As Far as the Stars. Virginia Macgregor
those meeting passengers on Flight UKFlyer0217 from Heathrow. Please come to the information desk.
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