One Bride for Five Brothers

I bite my lip, unbearably excited. The jelly is indeed freezing and I shudder and curl my toes.

The monitor flickers to life, all gray and snowy. Strange shapes float across the screen like ghosts, amorphous blobs. Dr. Francis squints at the screen while her right hand pushes the plastic device against my skin, shoving it this way and that, pointing it in different directions.

Suddenly there is a blob on the screen that almost looks like something I've seen before. Kind of a Casper the Friendly Ghost shape. It jiggles and wobbles, twitching this way and that.

“Oh my God,” I hear Stan sigh behind me, his voice thick with emotion.

“Just hang on a second here,” Dr. Francis mumbles. She taps on the keyboard, playing out little crosshairs and lines that look like measurements.

“Is something wrong?” Charlie blurts out, alarmed.

“No, nothing is wrong. I'm just trying to get a due date for you,” she informs us. “I have to measure the fetus to see how far along you are.”

“Oh, okay,” Tom sighs. “That makes sense.”

Dr. Francis nods, then glances over her shoulder, checking out each one of the guys. I almost see her thought process process on her face, and she realizes that each of them seem to be equally invested in this pregnancy. Her lips pop open in surprise, and then she closes them stubbornly as her professional look of non-judgment takes over again.

I see her shrug just a little bit when she turns around again. She resumes the measurements while smooshing me with the transponder from the outside.

“So I'm going to say… you’re about nine weeks long. Does that sound about right?”

I mentally calculate.

“Yes, that sounds about right,” I smile. That means I got pregnant more or less immediately. Lucky me.

“So that would give you a due date about thirty weeks out from now, give or take,” she continues.

“Thirty weeks,” I repeat, marveling.

“That's right. You look healthy and everything, so I'll give you some literature, and of course you want to start taking prenatal vitamins right away. But everything looks good here so far. Looks like you got a very healthy —”

She falls silent. Her fingers tap on the keyboard.

The room fills with a whooshing noise, a complicated percussion that starts in a slow beat, and becomes a very quick one, almost twice as fast.

As I listen, it seems to echo itself, doubling and duplicating, perhaps doubling in rate, but no… it's just an echo.

“Hold on,” she says quietly.

“Is that the heart beat?” Hank asks urgently. “Is everything okay?”

She taps and taps, while I feel my own heartbeat accelerating. I fight the urge to leap off the table and shake her by the shoulders.

“Dr. Francis?” I finally manage to say.

“You hear that?” she says.

We all listen closely. The rushing sound fills the room, a beautiful, fast beat.

Then she's pushes the transponder the other way and we hear it get even faster.

“Is the heartbeat speeding up? What is that?” I ask, feeling myself go frantic.

She turns around, smiling.

“Well, I guess I don't have to ask you if twins run in your family,” she remarks, nodding me

aningfully at Tim and Tom.