January 16th 2024

Chapter 16
The Season For Stories

They had agreed that if they told the children about what was going on with their Aunt Sophie they would want to do so carefully. There was almost no way that they wouldn't hear about what had happened that day, but they might misinterpret things, might be left to think that their aunt had been badly hurt or worse, and they couldn't let that happen. But then Maya made it home and, before Lucas could let her know that it had all come out in the open, Marianne was there, hurrying out to meet her. In times like these, it was almost impossible to see how much she'd grown. In height alone, she was nearly matching up to Maya, which was the most striking part for her always, and she'd have to remind herself that her firstborn was still weeks off from turning twelve.

"I didn't mean for them to find out, I swear," she told her mother. "We were leaving school, and June's mom heard it on the news, so she was talking to Dad. We were there, and he looked at us, and I think he wanted us to not hear, but I was just… I didn't…"

"Hey, it's okay," Maya hugged her. She'd been in shock, hadn't had the presence of mind to get them out of earshot. No one would blame her for it. "How are they doing now?"

"Dad talked to us a bit, so we'd know she was okay," Marianne nodded.

"That's good," Maya told her with a reassuring smile. All would be well, nothing to worry about.

They had been told Sophie was okay, and their parents' word might have been the most trustworthy thing on any day, but with something like this, it was hard to fully accept this claim without getting some concrete proof in the form of seeing Sophie with their own eyes or at least hearing her voice. Until then, they were sort of okay, but they still looked out of sorts enough that their mother's arrival was a big relief.

They had to leave it at this for the time being, heading into the evening routine, so it wasn't until after all the kids had been put to bed that Maya and Lucas went and sat outside, putting a call out to their friends. They called Chiara specifically, knowing Sophie enough to guess she wouldn't be up to getting on the phone. That was just what they heard from their Italian friend. She'd had a stressful day, they could hear it in how strong her accent was when she answered the call.

She confirmed the essential, being that Sophie was okay. She might have a few scrapes and bruises, but really nothing to worry about, even though Chiara would absolutely have been worried upon seeing them. Asher and Ray had been seeing to the kids for the most part that evening. Chiara had been with them, too, and so had Sophie, but there'd been this tension of aftermath in them, making it harder to go through the day to day, as badly as they might have wanted to do that and nothing else.

Chiara assured them that they would visit as soon as possible, but the week moved along with little more than one or two texts each day. They heard plenty in the meantime, as the news continued to cover the story. They spoke of the accident that had nearly claimed the lives of an entire family, how the father had been the only one to be lost, dead on impact, and how the mother and three small children had been pulled free before nearly being lost along with him. They spoke about the one who'd saved him, at the risk of her own life, more and more as the days passed, though this became shared with speculations that the father had crashed his family on purpose. The investigation was still happening, no definitive answer as of yet, but public opinions were plenty decided on their own, and that was part of the reason why Sophie's 'heroic act' was being lifted as it was, by means of giving the family peace and the father no further press.

What contact they'd had with members of the great Zvolensky-Mantovani and Garcia-Choi families over the week suggested Sophie was still just trying to process, and they were letting her do that. The rest of them couldn't help but discuss the situation between themselves, though they tried not to dwell. This was achieved in part, for those of TXNY, by getting together for band practice ahead of a set of shows they had booked.

Band practice nowadays was in many ways as different from band practice in the early years as it was the same. Sure, they'd been in their teens and early twenties back then, with lives very different from those they led now, with careers, spouses, children… They didn't have so many responsibilities, they would just get together to do music together for the fun of it, managing their local fame and watching it expand to distances they could barely fathom. They would want to do more and more together, always, which was part of the reason why they had not taken the record deal they had been offered. They never regretted that choice, and they were sure deep down that this was the reason why they were here to this day, sitting around the Hex, playing their instruments and singing together, and feeling that bond of music between them, feeling so alive for it… They were as determined as ever to carry on together for as long as they could.

It was not uncommon for one of them to spy the light flashing outside the booth, alerting them to someone having rung the studio bell while they were playing. A lot of the time, this would be one of their kids wanting to talk to their mother, or to hear her with the band. Sometimes, there'd be several of them together, an eager little audience… not so little anymore in some cases… But this time, their visitors were not looking to listen to them. They wanted to talk. Maya was the one to go and open the door, figuring it might have been one of the girls.

"Sophie…" she breathed, relief heavy in her voice as she pulled her friend and former teammate into her arms. She let the hold be their first conversation, and a lot of what she'd figured to be going through her friend's head. It had been days since the incident, but the time she'd spent out there, however long it had taken from witnessing, to stepping in, to it all being over… It would have been playing back again and again in her head, everything that had since come out and probably plenty of things she could not have shared with anyone because they would not have understood it like her. And then everything that had been added to the narrative in the days that had followed… It was a lot, too much, but she'd made it far enough that she didn't want to keep to her small bubble anymore. She needed her friends, wanted to be with them and talk with them, whether or not she'd want to speak about that day.

It was her and Chiara who'd come by, and they talked a while, weaving in and out of the subject. After a while, Sophie knew them well enough to understand that they weren't sure how much or how little she wanted to go on, so they asked her if she wanted them to play for her and Chiara. She only nodded, but it was there in her eyes that nothing would make her happier in that moment, so as she and Chiara sat in the console chairs, TXNY gave them their private performance, giving the energy of a packed room in their small studio.

Not all of them within the band as it stood today had been with Sophie all the way back since high school, not all of them had known her and seen her rise from classmate/fan to becoming part of their group, carrying into college, living together in Houston, starting off her career as an officer… Looking at her now, they saw that bright-eyed girl, but maybe most of all their minds would spin back to the night when they'd gotten a much worse call, when they'd had much more than a few scrapes and bruises to deal with. They could never forget when they'd seen her in the hospital the first time, almost unrecognizable. They'd seen her through a long recovery, but that first sight was the thing that always came to mind when they remembered how they'd nearly lost her. The way Chiara sat there that day, stealing glances to her wife, she remembered it most of all, and when she'd gotten the call this time, it had been all she'd seen as she'd feared actually losing her.

They wouldn't be attending the TXNY show that night, the actual show. They wanted to, they made that clear, but with the way they'd had to field public curiosity over Sophie these last few days, it just seemed like the wiser choice. The band understood, though they did let the two of them know that they would specifically do their favorite songs for them. They had found one another thanks to TXNY after all.

If their audience noticed this energy in them as they played that night, they just took it in stride and enjoyed every minute of the show. It was Maya's opportunity to reveal the fact that she was having a baby in March, as it wouldn't be long that their followers would notice anyway. The response was just what they would have expected, coming from their fans. They could count on them, again and again, to be there for them, to make them feel supported and loved. They were the other half of why they kept putting out music to this day.

If all that wasn't enough for them to go on, they had their newest generation of fans, the ones that they had personally brought into the world. The older their kids got, the easier it was to have them at the shows they gave, and it was occasionally a gamble to see whether they'd be able to make it through while keeping a straight face after any of them heard one of those voices from within the crowd, cheering them on. It was usually the smaller ones that challenged their composure, and it never failed to be the funniest memory they'd have of those performances.

"I recorded as much as I could," Kacey informed Maya when she and her siblings came to find her after the show. All but Ella had made it out to watch that night, as she'd volunteered herself to watch little brother Ezra along with her younger girls, sending oldest daughter Tori to stand in her place. "For Aunt Sophie," Kacey smiled.

"I thought we weren't supposed to do that," Mackenzie informed her mother.

"It's okay, she's our mom," Remy pointed out, sounding like she'd been having this argument with her little sister throughout the night.

"I guess you can say it depends on the situation," Maya told the girls. "But thank you for checking," she told Mackenzie, and that was good enough for her.

"She's going to love it, isn't she?" Lucy smiled even as she and the twins were huddled around the camera to look back through the videos they'd captured.

"They both will," Marianne told them. She might have loved her aunts' love story most of all from across her turtle aunts and uncles. The idea that they would have bonded over this music, and that this bond would lead them to meet in person one day, to become a family… She was growing into a little romantic these days, which was hardly a surprise, the great storyteller and story lover that she'd always been… She looked to her mother with such a smile now, and Maya was with her; Sophie and Chiara would be gifted these videos and receive them as a bigger balm to their present situation than their young nieces could begin to imagine.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners