Finding Colin Firth: A Novel (29 page)

“So you’re responsible for how good it smells in here?” Veronica asked as they headed toward the front door. She was surprised she could make small talk right now.

“If I do say so myself—yes. And the dining room has been closed since ten o’clock too—brunch hours for Sunday. Everyone wanted bacon this morning—I must have fried up five pounds. If you smell bread, it’s Isabel’s doing—she’s taking bread-baking lessons from the owner of the Italian bakery. Hot crusty Italian bread with butter? Nothing better.”

“She’s taking my pie class too,” Veronica said as she opened the passenger door of her car for Bea. “With all her new skills, she may put me out of business.”

“Your pies are a big hit at the inn, especially at tea time. Isabel says no one could ever come close to touching your pies.
I wanted to tell her that Veronica Russo, pie maven, is my biological mother, but I know you probably want to keep that private.”

Veronica hated how tight her expression must seem. Why did she want to keep it a secret? A holdover from how her parents had made her feel? From how her one trip into town, at seven months pregnant, had made her feel? Ashamed. Dirty. Damaged. The whispers and stares of people she knew, of strangers, had been unbearable.

Bea buckled her seat belt. “Are you sure you really want to take me on this tour? If it’s too much for you, I’ll understand.”

“It will be too much for me,” Veronica said. “And that’s probably a good thing. I came back to Boothbay Harbor to face my past, to stop running from it. But being here alone hasn’t been enough—I’ve kept a year of my life balled up inside me, locked up tight. I need to . . . let myself remember.”

Veronica drove the short distance to the high school, which was located far down Main Street. She passed it all the time but rarely let herself look at the building. She’d hated who she’d been there, how she’d felt in those halls and classrooms. Only for five brief months, when she’d been Timothy Macintosh’s girlfriend, had none of that mattered. She’d walked the halls with her head high, and for the first time, she’d felt as though nothing could touch her, hurt her.

She pulled into the parking lot and stared up at the school. “When I look back on it now, it seems crazy that I was in love with Timothy after just a few months of dating, but you know how it is when you’re sixteen. The weight of a day feels like a month, everything happens so fast and with such intensity.”

Bea nodded. “I’m embarrassed to say it’s still like that for me.”

“You have his smile,” Veronica said. “My mouth, but his smile. I loved his face so much I could just stare at him for hours. He had light blond hair, exactly like yours, and the most beautiful hazel eyes. He was a bit of a rebel but not a troublemaker. He wore a beat-up black leather jacket that smelled like his soap, and if it was remotely chilly, he’d give it to me. I used to love wearing that jacket.”

“His name was Timothy Macintosh, you said?”

She nodded. “Everyone was always so surprised by the quiet guy in the leather jacket with his head down suddenly raising his hand to ask intelligent questions or give right answers. I had such a crush on him, and when he asked me out, I said no at first. I was so used to being asked out because of my reputation—because of the lies spread about me, first by a group of mean girls who didn’t like the way the popular boys were following me around, and then by the boys who made up stories about sleeping with me. And I told him so. I told him off, actually—it was the first time I’d ever done that, stood up like that. But he insisted he liked me for me and that he wouldn’t even try to kiss me for a month if I went out with him.”

“Did you hold him to that?”

“I sure did. But he didn’t try. We spent so much time together that first month too. He didn’t try once.”

Bea smiled. “I love that.”

“Me too,” Veronica said, lost in the sweet memory for a moment. “We had such honest conversations—about how we felt, about school, our teachers, our parents, the world, government, everything. He came from a rougher background than I did, and I cared so much about him that I wanted to take him away from all that by just loving him with all my might.”

“Did you?”

“For five months, I did. And then I found out I was pregnant.” She started the car and drove the three miles to the house she’d grown up in, pulling over across the street. “See that blue house, number forty-nine? That’s where I grew up. My period was late, over a week, and I was shaking when I took the pregnancy test. I was so scared when that plus sign appeared. I told myself it couldn’t be true—we’d used condoms. But I took another one later in the day, and it was positive too. It took me two days to work up the nerve to tell my mother. I was so afraid to say the words out loud. But then while my parents and I were having pancakes one morning, I blurted it out.”

Bea was staring from the house to Veronica. “And they didn’t take it very well.”

“Understatement of the year. I’ll never forget the expression on my mother’s face,” Veronica said, the memory so vivid that as she repeated her mother’s words, verbatim, to Bea, it was as if she was reliving it right now.

“Your grandmother is rolling over in her grave right now,” her mother had screamed, her father just shaking his head and muttering, “How could you be so stupid, so careless?” Over and over.

Veronica had wished with everything inside her that her grandmother was still here, that she could tell her everything. She knew her grandmother would have wrapped her arms around Veronica, told her everything would be okay, that they’d get through this, that they were Russos, and Russos were strong.

All she had was her mother, pointing her finger in Veronica’s face and saying, “This makes you trash. No better than Maura’s
trashy daughter who got pregnant and now has a toddler at seventeen. And I won’t stand for it.”

Veronica had stood there, shocked.

“Just what the goddamned hell is everyone going to think?” her mother had said, shaking her head. “Goddammit.” And she reached out and slapped Veronica across the face.

Veronica winced as though her mother had slapped her right now.

“Oh, Veronica,” Bea said.

“I ran—to the one place that felt safe: my and Timothy’s ‘spot.’ ” Veronica started the car and drove back to Main Street, not too far from the high school, and parked across the street from Seagull Lane, a brick alleyway leading to the bay. The place where she and Timothy had kissed, finally, for the first time. Their meeting spot.

The place where she’d told him she was pregnant.

“I found a pay phone and called him,” Veronica said, “barely able to speak for the sobs coming from so deep inside me. He’d rushed to meet me—right there,” she added, pointing to the alleyway. “And I was so scared to tell him. Despite how close we were, all we’d talked about, the plans we made to run away together after high school, I was afraid to say the words. His mother had gotten pregnant at sixteen, and she had a hard life because of it, and I knew he’d be very upset at the news.”

“What did he say?” Bea asked.

“He didn’t say anything for the longest moment. Then he told me it couldn’t possibly be his baby. He said a lot of other things.” She closed her eyes for a second. “But it was his. Couldn’t possibly be anyone else’s. I was so shocked, so hurt, then I went back
home, in a daze, and my mother told me to pack my bags, that there was a spot for me at Hope Home. I was gone the next day.”

“The next day,” Bea repeated. “I can’t believe how fast it all happened. I can’t imagine what you were going through.”

Veronica drove the five miles to Hope Home, the long dirt driveway and pretty white farmhouse with its porch swing still so familiar. There had still been some snow on the ground when she’d arrived as a sixteen-year-old in early April. “This was actually a bright spot. I lived here for seven months.”

Veronica told Bea what it was like back then at Hope Home, how some girls had been sent away because their families were embarrassed to have a pregnant teenage daughter, but that most parents visited every week with care packages full of treats and L.L.Bean sweaters and books about pregnancy and what was happening in your body, even though the Hope Home library was full of them. And those girls had gone back home after their babies were born and adopted, stories made up about two semesters away as foreign exchange students.

She explained how no one had visited her in the seven months she’d been there. How her mother had called twice—once, her voice strained, to see if she needed anything, and another time to let her know the family dog had died. Even after that, when her mother had clearly wanted Veronica to feel worse than she already did, Veronica had hoped she’d call again, but she hadn’t. And any time Veronica called home, no one picked up or returned her calls. So she’d eventually stopped calling.

“Oh God,” Bea said, and Veronica was aware that Bea was trying to catch her eye. “You must have been so lonely.”

Veronica kept her gaze on the white farmhouse, on the
swing. “Well, to tell you the truth, my parents always made me feel lonely, even before I got pregnant. They were always on the cool side, difficult to get to know, very proper, impersonal. My mother found someone just like herself in my father. They even brought up the idea for me to get emancipated so that they wouldn’t be held liable in any way.”

Bea shook her head. “But you had friends at Hope Home?”

Veronica nodded. “Some of the girls didn’t get along all the time, but generally we did. The staff was wonderful.”

“Good,” Bea said. “I’m very glad to hear that. You went into labor at Hope Home but I started coming while you were in the ambulance?”

“I was screaming my head off—in so much pain, scared out of my mind—but the EMT guy who delivered you was great to me. He said there wouldn’t be time to get to the hospital, and he coached me through the whole thing. Then suddenly, there you were. I got to hold you for two minutes, and then he took you to clean you up.”

“What about on the way to the hospital?” Bea asked. “Were you able to hold me again?”

“The social worker who accompanied us said safety regulations prohibited it and that besides, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“So you wanted to?”

Veronica sucked in a breath. “Yeah.”

Bea was quiet for a moment. “Did you ever consider keeping me?”

Veronica didn’t answer; she drove off again, this time to Coastal General Hospital. She parked in the main lot, and they both glanced up at the stately brick building. “I had fantasies about it. Of running away with you. But I was sixteen and had
nowhere to go, no family, nothing. And the social workers were very good at their jobs, reassuring me that I was doing the best thing for you, that I was being selfless and not selfish.”

“So what happened after I was born? Did you ever get to see me again?”

Veronica glanced away. She didn’t like these questions. “Just once. On my way out of the hospital. Even though I was told I shouldn’t look, that it might be too painful, for my last memory to be of leaving you. And that nurse was right. Even thinking about how I’d held you those two minutes in the ambulance was enough to do me in. So I learned to close it all off. After a while, I had trouble even conjuring it up at all.”

Bea was quiet for a moment. “So after you left the hospital, then what?”

“I went back to Hope Home to pack my things for the trip to Florida. And before I left, I called the adoption agency and left my name for the file and said I’d call to update when I found a place to live. I felt like if I didn’t leave my name, one day it would feel like it never happened at all, that I didn’t give birth to a baby girl. But on the way to Florida, I ended up working damned hard to make myself feel exactly that way—like it didn’t happen.”

“I can understand that,” Bea said. “After all you’d gone through. How did you make it on your own in Florida? How did you even get there? You weren’t even seventeen.”

This was easier to talk about. She started the car again, driving to the Greyhound bus station in Wiscasset. “I was an emancipated minor at that point, thanks to my parents preparing the paperwork for me. I had around six hundred dollars saved from
my part-time job, so I asked for a ride to here and bought a one-way ticket to Florida.”

“Why Florida?”

Veronica explained that Florida was about an old dream of her grandmother’s, where there were no blizzards and lots of orange groves. Even though Veronica loved winter, loved snow, she’d always thought the hot and sunny orange-filled dream sounded magical. Once there, she lied about her age, got a waitressing job, something familiar, and found a nice female roommate in an apartment complex with palm trees and a pool. She’d stayed in Florida for a year, had a boyfriend or two, no one she’d loved, and certainly no one she’d tell her story to. When one of her boyfriends accused her of cheating on him, something Veronica had never done in her life, it had reminded her of Timothy and she’d packed up again. By then she’d been almost eighteen and wouldn’t have to lie about her age. Things would get easier. She’d headed west, crossing the south, staying for months at a time in various towns until she’d hear about someplace and pack up. She’d stayed in New Mexico the longest, but then her former beau had ditched her in Las Vegas when she wouldn’t marry him, and she’d known she had to come back home if she ever hoped to fix herself.

“I half expect you to drive us to Florida right now,” Bea said, smiling.

Veronica smiled back.

“Did you talk to your mom again?”

“I tried over the years, calling on her birthday, my father’s birthday. Christmas. But the conversations were stilted. No matter how many years passed, they couldn’t forgive me, couldn’t
move on.” Veronica drove the fifteen minutes back to her house, parking in front of it. “Then I moved here.”

Just before she’d moved to Boothbay Harbor she’d called her mother to let her know she was moving back home, that she was hoping to put her past to rest. Her plan had been to finally do what she should have done long ago: give up on her mother the way her mother had given up on her. Of course, the moment she’d heard her mother’s voice, she still longed for her, for something to change. But it hadn’t. In twenty-two years, Veronica had come to understand something about limitations, that sometimes, even when you needed them most, the people you loved couldn’t rise to the occasion. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Her mother’s response to her call: “I think too much time has gone by, Veronica, but I wish you well,” and Veronica had hung up, the breath knocked out of her. Good Lord, it was no wonder she was the way she was. With a heart that didn’t work right.