February 24th 2022
Chapter 55
Our Return to Stories
It hadn't been nearly as hard as she might have thought, in the end, to get caught up in her day enough that she'd just be okay. It didn't mean that she suddenly didn't miss being home with her daughters, far from it, but she got through it all in a fashion she could be satisfied with. Now though… Now, the day was done. Classes were over, and so was musical practice, and now she could go home. Thanks to her parents' updates, she knew they would have taken the girls back there by now, waiting for her and Lucas to come home.
The very first greetings she got came courtesy of the dogs. The moment she came through the door, they started to emerge and converge on her, tails wagging as they all tried and got close to her and her petting hands.
"Yeah, I missed you guys, too, hi… hi…" she laughed. If she was getting emotional already seeing the dogs, it'd be something else by the time she reached the babies. "Alright, hey, I'll be here all night, leave some for later," she told the little pack as she worked to move past them.
Her arrival soon summoned her father, who had been in the kitchen, getting a start on dinner. No matter how often you told him that you could have handled it and that it was early, he would just shrug at you and say something to the effect of 'well, I was here.' Knowing how the others were, maybe it was just a grandparent thing, but it was also just very Shawn. He let her know that the girls were upstairs with their grandmother, so up she went.
It wasn't hard to find them. The more she climbed up the stairs, she started to hear voices, two of them singing softly. One was her mother's, 'decent,' as Katy herself would qualify it, and the other was her granddaughter's. At two and a half, Tori spoke – and sang – with a bit of a lisp, which she didn't even realize she had. They'd try to casually repeat the words to her, and she'd only look at them like it was exactly what she'd said.
When she reached the nursery doorway, she looked in to discover the rest of the scene. Katy sat on the ground, with Tori in her lap and facing out as she was, both of them looking to the triplets, set up in their loungers and arranged in a curved line before them. They were all three of them wide awake and focused on their afternoon entertainment in their own way. Kacey would wave her arms about, Remy would wave one foot around while holding the other, and Lucy would just lie there with her little hands close to herself and a smile as she listened to the tune of her grandmother and her niece's voices. A lot of the time, they could be in their own worlds, all three of them, but if you had their attention, especially Lucy… It would make for moments like these.
The thing that actually broke this bit of focus this time around was actually Maya. They noticed her, one by one. They saw their mother… and they were elated. Oh, they had no idea how wonderful of a feeling they created when they did that…
"Nana!" Tori squeaked when she saw her, too. She was up on her feet in no time, dashing over to her, and Maya lifted her up at once, kissed her cheeks and relished in the hug she received. It wasn't just the babies she'd been leaving today, was it? So much of the last several months had been spent with the three of them and Tori, too. It took her back to when she'd been a baby, when she and Ella had been living with them. Even if they would occasionally come and stay at the house for a day, or a few days, a week or more, these last months of looking after her had meant so much, to both of them, clearly.
"Did you have a good time today?" she asked, pushing back a fringe of that raven hair she'd inherited from her mother.
"Yeah," Tori nodded, all the while playing at the necklace around her grandmother's neck. She loved to press her little fingers at the engraved fingerprints on the metal triangle, like just about every small child Maya ever held. "Play with babies," she looked back to the girls on the ground.
"I bet they loved that," Maya smiled.
Katy would take Tori downstairs to go see what Shawn was up to. She only had to get one look at her daughter to know all she wanted to do right now was hold her baby girls, just as she'd gotten to hold the toddler. Once it was just them, Maya crouched, knelt, and finally sat down, facing the triplets. They were just… a symphony of cooing noises, of happiness and anticipation. She was here!
"How about we make a deal? If I start to cry, we're just going to keep it between us, yeah? Pinky swear? Pinky? Yeah?" she carefully linked her little finger with the girls' miniscule ones, alternating the hand she used, one over the other and under the next, down the line. By the time she got to the last one, which today was Lucy, and she looked at her with those big blue eyes, Maya just went ahead and picked her up. "Hi, bun… Yeah, I missed you, too," she smiled, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "What do you think? Can I manage to get all three of you? Can I? Let's give it a shot…"
It bordered on chaotic, but yes, she was able to scoop one and then another of the twins, joining them to their sister. The one thing that never changed, no matter how much they all grew: when they were close together, they were so very calm. It was like a magic trick… if you knew just how to do it. To her, it was just one more of those instances where it was baffling to take in just how much they had grown. There were days where the simple fact that they could hold their heads up felt like a wonder. She could still remember them so small, the day they were born… But that was half a year ago, and now Remy was looking more and more like she was this close to figuring out how to pick herself up and crawl, or at least find some mode of motion for herself. Maybe she wasn't there yet, but it really felt as though she might be close. They were starting to see it in Kacey, too. The only one who was giving them none of that, which served to show that the others might be getting there, was Lucy. It didn't worry them. Everything they'd known of her in the months since her birth said that she was right on track for who she was.
She didn't know how long she sat there, holding her 'little butts,' but then she heard something else she'd been looking forward to. She heard Marianne calling for her from below. She was home, which meant Lucas would be, too. Maya could probably have called out to them to let them know where she was, but she still had the reflex, when holding any of the triplets, like the noise would only make them cry. And yet she could see them all looking at her, three pairs of blue eyes, two of them smaller and lighter than the third, and she realized that they would probably have been fine. Either way, someone down there would tell them where she was, and they'd come find her. Within seconds, she could hear them on their way.
"Mommy, are they sleeping?" Marianne whispered, and Maya smirked to imagine her, stopped just in the hall, outside the nursery… checking.
"No, everyone's awake," she promised, and a moment later here was her firstborn, star swinging from her neck… band-aid on her knee? "What happened here?" she frowned, suddenly aware of her load, preventing her from reaching out.
Slowly, she went and settled the girls back where they'd been, so she might motion for Marianne to approach her. She got a good hug first, of course, and then she sat on the ground, sticking her foot out to present her leg. Clearly, she was fine, which made her mother chuckle, but still… All of a sudden, she had a vivid flashback of the face her mother would make when she'd come home with a scraped up knee, or elbow, or any part of her… As Marianne sat there, telling her the whole tale of her knee, Maya spotted Lucas out of the corner of her eye, standing in the doorway, looking on, not unlike how she'd done it earlier.
"It doesn't hurt," Marianne shook her head. "Just if I…" she started to reach to her knee, and Maya stalled her.
"Gotta leave it alone, alright?" she smiled at her, and Marianne nodded. "Tell me about this afternoon, at the ranch, how was that? Good?"
While Lucas finally left his viewing spot and came into the room proper, the better to see to the babies, Marianne started telling her mother all about the green group, showing the bandana tied over her head, which she enjoyed tremendously. She told her about going to the archive, for stories with Carson, and then going to see Lucky the horse. She told her how June had loved all the boots, and Harper was scared of the horses, but she'd protected her. She told her how she and Winnie had had their bandanas done just the same way, and they wondered if they could wear them around even if they weren't at the ranch. What it all boiled down to was that she'd had a big, busy day, and she'd loved every minute of it… except maybe the part where she'd fallen, and when Miss Alma had to clean up her knee. The rest of it, that was all great.
"What about you? How was your day?" Maya turned a smirk to her husband, who had by now picked up Remy and Lucy. Kacey was still propped up on her lounger, but now her big sister was able to go up to her, briefly forgetting and very soon realizing that sitting up on her knees was not going to work just now. But she sat down properly and, as she was told that she could, she carefully lifted up her baby sister and held her. Kacey was all smiles when she found herself face to face with the four-year-old.
"My day was pretty good, especially the last part," Lucas declared with a nod. There would be other things for them to discuss later, especially what he and Juliet had discussed regarding her eventual retirement, but for now he was just happy to tell her about the after-school program from his perspective. He told her about his momentary slip up that morning, almost driving all the way to the preschool before remembering he didn't have Marianne, and Maya was gracious enough not to laugh… too much.
For how the day had started, there was something remarkably wonderful to them that this was where the day had led, sitting here, the six of them together on the nursery floor, with all these stories for them to exchange with one another. The high school, the ranch, preschool, and the green group… They probably wouldn't have this much to tell each other every single day, but for a good long while today, all through dinner, and bath time, and up to story time… Years ago, before they'd had any children at all, before the wedding, and the house, when this was little more than a distant dream, they could swear… It had looked a lot like this.
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
