Chapter 15
Moon Over Arizona

After the incident with Kermit and the rush back to Houston, Maya had started to accompany Lucas whenever he'd head to Austin with some of the others to do some work on the house. Sure, it wasn't like she had been the one rushed to the hospital, but neither of them wanted to run the risk that something else might happen where she needed him all of a sudden and he was two hours away. It had been two weeks now since Maya's birthday and since Kermit had gone back to New York, and both on the previous weekend and this weekend now, they had gone up to the house.

If it wasn't that it was still winter and too chilly to do so, she would have loved nothing more than to sit out front while the others worked. Instead, she settled for the seat they'd set up for her near the window, complete with foot rest. There she would sit and read or do work for class, sometimes switching it up with her baby books, or she'd start drawing… Sometimes, when she just wanted to put all that aside she would sink into a vortex of YouTube videos, anything from cute baby compilations to tutorials. By the end of the day, they would usually find her napping.

The change in schedule, taking them away from Houston from Friday night through Sunday night was not ideal as far as the loss in work hours, but the house needed to be made ready, and as much as he'd gotten offers from many others to come and do a lot of it for him, Lucas just couldn't accept it. In his mind, it needed to be him. He wanted to make the place ready, for Maya and him, for their Sprout. So, he did.

"Look what I found," he went down to find Maya at her window seat, where she'd been typing on the laptop propped up in her lap on a cushion. He showed her the old cigar box, on which the letters TJF were shakily carved. She set the laptop and cushion aside before taking it.

"Thomas… Joseph Friar?" she guessed, and he nodded. "So, to recap," she counted on one finger and the next, "Lucas Thomas, Thomas Joseph, and Joseph… What's your grandfather's middle name?"

"Nathaniel," Lucas replied confidently.

"And is that your great grandfather by any chance?" she smirked up at him. He nodded. "How far back does it go like that?"

"I'm not sure, I think just those, I think." She opened the box now, smiling when she saw what was inside.

"No way," she looked up at him. "You didn't read them, did you?" she asked, carefully thumbing through the envelopes addressed to this very house to Thomas Friar. It had been years, but the penmanship did not lie as to who had written the words. Letters, written by a young Melinda before she was a Friar herself.

"Wouldn't dream of it," he shook his head. "She would lecture me until the baby was in college," he nodded to the letters, making her chuckle. "Hold on to these for me?"

"Sure," she closed the box and set it at her side, on top of her books. "Hey, so, I've been thinking," she started, turning back to him. He sat down on the edge of her foot stool, then fully on after she took her feet down. "Ever since Kermit mentioned my aunt out in Tucson, I haven't been able to get her out of my head. Maybe next week, instead of coming up here we could sort of go out there and find her? I just… I'd really like to see her again, and I know she's wanted to see me again, too."

"Tucson," he considered this. "We'd have to fly out," he told her, figuring it would be a good half day if they went at it by car. "Are you sure you want to just go up to her door, no call, nothing? What if we show up and she's not there?"

"I know, I just… I don't know, I thought it would be nice to surprise her or something," she shrugged, sitting back in her chair, hand trailing the curve of her belly of nineteen weeks.

"Well… Might be nice to get away for a couple days," he told her. "We won't get many more chances after this." She smiled, leaning forward and setting her hands on his cheeks before laying a kiss on his lips, which he returned. As they pulled back, he let out a breath, setting both of his hands over the one she had on her belly. She knew what he was thinking. They had an appointment on Thursday afternoon. By the time they flew off to Arizona, they could well know if their little Sprout was a boy or a girl…

All through the next few days back in Houston, there were two things to keep Maya's mind occupied… Alright, there were many, many things keeping her mind occupied, especially since she'd become pregnant, but these two seemed to hold the top spots without contest at the moment. The first was hers and Lucas' trip over to Tucson to find her Aunt Luna. They'd booked a flight, and a hotel room, with much the same timetable as their weekends in Austin to work on the house. They were leaving on Friday evening, returning two days later.

It was strange how thinking about this woman she hadn't seen in… fifteen years or so… only brought back more and more little memories, connecting so many disconnected flashes until she realized they had been connected to her. She actually kind of remembered the last time she'd seen her, remembered… how sad she looked, like she knew it would be the last time. It made Maya feel even worse to think she'd almost forgotten her as time had gone on.

And then there were the videos.

It had taken her a week before she finally made up her mind to plug that thumb drive in and see what it held. She'd been sitting by the window at the house, her first weekend up there with Lucas while he and the others worked and she was told to hang back. That wasn't so bad, especially as she'd gone and started to develop a bit of a clumsy streak in the days before that. She'd been sitting there for a while, and she hadn't been able to stop thinking about the drive ever since she'd felt it while fishing out a pen from her bag. When she'd become aware that she'd been stuck on the same page of her book for as long as it took her to watch Lucas, Sophie, and Shawn to carry out something like twenty boxes of old papers over to the minivan, she'd finally given in, taking the thumb drive and her headphones out.

Videos, so many of them, and the file names she quickly realized marked the dates, from the day she was born to… somewhere about when Kermit would have left them, she knew. She'd sort of figured that would be it, and still to see them all there, how many there were… It caught her off guard enough that she'd needed a moment to collect herself, to work up the nerve to actually play any one of those. She took a few deep breaths, like she wanted to ensure that the baby wouldn't feel how nervous she was, all the while collecting her peace through the press of her hand to that roundness growing ahead of her.

The first one she'd watched had been the very first one, from the day of her birth. She'd been so inescapably captivated, watching her parents, all of eighteen years old and now holding their baby girl in their arms. All the stories she'd heard from her mother over the years, and the ones from her father in recent weeks, were given to her now with video evidence. They were young, and a tiny bit terrified, but they loved her, right from the start.

To absolutely no one's surprise, it had left her in tears, bringing Lucas and her father and Sophie to her side. She'd assured them that she was fine, replaying the video by way of explanation. For them to see newborn Maya there on the screen had been the first thing to draw their attention, noting how small and cute she'd been. Some things never change. Seeing the young Katy and Kermit with their daughter had been something else. Both Lucas and Sophie were amazed to see them, see how young they'd been.

Maya couldn't help but look to Shawn, to see how he took in this whole image, of his wife, half a lifetime ago and then some, as a brand-new mother, side by side with the guy who'd left both her and that tiny girl behind for so many years. Maya had reached out her hand to take his, looking up at him as he looked down at her and giving him a smile. You're my Dad, don't you forget it.

She'd spent the rest of that day watching one video after the next. She couldn't help it, had to keep going, like there was an answer she desperately needed to discover and somewhere in those videos she would find it if she just kept on looking. Did she even know the question she was trying to answer?

Can I give him a chance? Will we seal this truce into reality? Will I let him into my child's life?

Somewhere in those early videos, the girl had first appeared. Luna. Aunt Luna. She had been all of twelve years old when Maya was born, but when her brother had put the baby girl in her arms, she had held her like a pro. Seeing her now, the notion that stood out the most to her here was just that, for how many times she had been told she looked like her sister Cara, she almost felt like everyone had completely missed the mark. If there was a person who looked like Cara, it was her aunt. This girl here in the video could have been Cara, copied and pasted…

The more videos she'd watched, Maya had seen the progression of many stories woven together. The evolution of her mother, her father, her young self, her aunt, and any relations among these players. Her mother and herself, this much she knew well enough, although it was no less interesting to see these beats in their lives she had no way to remember at all or with any real clarity. Their relationship may have evolved to a place where the two of them were as good together as they could hope to be, but she hadn't forgotten the time where it was something else, and as much as she could want to make it so those times were better, she just couldn't.

Seeing her mother in those videos, in the early years, seeing how happy they all were, in spite of the struggles that their situation put in their way… When they'd left the house that night, after she'd been watching the videos, and they'd gone back to the Hunter Hart house, she had just found her mother and wrapped her arms around her, thinking just how bad she must have felt, when it was just the two of them and Maya would say or do things that must have made her feel so sad…

She would look at her little self and think how different she seemed. Sure, she was a baby, and a toddler and a small child, but still she remembered seeing similar videos of some of her friends, and really, factoring for growth, there remained an inherent quality to them that was just… them. Little Maya felt so much different to Older Maya, though at the same time… maybe if she interpreted it all from a different view point…

Luna, her little aunt… Maya could see how much she'd cared for her niece, like her niece cared for her. Little Maya would just go out of her head when Luna would leave her, and when she would arrive, oh… It was enough to make a parent jealous, if it wasn't that she reacted strongly to them, too. Throughout all those videos, both aunt and niece had been growing, and the love never left, only increased. The closer they got to the end, to the point where the videos stopped, where Kermit would be gone, she could almost see a fear in the young woman's face, like she could sense what was coming for the little family, and she worried for what it would mean for her 'Cherry Bug.' That was what she'd call her, and Maya could just remember when they would go for ice cream, and she'd want 'more cherries!' on top of hers, every time.

And her father… She couldn't help it, she would watch him closest of all, and how could she not? He had been the one putting questions in her head the longest, the very first of them… Why? Why did you leave? Where did you go? Where are you? Don't you love me anymore?

To watch his progression, from that eighteen-year-old kid so bowled over in love with his baby daughter into the guy who, at twenty-four, had made a choice that would change all of their lives forever… What she saw in him, as she made her way through the thumb drive, was someone whose motivation had just run headlong into reality, and the deeper he sank into it, the more his situation changed… and it changed him along with it. She could see just how much he had loved her mother, and loved her, every single day. But for all of that love, in the end, it just… it hadn't been enough, had it?

And then he'd left. That wasn't in the videos, of course not. Had he gone away hoping maybe to find the thing he was missing? If he had, he had taken a very wide detour, and he had met Abigail, and he had become a father again… and again… and again and again, and she had just remained on the outside of all that. Until… Until his illness had gone and knocked something into him… sense, or truth, whatever they might call it. And he had come back to her. Was she to understand that, had he not fallen ill, he wouldn't have made this turn? If that was the case, then how was she meant to react? When it came down to it, did the cause of the turn matter more than the turn itself?

The question had continued to spin at the back of her mind for almost two weeks now, and she had yet to figure out how to answer it, or if she should. She'd spoken with Kermit a few times, whenever she'd call her siblings. That was new. Still, despite the steps they'd taken over those days he'd stayed at the house, there was hesitation in their voices, caution and uncertainty as to where this would all go. They both knew things were not fixed one way or the other yet, not by a long shot. What would it be like then, when she reunited with her aunt?

Before all that though, there was something big for Lucas and her to see to. They had a doctor's appointment that afternoon, and there would be the scan, they would know… They had already decided they were going to find out if they could find out, and now the day had finally arrived.

Their class schedules made it so that she finished well ahead of him. With everything that needed to happen for them to get their answer, and maybe because Maya found it impossible to wait around the university, she had gone ahead of him and reached the clinic while Lucas was still in class. She sat in the waiting room, drinking water and flipping through a parenting magazine.

Meanwhile, Lucas was looking at the clock on his phone like his life depended on it. He was trying so hard to focus, but his mind kept wandering away to where it wanted to be, with Maya, to find out if they were having a boy or a girl, to see how their baby was growing and if all was going well… When class was dismissed, he was as good as gone once he could gather his things, except…

"Mr. Friar, a moment?" his professor called him back with a wave of the hand. Lucas froze mid-stride, turning back to the man.

"Uh, any chance it can wait until next week, Professor, it's just I've got an appointment and…"

"Unfortunately, no, please, sit," the professor pointed to one of the seats in the front row of the classroom. Lucas stared at him, strongly considering just leaving anyway. He might have done it, too, if he wasn't so concerned with ensuring that he kept presenting himself as he should. He went to sit, feeling his phone vibrate in his pocket and forcing himself not to check when he knew already what it would be.

Maya: I know you're just getting out of class, and no pressure, but the receptionist says I have to go in before too long. Hurry up but be careful? I'll try to hold it off as long as I can, but I'm telling you, it's already rough. That was so much water!

By the time he would see the message, it would be a good ten minutes later, closer on fifteen even, and it was accompanied by a confirmation that she was being called in. Lucas could only do his best and compartmentalize his talk with the professor and his desire to reach that clinic as soon as possible and all in one piece. He ended up grabbing a cab, where he was able to text Maya back and tell her about being held back.

Lucas: I'm on my way!

He sped through the clinic doors, where he was pointed over to an exam room. He was still catching his breath when he finally reached her.

"I'm so sorry…" he breathed. "Tried to tell him… Wouldn't let me…"

"I know," she reached out her hand for him so he'd come toward her. He walked up to the big chair where she still sat and kissed her, finding her smiling. "I'm just glad you're finally here."

"Where's the doctor, did you…"

"Stepped out for a minute, it's fine," she waved this off like she'd been waiting to get to say something. "So, you're a guy," she started, gesturing toward him. He tilted his head, blinking.

"Last time I checked, yeah," he couldn't help but chuckle. "Why?" She nodded past him.

"You tell me," she made a small face somewhere between sheepish and amused. Frowning confusedly, he turned around, finally registering the screen, frozen on an image he could somehow recognize as their baby, in all its fuzziness. For a second, he was forced to realize he had indeed missed it, which made him sort of sad, but then he was looking at their baby, and the details were so different from the last time they'd seen…

He knew without knowing when he saw what she'd wanted him to notice, and for a moment he just kept staring, and staring, and then… His feet almost tripped up on him, which was saying something, seeing as he was standing in place, and his head whipped back to look at her, with that growing smile on her face. I owe her a pizza…

"I really tried not to look until you got here, but then I saw and… well, you can't unsee…" She didn't say anything further here, as he leaned forward and kissed her. A boy… They were having a son… All of a sudden, it didn't matter so much what he had or hadn't pictured in his head. He couldn't wait for the day where he got to hold their baby boy in his arms.

As they'd returned home, there really was this buzz in the air between them, brought on with the knowledge that their baby was coming along right on schedule, that he was doing well, that he no longer had to be an it… At the same time, it left them with a bit of a choice to make. It was one thing that they had found out. Were they planning to let the others know, too? Their friends, roommates, families?

"Maybe we should," Maya offered as they were nearing the house. Dylan had been kind enough to drive Lucas' car back, after he'd left it at the university earlier, so they had taken the bus and were now walking along, arm in arm. "I have a feeling either of us could slip up at some point."

"Yeah…" he agreed. He usually had a pretty good poker face, but on this he just knew he would give himself away. "How do you want to do it?"

"I mean, I had time to think about it earlier," she pointed out, hoping not to make him feel bad for being late. "Instead of having to plan this whole big thing like it's some huge deal to everyone, I'm thinking we send them all a message… maybe while we're in Tucson this weekend. Equal opportunity all around," she lifted her chin. He laughed.

"I like that. We can take a picture when we're at the hotel or something."

"And watch our inbox implode," she nodded.

Keeping the lid on their little secret was easy enough for the fact that they hadn't specified their intent to find out what they were having to anyone but the two of them, still, there were a few close call in the day that followed, all the way to the point where they'd been dropped off at the airport for their short flight to Arizona.

Maya slept the whole way, literally dozing off even as the plane took off. She woke again just as they were being informed that they had successfully landed.

"We're here already?" she mumbled, turning her face up.

"Blink of an eye, right?" Lucas smiled, brushing hair from her face as she seemed to realize she had been asleep.

Maya had never been in Tucson before, and while Lucas had been, once, he had been no more than four years old at the time, so his recollection was lacking enough that they were on even footing. Somewhere over the next two days they would maybe get the chance to go around the city a bit more, but for the time being, they just headed straight for the hotel, where they checked in and soon decided to order room service. Only after they'd eaten did they bend their thoughts to this reveal to their friends and families.

"So, how do we do this?" Maya asked him with a giddy smile.

"I don't know, I tried to think of something while we were on the plane, but it was all a bit…" he shrugged.

"What, corny?" she filled in, chuckling. Again, he shrugged, evasive enough to suggest 'corny' was right on the money. "In this case, isn't it kind of appropriate? We're being all braggy and showy about our baby… our son," she pressed on, knowing it would get a smile out of him, and possibly a tear or two. It did not disappoint. "Yeah, see," she pointed at him. "So, come on, lay it on me, Dad Man," she insisted.

"Okay, but I'm leaving anything art-y in your hands," he countered, to which she gave a 'humble' tip of the head.

Not long after this, in Austin and Houston, in New York and Boston, many a phone came alive with a message from either Maya or Lucas, with the same text. Thought you'd like to know… Attached along with it was a picture. It showed the two of them, as she sat just before him, although their faces didn't appear, the picture instead framed roughly around Maya's belly, her shirt pulled up enough to expose it. Thanks to the assistance of some hastily bought electric blue eyeshadow down at a nearby drugstore, which they'd brushed on to part of his left hand and her right, they had curved their thumbs and index fingers, which they held joined somewhere about her belly button, to create a heart.

"They're going to figure out what it means, right?" Lucas asked, as they were cleaning up their hands a minute later. By way of response, his phone and hers started giving a chorus of notification bells.

"Think they got the message, yeah," Maya laughed.

Much as he had wondered if maybe the anticipation of the next day, seeking out her aunt, would keep her from finding sleep, Lucas had barely come back from brushing his teeth that he saw Maya was already sound asleep, turned on to her side in wait of his joining her. Instead of getting into bed right away though, he couldn't help himself, and he went and knelt by the side of the bed, for a bit of one-on-one chat time with the sprout.

"Hey, kiddo," he spoke quietly, letting his fingers graze their way under the hem of Maya's shirt until he could lay his hand flat over the bump. He stole a look up to her face, checking that he hadn't awakened her. "We didn't really get a chance to talk last night, even though I really wanted to say something. So, listen, I know that your Mom and I made kind of a big deal about you being…"

The moment he felt it, he froze. Was that… No way… He must have imagined it, flexed his hand or something.

"Did you just…" he started to ask, but then just as quickly reached up to give Maya's shoulder a careful nudge. "Hey, wake up," he spoke, a little louder now. She grumbled, halfway sleeping still. Lucas reached for her hand, brought it down to rest where his hand had been a moment before. "Alright, if that was really you, how about an encore for your Mom, huh? Maya, come on, I think he's…"

"What are you…" Maya muttered, coming around to more awake, which came right on time. Lucas saw the surprise in her face at once.

"Did you feel that?" he asked. "I was just talking, and then he…"

"I did," she nodded, completely more awake now. She was speechless now. It wasn't exactly going to win any soccer match, but it was definitely something, and she'd felt it… They'd both felt it, one after the other. Her response now, in lieu of the words she couldn't get a hold of, was to laugh, running her hand over her belly of her own accord now. For nearly an hour after that they just lay there, big spoon and little spoon, with their hands laid side by side, waiting, trying to coax another manifestation with words and songs, but those two separate instances were all they got for now. That was alright though, it was something, it was contact. Their little boy was making his greetings.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners