“My name is Ann-Katrin. My husband is an old friend of your dad’s.”
“Maya,” Maya whispers.
Ann-Katrin puts her hand tenderly against the child’s cheek.
“I think you’re very brave, Maya.”
* * *
Peter drives back to Hed from Beartown. He walks into the hospital ready to announce triumphantly to Maya that Kevin has been picked up by the police. That she’s going to get justice. Then he walks into the room and sees her. Nothing in the world is as small as your own child in a hospital bed. There’s no justice to be had. He sits beside his daughter and cries, because he isn’t the sort of person who can kill someone. In the end he asks:
“What can I do, Maya? Tell me what I can do . . .”
His daughter pats her dad’s stubble.
“Love me.”
“Always.”
“Love me like you love hockey and David Bowie?”
“So much more, Pumpkin, much, much more.”
And she laughs. It’s funny that a ten-year-old nickname, “Pumpkin,” is the thing that does that. When she was nine she made him stop calling her that, but ever since then she’s missed it, the whole time.
“I need two things,” she whispers.
“Let me guess: Ana and your guitar?” he says.
She nods. Kira comes back into the room. The parents’ hands touch fleetingly. When Peter reaches the door, his daughter calls out:
“And you need to talk to Leo, Dad. He’s going to be petrified.”
The mom and dad look at each other. How many years will the stab in their chests feel like a heart attack when they think of this moment? Of all people, the only one who hasn’t forgotten Leo today is his big sister.
* * *
Ann-Katrin is sitting in the staffroom staring at the wall. Like everyone else, she’s heard that the police have picked Kevin up, but she’s one of the few who knows why Maya is at the hospital, who makes the connection. Maya didn’t recognize Ann-Katrin. Nor, if he’d been there, would Kevin, even though she’s been sitting in the crowd watching almost every match he’s played since little league. Some parents remain faceless to other children.
She sends her son a text: “Good luck today.” Bobo replies almost immediately: “Kev?? Heard anything??” His mother writes back: “No. Nothing. Try to concentrate on hockey now, darling!” It takes a few minutes before he replies: “Going to win for Kev!!” She swallows hard and writes: “I love you.” Bobo replies like teenage boys do: “OK.”
Ann-Katrin leans back in a hard chair, looks up at the ceiling of the staffroom, and thinks about all the children who are in such pain. You see a lot of it at this hospital. That’s why so many of her colleagues are on sick leave. Nurses and doctors have no break for summer training like in hockey, no finals, no time-outs. Their season just goes on, day after day after day, and that can break even the very toughest. Even people from Beartown.
* * *
And when even the toughest can’t handle it: Who’s going to be the leader then?
* * *
David starts to get up, clearing his throat to attract the boys’ attention, then stops when he sees that they’ve already begun to sit down. Not because of David, but Benji. The boy is standing in the middle of the bus, and looks each of them straight in the eye in turn, before finishing up in front of Filip, a soft-spoken boy who’s a year younger than most of the team, and who lives three houses away from Kevin in the Heights.
“When we were little, Filip, and you were upset because you were smallest and worst on the team; when you couldn’t even shoot above the yellow strip at the bottom of the boards, what did David say to you then?”
Filip looks down at his lap, embarrassed, but Benji puts his palm under his chin and tips his head back. Filip wasn’t just a year younger, he was also far behind players like Bobo in purely physical terms for so many years that no one even noticed how good he was at everything else. He’s the type of guy who disappears in a locker room, never says anything, never causes problems, just goes along with things. In the past three years he has, in his usual unassuming way, become by far the best back on the team without anyone really noticing it happening.
“Ignore everything else, just concentrate on the things you can change,” Filip replies quietly.
Benji nods and pats him on the head. Then he turns to William Lyt.
“And what did David say to you, Lyt, when all the others learned to skate backward before you, and you didn’t think you’d be allowed to carry on playing?”
Lyt blinks hard and wipes his cheeks angrily.
“Concentrate on the things you can change.”
Benji takes hold of Lyt by the shoulders and looks into his eyes as he quotes their coach again:
“We’re a team. We give each other power. When one man falls, another steps up.”
Lyt rubs his eyes with his sleeve and goes on:
“Team before self. Club before individual.”
When no one else can hear, Benji whispers to him:
“We’re relying on you now, Lyt, you’re our star today. You have to lead us.”
If Benji had asked Lyt to kill someone at that moment, the boy would have done it without hesitation. No social scientist nor any member of a sports team really knows what makes them who they are, the leaders we follow. Only that we don’t hesitate when we see them.
Benji stops in front of Bobo, the giant who was the best back on the team until all the others learned to skate better than him.
“What’s the second-best thing in the world, Bobo?”
It takes a moment before Bobo replies hesitantly:
“Fucking?”
Some of the juniors giggle. Benji lowers his head to Bobo’s big face.
“But first we’re on our way to do the best thing in the world, Bobo. And do you know how many things I want from you right now?”
Bobo stands up. “Just one, eh?”
“Win,” Benji says.
“Win!” Bobo shouts.
“WIN!” the whole bus roars.
* * *
David sits down in his seat. “WIN! WIN! WIN!” the team is chanting, and David deletes the text from Kevin’s father. When Lars comes over and asks if he’s heard anything about why Kevin was taken away by the police, David shakes his head and replies:
“No. Nothing. Now we’re going to concentrate on the things we can change, Lars.”
* * *
Benji goes and lies down at the back of the bus. Sleeps the rest of the way.
32
There’s a town in a forest that loves a game. There’s a girl sitting on a bed playing the guitar for her best friend. There’s a young man sitting in a police station trying not to look scared. In a hallway in a hospital, a nurse walks past a lawyer talking loudly into her cell phone. In the stands in an ice rink in a capital city grown men and women are on their feet, shouting that they are the bears from Beartown, along with sponsors and board members who ten years before laughed at a GM who said that one day they would have the best junior team in the country. Now everyone who is connected to the club is here except the GM.
A team is waiting in a locker room, sticks in hand, waiting for a game to start. A little brother is waiting on a bench with a phone in his lap, waiting to see what his friends will write about his sister on the Internet when they find out what’s happened. A law firm gets a call from a wealthy client, and at another law firm a mother starts a war. The girl goes on playing her guitar until her best friend falls asleep, and in the doorway stands a father, thinking that the girls will survive this. They’ll be able to deal with it. That’s what he’s afraid of. That that’s what’s going to make the rest of the world go on thinking that everything is okay.
* * *
There’s a player with the number “16” on his back who, ever since he learned to skate, has had to learn exactly what it takes to win. He knows that games are won as much in the head as they are on the ice, and his coach has taught him ho
w hockey is musical: every team has a rhythm and a tempo they like playing in. If you disrupt that rhythm, you disrupt their music, because even the best musicians in the world hate being forced to play out of time, and once they’ve started it’s hard to stop. An object in motion wants to keep going in the same direction, and the larger a rolling snowball gets, the more of a fool you have to be to dare to stand in its path. That’s what sportspeople mean by “momentum,” whereas in physics lessons at school teachers talk about the “principle of inertia.” David was always rather more blunt when he used to talk to Benji: “When something goes right for a team everything feels easy, so it automatically goes even better. But if you can cause a bit of trouble for them, only a very little bit, you’ll soon see that they manage to create a lot more trouble for themselves.” It’s about balance. The slightest puff of wind can be all it takes.
* * *
An opposing team arrives at an arena to play against Beartown Ice Hockey, but everyone on the team scornfully calls them “Erdahl Ice Hockey.” They already knew long before the match that they were light-years better than the peasants from the forest, but now they’ve just found out that Kevin isn’t even going to be playing. Beartown is nothing without him. A joke. Roadkill at the side of a freeway. As they arrive at the arena the players are confident and calm; they know that all they have to do to win is to play their game. Have ice in their stomachs. Keep themselves balanced.
Their coach is still outside, but the players are hyped up with pride; they want to see their opponents, so they go into the rink ahead of him. The lights in the corridor to the locker rooms are broken; someone jokes that “the poor peasants have probably nicked the bulbs,” and someone else replies: “What for? They don’t have electricity in Beartown!” At first they think the unmoving shape outside their locker room is just a shadow—their eyes haven’t gotten used to the gloom yet—so the first player walks straight into him. Benji’s chest is concrete; the whites of his eyes swivel toward each of the twenty players in turn. If they’d had time to react, they might have laughed nervously, but now they just stand silent in the darkness, their eyes darting about.
Benji doesn’t move. Just waits in the doorway. Forces them to come at him in order to get into their locker room. They should have waited for their coach, they should have gone to get a referee, but they’re too proud for that. When they lose their temper it’s predictable; he’s already identified which two it will be. One gives him a shove, the other hits him in the shoulder with his fist. Benji soaks up the first and responds to the second by hitting him so quickly on his ear that he falls to the ground with a yelp. Benji twists toward the first again and hits him twice in the ribs, not hard enough to break anything but enough for him to double up, whereupon Benji elbows him in the back of the neck so that he collapses on top of his friend. When a third player rushes toward him, Benji darts out of the way and shoves him in the back, sending him flying into the unlit locker room. The fourth makes the mistake of grabbing hold of Benji’s clothes with both hands; Benji headbutts him in the cheek and he falls backward with no one to catch him.
Obviously there’s no way he could have taken on the whole team in a well-lit room, but in a cramped, dark corridor where no more than one or two can attack him at a time, they all need to ask themselves the question: Who goes first?
The answer is that no one does. That’s enough—that single second’s hesitation from a whole group. Benji grins at them, then calmly walks off before anyone thinks of anything to say. When he opens the door to his own team’s locker room, “WE ARE THE BEARS!” from two dozen crazed voices echoes into the corridor, and the beam of light lasts just long enough for everyone on the opposing team to see exactly how off balance their teammates suddenly are.
They won’t say anything to their coach, because what would they say? That they let a single guy take out their four strongest players while the rest of them stood and watched? “What the fuck was that?” someone mutters. “Head case,” another one declares. When they switch the lights on, they try to laugh it off. They try to convince each other that they’re going to get number sixteen later, that it doesn’t matter, that they’re too good to care about something like that. When the game starts it’s very obvious that they haven’t succeeded. Rhythm, tempo, balance. Puffs of wind.
* * *
Benji pulls on jersey number sixteen. David stands in front of his team with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the floor. He has spent the whole journey here thinking about what leadership actually means to him, and has reached one single, shimmering conclusion: Sune has been his mentor, and Sune’s greatest strength was always that he nurtured leaders. His problem was that he never let them lead.
The players are holding their breath, but when David looks up at them he is almost smiling.
“Do you want to hear the truth, guys? The truth is that no one believed you could get here. Not your opponents, not the association, not the national coaches, and certainly not any of the people out there in the stands. For them this was a dream, for you it was a goal. No one did this for you. So this game, this moment . . . it belongs to you. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do with it.”
He wants to say so much more, but they’re in the final now. He’s done all he can. So he turns and walks out of the locker room. A few seconds later Lars follows, bewildered. The team sits there, at first just staring at each other in surprise. Then they stand up, one by one, and tap each other twice on the helmet. Of all people, the quietest of them is the first to raise his voice:
“Where are we from?” Filip asks.
“BEARTOWN!” the locker room replies.
Lyt climbs onto a bench and bellows: “FOR KEVIN!”
“FOR KEVIN!” the locker room replies.
Benji is already standing on the ice when they come out. Alone in the center circle, number “16” on his back, eyes black. The last to emerge from the Beartown locker room are the team’s largest player and its smallest. Bobo taps Amat on the shoulder and asks:
“Where are you from, Amat?”
Amat looks up with his jaw trembling:
“The Hollow.”
Bobo nods and holds up his gloves. He’s written Shantytown Hockey on them with a marker pen. It’s a clumsy gesture from a clumsy boy.
* * *
Sometimes they’re worth the most.
* * *
Why does anyone care about sports? There’s a woman in the stands who cares because they’re the last thing she’s got that gives her straight answers. She used to be a cross-country skier at the elite level. She sacrificed all her teenage years to skiing long-distance trails, evening after evening with a headlamp and tears streaming from cold and exhaustion, and all the pain and all the losses, and all the things other high school kids were doing with their free time that she could never be part of. But if you were to ask her now if she regrets anything, she’d shake her head. If you were to ask what she would have done if she could go back in time, she’d answer without hesitation: “Train harder.” She can’t explain why she cares about sports, because she’s learned that if you have to ask the question, you simply wouldn’t understand her answer.
Her son Filip is playing in the first line defense pairing, but she knows what he’s had to do to get there. All the running in the forest in the light of two headlamps, all the hours on the terrace firing pucks while his mom stood in goal. All the tears when he was the smallest on the team and used to measure and weigh himself every morning because the doctor had promised that his body would catch up with the others in the end. The pencil marks on the doorframe that his mom can’t bring herself to paint over now. The crushed little heap that she had to pick up from the kitchen floor every day when he realized he was just as short as the day before. Just as light. No one else may have noticed when he made himself into the best back on the whole team, but his mom was there every step of the way.
* * *
Tails has spent the entire warm-up with his phone in his hand
, trying to find out what’s happened to Kevin. Still nothing. He suspects that David is the first person Kevin’s dad will contact when they know anything, but he can’t get in touch with the coach from here.
The sponsors and board members around him are angry about the lack of information. They’re already talking about which lawyers to contact, which journalists to share the story with, who’s going to be punished for this.
Tails isn’t angry; his emotions have reached another level now. He looks at the parents in the stands. Tries to add up all the days and evenings and nights they’ve devoted to this team. He feels the weight of his own silver medal from another age around his neck. He doesn’t know who’s snatched their chance of victory from them, but already he hates them.
* * *
It’s Benji who tells David and Lars to let Lyt play in the center in place of Kevin. There will never be enough words to describe what that would mean to Lyt. Before the first face-off Benji stops in front of Amat and asks:
“Have you got your fast skates on today, then?”
Amat grins and nods. Their opponents are already talking loudly on their bench about “making number sixteen take his penalty calls.” They’re not idiots; they’ve seen Benji for the violent lunatic he is. So when the other team wins the face-off, Benji skates at full speed with his stick raised toward the player who gets hold of the puck, and everyone who saw number sixteen in the darkened corridor a while back obviously realizes that he’s going to ignore the puck and go straight in for the hit. His opponent braces his skates and tenses his body to absorb the impact.
It never comes. Benji goes straight for the puck and pokes it between the defenseman’s skates into the offensive zone, Lyt takes a hit in the neutral zone and is sent sprawling across the ice like a shot seal—a center sacrificing himself to give the third player in the line enough space. They get one single tiny chance in this game before their opponents realize how fast Amat is.
* * *