Chapter 11

It's very interesting how you think you know what will happen in a given situation, only to find out your expectations turn out to be completely wrong.

Okay. Maybe not completely wrong. They were angry. Sure. And all those phrases about stupidity and throwing our lives away, that I expected to come out of their mouths did, in fact come out of their mouths.

But that's where things went differently than I expected. I suppose to be completely truthful, I didn't know what to expect, but I knew it would be bad, and I knew it would tear us apart.

But that's not what happened. Maybe that was because our parents, being actual adults, instead of teenagers trying to act like adults, got down to deciding what to actually do about the situation. They didn't dither, like we had, or delay, or try to pretend nothing was wrong. They didn't hope for some miracle to undo things. And they loved us like parents should love their children. This was the first lesson I got in how parents can be really disappointed in the choices their children make, but go on loving them anyway.

It was pretty hot and fiery for an hour. That part matched my expectations. But it only lasted an hour, and then came the part that blew us both away, because Mom hugged Addie and Dad hugged me, and we sat down to talk about how all this had happened.

It all came out, of course. I'm quite sure that if they'd have threatened us with the kinds of things we expected them to threaten us with, that we'd have clammed up and given them only name, rank and serial number. But that didn't happen, and the obvious love and concern they showed us disarmed us to the point that we wanted to explain how it had come to be. Or maybe it was that confession is good for the soul thing, just playing out further.

I think, in a sense, that it wasn't until we described to them what I've described to you in this story, that we realized how smoothly we'd been manipulated by Vlad into taking one little step after another down the path of moral turpitude. Not that we thought of it as moral turpitude, exactly, but we all knew everybody else in the world would call it that. And we knew better. Meaning we knew we shouldn't have done any of the things Vlad suggested, such as me helping Addie get dressed, and oiling her up and all that.

Speaking of which, on the level of something that seems pretty wacked out when it happens, but kind of funny later on, our parents demanded details. I don't mean I had to describe what color I thought Addie's nipples were, the first time I saw them, but details about what, exactly, Vlad had taken pictures of and what had happened inside that changing booth. Here's an example of what that sounded like.

"Well, he said the glue on the fingernails would take a while to dry, and that I should help her get into her first outfit for the night. So I did."

"Describe the process for us," said Dad.

"Oh, I had to unbutton her shirt and take her bra off and pull her jeans down ... you know."

"So she took her own panties off," prompted Mom.

"No, I had to take her panties off too. And then I put the bikini on her."

"What kind of bikini?"

So then I had to describe that, and how it was a thong and how I had to push the string in back between her butt cheeks, and tuck in the pubes that were sticking out.

And then Addie said, "Was that the time he made you put baby oil all over me?"

At which point we were off to the races, describing exactly where I put the oil, and whether Vlad told me where to put it or not, and whether he was there while I did that.

But the wacked out part was that they had to keep taking these breaks. Mom would say, "Your father and I need to discuss this," and they'd go off to their bedroom and stay there for ten minutes or so. Then they came back and asked for more. I'm not suggesting they got turned on by any of this, or that they went to the bedroom to relieve that kind of stress. Rather it might well have been that they listened to as much as they could stand, and then just needed a little break or something. I don't actually know. But they were always agitated when they left, and calm when they came back. It just seemed odd then, and kind of fascinatingly funny now.

About the only thing we planned that was right, was the need for an entire day to unpack all the baggage. It took us all day to go over what happened, and how we came to make the decisions we made, which led us to do the things we did.

In the end, our parents found out this wasn't just a one off little accident. They found out their children were passionately in love with each other. And I think the single most important part of all this is that they didn't just decide it was puppy love, or curiosity, and that we were not, in fact, really in love. They didn't suggest that teenagers can't possibly understand what love is, and think (erroneously) that what they feel is genuine. They didn't try to force us out of love.

Of course my parents were pretty smart people. And a smart person might take a look at marriages in the society around him or her, and see that fifty percent of the adults haven't figured out what love is, themselves. If they had, they wouldn't get divorced, or cheat on their spouse and all that. So ignorance of what love "really is", isn't restricted to the young. Nor is the actual thing restricted to adults.

A smart person might look at the sometimes fleeting romances teenagers become involved in, and see those as being very similar to what many adults do as well. It isn't that what the teen feels isn't real. Love is love, and being in love for someone who is seventeen is no different than being in love is for someone who is thirty-three. The difference is that the teen may be less willing to make the sacrifices needed to stay in love for the long haul. And if that teen never learns that one of the primary aspects of true love is the sacrifice it demands we make to our mate ... then they keep going through the motions of falling in and out of love, and become adults who get divorced. That's really what teens are doing ... isn't it? They fall in love ... and get divorced.

If they're lucky, along the way they figure out how to keep falling in love every day, as time changes the person they fell in love with. And if they're really lucky, their mate figures it out at the same time.

Sorry. I didn't mean to go off on a philosophical rant. It's just that when you're as lucky as I've been, you tend to be thankful a lot, and want others to share the wealth.

Anyway, I guess there was one other thing we expected that came true. Not once, that Saturday, or in the months that followed, did either of our parents suggest that a routine abortion might be one avenue to take.

There was significant discussion about what would happen to the baby once it was born. Addie made it quite clear that she wanted to keep the baby, and would be devastated if she could not. And I would have to say that the majority of the angst I had, after we came clean with our parents, was tied up in whether they would make her give it up for adoption or not.

I'm not trying to be dramatic about this. It really was up in the air for the next five months. Basically, what it came down to was that, because we had already exhibited a deficit of good sense and maturity (not physical maturity), the jury was out on whether or not we were capable of being good parents. By good parents, I mean the kind of parents a child deserves.

And that involves tons of sacrifice too. It is love, after all. Or should be. And that was the point. We were put on notice that they would be watching us to see if we were mature enough to take on the responsibility of raising a child. If, in their judgment, we were not, then the child would be offered for adoption to people who, presumably, would make better parents.

That sounds all neat and clear, but it wasn't. There were a number of variables in this system. One of those was that they didn't nag us to do the things we knew we were supposed to do. Some of those were little things, like the chores we'd always been expected to complete, and which they had always had to harp on us to get us to do. The harping stopped.

Then there was the discussion about the danger of problems with incest babies. How would we feel if the baby had a defect? Could we still love it? Would we be willing to take care of it? What if it was so defective that the doctors suggested abortion? What then? We did a ton of research online about that. Or tried to. Turns out there's not a lot out there that has been done under anything even close to the conditions good research is conducted under. There are a lot of anecdotal stories, and references to incest in distant history. Incest, it seems, has pretty much always been swept under the carpet or hidden, instead of being discussed with any effort to learn more about it. These days are no different. There are two camps, those who have assumed nothing good can ever come from incest, under any circumstances whatsoever, and those who feel the opposite. Black, and white.

But Addie and I were as gray as gray can be. We didn't intend to become involved in an incestuous relationship. We didn't intend to make a baby. I didn't force her into anything. Nor did she seduce me on any intentional basis. It just sort of happened. It wasn't black or white at all.

In the end it was Addie's doctor who told her not to worry until he gave her something to worry about. He didn't appear to be worried at all.

Being a doctor must be really interesting. Think about it. Their job is to help people. They labor under strict laws about confidentiality. They have to report some things, like gunshots and rapes. But what if they find out a girl got pregnant by her brother, and that there was no rape involved? What if she seems fine, psychologically? What if the family appears to be dealing with the situation in a healthy way? What if, by reporting this incestuous pregnancy you would be tearing the family apart? What if you've seen more than one pregnancy that you suspected was an incest baby, but had no proof of, and those babies turned out just fine?

Think how much of that you'd have to keep to yourself. You couldn't even tell your wife. Your priest, maybe, in confession, but then he can't tell anybody about it either, now can he? I think it would be almost like being a superhero with a secret identity.

Anyway, the doctor did an ultrasound, and said everything looked normal. The baby's heartbeat sounded normal. He said they'd do more ultrasounds and keep a close eye on things, and that all worrying about it would do was elevate certain hormones in her system that weren't good for either of them.

And, obviously, he didn't tell anybody who the father was, because nobody came knocking on our door.

The medical side of things was the easy part. It was school that was hell.

We should have expected it. In fact, that Saturday, Dad said something about how school might be harder than it was worth, and that he could home school Addie. Mom said no in that tone of voice that brooked no argument. At least not from Dad. Maybe she considered what was going to happen in school to be part of the test of whether we could make it as parents or not. She didn't say.

Addie didn't tell anybody, but of course she didn't have to. We only had three more months of school left, but when you're maybe three months pregnant ... and a cheerleader ... it's impossible to hide the baby bump, even if it's not a big one. And rumors got started, and people wanted to believe them, so pretty soon it was common knowledge that Addison Stapleton, the Ice Queen, the girl no guy could ever get more out of than a few kisses, had been spreading her luscious cheerleader legs for somebody.

Her friends deserted her as soon as she wouldn't tell them who the father was. Her coach adopted the attitude we thought our parents would but, thankfully, had not. It would set a bad example if she were allowed to stay on the squad, or return next year. Sorry.

What took me by surprise was that I wasn't immune. I was also besieged by people, both male and female, all of whom wanted to know who had done the deed with Addison. My stock answer of "How the fuck should I know?" wasn't received with grace. A lot of guys seemed to think that fantasizing about who had done it, and when, and in what setting, would somehow make me feel better. I didn't get in any fights, but I can honestly say the only reason was because I knew that wouldn't come down on the "mature" side of things with my parents.

It wasn't bad enough that kids in general (and a couple of specific teachers) treated Addison like she had leprosy. What hurt her the most was that even our cohorts in crime abandoned us. I'm talking, of course, about Jerry Thompson, Cindy Jenkins, and Kerry and Natalie Watson.

Why they abandoned us became clear when Cindy and Natalie pulled Addison aside in a stairwell one day and asked in a harsh whisper, "Did you tell your parents about Vlad?" She knew they weren't talking about the clothes she had modeled for Vlad. What she was curious about (to say the least) is how they knew she did anything but model clothes for Vlad.

That was how we learned that Cindy had recruited Addison because Vlad paid her extra to find her other models who "might be interested in making a lot of money." Cindy already knew about Kerry and Natalie, of course, because she and Jerry had worked with them, making Vlad's little fairy tale porn flicks. So it wasn't much of a leap of imagination for her to think that the reason Addison was such an ice queen was because her brother was taking care of her needs at home. It wasn't true, but it was what she was able to imagine.

Maybe it was a little prophetic, come to think of it.

Anyway, it had always been Vlad's intent to get us involved in fuck flicks. His whole modeling gig was a cover for finding and grooming underage performers, especially siblings, to get involved in what made him hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when things got kinky, such as when Cindy told him, "The reason Addison quit is probably that she's pregnant," he packed up and disappeared to somewhere else, where it was less likely he'd be the unhappy host of a police raid.

Want to hear something funny? When Addison asked Cindy why she thought we might want to do that kind of thing, and Cindy told her what I explained above, she added, "Plus I wanted to fuck your brother. I think he's a hunk."

That's what destroyed their friendship forever. Cindy never knew it, but Addison couldn't stand the thought of me being in bed with her.

If this is sounding a bit disjointed, I apologize. It's not intentional. It is a byproduct of the fact that our lives were a bit hectic during that time period. You know some of why it was hectic. We were busy coping, and trying to prove to our parents that we deserved to be parents ourselves. But there was something else that happened which caused even more upheaval in our lives.

Mr. Thompson (sorry, I don't know his first name), Jerry's father, listened to some religious radio channel, and I guess there was a commentator one day who said it was a parent's duty to be intimately acquainted with what was on their children's' computers. I gather that porn was mentioned. So Mr. Thompson felt it was his duty to go examine Jerry's computer.

Jerry, it seems, had snuck a flash drive into Vlad's studio and made a copy of the first movie in which he got to fuck not only Cindy Jenkins, but Natalie Watson as well. And, of course, Kerry fucked both girls too.

And Mr. Thompson found it.

We've thanked our lucky stars more than once that he didn't get anything of us, either in still shots or movies. We know this because the police never came to talk to us. That also gave us reason to thank our lucky stars that the other four never ratted us out. That didn't repair things between Addie and Cindy, but we were still very thankful.

It hit the news, of course. I don't think that was Mr. Thompson's intent when he went to the police with the whole computer, demanding that whoever "visited this abomination on my son" be found and prosecuted immediately, but of course something like that is impossible to keep quiet. It didn't help that the police decided they needed to search the rooms of all the "juvenile participants", and showed up with lights blazing, instead of in unmarked cars. But we're a small town fifteen miles from the metropolis the university is in, and we might not even have an unmarked car, for all I know. We certainly don't have high profile juicy sex scandals, which is also probably why it couldn't be kept quiet. Somebody told his wife, who told her friends, and on and on.

Anyway, when that story exploded in the paper, that's when we found out about one of the more difficult decisions our parents had been required to make. Believe it or not, neither Addie nor I thought about the fact that our parents never went after Vlad. Legally, I mean. Thinking back on it, I might not have been surprised to find out my father had murdered him and cleaned out the house and then drove the truck with all the evidence in it into a lake somewhere. I'm kidding. I think. I mean he'd have to have been gone a long time to do that, and I'm sure I'd have noticed that.

But the point is they were faced with making one of two decisions. Report Vlad to the cops, whereupon his studio would be searched, and all the pictures and films we'd made would be confiscated ... and viewed by who knows how many people. That decision would also mean that everyone would eventually learn how Addie had gotten pregnant, and by whom.

The other decision was just as hard to swallow: do nothing about Vlad.

What would you have done? You could seek justice and the protection of many more than just your own kids, but would run the risk of destroying your children. What if Social Services decided you were bad parents, and took your pregnant daughter away from you? What if there were some law that had been violated that meant your son had to go to prison until he was an adult?

Or, you could look at the facts at your disposal and decide that the kids who had gotten involved in this illicit scheme were stupid, but that nobody seemed to have been coerced into anything, or injured in any clearly visible way ... and do nothing about the man who had helped seduce them.

I suppose you could leave a cryptic message on his door, saying, "We know what you do here. You have until noon to get out of town, or we're coming for you."

The point is that none of those are good choices. But you have to make some choice.

So what do you do?

My parents decided to concentrate on salvaging what they could from their children's situation. They chose to concentrate on our mental and emotional health, instead of tilting at the windmills that society might demand they do.

Actually, I don't know about that cryptic note business. It wouldn't actually take much to do something like that. It could be done quickly, in the dark of night, and the risk of capture would be vanishingly small. But the thing is that I can't see my dad doing that. Knowing what kind of skill set he probably still has left over from the Army, and knowing how he must have felt towards Vlad for corrupting his little girl, I just can't see him stopping at putting a note on the door. Now my mother, on the other hand ... I have no problem envisioning my mother marching up to his door and putting something on it that would make him pull up stakes. She would have thought of that as protecting other kids. She's been in a lot of foreign countries, where you had the government, which you had to cooperate with to be there at all, and then had the local elders or whatever, who had their own rules about justice and such.

Anyway, when the shit hit the fan, our parents recognized the possibility that we might get dragged into the whole mess. After all, we had parked the bug behind his house dozens of times, and some neighbor must have seen it there. That would come out in interviews, and someone would try to track down the owner of the vehicle described. And then we'd be interviewed, and just that fact, whether we admitted anything or not, would bring the stain of shame upon us all. I guess they didn't see any good that could come from that, especially since the paper said the mysterious Russian man had disappeared without a trace...

So they sent us both to Montana for the summer, to work on our Aunt Maureen's horse ranch.

Aunt Maureen is my mother's older sister. And I mean older. Apparently mom was a bit of an accident, and was ten years younger than her big sister. Maureen went to "The Cow College" In Minnesota, to be a veterinarian, and then went to help run their grandfather's ranch in Montana. We'd been to the ranch before, when we were smaller, and we both loved Aunt Maureen, who was as different from our mother as it was possible to be.

Aunt Maureen was rough, and somewhat foul-mouthed, at least around the men who worked for her. Her face was already crisscrossed with fine lines that we would later learn were the result of spending so much time out in the weather. She rode a horse like she was born on one, and she wasn't afraid of anything. I still remember her stalking a mouse in her kitchen and stomping on it with her boot as it tried, frantically, to get away. Most women (and a lot of men) would have jumped back when that mouse dashed across the floor. Not Aunt Maureen. She killed it, saying, "Damned vermin!" She didn't have a husband to kill the mice for her. She was divorced.

What we did not know the last time we'd been to the ranch, back when we were ten and eleven, was that Aunt Maureen was divorced because she couldn't keep her hands off the hired hands. Our mother knew her sister had a prodigious sexual appetite, but we didn't. And, truthfully, that may be why we hadn't visited more often than we had.

But events were driving decisions now, so to the ranch we were sent.

The ranch had a name, which we hadn't paid much attention to before this. It was called the "Broken B" and the brand they put on the horses was in the shape of the letter B, but with the bottom part not quite attached to the upright. It sort of looked like while someone was making the shape out of iron, they got to the bottom part and got the bend mostly made, but didn't quite finish. Aunt Maureen explained to us that the way the ranch got its name was that her great grandfather, whose name was Bernard, almost went bankrupt trying to make a go of things when he established the concern.

Of course our parents decided to give Aunt Maureen some pertinent details. It wouldn't have been fair for her to find out on her own, and they knew it was impossible for someone living with us to miss the fact that Addison was well and truly knocked up, and that we were crazy for each other. Crazy in a much-more-than-brother/sister kind of way.