She blinked and felt grit against her eyes. Her brain remembered the man in front of her, Dante Sabourian, the head of the safety team. He’d conducted the drivers’ safety meeting yesterday.
“What happened?”
Dante lightly tapped her helmet again. “Stay with me. Do you feel your toes?”
Slowly, Mack wiggled her feet and felt a rush of relief when her toes scraped the top of her shoes. The movement jarred her braininto connection with her body, and she began to flex and stretch, suddenly feeling sensations everywhere. Most of them hurt. “I can feel everything. Nothing hurts too bad, except maybe my hand is a little sore.”
Dante nodded and held a thumbs-up toward the rest of the safety team. Another safety worker unbuckled her harness, removed her steering wheel, and helped her sit on the side of the aeroscreen. From her perch, Mack watched the fleet of orange suits scatter around the track, picking up pieces of her car both big and small. Her eyes followed the skid marks left by her tires to where they terminated in a fresh, dark smear of rubber on the wide white wall. While she’d impacted in turn two, the force of the hit threw her into the backstretch before her car finally came to rest on the inside of the track, several hundred feet from where she’d hit. Slowly, she unbuckled her helmet and pulled it off.
She turned her head in time to catch a replay of her accident on the infield jumbotron. Despite her foggy head, she keenly registered a small puff from the back left side of her car. Seeing the smoke reminded her of the pop she’d heard right as she’d started to spin, and the entire incident flooded her mind in crystalline memory. The back end stepping out, the popping sound, the spin, the wall. She didn’t remember hitting the wall, but she remembered trying to pull her hands back from the steering wheel, not wanting to break a bone in the quick snap as the front axle crumpled. Her sore hand told her she hadn’t entirely succeeded.
“I cut a tire,” she said to no one.
Dante gently touched her arm to guide her toward the waiting ambulance.
“I’m fine,” she protested. No way was she going to a hospital. She needed to get back to the garage and convince Janet that she’d lost a tire.
“Everyone who busts the wall gets a free ride to the infield clinic. Indy Uber.”
His deep voice made it clear he would brook zero arguments so Mack got in the vehicle. As it pulled away, she watched the remaining safety crew sweep the shattered remnants of her car into neat little piles.
Mack exited the infield track hospital to a dizzying array of cameras, microphones, and people. She’d passed the concussion protocol but the swirl of sensory input from the sea of people and phones and lights overloaded her shot nerves.
A small figure darted through the crowd, straight toward her, and Mack lifted a sobbing Shaw up into her arms.
“Mommy, we saw you crash on the big TV! You didn’t get out of the car!”
Shaw’s messy sobs flooded Mack’s ears and her arm screamed in pain as she hastily turned away from the reporters and walked back inside the medical center so they could have privacy. The din of voices muffled as the door closed behind her, and Mack sat down on a gurney and set Shaw on her lap. Mack gently touched her daughter’s forehead with her own, lining up their noses the way she had when Shaw was a toddler and still wanted ugga-muggas. Up close, Shaw’s lashes shimmered with clusters of tears.
“Mommy!” she wailed over and over as she squeezed Mack’s neck. “Mommy!”
Mack held her daughter and let her weep until she stopped making sounds, dry heaves racking her body as she continued to cry long past the point of making tears. It had been years since Shaw last crawled into Mack’s lap, and Mack ignored the throb that pulsed in her hand. If Shaw needed to be held and comforted, Mack would do it as long as her daughter let her. Minutes passed as she rubbed Shaw’s back in slow, soothing circles. Shaw was on the cusp of a change, still silly but sometimes quiet and contemplative. Soon, she’d care more about what her friends wore than what mermaids ate for dinner, and Mackpreemptively grieved the end of Shaw’s childhood. She’d always be Shaw, always have that essential lightness that defined her, but puberty would change her in ways Mack could not know. It would changethem.
A hand settled on her shoulder, and she glanced over Shaw’s head to see Wes and Billie. Laurie was not with them. She’d always hated it when Mack and Wes wrecked, but before she’d always rushed to make sure they were safe.
“You okay?” Wes asked softly, and Mack nodded, Shaw’s hair tickling her face. The deep grooves around Wes’s eyes pulled tight with strain as he scanned her up and down. Mack and Wes had been through this many times before, one of them checking on the other after an accident, the familial part of them scared and shaken while the professional driver assessed.
As she stroked Shaw’s hair, Mack remembered the times she’d watched her dad climb out of a battered race car. Only rarely was she truly afraid; mostly, she’d felt a blind faith that her father would be okay because he was Wes Williams, the man who could survive anything. She’d always been grateful she wasn’t at the track the night of his accident, that she hadn’t been there waiting for him to climb out of his car, feeling the swirling dread when he did not.
But you’re the mom.
She wasn’t only the mom, she was the only parent Shaw could count on. Mack wished she could feel the pain of the crash twenty times more instead of the pain of hearing her daughter cry.
Mack met Wes’s eyes and he shrugged a shoulder almost imperceptibly, and she understood him as clearly as if he’d spoken:That’s the cost of playing the game.Drivers never spoke of the ultimate consequences of their profession, but they made ironclad wills, took questionable sponsorships to pad bank accounts for spouses and children, wrote secret letters to be opened in the event of disaster. Every driver made a choice—undeniably selfish, arguably unforgivable—every time they drove out of pit lane. Even when Kelley broke his body into pieces, Mack hadn’t begrudged him his profession. It was his most redeeming quality.
Mack was okay with the risk. She’d grown up with it. Made peace with it. But she’d never considered what it would feel like for Shaw to watch her mother wreck. Mack was hardened to racing injuries, but Shaw was soft, unfamiliar with her mom showing any weakness, let alone physical injury. She’d accepted the risk for herself, but Shaw hadn’t been given a choice. Unconsciously, she pulled her daughter in tighter, causing a pain in her right arm so intense that she momentarily saw spots.
Once the adrenaline left her body it would hurt even worse, but she couldn’t think about that now. Just like she couldn’t think about facing Janet or finding out what would come tomorrow. Would she have a car to qualify? Janet said she didn’t have the money to rebuild the car—was she serious? What if Janet decided Mack wasn’t worth a second chance?
Shaw had quieted, and Mack gently nudged her chin up. “I am one hundred percent fine, okay? I know it looked scary, but I am right here in front of you. I’m safe. You’re safe. It’s okay.”
“You’re supposed to lift your visor to tell people you’re okay. That’s what Pawpaw told me.” Her voice sounded soft and childish, and for a moment Mack could see toddler Shaw, chubby cheeked and freckled, crying over a dropped Popsicle. Tears clung to her lashes, the little blond wisps stuck together in clumps.
“I know, love, and I’m so sorry. I was a little surprised and I forgot.” Mack cringed for the fear her family must have felt for the few moments before she caught her breath, but she wasn’t about to tell them that she’d forgotten to lift her visor because she’d had the wind knocked out of her.
“You can’t forget,” Shaw scolded. Mack pressed her lips together to hide a smile. She’d take a sassy Shaw over a sad Shaw every day of the week.
“I won’t ever do that again.”
