February 16th 2023

Chapter 47
We Wonder What To Say

As they drove up to the house, neither Maya nor Lucas knew exactly what they would be walking into yet. They had never needed to wonder that their daughters would have been seen to, that their people would have collected them from school and gotten them through dinner, and bath time, and eventually bed time... They didn't make it back before darkness had fallen and if they'd managed it then, by all rights, every little Friar should have been sleeping, completely unaware of the tragedy that had befallen them. Even knowing this though, when Maya had parked and everything became quiet, neither she nor Lucas made a move to step out. They just stared at the house, the low glow of light where it could be seen through the windows...

"Hey..." Maya finally turned to look at Lucas. She was worried for him, and how could she not? His mother had just died, as unexpectedly as one could. Never mind that he'd have to pass this grief on to their girls, he was still at the very precipice of his loss. Nothing made sense, nothing could. For all they'd both gone through over the years, this one...

"I just... I need a minute," he quietly told her.

"As long as you need, yeah," she promised. "Do you want to be alone for a bit?" she offered. Seeing him process the question, she guessed that the answer was not so much that he wanted it, but maybe he needed it. "I'll go see how it is in there."

"Yeah... alright," he replied, so she moved to get out. "Maya?" he spoke and she turned to look at him again. He didn't need to say a word. She scooted nearer again and embraced him, pressed one kiss and another at the side of his head, then one to his lips before setting her forehead to his. She believed they would get through this somehow, but it wouldn't have felt right to suggest it, so she didn't. Instead, she got out and started walking to the porch.

Walking into the house, she found her parents sitting on the couch, and it was hard to explain what it felt like to see them after everything that she'd experienced over the last several hours. When they got up and approached her, she very quickly stepped up and hugged them as one, let herself be hugged by them as their daughter who needed that parental comfort for herself.

"Lucas?" Shawn asked.

"He'll be a few minutes," Maya told him. "The girls?"

"Asleep," Katy replied, in a tone to tack on 'as far as we know.' It was all any of them could ever say. Right here, they could only catch her up on their side of the afternoon and evening.

It had once again fallen to Cory to pass on the news, this time reaching out to his best friend, to let him know about the elder Friars' accident and what had come of it. For Shawn as for Katy, once she'd been told, it had been at once a devastation and a call to action. They had known Melinda as a very close friend even before they'd all shared in their titles as parents, in-laws, grandparents... They all had so much history together across the years, and to hear that she'd been lost... They were suddenly stuck between personal grief and awareness of their daughter, and their son-in-law as he now grieved his mother. And they had to think of their granddaughters. Two of them were already in their care that day, and they struggled with the relief they couldn't help but feel, thinking that this day Mackenzie and Aubrey had been with them and not in that car with their other grandparents.

They'd seen to them all night, no worry about it, but... well, some worry, and the top one in this: how were they going to go along as though it was a regular day once they went to collect Marianne and the triplets, and they asked the very obvious question: where were their parents? 'Something came up' could be a very manageable half truth with most of them, but it wouldn't fly with all of them. Lucy was giving airs of her aunt Gracie sometimes with how discerning she could be, and the excuse might not have been good enough for her, but then there was Marianne, and no one who knew her in the slightest could believe that she'd leave it at that. They'd done their best, but even without having told her anything, they weren't so sure that she hadn't at least gone to bed with mistrust and unease.

Maya had time to go up and quietly look into both rooms, to see that three girls slept in each room and had in both cases ended up huddling together in a single bed to do so. Whatever they did or didn't know of this day, there had been enough of a dissonance that they had been sure of one thing: they didn't want to be alone. When she got back down, she'd made it halfway when she heard the door. Lucas was finally coming inside. Katy and Shawn were both understandably cautious about how to approach him, in respect to how he might have felt about how much was alright or too much.

All he could say, in complete honesty, was how thankful he was to the both of them for having been there that evening. Yes, it went without saying that they would be there for them and for their granddaughters, but it wouldn't have felt right to him to leave gratitude unspoken... today more than ever. They didn't stick around very long after this. They could see that both Lucas and Maya were absolutely drained and, although there was no certainty that they would get much in the way of sleep that night, they had to be given the chance to try.

"Hey, come here, sit down," Maya touched Lucas' arm when they reached their room and he looked about to lie down just as he was. He didn't resist her for a moment, so she went ahead and helped get him changed, after which she did the same for herself while he lay down. When she joined him, he was staring up at the ceiling, lost in his own head. She turned on her side, toward him rather than away as she'd done for years, the little spoon to his big, and did her best to be the big spoon for him this time, protective as she tried to encourage him toward sleep. She sang for him, hummed, soothing as she would be for their daughters.

There was no telling if or when this worked or how well, but in time they opened their eyes and the sun was rising on a new morning. Maya was awake, and she could see Lucas was, too. How long he'd been awake, that she didn't know, but she could see very well that what sleep he'd gotten had been disturbed and sporadic.

"I don't... I don't know how to do this to them..." he spoke, his voice about as weak as she'd ever heard it.

Her heart nearly broke at hearing it, especially as she knew just what he meant. They were going to have to tell their daughters what had happened. There'd be no hiding the strangeness of the days to come, least of all the state their parents were in, or why Pappy Tom was hurt, or worst of all... Where had Granny Mel gone? The words he'd found though, those were as precise as they were painful. They were not responsible for what had happened to her, but they'd be the ones to lodge the fact of her death in those girls' hearts forever, and they couldn't bear the idea of ever causing their girls any harm.

"I keep thinking about everything Riley had told us, when my grandmother was sick, when we knew that we were going to lose her, but it doesn't feel right with... this... They saw her just two days ago and she was fine, she was..." Something halfway between a sob and a laugh came from her and she wiped at new tears on her face. "She was asking Mackenzie what she wanted to do for her birthday. Didn't matter that it's still two months away."

"No, birthdays always start early, otherwise how's it going to be just right," Lucas recalled, and for a few seconds they just lay there, stricken with the impossible crossing of happy memories and the knowledge that everything would be different now without her.

The silence was broken by a short, pained gasp, and they both turned their heads at once, knowing deep down what it would be even as they wished that it wouldn't be. But there she was... Marianne... and that gasp had encapsulated the very moment when she understood what she was hearing and knew...

"Pumpkin..." Maya breathed, feeling her firstborn's ache coming off of her in waves in the second before she turned heel and bolted for the stairs.

Both Maya and Lucas hurried out of bed and went after her, just far enough back that she had time to get downstairs, into the kitchen, and pick up the phone, dialing her grandparents' number.

"Marianne... They're not there," Lucas gently told her. She stared at him but didn't let the phone go, just kept squeezing it. "Pappy Tom is at Mike and Keith's house," he revealed. He knelt down before her, gave her arm a light squeeze even as he very carefully took the phone out of her hand. The call went to voicemail, and to hear Melinda's cheerful voice emerge from the receiver, it rattled him enough that his own pain passed, undeniable, over to his daughter, and she knew that it was true.

"Sh-She can't..." she cried, voice shaking, eyes overly bright and welling up. Lucas held her gaze, cupping her face in his hands. He thought the same thing. When she just broke down, he closed her as securely in his arms as he could make her and let her cry along with him.

Maya could only stand by them and leave the moment to them even as she felt the helplessness in her heart. But then she had to think of the others, upstairs, and just now she could hear movement. Of course, they would have woken up after all this. She went to climb back up to the first floor and soon came upon five little blondes huddled at the top, looking down at her through the bars next to the stairs.

"Hey..." she quietly greeted them, wondering what her face must have looked like in that moment even as she tried to be encouraging without being overly cheerful; it would have been disingenuous. "Come here, it's okay. Come here, baby," she climbed up until she could scoop up Aubrey, which was as good as the others needed to start and move to follow her.

Thinking better than to assume that Marianne would be ready to rejoin her sisters for a while and also trusting that Lucas would see the need for her to carry on without him for this part, Maya brought the triplets and the little sisters to sit in the living room. And she told them. She didn't give them the exact and detailed explanation as to why they no longer had their Granny Mel, but she told them how she had gone and passed, in as gentle but truthful a way as she could. She did her best with this and with the reality that they were going to be seeing a lot of their people be very sad for a while.

There was no way to do it right. Michael had told her, as his sister had once told Lucas, and that was as true as it got, wasn't it? Aubrey and Mackenzie would need the most time to grasp it all, and they would do their best to see them through it all, whereas their older sisters... For what they did and didn't understand, the one thing that stood out was this certainty, awful as it was, that they would never see their Granny Mel again. There was sadness, disbelief, certainty that this wouldn't be true... But then when their father and their big sister joined them, with those looks on their faces... It was a lot harder to do anything but feel the terrible truth in them. Now, all they could do was hold to one another and try and get through this day... and the one after that... and each one after.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners