Chapter 88
We Are Made of So Much More

July 2024

"Can I hold him?" Ariel asked, pointing to the baby. She had only just come from Dr. Eisley's office to find Maya there, with the stroller. Elliott was sitting in her lap, wriggling like he wanted to walk around and wasn't being permitted, while Noah lay contentedly awake in his seat. Maya didn't make it a habit of bringing them along, not because she didn't want to but rather because it had become their routine for Lucas to get this time with the boys while she was here. But he had a dentist's appointment today, so here they were.

"Have you ever held babies before?" Maya smiled.

"Yeah, my cousins when they were smaller, and my neighbor's kids," Ariel replied. "I babysit for them sometimes."

"Have a seat then," Maya nodded. Ariel moved around and picked up Noah from his seat before sitting down at Maya's side. It was easy to see she was indeed familiar with handling small children. Noah certainly didn't look disturbed by any means, and then Ariel just looked overjoyed to get to interact with him, brushing at the curling gold on his head, holding his hand…

"Dr. Eisley is going on vacation for three weeks, did she tell you that?" Ariel asked, finally allowing herself to look anywhere that wasn't aimed at the boy in her arms.

"I saw, yes," Maya nodded.

Actually, she'd heard about it, when she and Cara had gone to deliver the cake for her daughter's birthday, a few days back. The girl's actual birth date wasn't until next week, but the family would be out of town at the time, so they had gone ahead and had the party while they were still in Austin, with family and friends all around.

She got a sense that the reason Ariel brought this up now was that she dreaded it. She'd come to rely on this routine, with the sessions, and she wasn't sure how she'd do without them.

"Do you like going to the mall?" Maya asked, finally standing up and putting her older son on his feet, the better to let him wander while keeping an eye on him. Her mother would joke that 'his Maya' was starting to show. The kid liked to explore, at the peril of his fingers and toes, not to mention his parents and grandparents' nerves as they sought to prevent injury.

"Kind of," Ariel replied. "I usually go in the bookstore… for hours," she revealed, and Maya laughed. Yeah, that tracked. "Other times, I mostly follow my mom. She loves going into those stores with the soaps, and the home stuff."

"Well, I go to the mall, mostly to go around with these two," Maya nodded to her sons, even as she moved to covertly redirect the Great Adventurer. "So, I'm thinking, we've got this time that just opened up. Maybe we all spend it over there. You, me, your mom, these guys… It'll be as close to this as it gets, while the doctor's away," she shrugged. "What do you think?"

She liked the idea very much, and when her mother finished with Dr. Eisley and came over, smiling as she saw them all there, Ariel asked her mother if they could go and meet Maya and the boys at the mall on their appointment days. Nadia took one look at her happy face, and it was settled. She and Maya exchanged numbers, and they were set to meet – at the bookstore – the following week.

X

This time last year, as mind blowing as it would be to think about it, they were tending to Elliott, himself only two months old. They were still figuring themselves out as parents, and now… Now they had not one but two children, their beautiful boys, who made their lives better, every day, just for existing. With everything they'd been going through lately, Maya especially, it had never meant quite so much that they got to say those words. In a lot of ways, they were still adjusting to having not one but two to look after, and the learning curve was… complicated. But for all that, they would stop from time to time, and they'd look around, and it would really feel that they were doing a lot better than they realized. The activities were not the new things so much as the need to have more of it. More diapers, more feedings, whether those involved milk or food, more nap times, and play times, and bath times… They could cope fine, they had plenty of hands at the ready, whether those hands belonged to the trio of round-the-clock caretakers, or those who would visit them from time to time.

"He looks like he should be down for the night," Lucas reflected, looking to Elliott as they reached the top of the stairs. He was all curled up in his arms just now, as he'd settled from the moment that he'd been lifted out of his car seat, with Opie Bunny in a vice grip. When Maya turned and saw him like that, she just smiled, looking from him to Noah, sleeping soundly in her arms. It would just feel sometimes like, for as much as they knew to the deepest of their hearts that they loved those boys more than their own lives, suddenly they felt it even harder, even fiercer. And this was one of those moments. She looked back to Lucas now, and he ventured his face was showing that he was feeling it all, too. "Getting itchy drawing fingers?" he asked, reaching out his free hand to brush at their youngest's curls.

"Are you kidding? The queue has been growing all day," she breathed, leading the way into their room.

It had been a really good day, the kind where even if it had not been for the effect of recent months, it would still have been a highlight. But the last few months had happened, and for that… It had been a really great day.

They went to the beach. Maya, Lucas, the boys, the Hunters and the Harts… It was something Maya would never have even dreamed of until… really not so long ago. Her brothers and sisters, all of them running around and playing together, the ones mobile as of yet anyway. But there they were, Sam – Dora, too – Cara, Eliza, Wyatt, Nellie, Gracie, MJ… The bigger ones were more than capable of keeping the littler ones wrangled, though Shawn and Lucas still hovered about. Meanwhile, Maya, Katy, and Abigail would look on from the shade of the area where they'd all settled in, with Elliott, Noah, and Alex. They would swap out, throughout the day, who stayed with the littlest ones and who went off into the water or to play around with the others.

"Hey, ready to trade?" Lucas asked as he first came to relieve one of them.

"I'll return you your firstborn here," Abigail got up, holding Elliott's hands aloft as the boy remained baffled by the sand under his feet, and assisting him on his way to…

"Dada!" he squeaked. Lucas grinned, lifting him up before reaching to adjust his hat. It could only do so much to protect him from the sun when he kept turning his head this way and that, but it had been a gift from Granny Mel, and as she would go on vowing, he looked very sweet in it.

They watched Abigail as she went to rejoin the kids and Shawn. Some of them had gone ahead to swim, while the others were working up a sandcastle, possibly a whole sand kingdom by the end of the day, with the way they were going at it.

"We can watch Alex, too, if you want to go out there," Maya told her mother.

"No, it's alright," Katy insisted, looking to the eight-month-old sat on her knees, his back to her and secured in place with her arms. He would prod his fingers at her, high as he could reach, like they were playing a game of itsy-bitsy spider. They could never fault her for being protective of him as she was, with how close she'd come to losing him before he was ever born. He was fairly small for his age, and he couldn't see, and he would remain her youngest, now that she and Shawn would have no more children after him. If she wanted to stay here with him today, they wouldn't try and talk her out of it.

"Ba!" Elliott exclaimed now, and Lucas chuckled.

"Yeah, okay, let's go," he carried him over and knelt at his mother-in-law's side, setting Elliott on his feet so he might get a look of his uncle. He was getting pretty good at expressing 'you, tall person, I would like to see that thing over there,' especially with his parents and Pappy Joe. And he loved his uncle, just as he loved his baby brother. It was impossible to say just what distinction he comprehended. For all they knew, he saw Alex on an equal footing to Noah. He called the former 'Ba!' possibly short for baby, which was what he used to call Noah. They had said his baby brother's name so many times around him though, and he had started calling out 'Na!' which was really not that far off, was it?

"Hey, Elliott," Katy smiled to her grandson as he reached out a gentle hand and touched Alex' foot.

"Ba!" he spoke, and Alex reacted. He stopped his poking, kicked his feet about, which made Elliott laugh.

Lucas loved the idea of those three growing up together, his sons, and their uncle. If they kept going as they were now, they would be as brothers, all of them, and that was wonderful. Maybe it was that he'd grown up an only child, surrounded instead by friends he had essentially cast as his brothers, but he wanted that for them, too.

Turning back to Maya, he found her rocking Noah lightly to sleep, humming her father's lullaby. Even as she did this though, her eyes were somewhere else, likely taking a sizable portion of her thoughts with them. She was watching her brothers and sisters in the distance, the ones building in the sand, the ones splashing along in the water… She was smiling, seeing them all mingled together, no doubt, but at the same time she continued to be drawn into worrying for her fellow grievers.

In some ways, they were improving, all of them. That didn't mean that they would continue on that upswing, that they wouldn't suddenly find themselves spiraling right back down, and that was what she was probably looking out for the most. Wyatt was still worried about being left on his own, still slept in Sam's room at night. Eliza remained mostly silent, though she had opened herself to the occasional word.

Cara… Well, there was another incident, only this time it wasn't an understanding older sister who'd busted her but a store clerk. Abigail had been called in, and though Cara had been let off with a warning, that only went so far as keeping her out of trouble with the store. With her mother, it was a whole other story, and as repentant as Cara was, it didn't change the fact that this wasn't the first time, and Abigail knew it now. After they had spent the day together, Maya had revealed to Cara how she'd seen her that day, and she'd also convinced her to tell her mother the truth. Now, after this second time, the deal was enacted between them. Cara and her mother had decided that she'd continue on as she was for the time being, that she wouldn't go and see Dr. Eisley just yet, but if the time came when a bigger reason came along… and it had. She'd been going for a couple weeks now, accompanied by her grandmother. They went on different days from Maya, as they had all agreed it would be easier for her to focus on herself if her big sister wasn't there, too. So far, it was going well enough, though it could easily be that Cara was underplaying it.

As for Sam, out there now filling a mold with sand for his little brother and MJ, it was kind of hard to say. He'd be off having a great time with Dora, the two of them being just the teenagers they deserved to be. They would be seen looking more and more like a couple, like they were finding their way as boyfriend and girlfriend. And then all it would take would be for one of his younger siblings to have a bad day, or his mother, or his grandmother, or… well, himself, too, if he was able to recognize it as such, and then he'd be back on with his need to look after them and ignore everything else. Sure, it wasn't bad for him to be attentive to his family, far from it. But it was like all this time, every step he took with Dora, took him closer and closer to opening up his own baggage and emptying it out. And then every time he was called back, the baggage would be forced shut again, possibly taking on a further charge, making the whole thing heavier than before. They couldn't force him to unburden himself, it had to come from him, but if it didn't happen, then…

It was something like a half blessing that Kermit and Abigail had moved to Texas with the kids when they did, so that they could all be together, them and Maya and him. Just thinking of how it would have weighed on Maya, if she'd been here and her siblings had been across the country, dealing with all this… It would have been a nightmare. Now… They were here, and she could do her part to help them, sure, but it didn't fix everything either. It couldn't, and it wouldn't. So, she'd just have to do the part that she could do. They all would.

"You want to go?" Shawn asked Maya when he returned, MJ perched on his shoulders. They'd both gone for a swim after the kingdom had fallen to ruin at the mercy of a trampling dog chased by its people.

"Uh…" Maya looked down to Noah. "Okay, but he's giving me those looks like he's about to 'make a deposit,' so, just, you know, keep an eye out… or a nose…"

"Yeah, I'm familiar," her father promised as she stood. MJ was set back in the sand, where he went to see his mother and little brother, while Shawn was passed his younger grandson. "Young man," he nodded to Noah, who responded by clamping on to his beard. "Great, he does that, too. Am I supposed to shave? Is that what these kids are trying to tell me?"

"Don't you dare," Katy laughed from where she sat. "Lucas, you go on, too. We've got him," she indicated Elliott.

Never to miss a chance to go out there with his wife, Lucas collected Maya's hand, and they took off toward the water. Sometimes, he would have to stop and remind himself that underneath it all, under the presence of heavy grief, and the responsibilities of parenthood to two boys as young as theirs, they were still themselves, still Lucas and Maya, barely in their twenties, either of them… They would never regret the path their lives had taken, he was sure, but it didn't mean they wouldn't wish they got more chances to bask in this youth while they had it. He wanted to ensure, almost more than anything, that Maya would know he still saw her as the girl he'd fallen in love with, the one he wanted to spend all his life alongside. This love he had for her had never decreased, could only ever increase.

"You know, it's eyes like those that landed us with a second kid so fast," she smirked as they floated about in the water. Lucas laughed.

"Yours weren't exactly without expression either," he reminded her. She pretended as though she would go and cover her eyes. "Not that it's a reason to deprive me," he asked pitifully, and she let her hand down… the better to splash him, which led him to retaliate by taking them for a quick dive under the surface.

"Well, no chance of getting those 'come hither' eyes now," she laughed, blinking water away. "I'll just have to use the rest of my powers of seduction."

"Alright, I'm listening," he challenged, wishing she could see the smile on his face right about then.

"Yeah, it's not going to happen here or now, not unless you're looking to get arrested. How very un-Huckleberry that would be…"

They were all at the beach until after the sun had set, though they couldn't say that any of them had gone anywhere near the water or away from their spot for the last hour and then some. There was food though, and there were songs, and it was everything they could have hoped for, all of them together. It couldn't last forever though, and so they finally had to pack up and go their separate ways.

Now, here they were, the four of them on the island of their bed, as Maya did as she would, at a time like this. She immortalized memories. She had three sketchbooks to service that night, one that was just the one of the moment, and one each to Elliott and Noah. She'd been adding to those since the boys had each been born, a time capsule of life with them. They would both find themselves leafing through the pages she'd already filled, especially Elliott's, as it had over a year of memories in it.

"We're going to have to be careful, for a while," Maya sighed, when she could finally close her last sketchbook and sit back. She smiled, looking to Noah, who had spent the whole time sleeping peacefully against her. She kissed the top of his head, those lithe little curls…

Lucas looked over at her, and with how she looked at him, he understood what she was referring to. Right around this time last year, they had gone and conceived the baby boy she held, as the one he held was about the same age. They were not looking to end up with a two-year-old, a one-year-old, and a months-old baby by the next summer. But they were also not likely to find themselves embracing celibacy all of a sudden.

"Right," he breathed out, making her laugh quietly. "How long do you think that window's going to stay closed?" he had to wonder. "We're still looking at…"

"If you say, 'seven tall sons,' I will lock that window and throw away the key," she teased.

"I would never," he promised. "Wouldn't say no to one daughter of any size though…" Now she had to smile.

"Wouldn't either," she agreed before resettling her position, all the while minding Noah. "As for when…" she considered the question. "The plan is getting in school in January, graduating three semesters later. After that, well… who knows how long it'll be before I actually get a teaching job. So… little over a year, I guess?"

"We can work with that," Lucas nodded. For a little while after this, they sat there, with their boys, with this thought of more children like them… So much would have had time to change by then, for the four of them, for others around them… And they looked forward to every single minute between now and then. "Alright, let me get this guy in his crib before he wakes up." All this talk of the future made him think how it would feel like no time at all before Elliott needed a toddler bed, but he didn't say it out loud. He wasn't ready for that transition, and he doubted Maya was either.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners