As Far as the Stars

by Virginia MacGregor

  It’s been a tough year, watching the investigation unfold. Wishing, over and over, that we could turn back time and somehow stop that plane from ever taking off.

  But we’re okay now.

  Well, that’s not true: we’ll never be okay, not really. But we’re trying to make it work.

  Some days, we pretend that the reason Blake’s not around is because he’s on tour somewhere or that he’s gone off on one of his random drives because he got tired of staying in the same place.

  Some days, we talk about him in the present tense, like he’s still here. We know we’re doing it. And we know it’s not accurate, grammatically – that it’s not the truth – but we do it anyway, because it feels good to acknowledge that he’s still part of us.

  Mom will pick up some Ben & Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Chunk from the grocery store – even though none of us like mint chocolate much – because it was Blake’s favourite. And then we eat it together, sitting in the living room, watching the video of the wedding. We even laugh when it comes to the bit where I try to sing Blake’s song. Because no matter how you look at it, it was pretty embarrassing and pretty bad.

  Jude will drop by with Stephen for dinner and complain that Blake’s jackets are taking up all the space on the coatrack. He had as many jackets as he did sunglasses.

  Some days, we feel so sad that none of us can even look at each other. On those days, Mom lets the house get messy and doesn’t get out of her PJs and Dad eats too many donuts, even though he’s been working really hard on lowering his cholesterol, and Jude sits on the living-room floor, sobbing her eyes out as she looks through the wedding album Mom made, because every picture screams out that Blake wasn’t there.

  And me? I sit in Blake’s room, listening to his songs, and it feels like my heart’s going to break into a thousand little pieces and never go back together again.

  And some days, we’re just plain angry. Mainly because each of us carry all this what-if guilt around.

  What if I’d gone to bed early that night instead of bellyaching about the research paper?

  What if I’d only seen Blake’s message the next morning, when I’d have been clear-headed enough to book him onto the right flight?

  What if I’d refused to book his flight, told him to deal with his own mess? He might have been late for the wedding. He might not even have made it at all. But he’d still be here.

  And what if Mom had insisted that Blake come home earlier and that we all drive down to Nashville together?

  What if Mom and Dad had put their foot down and said that, this summer, he wasn’t going to London, that he had to stay in DC and focus on the wedding?

  And what if Blake himself had been with it enough to realise that he shouldn’t be flying to DC? That I’d got it wrong? That he shouldn’t get onto the plane?

  Even Jude feels guilty. Once, she said she wished she’d never got married at all. If it hadn’t been for her wedding, Blake would still be alive.

  Those angry, guilty days are the worst.

  But they’re rare now. Mostly, we try to get on with things. Mom goes to the White House to do her legal stuff; Dad grades his papers and prepares his lectures; I do my prep reading for MIT; Jude orders a million baby clothes and nursery items so that everything’s ready in time. She’s due in five months. A Christmas baby.

  My stomach turns in on itself. The plane’s started its descent into London.

  I close my eyes and reach for the paper star pendant hanging from the piece of string around my neck. I’ve worn it every day. You’d think that it would have got damaged over time. That paper wouldn’t last. But it’s so small and strong, the folds so intricate, that it’s stayed in one piece.

  A moment later, the wheels hit the tarmac, the plane shakes and judders and there’s a loud drag as the pilot slams on the brakes.

  As we come into land, I switch my phone back on and a message pings up from Christopher’s mom, Amy:

  Hope the trip went well. So good of you to come. Can’t wait to see Christopher’s face when you show up. X

  We’d planned it together, me and Amy, the trip here – the surprise for Christopher. It’s weird how, when crazy things happen – when bad things happen, like the plane crash – lives collide in ways you don’t expect. You end up having relationships with people you never knew even existed. And I don’t just mean Christopher.

  After that afternoon and night I spent at her house in Atlanta, Amy and I stayed in touch. As part of her work as a marine biologist, she runs workshops around the country for kids, for girls, especially, to inspire them to go into science. She passes through Boston, NYC and DC a few times a year. Whenever she came to DC she took me out for lunch and we talked about how my school work was going and my application to MIT – she acted like she was really interested, and like she believed in me, and that meant a lot: that someone outside my family was rooting for me. She asked me how things were at home without Blake and it was easier to talk to her about it than to Mom or Dad or Jude, I guess because I didn’t need to worry about her being upset. And then we talked about Christopher.

  Christopher stayed to finish boarding school in England. His mom thought it would be less disruptive than transferring him to a school in the US. She’s been out to see him regularly. Sometimes with Nina and Mitch, like last Christmas when she thought they should all be together. Christopher hasn’t been back to the US yet. He told me he wants to give travelling a rest for now. That he’s not ready to get back on a plane. Which is another reason I decided to fly over for this.

  Mostly, though, Amy went out to see Christopher on her own. She said she wanted time, just the two of them, so they could get to know each other. She’s been helping him with his studies too. He was able to switch one of his A-Level choices to include Art. And she’s the one who persuaded him to enter the competition to exhibit in a gallery in London. I think she’s helping him to understand that what he does is amazing – that it’s a big thing. A big and important thing. And that he’s brilliant at it.

  Christopher and I FaceTime sometimes and write emails but he still feels far away. When I talk to Amy about him, he feels closer. That’s why I like to see her. And to call her. And I guess I like her too. I love Mom and we’re close in our way, but sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone else’s mom. Especially a mom who doesn’t have all the answers. Who knows she’s got stuff wrong. Big stuff.

  I’ve told her some of the details of the long car trip from DC to Nashville and then on to Atlanta. I shared some of the things Christopher told me about his dad, things I didn’t think he’d mind me saying. And maybe I’m seeing what I want to see but when I sit in front of Amy, thinking about the time she’s taking to talk to me, some random girl her son met a year ago, when I think about how often she goes out to see him in England and how, when she does, they just hang out together, like he wanted to do with his dad, my heart gets a bit lighter. Like maybe, despite the fact that she walked out on him as a baby, despite the fact that it will take her a lifetime to make up for that, maybe, for once, he feels like there’s someone he belongs to.

  I look down at my phone and type:

  Landed safely. Can’t wait either.

  And then the plane jolts to a stop.

  And we’re here. In London.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Shoreditch, London

  There’s a picture of him on the billboard outside the small gallery in Shoreditch. It feels strange to see his face like that, on a poster. I remember how shy he was when I first met him in Dulles – and then how crazy he acted on the roof of the diner in Knoxville, persuading me to rehearse Blake’s song. How it was like, with every mile we drove, he became more alive.

  And here he is, staring into the camera, his grey eyes wide and confident.

  I notice that he’s wearing new glasses – black, artsy frames that make him look kind of hip – a bit less Christopher Robin than this time last year.

  Next to him, there’s a write-up about the ar
t competition he won earlier this year and the prize: a chance to exhibit his work in a London gallery.

  At the bottom of the write-up, there’s a dedication: a photograph of his dad, in his pilot’s uniform and under it, his name: Edward Ellis, 1975–2017.

  I considered telling Christopher that I was coming but then I thought that, after how he showed up at Jude’s wedding without any warning, bang in the middle of my song, he deserved a taste of his own medicine. Plus, Amy liked the thought of it being a surprise.

  ‘Ready?’ Dad asks me.

  I nod and we walk into the gallery.

  It’s dark. Only a few lights flicker above us. It makes me think of the planetarium back in DC where Blake and I spent so many hours: a thick, hushed, dark silence, full of other people we’d never know.

  From the other side of the room, I can hear his voice. He’s doing a Q&A.

  ‘Why do you work with paper?’ someone asks.

  ‘Because it’s beautiful,’ he answers. ‘And simple. And because it’s everywhere. Paper is part of our everyday lives.’ He smiles. That’s more confident too, his smile. ‘And because I loved to make paper planes when I was a kid.’

  His words send a shudder through me. It’s the answer he gave me when I first asked him why he made those models.

  ‘And you made every single one yourself?’ someone else asks.

  I stand up on tiptoes to look over the audience. He’s wearing a suit. A tie. It’s the first time I see a bit of his dad in him.

  His mom is standing in the front row. She notices me and gives me a small wave and a smile. Mitch, Christopher’s stepdad is there too, and between them, in a green dress, stands Nina, the little girl with the long, tangled hair I saw running across the grass that morning in Atlanta. Her head is tilted up to the roof of the gallery: she can’t take her eyes off all those folded pieces of paper.

  ‘Yeah, I make them all,’ he says. ‘It’s therapeutic – all that folding.’

  His audience laughs.

  He told me that in one of our Skype chats. How, when he folded paper, especially for installations that required lots of repetitions, his mind stopped whirring and allowed him to get lost in what he was doing. For those hours, his fingers and his mind busy with paper, he didn’t have to think about what had happened – about how his dad had tried to save everyone’s life and how close he’d got but how, in the end, even he couldn’t do it. And now he’ll never see him again.

  I leave Mom, Dad, Jude and Stephen in the main bit of the gallery and go up the back stairs to the balcony.

  I want to see the installation from above.

  ‘They’re made from airplane tickets – is that right?’ a young woman asks.

  Christopher nods. ‘I used to collect them, when I hung out with my dad at the airport. Once people had got to wherever they were meant to be, they discarded them. In the front pockets of aeroplane seats. On the ground. In bins. I’ve always made models out of found bits of paper. Receipts. Flyers. Menus. Old posters. Sheets of newspaper. After the crash, when I went home, I found all of these – I had thousands of them, stacked up in boxes in my bedroom. So, I thought I’d use them for this.’

  The room goes still. They’ve probably done their research. They know that, a year ago, Christopher Ellis lost his dad – the pilot of the plane – that crashed into the Atlantic. There was lots of news coverage in the weeks following the discovery of the black box.

  ‘Why stars?’ someone asks.

  My heart jolts.

  Christopher looks up at the ceiling from which his installation hangs. His hair’s shorter, smarter somehow; it’s still curly but the tangles have gone.

  Christopher’s head shifts to the cascade of stars that hang from the ceiling. Hundreds and hundreds of them, every one of them a plane ticket, folded by him.

  Each star has a small light inside. That’s where the flickering came from.

  He keeps scanning the ceiling. And then he notices me. His eyes go wide.

  I look back at him and smile.

  You didn’t think I’d miss your official opening, did you? I try to say with my eyes.

  Christopher looks back to the guy asking the question.

  ‘A friend once taught me about the stars,’ he says. ‘How they’re always with us. Even when we can’t see them – even when they’re hundreds of light years away. I guess that inspired me.’

  Someone starts clapping. And then others join in. Soon, the whole room is applauding him.

  He gives them a small nod and steps away from the lectern.

  I wait on the balcony while he shakes people’s hands and answers more questions that people didn’t get to ask in the official Q&A.

  Mom, Dad, Jude and Stephen walk up to him and give him a hug. It’s like they know Christopher, when really, besides that brief glimpse they got of him in the lobby of the hotel back in Nashville a year ago, this is the first time they’ve met him properly. I guess they’ve heard so much about him that he feels familiar.

  Then Christopher disappears from the crowd for a bit and I think he’s gone to the bathroom or that he’s slipped outside to get some air because it’s all too much. It would be killing him, all this attention.

  I sit down, my back pressed to the wall, and look up the hundreds of paper stars.

  ‘You showed up – again.’ His voice comes in from behind me.

  I turn to see him in the doorway. He’s got taller this past year. And he’s standing straighter. And he doesn’t have that ridiculous backpack weighing him down.

  ‘Wouldn’t have missed it,’ I say.

  He comes and sits down beside me.

  ‘And you’re wearing a dress,’ he says, touching the hem of the yellow cotton dress Jude helped me pick out for tonight.

  ‘It’s a special occasion,’ I say.

  He looks up at me. ‘It is?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  For a while, we both sit there, our backs pressed to the wall, our legs stretched out, just touching, looking up at the dark ceiling and those hundreds of flickering paper stars.

  ‘So, you finally got it,’ I say.

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘That they’re art.’

  ‘I’m still not sure about that.’

  I laugh. ‘You won a major art competition and your work’s in a gallery and you’ve got people asking you questions about your installation – and you got an art scholarship to Central St. Martin’s – and you still don’t think you’re an artist?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘You’re an artist, Christopher. A totally kickass artist.’

  His eyes go back to the ceiling, to all those stars.

  ‘I’m a bit of a fraud, you know,’ he says.

  ‘A fraud?’

  ‘I stole someone else’s work.’

  ‘What?’

  He points to a corner of the room. ‘Once upon a time, this American girl made a paper moon…’

  And that’s when I see it. My odd-shaped, black and white, paper moon, hanging from the ceiling, side by side with the one he made at the diner.

  ‘You hung them up!’

  ‘They complete the piece, don’t you think.’

  I laugh. ‘Well, I’m honoured.’

  He smiles and then sits back. The sound of clinking glasses, the murmur of voices, jazz music, playing low, swirls below us. Then he says, ‘I keep wondering what Dad would have thought.’

  ‘Your dad would have been totally proud. This is a big thing, Christopher. A really big thing.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Your mom’s so proud too.’

  ‘You spoke to her?’

  I nod. ‘I called her to check the details – for today.’

  ‘So, the two of you conspired?’

  I smile. ‘Yep.’

  I think he kind of likes that we’re in touch, him and his mom.

  ‘Mum’s good at showing up,’ Christopher says. ‘Like you.’

  Christopher hasn’t said all that much about his mom and I kno
w it must be hard, getting used to having her as his main parent when she walked out on him and his dad all those years ago. But I know that it’s a good thing too, that they’ve fond each other again.

  ‘Are you staying for a bit?’ he asks.

  I nod. ‘Until school starts.’

  He was the first person I called when I got into MIT. If he was still here, it would have been Blake. But it felt good to share it with Christopher.

  Although it’s dark up here, I see his eyes light up.

  I open the palm of my hand. The star’s sitting there, the one he made for me a year ago. The star that gave me courage to sing Blake’s song at Jude’s wedding; the star that’s helped me get through this past year.

  ‘You’ve still got it.’

  ‘Of course.’ I hold it up and look at it in relation to all the other stars hanging from the ceiling and I wonder whether one day, we’ll work it out: how far the stars really are from us.

  ‘I’m going to take it with me,’ I say.

  ‘Take it with you?’

  ‘This – your art.’ I hold out the paper star. ‘On my first trip into space.’ I smile.

  He takes the star from me and places it on the ground.

  Then he holds my hand.

  ‘You still believe that thing about astronauts and personal relationships?’ he asks.

  Blood rushes to the surface of my skin.

  ‘The statistics don’t lie,’ I say.

  ‘Let’s not be a statistic then,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not sure we get to decide.’

  ‘Yeah, we get to decide,’ he says.

  And then he leans in and, very lightly, he presses his lips to mine.

  Everything goes still.

  All I can feel is his breath and his touch.

  Through his lips, he whispers, ‘This is big enough for me.’

  And then I kiss him back.

  And the kiss feels like it lasts a lifetime. And like a second. Like time in space.