Chapter 16
In Heart and Mind

She had always been an early riser, but somehow waking in a bed that wasn't her own, especially in a hotel, only made this more of a thing. Add to it the growing baby boy inside her and she was unsurprised to wake to sunrise in Tucson.

Lucas was still asleep, and she just managed to get up without waking him. After a quick stop in the bathroom, she lingered on her way to the window, stopping for her phone and a sketchbook and pencil before sitting on the small couch, facing toward the sky colored by the rising sun. Knowing with certain authority that she'd be awake by now, she texted her mother.

Maya: The baby kicked last night! Twice!

Waiting on a response, she looked down to herself and pulled up her shirt a bit, like maybe it would happen again and she'd see… something. She let it down again when her phone vibrated with a response. The first one was a row of happy emojis, then a moment after that:

Katy: Sleep alright?

She sighed, though at the same time she had to smile. She assured her mother that yes, she'd slept just fine. Her mother was very familiar with her hotel sleep patterns, too, wasn't she?

Katy: Nervous?

A breath now instead of expelled in a sigh. She'd say no to anyone who'd ask, even Lucas, even her mother. She would have told them, if not for the fact that, while she was nervous, it hardly felt enough to warrant raising any concerns. How else was she supposed to feel when she was about to go and basically cold call the aunt she hadn't seen in fifteen years? Sure, she was pretty sure she'd be welcomed with open arms, but until that actually happened, well… anything else could happen, too.

Maya: Did you ever try and get in touch with her again?

She'd never gotten the nerve up to ask the question. She knew it had been her mother's call not to have Luna around anymore after Kermit had left, and despite everything Maya did understand why she'd done it. But that had been a choice made in a moment of great pain, and after it hadn't been so fresh anymore…

Katy: No, I didn't. I tried to, a lot of times. Mostly around your birthdays, or when you'd do something and I'd get this thought in the back of my mind that she would have been excited, too. But every time I would think about it, I would think about the last time I saw her, and the things I said to her, and I couldn't do it.

Maya didn't have trouble picturing her mother's hesitation in those moments, same as she understood what she was saying under all that: she was ashamed of how she'd acted, and she hoped she might repair some of it someday. I can get it started for all of us.

She set down her phone when she was done with her mother. Picking up her sketchbook and setting it in her lap, she started to leaf through the pages she'd already filled. She'd started this one in early November, putting to paper what she could, to express the things she felt upon learning of her impending motherhood, of the presence and the growth of their sprout… their baby boy… Soon, that was what this whole sketchbook had become devoted to. Happiness and anticipation, one step and then another…

When she reached the next blank pages, she smiled to herself. Two pages side by side and two new things happening one day after the other. On the left-hand side, she sketched a reproduction of the image they had sent to their friends and family, their hands covered in blue eye shadow, held in a heart over her belly. She'd add the blue once they were home again. On the right-hand side, she created an interpretation of what it had felt like to feel that first kick, not so much the actual kick itself, but that so long sought event. Contact.

"You've been up a long time," a still sleepy voice spoke from over her shoulder. As enthralled as she'd been in her drawing, the room was so quiet that she hadn't been startled by his approach. She looked over her shoulder to find Lucas standing there, taking in her new drawings, while she was much more taken with his bed hair. It was going strong this morning, and she had to bite back a laugh. "Hotel or sprout?"

"Both," she shrugged, as he went to sit at the other end of the love seat, picking up her legs from the second seat and setting them in his lap. "I looked up some breakfast places around here," she took up her phone and held it toward him. "I like this one," she declared, waiting on his opinion.

"If you've been up drawing that long, I'm guessing right now you're pretty hungry, huh?" he asked.

"I'm about five minutes from doing that thing like in cartoons when hungry people see other people as food," she gave a solid nod. He laughed.

"Fair enough, won't keep you waiting."

They got dressed and left the hotel, making their way to the restaurant Maya had found. The place was crowded enough, though not so much that they had to wait to be seated.

"I'm still getting responses from the picture last night, you?" Lucas showed her a message he'd received from Zay. He and Nadine wanted to know if, now that they knew it was a boy, they had decided on a name. And, if they had picked, could they know it?

"He just wants to know if Isaiah is in the running," Maya laughed.

"Isaiah Friar," Lucas tested it out. She gave a cringing smile.

"Don't get me wrong, it's a solid name, just… How do I say this without insulting you, our friend, and the whole of our home state?"

"Bit too… Huckleberry?" he suggested.

"Now…" she gasped with mock hurt, but then he laughed, so she joined in. "I'd be willing to keep Isaiah on the backburner as a middle name for any future sons."

"I like that," he nodded.

"Speaking of names though, I'm starting to have doubts on my pick."

"What? Why?" Lucas asked, blinking. Much as they'd always said they might change it down the line, only making things official once they actually had the baby, he'd sort of adopted the name in the part of his mind that trusted Maya's gut too much to think she'd be wrong.

"Because I just realized it would mean his initials would be A.L.F.," she explained. Off his hesitation, she pressed on with a small nod like 'you know who that is, don't you?'

"Is that… the thing with the puppet?" he asked, unsure.

"More or less, yeah. My mother loved that show as a kid, watched reruns when I was little. Anyway, all it takes is one kid finding out that's a thing, and our kid will have that following him through school," she sat back in her seat with a frown. Lucas found it near impossible not to find it adorable whenever she'd get preemptively incensed over some future trouble for their child.

"Who's going to know his middle name anyway?"

"He's going to be half me, he'll probably get in trouble, and I'll march into that school like 'Alexander Lucas Friar, what did you do?'" Alright, he couldn't hold back the laugh that time.

"Okay, so just don't do that, and he'll be fine. They won't know, so he'll just be…"

"A.F.," she provided, with a raised eyebrow. The first one was cute, the second one had a different potential, or at least it did in her mind, because for some reason, now that she was going to be someone's mom, it was like her brain had gotten itself an expansion pack that foresaw all the possibilities, and about half of them were bad.

"Right…" Lucas slowly nodded. "Is that even going to be a thing by then? It's not even really a thing anymore now." She wasn't paying attention to him, was looking sort of through him or… past him? "Maya?" he waved his hand about until she blinked and looked at him again. "What's…" She pointed past him, looking strangely stunned.

He turned in his seat and looked over the top of the booth, unsure what he was looking for at first, until he saw something that made him give a double take. There was a woman sitting across the restaurant, at one of the tables with chairs instead of booths, with a couple of small girls. The girls were sitting across from her so he couldn't see their faces, but it wasn't them Maya had seen. The woman… He hadn't seen the photo, but he didn't have to. The family resemblance was there to slap him upside the head.

Luna… That was her. And those would be her daughters, Maya's cousins… and her aunt. Of all the restaurants they might have picked, of all the days, and times…

"What do I do?" Maya asked, whispering. Looking back to her, she seemed to be trying to make herself even smaller, so she couldn't be seen. All at once, her small, insignificant worries felt huge and made of stone. Was this a mistake? Should she have called first?"

"Want me to go talk to her first?" Lucas asked, trying to position himself on his seat so that Luna wouldn't see her yet, out of instinctive support.

"What? No, that'd be… I mean…" She closed her eyes, took a breath. "No, I-I'll just…" She reached for her water glass, drank down half of it in a few gulps, paused, took a few breaths, drank the rest, breathed some more. "Be right back. If the food come, don't eat my potatoes. Or anything else off my plate."

She stood up from the booth, absently straightened up her shirt. No chance of unpacking things bit by bit, no, it'd be straight up 'Hi, Aunt Luna, here I am, the niece you haven't seen in a decade and a half because your brother ran out on us and my mom chased you off, oh, also, I'm having a baby.' They'd come all the way to Tucson for her to get to see her again, this was the whole purpose of their trip, and she was being overly dramatic for nothing. She walked slowly across the dining room.

Luna was occupied as she approached her. Both her daughters had been equipped with crayons to turn their blank placemats into masterpieces, and she was listening as they told her all about what they'd drawn. Seeing that smile on her face as she gave them her undivided attention, Maya could remember mornings when it had been the two of them having similar conversations.

"And the unicorn is called Shimmer," said the older one, who'd be Ginny, while her little sister, Sadie, went on to say that there was a unicorn on her drawing, too, but they couldn't see it because it was hiding behind the house. For one split second, Maya thought once more about backing away. But in that same moment, Luna looked up. She saw her. The way she froze, Maya knew she had recognized her.

"Mommy, look," three-year-old Sadie poked her arm with her crayon. "Loo-ook!" The spell was momentarily broken, as Luna blinked and looked back down to her daughters for a moment before looking to the young woman standing behind them.

"Yes, baby, just hold on a minute, alright?" she smiled to Sadie touching her chubby little cheek as she stood and moved around the table. "Maya?" she asked in a sort of trembling voice as she took the few steps to stand before her.

"Hey…" she held up her hand in a weak wave, not knowing what else to say. She was always so quick with a comeback, and right now she really had nothing.

"H-how… You're here, you…"

"Funny thing, I came all the way to Tucson to find you, and the one place I stop to have breakfast first… here you are. I might have missed you if I…" Oh, good, now she'd hit the other extreme, it was either shocked silence or excessive rambling.

Luna inadvertently came to her rescue on that one, because in the next moment she'd reached out and hugged her near, and Maya stopped talking at once, hugging her back. The hold may have lasted longer, and the next one certainly would, but right about now they were interrupted as the sprout gave its other form of contact. Luna pulled back and looked down to her belly. She hadn't even noticed, right up to that moment.

"Oh, by the way…" Maya had to laugh, even as she was coming to discover she'd been shedding some happy tears, just as her aunt did.

"Mommy, who's she?" six-year-old Ginny asked. For the second time in all of a minute, Luna was brought back to reality by one of her daughters. She turned back around, which now presented the two girls with a side-by-side sight of their mother and the stranger. "How come she looks like you?" All Maya could think was that if she ever met Nellie, those two would get on like a dream.

"Well, that's because she's family," Luna explained, turning a smile to Maya, the kind you got when you still hadn't gotten over something wonderful that had just happened.

"She is?" Sadie asked, perched on her knees as she turned on her chair to look at them.

"But we never met her," Ginny maintained her inquiry.

"That's a long story, a… a very long story, and I'll tell it to you someday. But to make it short, this is your cousin Maya."

"Cousin?" Ginny's eyes widened.

"Like Sammy?" Sadie asked, smiling. At this, Maya leaned forward with a smile of her own.

"He's my brother," she whispered, and Sadie looked satisfied enough by this to stretch out her arm to offer her hand in greeting, like she'd seen people do.

"My name's Sadie Chen," she announced. Maya took the offered hand.

"Nice to meet you," she nodded, and that was Sadie sorted. As for Ginny, she was still momentarily held back by the confusion of how this stranger could be family, but if her mother said she was, who was she to argue? So, she did the same as her little sister, and got her own handshake.

"I'm Ginny," she introduced herself. "It's short for Virginia," she added after a moment, like she'd thought 'well, she's family, so she should know that.'

"Got it," Maya nodded. "I'm Maya… That's short enough as it is, and so am I." Ginny and Sadie laughed. Oh, they liked her already.

"Are you here by yourself?" Luna asked now. Her hand had been coming and going from Maya's arm, like she still couldn't convince herself she was really there.

"No, see that guy in the booth over there, trying to look like he's not looking here? That's my fiancé," she explained.

"What's that?" Sadie asked, faced up to a word she didn't know.

"It means they're going to get married," Ginny told her little sister.

"Oh!" Sadie smiled, satisfied that it was nothing bad.

"Oh, get him over here, sit with us, please," Luna insisted, already moving to bring a fifth chair over from a neighboring table. "Don't worry, we're here all the time, they know us."

Taking that walk back to the booth, Maya no longer felt those nerves plaguing her. She felt a kick, actually, and it couldn't have been any timelier. She stopped next to booth, seeing their plates hadn't arrived yet, which was just as well.

"Hey, Sneaky, don't become a spy," she told Lucas. "Come on, we've been invited."

Picking up their things, he followed her over to the table, where one of the waitresses had already managed to pass and add a fifth setting, at the end of the table that would place him between Sadie and Maya. Freeing a hand, he shook with Luna as Maya made the introductions. Both girls held up their hands at once to get their turn.

"Maya said you're… fancy?" Sadie asked, turning to her mother even as she asked. Luna and Maya both laughed.

"Fiancé, baby," Luna told her. Sadie looked at her with a frown like 'yeah, that's what I said.'

The meal continued to be for the most part an interrogation session from the Detectives Chen toward their new cousin and her fancy. To a certain point, this proved beneficial, for Luna and her girls at least, as it provided them with a lot of information. As far as Maya getting to speak with her aunt however, it was not happening. When they were done eating though, Luna was set to drop them off at their father's for the weekend, so she invited Maya and Lucas to join her back at her house.

"Kenneth and I split up two years ago," Luna told them as they drove from his apartment building. She looked to Maya, sitting in the passenger seat. "I could see the question in your eyes," she explained.

"Sorry," Maya still had to say.

"It's alright. Truth is it should have happened a long time ago, but then I tell myself that, if we'd gone our own ways, I wouldn't have Sadie, maybe even Ginny, and I don't regret a thing anymore. I'm just glad we didn't drag it on and get to the point where it could affect them." There was a beat of silence. "Now for a very bad segue, how long have you two been together?" Maya snorted, catching Lucas' eyes going wide through the rearview mirror.

"Uh, officially, six years. There was about a year before that though where we were sort of… teetering on the edge. We got engaged on Christmas Eve," she smiled, momentarily taken back to that moment on the steps of their old middle school, even as her hand went to the ring on the chain around her neck." From the interrogation at the restaurant, Luna had already learned that the baby was due in June and that it was a boy.

There were some bigger questions she was dying to ask, Maya could see it in her face, but she was holding off until they were at the house, not on the road, so she left those alone, too, instead asking about Luna's life here, what she did for a living and all that. She learned that her aunt worked at the front desk in a hotel. When she told them which one, both Maya and Lucas must have had the same look on their faces, which led Luna to guess…

"You're staying there, aren't you?" They nodded. "I'm not in on weekends and evenings," Luna told them, which explained how they hadn't run into her. "But I can get you two a discount," she smirked.

Finally, they were at the house. Luna let them in and just as soon hurried to pick up some toys and books and DVD boxes lying around the living room in the manner of anyone welcoming unexpected guests. At the same time, she looked just a bit frazzled. Maya may have been looking forward to reuniting with Luna for a couple weeks, but Luna had been wanting to reunite with her for years… so many damned years, and she was here. She was finally here.

"How…" she started to ask what had to be the biggest question at the top of the queue in her mind right now. "How did you… I didn't think you'd even know who I was, but you…"

"I…" Maya tried to explain, but words failed her, too. "I guess I didn't… I mean, it was all still there, just way… ways down, but then Kermit, he…"

"You talked," Luna cut in here, like she thought she must have misheard, which would have been something of a feat with someone called Kermit. "You talked to your father? When?"

"He didn't you what happened?" Maya was surprised.

"Something happened?" Luna shook her head.

"He showed up on my doorstep about a month ago to bring me birthday presents from him and Abigail and the kids, and because he'd found out about the baby," Maya explained. "I… wasn't exactly pleased to see him, some words were said, and then he collapsed." Luna listened to all this with a concerned look on her face. "Paramedics got him to the hospital, and that's when I found out about what's been going on with him."

Whatever her brother had or hadn't done when he was supposed to do it, she still loved him very much, and the fact that he had been so ill appeared like a dark cloud over her.

"He couldn't fly home right away, so… I let him stay at the house with us," she looked to Lucas sitting by her side. "Once, he mentioned you and… the moment he said your name, it was like a door blew open and stuff spilled out."

"I've got one of those upstairs," Luna gestured with a faint smile returning to her.

"And then there's these videos he gave me on a drive. I saw you in a lot of them," Maya smiled back. "And I remembered so much more. After that, I just… I wanted to see you again, decided to surprise you." Luna nodded. You did.

"I wanted to come and see you so many times, you don't even know," she breathed out. "Whenever I'd be home from school back in college… One time, I came as far as your building, you must have been around eight or nine. Saw you playing around with some other kids, you looked like you were having fun. I wanted to cross the street, see if you'd still know me, but I… I chickened out. Next time I came, I went right through the door, up the stairs, knocked on the door… Some guy opened the door, said you and your mom had moved out."

Maya imagined that moment all too well, building up courage that came too late and realizing it was all for nothing.

"I used to tell people you were my little sister," Luna looked to Maya with a sad smile. "You looked like you could have been," she shrugged, "And… after a while, maybe that's how I saw you. 'Niece' didn't feel like it fit you anymore. But then…" she bowed her head.

But then, Kermit had left them. But then, Katy hadn't wanted Luna around her daughter anymore.

Maya had gotten up from one couch only to go and sit on the other, putting her arms around the woman, who hugged her back now, without the interruption of curious children.

Once they had pulled away, the conversation had moved into a solid bit of catching up between the estranged aunt and niece. On the whole, Luna was much interested in hearing about Maya's life than giving her the beats of her own life.

Maya gave her the highlights, from growing up in New York alone with her mother after Kermit had left, meeting Riley and her family, which would one day facilitate their move to Texas thanks to a loan from the Matthews which had long been repaid. She told her about how it had been rough for her to adjust in the beginning, how she couldn't have done it if she hadn't met Lucas and his friends. She told her about playing basketball in middle and high school, with a brief move into the matter of the teams being disbanded for two years. It still all seemed like yesterday.

She told her about meeting Sam by chance, and how it had led her to reconnect with her half-siblings out in New York, even as she'd keep a wall up where Kermit was concerned. This much Luna had heard about, through her other nieces and nephews, and her brother and his wife, though she was glad to hear her side of it, too.

Maya went on to tell Luna about her art, how she was currently studying to be an art teacher. She had her baby sketchbook in her bag and she showed it to her aunt, who looked more and more amazed with every page she turned. When she landed on one page where Maya had been scribbling something that looked like a poem, she explained they were actually song lyrics, something she'd been tinkering with for a lullaby. This then led to the revelation that she was in a band. A pretty solid band with followers around the world, as Lucas was so kind as to inform Luna, turning a smile to Maya when she looked at him. No chance you should sell yourself short.

"You sing?" Luna asked with a smile.

"And plays guitar, and writes songs…"

"Lucas!" Maya turned to him again. He shrugged and sat back. His work here was done. She squinted at him; she couldn't even be mad.

This bit of information seemed to strike Luna in particular. As she told it now, she'd been in college all those years ago with designs on becoming a writer. It had never panned out, especially after she'd gotten married to Kenneth, and she'd sort of let it all fall by the side, out of necessity, once Ginny and Sadie came around. She didn't regret any of it, but she couldn't pretend that there weren't days where she still wondered what could have been. Looking at Maya, Lucas could see that look in the back of her gaze like she'd just decided someone needed to do something about this, and that someone was her.

Hours later, Lucas volunteered himself for going out to get dinner for the three of them, leaving Maya and Luna to watch TXNY videos together, anything from the videos accompanying their various songs, to those more like video diaries from the band throughout the years.

"Do you… Are you angry at my mother for pushing you out?" Maya finally dared to ask at one point. Luna looked at her.

"I was never angry at her. In the beginning, I was just… I felt helpless, confused, but at the same time I guess I understood. That part never changed."

"She feels awful about it," Maya confessed. "She won't say it, but I know she does. I think she'd like to apologize, to see you again." Going by the way Luna smiled here, Maya could tell she wanted this, too.

So, there was one big question out. And there was the other, the biggest of the big, and it was the never stated other reason why she'd come all this way. She knew deep down that if anyone was going to tell her what she needed to hear, one way or the other, it would be her aunt.

"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now," she started, and something in her eyes must have telegraphed what she meant. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now about Kermit, about letting him into my life, our lives…

"My brother did a lot of dumb mistakes in his life," Luna told her. "We're talking for as long as I can remember and after he left you guys, too. For a very, very long time, he wouldn't admit that… maybe he couldn't, I don't know. Most of it was silly, some of it was… borderline delinquent… One… One was unforgivable, and that's by his appraisal. When he first got sick, when it got to be pretty bad, he… It was like he'd finally sobered up, and that was what he got out of it. His biggest mistake."

"Leaving us," Maya spoke quietly.

"No," Luna shook her head, and Maya looked up at her, surprised. "I mean, yes, obviously, that wasn't a good thing. He thought he was doing the right thing for you guys, and maybe deep down he was. But everything that came after, not being in your life, being in it in all the wrong ways… He got to feeling like he'd done too much and too little, like no matter what, he'd buried himself in quicksand all those years, and there was no coming back up.

But he tried anyway.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners