April 10th 2023

Chapter 100
We Move Toward Pumpkin Season

After just a few weeks of having her sisters living with them in the house, Maya and Lucas could both say how glad they were to have them there. They'd all looked forward to this time, all of them for their own reasons, and now that it had arrived, they were even more excited for the next few years. There had been this brief concern – a silly one, now that they looked back on it – that they would be disappointed, the sisters in particular. They'd waited so long to get to live together again, like they'd done when the twins were very little, when their big sister hadn't yet left for college. What if it didn't work out? What if they couldn't do the living together part when they were all older now?

That wasn't what happened at all. The fact was that Nellie and Gracie had lived in that house for all nineteen years of their lives, and they were living somewhere else now for the first time… and also starting out college. They may have stayed in the city of their births, the city where they had always lived, but they had stepped out into the world, good and proper, and that was a big, scary step. Thrilling, in so many ways, but also scary. In a situation like that, where could they have landed that would have been any better than in their big sister's house?

On their first day of class, as hectic as it was for all of them, especially with the girls being in a mood as they'd been, Maya had driven them to school. They hadn't gotten to do things exactly how they'd planned, but oh, they would have shown themselves to not know their sister very well if they believed she'd leave it there. She'd wanted this day to be great for them, wanted to make up, in what ways she could, for some of the time that they had missed. Even now, after a few weeks of their first semester, she would come up with ways to surprise them and make them laugh; she never failed.

It hadn't been easy, any of it, so having this home to go to at the end of the day, that had been so much more helpful than they'd anticipated. They had their jobs, and they thought they'd had the split between working and going to school under control, after working all through high school, but they'd soon learned that holding down a job in high school and doing the same with a college courseload was a whole other beast. And as for the courses, well… Some were easier to handle, while others were getting to feel very heavy, with both hands supporting the weight and knees almost buckling underneath. Between them and Wyatt, who was in the same situation but with a baby on top of it all, the three of them had taken up to settling under the skylight in the art space outside their rooms, sitting on the beanbags and alternating who got to hold Finneas.

And when they weren't all working, or at school, or studying – which did happen, despite their sometimes lamenting how much of the rest there was – they had their boyfriends, and their friends, but as much as possible they would try and give over their free time to their family, whether that was their parents and younger siblings still living at home or their big sister and her family in the house. They loved especially how they got to share time with their nieces, sharing their gardening knowledge and working with them to put that into practice in and out of the house. They had stuck their green thumbs to their sister's house long before they actually lived there, but now that they were here, both Maya and Lucas had made it very clear that this was their home in every right, and that included the garden. They could already see signs of it all over the place, but to no one's surprise, the thing they had been most excited about, where gardening and the Friar house met, was the pumpkin patch.

They had been obsessed with it since they were kids, and now that they were here all the time, they couldn't wait to get even more involved. They were getting so close to 'the big day' for their pumpkins, the ones growing in the patch and the human girl as well, and they were so ready for that.

The same could be said for the whole family, whether it was Lucas and Maya, who counted Halloween as one of their favorite days since one night in a haunted house, or their daughters, whether or not they'd been born in the middle of a costumed party, or any of the three college student siblings now living up in the former attic. And while they still had a while to wait for the fairies to make their nighttime visit to bring Christmas cheer, right now they all looked forward to bringing a bit of… Hallowannie mayhem into the world, first at home, and then at the ranch.

That day, home decoration day, Maya and Lucas woke up in turn to the sound of small feet running by… and giggling… and feet on steps… and talking and laughing from above… and a baby crying…

"They're all up there, aren't they?" Maya mumbled. They paused, barely awake minds and ears listening, counting…

"Sounds that way…" Lucas replied in much the same tone. When Maya finally made herself turn on to her back with a sigh, she turned her head to look at him and smiled. "Good morning," he smiled back.

"Could be good…" she whispered. "Could be so very…"

"Mommy! Daddy!" a voice – Lucy – called from the stairs.

"How did we manage to have six babies?" Maya sighed.

"Kind of took a shortcut with two through four there," Lucas reminded her, and she smirked. "Want me to go, or…"

"Pretty sure she wants us both, come on." They got out of bed and stepped into the hall just as Lucy came down the last steps, and they watched her stop on that last one before very slowly bracing herself and taking a small, controlled hop down. She was not adventurous, this one, no, but she would 'test' her limits every once in a while, especially if no one was looking, and she would smile to herself. Of course, here, she realized that her parents were right there, and she leaned on the wall with an innocent smile.

"Hi!" she greeted them.

"Morning, bun," Lucas tipped his head to her as though he hadn't seen a thing and did not at all feel the urge to laugh. Maya needed a few seconds more to get that under control herself.

"We put the things up for Hallowannie in the morning, right?" Lucy asked.

"Yeah, we are, just after breakfast, okay?" he replied, and that was all she needed to start heading up the stairs again, the better to tell the rest of their decoration team.

Breakfast had never been such a busy thing as nowadays, with twelve people in the house and eleven of them in need of a plate. Wyatt would see to Finneas, as he always did when he was home. That didn't stop him from participating, like the others, in the meal prep. He kind of liked that part of the day the most, and he wasn't the only one. There was something about the process, with all of them cooperating… By the time they'd all be sitting around the table, everyone served, it would really feel like a family meal, and they couldn't wait to get started.

Where the kids were concerned, now, with what was ahead of them, it felt a lot more like their parents, aunts, and uncle had to convince them to take their time with it all and not just hurry to shovel it all in so they could get to decorating faster. They almost had to remind Marianne the most, not because she had no self control but because, while at her age she had a bit more control on chewing and swallowing, the same couldn't be said for her younger sisters, and they were all back on the 'Annie is our queen, let's do as she does' train, so if she ate too fast…

All small blondes made it through breakfast without obstruction, and so everyone went and got dressed so they could get started on turning their home into a den of spookiness. Marianne's bouncing pumpkins headband made a return, as did the several other pairs bought last year so that her sisters could all have their own and celebrate with her. It made for a very strange image as the morning progressed. On the one hand, they would give their house a very respectable Halloween vibe, enough to make some people young and old feel a big uneasy, but at the same time, there would also be six young blondes running around with springy pumpkins waving madly atop their heads.

"You're not going to have nightmares up here, are you?" Lucas asked the green room trio when their room's transformation was completed. Marianne, Mackenzie, and Aubrey all shook their heads, making the pumpkins bounce and each other laugh. "Well, if you're sure," he held up his hands in surrender. They were big girls, big Hallowannie-loving girls. There were some far sillier and harmless things for them to be scared about in the world, but their room was not part of it.

"It's okay, Daddy," Mackenzie nodded. "Granny's gonna keep us safe." Aubrey approved of this statement with a nod, while Marianne looked at the two of them and then their father with a near nervous look, which gave him a very good idea of where they'd gotten that idea. It didn't upset him. If anything, it made him smile.

"I'm sure she is," he told them all, looking to Marianne especially when he said it. She smiled and nodded. "Actually, can I tell you all something?" Of course, he could. "I don't think she's alone, protecting you guys." They all looked at him, intrigued. "Sometimes, I feel like my Nana is here, too."

"Nana Susannah?" Marianne's brows lifted.

"Like Remy!" Mackenzie thought aloud.

"Yeah, like her," Lucas smiled. As different as the girl and the woman were from one another, he really felt that they could not have matched their daughter better when they'd chosen her middle name. "You know who Nana Susannah is, right? She was Pappy Tom's Mommy, and she lived in this house."

"She's with Granny Mel now," Marianne told her little sisters. They were still very little, but they'd had to be sold on the existence of this place where their grandmother had gone, a place they couldn't visit. When they heard this, they nodded like it all made sense suddenly.

"If you ask me, her spirit never left this place. So, if you get scared, you've got the two of them there to remind you that you're safe."

"And Granny Lizzie?" Marianne asked.

"Oh, definitely," Lucas agreed, and he could see her consider this, take it in and exist with the idea. It all meant something else to her than it did her little sisters.

When they'd check in on the girls that night, after bedtime, they'd find them all sleeping peacefully, in their spooky rooms, none of them looking at all like there was a nightmare in sight. In the room down the hall, along with his sleeping firstborn and youngest two, along with Artie, and Honey Bee, Lucas and Maya would both spot a new addition to the décor, from after everything they'd done earlier. On the window ledge, eight of them in a row, there were the battery-operated 'candles' they had earlier been unable to find. They could have been an added night light, cutting through the dark, but in thinking how they, in essence, kept the nightmares at bay, their meaning became clearer. They were Marianne's ghosts, there to guard her and her sisters, and their whole family. They'd spoken of Granny Mel, and Nana Susannah, and Granny Lizzie, but they saw the other lights and they didn't have to wonder who they were for. Simon and Marianne Sullivan, Jax Murphy, Kermit Hart… One more… Lambert Day.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners