This is a 9380 word story that the author considers to be a sibling incest romance with first-time, vanilla, heterosexual content. It is a biography and completely true within the constraints of maintaining the anonymity of the characters. It doesn’t follow chronological order, but each of the 13 sections are placed in order by their titles.

Eastertime - Seven months ago...

Are all things in life fleeting, or do some things truly endure? Perhaps all of life is just part of the grand cycle of death, decay, rebirth, and growth to maturity. That state being followed by decline and death again. But this was a happy day. The flowers were all in bloom here in northern Ohio. I had just looked out the wall of big plate glass windows at the green grass in the triangular city park. The one across the greying concrete street that was bisected by a tan cobblestone diagonal path and lined by brown mulched beds with their brilliant white, red, blue, yellow, and violet flowers.

On the seventh floor, we were high enough up that I could look over downtown Sandusky. A historic city with its venerable commercial structures made of the local white limestone marbled with black, or red and yellow brick sitting between the modern silvery and green glass tower that I stood in and the blue-green waters of the bay. I felt giddy, I suppose my physical condition was making me philosophical. But my joy was quickly abated as I continued my journey. One moment I was contemplating the fact a new life that might be born tomorrow on Easter Sunday.

Then in the next moment, I was in a sterile white room devoid of any character, lying in a brown metal and beige plastic adjustable bed, covered by a light white sheet while wearing nothing but a cheap ill-fitting pale green hospital gown. After a noontime walk across the polished black and white linoleum laid in a checkerboard pattern in the hallway of the obstetrics department, I was saying goodbye to the very large and very soft-spoken male nurse in the crazy red and white tiger-striped scrubs.

I missed him even before he was gone. For, while his demeanor suggested that he had never been in a single physical altercation in his two-decades plus-a-couple-years on the planet, his imposing bronze presence may have deterred my father’s unconcealed rage. I wished that he hadn’t left me to walk another woman about to deliver. Right now I wanted to live among the beautifully tanned inhabitants of his native island, wherever that was. I desperately wanted to live in seclusion on any island really, although one with brilliant white sand, shimmering blue water, surrounded by huge, hungry, man-eating, grey sharks appealed to me the most on that day.

Dad’s rage was directed towards Andy, but we both knew that it was me, not Andy who was responsible for this mess. Well, the horrible mess unfolding at Miami Hospital ... That was entirely my doing. Dad was responsible for the really big mess that all of our lives had become. I was regretting the three telephone calls that I had made with good intentions. Telling our parents where we were and that their first grandchild was getting ready to make his debut.

Separately they had driven six hours from Waukegan Wisconsin to our refuge on the shores of Lake Erie. I must have been crazy. No, not crazy, I was delusional. I was guilty of deluding myself into believing that seven months would have caused a change in his behavior. But he who had set all the many marbles into motion felt absolutely no responsibility for where they wound up or the damage they caused getting there.

There was a khaki over brown uniformed hospital security staff member and a city police officer in a dark blue uniform talking to dad while a second rent-a-cop was talking to Andy. Eventually, the real policeman walked a few steps over to speak to me.

“Ma’am, I have to tell you that right now the hospital would like all of you to leave. But obviously, you can’t ... This whole drama is very disruptive to the medical staff who are just trying to do their jobs. If we can’t get some semblance of order, and I mean now, I’m going to have to remove your father and your boyfriend.”

“He is my husband,” I said.

“No, he isn’t,” dad shouted from the hallway, “their marriage license was revoked because he committed fraud and lied on the application. He’s nothing but a common criminal and a fugitive from justice to boot. You don’t have a choice officer, you have to arrest him.”

“Fuck you,” I shouted at John as I completely lost my composure. “You slimy worm of a hypocritical motherfucker, you cheated on mom with your best friend’s wife. Then the two of you lied to everyone for twenty years. The church elder who claims an adult as his son just so he can ruin his life. A festering piece-of-shit whose first parental act was to swear out a warrant for the arrest of the child he abandoned before birth...”

“Please ... Ma’am, what do you want me to do?” Asked the policeman.

“Shoot my father ... please...”

Of course, he didn’t. He merely escorted John out of the building and told him that he would be arrested for trespass if he returned. But at least he didn’t arrest Andy. That was a possibility that I hadn’t considered when I made my phone calls. The policeman told my father - our father, ughh - that he couldn’t act on a Wisconsin judge’s order. If John really wanted to be responsible for having his son and his daughter’s “husband, boyfriend, brother, whatever” arrested on the day and at the location that his grandchild was being born he would have to present the out-of-state order to an Ohio judge and have that judge issue an arrest warrant.

But before he did that he might want to get his earthly affairs in order. Because he had three women and a young man, all of whom he had grievously wronged, and who all wanted him dead.

Fifteen months ago...

The four horsemen of our metaphorical apocalypse had apparently gathered a day or so after Andy and I went missing, and then again a couple of days later when the brown paper cardboard tube with white plastic ends arrived in the mail at Charlie and Vivian’s house - we had considered that the lesser of two evils. They didn’t have to open it. The mailing label conveniently stated exactly what was inside. Then we reluctantly attended a couple of family meetings after we were found. We listened - politely at first - to their concerns, but had not found anything worthy to respond to in their monologues. This meeting was different, however, because we had something to say to them.

The lines had already been drawn and positions staked out. In historical terms, it was February 1861 in Washington DC’s Willard’s Hotel. Ultimately it was just as successful as that attempt to avert internecine bloodshed. In our last meeting. John, my soon to be ex-father, stated unequivocally that he fathered Andy nineteen years prior. For that reason we could not marry, and he was pushing for us to go to different colleges in different states as his solution. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Anne, my mother clearly did, because her position had changed 150 degrees from being totally in favor of our union to being mostly opposed, differing with her husband only on the need to keep us apart.

Aunt Vivian seemed to be in a daze, she never denied John’s claim, and she never defended or explained their actions. Her encompassing anger was directed exclusively at John and she seemed most concerned with “keeping a lid on everything.” Having known what she knew for all of these years, but never having said anything, she was the worst of all possible allies. Yet she was the only one whose “solution” I found palatable.

The harm she said - after several glasses of Riesling in the first meeting Andy and I had attended - was not in what had been done. That it was “God’s will,” something we had to accept. It was not required that we understand why. The harm was not in what Andy and I felt for one another. That was likewise, “God’s will.” The harm was what others could do to us if they learned what had happened. Therefore her solution was that we both go to college in Arizona or Indiana, together if that was our choice.

It was a rogues gallery and I wasn’t sure whom I hated the most. Probably my ex-Uncle Charlie, because although he was originally the least guilty party in the whole mess, his reaction was to distance himself from Andy. Roughly by the distance from Wisconsin to Australia, give or take. He rationalized that Andy was an adult, able to make his own decisions, and stated that while he wanted no part of the decision-making process, he would support whatever decision his ex-son made. His single redeeming quality was that he showed me that I could divorce my father just as he had divorced his son. In a moment though all four of them would make the decision to divorce Andy and me.

After a couple of minutes of listening to a rehash of their staked-out positions, I spoke up.

“It’s ‘show and tell’ time,” I said, removing a baggie from my purse, handing it to my mom. “Look at this.” I had a huge grin on my face.

She turned whiter than white and handed the baggie with the white plastic stick inside to Aunt Vivian who fell silent and handed it to Uncle Charlie who started snickering a little under his breath. He handed the baggie to my ex-father...

“The two pink lines...” he said.

“It means that I’m pregnant ... with--”

“My child,” Andy said as he hugged me, “and that the church won’t annul our marriage...”

John opened the baggie to take a closer look.

Aunt Vivian started to snicker, “that moisture on your fingers,” she said, “is pee.”

Sixteen months ago...

It’s never a good idea to tell teenagers who have been taught critical thinking and who have been used to having some degree of autonomy in their life that they will do exactly what they are told, exactly when they are told, and not question the reasons why. They will find a way. It is a part of nature, life always finds a way. I know this because that is exactly what we did, we found a way. The irony being I had been charting my cycle for a couple of months with exactly the opposite idea. I had intended to use it as a guide so that we could enjoy that summer - the one I saw as “our summer,” following our imminent wedding and leading up to our freshman year in college - like little brown and white lop-eared bunny rabbits without creating a litter.

But knowledge is a tool; tools have no morality or ethics. They merely exist and do the bidding of the moral actors who wield them. In my research, which was aimed at preventing pregnancy, I learned the location of the most effective five-day window. It was tough waiting for that window to open. Tougher to wait these few days than it had been waiting for a much longer time before. Because back then we both thought, known that it would definitely happen. We didn’t believe that anybody wanted to stop us. Only that they were interested in making sure that our decision was well-considered and well-timed. That we showed a good example to our younger siblings. Now we knew the truth.

Sometimes the simplest decisions in life are also the most difficult to make. This was both the easiest decision that I have ever made and the toughest one. I had found my soulmate, we were simply meant to be together. If he were in reality my half-brother ... And I could easily justify that “if” with the fact that after lying to us for 20 years Charlie was suddenly “coming clean” in order to prevent a marriage he didn’t desire to occur. If Andy were in fact my half-brother, all that really did was explain our amazing compatibility. I knew how we both felt. This “factoid” didn’t change my desire to marry him and have a life and children with him.

I prepared the very few things that I would need, ID, cash, and some clean underwear, placing them in a small green plastic bag from a department store. I left my pink leather purse, matching wallet - with its cash and credit cards but sans ID - and purple cased cell phone on the pale yellow sheets of my comforter after deleting my last call to Andy. I had waited to ask him until the morning the window opened because I had no doubt that I knew the truth. Just as I later refused all DNA testing because I knew the truth about that as well. I knew that he wanted it as much as I did, I knew that Andy would say yes. Although in truth I believe what he said was, “I’ll be there in five, meet me at the corner.” He was thirty-seconds early.

I can’t ever remember a time when the question “should we” was ever uttered between us. It was always “how should we,” or “when should we,” perhaps “where should we.” Well, the answer to that last one certainly didn’t turn out the way we planned it. Our three questions were answered that day as we drove to the imposing hundred-year-old red and grey stone Waukegan City-County Building in Andy’s car. We parked in the blue zone at a rusty grey parking meter, scrounged through the burgundy car for a piece of silver, and walked up the worn iron red granite steps into the dark oak-paneled main hallway.

Walking down the hallway which was lined with locked glass and oxidized copper cases displaying inane public-service announcements - like “don’t eat laundry detergent just because it’s pretty shades of blue” - and mundane mementos of truly trivial pursuits by local residents we found the County Registrar’s office. A room of ancient cream-colored metal, government-issued filing cabinets and desks topped by white Formica tops and warped green blotters. It was an oddly arranged and inefficient working place with real plaster over brick walls that were unattractively painted in off-white above an olive green belt rail with the same green below. An older man in a conservative brown suit directed us to a rotund woman in a bright yellow, orange, and red pattern dress who recorded property deeds and marriages, an interesting combination.

We filled out the application on an official three-part form of white, pink, and yellow, using black and not blue ink. Then we provided the clerk with a black and green portrait of Alexander Hamilton. This caused the senior bureaucrat in the Registrar’s Office to have an intern walk down to the Filing Office in the basement. There he pulled a couple of forms to ensure that the disinterested bureaucrats across the hall in the Motor Vehicle’s Office who issued our state IDs a few months ago had not erred. When the intern returned twenty minutes later we handed over another two pieces of cloth paper with embedded red and blue fiber. This time the portraits were of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

We waited ten more minutes while the three colored sheets were separated and segregated. Each color copy went into a dull powdery white oxidized metal basket with other like-colored forms. Then the pink form was removed and examined. The pale blue form the intern had carried downstairs was retrieved from a fourth basket, filled out in black ink by the clerk, and placed in a fifth basket. Then the pink copy we had filled out earlier was stapled to a curled cash register receipt - with nearly illegible pre-faded blue ink acknowledging receipt of thirty-five dollars - and a fuzzy two-tone grey xerox copy of an ancient typed mimeograph explaining how to change your “driver, or other state-issued, license(s).”

“Here you go Mister and Misses Walker,” the clerk said to us as she handed us the papers. “You will receive a rather nice frameable “Certificate of Marriage” in black calligraphy with an embossed gold seal on real parchment by mail within the week.”

“Could we come back here later and pick it up?” Andy asked. “We are leaving directly from here to go on our honeymoon.”

“I’m sorry, it gets printed in Madison and mailed from there,” the clerk replied. “Don’t worry, they put it in a tube so it will be okay.”

What a wonderfully blissful thought, to be worried that the certificate might arrive with an unsightly crease. Not that its arrival might end all life on this planet. Well, we had at least a three-day head start.

In the beginning...

I was two years old when we moved from the tiny white Cape-Cod with red shutters that I only remember from family photographs into the big yellow brick ranch-type house on the top of the hill that backed to the brand new concrete colored church. It was just up the street and around the corner from my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Vivian’s identical yellow brick ranch. They weren’t really my aunt and uncle, it was an honorific for my parent’s best friends. My father, John, worked for Uncle Charlie, he was the top salesman in the organization. Wille John and Charlie were busy making lots of money and growing a business. Aunt Vivian and my mother, Anne, kept busy planning things, organizing things, and generally enjoying one another’s company.

Uncle Charlie and Dad enjoyed spending time away from the office together too. They took fishing trips to Northern Wisconsin and Canada occasionally taking my best friend, my “cousin” Andy. Although he was a bit of a chauvinist, as was dad, Uncle Charlie gave me a dog when I was five and always included me in what he considered to be mixed gender family activities. It was a small town, with strong union affiliations. Charlie’s company was one of the biggest employers in town, and although we all went to school together children of management were not generally welcomed in activities by the children of the rank-and-file.

We were both the eldest children in our respective families. I was less than two months older than Andy, and I spent a lot of time playing with him, which was always encouraged by both of our families. When we were six Charlie and Vivian built a swimming pool in their backyard. It became the focal point of our next twelve summers. Our parents gave both of us younger siblings. By way of a belated introduction, I am Ba’ba - my little sister gave me that nickname when she was two and I kept it. We were good brothers and sisters to them, but there’s something special about having playmates one’s own age. My relationship with Andy has always been really special. We could talk about absolutely anything with one another.

One week after Easter, seven months ago...

It took a long time for me to calm down enough to allow John to see his grandson. I was really torn. I hated my ex-father for what he had done, but he actually wanted to see the baby. Andy’s ex-father didn’t want to see Andy let alone our baby, who “wasn’t his grandson.” Charlie had helped raise Andy into the incredible man he became. But Charlie washed his hands of us when he found out that Andy “wasn’t his.” Not that he washed his hands of Vivian who had actually wronged him an lied to him for twenty years. I hated Vivian for her lies, although I hated both Charlie and John far more. And Vivian didn’t want to split us up.

Andy went along with my harebrained scheme because he loved me. He didn’t feel anything for John, who by claiming him deprived him of his real father, the guy who taught him to catch a ball, shave, drive a car, and tie a Windsor knot. He was close to Aunt Vivian, which was another reason I gave the bitch a pass. I wanted our son to bond with his grandparents, and since John wanted to, Andy made it happen. He and Vivian sat out on the balcony and looked at the orange and yellow sailboats with their white sails on the blue-green bay, while John held his grandson inside.

“What I did was wrong,” John said in a whisper while holding the sleeping baby, “but what you two did was wrong as well.”

“Excuse me?” I said, also whispering.

“I wanted something that I wasn’t allowed to have and I took it,” he said in a barely audible voice. “It was wrong, and look at the damage it caused--”

“I don’t care what you did twenty years ago, back before I was born. Your first massive fuck-up was talking about it. Your second is comparing anything Andy and I did with what you did. It only serves to justify your--”

“You knew he was your brother when you--”

“I knew that a fucking liar told me so--”

“Liar? You both lied on your marriage application--”

“We didn’t lie, the clerk copied what was on our birth certificates--”

“You knowingly let someone else write down information that you knew to be false. Then you signed a statement saying that it was ‘true to the best of your knowledge,’ that’s a crime.”

“What complete bullshit,” I whispered, “you and Aunt Vivian put that false information on those forms. You explicitly said it was true. Then you implicitly said it was true every time you used those forms, for two decades. If anyone committed a crime you did.”

“No, honey, I did nothing illegal,” John whispered as he handed the sleeping baby to Anne. As pissed off as she was at John, she had sense enough to remain silent. “Charlie was the one who gave that document to the church, school, state, and the insurance companies, not me. Vivian didn’t cause that faulty document to be created. She was in a hospital bed when Charlie filled out the form with what turned out to be a material error. It was a case of miscommunication, Vivian didn’t ever tell Charlie that he wasn’t Andy’s father. He didn’t know and he isn’t responsible for what he didn’t know. But you two knew what you did was wrong...”

“You can twist it all you want,” I said. “Andy and I are married and Pastor Fils says our marriage is valid--”

“It can’t be, the county invalidated the license--”

“Doesn’t matter, Pastor Fils says that only Andy or I could seek an annulment, you can’t. With my having a child that Andy acknowledged at birth - something a real man would do - it won’t ever be.

“It’s incestuous...

“That’s your fault, not mine.

“I told you the truth before you got married and before you consummated your incestuous union.”

“You told us after ... After we fell in love ... After we had already told you that we were going to get married ... You told us we couldn’t get married after we had been dating with your blessing since the first time that you and mom let me go out on a real date. You asshole ... You had two fucking years to take me aside and tell me privately without it destroying everyone’s lives.”

“You wouldn’t have believed me.”

“So what, I don’t believe you now.”

“Yes you do, or you’d both get tested to disprove the allegation. The state has revoked your marriage license. You are too closely related to marry anywhere. The church will eventually annul the marriage as well.”

“No, Pastor Fils said we could get a dispensation if we had to, but that we don’t have to. The birth certificate you gave the church and said was accurate twenty years ago lists Charlie as Andy’s father.”

“The church will invalidate your marriage. Incest is a sin.”

“Oh, and adultery isn’t? Or bearing false witness? Those are two of the top ten.”

“They won’t fight for a civil union, you were only married at City Hall, not in a church.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said, “we registered it with Pastor Fils at the church the next day.”

“It’s still an illegal and incestuous union in the eyes of the state, you can go to jail--”

“Some places, but not here. All your dumb ass did is make it impossible for Andy and me to ever come back home. You committed the crimes but we got the punishment. If you had a soul that might bother you.”

‘But, honey, it’s immoral for you--”

I burst out with a quick laugh. But quickly stopped lest I wake the baby. Then in a whisper, I said, “you asshole, the church says we’re married. Are you so used to being the boss that you give God orders now?”

Sixteen months ago...

I was so confused. I sat in the small oak and whitewashed plaster office watching the colors projected on the wall by the stained glass window of Saint Wendelin and his dog as I waited to see Pastor Fils. He had been part of my support system growing up. A system that had recently fallen apart. I thought I knew what my life would be, it was what I had been groomed for eighteen years. I would marry Andy, we would get our bachelor degrees at U-W Madison and have successful lives living near our immediate family. When we had children in a few years, mom and Aunt Vivian would be a big part of their lives, and our children would have real cousins, the children of our younger siblings, to play with growing up. That had been our “plan-A,” and now it wasn’t going to happen.

Andy and I had followed all the rules. We had been the straight arrows who would not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who did. We did what had been asked and in turn were trusted, even by those who thought we were privileged - which we were - and disliked us for that reason. Mom and dad and Uncle Charlie and Aunt Vivian asked the most of us and trusted us accordingly. We agreed to be responsible and wait and they gave us the freedom to face temptation and resist it. We even rebelled within the rules that had been set for us. Already legal adults when we engaged in our first true act of rebellion, we drove to the City-County building and became husband and wife.

We had followed almost all of the rules at our church as well. We paid attention to the teachers in Sunday School, even if we hadn’t actually read the assigned passages. We mostly turned the other cheek and in general, were gracious to our classmates even when it was hard to be so. We broke no major rules, graduated, were confirmed, and welcomed into the adult body of the church. We discussed our marriage plans with Pastor Fils who was tremendously happy for us. Then we discussed a new, less than cannon, ultra apocalyptic verbal “Revelation of John,” which brought him to tears.

He tried to speak to John the far less than Divine, who ignored him retreating to his metaphorical Greek Island. Then he succeeded in speaking to Vivian who denied it. At first, Pastor Fils agreed to marry us in the church, justifying his decision on the file copy of Andy’s birth certificate provided at his baptism eighteen years prior and Vivian’s verbal denial of John’s claim. But then Pastor Fils heard the blaring sound of the seven trumpets of our apocalypse. He bowed to the four horsemen and begged off on marrying us in the church that we grew up in. We had reached an impasse in our last conversation.

“Vivian reversed herself and confirmed that John was Andy’s father.”

“Sperm-donor maybe, not father,” I said.

“Nevertheless--”

“She is a liar--”

“Please--”

“What she says cannot be trusted. She told you John is, after telling you he wasn’t, after supplying the church with a document saying that Charlie is. She lied multiple times, they all did the same tap-dance with Andy and me. When you knuckled under to them, you established that there is no objective truth in this realm, that Ceasar rules even in here.”

“They are your parents--”

“Maybe, or maybe just until tomorrow when they suddenly deny it.”

“We are all flawed human beings--”

“Is God fallible, Pastor?”

“What?”

“Does God make mistakes?”

“No, what--”

“God made me fall in love with my husband. The man I just married yesterday, the man I consummated that marriage with last night and again this morning. The man who will father and acknowledge our children. The man who spent eighteen years as a congregant here as did I. Half of the couple you wouldn’t perform a simple marriage ceremony for.”

There was a look of shame and sadness in his eyes when he took the copy of the civil marriage license that I offered him for his files.

Growing up...

Life can be really good when you’re living at the top of the pile. Our families went to the old German Brotherhood Church together. They were considered to be pillars of the community. At first, we attended specifically gender-separated Sunday school classes, where we learned what was expected of us, although they didn’t think to explain why and it didn’t occur to us to ask. Then after confirmation, we listened to the pastor’s message in mass and unquestioningly accepted it as if it had come directly from God. We had a lot of support and always managed to follow the rules whether we really wanted to or not.

As children, our parents always encouraged physical exercise. Being given free rein to run around and burn off energy when we were little and then later to remain active and play sports. We were each on various school sports teams and both attended the Summer Youth Sports Camps run by the County Parks Department. Discouraged from holding actual jobs because it could potentially interfere with our education - except for Andy who often performed actual tasks when he accompanied his father to the office - we worked together in the summers of our teenage years as junior and then senior counselors at the sports camp.

In school, we were recognized as being responsible by faculty, even if we weren’t generally liked, like the trustees on a prison work farm. We were often chosen to head up various extra-curricular activities that nobody else really wanted to do. This served to lessen everybody’s workload. Teachers avoided potential conflict with some of the more politically active parents and we didn’t challenge the popular kids in school. Neither mom nor Vivian worked outside of the house, they always paid attention to us. We weren’t unsupervised latchkey kids like many of our classmates, and we didn’t have a big circle of friends to impress by “being bad.”