Page 25

Chapter Twenty-Four

Shantal

A ustralia suits Darien much better than Saudi Arabia did, and he lands a P2 in the race, bringing him to a total of fifty-five points and second in the Championship, with Diana Zahrani for Revello in first. In fact, the only unfortunate thing about the race is that Miguel, Peter and Darien attempt a pit barbecue in the back of the track to cook brisket, and the stewards dig it up a whole six hours early, condemning not only a ton of meat but also a ton of coal.

Nevertheless, the team is immensely impressed with race performances; it looks as if the new training facility is holding up insanely well against expectations. Darien’s aim – to at least make P3 in the Championship – is looking achievable, as is Heidelberg’s in the Constructors’ title fight. It’s Miami up next – one of two ‘home’ races for Darien.

‘And there’s Turn Fourteen.’

We’re all gathered in Darien’s Heidelberg garage on the Miami track prior to the first free practice of the weekend. The garage should be saving us from the brutal sun but, although I have on a cap and sunglasses, my head still feels like it’s cooking. Miguel shields his eyes and points to the furthest end of the racetrack from us, which is …

‘Is that section of the track under … under a—’

‘Turnpike,’ Darien answers with lips so tight he has to be struggling to keep a straight face. ‘Whoever built this probably went on a serious trip while they were making the plans.’

‘Driving under a highway in an F1 car definitely wasn’t on my lifelong bingo card,’ adds Miguel. ‘But you get your pick of the bunch in this sport. Pretty much everyone’s a little bit … out there. It’s what gets us fans, to be honest.’ He squints at someone taking a photo by one of the other teams’ cars – Jolt, I believe. ‘And Kardashians, apparently. At least I think that’s a Kardashian. Might be a Jenner.’

‘Being “out there” earns fans?’

‘Being bold earns fans.’ Darien smirks as he corrects me, exchanging a grin with Miguel.

‘Cowboys,’ they proclaim together, which is just slightly freaky.

‘Okay, cowboys.’ Celina hustles up to us with a hefty clap of Darien’s back. ‘Time to put on the cooling vests and get fluids in you both. Let’s get a move on. No one wants to bake outside without defences.’

‘Agreed.’ I take a generous swig of water from my tumbler. ‘It’s scorching out here.’

‘God, the cockpit will be a nightmare,’ Miguel says as he cranes his neck to continue surveillance. ‘Is that the president?’

His trainer, Louie, appears before us with a tall bottle of electrolyte-rich hydration drink. ‘You can go find out after you’ve downed this.’

While the trainers sort out the vests, I get to watch the mechanic crew prepare Darien’s car. The goal of a practice session is essentially to gather track data, figure out how the car and driver can make tweaks to shave off seconds, and that requires change after change to the car, potentially major ones mid-session. The mechanics have to be prepared for anything.

Darien, sitting off towards the pit wall with his vest and electrolyte drink, hops down off his chair and nods towards the car. ‘I see ’em do this all the time, but this never gets old. One of my best buddies from her garage loves screwing with the engine and stuff. This is his idea of paradise.’

I couldn’t exactly see how, but I’m also the sort of person who struggles with the instruction manuals for Lego sets. ‘I suppose that could be.’

He cracks a smile. ‘Do you want to sit in it?’

‘Do I …?’ I look up at Darien in shock. ‘Do I what? ’

‘Go ahead.’ Darien tips his head at one of the mechanics, and he returns the gesture, calling out to the guys to stop work for a moment. The crew kicks back on the chairs lined up to the right of the garage to take a break, and Darien gives the car a little pat that screams pride and joy . ‘I’ll be right here. Just don’t press anything.’

That’s a quite vague warning but, eyes wide, I tentatively step in the cockpit of the Formula 1 car , a beautiful white and ice blue machine that makes my work car look like a lawnmower, one foot at a time.

‘Hold the halo and lower yourself,’ instructs Darien, crouching down beside the car, his arms resting casually on the edge of the cockpit. He’s so close I can make out every shade of brown in his irises, and as I follow his directions, bringing myself down to the seat that’s moulded specifically to his body, I struggle to look away from him. Look away .

‘And the belt. Is it all right if I …’ He gestures to the straps hanging to the sides.

‘Sure.’

Gently, he brings the seat belts over my shoulders and buckles down, giving the straps a good tug. His arms brush mine, his curls tickling my forehead as they fall forward.

‘Just in case,’ he says, and I can feel the breath that he lets out with every word on my skin. He grins. The dimples, those are the next thing I notice, tiny valleys that etch themselves into his cheeks as his eyes crease happily. The rest of the garage fades out, and it’s just Darien in front of me as he fiddles with the seat belt, his eyebrows knitting in concentration. He grabs the steering wheel off the tool chest to his right and tells me, ‘I’m gonna reach in front of you, Shantal. Sorry …’

He does, he reaches in front of me, and he fits the steering wheel to the dashboard – do they call it that? – in the front of the cockpit. This time, it’s not like Carnaval. I’m very much sober, and I very much take note of every single possible sensation in the moment. His cheek is centimetres from mine, his chin right over my shoulder. He smells of sandalwood and mint, and his body is cold, owing to the vest he’s got on.

‘Okay, and now,’ he messes with the steering, ‘hold on to this at three and nine o’ clock.’

I bring my hands up to the steering wheel, right beneath his, and he turns to me so abruptly that my heart hitches in my chest.

‘Can I show you what the paddles do?’ Darien asks.

I can’t do anything other than nod yes in the moment. My brain is so overcome by his proximity, my senses totally awash in his presence. I feel like my emotions are short-circuiting. I’ve had such a tight grip on myself and now I’m suddenly out of control.

Why do I want to be out of control?

‘Move your finger here.’ His voice is quiet but deep. This is a harmless little tutorial, I remind myself. Don’t make it mean anything . Even though we are sharing air right now. Even though the way he speaks to me is intimate without a semblance of touch. Even though I can’t take my eyes off him.

His hands work deftly with mine, taking my fingers and moving them from the steering to the paddles behind it.

‘If you push this one …’ his index fingers brush mine, ‘you can get DRS. And if you push this …’ He moves my fingers down a paddle. ‘Upshift and downshift gears. Then this one …’

His eyes drag themselves away from the steering wheel and up to mine as he guides my fingers down to the last paddle of the steering wheel. ‘Clutch,’ he murmurs, a deadly kind of huskiness lacing his voice.

‘Clutch,’ I echo.

I think I melt a little bit on the spot. I like to tell myself it’s just the raging Miami heat, but I know better. I’m holding my hand over that dumb burning candle again, except this time, there’s something blissful about the way it stings my palm.

It’s a fun little secret to keep, you know, that you’re losing your mind over a fleeting moment like that.

It stops being fun around the time the cars go out on track. Because that’s the point where I remember that no part of that fleeting moment can mean anything to me.

Even an obnoxiously long shower after the day’s two practice sessions does nothing.

It still feels like there will be some kind of evidence of my transgressions there, of Darien’s touch, no matter how hard I try to erase it.

I lie back on my bed and watch the high-end fan in my hotel room spin round and round. If I close my eyes, his breath caresses my cheek. If I open my eyes, I see the smile in his deep brown ones.

Darien Cardoso-Magalh?es, what are you made of?

Despite the implicit obligation I took up after we lost Sonia – the obligation of the good child, the child who will marry a good, stable guy and work a good, stable job – my soul still pulses like a caged bird yearning for freedom. I feel as if I’m a young girl running along the beach back home again, on top of the world for a few glorious seconds. I don’t quite know if I’ve been feeling that way since Darien smiled his smile with the damned football in his arms at the pitch back in Rio, daring me to accept his challenge, but all it took was the reality of the way he sends my mind and body into overdrive to remind me that something is certainly going on.

I press my face into a pillow, hoping it will dispel my thoughts of him, this high I don’t want to ride. But it doesn’t do a thing. I still feel his strong hands covering mine as he guides me from paddle to paddle on the steering wheel.

I throw the stupid pillow to the side, and it’s all gone, except for me. I’m alone in this room. My only companion is my denial, and maybe the shadow of Darien that I can’t stop seeing. I should hate him. Our lives are vastly different. Our responsibilities are a world apart.

‘We can’t do this,’ I whisper quietly. ‘Don’t waste your time on me. Leave.’

I remember sitting on the floor in our living room with a photo of Sonia, large, framed, at the mantel, garlanded in jasmine flowers. Her picture, the same one that is on my nightstand – smiling broadly, not a care in the world – watched us all cry as the pandit led us in prayers. Sonia’s shraddh , her wake, brought family and friends from far and wide, people from the other side of the globe; that’s how loved she was.

We mourned for thirteen days, during which I contemplated what purpose I had without Sonia. During which my parents watched me eat, sleep, come up and down the stairs once or twice, not a single word uttered to anyone.

On the thirteenth day, I realized.

Ma and Babu wanted happiness again. But I didn’t. I had felt it all leave my body, and I knew that – henceforth – I would be incapable of it. Incapable of love.

I should have felt more remorse or realized how much I was hurting myself, but I didn’t. Neither I nor my parents did. I regretted nothing. There was no other way for me to mend my life than close the doors. So when I sat down to talk to them after the terahvin , the rituals we performed on that thirteenth day to grant Sonia’s soul peace, I told them point-blank that I was beginning to think I wanted an arranged marriage, in an attempt to offer my parents the happiness they so badly craved. I’m not sure they’d seen it coming – they had never so much as suggested arranging something for me. Sonia’s was a love marriage, after all. They were shocked, but they agreed, perhaps because they were as shaken as I was. Over the weeks, they warmed to the idea. A long-absent spark began to fill them both again as they talked about the logistics of finding a potential husband. I figured that would be that.

Yet now, this blissfully ignorant, innocent-eyed but mischievous face fills my thoughts and occupies a gap I never asked to have occupied. This face makes me regret, stirring up a dull throbbing in the back of my head.

I finally stand up and take my phone off my dresser. Maybe a walk will do it if lying here won’t, I decide.

But as I approach the door, piling my hair into a knotty bun, someone else beats me to it. There’s a loud knocking.

Hesitantly, I crack the door open, though when I see it’s just Miguel, I open it all the way. I’m about to question what he’s doing here until I realize that there is a look on his face, a look that sends my heart sinking into my trainers: raised eyebrows, wide eyes. Fear, confusion, and above all, shock.

‘Shantal.’ He’s out of breath, scared – an expression I haven’t come to associate with Miguel. ‘It’s Darien.’

Formula 1 drivers train to resist the forces of their own cars, as well as to resist the forces of another. Although some things can’t be resisted at all.

Celina gestures desperately to a nurse, her forehead creased with worry like I’ve never seen before. It’s evident to me, even though they’re all the way down the hall from the family room, where the rest of us wait.

Miguel and I each have an arm around a rattled Henri, who just looks at me, scared out of his mind. I am no different. I’m learning a new fear right now. I thought the only danger was racing in a car. I forgot about the everyday counterpart that is just as treacherous.

‘I hear he was just driving on the road,’ Henri whispers. ‘That it happened on that dumb turnpike right over the track. It was an exports truck.’

My breath seizes up. ‘A truck?’

Miguel just nods.

I cover my mouth with my hands and pray it will silence the sound of my resolve shattering. I remember what Darien told me about his father: he’d been in a car crash with a truck, too. It is so rare that lightning strikes twice like this, but here we are. My nerve endings still remember the feeling of his skin on mine mere hours ago, of his fingers guiding mine over the paddles of the steering. What happens now?

We are in intensive care. This place is the limbo state between yes and no .

Nevertheless, all our heads turn when we see someone come out from the red-marked double doors at the end of that long hall: a doctor, by the look of the white coat. He speaks to Celina, nodding and explaining. She exhales wearily, and I can feel our combined hope that it’s an exhale of relief.

They make their way back through the doors. Celina comes our way, her gaze downcast, a stark counterpoint to her bright pink hair.

She stops just before our row of chairs. ‘He is stable,’ she tells us.

‘Oh.’ The sound escapes me abruptly, more whimper than anything else, prompting Miguel to rub my back. When I look at him, I see the same tentative optimism on his face.

‘But … it’s not simple.’ Celina swallows hard. ‘It’s the right arm.’

The pressure in my chest is immediate: a fear I do not have to learn. The guys process this statement. I ask, ‘How bad?’

‘Bad enough that they’re hesitant to wake him because he’ll be inconsolable when he finds out. They’ll likely do that tomorrow.’ Celina gestures to me, a small beckoning motion. ‘Shantal.’

I follow her to the coffee machine in the corner on trembling legs. She shakes her head grimly, slightly guiltily. ‘Shantal, I … he won’t race.’

My throat feels like it’s closing in on itself. Darien has committed so much to this team. They’re counting on him to carry the expectations of this enormous complex through to the Championship, and he knows that. To not race …

The scattered handful of things he told me about his childhood floods back to me. And god, forget the implications for the team. He will have to live with this for ever. A loss of opportunity, a loss of redemption for his father. ‘No. He’s got to.’

‘His entire right arm, it’s shattered.’ Celina’s voice is so low she’s almost mouthing words. ‘They had to insert multiple pins. He broke three ribs, Shantal, suffered a concussion, we’re lucky his legs …’

The mere implication stops my heart.

I press a hand to my chest. I’ve always been the kind of person who is there for the players’ highs and lows, come what may. But this isn’t the same. My own bones seem to break with each injury Celina describes, and I cannot even completely understand why .

‘Shantal, are you all right?’ She peers at me with concern, and says, ‘He’s fine, love. He’s okay.’

I bite my tongue to hold back any more sounds of pain, hear a sigh leave my body instead.

‘I know,’ I finally tell Celina. I don’t know if I will be able to watch the toll this takes on him. I almost say that. Instead, I continue, ‘It’s instinct. You hurt when your players do, right?’