As Far as the Stars

by Virginia MacGregor

  Christopher gives me a sad, sideways smile. ‘I guess he and Blake have more in common than either of them would ever realise. Dad’s always kind of leaving too.’

  I sniff and look up at him, waiting for him to go on. He started opening up to me on the mountain – I want him to feel like he can tell me anything.

  He nods.

  ‘When I was younger, I hated him going to work,’ he says. ‘I know it sounds stupid, because I was with him so much of the time, but I’d have done anything for him to have a different job. Something boring and ordinary. A nine to five in an office somewhere.’ He closes his eyes and shakes his head. ‘When he was in the air – he was in his own world. I might as well have been on the ground – in a totally different country from him – for all the difference it made having me on board. He never came out to check on me. His air stewards would look out for me, give me special treats like the desserts from business class, but when we were in the air, Dad acted like I was just another passenger.’ Christopher clenches his hands together on his lap, his head bowed.

  ‘And when you got older?’

  ‘He hasn’t really changed. I sometimes think that he’s embarrassed about me.’

  ‘Embarrassed? How could he be embarrassed?’

  ‘I’m not like him.’ He looks down into his hands. ‘I don’t want the same things as him. He says I should be grateful – for all the opportunities he’s given me.’ He pauses. ‘I shouldn’t be saying bad stuff about him—’ His voice breaks. ‘Not with all this going on.’

  I shake my head. ‘You’re wrong.’

  He looks up at me, searching my face.

  ‘You should be saying this stuff about him.’

  He waits for me to go on.

  ‘Because it’s what you feel. And because talking about the bad stuff means that there’s still hope.’ I gulp. ‘And there is still hope.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  My throat goes tight but I push out the words. ‘It’s this unwritten rule, isn’t it? That when something bad happens to someone, you’re only allowed to say the good stuff about them. No one dares to say the stuff that made you mad, that drove you crazy, that they wish had been different. So, wherever the hell he is, I have to talk about Blake like he’s going to be okay.’

  ‘Air—’

  ‘Because they are,’ I say quickly. ‘Whenever they are, they’re both okay.’

  He goes really quiet.

  ‘Tell me something else about your dad,’ I say gently. ‘Something he does that drives you crazy.’

  He hesitates for a second and then he says:

  ‘He burns toast.’ His cheeks flush pink.

  ‘Toast?’

  He nods. ‘Yeah. You’d think someone who could fly a plane could operate a toaster, right? But basically, every time he makes me toast, we end up having to scratch the burnt bits off in the sink because he’ll have forgotten to pick up more bread so those two burnt slices are the only ones we have left to eat. He’s crap about food. Crap about cooking. We mostly have takeaways. Sometimes he even brings home leftover food from first class. But it’s the toast that pisses me off most. It’s like, this is the one normal thing we have together, sitting down and eating breakfast, having toast with butter and jam – and he spoils it, every time. And then the flat smells of charcoal for ages. And then he goes to work and I go back to school and all I can think about is the burnt toast.’ He pauses. ‘So most of the time, I make the toast. The cooking, generally. Whenever he has time off work or I’m home from school and he’s not dragging me off to the other side of the world to see something, I make us stuff.’

  ‘You cook? Like properly?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘That’s cool.’

  ‘Only easy stuff. Spag bol, chicken curry, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Still cool.’

  ‘Dad likes my baked bean lasagne.’

  I wrinkle my nose. ‘Baked bean lasagne?’

  ‘It’s delicious,’ he says. ‘To start with, it was an experiment. We ran out of tomato sauce. The only thing I could find were a few tins of baked beans at the back of a kitchen so I layered the beans up between the sheets of pasta and the layers of beef and the cheese. Dad really liked it, so that’s how I made it after that.’

  I smile. ‘What a delicacy.’

  ‘You bet it is.’ He laughs and his eyes well up at the same time and I can tell he’s got that same crazy tug of war going on his head that I do: of feeling guilty and sad and relieved at the same time.

  I lean back and sigh.

  ‘Blake zones out.’

  ‘Zones out?’

  ‘We’ll be out having a hot chocolate in a coffee shop or walking down the street or hanging out in my room at home, and one minute we’ll be having a conversation and the next minute his mind will be in a different place – usually when I’m saying something that really matters to me, like a fact I might have learnt in astronomy.’ I snap my fingers. ‘It’s like from one second to the next, he’s gone.’

  I close my eyes and think about the last time he did that, when I drove him to the airport to get his flight to London. For the millionth time, I was giving him instructions about the wedding. He didn’t take in a single thing. Which is how we got into this whole mess. If he’d listened to me this time – or any of the times before – he’d have got his own ticket to Nashville without asking me to book it for him at the last minute. And he wouldn’t have had to check his phone to look at the flight details, and he would have got on the right plane, the plane I booked for him.

  I open my eyes and look over at the diner. Blake composed a song there once, while we were sharing a stack of blueberry pancakes.

  ‘He gets inspired, that’s what he says – to excuse the zoning out thing. Says that he notices how someone looks, or he overhears what someone says, or he gets drawn in by the light in the sky, and then he thinks of a lyric or a tune and a moment later he’s forgotten I’m even there. And I get that he’s an artist and everything, but still, it’s not cool. And I’ve told him that.

  I yelled at him once, right in the middle of a Starbucks. I stood up and said: Stop being so rude, Blake, and I stormed off. But he didn’t even hear it, not really. Or he didn’t care. Because what matters is that he’s found another song.’ I pause. ‘And he knows that I’ll come running back to him. And so then he’ll do it all over again. He’ll be in the middle of eating a bowl of cereal or doing some washing or something and he’ll go off in his head somewhere and leave the soggy cereal and the pile of dirty clothes and then forget to come back to them. A bomb could explode right in front of Blake and he wouldn’t notice, not if he’s lost in composing a song.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to anyone this much about Blake before. I don’t think I’ve even said all this stuff to myself before.

  Christopher looks at me, his brow folded, his eyes soft, like he wants to take it away: the feeling I get every time I think about Blake and how he does all this stuff that upsets me and how I’m scared that one day he’ll take off and never come back and I’ll never get to feel upset again – like he’ll never get to smell his dad’s burnt toast again.

  My eyes are swimming. ‘I wish he’d think about someone other than himself for once.’

  Christopher shifts his head and looks through the side window. Streaks of pink and orange and purple slash the morning sky.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Christopher says, ‘I feel like flying matters more to Dad than I do. That even if we had all the money in the world so he could retire and be around more, like normal parents are, he still wouldn’t do it. Because being up there, above the clouds, makes him happy. Happier than anything I could give him.’

  I’ve sometimes wondered that about Blake: whether if he had to choose between us – his family – and his music, which way he’d go. And I never let myself reach a conclusion. I guess because I was scared of the answer.

  I want to reach out and touch Christopher in some way, to make him feel ev
en a tiny bit better and to let him know that I get it, how the people you love more than anything in the world are also the people who hurt you the most.

  ‘When Dad gets frustrated with me, he uses his captain’s voice. It annoys the hell out of me.’ Christopher’s on a roll now. I can tell that, in some weird way, it’s doing him good, to talk like this. He clears his throat. ‘We will soon be beginning our decent into London…the local time is 13.25 p.m. You only have one year left at school, Christopher. Not even a year. You need to make some decisions…Cabin crew, prepare for landing please…You have to have a plan, Christopher. You can’t just let life happen to you.’ He pauses. ‘It’s like he thinks that if he says it clearly enough, I’ll pay attention and give him the response he wants.’

  ‘Just after Blake has been totally annoying or gone off without telling me and I’ve decided that I’m not going to be that little sister trailing after him anymore, how I’ve got my own life, Blake will do something totally awesome and suck me right back in again.’ My voice is thick. ‘Like he’ll wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me if I’m hungry and he’ll put my coat on and take me to this bar where he knows the owner because he does gigs there and asks them to make a kids’ cocktail for me and I’ll feel like the luckiest sister in the world.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve always thought that about Dad – about being his kid. Even when he’s really annoying, I know that I’ve lucked out. He’s one of life’s good guys, you know? The kind of guy who’d save babies from burning buildings and get cats down from trees and help old ladies cross the road. He does all that disaster zone rescue stuff too. He makes people feel safe; they think that when he’s around nothing bad can happen. And I’ve always been totally proud of that, that he’s better than all the other dads put together.’ His voice chokes up but he keeps talking. ‘When I was little, I thought that he must be a superhero or something, like he was fuelling the plane through his own special powers.’ He pauses. ‘I know it was stupid…’

  Something goes still between us. I think back to how I found out about his dad being the pilot of the plane. How angry I was about him not telling me. It’s all gone now, the anger. Whatever happened up there, it’s not his dad’s fault. Maybe it was nobody’s fault. Maybe it’s one of those things that should never have happened but did anyway, and, somehow, Christopher and all those other people waiting for their friends and relatives to show up are going to have find a way of living with it.

  ‘No, it’s not stupid,’ I say. ‘I thought the same kind of thing about Blake. Not that he was a superhero but that somehow he wasn’t quite real.’ A thick nausea settles in the back of my throat. ‘I was worried that someday he’d take off and never come back – because he got sick of living at home or whatever – but I never thought anything bad could ever happen to him.’

  Then I turn around to look at Christopher. His eyes are closed.

  ‘Your dad could still be okay, couldn’t he?’

  He keeps his eyes closed.

  ‘The plane landed on water,’ I add. ‘You said that was better…’

  He doesn’t say anything.

  ‘And you said it yourself – your dad’s a pro. He would have done everything to keep the passengers safe.’

  Christopher’s head drops.

  ‘Say something, Christopher.’

  But he doesn’t answer.

  And that’s when I glance at the clock on the dashboard.

  ‘Shit! It’s gone seven – your bus.’

  Slowly, he opens his eyes.

  ‘There’s another one,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I looked it up on my phone. There’s another bus at 10.30 a.m.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep.’

  ‘You were exhausted. We both were. I decided to let you sleep.’ He gulps. ‘And…’

  ‘And?’

  He blushes. ‘I wasn’t ready to go yet.’

  I’m not ready for you to go yet, either, I think. But I know it wouldn’t be fair to say that. He needs to get to his mom. He has to focus on what’s going on with his dad. I’ve dragged him far enough into my mess.

  I lean back in my seat. The night’s over; it’s morning. In a few hours, the wedding will start.

  At least we won an hour, crossing the state line. It’ll take me another three hours to get to Nashville, but I should make it in time for the wedding.

  I look back at the diner and see Suzy, arranging chairs and tables on the porch. She notices the car and waves. My heart sinks. She recognises the Buick. She thinks Blake’s here.

  ‘You know her?’ Christopher asks.

  ‘Blake used to bring me here for pancakes.’ I pause. ‘They dated – Suzy and Blake. On and off for years.’

  ‘On and off?’

  ‘Blake lives in DC, Suzy lives here, in Knoxville. He’d hook up with her every time he swept through on his way to Nashville and they never broke up, not officially – not even when Blake dated other girls.’

  ‘That must have been hard for her.’

  That makes me like Christopher. He may not have had many normal relationships growing up but he gets how people feel.

  ‘You’d think so,’ I say. ‘But in the context of my brother, it was a compliment – she was his most long standing girlfriend. The constant, while all the others came and went.’

  Christopher scratches his head. ‘So they’re still going out?’

  ‘No. She finally ended it last summer – she met someone else. Someone she can settle down with. But I think she still likes him.’

  ‘Love-likes him?’

  I bet Christopher doesn’t have these conversations very often. I don’t have these conversations very often – not outside Blake’s world.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon she loves him. But Blake’s hard to love – even for his family.’

  I realise what a paradox that is. How everyone falls in love with my brother because he’s so interesting and talented – because he draws you in. But how really loving him, in a relationship kind of way, is nearly impossible. Because you’re always waiting for the next time he’ll let you down.

  Christopher nods and I can tell that he gets it. That it’s how he feels about his dad too.

  ‘It’s a shame. She’s nice,’ I say.

  I look back at the diner. Even though Suzy’s with someone else now, I know that she’ll be excited to see me – that she’ll look over my shoulder for Blake, like the rest of the world does.

  Unless he’s there.

  Unless he came here because he knew that, somehow, I’d come by and find him.

  Because that’s the kind of thing Blake does. Showing up, out of the blue, to surprise you.

  My stomach flips on itself and this time, there’s no tug of war inside me, I just feel sick at it all. At the fact that I’m here with the wrong person. That Christopher should be in Oregon, with his dad. That no matter how many stories we share about how annoying Blake or his dad are – or how amazing they are, it doesn’t change the fact that everything’s totally screwed up.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  08.12 CDT

  The bathroom’s off to the left, before the main door to the diner. I tell Christopher to meet me inside.

  In the bathroom, I take off Christopher’s boxers and T-shirt and pull on the bridesmaid’s dress. It’s too tight and too frilly and too bright, and it’s got scrunched from flying around on the back seat. But I don’t have a choice: next to the rehearsal dinner dress, it’s the only dry, clean bit of clothing I have left. And if I get into it now I won’t have to stop again – I can park the Buick and run straight to the wedding.

  Then I look down at my sneakers. Shit. I forgot the dress shoes back in DC – the ones that were meant to match the dress. Blue satin. A small heel. Gross. But, as far as Jude and Mom are concerned, absolutely essential to complete the look.

  If Mom doesn’t kill me for being late or for singing Blake’s song – she’ll kill me for the sneakers.

/>   Shit. Shit. Shit.

  I force myself to calm down. Shoes are the least of my problems. I’ll crouch a bit, make sure the hem goes over my feet, and Mom won’t notice.

  When I come out of the bathroom, I walk into the diner and stand by the door, scanning the booths.

  I know which one Blake would have gone for – by the window, overlooking the main road that leads into Knoxville. The best place for looking out onto the world and getting inspiration – and being noticed by the world too. Whatever he says, Blake likes the attention.

  But he’s not here.

  Like he wasn’t at Leda Springs.

  It’s all right. I press the words into my brain. If he’s not here, maybe he’s already made it to Nashville.

  Christopher’s chosen a booth at the far end of the diner, also by a window. He’s folding one of the paper napkins again, like back at the Mobil station. And even though the napkin’s too floppy and the folds don’t hold, I recognise it: he’s making a model of Leda.

  Then he sighs and shakes his head, screws the napkin up into a ball and puts it on the plate in front of him.

  I wish Christopher hadn’t done that; I wish I could have kept the paper model of Leda. Because soon, he’ll be on that bus to Atlanta. He’ll be gone too. And the model was good. Leda’s ears pricked up just right, her head cocked to one side, her tail trapped between her paws. A beautiful, scruffy, tiny Leda.

  I wish he’d see how good he was.

  Apart from an old couple sitting at the counter, drinking their filter coffees, we’re the only ones here. The local radio’s on: the presenter’s talking about the countdown to the eclipse.

  I wonder about the conversations they must be having in newsrooms up and down the country: what matters more? That a plane has dropped out of the sky on its way to the US or that, in a few hours, the world’s going to go dark? And who decides, I wonder?

  I notice Christopher looking down at his phone. As it blinks to life, my stomach clenches.

  It will have been on all the news channels. Mom and Dad and Jude and everyone else at the hotel must have seen it when they were having breakfast and getting ready. And it would have made them feel sick for a moment, like everyone feels sick when they hear about a plane crash, even if it’s totally unrelated to them. But then they’d have gone back to whatever it was they were doing.