December 3rd 2020

Chapter 338
Their Secret in Novelty

It was a contracted fact that, at minimum once a year, the many sisters by blood or by heart were to gather in what was affectionately referred to as the Sleepster. And now the time was fast approaching for their 2029 edition, whether it would be the only or only the first. Then again, keeping in mind what only a select few – mainly the trio on the lane – was aware was coming further down the line. Maybe for that reason, and maybe also in light of how the previous edition had been something of a mixed bag for the fact that they weren't all together as before, they had really worked to make sure they could get everyone this time, up in Austin as before.

The plan had been set in motion before Maya and Lucas had ever learned that they had successfully conceived their first child. Once this became a factor, there was a brief moment where they had to wonder if it would be wise to carry on with these plans, especially if they had any intention of keeping the baby a secret for the time being. In the end, Maya had felt confident she could keep it to herself, and so would Lucas. The initial hyperactive feeling had settled down now, enough that they could go about their days and act normally, no one even suspecting what was going through their minds. So, they could continue as planned, no sweat.

The next morning began with Maya experiencing her very first bit of morning sickness.

All she could think about as she sat there in the bathroom, waiting for the world to stop spinning, was how her mother had once said something, back when she'd been pregnant with Haley, how she'd grown up hearing that many of the women in her family had never experienced any kind of morning sickness or any time of day sickness whatsoever. She had not been so lucky, from Maya herself on down to the shutterbug growing in her belly at the time. When Maya had found out about her own baby, she'd hoped maybe the 'gift' of the Clutterbucket would pass to her, but alas…

Lucas and Sam had both come along in no time, called by the unavoidable tune of her retching, and it was almost comical to see them working like a well-oiled machine together, almost like they'd sat down and drawn up an action plan to deal with this very situation. Knowing those two, she wouldn't have been surprised if they actually did that. Just that alone, before anything else had been done, almost did most of the work in bringing her back somewhere she'd feel able to think about getting to work.

Those first couple days dealing with the sickness and then her time at the high school, she had to admit, had been pretty rough. She felt like must have looked like a ghost walking through those halls, but either no one noticed or they kept their opinions to themselves. This was just going to have to be the new normal, for a little while. It would be worth it in the end.

"Are you still sure you want to have the girls out here?" Lucas had asked her after that second day. "What's going to happen in the morning?" She had been thinking about that, too, whether she liked it or not. But she so desperately wanted to soldier on. There was so much change coming up, with her parents and LA, with the tour, now with the baby… She needed this, and she felt some of the other kids did, too. So, Sleepster remained on the schedule.

What became pressing instead were two things. The first was Maya's job, and the second was their appointment with the doctor, to confirm that everything was as they believed and all was well. Lucas skipped his Monday afternoon at the ranch that week, the better to accompany Maya. He would be with her every step of the way, just as she knew he would.

It felt like such a relief somehow, to hear it all confirmed. They were pregnant, and as they soon learned she'd been fairly on the money with her estimations. She was just about ten or eleven weeks along now, and she was due to deliver in mid-November. Suddenly, they could start to see something like a structure forming around them, steps to carry them through the rest of the year as the pregnancy advanced. They were a few months off from what they had first envisioned, when they had set their 'start date' to try for a baby, but that was really an ideal and little more. What mattered was that they were having this baby. The rest they could work around.

As far as her job though… It was already April, and it would be May in a little over a week. The school year was nearly over, and that was good and fine, but while the kids were looking at this like a good break coming along, the teachers would need to look to the start of the year after almost at once, and for Maya this would be especially true this time around. She'd been putting in a lot of that work ahead of time, what with her being off on tour all summer, but the news of the baby had pretty much forced her to scrap everything. She could finish out the year now and she'd barely be showing by the end of it, if at all. But by September…

By September, she'd be just about seven months along. There'd be no point in her even starting out that year at all, and after the baby was born, by the time he or she was in any way at a point where she could consider returning to work it'd be… spring, maybe… late spring… By that count, it left her with one conclusion, and that was that she'd need to miss the whole of next year.

It was a mark of how deeply she cared for her students, as Lucas would point out, that she felt so conflicted at the thought of missing all that time with them. But how could she not? She would miss… She would miss the passage of her third senior class, of Ariel Su, Daphne Brett, Dakota Day… And what about the freshmen? She guessed she would have to get used to that, in years to come. It had long been the plan for her and Lucas to have more than one child, more than two, and who knew how many in the end. That meant more lost time like this.

When could she be satisfied with a notion like this though? No, she was very good with solutions, and if there was one here, she would find it. She was having a baby. She wasn't taking a vow of isolation. Besides, if there was one thing her students had to know by now, it was that their art teacher would always go the extra mile for them, and they could count on her.

That was all good and fine, but her students would still need a teacher who could actually come into the school every day over the following school year, and if that wasn't going to be her, then they were going to have to find someone in time for September. So, she'd made an appointment with Vice-Principal Ríos. She had once upon a time been the English teacher here, and it was her appointment in her current position which brought Lindsay Alcott on to the faculty, plucked from the middle school.

When Maya told her about the pregnancy, it was hard to tell if her smile came out simply being happy for her, or perhaps having suspected it over recent days, or recalling the days when she'd been one of her students.

"You know, I was so looking forward to seeing how you'd do with my Talia next year," the vice-principal smiled, nodding to the pictures on her wall, school photos of her children and then another showing the whole family on a beach, possibly a few years past.

"Right," Maya smiled, remembering how she'd mentioned her eldest being in eighth grade this year. This only gave her even more desire to try and keep some form of contact with her classes while she was on leave, though she didn't bring it up for the time being, preferring to have a better handle on possibilities before she did anything. "It'll be for the year after that then," she nodded instead. Depending how long we wait between this baby and the next, who knows how many years we'll actually have together.

This notion of gap years with her students had easily been the thing she hated the most about all this, riding on the other side of the vast gap between the good and the bad with morning sickness as its companion.

Now, here they were, Thursday night, Lucas and Sam and her making a pre-Sleepster supply run. Their out of state contingent would be flying in the following day, and everyone had reason to be excited. There were some potential bumps in the road, especially where the girls would be concerned, waking up on Saturday morning to potentially discover the tiny little thing Maya was keeping hidden from them. And then there were… other things. The big one had to do with Wyatt. Maya had promised her little brother that she would answer his questions about their father when he came over to Austin for this sleepover visit.

There was just no preparing for that, was there? She had all the facts, yes, and she could have rattled them off to Wyatt, but that was not the way to go about it, no. She had to tell him in the right way, to make him understand the big picture. He had his own image of Kermit in his head, formed of sparse memories and stories shared. Maya did not want to be the one to break it all for him, when really there was nothing worth breaking. Her thoughts of her father were so not what they had been when she'd been in her early teens.

"What do you think about these?" Sam asked, holding up a bag of candy.

"I think they are excellent, very delicious," Maya nodded, and he dropped the bag in their basket. When she cleared her throat, he looked back at her.

"What?" he asked. Lucas knew what the answer was, but he wasn't about to go and tell it for her.

"If you put that bag in my hands, I will eat the whole thing. Not a big deal most days, but the tenant might have other ideas," Maya told her brother, who now looked at the bag again like he was rethinking it and his whole life. They had come to refer to the baby as the tenant, for the purposes of pre-reveal discussions in public, and as necessary as it felt, mostly it just amused them.

"Okay, fair point," Sam returned the bag to the shelf. "So what are we supposed to get then?" Maya scanned the shelves before indicating those kinds she knew she wouldn't care about, and he chose from them.

When they arrived home, Maya moved to scale the stairs up to the second floor with the kind of haste that made her 'nausea pit crew' move to follow in case they were needed. Instead, she came back a moment later with a cloth bag.

"I totally forgot, VP lent me these when I mentioned we hadn't gotten around to getting any yet," she held out the bag to her husband with a proud smile. He opened it to find a small stack of books, all the better to inform the soon-to-be first-time parents.

"You're going to have to hide these before everyone gets here," Sam reminded them when he saw the books. Maya sighed, nodding in agreement as she thought about Saturday morning.

"One of many things we'll have to do to hide our secret tenant."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners