As Far as the Stars

by Virginia MacGregor

  Mom never blames Blake for anything. She never even blames him for maxing out his debit card. She’s got this massive blind spot where he’s concerned. Being pissed off at how Mom is totally soft when it comes to Blake is one of the few things Jude and I bond over.

  Then I sent a text message to the phone he’d called from with the flight details for the totally overpriced last-minute ticket. That I’d meet him at Nashville airport and take him to the hotel.

  I sent him a few other texts too, not caring what stranger would read them first, telling him how pissed I was that he’d woken me up and how expensive the flight was and that he’d better be on time.

  He never answered any of my texts.

  I don’t really believe in praying: I don’t think anyone out there is listening. Except, perhaps, some life form on a planet we haven’t discovered yet. But not a God-like figure. Not someone who directs our lives. That night, though, I found myself begging that if there was some force out there who decided whether things work out or get fucked up, that Blake would get my messages. That whoever he’d borrowed a phone from would pass them on. That he wasn’t some random guy off the street that Blake would never see again.

  I guess I begged – or prayed, or whatever – because I knew that this time Blake had to get his shit together. That he had to make it back for the wedding.

  The next time I heard from him was the text he sent me when I was halfway to Nashville saying that he was landing in Dulles. The text was from a different number, probably another phone he borrowed.

  You mean Nashville!

  I’d texted back.

  No. Dulles. See you soon, sis.

  And then nothing.

  Had he not received any of my messages when I booked his flight? Did he end up booking a flight on his own? He was always borrowing money off people; maybe he’d found a way to pay the airfare. And then he’d got it wrong: he thought we were meant to meet up in Dulles and drive down to Nashville together. But that had never been the plan. I’d explained it to him.

  But then Blake’s not good at listening. Not when it comes to practical, everyday stuff.

  So, this was another typical Blake fuck-up. Only worse: a fuck-up on top of a fuck-up.

  I clench my hands, digging my fingernails into my palms.

  Focus, I think. Just focus on finding Blake.

  I’m really late. Two hours late. So, I guess all these stressed-out looking people, they’ve been here for a while already.

  There’s a toddler screaming. But besides him and the red-faced yelling guy, everything’s a weird kind of quiet, people walking around with wide, glazed eyes like they’ve lost something.

  I’ve been to this airport more times than I can remember – I’m Blake’s personal taxi service – and it’s never felt like this. And when I see how lost those people look, I feel bad – like I should be asking them if I can help or something – but I don’t have time to be helpful in other people’s lives right now: I’ve got to find Blake, get him into the car and start driving.

  That’s if he’s even here. Knowing Blake, he’s probably got on a plane to Hawaii or Iceland or bloody Timbuktu.

  I check my phone again.

  No. Dulles. See you soon, sis.

  Though, in the grand-Blake scheme of things, his message doesn’t really mean much. I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s told me where he’s planning to go, only to find out that he’s ended up somewhere else altogether.

  Maybe his brain went into autopilot; maybe he thought he was coming home to DC, like he usually does. Or maybe his brain was tired or hungover or in its general state of Blake-like distraction and he texted Dulles because that was what he was used to texting.

  Maybe, at this exact moment, he’s standing at the arrivals gate of Nashville International Airport – like he was meant to all along.

  God, I shouldn’t have turned the car round. I should have gone to Nashville as planned, assumed that he was on the plane I’d booked for him, ignored his random text.

  If you made me drive all the way to Dulles for nothing, I’m not doing anything for you ever again, I say to him in my head. And this time, I mean it.

  Dulles. Nashville. Dulles. Nashville. The words crash around in my brain.

  Where the hell are you, Blake?

  He should have some kind of electronic tag.

  I take a breath.

  I’ve got to concentrate on one thing at a time. Assume he’s here. Then work out from there. A clear, logical method.

  I search the area around the arrivals gate. Blake’s hard to miss. He’s really tall and skinny and has this crazy black hair that stands up a mile with all the gel he puts in it – it’s longer than mine. It’s a bit of a family joke – how Blake’s hair is longer than mine, and how many products he has in the bathroom, and how long he takes grooming himself.

  When we tease him, he says it’s part of his brand.

  Blake’s been honing his brand since he was five years old when this music teacher at school told him he had a talent – and that he was cute, which, she explained, was a winning combination.

  When I can’t find him, I scan the arrivals screen for his flight. Within a few seconds, I’ve found it:

  10.15 UKFlyer0217 From London Heathrow:

  DELAYED.

  Chapter Two

  12.40 EST

  I look back at the screen to make sure I’ve got it right.

  But the word’s still there:

  DELAYED.

  It doesn’t make any sense. Blake texted me before he got on the plane. If it had been delayed, he’d have known – and they wouldn’t have let passengers get onto the plane, not that early.

  Though sometimes they get everyone on and then pull everyone off again. If there’s a technical error or something. That could have happened.

  But who cares what happened? If we’re late for any of the wedding stuff, Mom’s going to kill me.

  I go up to a guy wearing what I recognise as a UKFlyer uniform:

  ‘Excuse me—’

  He spins round. His eyes are wide and kind of jumpy. UKFlyer officials have this way of looking totally calm. Like, even if the airport was on fire, every hair would stay in place. Mom says it’s a British thing. But this guy doesn’t look calm, not at all. Which is weird. Like it’s weird that everyone around me is acting so stressed out. It’s not like they’ve all got weddings to go to – or Moms like mine. Planes get delayed all the time.

  ‘The plane – the one that’s been delayed,’ I say to the UKFlyer guy. ‘I was meant to pick someone up.’ I pause. ‘Or I think I was. It’s complicated. Could you check the passenger list for me?’

  He stares at me and blinks like I’m not speaking English.

  I rephrase, trying to calm myself down enough to get the words out in the right order:

  ‘I need to check whether my brother was meant to be on the plane that’s been delayed.’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t release that information.’

  ‘I’m his sister.’

  ‘We still can’t release that information. Not at this point.’

  ‘What point?’

  He looks at me like I’m about two years old – or totally crazy – or both. I mean, shouldn’t I know if the person I’ve come to collect was on the plane? And if I don’t, isn’t that weird?

  Yeah, it’s weird. But then he doesn’t know Blake. Infuriatingly unpredictable Blake.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ the guy says, his eyes still darting around. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  My heart starts doing this weird arrhythmic pounding thing.

  This can’t be happening.

  If I screw up even the tiniest part of this wedding, Mom will never forgive me. She’s planned every last detail. It’s been her life for like a year.

  On the surface, my allocated job for the wedding is simple: Blake. Get Blake to Nashville. In good time. Get him to the family breakfast and then the rehearsal dinner and then, crucially, the wedding, wea
ring a morning suit: top hat, coat and waistcoat, like Jude wanted – and ready to sing.

  After Jude and Stephen have said their vows, during the eclipse, Blake is going to perform the song he’s written for their big day. The song that Jude – and Mom – and every guest at Mom’s perfectly choreographed wedding, would remember for the rest of their lives. I reckon most of Jude’s friends accepted the invitation just so they could drool over Blake Shaw’s big blue eyes and gravelly voice. Not that I’d tell her that.

  The only one who’s heard the song is me; I practised it with him over a million times before he left for London. And I made him promise to keep practising while he was away – This time, the charming-Blake-improv, won’t cut it, I told him.

  It’s my job to give Blake a hard time – to balance out the rest of the world that thinks the sun shines out of his butt.

  My body tenses up. If he messes up the song, I’m going to kill him, like properly kill him.

  I take a breath.

  Yeah, on the surface, getting Blake to the wedding was meant to be simple. But Blake’s never simple. Which is why I was given the job. Managing Blake is always my job. Besides working my butt off to get a higher Grade Point Average than the boys in my Advanced Physics class and looking at the night sky through a telescope, sorting out my big brother’s life is my primary occupation. When one of his songs hits the charts and he makes millions, I’m so taking a cut.

  Leda won’t stop fidgeting so I put her down and rub my eyes. The world blurs. I blink and look over at the people who are here to welcome the passengers off the Heathrow flight. And that’s when I see him.

  Scruffy, tangled blond hair falls over his forehead. His hair’s longer than mine. Way longer. Though I guess that isn’t hard. A year ago, I chopped all my hair off: went for a pixie. Blake loved it. Mom freaked. Jude looked kind of pleased, like now I definitely wouldn’t be competition in her daily one-woman beauty parade. At first, Dad didn’t say anything, he only kind of smiled with that twinkle he gets in his eye when he knows I’ve done something that’s kind of out there. Later, when Mom was out of earshot, he told me he thought it looked modern, which I guess was a compliment.

  Anyway, this guy’s hair is long and tangled and looks like it’s been hacked at by a pair of kid’s safety scissors. It brushes the top of his round tortoiseshell glasses, which make his eyes look huge. They’re light grey, like when the sun’s fighting to get through the clouds.

  He’s skinny and pale in that fade into the background kind of way.

  In other words, he’s the kind of guy, that, unlike Blake, people walk right past.

  But that’s what makes me notice him – the fact that he’s sitting on the floor, really still, out of everyone’s way.

  When you’re part of my family, the quiet-keep-it-to-themselves types seem to belong to a different species. Even Dad, who’s this bookish Classics professor, can be kind of loud and overexcited when he talks about his favourite (not very famous) Greek goddess, Pepromene.

  Anyway, the quiet guy’s head is bent over a piece of paper that he’s folding over and over. He’s totally lost in what he’s doing – it’s like all this craziness isn’t even touching him.

  For a second, looking at him and how calm he is, my heart stops hammering and I think that things might turn out okay. That they’ve made a mistake. That – with the proviso that Blake did get onto the flight to Dulles – any second now, he’s going to walk towards me, his guitar case slung over his shoulder, waving and looking guilty for having messed up his flight – but smiling too. Because that’s also part of his brand: the massive smile that makes his cheeks dimple; the smile that takes over his entire face; the smile that makes whoever’s looking at him think it’s just for them.

  Someone shoves past me and I’m snapped back into the present.

  Leda jumps up and down like a mad thing.

  And then an announcement blares out through the terminal speakers:

  Attention please ladies and gentlemen, this is a call for all those meeting passengers on Flight UKFlyer0217 from Heathrow. Please come to the information desk.

  Chapter Three

  13.31 EST

  We’re in a room now, behind the security gates. It’s all taking too much time. And it’s making me nervous. Why couldn’t they simply tell us what they had to tell us over the speakers or put a note on the arrivals screen? Why herd us all together like this for a plane that’s been delayed?

  I shouldn’t be here. I should get back into the car and drive to Nashville.

  Just tell me where you are, Blake! I say through gritted teeth.

  I look up at a digital clock on the wall. The wedding starts in less than forty-eight hours. By 9 a.m. tomorrow we’re meant to be having this family breakfast, some special family time before all the mad preparations for the wedding day start. It’ll be the last time it’s just the five of us. Mom’s booked a table at Louis’s, a diner-cum-bar on Music Row, near Grandpa’s flat. It’s open twenty-four hours a day, acknowledging that most musicians, like Blake, don’t really follow the same waking and sleeping cycles that the rest of us do. There’s a small stage where people can get up and play or sing. Blake loves it. Grandpa would take him there when he was little. He’s always going on about how, when he hits it big one day, he’ll buy it up from the owner who’s like a hundred years old. So breakfast at Louis’s was meant to be a big deal for Blake too. And if he’d arrived at DC at the time he was supposed to, and we drove through the night, stopping a few times to stay sane, we might have made it. Just. Now, it would take a miracle.

  And then the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night. We absolutely have to make it in time for that.

  My head hurts at the thought of all the wedding stuff I’m going to have to get through in the next two days and how, right now, I’m hundreds of miles away from where I should be – with no sign of Blake.

  I just wish someone would tell us whether the plane has been delayed by an hour or ten or if it has been cancelled altogether. To sort out this mess, I needed facts I could work with.

  I look back at the clock. 13.33.

  Right now, Blake and I should be in the hotel in Nashville, going through the song, steaming the creases out of our wedding clothes, keeping Mom from having a nervous breakdown, and trying really hard to bite our tongues about the fact that our sister, who graduated from Julliard and had this amazing glittering career ahead of her as a concert pianist, ditched it all to get married and have babies.

  The security checks took for ever. Even though none of us are flying, the airport staff still had to scan our bags and our bodies – and everyone was carrying all the wrong stuff, like liquids and nail scissors and lighter fluid – because it’s not like we were prepared for any of this.

  My telescope beeped like a hundred times when it went through the X-ray machine, and even when I took it out and explained what it was (and reminded them that there was an eclipse happening tomorrow so carrying a telescope around was totally normal – that, in fact, not carrying a telescope around when there’s an eclipse is what should concern them), they still looked at me suspiciously.

  And then I had a row with them about Leda coming through with me – especially as she wouldn’t stop jumping long enough for them to scan her properly. In the end, I said she was a service dog and that I’d start fitting if she didn’t come with me, so they let her through. It’s a trick Blake uses all the time.

  Then they took ages writing down everyone’s names and numbers.

  Which, I wanted to tell them, was double standards; taking my information and not giving me the information I wanted. Like whether Blake was on the plane.

  And now we’re waiting for someone to tell us something – anything – about what’s going on.

  I’ve got this massive headache from all the waiting and the stressing about Blake not being on time and the fact that this room doesn’t have any windows. It should be illegal: rooms where you can’t see the sky.

  I’ll be ther
e, no matter what, Blake said to me like a zillion times.

  And I know he will. He gets how important this is. And he’s never broken a promise to me – not once. Sometimes his promises take a while to materialise; sometimes, his promises have to go through an obstacle course of fuck-ups like this one – but Blake always comes through for me in the end.

  Which makes me think that I’m wasting time hanging around with all these people rather than finding out where he really is. If Blake was on the plane and it was delayed, he will have found another way to get to the wedding.

  So, I check my phone again. Still nothing.

  There aren’t enough chairs so I’m sitting on the floor with Leda on my lap. She’s finally gone to sleep, knackered from all that whining and jumping.

  The guy I saw at the arrivals gate is sitting on the floor again, leaning against this massive backpack he’s been lugging around. And he’s folding another bit of paper, some old flyer he’s picked up. I think he’s recreating the Washington Monument, though the model he’s making is so tiny it’s hard to tell.

  I remember how, when we moved from London to DC, and Dad took us round all the tourist stuff, the first thought I had when I saw the monument was that it looked like a rocket about to shoot off into the sky. But then my brain has a habit of shaping everything it sees into some kind of space-related universe.

  I look back at paper-folding guy. It’s cool, how he’s made this really accurate model out of a bit of scrap paper. And I’m about to go over and tell him that when he sighs, stands up, scrunches the model up into a ball and throws it in a trash can.

  Blake does that too – when he’s frustrated with how a song’s going. You can tell whether his composing is going well or badly by how many bits of balled up notation paper there are on his bedroom floor.

  Except the model the guy made was good – like amazingly good. I think about going to rescue it from the trash, but then people around me start shifting and shushing and I get distracted.