Ana nods and sniffs and promises: “I swear on my life.”
“That’s not enough. Swear on techno!”
Ana starts to laugh. How much wouldn’t you love someone who could make you do that at a time like this?
“I swear on all forms of electronic music. Apart from really shit Euro techno from the nineties.”
Maya smiles and wipes Ana’s tears, then looks her friend in the eye and whispers:
“Right now, Kevin has only hurt me. But if I talk, I’ll be letting him hurt everyone I love as well. I can’t handle that.”
They hold each other’s hands. Sit beside each other in bed and count sleeping pills, wondering how many it would take to end their lives. When they were children everything was different. It feels like only yesterday, because it was.
* * *
Benji sees it from a distance, the black object on top of the headstone. It’s been there a couple of hours. He shakes the snow off it and reads what’s written on it. One single word.
When Kevin, Bobo, Lyt, Benji, and the other players were young, David used to give them pucks before the games, with short messages that he wanted them to think about extra carefully. Backcheck harder or use your skates more or be patient. Sometimes he wrote things just to make them laugh. He could hand a puck to the most nervous player on the bus and look deadly serious, until the player glanced down and saw that it said: Zipper’s open. Cock hanging out. He had a sense of humor that only his players were allowed to see, and it made them feel special. Jokes are powerful like that, they can be both inclusive and exclusive. Can create both an Us and a Them.
More than anything else, David could give his players the feeling that he saw every single one of them. He invited the whole team to dinner and introduced them to his girlfriend, but when the club organized a “fathers against sons” game for all the boys’ teams, David was the only coach who didn’t show up. He went and picked up Kevin and Benji, one from his garden and the other from the cemetery, and drove them down to play on the lake instead.
He fought for them, literally. When Benji was nine or ten he already had a style of playing that used to make his opponents’ parents furious. In one away game against the little league team in Hed, one player shouted that he was going to get his dad after Benji had checked him. Benji thought no more about it until a large man appeared in the darkened players’ tunnel after the game and picked him up from the floor by the scruff of his neck and threw him violently against the wall, yelling: “Not so tough now, are you, you little gypsy brat?” Benji wasn’t scared, but he was convinced he was going to be killed at that moment. There were plenty of other adults who saw the incident and didn’t intervene. Benji never knew if it was because they were scared or because they thought he deserved it. All he can remember is David’s fist, knocking the father to the floor with a single punch.
“If I see a grown man lay one finger on a small child in this rink, I’ll kill him,” David said, not to the father specifically, but to all the adults who had stood there in silence.
Then he leaned toward Benji and whispered in his ear:
“Do you know how to save someone from Hed if they’re drowning?”
Benji shook his head. David grinned.
“Good.”
In the locker room David wrote a single word on a puck and tucked it in Benji’s bag. Proud. Benji still has it. In the bus on the way home that evening, all his teammates were telling jokes. The laughter got louder and louder, the punch-lines cruder and cruder. Benji can only remember one of the jokes, one that Lars told:
“Boys, how do you fit four gays on a chair at the same time? You turn it upside down!”
Everyone laughed. Benji remembers glancing surreptitiously at David, and saw that he was laughing, too. It’s just as easy to be exclusive as it is to be inclusive, just as easy to create an Us as a Them. Benji has never been worried about being beaten up or hated if anyone finds out the truth about him; he’s been hated by every opposing team since he was a child. The only thing he’s scared of is that one day there will be jokes that his teammates and coach won’t tell when he’s in the room. The exclusivity of laughter.
He stands by his father’s grave and weighs the puck in his hand. David has written a single word on it.
* * *
Win.
* * *
Benji doesn’t go to school the following day, but he does attend the training session. His jersey is sweatiest of all. Because when he no longer knows what anything in the world means, this is the only thing no one can take from him. The fact that he’s a winner. David pats his helmet twice without needing to say anything more.
Lyt had been sitting in Benji’s place in the locker room, next to Kevin. Benji didn’t use words, he merely stood in front of Lyt until Lyt gathered his things together and skulked unhappily back to the opposite bench. Kevin’s face remained motionless, but his eyes betrayed his feelings. They’ve never been able to lie to each other.
David has never seen his two best players perform better in a practice session.
* * *
Saturday comes. The day of the junior team’s final. Everywhere grown men and women wake up and put on green jerseys and scarves. In the parking lot in front of the rink stands a bus emblazoned with proud banners, ready to carry a team to the capital, with a spare seat ready for the trophy that will be coming back with them.
Early in the morning three girls of primary school age are playing in a street in the middle of town. They’re chasing each other, fencing with sticks, throwing some of the last snowballs of this long winter. Maya is standing at her bedroom window watching them. She and Ana used to babysit the girls a few years ago, and Ana sometimes still rushes out to have a snowball fight with them when she gets bored of Maya’s guitar-playing, making them laugh so hard that they fall over. Maya’s arms are wrapped tightly around her body. She’s been awake all night and every minute of it she was certain that she would never tell anyone about what had happened. It takes three little girls playing in the street outside her window to make her change her mind.
Ana is asleep in her bed, exhausted, so incredibly slight and fragile, with her eyes closed beneath the thick quilt. It will be a terrible story to tell about this town and this day: that Maya finally decided to tell the truth about Kevin, not because she wanted to protect herself, but because she wanted to protect others. And that she already knew, as she stood there at the window that morning, what the town would do to her.
29
The most dangerous thing on the ice is being hit when you’re not expecting it. So one of the very first things hockey teaches you is to keep your head up, always. Otherwise—bang.
* * *
Peter’s phone is busy all morning, sponsors and board members and players’ parents; the nerves of the whole town are exposed. In a few hours’ time he’s going to be on the bus with the junior team, heading to the game, even though he hates travelling. It used to be such a natural part of the family’s life, the fact that he used to be away roughly a third of all nights each season, and he was ashamed to admit it but sometimes he almost thought it was a good thing. Then Isak got sick on one of those nights, and since then he hasn’t been able to sleep in a hotel bed.
Leo has pestered his way to a seat in someone’s car. Peter objected at first, but it actually makes the whole thing feel a bit better. They’re going to be staying in the capital overnight, a huge adventure for a twelve-year-old boy, and Leo is so keen to go. In secret, Peter wishes Maya were too. He stands outside her door and has to summon up all his self-restraint to keep himself from knocking.
He once heard that the best way to prepare mentally for becoming a parent is to stay in a tent at a weeklong rock festival with a load of fat friends who are smoking hash. You blunder about in a permanent state of acute sleep deprivation wearing clothes covered with stains from food that is only very rarely your own, you suffer from tinnitus, you can’t go near a puddle without some giggling fool jumping in it, you can
’t go to the bathroom without someone standing outside banging on the door, you get woken up in the middle of the night because someone was “just thinking about something,” and you get woken up the next morning to find someone pissing on you.
It may be true, but it doesn’t help anyone. Because the thing you can never be prepared for when you have children is your increased sensitivity. Not just feeling, but hypersensitivity. He didn’t know he was capable of feeling this much, to the point where he can hardly bear to be in his own skin. After Isak was born the slightest sound became deafening, the slightest worry became terror, all cars drove faster, and he couldn’t watch the news without going to pieces. When Isak died Peter thought he would be left numb, but instead it was as if all his pores opened up, so that the air itself started to hurt. His chest can be ripped open by a single unhappy glance from either of the children, particularly his daughter. All the time he was growing up, the only thing he wanted was for life to speed up, and now all he wants is for it to slow down. For the clocks to stop, for Maya never to grow up.
He loves her so much because she always makes him feel a bit stupid. He hasn’t been able to help her with her homework since primary school, but sometimes she still asks, just to be kind. When she was little she used to pretend to fall asleep in the car so that he would carry her into the house. He always complained when he had to carry both her and the shopping, as well as steer Leo’s stroller, but he secretly loved the way his daughter would cling tight to his neck. That was how he knew she was only pretending, because when she was really asleep it was like carrying a bag of water, but when she was pretending she would bury her nose deep against his neck and wrap her arms around him as if she were afraid of losing him. When she got too big for that, he missed it every day. A year ago she sprained her ankle on a field trip and he had to carry her from the car to the house again. He has never felt more like a bad parent than when he admitted to himself that he wished she could sprain her ankle more often.
He stands with his hand on her door, but doesn’t knock. His phone goes on ringing. He’s so distracted that he’s still clutching his coffee cup in his hand when he goes out to the car.
* * *
Kira is cruising around the supermarket, sticking to her list, which is written in the exact order in which everything is located in the aisles. Not like Peter’s lists, which are entirely random, and which always lead to him shopping as if he were planning to fill a bomb shelter before the apocalypse.
Everyone says hello to her; some shoppers wave from the other side of the store. Tails comes trotting out from his office wearing a Beartown jersey with the number “9” and the name “Erdahl” printed on the back. He’s on his way to the rink, but he can’t stop talking and she listens patiently with one eye on the time; she doesn’t want Peter and Leo to leave before she gets home.
When she’s loading the bags into the car, the bottom of one of them gives way. People in the parking lot fight for the right to help her pick up her avocados. They all know her husband, the GM, so well. And yet they don’t know him at all.
“He must be so pleased he’s going to this game!” someone says, and Kira nods even though she knows he hates travelling. He has hardly left Maya and Leo overnight since the night Isak fell asleep for the last time. Kira has had to travel far more with her work, and for a while she always kept a ready-packed bag in the hall cupboard. Peter used to joke about it, saying he was worried that she also had “a safe-deposit box containing hair dye, fake passports, and a pistol.” She never told him how much that hurt her. She knows she’s being selfish and hates herself for it, but she almost wishes Leo weren’t going along on this trip. Because it’s something that Peter is doing as a dad, it’s not just a work trip, it doesn’t balance out any of the times she’s been away. It doesn’t make her the slightest little bit less self-absorbed.
She picks up an avocado from the ground and puts it in another bag. When Isak fell ill the family slipped into an almost military routine: doctor’s appointments, dates of operations, journey times, waiting rooms, treatments, lists, and protocols. After the funeral Peter couldn’t find a way back out of himself—the pain became too great for him to move at all. Kira carried on taking Maya to play in the park, carried on cleaning and making dinner, carried on going to the store with her list. She once read a book that said that after a deeply traumatic event, like an assault or a kidnapping, the victim often doesn’t break down until much later—in the ambulance or police car—when everything is over. Several months after Isak’s death Kira suddenly found herself sitting on the floor of a supermarket in Toronto with an avocado in each hand, unable to stop crying hysterically. Peter came and carried her home. For weeks after that he was like a machine: cleaning, preparing meals, looking after Maya. That may have been how they survived, Kira realizes: thanks to their ability not to fall apart at the same time.
She smiles in the car on the way home. Puts on the louder-louder playlist. She’s going to have a whole weekend with her daughter, and what a blessing that is. It’s no time at all since Maya was a little red raisin wrapped up in a blanket, with Kira staring at the nurses in the hospital as if they’d told her they were going to dump her and the baby alone in the Indian Ocean on a raft the size of a postage stamp made of beer cans when they suggested it might be time to go home. Then the little whining bundle suddenly became a complete person. Developed opinions and characteristics and her own taste in clothes and a dislike of soda. What sort of child doesn’t like soda? Or sweets? She can’t be bribed with sugar and, dear God, how can anyone function as the parent of a child who can’t be bribed? It’s no time at all since she needed help to burp. Now she plays the guitar. Dear God. Will this love for her daughter ever stop being unbearable?
* * *
The sun has settled above the treetops, the air is clear and light, it’s a good day. One single good day. Kira gets out of one car just as Peter and Leo are getting into the other. Peter kisses her, taking her breath away, and she pinches him and makes him embarrassed. He’s still clutching his coffee cup, and she picks up the bags of shopping and wearily shakes her head, and holds her hand out to take it from him just as Maya comes out onto the steps. Her parents turn toward her, and they will remember this moment. The very last moment of happiness and security.
* * *
The fifteen-year-old girl closes her eyes. Opens her mouth. Speaks. Tells them everything.
* * *
When the words stop, there are avocados on the ground among the fragments of a dropped coffee cup. On one of the biggest pieces you can still see parts of the pattern from the front of the cup. A bear.
30
Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that. Everyone is just doing their job. The police say it all the time. “I’m just doing my job here.” That’s why no one asks what the boy did; as soon as the girl starts to talk they interrupt her instead with questions about what she did. Did she go up the stairs ahead of him or behind him? Did she lie down on the bed voluntarily or was she forced? Did she unbutton her own blouse? Did she kiss him? No? Did she kiss him back, then? Had she been drinking alcohol? Had she smoked marijuana? Did she say no? Was she clear about that? Did she scream loudly enough? Did she struggle hard enough? Why didn’t she take photographs of her bruises right away? Why did she run from the party instead of saying anything to the other guests?
They have to gather all the information, they say, when they ask the same question ten times in different ways in order to see if she changes her answer. This is a serious allegation, they remind her, as if it’s the allegation that’s the problem. She is told all the things she shouldn’t have done: She shouldn’t have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn’t have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn’t have showered. Shouldn’t have drunk alcohol. Shouldn’t have put herself in that situation. Shouldn’t have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn’t existed, then none o
f this would have happened, why didn’t she think of that?
She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman.”
* * *
Words are not small things.
* * *
Kira shouts. Makes calls. Causes trouble. Gets told to calm down. Everyone is actually just doing their job here. Peter sits with his hand on top of Maya’s fingers at the little table in the interview room in the police station in Hed, and he doesn’t know if his daughter hates him because he isn’t shouting too. Because he hasn’t had legal training, he doesn’t know what to shout about. Because he isn’t out trying to kill someone, anyone. Because he’s powerless. When he takes his hand away from hers, father and daughter are both freezing.
Maya sees the nameless fury in the eyes of one of her parents, the eternal emptiness in the other’s. She goes with her mother to the hospital. Her dad heads in the other direction, toward Beartown.
There will be days when Maya is asked if she really understood the consequences of going to the police and telling the truth. She will nod. Sometimes she will believe that she was actually the only person who did understand. Much later, in ten years’ time, she will think that the biggest problem here was actually that she wasn’t as shocked as all the adults were. They were more innocent than she was. She was fifteen and had access to the Internet; she already knew that the world is a cruel place if you’re a girl. Her parents couldn’t imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn’t expected it to happen to her.
“What a terrible thing to realize,” she will think, in ten years’ time, and then she will remember the most peculiar details. Like the fact that one of the police officers was wearing a wedding ring that was too big, so it kept slipping down and hitting the table. And the fact that he never looked her in the eye, just kept his gaze focused on her forehead or mouth.