Finding Colin Firth: A Novel (10 page)

January 3. A New Year’s baby.

The doctor had answered all of Gemma’s questions about what foods she should avoid (deli meats, high-mercury fish, and Caesar dressing because of the raw eggs) and whether she could drink just one cup of coffee a day (she could). She’d been lucky to get the appointment; June had discreetly asked Isabel for the name of her OB, and thanks to a last-minute cancellation this morning, Gemma had herself an appointment. She’d get the results of the blood test in a few days, but the doc had told her that with two positive pregnancy tests, she was most definitely pregnant.

She touched her stomach, still relatively flat. When would it feel real? When the baby kicked for the first time, maybe. Her wedding ring glinted in the sunshine as she walked down Main Street. I’m pregnant, she said to herself. I’m having a baby. It was real, even if it didn’t feel real yet. Perhaps it was better for Gemma that it didn’t feel real just yet. Part of her, the part that loved her husband like crazy, wanted to call him and share it with
him, but every time she reached for her phone she stopped herself. The conversation would move from his jubilantly shouting “I’m going to be a father!” to his talking about the move to Westchester, to the Plan—for Gemma to be a stay-at-home mother and work part-time, if she “insisted,” at the free weekly newspaper. The other night, June had said that sounded pretty darn good to her, from her perspective, and considering June had been a twenty-one-year-old college student who hadn’t been able to locate the father of her baby, Gemma understood what June had meant. Gemma was lucky. She did have a doting husband. Too doting, maybe, but she was blessed. Still, was it wrong to want the career that meant so much to her? If she had to be pregnant now, couldn’t she have both? A baby and a career?

A month ago, she’d been on assignment in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, sitting on a cot next to a single mother who had nowhere to go, no skills, and no way to work without leaving her two-year-old, who lay sleeping on the cot—alone. Gemma had been so touched by her story that she’d gotten the woman an interview at a day care center to be an aide, but the job had gone to someone else. Twenty-plus calls to day care centers later between the two of them, the woman had gotten herself hired and a slot for her daughter. Within two weeks, she’d be able to leave the shelter for her own small apartment. Gemma’s feature story on three women at the shelter had elicited over a thousand comments on the
New York Weekly
website—some blasting her and the women for their circumstances, others full of empathy with talk of vicious cycles. This was what Gemma wanted to do—talk to people, tell their stories, some heartbreaking, some controversial, some just stories of everyday folks going through struggles like so many. She wanted to inform, start conversations.
Alexander had once said he thought Gemma’s drive to be a human interest reporter stemmed from her wanting people to be heard the way she herself hadn’t felt heard as a child. Maybe so. Sometimes she thought Alexander understood her so well. Other times . . .

Perhaps she’d call him tonight and tell him the news. After her meeting with Claire Lomax at the
Boothbay Regional Gazette.
Gemma had gotten damned lucky by running into Claire Saturday at their mutual friend’s wedding. As summer friends, the teenage Claire and Gemma would play reporter, interviewing people on the street and jotting down their answers in notebooks. Claire had always had a knack for coming up with the assignments; it was no surprise she was a big editor now at the well-read regional paper.

At their friend’s wedding reception, Claire had hugged Gemma as though they were close as ever, and they headed over to a table with their mini crab cakes and Stilton-stuffed grapes to catch up on their lives; they’d last seen each other at June’s aunt’s funeral two years ago. Gemma had been honest when she caught up with her friend, which had gotten Gemma congratulations on the pregnancy, sympathy about her issues with her husband and losing her beloved job, and an invitation to stop in this morning to discuss putting Gemma to work for the week. Claire, in a long-term relationship, related to everything Gemma had told her. Claire would give her a great assignment, a story she could put together in a few days, and just having the assignment, reporting from the field, researching, Gemma would feel stronger, feel like herself again. She’d be better equipped to make her case to Alexander when he started in about how it was a blessing in disguise that she’d been laid off.

As Gemma passed a shop called the Italian Bakery, she had a sudden craving for cannoli. She peered in the window at a plate lined with the delectable pastry. Just one, she told herself. She headed in and left with four, one for now, one for June, if she saw her later, one for Isabel at the inn, and one for tonight, when she’d be dreaming of cannoli. She sat down on a bench outside the shop and found her attention going to the passing mothers. And babies. They were everywhere suddenly. Strollers. Babies in soft carriers strapped to mothers’ and fathers’ chests. Or in elaborate backpacklike contraptions. One mother wore her baby in a sling across her torso.

They all had one thing in common, though. They all looked like they’d been doing it forever, this parenthood thing. Their faces were calm. The woman with the backpack stopped to window shop, another pushing a stroller paused to answer her phone, then went on pushing her stroller down the street as though taking care of a baby was no big deal. Gemma had to get a grip. Clearly, you could multitask. Clearly, she’d learn how to hold a baby and talk to someone at the same time. Mothers had been mothers since the dawn of time, for heaven’s sake. She could learn. She could talk to Isabel, who managed the Three Captains’ Inn, for advice on running a business and raising a baby. Isabel had a great nanny but she’d also said that June filled in for her often at the inn. Gemma’s sister, older by five years, lived in California and they weren’t close and never had been. Her sister ran cold, like their mother always had, and kept to herself.

She was struck with a memory of being alone in her apartment as a child, having no idea where her mother was, unable to find her, her father gone, as usual on a business trip. Gemma
would go door-to-door in the apartment, looking for her mother, and if she came to a locked door, she knew she’d found her. Her mother had worked full-time as a professor, but she’d hired sitters to watch Gemma when she was young, and once she was old enough to be trusted with a key, Gemma would come home to an empty apartment, her sister busy with her own life. There had to be a happy medium, but heck if Gemma knew where or what it was. She just knew she’d never had that feeling friends had spoken about—the yearning to have a baby. Alexander often insisted it was because she was afraid, because of how she’d been raised, because she didn’t have a warm and fuzzy mother. He also insisted she’d be a great mom, that she was loving and kind and full of compassion and commitment, and that was all you needed to be a great mother.

Gemma wasn’t so sure about that, though. You needed something else. Something more than all that combined. You had to want to be a mother in the first place.

Out of nowhere, tears stung Gemma’s eyes because it felt so awful to think such a thing, given that there was a life growing inside her. A life, a quarter inch long, with a pipe-shape heart just beginning to beat, according to the week-by-week pregnancy book she’d started reading Friday night. Her baby. Alexander’s baby.

Gemma put her hands on her stomach, wondering if she’d feel a flutter. Still nothing. Are you a boy or girl? she said silently to her belly. Will you have my straight light brown hair? Alexander’s sandy blond? His brown eyes? My dark blue? She wouldn’t mind if the baby inherited the Hendrickses’ cleft chin. And, yes, their pull-you-in warmth. Complain as she did about them, Mona and Artie Hendricks would be fantastic grandparents, the
kind a kid dreamed of, doting and spoiling and full of hugs and love.

A dog on a long leash came over and grabbed the cannoli out of Gemma’s hand. She’d only had two bites. The owner was full of apologies and said she’d go right in and get Gemma another cannoli, but Gemma smiled and opened the box and said she had extras, so no worries, that the dog had done her a favor, anyway.

Thank goodness for cute, cannoli-swiping dogs to stop Gemma from thinking about her belly and how complicated her life—her head, really—seemed. She glanced at her watch. Time to head over to the
Gazette.
If she was lucky, Claire would assign her to cover the big story everyone in town was buzzing about—the film crew that had set up over by Frog Marsh this past weekend. Interviewing the wonderful Colin Firth, one of her favorite actors, perhaps over a cannoli in the Italian Bakery, would take her mind off just about everything. She’d be dying to ask him to repeat her favorite words ever uttered on screen—“I like you. Very much. Just as you are.” But she wouldn’t, of course.

And an interview with a major movie star, on her home turf—well, her summer home turf—could be her way back. The personal angle combined with a story and interview of a major A-list movie star? It was the kind of story that would get her back into her old boss’s good graces. It very well might get her her job back.

A weight lifted off her head, heart, and shoulders, as she headed down Harbor Lane, one of her favorite side streets, with its cobblestone path, where the
Gazette
offices were located, just across from Books Brothers, on the second and third floors. She smiled at the Moon Tea Emporium, a fixture on Harbor Lane,
where she and teenage June and Claire had often gone to feel more grown-up, ordering tea and tiny sandwiches. She’d also made good use of the fortune-teller next door. Gemma peered in the windows, practically covered by red velvet drapes, and could see Madame Periot sitting at a round table with a woman. Maybe Gemma would stop in later. Or maybe she didn’t want to know her fortune.
You are confused and someone very close to you is getting impatient
, the middle-aged woman would say. Gemma would ask if she and Alexander would figure things out, find their happy medium, and Madame Periot would say yes, of course. She didn’t need to fork over thirty-five bucks for that.

Gemma glanced at her watch. She still had fifteen minutes to kill before her interview, so she ducked into Books Brothers, where June worked as the manager. In the Local Maine Interest aisle, Gemma found June helping a man select a book about climbing Mt. Katahdin.

“Crazy morning and we’ve only been open since nine,” June said, giving Gemma a kiss on the cheek once her customer had gone. “Feeling okay?”

“Something about the air up here and this town helps perk you up,” Gemma said. “And guess where I’m headed—to see Claire at the
Gazette
about being assigned a story.”

June smiled. “That’s great!” Two customers vied for June’s attention, so Gemma squeezed her hand and said she’d see her soon.

Gemma looked over the display of pretty notebooks and bought a new one to bring to her interview, then glanced at her watch. She still had ten minutes before she had to head over to the
Gazette
offices. She browsed the fiction shelves, then crossed over to nonfiction, lured by the sign that said
BOOKS THAT MIGHT
HELP YOU FIGURE IT OUT
. Now there was a sign meant for her. An entire shelf was devoted to marriage. Relationships. And several books on divorce. Divorce. Gemma turned away, a heaviness dogging her again, and focused on the pregnancy section. This is who you are, she reminded herself. Pregnant. Not someone who’s headed for divorce. Just someone who’s pregnant. And has her entire life going in a different direction. She glanced at her watch. Time to go. Time to get that life back on track.

At ten o’clock, Gemma sat across Claire’s big, scarred desk, feeling so hopeful again. Being here in the messy office of the loud newsroom in the center of town, the sound of keyboards clicking, of staff conversation, of editors yelling, and constant knocks on the door to interrupt Claire and ask for okays or sign-offs, made Gemma feel right at home. This was her territory, even if the offices of the
Gazette
—a daily paper—were an eighth of the size of the
New York Weekly
.

Gemma pulled out her new notebook, ready to jot down her assignment. “I thought you could assign me a piece about the movie set in town, the effect on the local economy, on morale, et cetera. I could interview Colin Firth, the other stars. I saw an ad for extras in the
Gazette
on Sunday—I could talk to the director about the hiring process, interview a few extras. There are so many interesting components.”

Claire, tall and slender with poker-straight dark hair to her shoulders and narrow dark eyes, looked exactly like the angular teenage girl Gemma remembered. Claire took a sip of her coffee, and before she could say a word, someone knocked, then came in and shoved papers at Claire for her to sign. Claire, one
of the most together women Gemma had ever known—nothing frazzled her—scanned and signed, then turned her full attention to Gemma. “Actually, I’ve already got someone covering the movie set and all that, and I’ll tell you—finding out when Colin Firth is actually arriving in town is proving impossible. But I asked you to come in because there is a story I’d like you to cover while you’re here.”