In the days after Daphna Cardinale delivered her second child, she experienced a rare sense of calm and wonder. The feeling was a relief after so much worrying: She and her husband, Alexander, had tried for three years to conceive before turning to in vitro fertilization, and Daphna, once pregnant, had frequent and painful early contractions. But now, miraculously, here was their baby, their perfect baby, May, with black hair plastered on her head. (May is a nickname that her parents requested to protect her privacy.)
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Because everything about May felt like an unexpected gift, Daphna was not surprised to find that she was an easy newborn: a good eater, a strong sleeper. The couple settled May into her lavender bedroom in their home in a suburb of Los Angeles. Daphna, on leave from her work as a therapist, was grateful for the bounty of two children, overjoyed that she could deliver to her older daughter, Olivia, then 5, the sister she had begged for since she could speak in full sentences.
Alexander, a singer and songwriter, wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their I.V.F. clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen. But friends and family members were also commenting to him on the striking difference in appearance — Alexander’s mother, for example, told him, out of Daphna’s earshot, that she would have guessed that at least one of May’s parents was Asian.
Alexander would convince himself that everything was fine, only to be walloped once again by the suspicion that May was not his genetic child. Daphna, who was accustomed to calming Alexander’s worries, quickly tired of his nervous jokes about the clinic. Looking back, she realized that her consciousness was working on two levels, that her mind was laboring not to see what was fairly obvious. She often sought reassurance from a baby photo of herself that her mother sent her, in which she closely resembled May. But occasionally, when Daphna looked in the mirror, she would see her own face and think it looked strange — as if there were something wrong with her.