And then Wes wrecked, and Mack and Shaw screamed together.
Even as Wes lay in the hospital hovering between life and death, Shaw screamed from sunup to sundown. Mack’s own wails of anguish echoed her daughter’s, leaking out like the milk that kept her breasts sticky and wet. Mack had stared down at her infant daughter and her broken dad, sobbing, unable to think anything other thanhelpmehelpmehelpme. Until the day a nurse calmly scooped up Shaw and led Mack into an unoccupied room. “You lay down and sleep as long as you can, okay? I’m Shauna. I’ve got your baby. You sleep.”
Delirious, Mack had crawled onto the sterile hospital bed and passed out, unable to worry about where Shaw was going or with whom. Mack didn’t know if she’d slept an hour or an entire day, but she woke to weak sunlight peeking through the thin curtains, her chest hard and achy. She’d found Shaw at the nurse’s station, quiet, clean, and contently suckling a bottle in Shauna’s arms. Mack was too stupefied to care what was in the bottle.
“Okay?” she’d asked, her voice raw and barely audible.
She’d been asking after Shaw but the nurse gave a sympathetic smile and said, “Same as yesterday. Remember, it could be weeks before the swelling in his brain goes down.”
Mack nodded. She wondered if she should hold her arms out for the baby and felt shame that she didn’t want to do anything that might make Shaw wake and scream.
“She’s not crying.”
The nurse smiled down at Shaw. “Some babies just don’t want to be babies.”
Shauna’s words became truth. Around the time Shaw could sit on her own, she started to cry less and laugh more, and by the time she was walking, all traces of that angry baby were gone and a smiling, golden-haired girl toddled in her place. If Mack had gazed into a crystal ball to see the truth of who her daughter would become, she couldn’t have believed it on that day.
In the years since, Mack had forgotten to reach out and ask for help, and accept help when it was offered. Outside of the hospital, there weren’t many Shaunas to be found. Laurie had been preoccupied with her own life, and Mack was alone, a young single mother with a disabled dad and a precarious business, forced to learn how to change diapers and dressings. She spent a decade powering through on her own, not knowing how to ask for help.
Which made accepting help from the crew infinitely harder.
Instead of going home to shower after the third day of practice, Mack sat on a metal folding chair in the team trailer, still in her reeking coveralls and pinched between a wall of whiteboards and a narrow table. IndyCars were fickle machines and the slightest change could add or subtract substantial speed, and she answered the crew’s questions about everything from seat vibrations to the exact sound the car made during gear shifts.
And there were a lot of crew. The eleven car’s team of engineers and mechanics crowded around the long conference table, tight enough that Mack’s knees touched someone else’s, while Janet sat in the middle of the table, one ankle crossed over her opposite knee, taking up enough space for three people. Leo leaned against the corner, shoulder to shoulder with his engineer. Jimmy had called all hands together to figure out the mystery of Mack’s lack of speed, and while she didn’t make a habit of doubting herself behind the wheel, she worried the problem with the eleven car washer.
She’d started the meeting by apologizing, trying to convey sincerity and humility, but after an hour of grilling, Mack’s answers grew shorter, sharper. She heard the snappishness of her own voice when she answered a question and then was asked the same thing again in a slightly different way. Over and over, she insisted that she felt a strong understeer, only to be told that she couldn’t possibly be feeling anything but oversteer. When she pointed out the places where she did feel oversteer, the engineers told her she was wrong. What was the point of answering their questions if they wouldn’t listen to her?
In the hot, crowded room, Mack’s mind started to wander. She wanted a shower, and she hadn’t even had a second to process an angry text she’d received from Kelley. He never reached out to her first and Mack had been startled to see his name pop up on her phone. He’d seen posts about her on the JJR social media account and demanded to know what she was doing. He didn’t ask about Shaw, didn’t question the whereabouts of his daughter, but wanted to know why Mack was atIndy. As an engineer droned on about wind shear, Mack was rereading the text and starting to get pissed off when Janet slapped her hands on the table hard enough to knock Mack’s thoughts back into the present, along with someone else’s water bottle. “Enough of this shit. We’ve accomplished zero in here. Time for a walk-n-talk.”
Groans echoed around the room as engineers grabbed their laptops and stumbled out of the trailer. Mack jumped at the chance to leave the stuffy room and followed dutifully behind Jimmy.
“What are we doing?”
The older man frowned as he descended the open-weave metal stairs. “When the team is cranky, the boss makes us get up and start walking. We keep working to solve the issue, but we do it while walking. Usually around whatever track we’re at.” He pointed to his leg. “My hip doesn’t like it much, but it does seem to knock the attitude outta these computer nerds.”
“I was starting to feel rage-y in there.”
“Exactly,” Jimmy said. “Harder to be on your high horse when your feet touch the ground.”
The track, so loud and crowded an hour ago, was eerily calm. Janet led her team like troops from the trailer to the track, marching like she intended to speed-walk the entire two-and-a-half-mile loop. They all followed in a ragged line, quiet conversations peppering the air as they reached the famous yard of bricks that made up the start-finish line. Jimmy and Lucie walked ahead, heads bowed in intense conversation, but Mack stayed behind the group. She slowed her steps as she passed over the bricks, felt the ridges of the mortar under her toes. It was only earth, clay and lime and water, and yet those three feet meant so much to so many people: history, hard work, heartbreak, holy ground.
“You okay, Rookie?”
Mack hadn’t noticed Leo walking out with the rest of the crew, and it surprised her that he’d stayed so long, especially since it had nothing to do with his own qualification. He looked calm and confident, thelate-afternoon sun showing off his perpetual tan. Hitting speeds in the two-hundred-thirty-mile mark must be good for the health.
“This feels pointless,” she admitted. “It’s like they’re mad that I’m feeling what I feel in the car.”
Leo shook his head. “They don’t know you yet. I’ve been with my team for eight years, and they know the lines I choose, the feel I prefer, even how my body moves in the car. You and your team don’t have that yet.”
“That’s not my fault,” she complained. She kept her gaze on the white walls of turn four looming ahead of them. It seemed so close, like they could touch the wall in a moment but in reality they would walk a thousand more steps before reaching it.
“It’s not,” Leo conceded. “But I promise they want to figure it out as much as you do.” Mack stared silently ahead, not convinced. “When you pull into the turn, what is it you need? What do you wish you were getting from the car?”
Her instinct was to snap at him that she’d done nothing but answer that same question for the last hour, but itwasa slightly different variation. The engineers asked what she felt—in the car, in her hands, in her body—but no one asked what shewishedshe felt in the car. She looked down at the storied asphalt and tried to explain.
“You know that moment when you first start turning the wheel? Like the very millisecond when you first move? It’s tight.”
Leo considered that for a long moment. “What about the exit?”
