Peter closes the door behind him. Sits down at his desk. Stares at the resignation papers that are waiting for Sune’s signature. If Peter has learned one thing about human nature during all his years in hockey, it’s that almost everyone regards themselves as a good team player, but that very few indeed understand what that really means. It’s often said that human beings are pack animals, and that thought is so deeply embedded that hardly anyone is prepared to admit that many of us are actually really rubbish at being in groups. That we can’t cooperate, that we’re selfish, or, worst of all, that we’re the sort of people other people just don’t like. So we keep repeating: “I’m a good team player.” Until we believe it ourselves, without actually being prepared to pay the price.
Peter has always existed on various teams, and he knows the sacrifices that being on a team truly demands. “The team is greater than the individual” is just a cliché for people who don’t understand sports; for those who do, it’s a painful truth because it hurts to live in accordance with it. Submitting to a role you don’t want, doing a crap job in silence, playing on defense instead of getting to score goals and be the star. When you can accept the worst aspects of your teammates because you love the collective, that’s when you’re a team player. And it was Sune who taught him that.
He stares at the space on the forms where Sune has to sign his name, so absorbed in his thoughts that he jumps when the phone rings. When he sees that it’s a Canadian number, he smiles as he answers:
“Brian the Butcher? How are you, you old rogue?”
“Pete!” his former teammate exclaims at the other end.
They played in the farm team league together. Brian never made it all the way to the NHL as a player, but became a scout instead. Now he identifies the most talented teenagers for one of the best teams in the league. Every summer when he hands in his report ahead of the NHL draft, he fulfills and crushes lifelong dreams the whole world over. So he isn’t just calling for Peter’s sake.
“How’s the family?”
“Good, good, Brian! How about yours?”
“Oh, you know. The divorce went through last month.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, Pete. I’ve got more time for golf now.”
Peter laughs halfheartedly. For a few years over in Canada, Brian was his best friend. His wife was close to Kira, and the children used to play together. They still call each other, but at some point they started to talk less and less about each other’s lives. In the end there was only hockey left. Peter is about to ask Are you okay? but doesn’t have time because Brian has already exclaimed:
“How’s your boy getting on?”
Peter takes a deep breath and nods.
“Kevin? Fantastic, really great. They won the semifinal. He’s been brilliant.”
“So I won’t regret it if I tell my people to include him in the draft?”
Peter’s heart starts to beat faster.
“Seriously? You’re thinking of drafting him?”
“If you can promise me that we won’t be making a mistake. I trust you, Pete!”
Peter has never been more serious when he replies:
“I can promise you that you’ll be getting a fantastic player.”
“And he’s . . . the right sort of guy?”
Peter nods hard, because he knows what that means. Drafting one player instead of another is an immense financial investment for an NHL team. They take absolutely everything into account. It’s no longer enough just to be good on the ice; they don’t want any unpleasant surprises from the player’s private life either. Peter knows it shouldn’t be like that, but those are the rules of the game these days. A few years ago he heard about a hugely talented youngster who slid down the draft because the scouts found out his dad was an alcoholic with a criminal record. That was enough to scare them off, because they had no way of knowing how the teenager would behave if he became a hockey millionaire overnight. So Peter tells the truth, a truth he knows Brian wants to hear:
“Kevin is the right sort of guy. He gets top grades in school. He comes from a stable family, well brought up. There are definitely no ‘off ice’ problems.”
Brian murmurs happily at the other end.
“Good, good. And he wears the same number you used to wear, right? Number nine?”
“Yes.”
“I thought they’d have retired that number and hung it from the rafters.”
Peter grins.
“They will. Only it’ll have Kevin’s name on it when they do.”
Brian laughs loudly. They hang up with a promise to be in touch again soon, that Peter will go over to Canada with his family, that the children will get to see each other again. They both know it will never happen.
* * *
Amat is gathering up the pucks and cones after practice. Not because anyone’s told him to, but because it comes naturally to him and because it gives him a chance to avoid the others. He’s expecting the locker room to be empty when he gets there, but is met by Bobo and Kevin. The two seventeen-year-olds are picking scraps of tape from the floor and throwing them in the garbage.
Amat stands in the doorway and is amazed at how easy it is, the bit that comes next. Kevin says it as if it were the most natural thing in the world:
“Lyt has borrowed his dad’s car. Let’s go to Hed and catch a film!”
Bobo slaps Amat happily on the back.
“Didn’t I say? You’re one of us now!”
Twenty minutes later they’re sitting in the car. Amat realizes he’s sitting in Benji’s place, but doesn’t ask. Lyt is boasting about a blowjob again. Kevin asks Bobo to “tell some jokes” and Bobo is so excited to be asked that he snorts Coke out of his nose all over the car seat, infuriating Lyt. They roar with laughter. Talk about the final, about the long bus trip to the city where it’s going to be taking place, about girls and parties, and how things are going to be when they’re all playing in the A-team. Amat slides into the conversation, at first reluctantly, then with a wonderful warm feeling of being allowed to belong to something. Because that’s much easier.
Even in Hed people recognize them, and they get slaps on the back and congratulations. After the movie, when Amat thinks they’re on the way home, Lyt turns off the main road just after the Beartown sign. He stops by the lake. Amat doesn’t understand why until Kevin opens the trunk of the car. They’ve got beer, lights, skates, and hockey sticks in the back. They put their woollen hats down to mark the goals.
They play hockey on the lake that night, four boys, and everything feels simple. As if they were children. Amat is amazed at how straightforward it is. Staying silent in return for being allowed to join in.
* * *
Peter throws his rubber ball at the wall again. Tries not to look at the resignation forms on the desk, tries not to think about Sune as a person and only as a coach. He knows that’s what Sune would want. Club first.
The board and sponsors can be assholes. Peter knows that better than anyone, but they only want the same as him and Sune: success for the club. Success demands that we see beyond ourselves. Sometimes Peter has had to keep his mouth shut when the board has demanded new recruitments that he knows are stupid, and then he has had to keep his mouth shut all over again when it turns out he was right. Sometimes he has been instructed only to sign seven-month contracts with players, so that the club won’t have to pay their wages during the summer. The players in turn sign on as unemployed for the rest of the year and are given public assistance, and every so often Tails provides fake certificates declaring that they’ve done “work placement” in his supermarket when they were actually training with the team all summer. Then, when the season starts again, they sign new seven-month contracts. Sometimes you have to skirt around a few moral issues in order to survive financially as a small club. Peter has had to accept that as part of the job. Kira once told him that the club had an unpleasant culture of silence, the sort of thing you find among soldiers and criminals. But sometimes tha
t’s what it takes, a culture of silence to foster a culture of winning.
Peter has spent more time than any other coach trying to reduce the Pack’s violence in the stands, as well as their menacing hold over the town, and that’s made him a hated figure in the Bearskin, but sometimes even he has trouble working out who the worst hooligans in the Beartown Ice Hockey Club are: the ones with tattoos on their necks, or the ones with neckties.
He puts the rubber ball down. Picks up a pen from a neatly organized box in his desk drawer and writes his signature on the line where it says “Representative of the club” on the resignation form. When Sune signs immediately below, it will officially look like he has resigned of his own accord. But Peter knows what he’s done. He’s just fired his idol.
* * *
Lars is standing in David’s office, hesitating as long as possible before eventually clearing his throat and asking:
“How do you want to punish Benji?”
David doesn’t look up from his computer screen.
“We won’t be punishing him.”
Lars’s nails tap the wood of the doorframe with pent-up frustration.
“He didn’t show up for a training session less than a week before the final. You wouldn’t tolerate that from anyone else.”
David looks up, straight at him, so abruptly that Lars jerks back.
“Do you want to win the final?”
“Of course!” Lars gasps.
“Then let this go. Because I may not be able to guarantee that we’re going to win with Benji, but I can damn well guarantee that we won’t win without him.”
Lars leaves the room without further protest. When David is alone he switches off his computer, sighs deeply, picks up a large marker pen, and goes and gets a puck. He writes three large letters on it.
Then he drives out to the cemetery.
* * *
Maya is lying in her bed, slipping so sleeplessly in and out of consciousness that she sometimes thinks she’s hallucinating. She’s stolen some of her mom’s sleeping pills from the bathroom cabinet. Last night she stood alone with them lined up neatly on the sink and tried to work out how many it would take for her not to have to wake up again. Now, as she blinks up at the ceiling, it’s as if she’s still hoping everything might be a dream, as if she could look around the room and realize that she’s back in reality: that it’s Friday, and nothing has happened yet. When awareness hits her, it’s like having to live through it all again. His grip on her throat, the bottomless fear, the absolute conviction that he was going to kill her.
* * *
Again. Again. Again.
* * *
Ana is eating dinner with her dad in that very specific silence they’ve been practicing for fifteen years. Her mom always hated it. It was the silence that made her leave. Ana could have gone with her. But she lied and said she couldn’t imagine living anywhere where there were no trees, and the only trees where her mom lives now are planted outside shopping malls as decoration. But of course really she stayed because she couldn’t abandon her dad, even if she doesn’t know if that was mostly for his sake or hers. They’ve never talked about it. But at least he’s drinking less than he did when her mom lived here, and Ana loves both parents more as a result.
She offers to take the dogs out. That obviously strikes her dad as odd, because he usually has to nag her to do it. But he says nothing. Nor does she.
They live in the old part of the Heights, in one of the houses that was here before the more expensive ones started to be built. They became Beartown aristocracy by association. She takes the long way around, via the illuminated jogging trail that the council is so proud of having built so that “the women of the district can exercise in safety.” By sheer coincidence the lights were, of course, first installed next to the Heights rather than in the forest beyond the Hollow. And by another fortunate coincidence, the two companies that won the contract from the council were both owned by men who lived in houses right next to the trail.
She lets the dogs off their leashes under the lamps and lets them play. Trees and animals—they always help.
* * *
Kevin comes home, passes his parents in the kitchen and living room without having to look them in the eye. He goes upstairs and closes the door to his room, and does push-ups until his vision starts to fade. When the house falls silent and the door to his parents’ bedroom is closed, he puts on his tracksuit and creeps out. He runs through the forest until he has no energy to think anymore.
* * *
Ana follows the dogs as they zigzag across the running track. Kevin stops abruptly fifteen yards away. At first she barely reacts, thinking that he must have been startled by the dogs. But then she sees that it’s her presence that’s made him stop. A couple of days ago he wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a class photograph, even if she were the only person on it, but now he knows who she is. And he looks neither proud nor embarrassed, which are the only two facial expressions she’s ever seen on a guy from school after he’s slept with a girl on the weekend.
He’s scared. She’s never seen a man look so terribly scared.
* * *
Maya tries to play her guitar, but her fingers are shaking too much. She’s sweating under her big grey hoodie, but when her parents ask she says she’s shaking with fever. She pulls the hood tighter around her neck, to hide the bruises. Pulls the sleeves halfway down over her hands to conceal the blue-black marks on her wrists.
She hears the doorbell ring; it’s too late to be one of Leo’s friends. She hears her mom talking outside, relieved and anxious at the same time, the way only her mom can. There’s a knock on her bedroom door and Maya pretends to be asleep, until she sees who’s standing in the doorway.
Ana closes the door gently behind her. Waits until she hears Kira’s footsteps go off toward the kitchen. She’s out of breath. She ran all the way here from the Heights, in a mixture of rage and panic. She sees the marks on Maya’s neck and wrists, no matter how her friend tries to hide them. When she finally looks Maya in the eye, tears find their way into every crease in their skin, every furrow, running in streams and dripping from their chins. Ana whispers:
“I saw him. He was scared. The bastard was scared. What did he do to you?”
It’s as if the event hasn’t properly existed for Maya herself until she says the words out loud. And when she does, she’s back in that boy’s bedroom with its trophies and hockey posters. Sobbing, she fumbles her hands over her hooded top for a blouse-button that was never there.
She falls apart in Ana’s arms, and Ana holds her as if her life depends on it, and wishes with all her being that they could change places with each other.
* * *
Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old.
28
When Ana and Maya were children—it feels like only yesterday—they always talked about how they would live in New York when they were rich and famous. Maya was the one who wanted to be rich, Ana the one who wanted to be famous, which surprised anyone who had spent time with them. They had strikingly different dreams: Maya dreamed of a silent music studio, Ana a noisy throng of people. Ana wanted to be famous as a form of affirmation, Maya wanted to be rich so she didn’t have to care what anyone else thought. They are both unfathomably complex, the pair of them, and that’s why as different as they are, they understand each other.
When she was very little, Ana wanted to be a professional hockey player. She played one season on the girls’ team in Hed, but she was too restless to do what the coaches told her and kept getting into fights the whole time. In the end her dad promised to teach her to hunt with a rifle if she stopped making him drive her to training sessions. She could see he was ashamed of the fact that she was so different, and the offer of learning how to shoot was too good to turn down.
When she got a bit older she wanted to be a sports commentator on television, then high school started and she learned that girls
were more than welcome to like sports in Beartown—just not the way that she did. Not that much. Not to the point where she would lecture the boys about rules and tactics. Teenage girls were primarily supposed to be interested in hockey players, not hockey.
So she bowed her head and devoted herself to Beartown’s real traditional sports: shame and silence. They were what drove her mom mad. Ana very nearly went with her when she moved away, but changed her mind and stayed. For Maya’s sake, for her dad’s sake, and perhaps because she loved the trees at least as much as she sometimes hated them.
She always thinks it was the forest that taught the people of Beartown to keep their mouths shut, because when you hunt and fish you need to stay quiet so as not to scare the animals, and if you teach people that lesson since birth, it’s going to color the way they communicate. So Ana has always been torn between the urge to scream as loud as she could, or not at all.
* * *
They’re lying next to each other in Maya’s bed. Ana whispers:
“You’ve got to tell.”
“Who?” Maya breathes.
“Everyone.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise he’ll do it again. To someone else.”
Over and over again they have the same quiet argument, with themselves and each other, because Ana knows it’s an unreasonable demand to make of another person: that Maya of all people should feel some sort of responsibility for anyone else right now. That she, of all people, should stand up and shout in the quietest town in the world. Scare the animals. Ana hides her face in her hands so that Maya’s parents won’t hear anyone crying in here.
“It’s my fucking fault, Maya, I should never have left you at the party. I should have known. I should have looked for you. I was so fucking, fucking, fucking weak. It’s my fault, it’s my f . . .”
Maya cups her friend’s face gently between her hands.
“It’s not your fault, Ana. It’s not our fault.”
“You’ve got to tell,” Ana sobs desperately, but Maya shakes her head.
“Can you keep a secret?”