“It’s nothing, sis. Sorry, I saw . . . I thought I saw . . . Oh, I’ve probably just smoked too much.”
Maya looks directly at him then; he’s standing ten yards away. Her tears are freezing at the same rate as his. But he merely gives a curt nod to the darkness, then turns around and disappears.
He knows too much about how it feels to have to hide to give away someone else doing the same.
* * *
As the red taillights of the car fade into the night, Maya stays where she is, with her forehead against the tree trunk, sobbing hysterically without making a sound, with no tears.
* * *
There are thousands of ways to die in Beartown. Especially on the inside.
23
Peter and Kira wake up happy. Laughing. That’s what they will remember about this day, and they will hate themselves for it. The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice-cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis. Our memories always force us back to those very best moments, night after night, prompting the questions: “Could I have done anything differently? Why did I just go around being happy? If only I’d known what was going to happen, could I have stopped it?”
Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward. When a child is born, its parents dream of it being as unique as possible, until it gets ill, when suddenly all they want is for everything to be normal. For several years after Isak died, Kira and Peter felt a terrible, lacerating guilt every time they laughed. Shame can still catch them when they feel happy, making them wonder if it’s a betrayal of their child that they didn’t disintegrate entirely when he left them. One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism. It’s impossible to explain what you have to do in order to carry on after a funeral, how to put the pieces of a family back together again, how to live with the jagged edges. So what do you end up asking for? You ask for a good day. One single good day. A few hours of amnesia.
So today, the morning after a hockey game, Peter and Kira wake up happy. Laughing. He whistles as he potters about in the kitchen, when she gets out of the shower they kiss each other the way adults do when they forget that they’re parents. Leo, twelve years old, runs from the table in disgust. His mom and dad laugh into each other’s mouths. One single good day.
* * *
Maya hears them from her room; she’s lying deeply cocooned under the covers. They haven’t even discovered that she’s home yet; they think she spent the night at Ana’s. When they open the door and look surprised, she will explain that she isn’t well, she’s wearing two pairs of jogging clothes to make sure her forehead feels warm enough. She can’t tell her parents the truth. She hasn’t got the heart to do that to them; she knows they wouldn’t survive. She’s not thinking like someone who’s been the victim of a crime, she’s thinking like someone who’s committed one: all she can think is that no one must ever know, that she must get rid of all the evidence. So when her dad drives Leo to practice and her mom goes to the supermarket, Maya creeps out of bed and washes the clothes she was wearing yesterday, so that no one will see the stains. She will put her shredded blouse in a plastic bag and walk toward the door. But there she will stop, and she will stand there in the doorway shaking with terror, unable to bring herself to walk to the garbage bin.
A thousand wishes yesterday, one single one today.
* * *
Benji’s three sisters have always communicated in different ways. His youngest sister, Gaby, talks, and his middle sister, Katia, listens. His eldest sister, Adri, shouts. If you have three younger siblings when your dad goes out into the forest with a rifle, you grow up faster than you should, and maybe become harder than you would really like to be.
Adri doesn’t let Benji sleep off his hangover, and forces him to get up and help her with the dogs all morning. When that’s done, she drags him over to the outbuilding that’s been fitted out as a small gym, and makes him pump weights until he throws up. He doesn’t complain. He never does. Adri could lift more than him until a couple of years ago, but when he passed her he did so at astonishing speed. She’s seen him take down three fully grown men over at the Barn when they’ve said something inappropriate to Katia. The sisters often talk about it when he isn’t there, the things they see in their little brother’s eyes when he gets really angry. Their mom always says that she doesn’t know what would have happened to the boy if he hadn’t found hockey, but his sisters know all too well what would have happened. They’ve seen men like that, in the Barn and at the gym and in a thousand other places.
Hockey gave Benji a context, a structure, rules. But above all it rewarded the best sides of him: his boundless heart and unshakeable loyalty. It provided a focus for his energy, channeling it into something constructive. All through his childhood he used to sleep with his hockey stick beside him, and sometimes Adri is pretty sure he still does.
When her little brother lets go of the bar and rolls off the bench to throw up for the third time, she hands him a bottle of water and sits down on a stool next to him.
“So. What’s the problem?”
“I’m just hungover,” he groans.
His phone rings. It’s been doing that all day but he refuses to answer it.
“No. Not the problem with your stomach, you donkey, what’s the problem up here?” She sighs, and points to his temple.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and drinks small sips of water.
“Oh . . . just a thing. With Kev.”
“Argument?”
“Sort of.”
“So?”
“Just crap.”
His phone goes on ringing. Adri shrugs and lies back on the bench. Benji stands behind her and spots her as she lifts the bar. He has always wished she could have played hockey longer; she would have beaten the shit out of the whole junior team. She played for the girls’ team in Hed for a few years when she was young, until driving there and back several evenings a week got too much for their mother. There was no girls’ team in Beartown, never has been. Sometimes Benji wonders how good his sister could have been. She gets the game—she yells at him for making the same sort of tactical mistakes that David tells him off for. And she loves it. The way her brother loves it. When she’s done she pats him on the cheek and says:
“You hockey boys are like dogs. To do something stupid, all you need is the opportunity. To do something good, all you need is a reason.”
“So?” he mutters.
She smiles and points at his phone.
“So stop being such an old woman, little brother, and go and talk to Kevin. Because if I have to listen to that ringtone one more time, I’m going to drop the bar on your face.”
* * *
Amat calls Maya’s number ten times. A hundred times. She’s not answering. He can still see every detail, thinks about it so intently that he starts trying to convince himself that he might have imagined it all. A misunderstanding. God, how wonderful that would be, if everything he thought he’d seen hadn’t happened. He was drunk, after all. Jealous. He calls Maya’s number, over and over again, doesn’t leave any messages on voicemail. Sends no texts. He goes out running in the forest until he’s too tired to think, running all day so he can collapse with exhaustion that evening.
* * *
Kevin is standing in the garden. All hockey players are used to playing through pain. There’s always some little injury somewhere. A groin-strain, a sprain, a fractured finger. Not a week passes in the junior team without someone talking about how they can’t wait until they’re old enough to play without a grille on their helmet. “Get rid of the shopping cart,” they plead. Even though they’ve all seen A-team players who’ve been hit in the face with pucks and sticks, they’re not afraid of it, but are actively looki
ng forward to it. When they were small they all saw a player standing after a game with twenty stitches in his lip from splitting his cheek open. But when asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?” he merely grinned and said, “Can’t pretend it doesn’t sting a bit when I chew tobacco.”
It’s Sunday afternoon and the Erdahl house, empty and silent, has been cleaned to perfection. Kevin is standing in the garden firing puck after puck after puck. Even in little league he learned to play through any pain. Even to enjoy it. Blood blisters, fractures, cuts, concussions: they never affected his game. But this is different. Now two deep scratches on one hand are making him shoot his pucks high above the net.
* * *
The front door is unlocked. Benji walks through the house and notices that apart from a mark on the door to the basement, the house looks like it always does. As if no one had ever lived there. He stands in the terrace doorway and watches Kevin spray pucks all over his neighbors’ flowerbeds as if he were firing blind. Kevin’s eyes are bloodshot and furious when they meet his.
“There you are! I must have called you a thousand times!”
“And now I’m here,” Benji replies.
“You need to answer when I call!” Kevin snarls.
Benji’s words come slowly, his eyebrows lower threateningly.
“I think you must be confusing me with Lyt or Bobo. I’m not your slave. I answer when I feel like it.”
Kevin points at him with the tip of his stick. It’s quivering with rage.
“Have you finished taking drugs now, then? We’re playing in the final next week and everyone’s acting like we’ve done enough just getting there. We need to get the guys together and make them all understand what I demand from them this week! So you need to be available! I won’t tolerate the fact that when the team needs you most, you vanish in a puff of smoke!”
Benji doesn’t know if he means “puff of smoke” as a joke, or if Kevin’s too stupid to appreciate the double meaning. It’s always hard to tell with Kevin. He’s both the smartest and stupidest person Benji knows.
“You know why I left the party.”
Kevin snorts.
“Yeah, because you’re a fucking saint, right?”
Benji’s eyes stare at Kevin’s, intently and without looking away. When Kevin eventually averts his gaze and looks away, his friend asks:
“What happened last night, Kev?”
Kevin lets out a curt laugh and throws his arms out.
“Nothing. Everyone was drunk. You know what it’s like.”
“What happened to your hand?”
“Nothing!”
“I saw Maya in the forest. It didn’t look like nothing.”
Kevin spins around as if he were about to hit Benji with his stick. His lips are quivering, his pupils burning.
“So NOW you give a damn? What the hell does it matter to you anyway? You weren’t even here! You’d rather go to Hed and get wasted than stay here with your best friends! Your TEAM!”
Benji’s eyes are staring intently at the way Kevin’s are moving. Kevin looks away again, fires a puck so high above the net that it should be recategorized as a hunting weapon, and mumbles:
“I needed you yesterday.”
Benji doesn’t answer, which always makes Kevin lose his temper with him, and he roars:
“You weren’t HERE, Benji! You’re NEVER here when I need you! Lyt was sick all over the fucking kitchen and someone banged into the cellar door and left a huge mark on it! Have you got any idea what’s going to happen when my dad gets home and sees it? Do you have any idea, or have you smoked away all . . . ?”
“I don’t give a shit about your dad. I want to know what happened last night,” Benji interrupts.
Kevin takes five quick steps and breaks his stick on the top of the goal, and it snaps into two razor-sharp projectiles, one of which misses Benji’s face by a hand’s width, but he doesn’t blink.
“REALLY? YOU DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MY DAD’S . . . ? You ungrateful fucking . . . Who’s been paying for your skates and sticks and gear for the past ten years? Didn’t you give a shit about him then either? Do you think your mom could have afforded all that? Christ, my dad’s right about you. He’s ALWAYS been right about you! You’re a virus, Benji, a fucking virus. You can’t live without some sort of host!”
Benji takes two steps forward, just two. His face is expressionless.
“What happened last night, Kev?”
“What do you want? Is this some fucking police interrogation? What’s your problem?”
“Don’t be a coward, Kev.”
“You want to lecture ME about being a coward? You want to talk about COWARDICE? For fuck’s sake, you’re the one who’s a fucking . . . a fucking . . .”
Benji moves so fast that Kevin breathes the last words into his face. Their eyes are just a few inches from each other’s. Benji’s are wide open.
“What? What am I, Kev? Tell me.”
Kevin’s skin is pulsating, his eyes running, his neck is red and blue on one side, as if he’s been punched hard by someone with small hands. He backs away and picks up part of the broken stick and slams it into the goal, making the metal sing.
“Get out of my house, Ovich. You’ve sponged off my family for long enough.”
He doesn’t turn around to watch Benji go. Nor when he hears the front door slam shut.
* * *
They get home late. The house looks like it did when they left it. Their son is pretending to be asleep; they don’t knock on his door. Kevin’s father finds two sheets of paper on the kitchen counter on which Kevin has given a careful account of all the statistics of each period of the game. Minutes played, shots, assists, goals, numerical superiority and inferiority, possession, penalties, mistakes. His father spends a couple of minutes sitting in the glow of a single lamp and smiles in a way that he doesn’t let anyone see anymore. So proud. A man with less impulse control would have gone upstairs and kissed his sleeping son on his forehead.
His mother notices things that his father misses. She sees the pictures that the cleaner has mixed up and hung in the wrong order. The table that is slightly askew in the living room. A scrap of the plastic covering that has caught beneath one corner of the sofa. But above all, she sees the mark on the cellar door.
While her husband is sitting in the kitchen, she takes a deep breath and slams her suitcase into it as hard as she can. He comes running and she apologizes, saying she tripped and let go of the case. He helps her up and holds her and whispers:
“Don’t look so upset, it’s only the cellar door, it’s just a little mark, darling.”
Then he shows her the sheets of paper and says:
“They won!”
She laughs into his shirt.
24
When the burglar alarm goes off at the school early on Monday morning, the security company doesn’t call the police, because it could take them hours to get there. They call one of the teachers instead. Not any teacher, they call the one whose little brother works for the security firm, so that her brother won’t have to go to the trouble of fetching his own keys. Jeanette gets out of her car in the deserted parking lot, pulls up the collar of her coat, and blinks tiredly:
“Sometimes you’re so lazy I’m starting to think your kids must be adopted.”
Her brother laughs.
“Come on, Sis, stop whining, you’re the one who always says I don’t call you often enough!”
She rolls her eyes, takes his flashlight off him, and unlocks a side door to the school.
“It’s probably just snow that’s slid off the roof onto the sensors around the back again.”
They go into the corridor without turning the lights on, because if anyone has broken in, the lights will have come on automatically in that section. But what sort of idiot would break into a school on a Monday morning?
* * *
Benji is woken by a bright light, even though the lamps in the ceiling are already on. His back aches. His mouth tastes
of moonshine and cheap beer nuts, which troubles him, because he has no memory of having eaten beer nuts. He blinks sleepily, holds up his hand, and tries to squint at the person who’s shining a light in his eyes.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” the teacher sighs.
Benji pushes himself into a sitting position on top of the two desks he’s been sleeping on in the classroom. He throws his arms out like the world’s most exhausted magician.
“The headmaster did tell me I needed to start showing up on time in the morning. So . . . ta-dah! Actually . . . what time is it?”
He feels his pockets. Can’t find his watch. His fractured memories of the previous night suggest that he may well have drunk that away too. Precisely what train of thought led him to conclude his little odyssey trying various substances with a break-in at his school is also a little vague in hindsight, but he’s sure it must have seemed a superb idea at the time.
The teacher leaves him without a word, and he sees her talking with a security guard out in the corridor. The guard will write this off as a false alarm, seeing as brothers do what their big sisters tell them, no matter how old they get. The teacher comes back into the classroom and opens two windows to air out the room. She sniffs at Benji’s jacket and makes a face.
“Please don’t tell me you’ve brought drugs into the school.”
Benji does a poor job of wagging his finger at her.
“It would NEVER even occur, occur . . . occur to me! Drugs in school are no good. I keep my drugs in my body. Do you want to dance?”
He falls off the desk with a giggle and lands on the floor on his back. The teacher crouches down beside him and looks at him somberly until he falls silent. Then she says: