February 16th 2022
Chapter 47
Our Inspiration For Music
Triplet Daycare… Adoption profiles… Maya's 'back to work bucket list' was progressing, each item checked off making her feel a lot more ready to go. Would she still struggle to go on those first few days? Without a doubt. But she'd get through those days, and they'd get on to the rhythm, just as they'd done after Marianne was born… hopefully. Until then, all she could do was continue going down her list. Today she'd get to cross another item off, a pretty big one and long coming, so… so long coming.
It wasn't as though she'd forgotten. She'd been aware of the anniversary approaching, but when it had actually come… Two years… They had all gone on with their lives, they had to, and then it would hit them, and it would still feel like a ton of bricks. Lambert…
She was thinking about him today, and she wasn't even sure why at first, but then she put it together. Today, Sam and Cara were coming over. They would retreat back in the Hex, and they would be putting together a first full run through of their musical. It would be a demo, to give them a better idea of where they were at, what they needed to do to tighten things up. They hadn't decided yet whether they'd go ahead and let anyone else hear it just yet, but still… They had taken so long just to get here, they'd taken… more than two years. They'd already been at it before Lambert's passing, but then the shock of it had made them stop, made her… need to stop. Now, she wasn't sure that she'd ever be able to think about or hear the musical without thinking about him.
Honestly, she was glad. She might end up thinking of how he'd died so young, yes, but she'd also remember how he'd loved being part of their school musical, and the good memories would balance out the bad ones. She'd gone so far as to lean into the feeling, making a last minute rewrite on a lyric, in their end of act one song, a call back to his big song, the one he'd performed in his first musical. It gave her flashes of sitting with him backstage, helping him through a panic attack. It'd probably go over 99% of people's heads, but maybe to those who'd been there that year, if they caught on to it…
"Frankie Cece Cesca…" Maya laughed as she got hold of the dashing toddler, lifted her up, kissed her little face… It always got a laugh out of her, hearing her name broken down into so many little nicknames, and she didn't let her aunt and godmother down here. There was time again, hard at work. Sam and Dora's girl was two and a half years old already. She was so like her mother, in so many ways and in looks most of all. And then she'd be put in the presence of her aunt, and maybe it was just in Maya's head, but… oh, it would be as though every little bit of her that was like her father would rise to the surface, and she'd be Sammy Jr.
"Hi," Francesca crooned at her, guaranteeing that Maya would find it near impossible to put her down.
"Well, doesn't look like we'll get anything done today…" she joked, looking to her brother and his wife as she held their daughter in a good, close hug, cheek to cheek. Francesca had her arms around her neck and appeared more than satisfied with the arrangement.
"Oh, so I shouldn't have brought her, is that what we're saying?" Sam asked her, challenged her. Maya simply tutted at him and moved back so the others could enter and shut the door. Any second now, her… rebuttal… would be coming along. She was just finishing up helping her father with the babies upstairs. Now, they heard her coming down the steps, and she barely made it down a few of those before Sam grinned and hurried off to meet her halfway. Marianne stopped when she saw him coming, one hand still on the ramp, as she was taught, while the other looked as giddy as her feet, barely keeping from bouncing. She was giggling before he ever got her and ended up sitting with her on the stairs.
"It's kind of concerning that I'm suddenly the responsible one," Cara sighed, looking to Mateo, Dora, and Teddy. Her siblings looked at her like they were about to protest that they'd heard that, and she just smiled. See?
So, the little girls were – begrudgingly – left to the group, while Maya, Sam, Cara, and Teddy headed toward the Hex. Teddy was one needed exception to the sort of triangle of secrecy they'd had going, with regards to the musical, for the sole reason that they needed a second male voice for the demo tracks. They hadn't even sent him anything to prepare, but he had accepted gladly once they'd made the request. He was confident that he'd be able to figure things out as they went along. Also, he was just excited that he got to be involved in his siblings' big secret project.
Maya and Cara had been working together to lay down the instrument tracks for a while now. Today was all about the vocal components, but before they could do that, they first had to run through the story with Teddy, show him each song. They'd split up the characters among the four of them, and it was easy enough for Maya, Sam, and Cara to know who they were and how to play them, while Teddy had to be given the run down. He took it all in stride, made notes on the pages they gave him… After about an hour, they were ready to begin recording.
If the musical felt like a long time coming, this collaboration between the four of them felt like it, too. It reminded Maya of moments all through the years as the four of them had grown as siblings together. All of them choosing to come to Austin as they'd done, the same for Eliza and Emma, it all felt like a miracle sometimes. So many of her siblings in the same city, while never forgetting the two still in Tucson…
"I remember when you couldn't get him to sing for almost anything," Teddy laughed when they were rehearsing the third song. Sam was so focused on his own pages that it took him a little while to realize they were talking about him. He looked up, blinked. "I never understood that," Teddy shook his head at his brother with a smile. Sam shrugged, but then there were his sisters, looking at him like they were curious, too.
"I was just shy, I don't know…" he told them. "Just because I can sing, it doesn't mean that I felt like doing it all the time."
"Meanwhile, he sits in here with the best voice out of the four of us," Cara shook her head at him. Maya and Teddy looked like they wanted to protest but, after a moment of consideration… No, yeah, she had a point. "So wasteful, Sammy," she teased, and he stuck a very childish tongue out at his little sister, who imitated him before they both snorted.
"I did it when it mattered though," he reasoned, and on that he was right. He used to sing for Eliza and Wyatt when they were little, and then for Maisie when she came along, for Marianne and Tori and the triplets… Oh, but how he sang for his Francesca… He sang for her most of all.
The recording session carried on, hours seeming to go by in the blink of an eye. The songs were really coming along, and for the trio who'd worked so hard to bring them together, it was a very difficult emotion to put into words. They had made this together, and even if it was just the four of them in a small studio behind Maya's house, performing their parts, it was like the fulfillment of everything. They had ditched the stools, the better to stand before their microphones, to be able to move and inhabit some of the emotion they had to portray. Their favorite parts – and definitely the ones they had to redo the most – were the more rousing ones, with all of them singing together…
"Okay, time out, time out, we need a break," Sam declared, after the third time they had to stop and start over on their tenth song because they were just laughing uncontrollably. Cara was just red in the face, and the others weren't far behind. So, they stepped out of the booth and sat on the chairs and the little couch, getting some water and a snack.
"Alright, someone say something so we can pull ourselves together, act a bit more human again," Cara gestured to the others. They exchanged looks, waiting to see if anyone would come up with anything. It wasn't as though they lacked subjects. The one of them who did finally speak, did so after letting out a breath that sounded like 'well, I might as well say it.'
"I talked to her," Teddy revealed, and being the informed siblings that they were, Maya, Sam, and Cara fell in line at once, eager to hear more. The girl who worked across the street from where he worked, the one he'd been having friendly/flirty non-encounters with for… oh, months now. "Her name's Priya."
"How did it go?" Maya asked.
"What did she say?" Sam asked.
"Did you ask her out?" Cara asked.
"I don't know if this is because we've been working on the musical, but I'm getting big Grease vibes right here," Maya gestured around the four of them, humming the tune in question and sending a new, more contained ripple of laughter around the room.
"Well, yesterday, my shift was almost done, I was just going around the store, doing whatever… And then someone spoke, and I thought it was a customer, I turned around, and it was her. She knew that I usually finished when she started, so she came early, that way she had time to come over and find me."
"See? Initiative," Cara pointed at her brother with a nod to suggest she already liked this girl. Maya gently shushed her and pulled her hand down before encouraging Teddy to go on.
"Anyway," he breathed, "The store was pretty dead in that last half hour, so we got to talk a while. I told her about how I came from New York, then moved to Tucson, was in Chicago a while, then back to Tucson, and now here… Didn't break down the whole family situation, just that I'd come out here to be with all you guys," he gestured to the trio here and then out the door to indicate their sisters currently living at the Friar house. "She talked about how she grew up near London, moved out here for school, wasn't planning to stay, but then she met someone, got married, had a kid…"
"Oh…" the trio around him reacted all at once, on reflex.
"Divorced now," Teddy added now, and the awkward faces melted away. "Got a three-year-old girl she's raising mostly on her own because her ex moved to Tennessee. She's still very close with her in-laws, less with her own family back in England, which is why she never considered moving back with her."
"She told you all that right in the first conversation?" Sam had to ask.
"She did," Teddy nodded. "Because one of the reasons why she came to the store to see me was that she figured I'd been working up the nerve all this time, and she decided to do it instead, but she wanted to make sure that her cards were on the table, not leaving anything to surprises later."
"She asked you out…" Maya understood, her face slipping into a soft smile. Teddy smiled back and nodded. He'd said yes.
"Initiative…" Cara hummed. Now she liked this Priya even more.
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
