Disclaimer: Desperate Housewives isn't mine. Author's notes at end.
Story Summary: Three different times pregnancy tests were taken at the Scavo house.
Three Tests
A story by Ryeloza
i. September 1997
Lynette licked both sides of the spoon in her hand, prolonging but not consciously savoring the last bite of ice cream before she dropped the utensil into the empty bowl. Her attention was focused on the pink box in her other hand, and as she heard the toilet flush, she called out, "The box says it only takes three minutes."
"Great. That makes me feel so much better, Lynette. Really."
Only the slightest empathy for her sister's situation kept Lynette from parrying just as biting a comment back. She shifted uncomfortably, bumping her elbow into the door frame as she did, and privately thought that three more minutes on the floor might be just as much an eternity for her given how tender and achy her body had been since she'd gotten pregnant. She didn't doubt that Lydia wouldn't find this comparison apt. Still, she couldn't help but add, "At least we won't be late to lunch."
The door wrenched open and Lydia stepped into view, leaning back against the frame of the door and glaring down at Lynette. "Lunch? My life might be over and you're worried about lunch?"
"We're supposed to meet Lucy, remember?" she said, not feeding into Lydia's more melodramatic tendencies. "That's the only reason I mentioned it."
"Well I'm not going. Not if this test turns out the way I think it will." She glanced down at the stick in her hand and gave it a little shake, a failed attempt to speed up the process. Lynette repressed a small smile, amused by a situation she had handled with slightly more aplomb only two months ago. Of course, she was married. And employed. Maybe those two things balanced out the gut-wrenching fear she'd initially felt as she sat there waiting for her own test to reveal one or two lines. "Lydia," she said, a pinch of sympathy finally making its way to the surface, "you know that Lucy and I will be there no matter what happens. Or what you decide to do."
Lydia's face pinched up, a scowl warping her usually soft features. "I can't keep it. How could I keep it? I don't even have a place to live right now. I've been sleeping on Miriam's couch for over a month."
"I told you that you could crash here," Lynette reminded her, but the offer sounded even more obligatory now than it had when she'd initially suggested it. It was one thing to offer her sister a place to crash for awhile; it was another thing entirely to ask Tom to put up with potentially pregnant Lydia, especially as she was self-aware enough to realize that her own pregnancy was overwhelming both of them. She had a feeling, though Tom hadn't said anything, that he was secretly as terrified as she was. "Or I'm sure Lucy—"
"We're not telling Lucy about this."
"What? Why?"
"Because I don't know what I'm going to do. And Lucy has been trying to have a baby for almost two years now. Somehow I don't think she'll see this from my point of view."
"Right." Lynette glanced down at her bowl and purposefully set it aside, trying to keep her sister from seeing the flash of anxiety that shot through her like a bolt of lightning. For the first time in memory, though, Lydia seemed cognizant of someone other than herself. "What?" she asked. "What was that look?"
"Nothing."
"You think I should keep it too, don't you? Come on, Lynette. Say it. In thirty-one years, you've never been able to keep an opinion to yourself. No need to start now—"
"Lydia!" she snapped, effectively shutting her sister up with one piercing look. Lydia, unlike herself or Lucy, had always been a pushover. "You don't even know if you're pregnant yet, and you certainly don't have to decide anything right this minute."
"But you think—"
Lynette sighed and laid her head back against the wall to stare up at the ceiling. "I'm pregnant, Lydia. With twins. And that was why I wanted to have lunch with you and Lucy today. So I could tell you."
The pregnancy test slipped out of Lydia's fingers and clattered to the floor, startling Lynette; she looked from the abandoned test up to her sister's stunned face. "Seriously?"
"Yes. But I didn't—I wasn't thinking about Lucy. At all." She gave a small, self-deprecating smile. "Tom and I didn't exactly plan on this, you know. It just…happened. And that…It's going to feel like I'm rubbing it in her face."
"Shit." Lydia sank to the floor, crossing her legs underneath her and mimicking Lynette's own frustrated glance at the ceiling. "Are you…happy about this?"
"Happy and excited and scared and annoyed and pretty much any other emotion you could think of, yeah. It's a lot to deal with."
"Wow."
"Yeah. Wow."
Lydia tapped her fingers against her knee, lost in thought somewhere Lynette couldn't follow. It was conflicting—to watch Lydia, who knew her backward and forward and would understand things about her that no one else ever could, contemplate this news, and yet somehow seem farther from her than she ever had before. At one point her sisters had been her whole world, and for the first time, she realized just how little she now belonged to them now. She had new priorities, a new life, and she wondered how wholly it would swallow her.
Absentmindedly, she picked up Lydia's pregnancy test and glanced down at it. "Hey," she said gently, tapping the stick against Lydia's knee. "One line. You're not pregnant."
Her sister just nodded, an unrecognizable smile on her face.
ii. November 2001
Tom looked at himself in the mirror and forced himself to smile. It looked strained, tired, unnatural; it certainly didn't reach his eyes, the first place she'd look for reassurance. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and tried to relax, giving himself a moment to recall the first two times Lynette had told him she was pregnant. He could still feel that joy when he thought back on it; he could remember that light-as-air, dizzying, world-tipped-upside-down feeling; the one that had effortlessly brought a smile to his face.
Of course, back then they hadn't already had three kids to budget for, and the house had felt new and exciting and not like a monstrous mortgage payment every month. Back then, they hadn't thought about how expensive diapers were or how exhausting it would be to get up with the baby three times a night or how cutting down to one income really took a toll. Even when Lynette had told him about Parker, he'd dismissed any worry with the thought that three wouldn't be much different than two.
Right now four felt like a hell of a lot more than three.
It was just such bad timing, he thought; a justification for the fact that he'd once told Lynette that he thought four would be perfect. Maybe four would be still be perfect, but that was someday, not now. Not when he'd just been passed up for a promotion; not after the year they'd had. After all, they'd had to buy a new car, and their insurance hadn't covered quite as much of Parker's emergency appendectomy than they had thought it would, and yeah, maybe they hadn't needed a new dishwasher after the old one broke, but it had really seemed like a necessity at the time.
He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. This line of thinking wouldn't get him anywhere. The only truth right now was that Lynette was going to walk out of their bathroom in another minute and give him the news, and if their previous luck was anything to go by, he needed to be prepared. It wasn't logical; if she was pregnant, they were going to have to sit down and have a long, serious talk about their finances. He might need to find a more lucrative job, or she might need to go back to work, a solution that would create as many new problems as it would eliminate them. But he felt like he owed her that initial reaction. That one little moment where she'd bite her lip, eyes torn between fear and love, and he could smile and kiss her and remind her that it was okay to be happy about this.
After all, she was practical enough for both of them.
He smiled again, opening up his eyes and meeting a reflection that looked vaguely nauseated. This wasn't working. Not at ten o'clock at night after he'd worked a ten hour day, rushed home to see his kids off to bed, and then had to run to the store to get the pregnancy test when Lynette had belatedly realized she was over a week late. It might have been comical to an outsider, someone who watched him come down the stairs to find his wife staring at the calendar, frantically counting weeks and muttering, "That's can't be right." To him, it was the inevitable end to this lousy month.
Resigned to this pulsating negativity in a way he rarely felt, Tom stood and loosened the knot of his tie, tossing it onto the chair as he walked toward the bathroom. Lynette hadn't bothered to close the door, and he stepped into the room to find her sitting on the edge of the bathtub. She glanced up at him for a second and then gave a tiny nod toward the test in her hand. "Congratulations," she said blandly. "You knocked me up again."
There came that usual dizziness, though this time it was coupled by an unfortunate wave of nausea. Without bothering to try to smile, he sat down next to her and wrapped an arm around her back; she leaned into his shoulder, and he pressed a kiss to the top of her head. "I'll make an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow," she said. "Make sure. But…" She trailed off, but it didn't matter, he knew the end of the sentence.
He wanted to offer some comfort—point out that it could be a girl this time or that whatever strain or hardship this brought, they were still going to love this kid like crazy—but his heart wasn't in it. When he looked back, he was sure he'd regret this weakness, maybe even hate himself for it, but right now it felt like the only course of action.
"Look," she sighed, apparently unable to read his uncharacteristic silence. She stood up and threw the test into the trash. "I know that we need to talk about this, and we will, but right now all I really want to do is go to bed."
He looked up at her. She stood by the sink now, hovering with a slight uncertainty, questions and exhaustion in her eyes that he knew were mirrored perfectly in his. "Is that…" She let out a shaky breath. "…okay?"
"Yeah." He stood and came to her, leaning down to give her a brief kiss and then hugging her tightly. "Let's just live in denial for a little while."
When she laughed, he finally smiled.
iii. June 2038
"Paige?" Penny gave a quick tap on the bathroom door as she opened it, giving her sister just enough time to tell her to get out if she wanted to; when she didn't respond, Penny entered and shut the door behind her. Her sister lay in the bathtub, bare feet propped up on the tile above the tub, her hands over her stomach like she was resting comfortably. In her right hand was the pregnancy test Penny had brought her. "Are you okay?" asked Penny. She couldn't tell if her sister had gone catatonic or was in some ridiculous state of meditation. "What did the test say?"
"I don't know. I haven't been able to look at it yet."
"Do you want me to do it for you?"
Paige sighed loudly. "No. I'm just working up to it. Building my nerve."
With effort, Penny bit her tongue. Paige, while an unapologetic showoff and social butterfly, had a serenity to her that seemed to have escaped Penny and her brothers; she could only attribute this to the fact that she hadn't grown up in a house where she was constantly fighting to be heard over the chaos. It did little to make up for Penny's own impatience, however. "How late is your period?" she asked, purposefully forgetting that she had asked the same thing when Paige had called. "Are your breasts tender? Have you felt nauseated?"
"Please don't diagnose me, Dr. McKenna."
Penny rolled her eyes and leaned back against the sink with her arms crossed. "You're the one who called me, remember?"
"I called my sister."
"Who happens to be a doctor."
"And a mother." Paige turned her head and peaked over the rim of the tub. "There's a reason I didn't talk to Mom about this."
It seemed unnecessarily cruel to state the obvious—that their parents were going to flip if their twenty-year-old daughter was pregnant—especially as the clear anxiety in Paige's eyes belied her calm demeanor. The problem was, the only other thoughts that came to mind were either along the line of "Please tell me you used birth control" or a lecture on not quitting school that would rapidly spin out of control. And Paige was right; if she was pregnant, she'd be hearing the same things from their parents anyway.
This was the hard part about being fourteen years older. It had been hard when she was nineteen and Paige had begged her to play tea party when she was home from college, and it was hard now that she was married with two kids and Paige was still living in a dormitory most of the year. The truth was that being Paige's sister was never quite going to be the same as being a sister to her brothers was, no matter how much either of them wanted it to be different sometimes.
"All right," said Penny, bound and determined to find a compromise. She walked to the tub, nudging Paige's legs out of the way and climbing in so they faced one another. Paige settled her feet in Penny's lap, sitting up slightly to accommodate the welcome intrusion, and Penny held out her hand. "Give me the test. If you really are pregnant, I'll help you tell Mom and Dad."
"Really?"
"Yes. And then I'll help them hunt down whoever did this to you."
"Penny!"
"Oh come on, Paige. It's like ripping off a Band-Aid. Better to get it over with."
Reluctantly, Paige handed the stick over, wrapping one arm around her knees and biting her lip. Penny didn't hesitate, and with one glance at the single blue line, relief flooded through her. "Negative."
"Really?"
"Yes. You're not pregnant."
Paige gave a loud laugh of relief, lying back in the tub again and pushing her hair out of her eyes. "Thank God."
"You dodged a bullet," said Penny. She gave her sister's leg a light smack, drawing Paige's attention back. "Now do you want a talk on birth control from me or Mom?"
Paige covered her eyes and continued laughing.
A/n: I know—I have at least 5 WIPs that I have to finish, and I've been MIA for two weeks. I completely confess my guilt. And when I sat down tonight to write a new chapter of "Equivocacy," I was looking for some old notes and stumbled across this fic idea, which I had written down months ago and then forgot about. At that point, inspiration struck and, well, here we are.
But, yes, I do apologize for the fact that this isn't any of the fics I should be working on (especially the last chapter of "A Second Collection").
Side notes on the actual story:
One: The second section is meant to be a false positive about a year and a half before they actually got pregnant with Penny. In my pre-series world, I always envisioned Tom starting to travel more right before or around when Penny was born (thus tipping the scales of how overwhelmed Lynette was). So I thought it would be fun to envision a time that maybe Tom wasn't so excited about the idea of having a baby for his own reasons.
Two: I have vaguely planned futures for all of the Scavo kids (husbands/wives, kids, birthdays) so I can keep things straight in my post-series fics. Hopefully it was clear, but Paige was using Penny's married name when she called her Dr. McKenna.
Three: I have mentioned this Parker has an appendectomy idea in at least three fics now. Maybe someday I'll actually write it.
Four: As usual, I have made the age different between Penny and Paige greater than it is on the show.
Five: Writing grown up Paige and Penny is way too much fun.
Feedback is genuinely welcomed with open arms and a big smile. Thank you so much if you take the time!
-Ryeloza