The Meridians (2 page)

"Hello?" she said.

“
Hello, beautiful,” he answered.

“
Scott!”

Upon hearing his name, Chad shouted, "Is that Daddy?"

"He's on the phone," said Amy, and handed the boy the cell phone.

"Hi, Daddy," said Chad. "Where are you?"

"Right behind you, kid," answered Scott. Chad turned, and even at this distance Scott could see the grin that widened his son's features and made them even more beautiful, if that were possible. Chad waved the hand with the badge at Scott. "I see you, Daddy," he shouted, glee making his voice almost loud enough to be heard without use of the cell phone.

“
And I see you, bud,” answered Scott.

Ahead, he saw his son thrust the phone back to his mother, then grab her hand and start pulling at her. "Hide from Daddy, Mommy! Hide from Daddy!"

Scott heard his son's laugh, and it warmed him like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter's day. Once upon a time, Scott had a son, and his son's laugh was magic.

Amy had barely a second to say into the phone, "Looks like you're going to have to chase us, honey," before she hung up and ran with her son.

Scott put his own cell phone back into his pocket, almost scratching himself on the LAPD badge – a larger version of the one his son held – that hung from his belt. He laughed and gave chase, going slowly so as not to gain ground too quickly - wouldn't want to disappoint Chad - but catching up, bit by bit.

His family disappeared around a corner, and he followed the laughter, bright as sunlight in this moonless, starless city of the Angels where the city lights had long ago chased away the sky. Scott turned the corner as well, moving quickly onto an adjoining street, laughing like the worst kind of madman: the kind of man who has somehow managed to find a way to be truly happy.

Then the laughter died in his throat. Like most cops, Scott had a kind of sixth sense that often activated before his other five senses picked up on anything; a subconscious feeling that something was amiss.

He cast his gaze about, looking for his family. Visible only a second before, they were now nowhere to be seen.

Then he heard a short yelp. A child's cry.

He looked to the sound and saw...his wife's feet, kicking, flailing as she was dragged into a dark alleyway.

Chad was nowhere to be seen.

"Amy!" shouted Scott, and drew his gun at the same instant. He flicked the safety off, which was technically a violation of LAPD rules, but dammit this was his family and he was not going to wait until the last second to be ready to kill or be killed. The handsome prince didn't wait until the dragon shot its flame before drawing his sword. No, he went into the castle armed and ready to destroy anything that stood between him and happily ever after.

Scott ran to the alley.

All sound faded. All Scott could hear was his own tortured, panicked breathing; his own arrhythmic heartbeat.

Complete silence, save only the sound of blood pumping in his ears.

Amy's feet disappeared into the darkness of the alley.

Silence.

Then, at last, a pair of hard, fast sounds pierced the night: two gunshots.

Scott ran the rest of the way into the alley, but he knew what he would find there. That sixth sense was active as it had never been before, telling his cop self what he was going to find before he even got there.

Two bodies, intermingled and holding hands in death as they always had in life.

One hand holding a phone. One hand holding a plastic badge. Two bodies floating in pools of blood like once-bright boats in colorfully morbid seas dotting the countryside of the alleyway.

Once upon a time, Scott screamed. And riding the crest of that wave of sound, he felt sound return to the universe. He held the two bodies to his chest and cried. Because once upon a time, he had been happy. But now the fairy tale was over, and it would never end happily ever after. It would end, night after night in his dreams for the rest of his life, in bodies and blood and death. It would end in a lonely city where over four million people lived as strangers for the brief period of weeks or months or years or a lifetime.

It would end here, with the blood of his child and wife on his hands, and in the knowledge that not only would he never live happily ever after, but he would likely never be truly happy for another moment as long as he lived.

Once upon a time, the fairy tale ended, and Scott hated God for making him believe that it would go on forever.

***

3.
***

Lynette Randall's day started with her death, and ended with birth.

She awoke as she had every single night of her pregnancy, which was now in its thirtieth week: needing to pee and wanting to eat. Peeing came first, of course, if for no other reason than eating from an opened tub of ice cream while pee-bloated was a singularly unpleasant feeling.

So she flipped the covers off herself, careful to keep them on her side of the bed. Contrary to popular belief, the only guarantee in life was neither death nor taxes: it was that if she allowed any portion of her covers to stray over onto Robbie's side of the bed, he would instantly wrap them around himself like some kind of burlesque dancer's boa, making it impossible to remove from him without either waking him up and having him physically unwind himself, or simply yanking any available end of the blankets hard enough to spin him like a yo-yo, catapulting him out of bed and at the same time returning her portion of the blankets to her.

She had never, as yet, tried the yo-yo version of the solution, but there were nights when she was tempted to try.

Not tonight, though. Tonight she was extra-careful to get out of bed as slowly and quietly as possible. Robbie was a light sleeper at the best of times, and she often woke him as she went on her nightly pee-and-eat quest. Sometimes Robbie stayed awake far after she did, occasionally even going the rest of the night without a wink of sleep. But Lynette knew that he had a long day scheduled at work, and the last thing she wanted to do was send him off to his job cranky and operating at only partial capacity.

So, moving with the stealth and care of a ninja, she slipped out of the covers (careful to keep them on her side as much as possible), and then went to the bathroom. After finishing there, she crept through her and Robbie's room into the hall. She stopped there to glance into the baby's partially finished room. They had another two-plus months, so there was no crib, no mobile, no baby monitor. Just an empty room that Robbie had painted so recently that the smell of the paint still hung in the air and nauseated her if she subjected her sensitive pregnant nose to it for more than a few minutes.

Still, even though the bedroom was empty in reality, Lynette never saw it that way in her mind. She saw it as full. Not full of furniture or toys or even full of the presence of her coming child, but rather full of promise and hope. She saw the room as a sort of shrine to faith, to the knowledge-without-knowledge that a baby was coming, that it would be fine, that it would be happy and whole. Inside its walls she could imagine playing with her baby, holding its perfect fingers, tickling its perfect toes.

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.

"Lynny!" he shouted.

Lynette tried to speak back, tried to answer him and tell him that she couldn't breathe. But no words came. Instead, she suddenly felt her right hand grow numb. Her chest grew even tighter, though now the tightness was of a different sort than the respiratory failure that had been gripping her only a moment before.