“With all due respect: you know I don’t agree about that. I don’t think David’s ready,” he said quietly.
He doesn’t make eye contact with the president and looks around the walls of the office instead, as if he were looking for something. The only time he avoids eye contact is when something feels extremely unpleasant. Kira says he starts “shooting imaginary clay pigeons” as soon as he finds himself in any sort of conflict. He can’t even point out that he’s been given the wrong change in the supermarket without breaking into a cold sweat and wanting to curl up into a ball. The wall behind the president is decorated with pictures and pennants, and one of them—ancient and faded—reads “Culture, Values, Community.” Peter feels like asking the president what he thinks that means now that they’re about to fire the man who built up everything surrounding them. But he stays quiet. The president throws up his hands.
“We’re aware that David pushes hard, but he gets results. And the sponsors have made a significant investment . . . for God’s sake, Peter, they saved us from bankruptcy. And we’ve got a chance to build something big now, using the products of the junior team.”
Peter looks him in the eye for the first time and replies through gritted teeth:
“We’re not supposed to develop ‘products.’ We don’t manufacture anything at all. We nurture human beings. Those guys are flesh and blood, not business plans and investment targets. The youth program isn’t some factory, regardless of what some of our sponsors seem to think.”
He bites his lip hard and stops himself. The president scratches his stubble. They both look tired. Peter looks down at the floor again.
“Sune thinks David is pushing the juniors too hard. I’m concerned about what might happen if he’s right,” he mutters.
The president smiles. And shrugs his shoulders.
“Do you know what happens to coal if you apply enough pressure to it, Peter? It turns into diamonds.”
* * *
The Andersson family never plays Monopoly, not because the parents don’t want to, but because the children refuse. The last time they tried, Kira ended up holding the board over the open fire, threatening to burn it unless Peter confessed that he had been cheating. Their parents are so competitive that Maya and Leo simply refuse to play. Leo loves hockey because he loves being part of a team, but he would probably have been just as happy being in charge of the equipment as he is being a center. Maya chose the guitar. You can’t compete at playing the guitar. Maya’s last sporting memory is of the time she lost a game of table tennis when she was six because another girl ran into her and knocked her over, and how the youth-group leader who was supposed to hand out the medals had to lock himself in a cleaning cupboard so Kira wouldn’t find him. Maya had to console her mother all the way home. After that she announced that she wanted to learn to play a musical instrument.
Nothing has made Kira more proud or more envious than when she heard her daughter plug in an amplifier for the first time and play David Bowie in the garage with her dad on drums. She hated and loved Peter because he had the sensitivity to learn. So that he could be close to Maya.
The four members of the family are so improbably different, and even if Kira never stops reminding them that Peter actually confessed to cheating at Monopoly, she nonetheless thinks about that Monopoly board every now and then and feels . . . ashamed. Not a second has passed since she had children without her feeling like a bad mother. For everything. For not understanding, for being impatient, for not knowing everything, not making better packed lunches, for still wanting more out of life than just being a mother. She hears other women in Beartown sigh behind her back: “Yes, but she has a full-time job, you know. Can you imagine?” No matter how much you try to let words like that run off you, a few of them stick.
She’s ashamed to admit it to herself, but getting to work feels like a liberation. She knows she’s good at her job, and she never feels that way about being a parent. Even on the best days—the tiny, shimmering moments when they’re on holiday and Peter and the children are fooling about on a beach and everyone is happy and laughing—Kira always feels like a fake. As if she doesn’t deserve it, as if she just wants to be able to show a photoshopped family photograph to the rest of the world.
Her work may be demanding and tough, but it’s straightforward and logical. And being a parent is never like that. If she does everything right at work, things usually go as planned, but it doesn’t matter if she does absolutely everything in the universe correctly as a mother: the very worst can still happen.
* * *
The weight on Peter’s chest feels too heavy for him to be able to get up from his chair. The president tries to look authoritative:
“The board wants you to tell Sune the news and deal with the interviews with the press. It’s important that we demonstrate that we’re all united regarding this decision.”
Peter rubs his eyebrows with his knuckles. “When?”
“Right after the juniors’ final.” Peter looks up in surprise.
“Don’t you mean after the semifinal? Tomorrow?”
The president shakes his head calmly.
“No. If they lose the semifinal, David won’t be getting the job. The board will select someone else instead. In which case we’ll need another couple of weeks.”
Peter’s world wobbles on its axis.
“Are you kidding? You’re seriously contemplating firing Sune and then bringing in someone from outside?”
The president opens a small bag of chips, eats a handful, and wipes the salt on his jacket.
“Come on, Peter, don’t be naive. If the juniors win the final, we’ll get an incredible amount of publicity. The sponsors, the council, everyone’s going to want to join in. But the board isn’t interested in ‘almost’. . . Just look at us, look at the club . . .”
The president throws up his hands a bit too quickly, but carries on talking through the ensuing shower of crumbs:
“Don’t be a hypocrite, Peter. You haven’t devoted all those hours to this team for ‘almost,’ you didn’t become GM for ‘almost.’ No one really cares if the guys put up a good fight, they’ll only remember the final result. David is completely inexperienced as an A-team coach, but we can overlook that if he wins. But if he doesn’t . . . well, you know the rules: either you win, or you’re an also-ran.”
For a long time they just look at each other, the club president and its GM. They say nothing more, but they both know: if Peter doesn’t fall into line behind the board and the sponsors, he, too, can be replaced. Club first. Always.
He leaves the president’s office, closes the door behind him, and stands forlornly in the hallway with his forehead against the wall. One harsh lesson that Peter had to learn very quickly when he became GM was that everyone was always unhappy with him. That was hard to accept for someone who has always wanted to keep people happy. It was Sune who told him not to let it bother him, and that his talent for compromise would get him a long way. Then he was able to listen and make difficult decisions with his head rather than his heart.
Perhaps Sune didn’t have his own dismissal in mind when he said that. Perhaps he changed his mind when he got older. Perhaps Peter himself has changed, he doesn’t know. But he does know the rules, everyone knows the rules. You’re either a particular type of club, or you’re one of all the rest.
Not that any of this feels the slightest bit better as a result. All he knows is that he keeps disappointing people. Always.
* * *
On one corner of the desk in Kira’s office there’s an increasingly cramped collection of family photographs. One is of her and Peter taken the day they moved to Canada, when he’d only just gotten his NHL contract. She happens to notice it just as she’s putting her briefcase down and smiles. God, they were so young then. She had only just qualified as a lawyer, and was pregnant, and he was going to be a superstar. How easy everything was back then, for a few magical weeks. She stops smiling when she remembers how quickl
y the smiles in that picture had faded.
Peter broke his foot in preseason training, and when he returned he had to fight his way up through the farm team league, only to break his foot a second time when he was finally allowed to play again. After four NHL games. It took him two years to work his way back after that. Six minutes into his fifth game he fell and didn’t get back up. She screamed out loud, despite swearing while she was growing up that she would never make a fool of herself for any man. She sat through nine operations, she doesn’t know how many hours of rehab, physiotherapists, and specialists. All that talent, all that sweat, all leading up to nothing but tears and bitterness in a man whose heart wanted so much more than his body could handle. She remembers when the doctor told her Peter would never be able to play at elite level again, because no one dared tell Peter directly.
They had a young son at the time, and a daughter on the way. Kira had already decided that she would be called Maya. For several months they had a dad who was present without being present. There are no former hockey players, because they never quite reach the same temperature as the rest of us. It’s like trying to rehabilitate returning soldiers: they drift about aimlessly when they don’t have anyone to fight with or for. The whole of Peter’s life had been divided into times and schedules and bus trips and locker rooms. Meals and training sessions and even regulated times for sleep. One of the toughest concepts to teach someone like that is “everyday life.”
There were days when Kira thought about giving up and asking for a divorce. But she remembered one of the stupid slogans written on scraps of paper all over Peter’s room when he was growing up: “The only time I’m not moving forward is when I’m taking aim.”
* * *
Peter is alone in the hallway. The door to Sune’s office is closed. It’s the first time in twenty years that Peter has seen it like that, and he’s never been more grateful. He thinks about the words on the wall of the president’s office: “Culture, Values, Community.” He remembers something Sune told him during preseason training a lifetime ago: “Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we permit.” For Sune the coach, that applied to making them run through the forest until they threw up, but for Sune the man it also applied to life.
Peter gets some coffee and drinks it, even though it tastes like something has crawled into the cup and died there, then stops in front of the team photograph from their silver-medal season, the club’s greatest triumph. There are copies of the picture all around the building. Robbie Holts is standing next to him in the middle row. They haven’t so much as spoken to each other since Peter came back to Beartown, and hardly a day goes by without Peter wondering what life would have been like if they had changed places. If Robbie had been the more talented one, if he had gone to Canada, if Peter had stayed here and worked in the factory. How different life would have been then.
He remembers one morning in Canada when Kira pulled him out of bed before the children woke up. Forced him to sit and look at them as they slept. “They’re your team now,” she whispered, over and over again, until tears from his eyes started to run down her cheeks.
That year they built a new life, stayed in Canada, and fought their way through every battle that came their way. Kira got a job in a law firm, Peter worked part-time selling insurance. They made it work, they settled, and then—just as Kira started to make plans for the future—came the nights when they realized something was wrong.
* * *
All through their childhood boys are told that all they need to do is their best. That it will be enough, as long as they give their all. Peter looks himself in the eye in the photograph; he’s so incredibly young. He met Kira for the first time the evening they lost that last game down in the capital. The fact that they’d made it as far as that was a miracle, but that wasn’t good enough for Peter. For him it was more than a game, it was a chance for a small town to show the big city that not everything can be bought. The papers in the capital had patronizingly decided to label the game “The Call of the Wild,” and Peter had looked each of his teammates in the eye and roared: “They may have the money, but hockey belongs to us!” They gave it everything they had. It wasn’t enough.
That evening the team went out to celebrate winning silver. Peter sat on his own all night in a little family-run restaurant next to the hotel. Kira was behind the bar. Peter broke down in tears in front of her, not for his own sake but because he wouldn’t be able to look his town in the eye again. Because he’d let them all down. It was a pretty weird first date, but he’s able to smile about it in hindsight. What was it she said to him? “Have you ever considered not feeling so sorry for yourself?” That made him laugh, and he didn’t stop for several days. He’s fallen for her every day since then.
And once, a long time afterward, when Kira had been drinking and was a bit too loud, the way she gets after too much wine, she held his ears so tightly that he genuinely thought they were going to come off, and when he lowered his head to hers she whispered: “You adorable stupid idiot, don’t you realize that’s when I fell in love with you? You were a lost little kid from the backwoods, but I knew that someone who was second-best in the country but was still crying because he was worried about disappointing the people he loved, that person was going to turn out to be a good man. He’d be a good father. He’d protect his children. He’d never let anything happen to his family.”
* * *
Kira remembers every inch of the descent into darkness. The greatest terror of every parent, waking up and listening out for small breaths. And every night you feel so foolish when you hear them, as usual, for worrying about nothing. “How did I become someone like this?” you think. You promise yourself that you’ll relax, because of course you know that nothing’s going to happen. But the following night you still lie there wide awake, staring up at the ceiling and shaking your head, until you tell yourself, “Just tonight, then.” And you creep out of bed and put your palms to your children’s little chests to feel them rising and falling. And then one night one of them falls and doesn’t rise again as strongly.
And then you fall. All the hours in the waiting room at the hospital, all the nights on the floor beside the boy’s bed, that morning when the doctor told Peter because no one dared tell Kira. They simply fell. If they hadn’t had Maya, would they have been able to go on living? How does anyone do that?
Kira was so pleased when they moved away; she could never imagine that she would feel so happy to move back. But they could start again there. She and Peter and Maya. And then Leo came along. They were happy, or at least as happy as a family can be when it’s burdened by a grief too large to be absorbed by time.
* * *
But Kira still doesn’t know how to deal with it.
* * *
Peter puts his hand on the glass of the frame. Kira never stopped making his pulse throb in his throat; he still loves her the way you do when you’re a teenager, when your heart swells in your chest and makes you feel like you can’t breathe. But she had been wrong. He couldn’t protect his family. And not a single day goes by without him wondering what he could have done differently. Could he have made a deal with God? If he had sacrificed all his talent? Given up all his success? His own life? What would God have given him in exchange? Could he have changed places in the coffin with his firstborn son?
* * *
At night Kira still goes around the house, counting their children. One, two, three.
* * *
Two in their beds. One in heaven.
10
Say what you like about Beartown, it can take your breath away. When the sun rises above the lake, when the mornings are so cold that the oxygen itself is crisp, when the trees seem to bow respectfully over the ice in order to let as much light as possible reach the children playing on it, then you can’t help wondering how anyone could choose to live in places where all you can see are concrete and buildings. Four-year-olds play outdoors on their own here, and there are still people w
ho have never locked their front doors. After Canada, Maya’s parents were overprotective to a degree that might have appeared a bit unusual even in a big city, so in Beartown it seemed almost psychotic. There’s something very peculiar about growing up in the shadow of a dead older brother: children in that situation become either terrified of everything or nothing at all. Maya fell into the second group.
She parts from Ana in the hallway with their secret handshake. They were in their first year at school when Ana came up with it, but Maya was the one who realized that the only way to keep it secret was to do it so quickly that no one had time to see the different elements: fist up, fist down, palm, palm, butterfly, bent finger, pistols, jazz hands, minirocket, explosion, ass-to-ass, outbitches. Ana came up with the descriptions. Maya still laughs every time they bang their backsides together at the end and Ana turns her back on her, throwing her hands up in the air and yelling: “. . . and Ana is OUT, bitches!” and walks away.
But she doesn’t do it as loudly anymore, not when they’re at school, not when other people can see her. She pulls her arms in, lowers her voice, tries to fit in. Throughout their childhood Maya loved her best friend because she wasn’t like any other girl she had met, but life as a teenager seems to have acted like sandpaper on Ana. She’s getting smoother and smoother, smaller and smaller.
* * *
Sometimes Maya misses her.
* * *
Kira looks at the time, pulls some papers from her briefcase, and hurries off to a meeting, then straight on to another one. She’s running late as usual as she hurries back to her office, already behind schedule. There’s a label she used to love but which she loathes when it’s pronounced in a Beartown accent: “career woman.” Peter’s friends call her that, some in admiration and some with distaste, but no one calls Peter a “career man.” It strikes a nerve because Kira recognizes the insinuation: you have a “job” so you can provide for your family, whereas a “career” is selfish. You have one of those for your own sake. So now she’s dangling somewhere between two worlds, and feels just as guilty when she’s in the office as she does when she’s at home.