The Legend

by Shey Stahl

  “What are you going to do?” Sway laughed. “...Drag her home by her hair?”

  “If I have to, I will.”

  “So mature,” she rolled her eyes pouring a glass of rum.

  Rosa walked in holding a tissue to her eyes. “I can’t believe our little girl moved out.”

  “Really,” I balked looked at Sway and then Rosa. “She’s not your little girl, Rosa.”

  Ignoring me, Rosa poured her own glass of rum and started drinking with Sway. Apparently, I was no longer part of the conversation as they made small talk with each other. There were times, and now was a good reminder of it, I felt like my lifestyle was harder than in needed to be. Life on the road was never good for family life. My biggest fear was that they suddenly wouldn’t need me anymore. That they had become so accustomed to me not being around, that they wouldn’t notice when I was. My biggest fear was that they would make a life without me.

  I had a hard time with Arie dating Brian. I didn’t trust him and this tattooed angry little girl was not the Arie that we knew. She used to be such a sweet girl. She was a little girl that would be bouncing with excitement when I got home and rush to the door to wrap her-self around my legs. Now all I got was an eye roll if I was lucky.

  With Axel suspended for punching Brian, I had a feeling it was something more than your average pit fight. Knowing Axel, I knew there was more to it than racing. Axel didn’t go around punching just anyone. Usually it was provoked for him to take a swing at someone.

  Just as I was about to call Axel, who was now heading to Terra Haute, Van called.

  “Jameson, we have a problem,” were his first words followed by, “meet me in twenty minutes at the sprint car shop.”

  I was there in ten along with Sway and Rosa who insisted on coming with us.

  Van was waiting by his car, his burly arms crossed over his chest with his head bent down staring at the ground.

  “What’s up?” I asked reaching for Sway’s hand as she caught up to my jog over to Van.

  His eyes, cold and tense, met with mine and reminded me of the time he found Darrin in the bar. Van was different these days, a former Navy Seal, he was hired by our attorney back in 2003 to be my bodyguard at a time when a rival driver and me were heavily involved in an on and off the track battle.

  Emotionally I still wasn’t over the fact that Darrin had gotten me to a point back then where he knew it would destroy me, Sway. Van also lost his family because of Darrin. He and I had a connection that was hard to break we understood each other.

  After the thing with Darrin, Van had become close with our family and eventually re-married and had a little girl, Macy, and adopted Andrea’s twin boys, Logan and Lucas, after they were married.

  He always treated my kids like his own. Their safety meant everything to him. Over time, I realized just how much of an impact they had on him. The only way I could describe this would be the potato theory. You can put a potato in a freezer eventually it will grow roots. You can wrap it in plastic and freeze it, and it will still grow roots. My point, even frozen spuds grow roots eventually. My kids were Van’s frozen roots.

  The faraway look in Van’s eyes confirmed he felt the connection between now and back when Darrin had gotten to Sway.

  I was about to ask him again what was up when he let out a deep sigh and opened the back door to his SUV revealing Arie.

  Arie sat curled up in the seat, her legs drawn to her chest as she shook with sobs. At first glance, you wouldn’t think anything was wrong with her, aside from the crying, until you saw her face.

  I couldn’t see her face. No, the face I saw was one of a girl who’d given everything to a boy, once again, only to have him use her.

  At the sight, I thought for sure I was having a heart attack. Sway gasped when Arie looked at her moving quickly to sit next to her. My stomach dropped, the pain surged through my arms and legs, throbbing. The blinding anger rose, I could feel my chest tighten trying to subdue the onset.

  Sway cradled Aries’ head in her lap, sitting beside her on the bench seat. The black leather of the seat only made the red bloodstains on her white shirt more of a shock, a horrifying shock.

  Sway’s eyes searched mine waiting for my reaction. Arie refused to look at either one of us.

  The thing is, I didn’t see Arie in that moment. I saw Sway lying in a hospital bed because I couldn’t protect her against Darrin. Now, nearly twenty years later, history had repeated itself. Only now, this was my own flesh and blood. A little girl that I watch carefully as she slept in my arms as an infant, praying nothing bad would ever happened to her. The same little girl would wait up for me on Sundays. A little girl that I taught to ride a bike, kissed her scrapes when she fell, played tea cups on Monday mornings and watch The Princess and the Pea repeatedly for an entire year. The same little girl that had me spray paint her Barbie Power Wheel to match my race car when she was four.

  This was a difficult image to stomach that’s for sure.

  Grady, who had been inside the sprint car shop, came out with a nervous energy to him. “Is everything all right out here?”

  Van and I looked back at Grady he looked concerned. “Everything’s fine Grady. Please leave.”

  He didn’t need telling twice but something struck me as off. He was at the sprint car shop when I didn’t tell him he needed to be. He should have been off today as I gave him every Monday and Tuesday off. I didn’t have time to focus on that now. Instead, my attention was on my daughter.

  “How did you find out about this before me?” I asked turning back around to face Van.

  “She called me to come get her,” Van said beside me, his voice was low. “It seems Brian wasn’t happy with Axel’s reaction today and took it out on Arie.”

  When Van spoke, Arie sobbed louder clutching herself closer to Sway whispering, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right baby.” Sway soothed, gently running her hand across her back. Arie flinched squirming from her touch.

  Sway swallowed and then lifted Aries’ shirt. I lost it completely.

  “What the fuck happened?” I demanded of Van. “Where is that fucking kid?”

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes drowning. When it came to my kids, I knew him well enough to know that this is who he was. “I’m not really sure but I think we should get her to the doctor first. Those aren’t her only injuries.”

  I don’t think I will ever understand why the strong preyed upon the weak. I’ll never understand why good people die young and assholes get to live happy long lives. I’ll never understand why a six-year old little boy with bright chocolate eyes never got to see his first race and lost a battle he should have never had to endure. I’ll never understand why planes crash and kill innocent victims or why one person loses their life in a wreck and others walk away without a scratch.

  Mostly, in that moment, I couldn’t understand why Brian would do something like this to my little girl simply because Axel punched him. I didn’t know everything that happened between them and I honestly didn’t care. All I cared about was why Brian felt the need to take it out on Arie. I needed answers.

  Sway and my mom ended up taking Arie to the hospital while Van and Spencer went to question Brian. I never liked Brian and he was about to find out just how much I disliked him. He was about to have a really bad day.

  “He’s nineteen Jameson. Be careful,” was Sway’s only advice to me when I left, but the words stuck with me the way to his house. Sure Brian was nineteen but Arie was seventeen. What he did was unacceptable to me and he needed to know that.

  We picked up Spencer on the way there but in the nearly forty-minute drive to Westport from the shop in Mooresville, Axel had called and filled us in on what happened.

  Brian and Axel had been battling for third place in the points for the last few months when a late race wreck took them both out of contention. Brian thought Axel wrecked him on purpose and pushed him into Lily after the race causing her to fall. She wasn’t hurt but it p
issed Axel off enough that he took a swing at Brian. This caused an all-out pit fight and ended up with Axel getting a fine, along with Tommy and Rager when they got involved.

  Brian, upset with Axel, took it out on Arie when he got home after the race.

  I kept my cool when he shut the door in my face after we arrived and I kept my cool when he called my son an asshole. I also kept my cool when he said my daughter instigated him. Let’s face it, Arie was a spitfire and passionate. Much like me, if she believed something to be true, she would scream until she was blue in the face to prove her point. She also knew how to push your buttons if needed.

  When did I lose it?

  When he had the nerve to say he didn’t hit Arie that hard.

  I may have been forty-two years old and he may have only been nineteen, but I didn’t care at that moment. He could sue me for assault but he would think twice before hitting a girl again. He would think twice about hitting my little girl.

  Spencer and Van did nothing but stand there near the front door. I could have very well did some damage to him but that wasn’t me. I didn’t want to kill the kid; I only wanted to teach him a lesson about respecting women, more importantly my little girl.

  “I’ll press charges against you!” he wailed holding his broken nose. “I will! You fucking asshole, get out!”

  Spencer stepped besides me. “It’s about time we left, Jameson.”

  I nodded to him but laughed darkly stepping toward Brian again. He flinched, curling into himself against the tile floor in his kitchen afraid of what I might do.

  “Go ahead, press charges,” I leaned down to his level, my voice burned with a warning he would never forget, “and I will press charges for what you’ve done to my daughter. She is seventeen. Did you forget that?”

  His eyes widened with surprise but the warning sunk in. He knew the charges he would face and I’m pretty sure he understood he could kiss any racing career he wanted, goodbye now.

  Personally, I thought I handled it well. I did lose my temper and yes, I hit the kid but I did a lot less damage than he did to my daughter. At least that’s how I justified the regret I felt afterward.

  I don’t know why I felt regret about it. Maybe it was because he was just a kid himself.

  Either way, after I arrived at the hospital and saw Arie lying in that hospital bed with Casten, the regret was gone.

  Her face swollen on the left side, her lower lip had three stitches with her left eye completely swollen shut. Deep purple blotches covered her eyelid. Her nose was surely broken; gauze shoved up each nostril to stop the bleeding. Thankfully, I couldn’t see the other bruises on her body but I knew very well that they were there.

  The door clicked behind me, Arie looked up tears streaming down her face but she never spoke a word. Casten withdrew himself from her grip and slipped outside to call Axel leaving me alone with her.

  “Can I sit with you, sweetie?” I asked hesitantly stepping forward.

  Since she’d been dating Brian, Arie didn’t want much to do with me. Mostly because I never liked Brian and protested any relationship, she had with him. That never went over well with Arie.

  Arie nodded carefully, her eyes fell to her hands as she fidgeted nervously with the white fleece blanket covering her.

  Cautiously, I moved to sit next to her but hesitated when I heard the beeping of the monitors beside her. Instantly and without warning, my mind flashed with images of Sway and Darrin. It was an image I would never forget, him hovering over her in that dark stairwell.

  Shaking my head, I tried to erase the image.

  Sucking in a deep jagged breath, it was like dying a slow painful death reliving those images that had haunted me for over twenty years. The pain never faded, only now this was my daughter.

  My fists clenched automatically, my knees gave way when Sway came into the room with Rosa. Thankfully, Rosa stepped back and waited in the hallway.

  “Oh god...Jameson,” Sway ran to me. Her arms were shaky as they slid over my shoulders to wrap around my neck, “Look at me baby.”

  I somehow forced myself to the edge of the ocean of my guilt to reach the surface. My wife knew me well enough to know I never got over that night in Loudon. I tried, oh god did I try but this, although it wasn’t exactly the same, just brought everything crashing back down upon me.

  Sway’s lips hovered at my ear, speaking slowly, “Jameson, Arie needs you right now.”

  She knew what to say to me.

  Immediately I fought hard to focus on our daughter instead of my own pain. Regardless, if I felt guilty, this wasn’t about me right now. This is exactly the sort of thing I feared when I first held Arie, not being able to protect her, let alone Sway.

  I don’t remember doing it but I hit the closest thing next to me, which happened to be the wall. Arie and Sway jumped when the cart next to the bed fell over with my movement sending ice water all over the floor, chunks of ice scattered throughout the room like marbles.

  I could only focus on the fact that history had once again repeated itself and not in a good way.

  Sway held her hands up, trying to calm me down when I stood up. Arie looked up at me as well, scared, angry, and apologetic all at the same time. She never asked for this, nor did Sway. She was simply there at the wrong time.

  Between me punching the wall again, the only noise that didn’t drown out my own loud thumping heart and adrenaline was my daughter whispering in a shaky voice holding as much regret as I felt, “I’m sorry daddy.”

  I reached for her realizing that regardless of this guilt, my world was her, Sway, and our boys. I would do anything for them. So many times, I wanted them to have normal lives without having to live on the road but I was too selfish.

  Tears were running down Arie and Sways’ faces, reminding me once again, this was on me.

  It took me a good hour to calm down an actually speak. Arie had fallen asleep in my arms with Sway sitting next to us in a chair. My right arm was under Arie as she lay on my chest, her head nestled under my chin breathing lightly. My right hand gently stroked through her hair as I did when she was little and couldn’t sleep at night.

  So far, I hadn’t spoken since I came into her room, only drowning in thoughts that I couldn’t control.

  Sway kept quiet to, but when I looked into my wife’s tormented eyes, I decided it was time to say something to her. She didn’t deserve to see this unstable side of me again. With Darrin, she’d been unconscious for most of it and not subjected to the rage I had for it. She also never saw how emotionally worked up I was over it.

  Now it was right there for her to see.

  Did she judge me?

  No. She never did and never would.

  “I’m sorry honey. I don’t even know what to say.” Keeping my eyes focused on hers, I watched as a tear slipped down her cheek. I was beyond ashamed at the way I acted.

  She smiled softly, just the corner of her mouth twitched. “You don’t need to be sorry. I know this is harder on you than anyone can understand right now, me included.”

  “I think if anyone understands; it’s you.”

  With tears slowly streaming down her cheeks, it took her a moment to find her voice, “I can relate but I’ll never truly understand. No one can.”

  She was wrong though, she did understand. That’s why she never judged me.

  “Jameson,” she began, her voice hushed as if she regretted speaking the words, true or not. “You are what holds all this together for us. I know you understand that, but I don’t want you to forget it, ever. We need you more than you think.”

  Closing my eyes, her words enclosed around me. I knew the bond between my wife and me was vital for me, but I failed to realize how vital I was to the rest of our family including our kids. They may have grown into their own person but they still needed us.

  “I hate that he hit her.”

  “She’s okay Jameson. She’s stronger than we give her credit for.”

  I knew that. Arie was hardh
eaded just like me but she also knew and believed in herself. When she said she was sorry to me, she said it more to herself forever getting wrapped up with Brian in the first place.

  I must have beaten myself up all night over this as I continued to hold Arie. Sway left in the morning to bail Axel and Lane out of jail. You can guess why.

  This gave me some alone time with Arie.

  She spoke first, quietly and mostly to her hands, “I’m sorry dad.”

  “Arie sweetie, you have nothing to be sorry about.” I placed a kiss on her forehead pulling back to look at her green eyes clouded with tears.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything to Brian when he came back from the race.” Her eyes fell to her hands. “I was mad that he pushed Axel.”

  “That still doesn’t give him the right to hit you or push you back. No man should ever lay a hand on a woman, Arie. Nothing ever makes that okay.”

  “I know,” she finally looked at me. “It doesn’t make it okay. I know how this looks to you.”

  My gaze that focused on the wall that I punched shot to hers, “What?”

  “With everything that happened to mom...” her voice faded when she noticed my breathing increasing.

  I tried to keep the anger out of my tone, afraid if she heard the pure disgust when it came to Darrin she would think this had something to do with her and Brian, but it didn’t. Unfortunately, there are just some things in life that you can’t forget. You try but you can’t. Your mind acts as a head sock to memories, blocking out the unwanted fire in them, but eventually the fire resistance gives way when you remove the head sock and you’re vulnerable again.

  “What happened back then is in the past but yes, this reminds me of that,” I told her honestly. There was no sense in lying to her about it. To understand my reactions to this, she needed the truth. “When I saw your face...all I saw was your mom twenty years ago, holding on to life.”

  “It’s just a few bruises dad.” She shook her head with derision. “I wasn’t dying.”

  “Doesn’t matter if it was a bruise or not, he still hit you Arie. That’s unforgivable.”