As Far as the Stars

by Virginia MacGregor

  ‘She wants to see you, Christopher.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because she’s your mom. And because whether she knows it or not, she’s been missing out, big time. And if she didn’t want to see you, she would have told you not to come when you called her.’

  ‘She didn’t exactly have a choice,’ he says. ‘I caught her off guard.’

  ‘She’s going to love you, Christopher. You have to trust me on this one. You have to trust yourself.’

  He doesn’t answer. And I know that my words probably sound hollow. I mean, what do I know, right? I’ve never met his mom. I hardly know him. But from the last two days we’ve spent together, I’ve seen enough of Christopher to know that unless there’s something really wrong with her, his mom is going to love him – she has to. Because he’s one of the most awesome human beings I’ve ever met and even if his dad didn’t see him like he wanted to be seen, I know he loved him too. He must have done.

  ‘You’re still going though, aren’t you? To Atlanta?’

  He nods. ‘I don’t know where else to go.’

  I get that sense again, of how lonely he is. How few people he has in his life looking out for him.

  I look out towards the diner.

  ‘You hungry for breakfast?’ I ask.

  ‘I could do with some coffee.’

  ‘Then I’ve got just the place.’ I hold his gaze again. ‘A goodbye breakfast.’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘A goodbye breakfast?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I stand up and hold out my hand.

  ‘It’s not somewhere crazy, is it?’ he asks.

  ‘No, it’s not somewhere crazy,’ I say and pull him up.

  He stumbles into me and our bodies crash into each other awkwardly and, before I know it, we’re hugging.

  ‘Thanks for being here too,’ he whispers into my hair.

  And, for a moment, I allow my body to rest into his and I let the rest of the world fall away.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  04.33 CDT Pancake Stack Diner, Knoxville, TN

  I lean into the car. ‘It opens in an hour,’ I say. ‘And your bus leaves in an hour and a half. So, I vote we wait.’

  I’m standing there, in the bluey-black light of dawn, still wearing Christopher’s T-shirt and boxers.

  He nods.

  I get back into the car beside him. I notice goosebumps on his bare arms. I lean over and switch on the heater.

  We’re sitting in the car park of this diner Blake took me to whenever we drove to Nashville. At this point in the drive, we’d get hungry and need something to keep us going for the last 180 miles.

  I can see him now, throwing his arm around Suzy, smiling.

  This girl makes the best pancakes in Tennessee, he’d say.

  And she’d blush and smile.

  Suzy was Blake’s girlfriend. On and off for years, actually. The only girlfriend I’ve ever liked. There was a time when he came down to Nashville nearly every weekend. Before Grandpa passed away he’d stay with him in his apartment on Music Row. Sometimes he took Suzy with him. And even when he was busy, he’d take the time to drop into The Pancake Stack.

  My heart skips a beat. Perhaps Blake’s been in touch with her – told her where he is. That would be typical of Blake: sharing his plans with an ex-girlfriend rather than his actual family.

  The Greyhound bus stop is on the other side of town. If Christopher gets the 6.30 a.m. bus, he’ll be with his mom just after lunchtime.

  And by lunchtime, I’ll be standing at Jude’s wedding, making up some excuse for Blake not being there. Or maybe he’ll be there already. Or maybe he’ll storm in at the last minute, make one of his grand entrances, and save me from having to sing that damned song of his. Whatever happens, when all of this is over, I’m going to give him hell for having put me through this. Up until now I’ve always had his back. And when it’s come to Jude being pissed at something he’s done, I’ve been right there, at his side, defending him. But not this time. I think about how she was on the phone, how she thought we’d done this on purpose to upset her and then how scared she sounded, that she thought she was making a mistake. What Blake’s done has made her doubt the one thing she believes in. No, today, Blake doesn’t get to let Jude down.

  I yawn and rub my eyes.

  ‘You should get some sleep,’ Christopher says.

  I shake my head. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Look, you’re going to need some energy,’ he says. ‘To get through your wedding. At best, you only got a few hours back at the motel. Even Leda’s asleep.’

  I look down at Leda settled between us on the front seats. She must still be exhausted after her hike up to Deer Ridge. She lets out a snuffle and twitches her paws, like she’s chasing after something in her dream.

  I yawn again. ‘You’re making me tired, I was fine before you said anything about sleeping.’

  ‘You’ve got a long drive. I don’t want to be responsible…’ his voice trails off.

  ‘Responsible?’

  ‘For anything happening to you.’

  It’s crazy. How two people who hardly know each other can get so tangled up in each other’s lives that they come to care about each other in a way that goes way deeper than you’d ever expect. When he says those words – about being worried about something happening to me – I believe him. And I want to believe him: I want him to care.

  ‘I’ll wake you as soon as the diner opens,’ Christopher, ‘Then we’ll get breakfast.’

  And then we’ll say goodbye. For good. And the thought of that makes me feel empty. I’ve got used to having him beside me. More than used to it: I’ve grown to like it.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, leaning my head against the side of the car. The car door feels hard under my head. I shift uncomfortably.

  ‘Why don’t you lean on my shoulder?’ he says.

  I look at him for a second. His cheeks are bright pink, his eyes watery with embarrassment. But he’s holding my gaze.

  ‘If…if you want to, I mean,’ he stutters.

  I hesitate for a second but tiredness washes over me so hard that I give in to it. I shuffle up on the seat and lean against him. My head falls onto his shoulder but I don’t have the strength to move it.

  ‘You smell of pines,’ I mumble, my voice far away and sleepy. Pines and sky and the cool water.

  He squirms his arm out from between us and puts it round my shoulders.

  I wonder what Blake would think. Me and a guy – a guy who’s not him – sitting together in his car.

  And then it comes back to me, how this really bad thing has happened.

  And I can’t get my head to undo those knots: the knots of how my body feels, leaning into Christopher like this – when I’ve never even been on a date before, not a proper one, and the knot about what’s happened to Christopher and his dad. What’s really happened. And when we’re going to know for sure, and what we’re going to do when we find out.

  I don’t know how to make all those feelings fit in my body at the same time.

  I notice Christopher get his phone out to check the news but then he switches it off again, like he doesn’t want to see, not now.

  My body slumps more heavily against him.

  Yeah, he smells of cool, dark water. And mountains. He smells of all the places we’ve been together and all those amazing faraway places he’s been to that I’ll probably never see. I can feel his breath against the top of my head and it feels kind of familiar. More familiar than it should for someone I’ve only known for a just over a day. More familiar than someone I should still be totally mad at for having lied to me.

  I look over at the diner. I can see through one of the back windows into the kitchen. Suzy is getting things ready: pouring filter coffee into thermos flasks, pulling muffins out of the oven, beating eggs into the pancake batter.

  There’s something soothing about watching her going through her routines, preparing for another ordinary day.

>   The windows steam up as the kitchen gets hotter and soon, she disappears.

  My eyes flicker.

  As my eyelids begin to fall, I feel Christopher lean forward – he holds my head lightly so as not to disturb me. I watch him grab a scrap of paper from his backpack, and then he starts folding.

  And then my eyelids get heavier. And the car’s really warm. From the fan heater. From our breaths – mine, Christopher’s and Leda’s too.

  I want to stay awake. I want to watch him, folding that paper between his long fingers.

  But my body begins to go slack.

  And then I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.

  My eyelids close.

  My body slouches into the seat.

  And then I’m somewhere else.

  ‘Wake up, Air.’ He’s shaking my shoulders.

  I can smell him in the room. Cigarette smoke. Leather jacket. Hair gel. Cold air from having climbed in through one of my two windows, the one that faces out onto the street.

  I’m thirteen; he’s seventeen.

  I rub my eyes.

  ‘Come on – let’s go.’ He tugs at my pyjamas.

  I rub my eyes some more.

  ‘I’ve got an assignment due tomorrow,’ I say.

  Physics. A presentation on the moons of Jupiter. I’ve been preparing for weeks and I’m determined to get the best grade in the class.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he says.

  I straighten up and look at him, sitting there on the end of my bed. Light from the window falls across his face. It’s a full moon.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To chat. On the roof.’

  This is what he does. Goes and does a gig somewhere in Georgetown, comes back totally wired and unable to sleep and gets me up – because he doesn’t want to be alone. Blake’s never been good at being alone.

  ‘And we should check out the moon,’ he says. ‘Say hi.’ Then he smiles at me. ‘It’s missing you.’

  He does that too: makes it sound like the sky is as interested in me as I am in it.

  ‘Fine – for a few minutes,’ I say.

  I never say no to Blake. No one ever says no to Blake. Because we know that whatever he’s asking, it’ll be worth it. Spending time with Blake is worth it, period. And we know that he’d do anything for us too. If I asked him to stand outside the window of my Physics class tomorrow holding up cue cards for my presentation, he’d so be there.

  I swing my legs out of bed and a moment later we’re climbing out of my other window, the one that leads onto the roof rather than to the street.

  He starts rolling a cigarette.

  ‘It’ll kill you,’ I say, nodding at the cigarette. ‘Scientifically proven.’

  ‘Ah, the beautiful die young.’ He flashes me a smile.

  I remember getting a sinking feeling in my stomach whenever he joked about stuff like that. He didn’t understand – how, if ever something did happen to him, none of us would survive it.

  A gust of cold air brushes over my skin. I shiver.

  ‘Here,’ he says, taking off his leather jacket and draping it over my shoulders.

  I snuggle into it, breathing in the smell of his aftershave and his skin.

  ‘So, how did it go?’ I ask.

  ‘I think I messed up the last song.’

  He was doing a Johnny Cash cover in a bar. Greatest hits. Blake gave them his own spin.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘“Flesh and Blood.”’

  ‘But that’s your best song.’

  He’d sung it to me a million times.

  ‘Yeah, that’s why I messed it up.’

  I got it. It was the same with me at school. It was the same with this project tomorrow. Sometimes choosing your favourite thing to talk about in a project is a total risk – because if you mess it up, you’re left with this horrible empty feeling inside, like you’ve let it down, the thing that you love so much.

  ‘I bet it was amazing,’ I say.

  ‘Didn’t feel like it,’ he lies back.

  We lie there in silence. Then he says:

  ‘Stars look good tonight.’

  I shake my head. ‘Too much light pollution.’

  ‘Damn it,’ he laughs. ‘I forgot to ask the city to switch off all the lights.’

  I laugh too. I know that Blake would do that for me if he could – switch off every single light in DC so that I could get a better view of the stars.

  ‘You think I’ll be up there one day?’ I ask.

  ‘You bet, little sis’.’ He takes my hand. ‘As far as the stars – that’s where you’re bound.’

  ‘As far as the stars,’ I whisper back.

  I think about the millions of times we’ve been out here together, lying side by side on the roof of the house, looking at the stars. How it’s what got me interested in space to begin with.

  I hear some sounds coming from my room, below us.

  ‘I’m going to go out again,’ he says, getting up.

  ‘But it’s nearly morning.’

  ‘Exactly. Too late for sleep.’

  He starts humming the tune to ‘Flesh and Blood’. He’s hard on himself; I bet he totally rocked it.

  ‘If you’re not back for breakfast, Mom will kill you.’

  He keeps humming. And then he answers, singing, ‘I’m always back for breakfast.’

  From down in my room, I hear the desk creaking, the one we have to climb onto to get to the skylight which leads onto the roof.

  I take off the leather jacket and hand it back to him.

  ‘Thanks, Airbug.’ He puts it on and walks to the edge of the roof.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Shortcut.’

  Someone’s behind me on the roof, I can feel it.

  ‘It’s not a shortcut,’ I call after him. ‘The street’s on the other side.’

  He’s singing again. He’s not listening.

  This isn’t the window he uses to get out of the house. This is the roof window, where we talk. He should be going back into my bedroom and using the other window, the one with the drainpipe that leads onto the street.

  ‘Blake!’

  ‘I’ll get there quicker!’ he says.

  ‘But—’

  ‘See you little sis,’ he says.

  And then he jumps.

  ‘Air?’

  I spin round.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ It’s Jude. She looks hurt. Like she does whenever Blake and I hang out without her.

  ‘I was just talking to Blake.’ I look back over to the edge of the roof.

  I notice that my whole body is shaking.

  ‘Blake?’ I hear Jude say, though she sounds really far away. ‘Blake’s not here.’

  I rub my eyes again and stare hard at the spot where, a second ago, he was standing.

  But she’s right. He’s gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  07.45 CDT

  Someone’s shaking my shoulders, so hard I can feel their fingers digging into my collarbone.

  ‘Air?’

  ‘Blake! Come back!’ I yell.

  Lights shine behind my eyelids. I feel tears on my cheeks and realise that I’m crying.

  ‘Blake!’ I’m screaming now.

  ‘Air! Air! Wake up!’

  My eyelids fly open.

  He’s staring right at me, his grey eyes lit up by the morning sun that’s pouring through the windscreen. Sometimes, his eyes and his skin and his hair are so pale, it’s like he’s not there at all: like he’s a ghost.

  ‘It’s okay, Air. It’s okay,’ Christopher says. ‘You were just having a bad dream.’

  Sweat runs down my back. I stare at him, confused by who he is and why he’s here and why, at the same time, he feels so familiar. I notice that he’s holding my hand, squeezing it tight like he’s worried I’m going to take off.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says again.

  I blink at him. And I nod. But it doesn’t feel okay. Not even close. And from hi
s eyes and from the fold in his brow, I know that he knows it too.

  ‘I have to get to Nashville,’ I say, my words jagged. ‘I have to be there for Mom and Dad and Jude.’

  I wipe my eyes on the back of my hands.

  ‘I know,’ he says.

  ‘He’s always leaving,’ I blurt out and then wish I hadn’t said that, not out loud. Not even in my head. I don’t get to say bad stuff about Blake, not with him missing. But I feel a ball of anger in my stomach.

  ‘Leaving?’ Christopher asks me gently.

  ‘He’s always taking off. Even when we were younger and he wasn’t allowed to go out without telling Mom and Dad, he’d climb out through my window in the middle of the night and ask me to cover for him, and then, just when I thought I’d have to tell Mom that he was missing, he’d sneak back in.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘I never knew. Which made it worse. At least if I could have pictured where he was, I’d have known how close he was – or how far away.’ I catch my breath. ‘I’d have known he was okay.’

  ‘And was he okay?’

  ‘Yeah, Blake’s always okay. When he came back, I’d find out that he’d gone to sing and play his guitar in some bar in Georgetown. Or that he’d just taken a walk. Or got onto the subway and skipped from one train onto the next, not going anywhere.’

  ‘A free spirit.’

  ‘More like annoyingly unpredictable.’

  ‘And he likes to go out at night?’

  I nod. ‘He says that night time is when he’s most inspired to write songs – that that’s why he never sleeps.’ I see Blake, standing in the frame of my window – my bedroom was the only one that faced out onto the street – giving me that massive smile of his, the smile that got him out of anything. Tears sting my eyes. ‘And of course I cover for him. Just like I’m covering for him now. I cover for him because I know he’ll come back. Because, every time, he promises me he’ll be fine. And I believe him.’ Tears are rolling down my cheeks so hard I don’t even bother to wipe them away. ‘No matter how much I begged him to take me along, he always left me behind.’

  Christopher digs around in his backpack, pulls out packet of tissues and hands one to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say and blow my nose hard. And then I look at him, my eyes blurry. ‘I’m sorry, I keep going on about myself. And I know you had a hard time too – with your dad and how he was never really there for you.’