Chapter Two Bailey #4
The swans were named Hissy and Prissy, and they were total assholes.
They flapped their wings aggressively whenever you went near them, they chased away smaller ducks and birds who encroached on their spot, and they would try and bite you if you so much as went to refill their water bowl.
Despite all that, Bailey had a real soft spot for them.
They were both female swans, pens, bought specially from a breeder for five hundred bucks a pop, and although the breeder had guaranteed the gender, Bailey’s mother had wanted to make sure they didn’t end up with tiny cygnets, so she hired a vet to come out and authenticate it with DNA testing, since cobs and pens were hard to tell apart and instances of sexing mistakes were rampant.
(Bailey always felt a pang when she heard the phrase “sexing mistakes” since she felt she had made some of her own.) Hissy and Prissy had pinioned wings, so they couldn’t fly away, and the whole thing made Bailey sort of sad.
In an age where everyone knew you were supposed to adopt a dog from the shelter rather than buy a purebred, the idea that her mother had sourced these cantankerous mute swans just to live sexless, decorative lives felt wildly out of touch.
For years Bailey had watched her father take care of them.
In the winter, when the pond froze over and there were no weeds or clumps of algae to eat, he moved the swans to the barn, where he covered the floor with hay, put on the small heaters, and brought them bowls of dry food.
When Bailey was around, she would tag along, sneaking them bits of her pancakes to share.
The pens spent four long months under the heaters until, finally, on the first warm day in spring, Bailey’s father would open the barn door and let them back out to their thawing pond.
This year Bailey had done it all the same.
When spring came and the ice on the pond turned to mud, Bailey opened the barn doors and Hissy and Prissy pushed past her as though they were breaking out of jail.
They waddled across the grass squawking happily, splashing down past the reeds and spinning in dizzy circles on the water.
They dipped their heads and yanked up weeds and declared their winter barn days over.
But then, one Sunday, they moved up onto the little island to lay their eggs and just stayed there.
Every morning while she drank her coffee Bailey had stomped down in her rubber boots to check on them.
Every afternoon before she left the house she’d step out on the back deck and look again.
It was weird, but they wouldn’t get back in the water.
They just sat there on the little island, and Bailey had realized, with a jolt of horror, what that meant.
The pens lay eggs, clutches of six or ten.
The eggs weren’t fertilized—the vet had proved they were both lady birds so there was no mating involved—and usually after a few days they felt something in the eggs that made them understand they weren’t going to hatch, and they moved on.
Once in a while, though, they seemed convinced there were chicks inside.
They would sit on the eggs waiting for them to hatch week after week.
When this happened, the only way to save them was to take away their eggs.
It was, hands down, the worst part of swan husbandry.
You could wait a couple of weeks to see if they figured it out on their own, but if you waited too long the pens would die, starving to death as they protected their hopeless eggs.
It made Bailey miserable to think about.
Even though Hissy and Prissy were assholes by nature, she felt she had developed a good relationship with them.
They knew she brought them food and they no longer raised their wings angrily or snorted as long as she kept her distance.
In the past her father had taken the eggs, wearing heavy gloves to protect himself from bites and scratches, but he wouldn’t be back in time.
When Vanny rattled up in his Subaru Outback and pulled a lacrosse helmet and gloves out of the trunk, Bailey felt like she was watching Indiana Jones arrive with his whip.
Together Bailey and Vanny performed the terrible task, wading out to the island, Bailey menacing the pens with a long broom, pushing them off the nest with the sharp bristles, Vanny darting in to snatch up the eggs as the swans flapped and screeched their furious cries.
It was awful and frightening, and when it was over Vanny came into the kitchen and collapsed on a chair, examining the long scratch on his arm, which was either from Hissy’s claw or a swipe of Bailey’s broom.
“Well, I’m traumatized,” Vanny said, pushing his long hair out of his eyes and balancing one socked foot across his knee.
Bailey always thought he looked like he was stretching himself out for a nap.
She made him a coffee in a go-cup, and when he left, she waved to him from the door feeling something she couldn’t quite name.
As he drove away, Bailey realized what it was.
She googled “implantation bleeding,” and everything went sideways.
The spot in her underwear. The pinch in the night.
It was an egg, fertilized, nestling into the lining of her uterus.