January 4th 2020

Chapter 4
Their House of Siblings

"I had no idea one-year-old birthday parties were such ragers…" Maya grumbled, barely awake, Monday morning after Haley's birthday. She turned herself around until she could look at Lucas. He looked about as worn out as she did. "What's the matter? Pony's worn out?" she asked, getting a barely concealed yawn out of him. "That bad?" Maya chuckled. "Are you going to be okay to drive today?"

"Four and a half hours each, that's the plan, and I'm sticking to it," Lucas promised.

"Do you want the last stretch so you can nap in the car?"

"Yes, please," he agreed at once, making her laugh as she set some energizing kisses to his forehead.

It wasn't as though the party had gone well into the night, not when the birthday girl's bedtime went no further than eight in the evening. But it had been a very lively day, and by the time the rest of them had gone to bed they could all have used a full night's sleep, which was alas not in the cards for the trio bound for Tucson that next morning. It would take somewhere north of thirteen hours to get there, not counting breaks and potential traffic jams. If they wanted to make it at a decent hour, then the only option left to them was to leave Austin early. And that meant getting up before the sun rose.

The rest of the household was to be left to sleep a while more and likely to miss their departure. The dogs had been left in the basement, the better to enable this, and even so Lucas and Maya crept quietly from the room, the better not to wake their guest if she still slept. To what degree this might be possible, with her hearing aids out for the night, they couldn't say, but they took no chances.

"Morning," Dora beamed casually, sitting up on the couch which had been her bed. She'd already folded up the sheets neatly and set them aside with the pillow, suggesting she'd been awake for some time. She was reading a book under the light of her phone's flashlight.

"How'd you sleep?" Lucas asked his cousin.

"Great," Dora told him, rising to join him and Maya as they moved toward the kitchen, phone and book still in hand. "Not a lot, but what I got was fine." She was excited to hit the road, they could see it on her face, whether she said it or not.

Breakfast was had, travel mugs were filled with coffee to go, and by five they were out the door and in the car, where Maya would take the first stretch behind the wheel. Lucas was convinced into the backseat, in case he felt like catching up on sleep, under the excuse that they should let Dora have the passenger seat, to enjoy the view.

"Are you going to live in the house now that Sam will be here?" Dora asked Maya as they moved through the streets on their way out of Austin.

"Uh, not yet," Maya told her.

"But all the work's done, isn't it?"

"It is, yeah," Maya confirmed with a nod. "We still need to unpack a lot, and put everything where it'll go, get the stuff we still don't have. But there's also that I want to spend more time with my brother and my sisters back there when we get back from Arizona." They would be staying two nights out there, to rest from the long drive as much as to spend time with the other half of her siblings before they went and left with one of them.

"I wish I had little siblings like that," Dora declared. "I only have Alex, and he's almost the same age as me most of the time."

"Hey, you never know," Maya told her. "When my mom had the twins I was seventeen, then by the time Haley came around, I was twenty-two." More and more, as her Hart siblings had grown to be part of her life, she would be left to wish she could have known them from the time they were just babies, like with her Hunters. The closest she'd come to that had been Wyatt, who'd only been one at the time, but then he was so far away, and their contact was limited… But they were in her life now, when for a while they had been strangers, and really that was all she needed to think about.

They'd mapped out their trip well enough to find where they would stop along the way, to rest, get food, switch drivers… When they hit stop number one, Maya was just sending off a quick text back home and ahead to Sam, to they all knew how things were progressing, when she heard Dora chuckle. Turning to her, she saw the girl was staring into the backseat, so she looked, too. She couldn't say exactly when he'd dozed off, but Lucas was presently sound asleep.

"He looks so much like Pappy Joe when he naps," Maya whispered to Dora, who bit back a smile and nodded in agreement. "Come on, we'll give him a few more minutes."

They got out of the car and went off to the bathroom before grabbing lunch, which they brought back to their sleeping cowboy. They got back in the car – now with Dora in the driver's seat and Maya as passenger – and waited for the scent of the food to reach the back and draw Lucas back. He actually startled when he woke up, which made the girls in the front burst out laughing.

"Where are we?" he looked around, scrubbing at his face.

"One third of the way between Austin and Tucson," Maya declared. "Fries?" she held out the bag with his lunch.

"In a minute," he climbed out of the car and off to find the bathroom.

When time came for them to head back on for the next stretch of the drive, with Dora at the wheel, both Maya and Lucas couldn't help but be more attentive. She was still a relatively new driver, although even before she'd started to learn it had been more or less expected that she would be good. She just had this temperament to her, calm, observant, that gave you all the confidence in the world that you could put her behind the wheel of a car and she would do great.

Both Maya and Lucas would later reflect on how they had apparently reached the point in their lives where they would think something along the lines of 'but she's so young!' as though they hadn't been her age when they'd done the same. It was both depressing and amusing.

Dora did just fine though, and by the time they reached stop number two, they had more or less forgotten about any concerns they may have had. They focused instead on much the same things as at the last stop. Lucas had volunteered to do the snack run this time around. Maya suspected he didn't trust her not to return with arms full of chips and candy… He knew her well enough that way.

He returned to find her and Dora waiting in the backseat of the car, laughing over something on Maya's phone. Lucas knocked on the back window to get their attention and Maya rolled it down an inch.

"Yes?" she asked, like he was some stranger intruding. He held up the bag of snacks. Her smile instantly shifted. "Hi, honey!"

"Ten years of you calling me Huckleberry, that just didn't feel right," he told her as she rolled the window down far enough to receive the bag.

"I wasn't going to say anything, but now that you mention it…

They were making good time, though they had been put just a bit behind schedule due to an unexpected traffic jam. They hadn't expected to reach Abigail's house by dinner time, but at this rate some of the younger kids might have been gearing up for bed by the time they arrived. Knowing them, Wyatt especially, they would do everything in their power to stay awake though they'd appear to sleep.

"I've never been out here before," Dora commented as they passed the Tucson city limits. Every time they had passed out of one state or city and into another, she had looked like she wanted to take every detail in, and that spirit had a way of being infectious. Maya and Lucas started to feel it, too.

"Well, we'll be here all of tomorrow, I'm sure Sam would be glad to show you around," Maya casually pointed out, and she had to hand it to Dora for keeping most of her composure and not blushing like a tomato.

"That's a good idea," she simply said.

"Right?" Maya nodded with a smile. In the driver's seat, Lucas just nudged back the urge to chuckle.

The trip as a whole hadn't been so rough, despite being over half a day on the road. Still, by the time they were nearing Abigail's house, they were all eager to be done with driving for a while.

There was no mistaking whether they'd arrived or not. If they hadn't already been here before – two of them anyway – the sight of Sam, Cara, and Eliza sitting on the front steps would have been enough to tell. Eliza had been the first one to spot them, and she pointed even as she sprang to her feet, quickly followed by her brother and sister. Almost as soon as the car had come to a stop, Maya was climbing out, which was as good as a signal for her sisters to come sprinting to meet her.

"Hey! Oh, I've never been so happy to see you, hey…" she laughed, squeezing them close as they threw their arms around her. Much as they all got to see one another more often now that Abigail had moved the kids out to Arizona, sometimes it really wasn't enough. They were family, and it never felt right to be apart.

"I'm going to see if it's too late to start the movie," Cara bolted back for the house, while Eliza moved to greet Lucas. When Maya turned to find her brother, he was standing with Dora, the two of them talking in hushed tones. The both of them looked like they were filled with sunlight. You wouldn't know it was the first time they actually stood in the same place at the same time.

"I'm in so much trouble…" Maya breathed to herself.

Leaving the two of them to their meeting/reunion, she went into the house, where she met with Abigail. Her stepmother gave her a quick hug before informing her that she was 'expected' upstairs. With a smirk, she went up to find her young brother. He was not in his bed, in the room across the hall from what had been and would remain Sam's room, and without a moment's pause, Maya went right along toward the stairs leading into the attic, her room, also known as Wyatt's ship.

"Hey, bud," she whispered after sitting on the bed and gently waking the seven-year-old boy curled asleep in the middle of the mattress.

"Mom said I could sleep here," he yawned.

"You wanted to make sure I'd have to wake you when I got here, huh?" Maya guessed and her brother nodded. "So smart," she laughed, pulling him into her arms. Much as he had been prepared over the past months, for the day when his big brother would be leaving, they knew this moment was going to be rough on him most of all. Much as he'd adjusted in the time since Kermit's passing, he still struggled with separations. "You and Sam having a sleepover tonight?"

"In my room," Wyatt nodded as they moved toward the stairs. "His room has boxes in it."

"Yeah, so's mine," Maya told him, and her young brother laughed.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners