to work on exactly the kind of stories I’m working on now. Tonight, a birth mother is meeting the daughter she gave up for adoption twenty-two years ago.”

  He put her hand on her stomach. “I don’t see why you can’t do this from Westchester, then. You’ll work part-time at the local paper. If you’re assigned this story here, why not there?”

  I’m not moving to Westchester to live next door to your family, dammit! “I don’t want to leave the city.” The local newspaper might not hire her, anyway, she full well knew.

  He shook his head and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Well, I do, Gem. And I’m not raising this baby in the city. I won’t.”

  “Well, I won’t move to Westchester.”

  “You’re so selfish!” he snapped.

  “Did you come here to scream at me?”

  He dropped his head back and let out a frustrated breath. “How are we going to work this out?”

  She sat down beside him and took his hand, and he closed it tight around hers. “I don’t know. I just know that I want to stay here for the next couple of weeks and work on this story. I want to get used to being pregnant, come to terms with it. It’s completely unexpected.”

  “Come to terms with it?” He shook his head. “Do you know how lucky we are?”

  Why couldn’t he understand?

  He sighed. “Fine, come to terms with it, if that’s what you have to do. If that’s what it takes to make you see that moving to Dobbs Ferry is in all our best interest. We’ll have my family right there for support, babysitting, community. The neighborhoods I’m interested in are full of young families like us. We’ll fit right in.”

  “But I won’t.”

  He closed his eyes in frustration. “I don’t know how you can stand this tiny room. Why not get a bigger room?”

  “June gave me the dear-old-friend discount on this single,” she said. “The regular rooms go for almost two hundred a night, and I didn’t want to take a room away from a full-paying guest. And I like this room. It’s cozy. Isabel, June’s older sister, manages the inn and she’s be
en great to me.”

  “I miss you, Gem.”

  Tears filled her eyes. “I miss you too.”

  He sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard, and pulled her back against his chest, wrapping his arms around her. “We’ll figure it out.”

  How, though? Gemma wondered, Caitlin Auerman’s weary face flashing in her mind.

  Chapter 13

  BEA

  In a romantic little Mexican restaurant on a pier, Bea sat across from Patrick, the tall, dark, and intelligent second assistant director on the Colin Firth film, listening to him tell a hilarious story about an A-list movie star he’d once worked with, without mentioning names. She liked that he didn’t name-drop or talk behind the actors’ backs. She liked that he’d said some of the biggest movie stars were among the nicest people he’d ever met. She liked the way he listened intently to her, the warmth in his expression. She liked him. He was twenty-eight, from Seattle, and his dream was to direct interesting documentaries. He’d been around the world on various film shoots, but he wasn’t full of himself at all. And the more Bea looked at him, the hotter he got. He was exactly her height—at five feet ten, Bea rarely wore heels or she’d tower over most people—with narrow blue eyes, freckles, and sexy dark, wavy hair. He’d picked her up at the inn right on time, and they’d walked to the colorful restaurant, where he’d made a reservation, though at five o’clock it hadn’t been necessary.

  After the waiter left with their orders, he asked her to tell him all about herself, and she wanted to blurt out that in less than three hours she’d be meeting her birth mother for the first time ever, but instead she found herself telling him about her mother’s death and losing sight of her own dreams to be a teacher, and that maybe getting fired from her crutch job at Crazy Burger had been a blessing in disguise.

  “What brought you to Boothbay Harbor, Maine?” he asked, swiping a tortilla chip through the excellent dish of salsa between them.