May 7th 2023

Chapter 127
We Remember Life & Love

Dear Mrs. Friar,

Of all the people I might have written or spoken to today, yours was the very first name I thought of, so I decided to sit and take out some paper and a pen. It has been seven years today. Seven years since my brother passed away. So much has changed in my life, in my family's lives, but no matter how long it's been since he's been part of it all with us, Lambert is fully a part of each and every one of us, like I know that he's still a part of other people's lives beyond my parents and brothers, from all his friends and on to you, his teacher. I know he meant a lot to you, and I'm sure you know that you meant a lot to him, too.

When I woke up this morning, the thought that kept coming to me was one I couldn't see myself sharing with just anyone, and I'm not even sure why, but there it was. I woke up, and I looked around my apartment, at the number of things piled on my desk, or around my desk, or pinned to the walls, or left lying here and there around the place, all of it seeing me through med school and on my way to where I want to be and need to be, and I thought to myself 'I wonder if he'd be proud.' It's silly, I know, because of course he would be. He was always proud of me, no matter what I did. There's these videos of when I started to learn to walk, and Lambert was barely a couple years older than me, but you could see him in there and as happy as everyone else was, Mom, Dad, Dakota, Roman… Lambert was just the proudest of all of them because his baby brother was walking. That was the attitude he had about everything else I did, too, and none of it was put upon. He would have been proud.

Of course, if he hadn't died, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now, would I? My life might have been completely different. Except we would always have ended up here, wouldn't we? Lambert would always end up dead the way he did, and I would always be the one to find him there, unless by chance something could have led us to discover there was this thing in his head just waiting to take him from us. No matter what, I guess I was always going to end up here. I just wish I didn't have to lose my brother in the process. One day, I could get to save someone else's brother, or sister, parent, child… If I just got to do that, then… I don't know, I can't say that it would make what happened worth it, not when that meant that Lambert was lost, but then at least it won't have been in vain, right?

That's really all I wanted to say. I needed to get it off my chest, you know? I hope you're having a good day. Is Mr. Friar doing alright with his recovery? Say hello to him from me, too, will you?

All the best,
Anton Day

.

Dear Anton,

I'm not going to tell you what you already know about what Lambert would have thought, because you already figured that out for yourself. I did appreciate the visual of the story you shared with me however, and I can see exactly how this would have been his way. Sometimes it feels like it's been so long since I got to know your brother, but if I ever get to think this, it never lasts very long. It has been years now since he was taken from us, and I still see him. I see him in the enthusiasm of every student who joins the musical. I see him in Ella, and Taylor, and Lea, who have not for one second forgotten their friend. I see him in your brothers when I see them, Dakota especially, whenever he and Emma are around. And I see him in your parents, who I know will have that same pride your brother would have had in you, possibly that much more of it.

The day the anniversary went by, I know we all thought about him, just as you did. Here at home, the girls and I baked a cake together, and maybe most of them didn't understand why we did it and only figured we did a cake just to make a cake, but Ella was there, and she knew, and Marianne did, too. Ella told the rest of them all about your brother and how much he meant to her as a friend. Tori told them about him, too, because even though she was only a baby when he died, she grew up hearing all about him from her mother and her friends, now her stepfather…

Mr. Friar is doing well. He's still got some way to go in his recovery, but he's making progress. As it is, he's got other things on his mind, too, with a similar anniversary coming up in a few weeks' time. The thing about grief like that is that it hardly ever touches only one person. He's got the rest of us around him, as you have your family around you. I'm still very touched to know that you count me as someone you can reach out to, and rightly so.

Please don't hesitate to drop by at any time,
Much love,
Mrs. Maya Friar

X

Getting into the first month of the new year had gotten to feel like a strange sort of roller coaster in recent years. They'd start with the high of the holidays' end, and then the return to school, only to take a bit of a dip when they'd come across the anniversary of the loss of Lambert Day. After that, there'd be a bit of a lull, only to start a steady climb again, as they knew what the advancing month would bring: Maya's birthday was coming up, and in a house filled with her husband, daughters, and siblings, it was practically a holiday onto itself.

This year, seeing as he was home most of the time, with a lot of freedom afforded to his 'schedule,' Lucas saw it as more than enough reason for him to commit to giving his wife an excellent birthday. He had plenty of input from others, some more discreet than others in how they passed their ideas on to him. Ella was very good with the covert messages, slipping in a code word that would tell him to give her an all-clear once he was sure that she could write him, and he could write back without her mother becoming in any way aware. Marianne, meanwhile, had identified a very secret hiding place where the two of them could leave notes for one another, and this bit of correspondence was just the brand of sneakiness he could get behind.

Going down the list, the triplets each had a similar approach of trying to sneak up and talk to him when Maya wasn't around, but then if she did happen to walk into the room while this was going on, they would all try and act cool and natural… with varying degrees of success. After that, despite the ineffectiveness when it came to remaining covert, he had to say that he had a distinct love for the little sisters' methods, especially Mackenzie's, who would plainly turn and go make her mother leave if she was around, by either pulling her away or pushing her, the whole time with a sort of 'no, Mommy, you can't be here' look to her. Aubrey, meanwhile, would look very stressed, like she might get things mixed up and say out loud the things she was meant to whisper and vice versa, so she ended up saying nothing at all, twisting around like she needed to use the bathroom.

It was helpful then that they at least had their aunts and uncle in the house, the better to coordinate 'the committee.' Wyatt had his part, and Nellie and Gracie had theirs. These days, they were more than happy to use the gaps in their winter semester schedules to return home and be with their brother-in-law to talk a few things over. They all knew exactly what they were dealing with, as Maya was fully expected to drop in over her long afternoon breaks where she could, so she could be with Lucas a while. She wouldn't say that she was checking on him, even though that was basically what she was doing, and Lucas wouldn't treat it that way. At this point, any chance to spend more time with her was a good reason, wasn't it? This one definitely fell under the heading of unexpected, but they would take it. Now so far as the planning went though… If she came home unexpectedly and found her husband and her sisters busy together, there'd need to be a valid reason, the better to throw off suspicions.

"You know, we wanted to do this for so long, back at Mom and Dad's, but they said it'd be 'a bit much.' This isn't too much, is it?" Nellie asked Lucas. She and Gracie were sitting on the ground, up on the second floor, looking around their sister's art space.

As much as getting up and down this many stairs was still a lot for him to do, some days more than most, Lucas was very glad that he'd come up for this, as much for their plans for the birthday as for the day's subterfuge, which had led the lifelong young gardeners to give a notable update to the second floor's plants. They'd had several of them on the former trap door stairs, which had been transformed into part of the shelves where Maya, Lucas, and now their daughters kept any number of their old things, from student files to ranch documents, to artwork and photo albums… But now the twins had expanded this, adding some hanging plants that traversed the space – and that was definitely the right word, traversed – to add some greenery up above, around the skylight, and the windows looking out on to the lane and their neighbors' houses. The Friar girls had taken to standing up here to communicate with their aunt Maisie across the road, with a flashlight and a self-developed code.

"No, not at all, it's great," Lucas told Nellie, and he meant it. Between these and the lights, and the desk, the awards case, the shelves, beanbag chairs, and various toys left behind, the room felt even more like itself than it had before, like the added plants had always been missing, and now they had been added at long last.

Having the two of them there that afternoon, even though they had come specifically to plot for their sister's birthday, it reminded Lucas of how glad he was that they were here with them, living at the house since the end of last summer and for the next few years. Even though it had not been an immediate thing for him to look at the two of them and see the widespread impact of his relationship to their big sister, he had known the two of them since they were born, and they had very much been the first people he'd known in the world and counted as being his sisters. It had been years before he'd said the word or even really thought it, but even without that he had felt it. Here were his little sisters, and he was so glad to have them in his life.

"I think I heard a car," Gracie sat up, and in an instant she and Nellie scrambled over to the window, keeping low. "Maya's here," she reported, and Nellie shuffled back before looking over to her brother-in-law.

"What do we do?"

"What do you mean, 'what do we do?'" Gracie turned to her twin, exchanging a look with her that felt like an entire conversation in and of itself.

"Right, no, yeah, I got it, I got it, come on," Nellie got up and pulled her sister up to follow her. They rushed downstairs to go meet Maya at the door, the better to show her what they'd done. Lucas just waited where he was, chuckling to himself.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners