Three Black Swans

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Missy, when she was nervous, always yanked out her ponytail. At the exact same moment both cousins pulled out their pink hair elastics, shook their heads in the same way to free up their hair and re-ponytailed.

  “Isn’t it time to do the Pledge of Allegiance, Rick?” asked Missy, yanking out her ponytail a second time, which meant she was really nervous.

  Claire locked her fingers to prevent herself from yanking out her ponytail a second time. I am not Missy’s mirror image, she reminded herself. This is a game. All I have to do is smile. Only Missy has to act.

  Rick studied them minutely and then shook himself like a spaniel coming out of water. “After the Pledge, I do my regular stuff, and then I cut to you, Missy. You’ll have about a minute. Margaret here will do a countdown, so you stop at the exact right second.” Rick checked his lavalier mike, straightened his shirt and sat behind the desk.

  There were no adults present. Either Missy had contrived to get rid of supervision, or Rick and his crew were so trusted that advisors didn’t feel the need to be here. They might change their minds now. Claire whispered to her cousin, “What happened to Annabel Griffin?”

  “I forgot about her.” Missy squeezed Claire’s hand. It gave Claire the oddest sensation that Missy was the older one. She was guided onto a stool, and a tiny mike was fastened to her sweater. She could not suppress a shudder.

  “And roll,” called out one of the crew.

  Rick smiled at the cameras. “Good morning, friends.”

  Claire could not smile. She could barely stay attached to the stool. A series of memories passed through her, like the flipping of old snapshots. Mom refusing to let her dress like Missy anymore (“Baby-girl outfits are fine for Missy, but you need something tailored, Claire; something mature.”). Mom insisting she could not wear her hair the same as Missy (“That looks sweet on Missy, but you need something more sophisticated.”) or participate in the same activities (“Don’t copy Missy. Don’t be a sheep in a flock. Strive to be different.”). She remembered herself laughing. “Mom, I’m not copying Missy. All girls my age have long hair. I’m just part of the crowd.”

  “Is that the best thing, dear?” her mom had asked.

  “Mom, it’s hair. It does not predict my future as a clone of society.”

  A clone, thought Claire.

  Hideous deep panic crawled into her heart.

  When Missy began to talk, Claire was startled. Announcements were over already?

  “Hi, everybody,” said Missy, beaming at the cameras. “I’m Missy Vianello. I’m a sophomore here. And I have the most wonderful, amazing, beautiful thing to share. My identical twin just surfaced. We just found each other! Can you believe it? I have a long-lost identical twin. And this,” said Missy, touching Claire’s shoulder, “this is my twin, Claire.”

  A sob formed in her throat. Claire choked it back. She pressed her lips together and then her jaw. It was like squeezing a tube of toothpaste. Tears spurted out the top. “We shouldn’t have done this,” she said to Missy. Her voice sounded like gravel. “I shouldn’t have agreed.”

  Missy ignored her. “Claire’s going to attend school with me today,” she said, perky as a cheerleader, “and this seemed like a good way to let everybody know who she is and why she’s here.”

  Claire felt as if her bones had cracked. She tried to find something to hold on to, but for once it couldn’t be Missy.

  Missy was a stranger. What does she know and didn’t tell me? thought Claire. We’ve always shared everything.

  And then she thought, Or have we?

  Claire could not control her tears.

  Missy was shaken. “I guess this wasn’t such a great idea after all. Rick, just cut our segment, okay?”

  Rick was pale. “This is live, Missy. We can’t cut anything. But we welcome you, Claire, and we’re thrilled for you both, and this has definitely introduced you to the entire high school. It’s seven-fifty-five, people. Have a nice day.”

  The passing bell rang immediately. It sounded more like an air-raid siren than the pleasant musical chord at Claire’s school. A camera kid handed her a box of cheap tissues. She mopped up her face.

  Claire’s mother liked to repeat everything three times. “I’m busy, busy, busy,” she would say. I’m okay, okay, okay, Claire told herself. I am not Missy’s twin. I know all the family stories. My parents tried for years to have a baby, and when I was born at last, I was strong and healthy and Mom was thrilled, thrilled, thrilled. Missy was premature and had to stay in the hospital for weeks and weeks. Uncle Matt and Aunt Kitty hovered over her teensy little crib night after night, full of fear and prayer. We are not twins.

  “That was something!” said Rick. “Thanks for letting me be part of it. I’m happy for both of you. I have to run. My first class is all the way on the other side of the school and up two floors.”

  “Thank you, Rick,” cried Missy, cheerful as a Christmas elf.

  Claire felt as drained as a tub.

  “Nice to have you here, Claire,” said one of the camera girls. “Good luck. See you later.” And then they were all gone, rushing to their first-period classes.

  Claire and Missy stood alone in the well-equipped studio. Missy shut the door. Claire pasted the tissue over her face.

  “We’ll wait until the hallways are clear,” said Missy, “and hope the principal doesn’t come racing down for some personal interviewing of her own. I think it went well. What did you think?”

  I’m thinking that was not a hoax, thought Claire. But it has to be a hoax. If it’s true, both of our parents lied all these years, along with all our relatives. If it’s true, even my birthday is a lie. Or Missy’s is.

  But these days, no one kept adoption a secret. If you adopted a baby, you bragged about it. “I chose you,” the parents said to their adopted child. “We chose our baby girl,” they proudly told other parents.

  Obviously your parents didn’t want you. If they had wanted you, they would have kept you. And here you are, like a lemon of a car, back from the garage.

  Who didn’t want me? thought Claire.

  “Somebody’s coming,” said Missy. “I don’t want to talk to any teachers.” She turned off the studio lights. In the pitch dark, the girls pressed themselves against the wall.

  The door swung open and hid them. If the person pushed hard, Claire’s foot or face would be smashed.

  Nobody stepped inside. The door closed.

  “Probably the principal,” murmured Missy. “Or the advisor. It’s dark in here, so they think we left. Hope they don’t lock us in. That would be crummy.”

  How casual Missy sounded. Maybe she really felt casual. Maybe it really was a hoax.

  Missy opened her cell phone. The girls stood in the dark, watching the tiny cool light of the screen, and its digital clock. Missy’s cell displayed a photo of the two of them. It was not recent. Claire was visibly older and taller.

  The vicious siren blatted the end of passing period.

  “I’ll walk you to the front door,” said Missy. “Then I have to last through two class periods, and then comes biology, and then I fess up.”

  How awful if I were adopted, thought Claire. I want to be the daughter of the people I’m the daughter of. I want Missy to be the daughter of Uncle Matt and Aunt Kitty. I want both of us to have the same parents we’ve always had, forever and ever.

  Missy opened the studio door and peeked out.

  If we are actually separated twins, thought Claire, Missy and I do have the same parents.

  We just don’t know who they are.

  EIGHT A.M.

  Still Thursday

  CLAIRE AND MISSY walked silently to the foyer. Sunlight poured over them and dust motes danced around them. Claire loved the sun. Sometimes she thought of sunshine as her second-best friend, after Missy. Not that Missy felt like a friend right now. But in the soft yellow heat, the doubts Missy had sown disappeared. Claire was able to smile at her cousin. “See you tomorrow night.”

&nb
sp; Missy did not return the smile. She seemed to be waiting for something. Did she want compliments from Claire? (“Hey, good hoax, Miss.”) In an oddly formal voice, Missy said, “Thanks for coming, Claire,” and walked away.

  Claire hurried to her father’s truck. The shallow steps were as hard to go down as they had been to go up. She was surprised to find huge clay pots of gold chrysanthemums lining the brick path. She had been so anxious coming in that she had not seen in color.

  The windshield of her father’s pickup had collected a layer of leaves. In the cab, her father dozed, head back, mouth open, newspaper draped over the steering wheel. He was perfect, except for getting up to a weight that was dangerous.

  This is my father, she told herself. I am not adopted.

  Claire opened the passenger door. Hot air from the closed cab enveloped her like a hug. “Hi, Daddy.” She yanked out her ponytail and let the thick black hair fall forward to hide any trace of tears.

  Her father woke up and rubbed his eyes. “You finish bailing out your cousin?” He yawned, swigged a little coffee and frowned at the cup. It had probably gotten cold. He started the engine and backed out of the parking space.

  “I finished,” she told him. “Everything’s good. Now I’m worried about how late I am. Drive fast, Dad. I don’t want to miss my second-period class. It’s Latin, and I did the entire translation perfectly and I want to get called on so I get a check-plus for the day.” Claire did not usually ramble, nor was Latin a class that usually led her to tell anecdotes, but she babbled on. “We’ve been doing comparatives, Daddy. Like in the Latin motto for the Olympics? Citius, altius, fortius. Faster, higher, stronger.”

  “I love that you’re taking Latin.” Her father drove with the one-handed ease of somebody who is behind the wheel all the time. “School was hard for me. I couldn’t wait to drop out. For years I was mad at my dad because he forced me to stay in school after I turned sixteen.”

  Claire’s grandfather Linnehan had died last year after a long illness. Her grandmother had stayed in Arizona, where she was content to play endless card games in her retirement center. At most, Claire had seen her grandparents annually. Now she thought, If I’m adopted, Nana isn’t Nana.

  Her father accelerated onto the turnpike ramp. “Truth is, I barely graduated. It’s so great to see my daughter be this terrific student who even enjoys Latin.” Merging with I-95 traffic took his attention. He could only partially turn toward Claire and she could only partially see his grin.

  No, she thought. It’s a partial grin. He’s faking as much as I am. He can’t know what Missy and I just did. What is he upset about?

  She lifted her hair out of the way and studied her father. There were lines in his face she hadn’t noticed before. Gray patches in his hair she hadn’t seen, and a sag to his shoulders. She had known her father could get heavier. But it had not occurred to her that he could get older.

  The drive was difficult. Claire could not allow silence because her father might remember to ask what Missy’s project had been about. It was surprisingly hard to engage him in discussion about his construction jobs; it was impossible to keep her mind off Missy’s hoax.

  The two families lived only twenty miles apart. Or so the parents claimed. Claire happened to know that the shortest route was actually twenty-two and six-tenths miles. In some parts of the country that was nothing. But in the suburbs of New York City it was major. There were few routes, and all had heavy traffic. During commuter time twenty miles could take an hour, a long time to sustain a conversation about Latin.

  The questions Rick could have asked if he had done a proper interview—the questions anybody would ask if they considered Missy’s presentation for a single minute—sprayed Claire’s mind like insecticide, killing normal thought.

  If she and Missy were identical twins—which was impossible, since she was older, but just pretend—then probably the biological mother was some poor teenager for whom having a baby had been the end of the world, not the beginning. Maybe she’d entrusted her twins to an adoption agency that by a wild coincidence had divided the twins between two adult sisters—Frannie Linnehan and Kitty Vianello.

  What beautiful symmetry, sisters adopting twins.

  But it did not add up. Couples who adopted told the whole world. They threw parties and held baby showers. They designed special birth announcements. They celebrated.

  If Missy and Claire were twins, the Linnehans and the Vianellos had kept it secret.

  What if there had been no teen mother? Both Claire’s mother and Missy’s mother had had trouble getting pregnant; years had passed without success. What if one of them had never gotten pregnant, while the other had given birth to two babies? What if Claire’s very own mother and father had had twins and had given one to the Vianellos, or the other way around?

  Claire tried to imagine her mother lying in the hospital bed, saying to the doctor, “Listen. I just want one. Call my sister. See if she’ll take the extra kid.”

  Nobody would do that. And Dad would have been standing there, wouldn’t he? Didn’t all fathers attend their child’s birth? Dad would have said, “What are you talking about, Frannie? Two beautiful girls? And you want just one? I don’t know what kind of postpartum depression that is, but get over it. I’ll buy a second crib and we’re all set.”

  It’s insane even to think about this, Claire told herself. I am two months older than Missy. We are not twins. There’s a strong family resemblance, that’s all.

  “We’re here,” said her father, smiling.

  She ripped out a sheet of notebook paper and her father wrote her a late excuse. They kissed good-bye and Claire hopped down from the truck. In the office, the administrative aide gave her a late pass. She did not dawdle.

  One good thing: Claire had definitely found out that she was susceptible to suggestion. Let somebody say to her, “You’re an identical twin,” and she was hypnotized and bought into it and became one.

  This did not bode well for adult life, when Claire needed to be skeptical and careful because the world was full of bad guys and loser guys and greedy guys. Some lowlife would lean over her, saying, “I’m perfect, and you want to spend your life with me,” and Claire would be hypnotized and agree, without even knowing the guy’s name.

  Claire wanted to share these thoughts with Missy, her response when anything happened in life and plenty of times when nothing did. But she was only steps from her classroom.

  She remembered that she had a crush on Aiden, and that Aiden also took Latin. Since she was late, all eyes would turn toward her. Aiden might look interested, and she might text him during class.

  She opened the classroom door. Sure enough, Aiden was smiling at her.

  In her mind’s eye, his clothing fell away.

  If Missy and I are identical twins, she thought, we not only had a teen mother, we had a teen father. Some Aiden out there had sex with that girl. They could have been younger than I am now! Fifteen. Or even fourteen. I suppose they could have been thirteen! They smiled at each other across a classroom and one thing led to another and the next thing you know, they’re having twins.

  In that case, I am nothing but an error. Missy and I were a burden and a mistake. Just a set to be divided.

  Claire could not look at Aiden. No matter how much the pretend teenage mother had enjoyed herself with her Aiden, the result wasn’t pretty. A pregnancy was not an overnight thing. For nine months that girl had had weight gain and ankle swelling, fatigue and complications. Urine tests and blood tests, ultrasounds and internal exams. No more cool clothing for that girl; she had to shop for ugly, shapeless maternity clothes. But not baby clothes—she wasn’t going to need those; she was giving her baby away. Then came the delivery, a postage-stamp word for a very scary event. Two scary events, if she’d had twins. Then this teenage girl had had to look at these two babies she’d created, shrug and go home. To what parents or relative or dorm room had she returned? To what welcome or anger? Then she’d have had to lo
se weight and try to feel like a kid again. Attend school again, but not as a kid. No matter how young she was, a mother was not a kid.

  Claire could not look at Aiden, or at any other boy. She was the first to flee when the bell rang. She took refuge in the nearest girls’ room. She wet a handful of paper towels, regretting that the school used rough gray recycled paper instead of nice soft white. She pressed the cold wetness against her feverish eyes.

  Lilianne followed her into the bathroom. Claire and Lilianne had been in classes together since nursery school, but Claire did not want her company now.

  “Claire?” said Lilianne softly. “Did you just find out?”

  Claire stared at Lilianne. The hoax had been at Missy’s school, which was in another state! How could Lilianne possibly know about the TV interview?

  “My father, too,” said Lilianne. “There just isn’t any work. They’re all just driving around in their trucks, pretending they have jobs, pretending they have income.”

  * * *

  Rick’s first-period class was advanced physics. It turned out that the physics teacher was himself a twin, although he was a fraternal twin and his twin was a girl. Mr. Shemtov had done a lot of reading over the years about twins, a fascinating subject, and especially about identical twins, who were even more fascinating. But most of all, he liked to read about identical twins who had been separated at birth.

  “To a scientist,” Mr. Shemtov told his class, “identical twins separated at birth are the ultimate biological test group. Studying that very small, very exceptional group allows the scientist to address huge questions. For example, what matters most in how a person turns out, genes or environment? Inherited traits or upbringing?”

  It turned out that there were enough sets of identical twins separated at birth to use them in genetic, medical, nature/nurture and psychological studies. Rick could not imagine having major medical centers and universities call to ask if you would participate in a study about intelligence or schizophrenia or body fat.