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WHEN ASTRA Hart was four years old, a man told her a story. It had begun with the rain; relentlessly harsh and unapologetic as it crashed down onto the cobblestone pavement, and ended with eight bodies, dead in the seats of a bus, only one survivor.
"She doesn't have any other family," a nurse was heard saying, "they say her parents kept her away from their own."
"Well," another begun, rather morbidly, "they have no way of objecting now." And it was true — Astra Hart who lay in a coma had no family par her grandpa, a man she scarcely saw, only having met once or twice before her parents' demise. "Let's call him."
It was a few days later when he showed up, clad in a leather jacket and jeans, unlike one would suspect a fifty-something year old man to dress. "Where is she? Where's my Star?"
He was pointed to a room where the little girl lay, playing mindlessly with a doll — in a few years time, the memories of her parents would fade, the crash would be nothing more than a bad dream —"do you remember me, Astra?"
The little girl shook her head and placed the barbie doll in a hot pink plastic car. "I have a car just like this one," he'd said with a laugh, Astra's eyes were wide.
"Can I see it?" In that harmless question, Astra had sealed her fate to move with the man to LA. He seemed kind enough, she had thought.
And, by the time Astra Hart was seven years old, she had forgotten the man, and the story he'd told. Only knowing life in LA, surrounded by racing cars and men five times her age, caring for only one person in the world — the man who saved her from a life of despair.
Oh, if only she had just remembered the man's face, then maybe what was about to transpire, wouldn't have to happen at all.
