Three Black Swans (14 page)

When Missy became a toddler, demanding to do things by herself, marching around the house like a tiny soldier, assaulting the rules that kept her down, Kitty found herself with a
different fear. Missy was perfect. If the birth mother knew, she would come to the door, and Kitty and Matt would have to give Missy back.

Matt was equally afraid. He wouldn’t even confide in a lawyer.

When Kitty tried to talk it over with her sister, Frannie was annoyed. “There was no crime.”

“We don’t
think
there was a crime.” Kitty hated to repeat the rats-chewing-on-her-gut fear that Missy had been stolen.

“You’re irrational,” her sister would snap. “Missy had hospital staff twenty-four/seven for weeks. They never saw anything wrong. And you and I had the same obstetrician. It’s a mess, but it isn’t a crime.”

Easy for her sister to say. Her adoption was legal.

On the same Friday morning that Genevieve Candler trembled, Claire Linnehan braced herself, and Missy Vianello repeated the word “hoax” over and over, Kitty Vianello raced down the stairs once more, hoping the exercise would keep her body as trim as her writing. But every excursion ended in front of the refrigerator. Stuck to the front of the refrigerator with magnets Missy had made in first grade were the latest photographs of the cousins.

The photographs were terrifying.

Kitty leaned against the cool door of the fridge, her mind on a shopping bag with a ribbon still curly after all these years, sitting on a shelf in a rarely used closet in the dining room, hiding the terrifying evidence from a long-ago purchase in a scrapbook store. Kitty had been seduced by the beautiful paper, and
had decided to make a scrapbook of the life of her daughter. She and Matt had taken thousands of pictures of Missy. Kitty remembered or didn’t remember to pick them up once they were developed. The pictures lay around the house in their store envelopes, finding their way to a kitchen drawer needed for spatulas and slotted spoons. Missy was nine then, dangerously distant from babyhood, and Kitty was starting to forget when and where all those photographs had been taken.

Many photographs were from the Friday-night sleepovers. Tiny Missy and tall Claire played together with an intensity that made the adults laugh. Missy bore a comical resemblance to her cousin and imitated Claire in everything.

One Saturday morning, when Phil and Frannie came to get Claire, they stayed for lunch. The men played pool in the basement family room, while Kitty and Frannie took over the dining room. With Frannie as her cheerleader, Kitty felt that today was the day. By dinner, she would have a scrapbook. They sent the girls outside and faced a table strewn with years of photographs. Step one was to get them in chronological order.

An eerie problem surfaced.

Frannie and Kitty couldn’t always tell which photographs were of Missy and which were of Claire. At first it was funny. Missy was a lot smaller, and therefore wore Claire’s hand-me-downs. It was not surprising that there were pictures of Claire at age five in a beautiful blue Sunday dress, and Missy a year or two later in the same blue dress.

What was surprising was that their very own mothers could not tell which girl was which.

“This must be Missy because it’s our sofa,” Kitty would say.

“It could be Claire visiting,” Frannie would point out.

The photographs they could not label because they did not know whether the child was Missy or Claire became a stack.

It stopped being funny.

In life, the two mothers saw completely different children. Claire was not a bit like Missy. Claire was sober; Missy was bubbly. Missy smiled a lot and widely; Claire smiled less, and rather carefully. Claire had a large vocabulary and used it; Missy was apt to skip speech in favor of dance or tantrums. Missy was fearless, and threw herself off things and on things and into things. Claire waited.

But in photographs, no difference was visible.

The little girls in these pictures were not similar. They were identical. One of them just had a smaller footprint.

Kitty whispered the terrifying thought. “Did we adopt twins, Frannie?”

“Impossible!” Frannie’s arms were folded across her chest as if to protect herself from the mere thought. “Our Claire is older than your Missy.”

“We don’t know that, Frannie. We only know what Dr. Russo said. And he contradicted himself.”

“They’re not twins!”

Downstairs their husbands were laughing. On the front porch their daughters were giggling.

After a while, Kitty packed the photographs in shoeboxes. Frannie slid the scrapbook materials back into the handsome paper shopping bag and retied the curly bow. There was a useless
closet in the dining room. They put the paper bag on the top shelf and closed the door. But they could not close off their guesses.

Every now and then the four parents talked about it. They could go for months or even years without a discussion, and then the topic would blow up on the horizon like a storm, a hurricane requiring them to nail plywood over the windows.

Claire’s mother would say, “The girls come together like magnets. Is that proof they’re twins?”

Missy’s father would be irritated. “It’s because we bring them together every week. They’re used to each other. They’re not twins.”

Claire’s parents would say, “Experts want adoptive parents to tell the truth right from the beginning.”

Missy’s parents would erupt. “We don’t know the truth! And you’re not in our situation! You’re legal! Anyway, all four of us made the same promise. We promised never to tell.”

“It was a stupid promise,” Frannie would say. “We have to tell eventually. Especially you guys. It’s unbelievable that you’ve gotten away without proper papers for so long. What happens when you run up against a school official who won’t buy into your lies and postponements?”

The lies and postponements had been amazingly easy.

Way back when it was time for Missy to attend kindergarten, her parents had enrolled her with a promise to bring in identification. They were lucky. The woman in charge of such things was not competent, and forgot. Every now and then at parent conferences a teacher would say, “We don’t seem to have
all of Missy’s paperwork,” and Matt would say, “I’ll get on it,” and incredibly that would suffice. The school ran from kindergarten through fifth grade, giving them six years of grace. There was a sticky moment when the school demanded a social security number prior to Missy’s shift to middle school. Matt replied sharply that this demand was totally unwarranted and he did not intend to hand out such an important number for no reason. The school pressed. Matt demanded to know why they were making an already tough transition from sweet elementary school to the rigors of middle school even more painful for a sensitive child. The Vianellos had their rights, he explained, and privacy was crucial to them. If the school kept up with its invasive nonsense, they would take Missy out and homeschool her.

This was no empty threat. Matt and Kitty were former teachers. They could homeschool Missy if they had to. But Missy—all friendship all the time—would have been crushed by the isolation.

Schools hate homeschooling, so this was an effective tactic. Whenever a clerk phoned or e-mailed to ask again for the missing data, Matt would threaten to file an official complaint. Did the office want to be investigated for incompetence? The poor clerks were dealing with a thousand students. They didn’t have the time or energy to fight about one nice little girl saddled with combative parents.

And in middle school, Missy had had her own worries. Was she popular? Was she smart enough? Good enough? Pretty enough?

The answer was no. Missy was gawky in middle school. In body, speech and style, she did nothing but stumble. Then suddenly, in ninth grade, Missy became an independent young woman, at ease with herself, good at anything she felt like being good at. By sophomore year, she was elegant and accomplished.

Where had the years gone? her mother wondered now. It was already time to discuss college.

Maddeningly, Missy wanted to attend whatever college Claire chose, and therefore saw no reason to discuss anything. She explained that after Claire was accepted, Missy would know where
she
was going, too. “You cannot base your college choice on what is right for Claire!” Kitty yelled at her daughter.

“Of course I can,” said Missy, not being rude, just stating a fact.

This Friday, Kitty Vianello was eager for the weekend. She straightened up, eager for a nice snack, too. Then she saw that on the fridge door, along with reminders of dentist appointments, the endlessly updated grocery list, the photographs and the phone numbers, was the strange little paragraph her husband had torn out about black swans.

The black swan that could bring doom into her life beat its wings in Kitty Vianello’s heart.

Her sister felt that if the birth mothers had wanted Missy or Claire, they would have come by now. But Kitty knew that the ways of the heart were mysterious. Years might pass, but sorrow and regret could swell instead of vanishing. If the birth
mother contacted Missy now, Missy was too old to be taken away. But Missy might choose to leave the parents who had lied to her all these years.

*  *  *

Missy had been texting Claire on and off all day. Claire hadn’t answered. Missy kept remembering her cousin’s closing statement last night: “I won’t be your toy twin.”

She did not listen as the history teacher read aloud from an ancillary text. She felt as restless as bubbles in soda, little pieces of her surfacing and breaking through.

The person she cared about most on this earth had been the victim of her hoax. The two people she cared about maybe as much—maybe more; how did you quantify love for your own parents?—sat at their computers, not dreaming that Missy had toyed with their lives. Missy had not had the simple decency just to ask them for the truth. She had seen an opportunity and seized it with no more thought than a toddler seizing a cookie.

The largest thing in life—Who am I? Who are we? Who are you?—and Missy had made it a game.

There was no escape. The video blocked every exit.

And yet at the same time, Missy thought the video was perfect. Her parents, Claire’s parents and Claire herself also had no exit. They were locked in that video, and somebody had the answers and would have to tell.

Missy checked her phone again, but Claire still had not
replied, by text, voice or e-mail, which she checked last because it was the least likely. She opened the Facebook e-mail.

“We need to confirm that you know Genevieve in order for you to be friends on Facebook. Genevieve says,
We have to talk. Here’s my cell number. It’s a matter of life and death.
”

How peculiar. Not at all what a person wrote when she wanted to friend somebody. Missy read it again. Wait. It didn’t say “life and death.” It said “life and birth.”

This is about my birth. Somebody who knows my history saw the video! I bet Genevieve Candler is the doctor who delivered us. Or the nurse. Maybe the aide. I know, I know! It’s the social worker who split us up!

Wait.

It couldn’t be the doctor who had delivered the twins. It couldn’t be a nurse, an aide or a social worker. Even if they could separate in memory a particular set of newborns, they would never remember the names of those babies sixteen years later. And if Missy and Claire were adopted, they hadn’t had the names Vianello or Linnehan at birth anyway. A person who had been in that delivery room and then sixteen years later saw a weepy reunion between two cute girls would not connect the video to the birth of one scrawny and one healthy twin.

Except for one person. One person in that delivery room might make such a connection.

The mother
.

The real actual biological mother.

Missy was stricken. She had daydreamed about being identical twins as if the idea were a party favor, sparkly and silly and sweet. This message was more like a fire eating a house, suffocating a family.

Missy’s family.

Claire’s.

The birth mother wanted to be her friend
.

Missy’s phone sat in her lap like a hand grenade. If she touched it, their lives would explode.

*  *  *

Aiden said eagerly, “What did you find out, Claire? Have all the parents met each other now? Do you know who you really are?”

Thirty-six hours ago I knew, thought Claire. Now I know nothing.

Claire thought about church. She loved church and yet it bored her. The music predated her grandparents, never mind her parents. She generally read the pew Bible to keep herself going for the whole hour. God and Jesus were always telling people to do things “in my name.”

Names mattered. You had to know your name. Of course, all parents have to choose a name because no baby arrives with a tag, like a collectible doll. But if a baby is adopted, its name is more made-up than other kids’ names.

How are Missy and I going to get out of this? thought Claire.
What happens when our parents see that video? What names will they give us then? The names of our real parents?

I don’t want real parents! I want my parents. I want Missy to be a nasty mean interfering manipulating
cousin
.

In front of Aiden, she hid behind Missy’s story. “It was a hoax. I should have told you yesterday, Aiden. Missy had an assignment. I think we got carried away.”

“A classroom assignment?” said Aiden in disbelief. “To do a hoax?”

Claire nodded. Her neck was stiff. She was paralyzed from anxiety. “The hoax was supposed to involve science. I guess the science in our hoax is the psychology of fooling people.”

Aiden’s face fell. “You’re not her identical twin?”

“No. We’re cousins. There’s a strong family resemblance.”

Aiden lost interest and walked away. Claire could not figure out how to call him back. She had the oddest sensation that she could not call herself back either. The girl named Claire Linnehan was gone. In her place was a child of unknown origin, waiting to be identified.

*  *  *