As Far as the Stars

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, wearing 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 there, 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.

I look up in time to see a short, bald official in a UKFlyer uniform climbing onto a chair. He tries to get our attention, but everyone speaks over him, shouting out questions.

So, I stick two fingers in my mouth and whistle.

A few people give me a dirty look, like what I did was inappropriate. But it works: the room goes still.

The paper-folding guy looks up at me, his eyes big and grey behind his glasses, and smiles.

Everyone else turns to face the UKFlyer representative.

‘I’m sorry that we haven’t been able to give you more information about the flight—’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ It’s the man I saw earlier, the one with the red face.

‘If you bear with me—’

But he’s lost us. We all know that he hasn’t got any more of a clue about what’s going on than we do.

Which totally pisses me off. I need to know what’s happening so that I can work out, for sure, whether Blake’s going to make it to the wedding or not. Unless Blake shows up right now, we’re already too late to make it to the family breakfast, news which will cause a minor earth tremor when it reaches Mom.

My heart sinks. It’s the middle of the summer vacation and everyone’s coming over to see the solar eclipse: it would take a miracle for him to find a seat on another plane. And if Blake doesn’t get onto another flight – and soon; if he ends up stuck in Heathrow, he’ll miss the rehearsal dinner too. God, he might not even make it to the wedding on time.

And it’s not as if we can delay the wedding – like we usually delay things for Blake being late. Because the whole point of the wedding is that it’s meant to happen during the eclipse. And the eclipse isn’t going to hang around for anyone – not even my brother. On Monday 21st of August 2017, between 13.25 and 14.26 (there’s a time-zone change between the states of Virginia and Tennessee), the moon’s shadow will rush across Nashville at 1,800 mph, and Jude will marry her high school sweetheart, Stephen. And they’ll live happily ever after.

Or that was what was meant to happen. Before this – whatever it is – got in the way.

I look at my phone. Mom’s left another message.

Did you pick up Blake’s suit?

I text back quickly:

Yes.

Then I put my phone away.

You want to know the really ironic thing? It was my idea. Having the wedding during the eclipse. It was genius. A kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of genius. Four birds, actually.

Bird One: the solar eclipse is a big deal for me. Skies and planets and stars – basically, everything that’s not on earth – is what I spend all my time thinking about. This is the first total solar eclipse to sweep across the entire USA in ninety-nine years and Nashville is the largest city in the path of the totality. Having a special family event connected to it felt cool.

Bird Two: Mom wanted a wedding that trumped all her friends’ daughters’ weddings – and none of those got married or are planning to get married during the eclipse. The idea totally got me into Mom’s good books.

Bird Three: Nashville’s kind of a home away from home for us. When we were little we’d visit all the time, squeezing into Grandpa’s tiny flat on Music Row. Grandpa was Blake’s hero. He played the electric guitar and they’d jam together for hours. Gran passed away before we had the chance to meet her so we were Grandpa’s only family. Blake was the one who made sure that Grandpa never felt alone. Anyway, all our happiest family memories are from that time. When Grandpa passed away, Dad decided to keep the flat, for all of us but for Blake mainly, who totally loves Nashville. One day Blake wants to live there – there and London, his two favourite cities in the world.

Anyway, that’s kind of Bird Four: holding the wedding in Music City was a way to guarantee that Blake would show up and that he’d buy into the whole wedding thing. Blake loves Nashville. He sees himself as the blended reincarnation of Johnny Cash and Jimi Hendrix – with a bit of Dolly Parton thrown in for good measure: Blake’s got this kind of hip androgynous thing going, which is also part of his brand. When people ask him if he’s gay or bi or something, he says: You fall in love with a person, not a gender. Which gives him this sexy, mysterious vibe that make girls – and guys – even more into him.

Anyway, when I suggested the eclipse, just for a moment, Mom and Dad looked at me like I was the special one. Like they do with Blake because he’s this really talented musician with good looks and has this totally magnetic personality. Like they look at Jude because she’s pretty and because she’s marrying a guy who’s going to law school, like Mom did, and is going to give them a million grandchildren.

So, I’d done well.

Only I didn’t factor in the fact that Blake might not show.

I start to feel dizzy, like the ground is falling away from under me.

The UKFlyer guy looks out across the room, like he’s hoping that someone’s going to save him so that he can get down and not have to do this anymore.

A woman with a baby asleep in a sling walks up to the counter where the guy’s standing and looks up at him, her eyes bloodshot.

‘Please tell us what’s going on.’ She says it in this really quiet voice, but we all hear her.

The guy stares down at her kid, like he’s never seen a baby before. His eyebrows scrunch together and his shoulders slump.

‘Please,’ she says again.

And then it’s like something clicks. He rolls back his shoulders, tilts up his head, opens his mouth and says it, the thing that no one in this room is ready to hear:

‘It’s missing.’ He clears his throat. ‘The plane’s missing.’

Chapter Four

15.23 EST

It’s been two hours since the UKFlyer official told us that the plane is missing. The plane with 267 crew and passengers on it. And Blake. Possibly. Or possibly not. I’m not sure what’s worse: knowing for sure that the person you’re waiting for is on a plane that’s vanished into thin air or not knowing whether the person you’re waiting for even got on the plane. I guess I do know. I guess that being on a missing plane is worse. But still, you get my point: this whole situation sucks.

I text Blake for like the millionth time – on both the numbers, the one from the other night when he asked me to book the flight and the other one where he told me that he was heading to Dulles. And I get that it’s stupid because he’s probably nowhere near either of those phones right now, but I don’t know what else to do.

Where are you?

I wait a beat.

Still no answer.

So, I text his actual cell in the hope that he found it:

Hi Blake, please tell me where you are – got to get to the wedding.

I shove my phone into the back pocket of my shorts and look around at the people who’ve been waiting with me for more news. They’ve gone quiet, like they’re scared to say anything out loud.

How can a plane just disappear? It’s not like Mom’s car keys or Dad’s hairline. We’re talking about thousands of tons of aluminium with hundreds of people on it. And it’s not like it’s an obscure route – planes from Heathrow land in DC all the time: it’s a clean, well-worn journey over the Atlantic. And they’d have been in contact with air traffic control the whole way, wouldn’t they?

Ground crew from the airline hand out water bottles and meal vouchers, like we’re the victims of some kind of natural disaster. Then they let us go back to the arrivals lounge where the cafes and restaurants are.

Whenever someone from UKFlyer talks to us, they say the same thing:

We’re on the case.

We’ll keep you updated on any developments.

Try not to worry.

So, we wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Which is driving me totally crazy. Because waiting is the one thing I can’t afford to do right now.

Blake’s going to be fine. He’s always fine. Being fine is in his DNA. Born under a lucky star and all that. What’s not going to be fine is him ruining our sister’s wedding.

The arrivals terminal has got even busier. A few people managed to get chairs. Most of us are standing or sitting on the floor.

I notice the toddler who was screaming earlier, sprawled on his dad’s lap, asleep.

And I notice the quiet, tangle-haired guy. He’s making another paper model from a sheet of newspaper, some kind of small bird, its wings spread wide. It’s totally amazing how quickly he makes those models. And how they go from being this big piece of paper to a tiny representation of something, like he’s creating a miniature world.

He brings the newspaper bird over to the woman with the baby, who’s been crying for what feels like the last hour. She’s taken him out of his sling and is bouncing him on her knee to calm him down. It takes her a few seconds to notice the guy standing there, with his paper bird.

He holds it out to her. She looks up at him.

‘For your baby,’ I hear him say.

The mom takes the bird from him, places it in her open palm and stares at it, as though she’s waiting for it to flap its wings and take off. When the baby notices the bird, he stops crying and starts swiping at it with his chubby fingers.

‘Thank you,’ the mom says.

The guy gives her this nod, accompanied by a little bow, and then goes back to sitting on the floor and takes another piece of scrap paper out of his backpack.

And then a new wave of people pours through the arrivals gate.

That’s the worst thing about all this: the fact that other planes are landing all the time. Planes full of people – including planes from Heathrow.

I keep scanning the passengers coming through, hoping to see Blake’s crazy black hair sticking up over everyone’s heads. I’m totally ready to storm up to him and make a scene, to lay into him for, well, being Blake: late, disorganised, unaware of anything else that’s going on in the world besides himself – and infuriatingly loveable with it so that just as I’m yelling at him I’ll want to hug him too. Because I’ve missed him this summer. I miss him whenever he’s away.