As Far as the Stars

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.