Three Black Swans (7 page)

If I’m really their daughter, thought Missy, I have to face them with what I’ve done. But if I’m not their daughter, they have to face me.

In the end, Mrs. Conway did nothing to either student, because there wasn’t anything to do. Rick and Missy left the vice principal’s office and walked out of the building.

Almost never did seniors take a school bus. Rick was the rare exception. His parents did not spend their money on cars and car insurance. Rick’s father had a traveling hobby: he wanted to visit every football and major league baseball stadium in America and every NASCAR track, and also fish in a hundred remote but famous streams. Rick and his father were always
flying to some distant venue for some great clash of athletes or else for trout. Rick was an interesting guy.

As for Missy, she was the last bus pickup in the morning and the first drop-off in the afternoon, making her bus ride quick and easy. Yet another reason why her parents were not about to let Missy have her license. Why pay for cars and insurance when you had free transport at the front door?

The buses were long gone. Rick and Missy could hike home or call their parents. Missy was not ready for parents. “I guess I’m walking,” she said to Rick.

“I’ll walk with you.”

Missy set a fast pace.

“You can’t outwalk me,” said Rick. “You two are identical twins. I’ll buy you a Coke if you tell me the real story.”

“I have a refrigerator full of Cokes at home,” said Missy, although at the moment she could think of no one she’d like to share a Coke with more than Rick.

“I’ll give you more airtime.”

“Thanks. I had all I needed.”

“Missy, you owe me. I want to do a real interview. With you and Claire. How does the weekend look?”

The weekend did not look like the usual sleepover. Why wasn’t Claire glad? thought Missy.

At the next intersection Rick had to walk in a different direction. “Think about it, okay, Missy?”

She smiled at him. He was nice. This wasn’t his fault.

He smiled back. “Say hi to your sister.”

Missy had used the word “twin.” She had never used the word “sister.”
I have a sister
.

How dare they? she thought. How dare my parents separate us?

*  *  *

Claire’s last class on Thursday was math, which came easily to her, and her best friends and the adorable Aiden were in it.

The hoax had thrown her into a tailspin and now Lilianne had spilled the unemployment news. It had never occurred to Claire that her father had problems. What else had never occurred to her? Certainly not adoption.

Claire walked into math class with her eyes averted so she would not see all these boys who were capable of being fathers and giving their daughters up for adoption. She wrenched her mind off the choreography of sex.

This was the moment Aiden chose to rush over. “Hi, Claire!”

In middle school, Aiden had been a loser. A lot of boys fit into this category in seventh and eighth grade. But by junior year, Aiden was tall, lean and sophisticated.

Claire tried to look like a girl with no concerns, a girl who was fun. Immediately the word “fun” felt like a substitute for the word “sex,” which rushed toward the appalling concept of teen fathers who abandoned their daughters.

“Remember Ashley Moore?” said Aiden excitedly. “Remember she used to live next door to me? Remember she moved away?”

Ashley had been both a cheerleader and a member of the dance team, which hardly seemed fair. Claire loved to dance, and of course Jazzercise used dance steps, so Claire had grown up at the feet of a dancing woman. But even with all that exposure, she was not a fine dancer. She and every other girl in school had been envious of Ashley. Had Ashley come back to snag Aiden?

A huge grin spread across Aiden’s face. “Ashley sent me the video.”

Ashley was sending Aiden videos?

“Ashley says hello. She says congratulations.”

Claire was thinking of dance. Of Ashley. And then it came to her. She, Claire Linnehan, who loved Facebook and YouTube and all the other social networking sites, who could hardly wait for the next download, had thought of her sixty seconds at Missy’s high school as a contained and finite event. A little box of time now closed. Sealed. Done.

But nothing stays in a drawer in a studio in another state. Nothing filmed is ever over. Of course there was a video. Of course it was online.

Claire yanked her ponytail out. Set her books down on her desk. Repaired the ponytail.

“A girl Ashley roomed with last year in cheerleading camp forwarded it to her,” explained Aiden, “because she remembered Ashley used to attend this school.”

This
school? But the video had been filmed at Missy’s school. In another state. Claire said thickly, “I don’t think I mentioned my high school.”

“No, you didn’t. But it’s one of the tags the announcer Rick used. It’s so exciting about your new sister.”

Sister
.

Claire felt as if weight were actually falling off her. If she looked down, she would see pounds of flesh lying on the floor, like locks of hair after a cut.

“That TV interview was so tough on you,” said Aiden. “I don’t blame you for sobbing.”

Claire would have said that a tear or two might have leaked out of one eye. She had sobbed?

The math teacher began teaching. Aiden lowered his voice. “I think identical twins are fascinating. I mean, the whole concept. Being exactly, totally the same as another person.”

Claire remembered the math. The indisputable eight-week age gap between her and Missy. She clung to the fact of the age difference.

I am not exactly, totally the same as any other person. It is impossible for us to be sisters. Aiden succumbed to the power of suggestion because Missy and I have a strong family resemblance.

The teacher raised his voice. “We will put today’s exercises on the board to observe how each problem is solved. Claire, will you begin?”

Begin what? And why? Who cared?

Now that Claire thought about it, who was it that she and Missy were supposed to resemble? Claire didn’t look a bit like either of her parents and Missy didn’t look a bit like hers. The strong family resemblance was strictly between Claire and Missy.

Claire needed to talk to Missy. Needed it like oxygen.

She stomped on the thought. I do not
need
Missy. She is not oxygen to me. I am complete without her.

But was she? Saturdays, when they parted company for another week, when Missy disappeared from sight, Claire would feel as if one of her limbs had been amputated.

Roberta, who sat behind Claire, leaned forward to tap the first exercise on the homework sheet with her beautiful fingernail. Roberta’s nails were black today, and featured tiny silver fir trees. Claire managed to walk to the board and write out her work.

Thinking about identical twins gave her vertigo. If she tipped close enough to the concept, she and Missy might merge. There would not be two of them. There would be one of them.

“Perfect,” said the teacher. “Any questions, people?”

Claire made it back to her seat. “How long is the video?” she whispered to Aiden.

“Maybe a minute. When did you find out, Claire? How are your parents handling it?”

My parents are going to see that video! It isn’t just me on the receiving end of Missy’s hoax. It’s Mom and Dad. It’s my aunt and uncle. They’ll be crushed.

Roberta whispered, “You’re going to go bald yanking at your hair like that.”

Claire could handle a new identical twin more easily than going bald. She re-ponytailed and locked her fingers together.

Usually she would be texting Missy about now, but she had
turned her phone off, which was like having her mind off or her pulse off.

Tomorrow was Friday. Sleepover night. Missy used to call them Claire-overs. When things in Claire’s life went wrong, Missy’s presence would remove the sting every Friday night.

Now Missy was the sting.

*  *  *

Missy stood on the front steps of her house, unwilling to walk in the door.

Melissa, what were you thinking?
Mrs. Conway had demanded.

She had been thinking of an afternoon at the mall in August, only a few months ago. Both the Vianellos and the Linnehans had been considering new appliances. Was there anything more boring than reading refrigerator energy-use tags? Missy and Claire had abandoned their parents and sped to a clothing shop too expensive for their parents to consider. For a lovely half hour, the cousins tried stuff on.

The saleswoman could not figure out how one customer changed so fast into so many outfits. Missy was emerging from the dressing room when the clerk spotted Claire poking through the accessories. “Why, you’re identical twins! You’re adorable,” she cried.

Over the last few years, the girls had often been asked if they were twins. They would haul out the “family resemblance” line.
But this was different. This was a woman who did nothing all day but scan bodies.

Claire laughed. “We’re just cousins.”

The saleswoman snorted. “No way. You are identical.”

Claire ignored this. “I absolutely have to have these earrings,” she said, handing the clerk a shiny card from which pink and silver bead earrings dangled. The woman was already holding a card with the exact same earrings, which Missy had picked out earlier.

“See?” said the clerk to Missy.

Missy saw.

Claire didn’t.

Missy’s mother had been horrified when Missy related this anecdote, and had returned to the same old topic of tapering off the cousin activity. “It’s not healthy to rely so heavily on a cousin,” said Missy’s mother. “No more sleepovers.”

“Fridays are sacred,” protested Missy.

“Sundays are sacred. Fridays are habit. In just a few years, Claire’s going to college. And here you are, depending on her like a toddler with a blankie.”

That night Missy had researched identical twins.

Surprisingly, experts couldn’t always tell by sight whether twins were identical. Fraternal twins could look very much alike, and might be called identical twins until blood tests proved this incorrect. Parents who had identical twins might not see them as being exactly alike; they would magnify the slightest difference between their children. The difference
might be attitude or personality or a chipped tooth, but it loomed large for the parents. As for the twins themselves, it was not unusual for identical twins to think they only mildly resembled each other. They would insist they were fraternal twins.

There were ways to determine whether two children were identical: Comparing ponderal indices. Fingerprint ridge counts. Palm print characteristics. DNA profiles. But even in these, fraternal twins could be confusingly close.

The real test was blood. There were as many as eighteen possible blood tests, and their combined result had a .001 percent chance of error.

Missy not only had no way to check these, she had no need. Claire was eight weeks older. Twins had to be born on the same day. Well—maybe one could be born at 11:59 p.m. and the other one at 12:15 a.m. the next calendar day. But no mother gave birth to Baby A and eight weeks later delivered Baby B. Definitively, Missy and Claire were not twins.

Still and all, Missy could not let go of her twin research.

Girls dream of boyfriends and love, college and careers. They do not dream of being identical twins. If Missy had told anybody about her biologically impossible daydream, they’d probably want to deprogram her.

All through August and into September, Missy did not share her research even with Claire. She tried to match what she knew of her parents’ lives with what she learned.

Matt and Kitty taught elementary school and had always spent every vacation traveling. They’d been in each of the fifty
states, towing a tent-style camper behind them and staying at parks whose slots they reserved a year in advance.

The day came when they wanted kids and nothing happened. Years passed. No baby. Conception was chaotic for identical twins, but failure to conceive was just as chaotic for the sad, desperate parents. During those same years, Aunt Frannie and Uncle Phil had also had trouble getting pregnant.

Years ago Missy had overheard her aunt exchanging pregnancy stories with a friend. The friend was very emotional over the story of sisters who had managed to get pregnant within weeks of each other. “Oh, the power of sister relationships!” cried the friend. “All that hormone communication and empathy!”

Even then, Missy knew that sisterly empathy did not result in a baby. And yet, the friend was correct. After years of dashed hopes and failed attempts, two adult sisters did have babies at almost the same time.

“Almost” was not “exactly.” Twins had to be born at exactly the same time.

And then had come a moment in a dry cleaner’s and a few lines on a radio. As talk show topics went, it was predictable. Who didn’t wonder what it would be like to have or to be an identical twin?

“Sometimes,” said the voice on the radio, “parents do not realize that twins are identical because the babies faced environmental differences. The environment is the mother. There are two babies inside her, and sometimes one baby has less room and less nutrition. One is bigger and stronger at birth
and therefore looks radically different from its smaller, weaker twin. It does not occur to the mother or the doctor that her twins are identical. Intriguingly, when identical twins are different in size and weight at birth, the little one almost always catches up to the bigger one, and they will end up identical in weight, height and bone structure after all.”

When they were toddlers and throughout elementary school, little Missy had worn Claire’s hand-me-downs. But in that dress shop at the mall in August, Missy had shared a dressing room with a cousin who fit perfectly into the exact same clothing. Their bone structure, size and weight were identical.

What if I was the smaller, weaker twin? thought Missy. What if I finally caught up to my bigger, stronger twin? Then my birthday is a lie. What if our parents got away with that lie because I was so small? No one could look at the two babies who were Claire and Missy and see any similarity.