Chapter 70
Where Dreams Are Made

One day, they would be able to tell Elliott Friar all about the first time he went to New York and how wonderful of a time it had been. His parents certainly looked forward to a time when he would be old enough to actually have memories of being there. For now, he was seven and a half months old, and while the power his tree had in allowing him to fall asleep in his crib said a lot in how he was growing and developing, this… This was something else, this was… a land for stories.

The flight had come so close to being incident free. Lucas had gotten Elliott to go to sleep shortly before take-off, and the boy had remained that way, snug against his father's chest, Opie Bunny gripped in his little hand, for a good hour. When he woke up, he was passed over to his mother, who handled his transition into wakefulness like a pro. For a little while after that, the baby was content to sit there in her lap, where his father and grandfather on either side could join in on the mission to keep him jolly. He was fed, and he was told a story, and he became very popular, as happy cute babies were prone to be, with the passengers and attendants nearby.

Where the bump in the road came, breaking their spotless flight, was when Elliott informed his adults that he was in need of changing. When he started to cry, they figured out why in no time, and Lucas got up to get hold of the diaper bag while Maya got up and moved into the aisle. They'd decided already that she would handle the changings unless for some reason she couldn't. So, off she went, with the crying baby, who was giving no care for anyone else's issues with his volume. At the very least, it got them up the line in an instant. It was not the most comfortable experience for mother or son, but they got through it. Elliott had had just about enough though, and now the flying didn't entertain him anymore. He spent the rest of the flight – ten whole minutes – being rotated between his mother, father, and grandfather, as they tried to bring him back down from his distress.

Elliott finally dozed off, taking his cries with him, as everyone was standing and gathering their belongings to get off the plane. None of the rest of the party had really decided what they wanted to do upon landing, but that last stretch had made up the decision for them. They were going to the hotel and checking in. They would choose what to do after that.

"The room is almost ready, they just need to get the crib up there," Kermit came back from the front desk to where Lucas and Maya waited with the baby. "We can go up now if you guys are set."

The room was just… so much more than they had anticipated. The one time they had really splurged on a hotel room had been the night following the wedding, and even that almost felt like standard fare compared to this one. Kermit had that look to him that said 'I know, it's a lot, but under these circumstances, I figured why not.'

"I asked for the room with the best view of the city," he went to the windows, and he smiled back at them, waving them over.

Lucas had Elliott in his arms in that moment, as the boy was just starting to wake up again. He turned him around until the baby's back was to his chest and he could look out the same way he did, coming to the window. It was really something. Maybe Elliott wouldn't remember this, but in that moment he was absolutely entranced by what he saw, babbling along and waving his fingers at the glass.

"There are a lot of trees down there, yeah?" Lucas smiled, looking down at him. Hearing a click, he turned his head to find Maya and her phone. She smiled, shrugging. Had to. "That's where your mommy was born, El," Lucas looked back down to their son, still fascinated by the view. "And your grandpa, too," he turned his head to look at Kermit now, finding him entirely happy for this moment.

"How would you guys like to go to the park?" he asked.

Their trip would be somewhat dictated by the places they would or wouldn't be comfortable in bringing Elliott, but this by no means meant that it would be bad, not even close. If anything, it would make it better. Anywhere they wouldn't feel at ease gathering as a family… well, what was even the point of going?

For Maya, to be here now with her father, with her husband, their son, and the baby in her belly… It might have been the most at ease she'd ever been, to be back in the city of her birth. Ever since she and her mother had left for Texas when she was thirteen, every time they had been back here for a visit, there had always been something… a disconnect. It didn't mean that she was unhappy to be here, not by any means, no, but it had never compared to when she'd been here, when she'd lived here. This time though, to be back here with her family in this way, showing her son the place where she'd grown up, even if he wouldn't remember this… She felt so happy, so at home, and she wanted to pass that feeling on to Elliott, to the Bee, in whatever way she could.

X

Three days later

"Your dad's asleep out there, how's this guy doing?" Lucas asked, whispering, as he approached the bed. Maya sat there, holding Elliott and watching him as she gently rocked him to sleep.

"Getting there," she replied. Lucas came and sat with her, looking down to their son, all curled up in his mother's hold, eyes all of a sliver left open and fluttering and Opie Bunny against his cheek. Lucas traced his finger along the boy's brow, brushing at fine blond hair, before looking to his wife's face. There, he thought he saw some distance between her mind and her eyes. He'd figured the moment they started preparing to head back to Texas would be difficult for her, for a number of reasons, but this felt like more than that.

"Hey," he tried to meet her eye. When she looked at him, he let out a breath. "What's going on?"

"It can wait until we're home," Maya shook her head. "This weekend has been so good, I don't want to end it like this. Wasn't it the best? Like a honeymoon… Still haven't had a real one of those…"

"When we finally have our honeymoon, our 'real' one, it'll be just you and me, you know that?" Lucas tried to get her to smile. He succeeded, about halfway at least.

"Great, so we should have one of those in about three years, provided we don't have another kid until after that," Maya nodded. "I have to say, I don't feel good about our odds," she indicated herself, holding their seven-month-old son and all the while doing her best to keep him off her belly, where their second child went on growing.

Whether or not this trip counted as anything close to a honeymoon, it had absolutely been wonderful.

They had spent the rest of Thursday just sort of taking in the city, letting it back into their bones, their lungs… Just making their way to the park, both Lucas and Maya could see how happy Kermit was, pushing Elliott's stroller as they walked. The two of them were just as happy to go hand in hand, and even though they were nowhere near the old diner, there was a moment where they were sure they had started thinking about the same day at the same time, the day they had shared their first kiss, back when they had still been some months away becoming a couple, when they had still been figuring out these feelings in their hearts. They were definitely going to go out there while they were in New York. They wanted to go and sit in that booth, with their son, wanted to see their initials if they were still under the table, wanted to see the look on April's face when they came along… Last Katy had heard, the waitress was still out there at the Nighthawk Diner.

The time they'd spent at the park that first day had been like something out of a dream, or a movie. It was a perfectly sunny day, a nice breeze… For January in New York, they couldn't have asked for anything better. Maya had brought her camera, and she snapped many shots out there, as she would in the days to follow. She could have stuck to her phone's camera, but for this trip, for what it was at its heart, whether they cared to think of it or not, she'd needed something more.

"Oh, you know what, we are almost at…" Kermit paused for a moment as they walked on from the park, looking like he had half a memory rising from his brain and was attempting to recall the rest of it. "Over there, come on," he led the way, and Maya and Lucas followed, if for no other reason than that he was once again leading Elliott's stroller. When Kermit stopped, they did, too, though neither one of them was sure where they were and why he was so interested in showing them.

"Why are we at a bus stop?" Lucas asked.

"It's not just any bus stop," Kermit shook his head, and that pulled another memory loose, this time out of Maya, who blinked and gasped as she looked around.

"That was your school over there?" she pointed to the building up the street. Kermit nodded, smiling. "This is where Mom told you… about me," she stated.

"It's also where I spoke to her for the first time," Kermit revealed. "I'd seen her at school, in class, yeah, but I could never work up the courage to speak to her out there. Your mom back then, oh, she was something else, and that's saying a lot. But then one afternoon I was leaving school, and… here she was… Don't know how I got myself together enough to do it, but I went in there, and I started talking to her. Ended up getting on the bus with her when it came, too, even though it wasn't my bus. It would still get me home sooner or later, with a few transfers and about a half hour more than my usual route, but I never regretted going with her, not one minute. A lot of my life happened because I spoke to her that day, the good, the bad… I kept taking the bus with her, every day for about two months before she figured out I had been going so far out of my way – literally – to spend time with her. That's how we started. I still took the bus with her, even when she knew where I actually lived. She found it sweet. And then, yeah, one day, we sat in here and she told me she was pregnant, told me we were having a baby."

And he'd been shellshocked at first, but very soon he had been so on board, enough to convince Katy to keep the baby, and from there the rest was history, with a baby girl called Maya, and twenty-two years of joys and sorrows, leading them to this moment. More and more it became impossible for her not to feel how much small instances, small choices, could ripple out into such massive changes down the line. One small moment…

Whether or not they had intended for this trip to turn into something like a walk back through history, Kermit's, and Katy's, and little Maya's, after the bus stop, that was what the next few days had turned into.

After dinner on Thursday, they had spent the evening at the hotel, the better to let everyone recharge for the next day. Early after breakfast the next day, the quartet had taken off once more, now with something of a mission guided by Kermit. He took them to see where Katy had lived, which was to say Betsy Young's former apartment building. Maya had never met her mother's cousin, though she'd heard enough tales that she could just about conjure her up in her mind.

Kermit also took them to his family's old house, the place where he had lived from the moment his parents had brought him from the hospital, up to the day they found out he had gotten Katy pregnant and they kicked him out… or his father had at least. Maya and Lucas had not realized this was where he had been taking them, not until they'd arrived, and once they did, they could only wonder why Kermit would bring them here, of all places. The reason, of course, was that despite the terrible way in which his time here had ended, a lot of it had been really good, and he could not forget it.

"My room was up there, that window," he pointed. "I used to be able to climb down the side of the house… and up the side of the house…"

"Between you and Mom, it's no wonder I got so good at it," Maya joked, making him laugh.

The Hart family had not lived here in a number of years, but there were still plenty of people along the street who had been here for decades, enough to see the little group from their window, or outside their homes… A few of them had merely watched from a distance, while a few of them had come along, reuniting with the former neighborhood kid and receiving him gladly. Maya and Lucas could tell these people had been friends, back in the day. One of them in fact had taken him in, that first night after he'd been kicked out, maybe thinking the break could be fixed. But there had been no use, and Kermit had been forced to move along. When the old woman had discovered she stood in the presence of her former neighbor's daughter, and his grandson… They'd ended up spending hours at her house, hearing tales of little Kermit and Luna.

Friday night, when they'd been back at the hotel, after Kermit had gone to sleep, Maya and Lucas had cooked up a plan which felt much too last minute to work, but somehow it had come together. Saturday morning, they had essentially taken charge of what they would do for the day. They had taken Kermit to breakfast, and as they'd still been eating, a pair of men had walked up to the table. The moment he'd turned around, Kermit had reacted with overwhelming happiness, recognizing two of his old friends from school.

As amazed as he'd been for the fortunate encounter, he had soon discovered that they had been invited here. It seemed someone had reached out to them late the night before. Kermit had turned to his daughter, found her smiling. All it had taken had been a call to Luna, back in Tucson, and she'd told them exactly who they needed to find. This had turned into their Saturday morning, and with more faces appearing as time went on, it felt as though they'd staged a pop-up high school reunion. Maya could just see how happy it made her father, and her camera worked relentlessly.

Much as he'd tried to go on without mentioning the fact that he was terminally ill, tried instead to focus on talking about his family, both here and back in Texas, near the end of the encounter – which lasted through the afternoon and into early evening, requiring them to relocate a couple of times – he'd almost had no choice. He'd been hit with a dizzy spell and nearly slipped out of his chair. After that, he'd had no choice but to tell his old friends the truth, that he was dying, that he had all of months left, and he was here to say goodbye to the city where he'd been born and raised.

"It was too much, all of this, what if he's so weak he can't fly home?" Maya had asked Lucas, whispering, after they'd made it back to the hotel and, as usual, Kermit had gone to bed early.

"He'll be…" Lucas had started to say, before deciding against saying 'okay.' "Look, how about we just stay here tomorrow, take it easy, all of us," he suggested, setting a hand to her belly.

"He's not going to want to," Maya shook her head. "It's going to be his last day here, not just before we go home, but…" But his last day in New York forever.

Maybe to give them an out which would not involve them coming up with a lie to keep them where they were, Sunday morning had started off with a thunderstorm, a heavy one. So, the day started with having to calm Elliott, who did not enjoy the loud noises one bit. By the time both the baby and the weather had lost their edge, they had all been left to enjoy a quiet time in their room, so they could allow themselves one more adventure. They had gone to the Nighthawk Diner.

Their arrival very quickly reminded Maya of the time she had walked into another diner, back in Austin, and Asher's uncle had spotted her with her belly full of Elliott. At the very least, here, no plates had been dropped to shatter to the ground, though there had been a resonant shout, as April the waitress had come and wrapped Maya in her arms, pulled back, looked at her belly, hugged her some more, crouched down to meet Elliott, recognized Lucas from his last visit… The fact that she also saw Kermit and reunited with him so civilly, they could guess that Katy, in the conversations she'd had with her former co-worker in the past year, had mentioned how Kermit had regained welcome status among the family. Maya remembered more than one time where she had overheard the woman say things about her father. One such time, April had spotted her, and when she'd realized she must have heard, she had been so apologetic, with words, and with a tuna melt. Maya had never had illusions of her liking her father after that.

When they had gone to sit at their old booth, Maya had needed Lucas to confirm for her that the initials were still there, as she could not make herself bend down to see. He looked, and he reassured her that the carvings were still there. They soon found themselves telling Kermit the story of their first kiss, seven years ago, they realized, almost to the day. That small fact had seen them through the afternoon, that and the food, and the company. Then, it was time for them to go back to the hotel, to start packing up for their flight the next morning.

Lucas had seen to most of that, convincing father and daughter to rest up. He had no idea then that, in those last few hours, there had been this thought growing in his wife's mind. Actually, it had been coming together almost as long as they'd been in New York. And no matter how much she tried to deflect with jokes, it didn't feel right to him to leave her with those thoughts unattended for another day.

"Maya, I can tell something's bothering you," he told her, and the shift in her face said enough. She wasn't able to ignore it either.

"I've just been thinking a lot about… my father, seeing him out here this weekend, and what's coming down the line for him, for Abigail, and the kids."

"Yeah," Lucas replied. What else could he say?

"And that made me think of us, and Elliott, and the baby," she looked down, one arm supporting their sleeping boy, the other draped over her belly. "What happens to them, if something happens to us?" she looked back to him, and Lucas finally got what had been on her mind, at least in part. "We never really discussed it when he was born," she looked at Elliott. "And we should have, shouldn't we? Who would get him if we never made arrangements? We should know this, and now there are going to be two of them, we need to know."

She was right, on every count. They should have decided already, and now they needed it even more. Neither of them wanted to think of a world where their children would be made to grow up without them, but then things happened, didn't they? How much of their great big life had been set in motion by mere instants? It could all happen so fast, one second they'd be here, and the next… The thought settled in him like shivers, and he had to reach out, cradle his boy's head, show that he was here with him, even as he slept.

"Maybe we should wait until we're back in Texas," he slowly spoke.

"It's too late now, I won't be able to…" Maya shook her head.

"Alright, okay," Lucas breathed. "What are you thinking?"

"At first I thought about my parents," Maya confessed, and he could hardly blame her for it. His first thought would have been of his own parents, too. "But they already have the twins, and MJ, and Alex, and it wouldn't feel right to saddle them with two more, even if they would say yes right away."

"They would," Lucas agreed, holding a smile in his mind, for Katy and Shawn.

"And Abigail, well she's got four of her own, too, older, sure, but then once my dad…" Maya paused, breathed out. "I think it should be your parents," she stated, with the calm of self-assurance.

"You do?" he still asked.

"They don't have any other kids to look after, and they love Elliott so much we still joke about them not giving him back," Maya chuckled. "And beside all that… They raised you. If that's not a rousing endorsement on their parental skills, I don't know what is." This made him laugh along, left him with a smile that carried on.

"I like that plan. I hope it never has to happen, but I like it."

"Once we're back in Austin, we should talk to Topanga, she'll know what we need to do. We'll have to ask them, too. Your parents, I mean."

"That conversation should go well," Lucas breathed out, imagining how his mother would react to the double concepts of 'what if our son and daughter-in-law died?' and 'what if we raised our grandbabies?' The latter could not happen without the former, so that just put a pin to all of it, didn't it? "We'll talk to them, as soon as possible, I promise," Lucas nodded to Maya, and she nodded back.

After sitting there for a few seconds, both of them watching Elliott, so carefree in his sleep, no clue of the terrifying thoughts his parents had just had to face, Lucas got hold of him and carried him to the hotel's crib before moving back to get his wife on to her feet.

"What are you doing?" she asked, curious.

He brought her up to the windows, overlooking the city. The moon and the streetlights gave the view a completely different appearance, but it didn't make it any less stunning. Tomorrow morning, they would be flying home. The next time they would see New York, they would have fond memories of this trip, but also… Also Kermit would be gone, wouldn't he? It would not be unlike the first time Maya had come here, after the move, and for how good it had been to be here this weekend, she did not look forward to feeling that happiness come crashing down.

This wasn't now. The time wasn't here yet. She had to remember that, had to remind herself. For one night more, they were in this beautiful room, and all was well.

"I'm really glad we decided to come," Maya hummed. Lucas put his arm around her, leaned in to kiss the top of her head.

"Me, too," he told her.

"I can't wait until they know this place, too," she added, running her hand over her belly, thinking of their Bee, and their Sprout… "It's a part of them, their history. They deserve to know it."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners