I need you, she told her identical sisters. I need you to embrace my mother the way your mothers embraced me.
And then Genevieve Candler knew that she was a triplet. From Missy and Claire came tiny nods and starter smiles. We’re here, they said. We’re yours.
* * *
LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON
The Cross Bronx Expressway
ON THE DRIVE back, talk was ceaseless. Everybody had opinions and stories, recriminations and questions, excuses and hopes.
“I’m so proud of how nice you were to those Candlers, girls,” said Claire’s mother. “Considering the ghastly version you’re giving us of their lifestyle.”
“It was a one-time thing,” said Claire. “I don’t feel any need to be around Ned and Allegra again.”
Missy didn’t feel any need either. But how could Ned and Allegra be avoided, if she and Claire were to have Genevieve in their lives?
“But you were so polite, Clairedy,” her mother said. “Especially to the mom. I thought you liked them.”
“Who could like them?” asked Claire. “Genevieve wanted us to be nice. So we were nice.”
We’re all pretending, thought Missy, that nobody here is actually related to anybody there. We’re pretending that the sort-of parents of Genevieve are just walk-ons, and that we can walk away. We loved crossing that bridge and leaving Long Island behind. The water barrier is a fear barrier too.
“Genevieve needed us to forgive her parents,” said Claire, “but Missy and I ended up exactly right. It’s Genevieve who has to forgive. We did two thirds of it. That’ll make it easier.”
No, thought Missy. You and I did none of it. Genevieve still has all of it.
“What do you mean, you did two thirds of it?” asked Claire’s father.
“We’re triplets,” said Claire breezily. “Two forgave. One’s working on it.”
Missy marveled. Claire had decided to give the biological parents only a minute of her time, only a shrug. Would that work? Or would Missy and Claire have a thousand nightmares where they were trapped in the little dark hall with the mother and father who wished they had never come? Would Missy and Claire, every day of their lives, shiver inside the knowledge that they were just recyclables? Soda cans put out by the curb?
It was decided to stop at a favorite restaurant because everybody was starving. The grown-ups argued about traffic and the best route to the best food.
The mystery, thought Missy, was not the existence of identical triplets. The mystery was how Genevieve had learned about love. Perhaps love was inborn, and you didn’t acquire it from observing your parents. Perhaps love came along with heart and lungs; you just had it from birth.
It could take years to stumble through the moral fog that was Ned and Allegra. No matter how fast they drove, no matter how often they stopped for food, they could not drive away from those parents.
Or, thought Missy, I could do what Claire’s doing, and give Ned and Allegra an hour. Claire’s dismissing them, because they were our parents in the beginning, but they are not, in the end, our parents.
They reached the restaurant. They had just placed their orders when the third text of the hour arrived from Genevieve. “They’re at the nursing home,” Claire reported. “Genevieve sent a photograph.”
Missy stared at an incredibly ancient woman, smiling cheek to cheek with their sister. Big and Little Genevieve.
“I can see us in her face,” whispered Claire. “Same jaw. Same eyes.”
Same love, thought Missy, and the mystery of where Genevieve learned love was solved. From the gamble of her hoax, Missy had had a splendid haul: an identical twin, an identical triplet, and the great-grandmother who had made sure that somebody loved Genevieve enough.
* * *
Claire was wondering where Genevieve wanted to go to college. I could go there too, she thought. We could be roommates. We didn’t get the first sixteen years together, but we could have four at college. We’re both high school juniors. In two years, we could be sisters under the same roof.
Claire didn’t feel like discussing this in front of parents. She texted Missy. What about college? Roomies—me and G?
No fair! You two would have a year without me!
I’m texting G. I want to know what colleges she’s thinking of.
What do I have to do, graduate a year early?
“What are you girls doing?” asked Missy’s mother.
“We’re bickering by text message,” said Missy. Next to her, Claire wrote to Genevieve about college. Missy considered what she wanted to say in her own message to Genevieve.
Whatever she wrote now would commit her to another trip to Long Island and another sighting of the sort-of parents. But our next visit won’t be about parents, she thought. It will be about sisters. And love.
CAROLINE B. COONEY is the author of many books for young people, including They Never Came Back; If the Witness Lied; Diamonds in the Shadow; A Friend at Midnight; Hit the Road; Code Orange; The Girl Who Invented Romance; Family Reunion; Goddess of Yesterday (an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book); The Ransom of Mercy Carter; Tune In Anytime; Burning Up; The Face on the Milk Carton (an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice Book) and its companions, Whatever Happened to Janie? and The Voice on the Radio (each of them an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults), as well as What Janie Found; What Child Is This? (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults); Driver’s Ed (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a Booklist Editors’ Choice); Among Friends; Twenty Pageants Later; and the Time Travel Quartet: Both Sides of Time, Out of Time, Prisoner of Time, and For All Time, which are also available as The Time Travelers, Volumes I and II.
Caroline B. Cooney lives in South Carolina and New York.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Caroline B. Cooney
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cooney, Caroline B.
Three black swans / Caroline B. Cooney. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When sixteen-year-old Missy Vianello decides to try to convince her classmates that her cousin Claire is really her long-lost identical twin, she has no idea that the results of her prank will be so life-changing.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89568-5 [1. Triplets—Fiction.
2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Adoption—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C7834Th 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009041990
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.0
Caroline B. Cooney, Three Black Swans
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