Chapter 37
The brief time leading up to Finn’s visit seemed to drag at one moment and fly by the next.
Rick finished a few odd jobs in the house for Vee but didn’t try to bring up the emotive subject they’d been discussing on the ferry, to her relief.
There would be time for that when the visit was over.
As the hours ticked away, Vee swung between being madly excited and more frightened than she’d ever been in her life.
A series of furious face-to-face calls with her sister didn’t help.
‘But you promised not to do this to us!’ Cassie screamed from Vee’s phone. FaceTime had its place, but it wasn’t great for soothing tempers, Vee thought, as she tried to pacify the woman on the other end of the line, who had ditched her usual cool and was wading in with all guns blazing.
‘I didn’t do it,’ repeated Vee for the fourth time. ‘It was Aunt Yolanda, and she had her reasons.’
‘Reasons for disrupting our beloved son’s whole world?’
With a pang, Vee registered that the use of the word our didn’t include her. Of course Cassie and Marissa were unhappy, but they were Finn’s mums and they were running scared.
‘I’m never going to try and take Finn away from you,’ she said, struggling to keep calm. ‘He’s bound to want to talk to me, now this is out in the open, but it probably would have happened at some point in the future, wouldn’t it? Wasn’t he always going to be curious about his parentage one day?’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Cassie, slightly less loudly. ‘Finn might never have bothered to find out, and now he’s furious with Marissa and me for keeping the truth from him.’
‘Oh, come on, get real. Finn’s known he was adopted for years but you spun him some ridiculous story about his birth. At some point he’d have realised it didn’t add up. Anyway, this argument’s silly. He’s going to be here in a couple of days. Don’t worry, I won’t keep him hostage.’
The bitterness in her own voice brought Vee up short.
The few times she’d met Finn face to face, obviously as his aunt and not his mother, she’d loved him unconditionally.
He was kind, funny and talented, a credit to his adoptive parents and maybe…
just maybe… to the genes of his natural mother.
She’d made sure to keep in touch, sending gifts and then money on birthdays and at Christmas, but hadn’t once overstepped the mark.
It had been hard at times not to blurt out the truth, but she’d made a deal with her sister and Marissa and she would never have gone back on her promise.
Yolanda had forced the issue, and now the shock waves had died down, Vee was longing to see what her new relationship with Finn would be like, even though the thought of the changes in store for them were daunting.
It was so important to get it right this time.
A couple more of these traumatic calls followed but eventually, Cassie began to get used to the idea that Finn was coming to England, although she was still very unhappy about it.
Vee knew there was nothing she could do to make things better between them but the rift with her sister stung.
The age gap between them had meant that growing up, they were never in anything like the same peer group at school, but later they’d forged an easy-going friendship that spanned the miles and suited them both.
Now, the distance between them was larger than any ocean.
The day of Finn’s arrival brought with it a touch of frost and a new chill in the air.
Vee hoped he’d had the sense to pack warm clothes.
The Indian summer that they’d enjoyed in France seemed a long time ago, and she shivered as she dressed in her favourite cords and a red sweater, lacing up her flowered Dr Martens in an attempt to feel braver.
She heard a horn toot outside and looked out of the window to see Rick in his van.
He waved to her and Vee grabbed a coat before rushing out to join him.
‘You didn’t have to do this,’ she said. ‘I could have booked a taxi to go and meet Finn.’
‘Moral support,’ was all he said, as he turned up the radio and let the music fill the cab and they both sang along with Duran Duran at the top of their lungs as Rick drove towards the airport.
‘There, isn’t that better?’ Rick asked. ‘You can’t beat a good old blast of “Hungry Like the Wolf”. The good thing about this van being a bit on the elderly side is that it’s got a CD player. Take your pick.’
He indicated a messy heap of CD cases stuffed into the door pocket.
Vee rummaged through them and pulled one out.
‘This is going to make me emotional,’ she said.
‘But maybe it’s better to get it over with now rather than drip tears all over Finn as soon as he gets here.
I can’t believe how much I’ve cried since I came to Willowbrook.
Nothing for years and then a tidal wave. ’
‘You’ve been bottling it all up. What’s the song?’
Vee pushed the CD into the slot and clicked through the tracks.
‘This was a hit the year Finn was born. I played it over and over again. The words summed up everything I was feeling after he’d gone with Cassie and Marissa.
I tried to make out that it was easy to give him up but it was hell on earth. ’
The Backstreet Boys and ‘Incomplete’ now rang out, overwhelming Vee with the emotive lyrics that perfectly captured the love and longing she’d felt for the tiny, beautiful scrap of humanity that was her newborn son.
Tears flowed down her cheeks and through them, she saw Rick rubbing his eyes with one hand as he negotiated a complicated roundabout.
‘That’s enough of being maudlin,’ Vee said, clicking the CD out as the song ended. ‘You need to give your attention to the motorway, or this journey will be over before it’s properly begun. Here, let’s have something upbeat. This one’s from our school disco days.’
It was a compilation this time, a collection of cheesy songs that took Vee right back to those heady, unpredictable days of flirting, trying to be popular and wanting so much to fit in that it hurt.
She led the singing as the CD began with ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, and Rick was soon outdoing her in volume.
As they pulled off the motorway after countless hold-ups and headed towards the airport junction, Vee began to feel as if this thing was possible.
She was going to meet her son as his birth mother for the first time, and she was going to give it her very best shot.
Rick parked as close to the terminal as he could and got out to open the door for Vee. He pulled her into a hug and for a moment she let herself be overwhelmed by the now-familiar scent of his shower gel and warm Rick-ness. He let her go and stepped back.
‘Good luck,’ he said, smiling down at her. ‘You’ve got this.’
‘Aren’t you… I mean, I thought you’d come in with me?’ Vee said, glancing at her watch. ‘He should be coming out very soon, I’ll need to run.’
‘This one’s for you to do on your own. Off you go. I’ll be here waiting.’
Vee turned to walk away and just as she was almost out of earshot, thought she heard him say, as if to himself, ‘I’ve always been waiting for you.’
Startled, Vee made herself keep going. There was no time to check if she’d heard right.
She began to jog towards the arrivals entrance, dodging families with small children coping with tantrums and tiredness and arriving just as the passengers from Boston began to trickle out into the open area.
Vee tidied her hair and tried to slow her breathing, but her heart was pounding so hard that she couldn’t stand still.
She moved from foot to foot as she watched the stream of bleary people wandering out.
Some spotted their lifts or welcoming parties immediately, others looked around as if stunned that they’d finally made it.
One or two marched off smartly in search of taxis and buses. None of them were Finn.
Just as Vee was about to give up hope and go to find a help desk to send out a message, a tall young man with tousled hair strolled out, as if he had all the time in the world.
He looked around and saw Vee standing alone in the middle of the arrivals area.
His expression was unreadable as he came towards her, dumping his huge backpack on the floor.
‘Hi, Aunty Vee,’ he said. ‘I mean… I guess I mean… Mom?’