The Meridians(4)

She could see herself as a mother, and it made her happy. Mostly because her own mother had been at best describable as lacking and probably more accurately describable as a monster. Lynette's mother had been drunk for nearly the entire time Lynette had been alive, and for much of the time before that event. Birthdays in the Hope family - for that had been her name before she married Robbie and became Lynette Randall, shedding the Hope surname like a chrysalid shedding its cocoon to emerge as a new and more beautiful being - were sordid affairs punctuated not by cake and presents but by drinking and physical and mental abuse. Lynette still walked with a slight limp from the time her mother had insisted on giving her "Birthday Spankings" that were so hard and so misplaced that one of them had broken young Lynette's femur in two places.

Nor were birthdays the only days when "accidents" could happen. Days that were too rainy, days that were too hot, days with too much humidity, or even just days where the sun rose and then set might be enough of an excuse to set Cindy Hope off on one of her almost convulsive tantrums that invariably resulted in attacks on Lynette, her only child and the only focus of her anger since Lynette's father had left the Hope home mere days before Lynette's birth.

Lynette's face furrowed at the memories, and she had to make a conscious effort to move her thoughts away from the horrors of the past and into the promises of the future.

In the master bedroom nearby, Robbie snorted and snuffled once in his sleep, then broke wind and rolled over. Lynette bit her lip to keep from laughing. Unlike many men she had met, Robbie was genteel, almost pretentiously polite when it came to the arena of bodily functions. He never "used the john," only "went to the restroom." He never "drained the lizard," only "relieved himself" - and then only when he was slightly tipsy from one to many drinks at a party. And he never, ever "farted" in front of her. Nor did he "break wind" or anything of the sort. At least, not consciously. She thought it was sort of adorable, how hard he worked at putting aside certain aspects of his maleness to make her more comfortable and more at ease.

But no quantity of good intentions could stop a person from farting in their sleep if that was what their body told them to do. Of course Robbie didn't believe it, any more than some men believed they snored. So Lynette had taped him one night, waiting for one of his "sleep toots" as she called them.

When she played the tape for him the next day, he staunchly refused to believe that any of the deep noises could possibly have come from him. The current view he was holding was that she had taped some National Geographic special about deadly gastrointestinal diseases and tried to pawn it off as him.

She let him win the argument. It didn't matter. What mattered wasn't what he did when he was asleep, it was what he did when he was awake. And when awake, there was no one more different from her mother than Robbie was. Where Cindy Hope had been a cruel, possibly even evil, harpy of a woman who went out of her way to let Lynette know at every moment that she was rotten and worthless and a waste of time, Robbie Randall was the epitome of gentleness and loving kindness. That was the main reason that Lynette was excited about her pregnancy, in fact: not just that she would have a baby, but that she would get to see Robbie be a father.

She smiled again, then took a step in the direction of the kitchen, thinking now about the ice cream that Robbie always kept stocked for what he called her "late night feedathons" - though always with a smile and a kiss to show he didn't mind, but indeed thought it rather charming and sweet that his dear wife could so easily succumb to stereotype in her pregnancy.

Not that Lynette had ever felt a need for something like tuna fish mixed in with her ice cream; nor did she eat the stuff by the quart. A small scoop of something no more exciting than cookie dough ice cream was usually enough to assuage her cravings and send her back to bed. But Robbie was definitely right in that it was a pregnancy craving: Lynette didn't much like ice cream. Or at any rate, she hadn't liked it until about six months ago, when Baskin Robbins suddenly found a place in her cell phone's speed dialer.

She walked into the kitchen, and bent over to open the freezer, which was one of the variations that was found at the bottom of the refrigerator unit, rather than the top. She felt dizzy when she did it, and immediately straightened up. She knew that if she was in the wrong position, the baby inside her could find itself resting on major blood vessels, leading to her dizziness. Usually adjusting her position was enough to stop the vertigo in a jiffy.

Not this time.

This time, straightening up just seemed to make things worse. She suddenly felt as though she couldn't breathe, felt as though she had a heavy piano sitting on her chest. She gasped. Or tried to, because surprisingly little air came into her lungs.

"Robbie," she wheezed, but knew at once that the sound had not proceeded past her own ears.

Her vision was fading now, drawing tighter and tighter in a black circle that blocked off her peripheral vision, and made it impossible for her to make out anything that wasn't directly in front of her.

Something's wrong, she thought, and knew instinctively that it had to do with the baby.

The baby's in danger!

The thought galvanized her, so that even though she was finding it harder and harder to breathe, she moved quickly to the nearby table. All thoughts of Robbie's long day and the need to let him have a full night's sleep fled from her in an instant as, with one sweep of her arm, she knocked two of the kitchen chairs over. They fell with a clatter that sounded thin and nearly silent to her ears, but that must have just been a trick played by whatever was wreaking havoc on her body, because Robbie came hustling into the kitchen in mere seconds, legs flapping beneath his boxers as he ran into the room.