Chapter 56
There Is Only Reality

After the day they'd had, with the constant roll of emotions brought on by the doctor's appointment and a triple round of baby reveals with their parents, Lucas and Maya had returned home feeling like they could not wait to be back with their boy. Elliott had quickly shown how this feeling was a mutual one, greeting his mother's appearance with such a smile as to light up her soul. The four of them had a quiet evening, spent in part with Lucas sharing the pictures they had gotten from his parents. Pappy Joe had received these with some smiling of his own, finding images of his late wife along with their young grandson. It didn't take much to get the man sharing stories, and with this, well… they were set for the night.

In time they had all gone off to bed, carrying those stories with them like tickets to sweet dreams. Even so, when Maya opened her eyes next, it was still very dark, and the clock informed her that she had been in bed for all of two hours.

For a long while, or what felt like a long while, she stayed as she was, only moving so far as to seek a new position which would have half a chance of returning her to sleep. This wasn't even a case of bodily discomfort, or any number of pregnancy related issues. She'd had them all, and it was way too early for any of them. Anyway, it didn't take a genius to figure out what might keep her up. So sure, she knew why she was awake, but that didn't mean she wouldn't do everything in her power to ignore it and drift off once again.

Another look at the clock showed she had only been awake again for about a quarter of an hour.

With a sigh, she sat up in the quiet, moonlit room. For a few seconds she just sort of… waited… like she expected to need to run. It was silly, just a bit, but after the previous morning's return to all of that, she had to wonder.

Instead of a feeling somewhere in her chest though, what pulled her from bed was the light sound of Elliott in his crib. He wasn't sleeping either, and any moment now he was likely to wake the others up, too, if no one intervened. So, Maya stood, carefully creeping across the room to look into the crib, getting hold of Elliott's hand for a moment, and smiling as she watched something like understanding wash over him.

"Hey there, Sprout," she whispered before she picked him up. "Now what's got you awake now, huh?" A quick check showed this was not a diaper situation. "Well it's not time for you to eat yet, so you just close your eyes for now, yeah?" She walked with him, back and forth across the room, for a few minutes. Now and then she would try and see if he was asleep again, but she'd find him just as awake as before. So, they kept on walking. Maya hummed as lightly as she could, so not to wake Lucas while also hoping that the vibration in her chest would work to slowly soothe Elliott right off to sleep. "I will keep on rotating through those lullabies as long as it takes, you know that?" she told him, after they'd gone through several of them. "And then I will start over if I have to, but I'd really prefer if I didn't, so let's sleep, yeah?" She really wished she could take her own advice right about now, especially when her yawn went and just got Elliott crying.

"I'm up…" Lucas jolted awake, sitting up, and Maya sighed, already working to calm the baby down.

"I'm sorry, it's fine, go back to sleep," she told Lucas, shifting into more calming steps, willing herself to be the embodiment of calm so their son might feel it, too. "We're alright, aren't we?" she asked, kissing his head as she moved. It was no use though, and the longer it went on, the more it got to feel like she was failing, and then her calm demeanor would reveal itself for being a total sham. "Fine, tag in," Maya breathed. She went around the bed and passed the crying boy into his father's arms.

"Mr. Elliott, what is the matter?" Lucas inquired, rubbing at his back.

"I think I kind of spooked him and…" Maya told him, feeling something in her throat now but not the something that would send her for the bathroom. It was a wave, carrying a swell of emotions she hadn't seen coming until it went and crashed over everything. "It was just a yawn, I didn't…" she tried to breathe deep, to stop from crying, but it was no use.

"What's happening? Hey… Maya… Maya, look at me, talk to me," Lucas pleaded, finding himself all of a sudden between his son crying in his arms and his wife having some kind of break. He couldn't exactly set Elliott down and tell him to wait.

"I couldn't… sleep, I… There's too much, in my head, I thought I had… a handle on it, it's just, I don't know…" she gestured around them. Another breath, another… Keeping the baby close and shielding his eyes as best he could, Lucas stood up and went to turn the lights on, bringing them from the dark. Here they were, in their room, they could see it again. To be honest, he'd been expecting this for a few days already, since the afternoon when she'd told him they were having another baby. As much of a change as the first time had brought into their lives, now, with this second go around, it was like they were so much more aware of what they were getting themselves into. And yeah, he was concerned, too, but it wasn't going to hit him the same way it would for her.

"Maya, hey… I'm right here, we're right here," he reminded her, looking to Elliott, who was thankfully responding to all of this by starting to calm down. He wasn't there yet, but he was on his way, and that made one of them. "Everything's…" She looked at him like she knew he was about to say the word 'fine' and she wholly disagreed with it. "Nothing is wrong right now, is it?" he redirected, applying to logic. She looked at him, considering his words but keeping quiet still. "And it doesn't have to be, or at least… whatever comes, we can deal with it. Look at us, we're here, we're doing great, aren't we? Look at this guy," he turned about, giving a look to Elliott. The baby was quiet now, blinking his little eyes. Maya was looking at him, and when she touched his hand he looked, and he found her, and he reached out for her. Without a moment's thought, she was reaching for him, too, and Lucas passed him back.

"Hey, baby boy…" she breathed, doing a bit of calming down, too. She had him now, and then Lucas had the both of them, as he put his arms around her. Maya lay her head to his shoulder, and for a little while they remained this way, the three of them huddled together… Four of us… "I don't know how to not feel like this, like everything is about to just implode and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

"Just talk to me," Lucas quietly pleaded, stroking her back with one hand, joining the other to the hold on Elliott. "Don't hold anything back." She didn't reply right away. Caught up as they were in this family hug, she just wanted to soak all that up, which would be so very hard if she started to air out the things she was just now trying to push back into the recesses of her mind. But she felt… she felt her son's tiny fingers poking at her chest, where they'd reached over her collar. She felt his little body all warm and alive and clinging to her… And she thought about that other baby, still so small and so far from being someone able to live outside her body, left to her care, to get him or her to the point where they would be a family of four… She considered herself, and her husband of a month and a half…

"You know, I just realized… I would already have been pregnant, the day we got married," she stated. Lucas smiled.

"Yeah, guess you would have been," he leaned to kiss her forehead. "That'll be a story one day." They were quiet for a moment. "Maya…"

"I'm just… I'm scared, okay?" she cut in, grabbing her courage with both hands as the thoughts were hoisted back into the light and away from the confines of her mind.

"I am, too," Lucas told her. "I'm trying to look on the bright side, to say that everything will be alright, because maybe it'll be easier to make sure this comes true if I do." Maya looked down to find that Elliott, after his lullabies and all that crying, had finally gone and fallen asleep. She let out a breath. Rather than to return him to his crib, she kept him there in her arms as she pulled back from Lucas' hold and went to sit on the bed. Lucas came and sat with her. They would talk this through. It was the only way to try and chase some of those fears away.

"When we were expecting Elliott, we were both in school, and working. Then I had to stop, when I got further along, and we moved here, and I was going to take a year off school, and I'd go back to work. We had a plan. The last few months, I've been focusing on him, like I'm supposed to, like I wanted to," Maya looked down to their sleeping boy, feeling that quake in her heart, the one she got when she'd look at him, from the day he was born.

Sometimes it didn't feel as though her body could ever contain her heart, for how full it had been made, being Elliott's mom. Now that little quake felt different, as though everything was being made to expand, to account for the child growing inside her, and this left her heart just sort of… tender, sensitive, and all the more vulnerable to incoming troubles.

"Except now, next fall, when I'm supposed to go back to school, I won't be able to go. I'll have another small one just like him, holding on to me, depending on me."

"You can go the year after that," Lucas quietly replied, not wanting to get in the way of her saying her bit but also feeling as though he needed to speak up.

"No, I don't think I can," Maya replied, lightly stroking the baby's cheek with her thumb.

"Maya…"

"I'm not saying I'll never go back, it's just… We're going to have two of them to provide for now, and school is expensive," she looked at him, and all he could see was how much it pained her to make this choice but she was ready to make it anyway, for their son, for their children. "We always said we wanted to provide for our family ourselves, didn't want to depend on our parents so much that they became a crutch, so much that we couldn't do this without them."

She was right, of course she was, and still he hated this. He hated that she was the one who had to give something up like this. He would have done it, in a heartbeat, if it meant helping her, helping them, but that didn't work so well, did it? She was having the baby, she was caring for Elliott, as she would with this new boy or girl expected in the spring.

"I could take next year off school, stay with the baby and Elliott," he still had to offer it, even if he knew she would say no. "You should get to continue," he pressed on. "You have two years left on your degree, and me… five more years… Which one of us is going to have more student debts to pay?" This had given her pause. He'd made a fair point and she couldn't deny it. Still… she didn't want him to have to do this. That didn't mean she had much of a choice to address the possibility.

"You've wanted to do this for as long as I've known you, and before that, too," she looked at him, those big sad eyes…

"And it took you all this time to find your place," he countered. "I don't want to take that from you, I… I want you to have that, more than I want to be a vet." He was telling the truth, she could see it, and it struck her with a combo of knowing how much she loved him, and how much he loved her, too. She held on to Elliott with both arms in order to lean forward and kiss her husband.

"No one's making decisions tonight, okay?" she had to ask anyway.

"Sure," he shook his head.

"But if you do this, then you need to finish your four years somehow," Maya declared. He opened his mouth to counter, but she was ahead of him. "If you don't go the whole eight years, you need something else. We both finish," she told him, holding out one hand, waiting for him to shake it, binding them to this vow. They were making a new plan, and right here was the start. Just looking at her, he could see some of her assurances strengthening again, and after seeing her not too long ago… He shook her hand.

"We both finish," he repeated, and she nodded. Good.

"So what would you do?" Maya asked. "You're just starting your third year, but there's the whole… trajectory, with the other school…"

"I might have to go an extra year," Lucas spoke as he considered the question. "I'll have to go and talk with someone about all this, see what I can do to make sure I don't have to graduate much later than I would have if I'd gone in like this from the start."

For a little while he sat there, thinking about his options. All this time, since they had learned they were going to be parents the first time, his entire goal had been to keep going, to get through his years and get the job in the end, to provide for his family. Now, that family was expanding much faster than they had anticipated, and the goals had to change. If he wasn't going to be a vet, then… what would he be?

"Are you okay to get back to bed now?" he looked to Maya, who was definitely starting to look like she was dozing off.

"It's almost time to feed him," she shook her head. "I've got him. And you have class in the morning."

"I don't know if I can even fall asleep now," Lucas sighed, rubbing at his eyes.

"Lie down, I've got this," she smiled at him. He chuckled, doing as he was told. If he could feed that good mood in her, he wasn't about to deny her. So, he lay down, and as she went to turn off the lights, Maya started back on her lullabies, soft like a dream. She returned to sit up on her side of the bed, with Elliott good and snuggled up, where she could reach over and trace her fingers along Lucas' arm. It made him laugh. "Shhh, you have to sleep now," she 'scolded' him, and he gave her a look of amused apology before complying.

Soon, he slept, though Maya carried on, her voice lightly filling the room around them. She felt better than she'd done earlier, when she'd woken up, and there had been… everything that had followed… The conversation had helped, set her back on balance, but she knew it wasn't a resolution, it was a barely traced road map. Right now, it was all she had to hold on to, if she didn't want to feel the way she'd felt before.

Elliott had woken up just as she'd come to expect he would, she'd set about feeding him. She looked at him, and already it felt like she couldn't see him without thinking about the other… her little Bee. They were a pair now, in her heart and her mind, and when she looked to the future, it all revolved around the two of them, and Lucas and her, as they set the world in motion for their children. They were the reason she was so afraid now, their lives, their future… She thought about her own childhood, the difficulties she and her mother had faced. The circumstances here were different, she knew that, but even so the very idea of those kids getting anything less than a wonderful life…

All these years ago, when she and her mother had come to Texas, they had left behind a chapter of their lives, made something new together, and it had been so much better than what they had back in New York. Maya had not forgotten, not any of it. And then she'd gotten pregnant at the age of twenty, just two years older than her mother when she'd had her, giving birth to her son then at twenty-one. Much as her circumstances had been different than her mother's, in almost every way, she had been reasonably concerned at the thought of doing right by this child. They had support though, so much of it. This house right here, that was their biggest miracle, and then they had Pappy Joe, and they had all those eager grandparents… Her parents had had none of that, only each other, just about, and then… then it had just been her mother and her…

No one would blame her for being concerned that history would find a way to repeat itself, not even Lucas, who was just… so unlike her own father had been, back when she was a kid. Despite everything she knew, all the things that should have reassured her they had a handle on things, she remained afraid. Maybe… maybe a part of that was because of her father, about the idea that she might lose him, much sooner than either of them would have hoped. It was all just so much to think about to begin with, ensuring that they would give their children the lives they deserved, without adding to it the idea of losing her father just when the two of them were starting to be good for each other.

Later on, when Lucas would wake up to start and get ready for class, he would wonder how much time had passed before Maya had finally gone to sleep. She was sleeping now, next to him, turned on to her side so as to face him, with her hand there on the mattress as though she had dozed off looking at him. He very carefully leaned in to kiss her temple without waking her, before getting up and heading over to the crib, where Elliott was very much awake, too. He was twisting about, like he might be trying to turn over on to his tummy, though he stopped and reached out a hand at once when he spotted his father's face swimming overhead.

"Morning," Lucas whispered, picking him up and kissing him on the cheek. "Think we have time for a quick story, huh?"

Next to the rocking chair, he found a notepad and pen, scribbled over with Maya's handwriting. There were words, and notes, in the format that could only be lyrics. Lucas was proud to say that, thanks to the guitar lessons he had gotten from Willow, he could recognize the melody Maya had traced in, and he knew it was Kermit's lullaby, the one he'd composed for her, when she had been a baby. He had never written any words, had struggled now to even remember how it went, and he had told Maya she could rectify that, find the words now, so she might pass the lullaby on to Elliott. There had been so much going on since that day, and she hadn't done it yet, but now…

"Look at that…" he whispered, looking down to Elliott, who was busy attempting to get his hand in his father's nose. Keeping a playfully wrangling hold on his son's hands, Lucas had read the words, imagining her sitting in that chair, exhaustion challenged by inspiration. She might not even remember doing it until she saw the page again. Lucas left it on the nightstand next to her before leaving the room so she might sleep on. She would still be asleep by the time he came back up – Elliott left in his great grandfather's care – to get dressed and leave for the day. First thing he would do, when he arrived at the university, would be to make an appointment to speak with someone about his new academic plans.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners