When Stars Collide

by Sara Furlong-Burr

  Peter shook his head. “No, I couldn’t. Every problem, every heartache that drove me to that bar last night was self-inflicted. I wasn’t about to drag you down the rabbit hole with me. I’ll deal with my demons and move on like you.” We walked in silence, but I could sense there was more he wanted to say. “He really cares about you, that much I can tell. As much as a relief as it is to see that, it’s also … excruciating. But I’ll get over it. It’s just something I need to do on my own.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets as he picked up his pace and walked away from me. It was typical Peter not to involve others in his problems, but I wasn’t prepared for how badly it hurt to have him shut me out.

  “Okay, people,” the officiant addressed us. “You’re going to line up in the order you’re going to be walking down the aisle, starting with myself, and then Candy, followed by Mark—”

  “Actually,” Elle interceded, “I was thinking I’d like Mark to walk me down the aisle with Tom.”

  “Really?” The stunned elation Mark was feeling was quite evident as he tried and failed to maintain a poker face.

  “Of course. You’re my dad, and a dad should walk his daughter down the aisle.”

  “Would you like me to walk with Candy, then?” Tom asked, his voice shaking, not from emotion, but from his advanced Parkinson’s disease. The fact he could even walk down the aisle at all was a miracle in and of itself.

  “Absolutely not, Tom. You’ll walk on one side of me, and Mark will walk on the other.”

  “Okay, so it’s settled. Candy, you’ll walk alone,” the officiant said, jotting down something in her notebook.

  “No, she won’t,” Elle interjected again. “Alex will walk behind her.”

  “M-Me,” Alex stammered, truly petrified by the idea.

  “You’re my sister, and I’d like my small family to be part of the ceremony. That is … only if you want to be.”

  Alex nodded. “O-Okay. Sure.”

  “Don’t worry, Alex, I’ll slip you a couple drinks beforehand. You won’t even know you’re walking down an aisle,” I offered. Elle eyed me, not the least bit amused. “What?”

  “Any more last-minute changes I should be aware of?” the officiant asked Elle, scribbling more notes down.

  “Nope, that should be it.”

  “Okay, so the order will go me first, then Candy and Alex, and then the groomsmen, followed by Monroe as the best man, and, of course, Luke.” The guys lined up in their respective order as the officiant looked down her list. “Next are the bridesmaids, followed by Mena as the maid of honor.” I took my spot behind Violet, wishing I could walk next to Peter so that I could get him to open up to me some more. “Finally, before Elle’s big entrance, we have the flower girl and the ring bearer.”

  The little girl with the brunette curls took her spot, but Jackson, the ring bearer, was nowhere to be found.

  “Jackson?” Amanda called her son, frustrated. “Jackson!” As she spun around, looking around the grounds, her frustration quickly melted into concern. “Jackson, where are you!”

  “Jackson!” Peter called nervously. He stepped out of the line, looking from left to right, as we all were doing now.

  “I thought he was with you!” Amanda exclaimed accusingly.

  “You’re the one who told him to go stand by Elle!” Peter shook his head. “Look, blaming each other isn’t going to find him. Let’s split up. He couldn’t have gotten far.”

  “We’ll search the east side of the property,” Elle volunteered herself and Luke.

  “I’ll look in the gardens,” Violet added.

  “Suzanne and I will search the west end, near the river.” Candy and Suzanne—the woman formerly known as the officiant—took off.

  “Oh God, the river!” Amanda shrieked.

  My panic rose right along with hers. We may not see eye-to-eye on most things, but when it came to Jackson, our feelings were aligned. That little boy meant the world to the both of us; the one bond we shared. “He wouldn’t have gone near the river,” I said to assuage my own fears more than anything. “Jackson hates the water.”

  “Mena’s right.” Peter put his hand on Amanda’s shoulders, giving me an appreciative smile. “You know how much the kid hates baths.” Amanda nodded, wiping away her tears with the back of her hand.

  In my peripheral vision, I spotted a figure approaching. Phineas. He must have heard the commotion. “Why don’t you two search the south end of the property? Phineas and I will take the north,” I proposed, just as he reached our group.

  Peter nodded, guiding a distraught Amanda down the cobblestones, calling out for Jackson with each footstep.

  “What’s going on?” Phineas asked, concerned.

  “Jackson’s missing.”

  “What? Oh no!” He looked around as though only his eyes could detect what the rest of ours had missed. By this point, everyone had scattered in opposite directions, aside from Tom, who sat on a bench near one of the gardens. “If I hadn’t been focused on my damn phone—”

  “What? You would have seen him? There was an entire group of us and not a single person noticed him slipping away. You can’t blame yourself.” I turned around, scanning the various outbuildings, most of which were already being searched, before turning back around to face Phineas.

  “We’ll find him.” His thumb brushed my cheek, wiping away a tear I hadn’t realized had fallen.

  I nodded, doing my best to keep it together as I followed Phineas back up the walkway. Frantic calls for Jackson surrounded us like mockingbirds, each call imitating the other, more frantic that its predecessor. We took a sharp turn down a path consisting of loose stones. Along that path stood a small tool shed. When we came upon it, Phineas threw its doors open, scanning the contents inside. Something told me Jackson wouldn’t be in there, just as something told me he wouldn’t be responding to anyone calling his name, even though I was positive that wherever he was, he probably heard our calls. He was a smart boy, and his disappearance was his own doing. He was upset, scared, and much like Peter, wanted to deal with his feelings on his own terms.

  Wait. He was scared. Scared. That’s it!

  “I get scared sometimes, too, but I deal with it.”

  “What do you do to help you not feel so scared?”

  “I find some place to hide where I can be by myself. My nana has a tree house in her backyard. I go there. It’s up high and no one ever thinks to look there.”

  That seemingly innocuous conversation happened so long ago, yet it was jam-packed with clues now. “Oh my God.” My eyes widened.

  “What?” Phineas asked, looking around. “What is it? Do you see him?”

  “No, but I think I might have an idea where he may be. I-I have to find Karen Hargrove.”

  Without providing any sort of an explanation to Phineas, I sprinted off in the direction of the farmhouse, pushing my tiny legs to their limit.

  “Mena, wait!” Phineas called behind me, but I was on a mission and waiting wasn’t an option.

  Thistles scraped my ankles as I ran through the untended part of the Hargrove property, unintended for traversal by the public. My adrenaline pumping, I kept on running, powering through the pain. This was the most I’d run in, well, ever. Never mind the fact that I was doing so in a pair of heels that made every attempt to thwart my efforts, occasionally planting themselves in soil softened by an early morning rainfall. If it weren’t for the thistles and whatever else may be hiding in the overgrowth, I would have kicked them off a long time ago.

  Up ahead, the pristine ivory farmhouse loomed closer and closer with each step. If my legs were as long as Elle’s I would probably be bounding up to the porch by now, but alas, they were not. “Shit,” I grumbled, coming up to a picket fence. It was tall, but not impossibly tall, much like a hurdle in track. Not wanting to break my stride, I made the snap decision to jump over it exactly like said hurdle and hope for the best. Sucking in a breath, I leapt much the same way I’d seen track stars
do in the Olympics. Except I had never run track, and my form wasn’t exactly on point—not to mention, my eyes weren’t exactly open.

  Just when I thought I’d lucked out and cleared the fence, my foot kicked one of the pickets. With a snap, it broke in half, sending me crashing to the ground. Dazed but still determined, I pushed myself up and limped the rest of the way to the house, knocking on the door like an anxious woodpecker. In mid-knock, the door opened.

  “Can I help you?” a woman I hoped was Karen Hargrove asked, inspecting me curiously. “My Lord, child, were you in a car accident?”

  I held up my finger, signaling that I was too out of breath to respond and proceeded to spend the next several seconds gathering myself. “Are … you … Karen … Hargrove?”

  “Yes, I am.” She gave me a look that reminded me of the one Jackson gave me whenever I asked him a question he thought I should already know the answer to.

  “I’m … in the … wedding party. There’s a boy … missing.”

  “What? Oh my, I’ll call 911 right away.”

  I felt my breath returning to me as I held out my hand, my voice slow but not as breathy. “That’s fine, but I need to know if you have a tree house anywhere on the property.”

  “A tree house?” She squinted her eyes, looking at me like I’d just asked the most inane question she’d ever heard. “No, there’s no tree house on the property.” My heart sank as my only lead to finding Jackson was smashed before my eyes. “There’s a tree stand that I like to sit in and listen to nature from time to time. My husband and I—”

  “A tree stand?” My jaw dropped. “Where is it?”

  “In the woods next to the parking lot. It’s only a few trees in. You should be able to see it from your car.”

  “Great.” In a hurry, I turned to leave, shouting as I ran, “I’m sorry about your fence. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Wait, what about my fence?” she called behind me.

  “Mena?” Phineas caught up to me mid-stride, just as out of breath as I had been, which made me feel better, considering he was in a hell of a lot better shape than I was. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

  “Get Peter and Amanda and have them meet at the tree stand near the parking lot.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. Recognizing the urgency in my eyes, he asked no further questions and, instead, ran back in the same direction he’d come from.

  Lungs on fire and legs made of jelly by the time I reached the parking lot, I scanned the tree line, searching for the tree stand Karen mentioned. “Please be here,” I whined to no one but myself as my legs limped across the asphalt. Growing increasingly despondent, I was just about to proclaim Karen a filthy liar when a glint from something in the woods caught my attention. Narrowing my eyes, I noticed something metallic twenty feet from the tree line. A ladder. A ladder that led up to a tree stand.

  “Jackson,” I called, approaching the ladder. After receiving no response, I peered up the rungs to see whether I could see into the blind, but was impeded by its camouflage cover, which didn’t afford so much as a glimpse of the inside. My stomach sank as I took in the height of the stand compared to my position on the ground and the thought of Jackson climbing up there by himself. Maybe I’d been wrong, and he wasn’t up there at all.

  “Jackson.” Disheartened when no response was forthcoming from inside of the blind, I sighed, leaning my body against the tree. If he wasn’t here, then I honestly had no idea where else he could be. This property was huge, a large part of it wooded. What if he was lost in the woods somewhere? What if we couldn’t find him before nightfall? “Oh, Jackson, where are you?”

  “I’m not up here,” a small voice answered me from inside of the blind. Give him a few more years and he would sound just as much like Peter as he looked.

  With a smile so all-encompassing it hurt my face, I stared up at the inside of the stand from the bottom of the ladder. “You know, you suck at hide-and-seek, right?”

  “It took you a while to find me, didn’t it?”

  The smartass gene must run strong in the Monroe family.

  “Point noted. Since I found you, why don’t you come down?”

  “No.”

  “W-Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to.”

  “Fair enough. But you realize that means I’m going to have to come up there, right?” I was met with nothing but silence from the tree stand. Damn it was high. “Okay, I’m coming up now.” I stepped up on the bottom rung, immediately withdrawing my foot when my heel slid on its surface. Kicking off my shoes, I stood barefoot in the dirt, psyching myself up to make the climb, only to once again withdraw my foot after stepping onto the first rung. “I’m for real climbing up there this time.” I think I said that more to motivate myself than anything else. “You’d better prepare yourself for a stern rebuke.”

  At least it’s high enough that if I were to fall, my death would be relatively quick.

  Shut up, brain.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped up on the first rung, willing myself to keep my eyes trained on the stand and not the ground below. Beads of sweat formed across my forehead; my heart rate increased. To add insult to injury, the rungs became even more unforgiving on my feet the higher I climbed, until, at last, I reached the stand. Once inside, I found a platform and a bench seat just large enough to hold Jackson and, probably, myself. On shaky legs, I walked on my knees over to Jackson and took him in my arms.

  “It took you long enough.”

  I laughed in spite of myself, wiping a tear away from my cheek as I faced him. “You’re going to hear this like a hundred times today, anyway, so let me be the first to tell you, don’t you dare ever do this again! Seriously, Jackson, what were you thinking?” Knees already aching from the metal platform, I moved to take a seat on the bench next to him.

  “So, you’re going to yell at me, too?” He let out a sigh. “You’re just like them.”

  “Jackson, you ran away. We were all very worried about you. Look, I know it may seem like I’m yelling at you, but I’m not. Adults, we jump to the worst-case scenario, especially when it comes to kids. Our adrenaline is running as high as our emotions and we react. Your mom and dad are no exception. You’re their son and they love you very much—they only want the best for you.”

  “Adults are weird.”

  “I can’t argue with that.” A minute amount of light came through a small window in the front of the cover. In that light, I noticed Jackson relax his shoulders as he inspected some dirt underneath his fingernails. “Do you want to talk about why you ran away?” He shrugged his shoulders, remaining quiet, his eyes never leaving his fingers. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

  “Mom and Dad have been fighting a lot. I thought that if I wasn’t there, maybe that would get them to stop.”

  “You know that whatever their reason is for having their disagreement, it has nothing to do with you, right?” It broke my heart that he would think otherwise.

  “Dad has been sad a lot and busy with work and school. He forgets things sometimes and it makes Mom mad.”

  “He’s stressed, and when he forgets to do things, it makes your mom stressed, too. When adults get stressed out, they can get mad easily, but it’s not your fault. No matter how mad they may be with each other, they will always love you, and they would be devastated without you.”

  The corners of Jackson’s mouth tugged upward into a smile that lasted shorter than a millisecond. “Dad was always happy when he was with you. He misses you. So do I.”

  “I miss you, too, buddy.” I put my arm around his shoulders, drawing him in closer to me. “How about I make you a deal?”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “If you agree to come down from this tree stand, then whenever I’m in town, I promise you that I’ll call your dad and come pick you up so that we can do something fun together.”

  “Like go to the fair?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’m welcome at the Virginia Sta
te Fair, anymore. I was thinking more like going out for pizza or something.”

  “You’re bribing me?”

  “Some would say bribery, some would say skilled settlement negotiations. Do we have a deal or not?”

  He thought for a split second before breaking out into a grin that revealed a missing incisor. “Deal.”

  “Glad doing business with you.” I shook his hand, pleased to have brokered a successful business deal with a second grader.

  “All right, we can get out of here now.”

  My stomach sank at the thought of my feet touching the ladder again. Apparently, human teleportation hadn’t yet come to fruition in the minutes since we’d been up here.

  “Mena, are you okay? You look like you’re going to hurl.”

  “I just may, Jackson. I just may.”

  *****

  “Baby!” Amanda exclaimed, rushing over to Jackson. She plucked him from the bottom rung and hugged him tightly in her arms. “I was so worried.” With tears streaming down her cheeks, she kissed his forehead. “Thank God, you’re okay,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. “Don’t you dare do this to me again!”

  I raised my eyebrow in an I told you so fashion when Jackson glanced up at me from over his mother’s shoulder as I propped myself against a tree, slipping my shoes back on my blistered feet. In the background, Phineas stood leaning against an oak tree, keeping his distance. Our eyes met and he grinned at me, his handsome face beaming with pride. Returning his smile, I moved to take a step in his direction but stopped short when Peter appeared in front of me.

  He didn’t have to say anything; his expression said it all. We were never at a loss for words when it came to each other. One of us always had something to say—a sarcastic quip, usually. But not this time. And we didn’t need to—our faces said enough, especially when I began to cry right along with him.

  Shaking his head, Peter threw his arms around me, breaking our silence. “Thank you.” It wasn’t necessary, to thank me, and he knew it. But it was the only thing he could think of to say.

  “I’m just glad I was right.”