Chapter 84: Progressions

John sat me down in January and did the Dutch uncle routine. As much as I wanted to pretend I was an average suburban dad, I wasn’t, not anymore. I was a multimillionaire, and at the pace we were growing, I stood to become the richest man in Baltimore County in the next ten or fifteen years. I needed to start acting like it and start taking security seriously. What if the next crazy we ran up against wanted to kidnap Charlie or Marilyn? I tried to protest, but I couldn’t. Too much shit had happened. I had a sit-down with the head of the security company we had used.

Some of the problems were simple. While I wasn’t planning on living under lock and key, I could at least put in a fence around the place. The driveway was rearranged so that somebody would have to go a gate further away from the house, and then loop up to the house. The good news - since Maryland is relatively warm most of the year, the fencing contractor could put in a fence even in the winter. The bad news - Do you have any idea how much over 4,500 linear feet of fence cost? Even the cheap galvanized steel chain link fence wasn’t cheap; something more decorative and stronger would (and did) cost me an absolute fortune! I offered up my first-born male child, but the contractor laughed and turned the offer down. It wasn’t enough!

I also rebuilt the house. The house had a brick façade all the way around, but I had the windows ripped out and bullet proof glass installed, and the doors were replaced with all steel frames and steel cores. I also had a professional quality alarm system installed. Yes, somebody could still break in, but they were going to have to work at it.

I balked at having armed guards living with us. I did, however, buy a piece of property across the road from the driveway. If it came down to it, I could put in a discreet little guard shack over there. Likewise, we arranged to have Marilyn continue with a traveling escort. I wasn’t sure what we would do when Charlie and his sibling(s) went to school. I wasn’t worried about anybody coming after me.

We weren’t completely safe because that is simply impossible. We were certainly safe against an average burglar or kidnapper. To get into the place would require a pro and would take longer. Of course, if a pro got in, it made for a completely different set of circumstances. It was the best we could come up with - you buys your ticket and you takes your chances. Even the Secret Service can’t keep somebody perfectly safe. The best you can do is raise the cost to a level the bad guys aren’t willing to pay.

Within just a few weeks of our return home, Marilyn was showing a noticeable baby bump and any hope of wearing either outfit again would have to be delayed for a year or so. What I found curious was when she told me that her obstetrician wanted her to come back in a few weeks, at the end of February, for an ultrasound examination. I didn’t worry too much about it. Marilyn hadn’t had one for our second child before, in what was then 1982, but that was at a small clinic in upstate New York. Now it was 1984 and, relatively speaking, in the big city.

Marilyn was quite excited by it all and wanted me to come with her. “We can find out if it’s a boy or a girl! Which would you prefer? A boy or a girl?”

“Ten fingers and ten toes, honey. After that it doesn’t matter.” I just wanted another healthy child.

“You’re no fun! Which would you prefer?”

I smiled at her. “A boy, of course! Girls are yucky! I might get cooties from them!”

She blew me a raspberry. “I am going to tell your daughter that her father is an awful person!”

I snorted out a laugh. “Truth in advertising!”

Charlie didn’t care about this at all. He was about two-and-a-half, and even though Marilyn told him he was getting a baby brother or sister, it just didn’t register. To be fair, I am sure my mother told me at the same age that I was getting a sibling, and I didn’t remember it either. If I had known, I could have drowned him at birth and saved myself infinite aggravation!

And so, it came about that the last Friday in February, the 24^th, 1984, I found myself driving Marilyn to her doctor’s office in Cockeysville. I sat there in the waiting room with Marilyn surrounded by some very pregnant women, quite uncomfortable with it all. I remember at one point leaning over to my wife and asking if I should announce her husband wasn’t able to make it, so she had brought her boyfriend instead. Marilyn shook her finger at me and warned me in no uncertain terms to “Behave!”

Eventually it was Marilyn’s turn, and the nurse asked her to go back. Then she turned to me and asked, “Do you want to come, too?”

It’s one thing to head downtown when I’m in bed with a woman, it’s quite another when her legs are up in the stirrups! I swallowed hard and gurgled out, “Uh ... uh ... that’s okay. I’ll stay here.” She gave me a smirking smile and led Marilyn down the hallway. I felt like every woman in the waiting room was staring at me and finding me wanting.

Twenty minutes later, the nurse reappeared. “Mister Buckman? Could you come with me? The doctor would like to see you along with your wife.”

That jolted me out of my complacency! Doctors never want to see the relatives unless something really bad is happening! “What’s wrong? Is Marilyn all right? What happened?”

“Your wife is fine, Mister Buckman. Just come on back and the doctor will talk to you.”

That just meant that it was so awful it couldn’t be mentioned in public! I walked down the hallway as scared as I had ever been in my life. The nurse opened the door and motioned me forward. Inside my wife was up on the exam table, her legs stretched out and not in the stirrups, and covered with a sheet. She was looking at me with a smile. “What’s wrong?” I blurted out.

“Nothing’s wrong, Mister Buckman. Your wife is fine,” answered Doctor Harrington. She was a middle-aged woman with a strong face and a bright smile.

“Then what’s the problem?”

The doctor rolled her eyes, so this must be a common enough occurrence. Marilyn answered, “Well, I thought you might like to see the ultrasound!”

“Oh!” I breathed deeply. “I thought ... never mind. Yeah, okay, sure.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it,” she said peevishly.

“No, I’m fine. Sure, let’s do it.”

She looked only slightly mollified, and I moved closer and held her nearest hand while the doctor started her procedure. The ultrasound equipment was located on a rolling cart. She threw some switches, turning on a cathode ray tube monitor, and then she washed her hands and squirted some jelly on the end of a flat ended tube sort of thing, the transducer. The sheet was pulled away from Marilyn’s midsection, showing her oversized belly, and Doctor Harrington placed the flat end of the tube against Marilyn’s stomach.

Marilyn jumped at the contact. She blushed and said, “It’s chilly!”

Doctor Harrington laughed and said, “We keep it stored in the freezer, next to the stethoscopes. It will warm up in a moment.” She began moving the wand around and ghostly black and white images began flashing on the monitor. “Okay, here we go!”

For the life of me, I have no idea how anybody can read this stuff. The same goes for X-rays. It’s all black and white and weird shades of gray, and none of it looks like the pictures in the human biology books I’ve seen. Of course, I can’t see shit in a microscope either.

The doctor was still talking, half to herself and half to Marilyn. I wasn’t paying all that much attention, just standing there by Marilyn’s head and holding her hand. Then I started paying attention when she said, “Well, that’s interesting! Look at that!”

Huh? “Look at what?” I asked. I just stared at the screen, looking at blobs of gray and white.

“Your children.”

I stood there dumb for a couple of seconds, and then replied, “Excuse me?”

Marilyn was grinning madly by now. “Twins!”

Doctor Harrington smiled and, while holding the wand against Marilyn’s belly, traced a pair of blobs on the screen with the index finger of her free hand. “That’s one head and that’s the other.”

I stared in disbelief. “Oh my God!”

I almost missed Marilyn asking, “Boys or girls?”

“Girls!”

“Holy Christ!” I exclaimed. Now it was Marilyn holding my lifeless fingers. I just stared at the screen in horror!

“What’s wrong?” asked the doctor, looking at me with concern.

“Carl! What’s wrong?” demanded Marilyn.

I stared at them, first the doctor, and then at Marilyn. “Twin girls? You’re sure?”

The doctor smiled and nodded. “Well, we won’t know for sure until July, but I’d put it over ninety percent.”

“Twin girls?” Suddenly I felt lightheaded. The nurse grabbed a chair and pushed me into it. I took a deep breath and looked at my wife.

“Isn’t this exciting?” she said.

Exciting? This was a disaster! All I could think of was what Maggie had been like as a teenager and what having two of her at the same time would be like. Yes, I knew Charlie and Parker were nothing alike, and I knew these girls would be nothing like Maggie, but still! Maggie hadn’t been a bad kid, but it’s never a good thing when your daughter knows all the deputy sheriffs in the county by name!

“You know what twin baby girls grow up into, don’t you?” I asked.

Marilyn was smiling now. “Tell me, what?”

“Twin teenage girls! Marilyn, how could you do this to me! One at a time would be bad enough, but two!”

“You bastard!” The doctor and the nurse just laughed at me, and Marilyn sputtered indignantly. Then she brightened even more. “Just wait, the next time we’ll have triplets! One, two, three!”

I slapped my forehead and groaned. “That’s an arithmetic progression - one, two, three, four. What if it’s a geometric progression? One, two, four, eight ... oh, my God! Marilyn! We’re getting a divorce!” Marilyn just laughed at me now. The doctor snorted and rolled her eyes.

I just sat there shaking my head while the exam finished, and Marilyn got dressed. Marilyn was ecstatic about the idea of twin girls. I just shook my head in disbelief. At one point, she got so bubbly, I had to ask, “So, who’s the father? There’s never been twins in the Buckman family!”

“You bastard!” she laughed. “There have been a few in the Lefleurs.”

“Yeah? You guys have also been known to marry your cousins!”

She gave me another raspberry for that one. “These are all yours!” I was told. She wrapped me in a big hug. “This is so exciting!”

“Ancient Chinese curse - ’May you live in exciting times!’”

“You’re just a fuddy duddy!”

“Let’s go.” I loaded Marilyn back into my car and headed, not towards Tusker and Tessa’s to retrieve Charlie, but kept going, down to the Dodge dealership in Timonium.

“Where are we going?” asked my wife.

“You’ll see.” I pulled into the lot and parked in front of the showroom. “Out!” I ordered.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

I smiled at her. “Do you honestly think you can cram Charlie and a pair of twins into your midget-mobile? You need something a bit bigger.”

“I like my Toyota just fine,” she protested.

I nodded. She had liked her Toyota, but way back when, on the first trip through, after she drove her first Dodge Caravan, she fell in love with the whole minivan idea and kept buying them for the next thirty plus years, even after the kids were out of the house. “Just give it a shot. You need the room.”

We headed inside, where we were descended on by a pack of hungry wolves. Well, at least one hungry wolf. He took one look at Marilyn’s baby bump (which was really more than just a bump these days!) and gave a big smile. He was already spending his commission check!

To be fair about it, when Chrysler invented the minivan in the mid-Eighties it was a marketing breakthrough. It was a station wagon for baby boomers who wouldn’t be caught dead in their parents’ station wagon! Built on a car chassis, it was roomy and comfortable, handled nicely, wasn’t ludicrously expensive, and really fulfilled a need. Chrysler had only started selling them a few months ago, and nobody else had anything like them. For the next thirty years we probably drove every single type, and the Chrysler versions were generally above average. They invented them, and pretty much defined what they could do and be.

We talked Marilyn into a test drive, and as I suspected, she liked it. It handled like a car, not a typical van, and she liked that. Then I had the sales rep show us one of their fancier models with all the whistles and bells. By that point the guy was practically drooling. I started signing papers and the asshole damn near came in his pants.

From there we drove over to Tusker and Tessa’s, where Tessa was being terrorized by our son. Bucky was now almost six years old. He was off at school in the first grade! With two pregnant women in the room with me, I was suffering from estrogen overload. Tessa was as excited as Marilyn about our having twins. I wondered how happy she would be when we called on ‘Aunt Tessa’ and ‘Uncle Tusker’ for baby-sitting duties.

And, slowly, life began getting back to normal. I wasn’t sure how normal normal was going to be, what with twin girls coming into the picture, but my family’s disaster began receding from my thoughts. We were no longer in the papers, I could go somewhere with Marilyn or Charlie without worries about anybody pointing at me and whispering, I didn’t have to worry about reporters tracking me down. Mind you, the Buckman family was generally in the shitter. My parents were now divorced, Mom blamed me for everything, and Suzie hadn’t talked to me since the shooting. She had sent me a letter apologizing for causing all the trouble (by inviting me to her graduation, I guess) and stating that she was taking a job at the Mayo Clinic and asking that I not chase after her. Dad? Who knew! I had killed a son of his and he hadn’t talked to me other than through lawyers. What a miserable clusterfuck!

The Tusk’s second child was also a son, and he was born on Friday, April 20, 1984. I remember that day because I ended up watching over Bucky for a few hours. He was home from school because it was a teacher’s conference day, and right after lunch I got a call at the office from Tusker. Tessa was having contractions, none of their parents could be reached, Marilyn couldn’t be reached (out grocery shopping), and could I come over and watch Bucky until somebody else got there? I just laughed and agreed, and then left the office. From Hereford to their house was less than fifteen minutes.