Three Black Swans

by Caroline B. Cooney

  It was no surprise that she felt sick and listless. Her body was going downhill. Her ankles grew thick and her ivory complexion became patchy. Allegra loved a mirror. She looked at herself in full-length mirrors and wall mirrors, the mirror in her compact and the mirror that pulled out from the bathroom wall. She looked at her reflection in every store window she passed. The occupation was ruined. It was not until her zippers would not zip that she realized she was pregnant. When she thought of stretch marks, she wanted to scream. She would be disfigured, and for what? For something that cried and whined and got wet and stinky and stayed up all night and cost money.

  How were she and Ned supposed to keep up their lives? What would happen to the parties and dances and season tickets?

  And what if she didn’t even love this baby? Her love didn’t go as far as other people’s. It was finite. She loved Ned. There wasn’t leftover love waiting around for some baby.

  The weeks passed. Allegra couldn’t bring herself to go to a doctor. She hated doctors’ examinations anyway, and pregnancy meant more of them. Ned coaxed her to make a doctor’s appointment and he went along.

  Enough weeks had gone by that they could view this future baby on ultrasound. “We’ll be able to see the sex of the baby,” said the obstetrician happily.

  Once Allegra knew if it was a boy or a girl, it would be real. She would have to think about its room and its clothes and its bed and its stroller. She would have to think about diapers.

  “If it’s a girl,” Ned said, “we’ll name her for my grandmother. Genevieve. My grandmother will be thrilled.” (In front of the doctor, Ned did not add, “And she’ll give the baby lots of money.”)

  Allegra didn’t like the name Genevieve. But she didn’t actually care what name the baby had. I should read a book about depression, she thought. I’ve heard of postpartum depression, which I’m sure I will have. It stands to reason that there’s prepartum depression, which I definitely have.

  “Wow,” said the obstetrician. “Wow.”

  What could be “wow” about yet another baby for a guy who saw them every day? Reluctantly, Allegra looked at the blurry black-and-white image on the screen.

  The doctor was ready to high-five. “Congratulations. You’re going to have triplets.” With his finger, he traced the babies’ outlines.

  It was like a horror film. Three creatures were swimming around inside her!

  “Three little girls!” the doctor told them, laughing out loud, eyes fixed on the ultrasound, as if he actually loved the little swirly shapes.

  “We could delete two, couldn’t we?” asked Allegra. It was arithmetic: simple subtraction.

  The doctor’s face went blank. His shoulders lowered. “There is such a procedure.” His body language was clear. The doctor thought less of her.

  Ned said, “Let’s think about it, Legs.”

  They went home. Allegra made an error. She would pay for this error all her life. That night she left a message on her boss’s phone. I have to take a sick day. I’m pregnant and feel awful.

  Her boss telephoned in the morning. “We’re so excited for you! We’re already planning a shower! Is it a boy or a girl?”

  There was no way now to have zero babies. Allegra said, “Girl.”

  Allegra became more important than she had ever been in her life. She was more important in the neighborhood. People dropped by, offered help (“We’ll paint the baby’s room for you”) and insisted on new rules (“You can’t put the baby upstairs when you sleep downstairs; you’ll never hear the baby cry”). She was more important at work. She was more important to Ned’s grandmother. Genevieve Candler was indeed thrilled that they would name her first great-grandchild after her.

  And the others, Allegra had thought. What are we supposed to name the others? I don’t want the others!

  “How are you feeling?” people asked. “Has the baby started kicking yet?”

  There isn’t a baby, Allegra would think. There’s a stream of them. A series.

  She couldn’t drag herself to the doctor’s. Every decision, whether to have a baby or to have breakfast, was beyond her. She got nausea from pregnancy and nausea from imagining her future.

  Her colleagues gave her a baby shower. Allegra forced herself to coo and clap over teensy eensy garments. She did not use the terrifying words “triplet” or “multiples.”

  There would be a huge awkward stroller with three babies sticking out in a row. When the babies were old enough to walk, she’d have to put them in harnesses like sled dogs. Mealtimes would be assembly lines of whiny children and boring food. She and Ned did not prepare meals. They ate out. Children were worthless in restaurants. They never liked the food and wanted to leave before it had been served anyway.

  Allegra could not imagine the expense. The diapers alone would beggar them.

  The decision came about one evening when Ned admitted he didn’t want three babies either. He loved golf and parties and sailing. He wanted expensive things, like antique cars and great watches. Now he’d have to invest every cent in babies, who would be around for eighteen years plus college.

  “We have to keep one,” said Ned, “because everybody knows we’re having a baby. But let’s give the others up. Unmarried mothers do it all the time. We happen to be married, but what difference does that make? A woman has the right to choose. Let’s choose to be a mother once.”

  “That’s brilliant,” said Allegra. “Jillions of people are desperate for kids. And who has better genes than we do?”

  Allegra began her leave of absence early so nobody would see her become size-triple huge. She didn’t want anybody to know that two out of three babies were being given away. If only she had ended the pregnancy the instant she suspected! Any of her friends would have gone with her and been supportive. The same friends, however, would be appalled that Allegra was getting rid of her babies after they were born.

  Ned and Allegra lived on Long Island, where Ned had grown up. To carry out the plan, Allegra announced that her baby must be born in Connecticut, where she had grown up. They rented a tiny furnished apartment, where Allegra lived like a swollen plant, waiting for the births that nobody would witness. Nobody would know she was coming home with one third of the set. Ned commuted between both places and they were on their cell phones all the time, missing each other. Back then, a cell phone was the size of a brick, and hardly anybody else had one.

  Together, they went to the doctor in Connecticut whom Allegra had seen from her teens until her marriage. Yes, Dr. Russo had said. I know couples eager to adopt.

  Pick the best families, Allegra told him. I want the best for them.

  Dr. Russo stared at her. She knew what he was thinking: the best would be their biological parents.

  She and Ned held hands. So they were unpopular with Dr. Russo. Who cared about him? They’d be very popular with the adopting parents. Ned and Allegra would go back to Long Island and never see Dr. Russo again, and he could never talk about them or about their decision because of privacy laws.

  “The first baby,” said Allegra, “will be ours. The others go to whatever mothers you choose. I don’t want a trail back to us. I want total privacy. Privacy is my right. I don’t want social workers and people who interfere.”

  “Do you want to know anything about the family? Do you want an open adoption, where you continue to visit your babies?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want the girls adopted as twins?”

  “Separately,” Ned said. “Twins might want to know their background more. Twins would have twice the questions. Twins might find us. We don’t want a paper trail or an electronic trail. We take one baby, we’re out of there and you find places for the others.”

  Then came childbirth. Pain and fear, which doctors were supposed to prevent, were intense. The first one out was beautiful, which surprised Allegra until she remembered that she and Ned were beautiful. It was small and screaming. The staff wrapped it in a white blanket edged in pink and blue
stripes. A tiny white hat with a tiny pink and blue pom-pom covered its little head.

  The second one was impossibly small. It looked more like a fat red spider than a future human. Allegra would have thrown up if she hadn’t been so busy delivering the third baby, which took its time coming. Allegra never looked at it. She fell asleep. By the time she woke up, Ned had handled the situation.

  Twenty-four hours later, she and Ned left the hospital with the first one.

  Dr. Russo had lined up parents. Baby Three was healthy, and its parents took it immediately. Allegra and Ned lived through the interviews and the paperwork and the signing off. Baby Two, however, was very sick. Its adopting parents didn’t want it after all, because their sole criterion was a healthy baby.

  Back on Long Island, Baby Genevieve was not a good sleeper and not a good eater. There was nothing she didn’t cry about—grating sobs that pierced the night and lasted throughout the day. There were parades of visitors. Ned’s grandmother and his brother Alan and his sister Dorothy and their spouses of the moment came. Everybody oohed and aahed. Nobody said, “Oh, by the way, did you happen to have a litter? Was there a runt? Who took them?”

  Allegra let everybody hold baby Genevieve as long as they wanted. She begged Ned’s grandmother to pay for a nanny, but Grandmother Candler just laughed and said the best way for Allegra to become an experienced mother was to do the mothering herself.

  Dr. Russo telephoned from Connecticut. Would Allegra and Ned care to visit the sick baby in Intensive Care?

  Dealing with baby Genevieve was as intensive as Allegra could stand. No, she would not care to visit an even more intensively demanding baby. She wanted to go back to work.

  People in their set did not use day care; they shelled out for a nanny, which was expensive. Allegra and Ned would have to sell one of their cars, stop going to restaurants and wear last year’s fashions.

  Again they approached Ned’s grandmother. “Nonsense,” said the older Genevieve. “Like everybody else, you’ll juggle career and baby. You’ll sacrifice joyfully to do what’s best for your little girl.”

  Every now and then Dr. Russo called. Baby Two had survived after all and had been given to a different set of adoptive parents. In spite of all the paperwork and painful invasive interviews even when Allegra had specified that she didn’t want to do any of that, it seemed that Allegra and Ned had not surrendered their parental rights to baby number two. It turned out they had to do it for each child. Dr. Russo wanted Allegra and Ned to come to Connecticut. “You promised to handle it,” Allegra snapped.

  “And I have, Allegra. But you have to meet the social workers, there has to be a court judgment, it has to be legal.”

  “I won’t be judged!”

  “It isn’t like that. They won’t judge you. But a judge has to be involved.”

  Allegra stopped answering his calls.

  To their surprise, little Genevieve grew on them. The difficult infant became a beautiful toddler, laughing and eager and quick to learn. They began calling her Vivi, which suited her—she was full of life. It was fun to have a little girl who was good at things, and it was especially fun to shop for her clothes. Vivi was a whirlwind, racing through each day. Thankfully the nanny dealt with her Monday through Friday, and would often stay for the weekend.

  When she entered school, Vivi loved it. She loved study. She loved new fields of study. “Oh! Spelling!” little Vivi said excitedly in second grade. “Oh! History!” she cried in third. “Oh! Geology!” she exclaimed in fourth, wanting to be driven to view cliffs and rock formations along the Hudson River.

  Allegra signed Vivi up for flute lessons, because the flute was silvery and delicate and made pretty sounds, but the band director begged Vivi to play trombone, because he didn’t have any trombones, so Vivi played both and for years carried the awkward trombone around and practiced at annoying times. She became a fine swimmer, which wasn’t fun, because you couldn’t tell who was who at swim meets and the humidity at pools ruined Allegra’s hair.

  Vivi loved knowledge. By tenth grade, she was in High School Bowl instead of something with bragging rights like tennis. She visited her annoying great-grandmother constantly, and when the old girl ended up in a nursing home, Vivi trotted by after school, willingly spending time with other wizened old women as well. When her great-grandmother’s house was sold, Vivi kept the contents of her library, and was always reading books by dusty old authors that GeeGee had loved three-quarters of a century earlier.

  Allegra often had the disorienting thought that she was the one with the adopted child.

  It was about this time that the children she had not kept began to grow in Allegra’s mind, like weeds in a garden. When Allegra glanced at Vivi, she would see shadows of the others. Those others were growing up somewhere. They had personalities of some kind. They played a sport and were good in some subjects and not others. They were fun or grumpy, interesting or annoying. They were people.

  People Allegra did not want in her life.

  Now they had popped up on a YouTube video like spam. And Vivi had found out. Allegra had never wanted anybody to find out.

  How creepy that the multiples had been identical. You would not have guessed at their birth. Well, not that Allegra had looked at the third one. But that second one, the shriveled red one. It was difficult to fathom that the Claire or the Missy in this video had been that shriveled red one.

  What a relief when Ned grabbed the knife from her hands. Allegra hated the thought of being hurt, let alone hurting herself. Telling the truth would also hurt. What would Vivi swallow? I rehearse presentations for work, she thought, staring at her implacable daughter. Why didn’t I rehearse for this?

  “I was selfish, Vivi,” she confessed. “I was worried about my career. I knew that parents who yearned for a child would be better at it than I would be. And you were just right for us. You were so smart and fun and easy and pretty. I loved fixing your hair and buying you dresses and watching you learn.”

  Allegra could not tell what her daughter was thinking. Probably she was better off not knowing.

  “How did you come to that decision?” asked Genevieve.

  Easily, thought Allegra. But even she knew not to say it out loud.

  Discarded identical triplets would be a scandal. Boyd sent his video links to everybody he knew, so thanks to Boyd, Allegra’s life was ruined. She imagined taking early retirement. Moving to the Carolinas. There was a lot of golf there. Allegra and Ned loved golf. She’d never have to see what other people thought of her. She could just enjoy herself. This house was worth a bunch, even though it was tiny, because it was in a terrific neighborhood. Somebody would bulldoze it and build a mansion in its place.

  Allegra fantasized about a house with a golf course view and a better climate.

  * * *

  Ned’s heart sank when his daughter’s eyes fixed on him next. He said nervously, “We hadn’t planned on children, Vivi. We were spoiled brats. But when we got pregnant, we knew we could rise to the occasion. And your great-grandmother was thrilled when we named you for her. You just know her as an old lady with a walker, getting meals on a tray, but seventeen years ago, Vivi, she was a corker.” Ned began a funny story about the older Genevieve.

  “Save it,” said Genevieve. “Go back to the day my sisters and I were born.”

  Make it sound fun, Ned told himself. “I remember when they brought you to me,” he said fondly. Ned had not been in the delivery room. The whole thing made him ill. He waited in the family room on a vinyl couch. “You were so pretty, Vivi. Your dark eyes were open and you were squalling. You were swaddled in a soft tiny blanket and wearing a sweet tiny cap. We saved the cap.”

  He remembered the rush of emotion when he held his daughter for the first time. He knew that if he held the other two, he would feel the same rush. If Allegra wants them after all, he decided, I’m okay with it. But Allegra never mentioned the other two, so he didn’t either.

  “And the decision?�
�� asked his daughter. “To discard your other daughters?”

  “We didn’t discard them. We gave them to adoptive parents. Our family physician, whom we knew and trusted, found excellent families.” He wanted his daughter to love him. He certainly loved her. Okay, he wasn’t home much. Plenty of parents weren’t home that much. It had nothing to do with love. “Every day, every month, you were more delightful, Vivi. You taught us how wonderful it is to be a parent.”

  It wouldn’t end here. Vivi would demand more knowledge. She was a file folder for facts. But Dr. Russo was deceased. Nobody knew about all his phone calls over the years. Nobody knew about his ceaseless demand that Ned and Allegra return to Connecticut to surrender parental rights to the last baby or else bring her home.

  Ned had made an error in judgment back then. He had said to his wife, “Vivi’s an unbelievable amount of work and noise, but I’m kind of crazy about her. If I see the other baby … I don’t know if I can surrender it after all.”

  So Allegra had never agreed to a trip to Connecticut, because she knew Ned would cave.

  Ned glanced back at the computer. His brother Alan was on Boyd’s e-mail list. Alan was probably staring at this video right now. He was probably laughing. Phoning their sister Dorothy. They couldn’t forward the video to the older Genevieve, because their grandmother did not use a computer, but they would make sure the old lady saw it.

  “What did you mean by haunted?” asked Vivi, facing Allegra.

  Ned hoped Allegra wouldn’t cry again, because Vivi would not feel sorry for her.

  “I didn’t hold them, you know,” said Allegra. “I didn’t want to bond. I think any parent who gives up a child is haunted. Hoping it’s okay.”

  Ned did not think Vivi would fall for this. A woman who hoped her children were okay would not have grabbed a knife from the drawer and pretended to end it all.

  He thought of Boyd’s e-mail. Boyd sent his stupid attachments to everybody. Neighbors would know. Golf partners. Tennis partners. Cruise companions.