Saturday, September 1st, 2018- Monza, Italy
Italian Grand Prix, the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza
"Hi, Kaia," Max hated the way his voice wavered as he said her name, his daughter's name, so he just tried to focus on her face, which to his eyes, from the perspective of a 20-year-old man's mind seemed impossibly tiny- her delicate features too minute to look real, perfect down to the very last detail- and not on how his arm trembled as he extended one hand towards her, uncertain of what else he could do beyond just reaching out to her.
"I'm Max, I'm your-" he falters for a beat, his syllables seeming to stumble around each other, his consonants tripping over one another, his vowels snagging on the tail end of sentences, before words fail him entirely.
In that moment, speech deserts him, leaving him high and dry to struggle through this all alone. Max feels like for reasons beyond his control, every single language he speaks fluently or that he knows well enough to get by with has just simultaneously left him for dead, abandoning him like this conversation is inconsequential, like it's nothing, like it's not the single most important conversation he has ever or will ever have.
He panics, he can't help it, and he can't stop it. Max is incapable of slowing the pace of his heart back down to a reasonable speed in much the same way his mouth and his mind refuse to cooperate, to let letters take shape or to make the sounds of words again. He can feel it, the way he's losing the handle he has on himself, 'how it's already slipping away from him, passing through his fingers like he's clutching at running water.
"M- Max?" She tries his name out, initially finding it a bit clunky, Kaia struggling a bit with tacking the last two letters onto the first and needing to repeat it a couple time before getting it,
"Max," Kaia grins brightly, "you're Max."
"Yeah, I'm Max," he confirms, nodding his head as he beams back at her, having just learnt first-hand that his daughter's happiness is contagious, "and you're Kaia, aren't you?"
"Kaia," she replies solemnly, repeating it again as if the word is both her name and a term of agreement, "Kaia," she's bobbing her head now, small, shallow wobbles in every direction, which belatedly Max finally realizes is her trying to recreate the way he'd been nodding at her.
"Like this," he says, showing her the gesture again and again until she gets it, "that's it, you've got it now," and then they're just sitting there, nodding their heads at one another like a couple of fucking basket cases, not saying a word, just grinning at each other, smiling like they're a matching set of Cheshire cats.
Max hadn't even realized his right hand was still aloft, held out casually in front of himself, his arm only partially extended, slightly bent at the elbow and braced against one thigh, his legs folded in half and bent deeply at the knees to help him keep his balance, crouched down like he is to put himself at Kaia's level, until it's too late and all he can do is to just try and stay still, and not do anything that might startle her.
Because Kaia, after much deliberation, has just reached a verdict, which rules that Max, like you, and like Daniel, is someone that can be trusted, that she can put her faith in, and that she can rely upon. She decides to share this the only way she knows how, and places her hand in Max's upturned one, her's just a fraction of the size and utterly dwarfed by his, even with all five of her little fingers spread out, still fits easily in the palm of his hand.
And though he's not entirely sure how he's just passed muster and been deemed to be safe, Max can't even begin to fathom by what the parameters would potentially be for a toddler trying to assess another individual's trustworthiness.
