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.
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
