A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now available!

February 18th 2021

Chapter 49
Our Family With Sisters

When the 'agreement' of the yearly sleepovers among them sisters had been made, between Maya, Cara, and Eliza in the beginning, it had always been this idea that they would keep doing it, year after year. It wouldn't matter how old they all got; they would just keep going. Was there a part of her, of all of them, who thought they would give it up eventually? Sure, maybe a little, though they'd wish the opposite, always. If they could keep going, they would do that, one hundred percent. Now here they were, a handful of years later, and they had not missed a beat. Distance didn't matter, weddings and babies didn't stop it, no. Sleepster thrived, it grew… every time. Today, while Lucas and the other boys were at Sam and Dora's place, here she was.

Along for the ride were her sisters, by blood or marriage. Cara, Eliza, Emma, Maisie, Nellie, Gracie, Haley… Here were cousins, hers or Lucas', accepted into this definition. Ginny, Sadie, Maggie, Dora. And there was Cecilia, who had sort of… come so close to being a sister that there was just no tearing that bond, even more than a year after her break with Sam, when both of them had moved on, him with Dora and her with Tony Janacek. There was also Desi Russell, so dear a friend to the Hunter twins as to be bestowed the title of sister. And there was Riley, Maya's first friend, first sister, naturally. And now… Marianne… her dear pumpkin… This was all new for her now, as so many things were. Who knew what the next sleepover would look like, who would be part of the lineup?

Sixteen of them… Women, girls… All they had wanted in the beginning was to spend time together, as family, and now it was so much more, more… and better. These nights, as simple as they could seem, were community between them, a space for them to exist in their own world, away from anything else.

Still, she had to pierce that bubble tonight, just briefly, not enough for the whole thing to come crashing down but enough for her to deal with two of her sisters.

"Can you get them set up?" she went and deposited Marianne in Cara's arms, where she was received with smiles even as her sister looked at her, grown curious. "I need to talk to the twins," she quietly explained. Cara may not have known what this was about, but she didn't need to. She just nodded and went about corralling the others like a camp counselor. Even as she did this, Maya wove through the group and found Nellie and Gracie, quietly directing them away from the rest. By the way neither resisted this, at least she could be sure that they had seen this coming.

They went through to the kitchen, and if not for the need to get boots and coats on again she would have taken them further, into the Hex. Instead, they ended up at the table, the smaller girls sitting side by side with their older sister one corner over rather than across from them, which would just have seemed too confrontational.

"So?" Maya asked the girls. She had never felt the need to put herself in a position like 'I am the adult here, and you need to answer me,' and she was not about to start now, except if this didn't pan out of the twins' own choice, then… She'd have to dig deeper, wouldn't she? The age difference had always existed, it was nothing new, and in time it would become something else… again. She'd been on the outskirts of being a kid when they'd first come along, but not anymore. She didn't want that to get in the way. They were always supposed to be able to talk to her, as their sister.

Gracie wasn't speaking, which was one thing, but she just gave off this impression like she had something to say and just didn't dare to vocalize it. And then Nellie… She kept looking to her twin like she was waiting for her to say something, so when she didn't, well… Nellie sighed.

"It was my fault," she admitted, looking back to Maya. "Gramps and Grangie can't punish her if it's not her fault, right?" At this, Gracie looked at her, shook her head.

"It's not just you," she declared, getting Nellie's attention back. "I shouldn't have reacted the way I did, I just…" she bowed her head now.

"What happened?" Maya quietly asked, opening the way for them.

"I…" Nellie started, looking for the right words. "I was upset, and I said things… It was mean, and I knew it was going to upset her, too, but I did it anyway. I… I guess I wanted her to be upset with me, but I didn't think…" she sniffed, pressed her hand to her eye like she might have started crying.

"Upset about what?" Maya asked, pulling her chair closer to theirs, putting her hand over her little sister's. The way she looked back at her, eyes full of something so hesitant and afraid, the answer was almost too obvious.

She missed their parents. It wasn't a new feeling, was it? What kid, who loved her mother and father as dearly as she was loved by them, wouldn't feel the void of distance when they were made to live apart? But at the same time… How could she not hesitate to express this feeling when she knew enough to understand how much it meant to her mother that she got to do what she was doing? It was like the world was telling her she either couldn't feel what she felt, or she had to keep it in… and that was never going to work out well.

From there, the next part was almost too easy to understand, too. Gracie… It wasn't as though she didn't show her emotions, no, but her little Mouse-Mouse of a sister had her own way of coping. Maya knew it, and Nellie more than anyone would have to know it, too, as Gracie's twin. Except she'd just gotten so caught up in her own feelings, her own sorrows, and for that she'd just been kind of blinded to that awareness in her. So, when she'd found herself in this deepest moment of missing her mother and father, and she'd looked to Gracie and found nothing like what she'd needed to find, she'd interpreted this as Gracie's simply not caring that their parents were far away in California and not at home with them. And then she'd lashed out, and Gracie, far from being a pushover, had found her own solitude triggered and lashed out in response. Now, here they were.

"You stopped being upset at each other a while ago, huh?" Maya guessed. The girls looked to one another. "Just didn't know if the other did, too."

"I'm really sorry," Nellie told her twin, a tremor in her voice. "I didn't mean it, okay?" Now Gracie looked on the verge of new tears, too, as she nodded.

"I'm so sorry, too. I didn't mean it either, I just… got scared, I guess… Can't do this without you." Without another word needed, Nellie tipped sideways until she could put her arms around her sister, and Gracie did the same. They both held on so very tightly.

Maya let out a breath, quiet as she could. She could tell herself that things would have sorted themselves out either way, that those two loved one another too much for it to last very long, but she wasn't about to make that assumption, no. And right now… right now, she was just glad that they had made such a prompt solution of it all, the three of them together. When the girls allowed their chairs to sit with all four legs on the floor again, they turned to their big sister and, like a single mind, moved at once to stand and embrace her. Maybe they sensed she'd needed some of that, too. Either way, Maya just grinned, held them both and kissed them atop brown-haired heads bowed together.

"It's okay that you miss them," she whispered. "We talked about this before, remember? You can tell them. And if you'd rather tell me, you can do that, too. You should. Anytime, okay?" The girls nodded. Anytime. "So, about the grounding…" she started, looking at them each in turn.

"It's okay," Gracie shrugged.

"Yeah?" Maya asked her. She nodded.

"We get to be together, yeah?" Nellie asked.

"Good point… Well, that's not tonight anyway, is it? Or tomorrow either… Should we go see what the others are doing?" Maya inquired.

"I want to see what Marianne is doing," Gracie informed her big sister, which made her laugh.

"Yeah, that makes two of us… Oh, three, of course, forgive me," she added upon seeing Nellie's hand go up.

With so many of them participating in this Sleepster, and especially with one pregnant woman and a not quite three-month-old baby, it was just not logical to have them all up in the attic, sleeping on the ground. It would be all but four of them up there. Marianne would spend the night in her crib, while Maya would sleep in her own bed, where she would be joined by Riley and her unborn son, and little Maisie between them. There was some concern that this would raise complaints from some of the others, like the smallest girls, but they all took it surprisingly well, understanding the reasons as they did.

For the rest of the girls, from Cara on down, it was to the attic, and they had gone about setting their sleeping bags in a circle, their dozen making the whole thing appear like a clock, all their heads in the middle, where they might all prop themselves up lying on their stomachs to talk and joke around that night once they turned in, if it so happened that they were all awake. The littler girls were bound to try their hardest to stick it out, and time would tell if they actually made it.

Dinner was made very easy with the sheer number of hands available to pitch in. The kitchen was overrun with them, and they worked with ease. Later, they would laugh at the fact that they had also made pizza, as Dora would mention Sam's making some back at their place. They could only make so many of them at one time, so they went for larger ones, the better to share. They might have ended up making a dessert, too, but then they had Melinda's pie, which they only had to warm up again. Some of the girls were disappointed about not getting to make something there, too, but they were reminded that they had the next day as well, and they could definitely make another thing or two.

"When is Marianne going to be able to have pizza?" Sadie Chen asked her cousin as they all sat crowded around the table. They'd lengthened it as much as they could, but they'd still needed to bring in another table and stick it next to the first, and as to the seating, well, they'd had to borrow some chairs from neighbors ahead of today, but they'd made it.

"Uh, well, not for a while," Maya chuckled, looking to her daughter. She'd kept her in one arm while she ate, a maneuver more and more familiar to her and maybe to Marianne, too. Whatever she understood of mealtime, and food, she had a definite sort of 'what is this, Mother, please give it to me?' look in her eyes. So long as she just looked, they were fine, right? "Next year, I think, yeah?" she pressed a kiss to the baby's forehead.

"Can I come again then?" Sadie followed this response.

"Of course, you can," Maya smiled back at her. They would have to do their best to try and get them all together before they set down any dates for this. There are so many others I could add to this roster.

The evening was spent with a great pile up, on and around the couch, where they watched one movie picked by the littler girls, and then another chosen by those in the middle. Somewhere in that block of time, they started to lose some people, much as they tried to stick it out. Still, they didn't move them, allowed them to stay and maybe wake up under a second wind, though it didn't come to pass. After a third movie, it was time to call it a night, and they started for upstairs, carrying those sleeping ones up to the attic and wishing the others a good night. Finally, Maya and Riley carried Maisie and Marianne into the master bedroom. The baby was placed in her crib, and the old friends settled in with the little Hart-Lane girl clinging to her big sister.

"All those of my siblings I got to see be this little, I don't think it ever hit me how fast they were growing, not like her," Maya reflected as she gently rubbed the girl's back and looked to her sleeping face. She had a lot of James in her, the eyes especially, but oh, that smile…

"It's just not the same, is it? You were seventeen when the twins were born," Riley pointed out as she worked to find her proper position to sleep, which was getting to be more complicated, as she'd shared.

"I know," Maya hummed, sparing a look to the crib across the room.

"What was going on with them earlier?" Riley asked.

"Huh?" Maya asked back, not getting what she was referring to at first. "Oh… Oh, it's nothing, it's all good," she promised. To look at Nellie and Gracie by the end of the night, lying shoulder to shoulder on the ground, where they'd been watching the movie until they'd finally fallen asleep, there was clearly not a single worry left in the world. They still missed their parents, that hadn't just evaporated all of a sudden, but now that they had cleared things up, it was as though they were now supporting that weight together once more, and it became just bearable enough.

"Are you sure?" Riley asked, and Maya nodded. "Okay, well… Now that it's just us," she started, then paused and looked to Maisie. Maya assured her that the girl was sleeping. She could talk enough now that she just might repeat anything she heard. It was funny to people, until secrets were involved. "I wanted to run a couple things by you, for… opinion." Maya smiled at once.

"A couple things like… names for Baby Boy Orlando?" she wondered. The smile on her best friend's face was as telling as it was priceless. "Please, I demand that you hit me with the options right now."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners