Nurse Hawthorne gasped and said, "Is this the first chance you've had to see your baby?!" She raised my bed up so that I was sitting upright, as Marilyn extricated Charlie from his contraption.
"Charles Robert Buckman, this is your father!" Marilyn held our son up to me. He was in blue baby clothes, and had a summer weight blanket around him, and she placed him in my hands.
If I had been expecting Charlie to look like Parker, it wasn't even close. Parker had taken after me and my mother; Charlie was more like Marilyn's family, the men's side, which tended to blond and stocky.
I sat my son in my lap and supported his back. He was about two months old now, and was able to hold himself upright, with some help. He didn't make much noise, but he was looking at me and making the funniest expressions on his face, and then he gave me a big grin. Marilyn was ecstatic! "He knows he's with his Daddy!"
"He's probably got gas!", I replied.
That set the nurse to laughing and she took her leave. Marilyn scolded me, but I just sniffed the air, and told her I thought I was closer to the truth. I held my right thumb up in front of him and he latched onto it. He was still too young to do much more than that, but he seemed pretty normal to me. Certainly I didn't see any signs of Williams Syndrome! You can tell in the facial structure long before any of the other symptoms show.
I counted aloud his fingers. "All ten! What about his toes?", I asked Marilyn.
"All ten there, too." answered my wife.
I grinned at my son. "All ten piggies? I'll check them later!" I glanced back at Marilyn. "What about, well, you know."
"What?"
"Well, can he count to 21?"
It took her a second, but then she rolled her eyes and groaned. "Men! You all think that's so important! Yes, he can count to 21!"
I turned back to Charlie. "I'll take Mommy's word for it. I'm not going to look. Daddy doesn't do diapers!"
"Daddy's a wimp!" Marilyn took him back and sniffed his diaper. "Here, you get to find out now." She handed him back to me and then dug a diaper from the diaper bag on the back of the stroller. She found a flat spot at the end of the bed and expertly changed him. She had been changing her brothers and sisters since she was big enough to pick up a baby. Before she was done, though, she held him up for me to see. "See? Twenty-one!"
"Looks like he can get to 22 and 23 as well.", I commented.
"Men!" After changing him, it was feeding time. Marilyn gave him back to me, and then dug out a blanket from the bag and draped it over her shoulder and her chest. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and took Charlie back, and slid him under the blanket. She was breast feeding him!
"Well, I guess that beats a bottle.", I said. We had discussed this during Lamaze classes.
"He's a little piglet is what he is!" Marilyn grimaced for a moment as he latched on fiercely. "Watch it buster!"
"Well, he's a Buckman, that's for sure!" Marilyn smiled at that. "God, you look so good. I have missed you so much!"
"I've missed you, too. You look terrible, though! You've lost a lot of weight."
I shrugged. "It's that delicious hospital food.", I told her. "It really cuts down on going back for seconds."
"It's more than that, and you know it."
I shrugged again. "I'm home now, and with you guys. I'll get back in shape. Hell of a diet plan, though, isn't it?"
Marilyn turned serious. "Carl, what happened to you? You were just supposed to go to Honduras for a few months and come home. Then you were reported lost and dead, and then you were under arrest, and then you were in the hospital. I don't understand! What happened to you?"
I sighed and told her. It took a good solid hour to explain things, since Marilyn didn't have the military background that Featherstone did. I glossed over the part with the prisoners, simply repeating my story that I released them and fired some shots in the air to hurry them along. (Yeah, hurry them along on their way to perdition. I was sure they would be there to greet me at some point in the future.)
She was simply speechless at the end of it. Charlie had drunk his fill and was snoozing in his stroller. I finished by saying, "And that's it. Now they have to operate on my leg and give me some rehab, and I'm out. I won't be Captain Buckman much longer, honey."
"After all that, they just throw you out? Like garbage? That's terrible! Can't you do something about it!?"
I was surprised by that, since Marilyn isn't the real gung-ho type. She wasn't real big on the Army to begin with. Maybe it was like when you are cleaning out a kid's closet and find the toy in the back they haven't played with in a year. You go to throw it away, and they toss a tantrum about it.
"It will be fine, Marilyn. We won't have to move to Oklahoma now, will we?", I said, putting a good face on it. It still galled me, but I could live with it. "Seriously, I might never walk without a limp again. I'll never have a command again."
"And that's important to you?", she asked.
And right then and there I knew it was. I didn't know what I was going to do in the future, but I knew I would have to be the boss. I looked out the window for a moment and then turned back. "Yeah, it is. It'd be like working in an ice cream store and never getting to lick the scoop. I'd go crazy. Don't worry about it, we'll be all right."
Marilyn gave me a very odd look as I said that. "Carl, we need to talk about that, too. I found your letter."
"Huh? What letter?"
She reached into her purse and pulled out a big manila envelope and my jaw dropped and my eyes opened wide. Oh, shit! That letter!
"You weren't supposed to read that, unless, well, you know!" The envelope had a label on it specifying, 'Open only in the event of my demise.', and had been in my dresser, under my briefs and underwear. I rubbed my hands over my face. Most soldiers have a letter like that, at least in the combat outfits. They either have one already made up, or write it just before they deploy, or sometimes they wait until the last minute and hand it to somebody back at the base before heading out on patrol or a jump. I had written mine back after we got married, and I updated it every few months after that.
"Dear Marilyn,
If you are reading this, then you'll know that I finally managed to make that jump without my chute on properly. Mom always said I'd come to no good, so I guess she was right all along.
You were the best thing I ever had in my life. You are better than I ever deserved. If I was to live a hundred lives, I would want you in each of them. I love you more than you can imagine. Please forgive me for not being good enough for you.
I am sorry I wasn't a better husband to you. You deserved a better man than me. Now, with you carrying our baby, I leave you alone with him (or her) and I wish I could have seen you with him. You will be a wonderful mother, and probably a much better father than I would have been. I am so sorry for that.
Someday you will meet somebody else, a man who will see in you all the wonderful things that I saw in you. He'll be a better man than I was, that's for sure. When it is time for you to move on, know that I want you to be happy. You deserve a good man.
As one last note, I want you to take the inner envelope to John Steiner, in Timonium, Maryland. His address is on the label. John has been my attorney for many years, and he wrote up my will, and will help you through all the probate and paperwork. Listen to him carefully. He's a very smart man, and a good friend.