‘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-Magalhães, 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 iscertainlygoing 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 thepanditled us in prayers. Sonia’sshraddh, herwake, 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 theterahvin, 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 facemakesme 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 wasracingin 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.’
