* * *
Kira and Maya are sitting in the Volvo; they’ve just left the kennels when Kira’s phone rings. It’s Peter. He’s already run into town.
“THE BEARSKIN’S ON FIRE! I DON’T KNOW WHERE LEO IS!” he roars.
The kennel is located a fair way into the forest. There are only two routes back to Beartown: the ordinary winding road that all normal people use, but also a barely maintained track through the trees with no lighting that’s occasionally used by hunters. The track leads directly to the main road that runs between Beartown and Hed.
* * *
Never have a mother and a sister driven that track faster than they do tonight.
* * *
A few minutes later the Volvo slides out of the forest with its engine roaring, down onto the main road. Some way down the road an old man is driving toward them from Hed and blows his horn angrily. Kira couldn’t care less. She puts her foot down.
Then she sees the white car; it’s coming toward them far too fast. Maya lets out a scream before Kira has time to react. The driver of the white car loses control, and the car skids across the road. Kira slams on the brakes, steers the Volvo toward the ditch, and throws herself across the seat to protect her daughter. The white car loses its grip on the road, takes off, and smashes into a tree.
* * *
Leo Andersson is running through the forest, darting between the trees to get there before the cars. He isn’t fast enough. Thank God.
* * *
He isn’t fast enough.
* * *
There’s an old man who’s a regular at the Bearskin; he usually sits with four other old men arguing about hockey. His eyesight isn’t good, the other old men sometimes swap his spectacles for cheap reading glasses to make him think he’s gone blind when he puts them on. As Ramona usually snaps, “So if he does go blind, how the hell is he going to know about it?”
The old man is wearing his own glasses tonight but still can’t see well in the dark. He tried saying that to the staff at the hospital. His wife isn’t home tonight, and his children have long since moved to bigger cities in search of better jobs and sushi bars and whatever the hell else young people want from big cities, and the old man woke up with a pain in his chest. So he got into his car and drove from Beartown to Hed and sat for several hours in the hospital before finally being told that it was nothing to worry about. Probably just indigestion. “Have you ever considered drinking less alcohol?” the doctor wondered. “Have you ever considered a lobotomy?” the old man wondered, and told the doctor off for making him wait so long. He doesn’t see well in the dark! He promised his wife he wouldn’t drive tonight! “We’re understaffed,” the doctor says. The old man drove away, feeling aggrieved. “What sort of crappy hospital is this, anyway?”
Then, when he’s driving back from Hed to Beartown, some crazy woman in a Volvo suddenly appears out of the forest and pulls out right in front of him. She’d evidently decided to take a shortcut to town, and the old man brakes and blows his horn and flashes his headlights, but of course the stupid woman doesn’t care. That’s just how people drive these days.
The Volvo is driving so fast that soon the old man can only just see its rear lights. Snow is blowing hard against the windshield. It’s dark. The old man curses and squints through his glasses. He doesn’t even see exactly what happens next, he has no chance to react. The stupid woman in the Volvo suddenly brakes and lurches toward the side of the road. Two cars are approaching from the other direction: perhaps the old man has time to see that the first one is white. It leaves the ground, rolls over, and smashes into a tree with horrific force. The car behind it is a Saab, the old man might have time to notice. It was evidently pursuing the white car, because it brakes sharply and slides across the entire width of the road, and Teemu, Spider, and Woody throw the doors open and leap out. The old man probably recognizes them from the Bearskin.
* * *
The old man brakes. But it’s snowing. It’s dark. Even if the brakes do all they can, perhaps no one could have stopped at that distance, not in this weather. Perhaps it isn’t anyone’s fault. The old man isn’t wearing a seat belt, he’s driving an old car, has old eyes. He passes the Volvo and then wrenches the wheel as hard as he can as he swerves past the Saab.
* * *
He doesn’t have time to see what he hits. Never hears the thud on the hood of his car. He’s already hit his head on the steering wheel and lost consciousness.
* * *
Kira throws herself out of the Volvo, runs around the car, and pulls Maya from the passenger seat. That’s the mother’s first thought: to get her daughter away from the road, protect her. They’re hugging each other tightly in the ditch when a third person embraces them, hard, as if he thinks they’ll leave him forever if he lets go.
* * *
It’s Leo.
* * *
Ana and Vidar are running through the forest, faster than either of them really has the energy for. If they had lived a whole life together, perhaps they might have enjoyed competing against each other. If they had had children, they would probably never have stopped arguing about which of them was fastest.
They hear the crashes from down on the road and change direction instinctively, running toward the noise. Vidar hears Teemu’s voice, then Spider’s and Woody’s, yelling “Call an ambulance!” and “Watch out!”
Vidar and Ana’s fingertips nudge each other one last time. Theirs is no ordinary love story. They may have loved each other for a shorter time than many of us, but they’ve loved harder than most.
“It’s on fire!” Ana cries as they reach the road.
On the far side they can see that a car has smashed into a tree, its front end crumpled around the trunk. The people inside are unconscious. Smoke is seeping out of the gaps in the hood. Ana shouts again, “IT’S ON FIRE! IT’S ON FIRE!”
Then she runs. Vidar tries to stop her, but she’s already out of his reach. Because she’s been raised by a dad who told her, “We’re not the type who let other people down, you and me.”
So she runs toward the burning white car, straight across the road. The old man driving back from hospital in Hed doesn’t see what he’s heading toward until it’s too late. He passes the Volvo and swerves around the Saab, braking as hard as he can. Ana is in the middle of the road.
* * *
Vidar runs, shouts, but everything happens too quickly. So Vidar throws himself forward and shoves Ana out of the way. Because he’s the sort of person who lacks any impulse control. He can’t help himself saving the life of the person he loves.
Ana rolls into the ditch, gets to her feet in the snow, and lets out a howl, but the person she loves isn’t there to hear it. The old man’s car is skidding too fast, it hits with full force, and the body slams onto the hood. Vidar Rinnius dies the same way he lived. Instantly.
* * *
Theirs was a love we will always remember.
48
“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! My baby!”
Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did.
* * *
Have you ever seen a town rise? Ours did that, too.
* * *
Have you seen people who usually can’t agree on a damn thing, be it politics, religion, sports, or anything else, come rushing from all directions to help one another put out a fire in an old pub? Have you seen them save one another’s lives? We did. Perhaps you would have done the same thing. Perhaps you’re not as unlike us as you think.
* * *
We did our very, very best. We gave all we had that night. But we still lost.
* * *
There are many beautiful trees in Beartown. We sometimes say that’s because a new one grows every time we bury someone. That’s why the births are listed alongside the deaths in the local paper, so we never run out of either trees or people.
* * *
It doesn’t matter.
* * *
We don’t want a new tree. Another per
son. We just want this one back.
* * *
“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” Vidar’s mother screams when she collapses into the arms of the men standing in her kitchen, drowned in tears.
The men have no words. They’re tumbling into the same darkness as she is. Vidar’s mother lies on the floor wailing inconsolably “My baby! Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby where’s my baby where’s my baby?”
* * *
Bloody kids.
* * *
How often does a mother think that while her children are growing up? “Bloody kids.” How much does she have to shout at them? How many times does she have to tell a young boy to do even the simplest little thing? Like tying his shoelaces. “Tie your laces!” she says. Does the boy listen? Of course not. “Tie your laces before you trip!” she says. “You’ll end up falling and hurting yourself!” You’ll hurt yourself. Bloody kid.
Leo didn’t tie his laces properly that night. If he had, he would have been a few seconds quicker through the trees, out of the forest, onto the road. He would have been there when the car arrived. Just a few seconds. Just one shoelace and a badly tied knot.
* * *
So Kira falls asleep on Leo’s bed that night, and he doesn’t make her go away, and what an incredible gift that is to a mother from a teenager. They both wake up when Maya creeps in and curls up beside them. Kira holds her children so hard that they can’t breathe.
* * *
Bloody kids.
* * *
Bloody bloody bloody kids.
* * *
When Vidar was little, he didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. All the other children had nightmares and wanted the light left on, but not him. When he and Teemu shared a room and had a bunk bed, Vidar insisted on sleeping on the bottom. It took Teemu several months to realize why. He woke up one night and heard Vidar crying, so he jumped down and forced him to explain why. Eventually the little boy, no more than five or six years old, said he was convinced that there were horrible monsters that came into the house at night. “So why the hell do you want to sleep in the bottom bunk, then?” Teemu asked.
Vidar sniffed. “So the monsters will get me first and you have time to escape!”
* * *
He couldn’t help himself. Ever.
* * *
The path back to normal life is indescribably long once death has swept the feet out from under those of us who are left. Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it.
Ana sits on the floor outside Vidar’s hospital room all night. Teemu and his mother sit on either side of her. They hold Ana’s hands, unless she’s holding theirs. Three people loved Vidar Rinnius so much that they wouldn’t have hesitated to change places with him if they could. That’s not a bad achievement for anyone. One day they might be able to think that thought without falling apart.
* * *
A boy has died tonight. An old man, too. A mother and a brother and a girlfriend sit in a hospital, an old woman goes home to a house that will never stop feeling empty. Two men from Hed will go to prison for arson, one of them will probably never walk again after the car crash in the forest, and some of us will never believe that’s anywhere near enough of a punishment.
Some of us will say it was an accident. Some that it was murder. Some will think it was only those men’s fault, others will say that more were responsible. That it was many people’s fault. Ours.
It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win. It’s an uneven fight.
* * *
Spider and Woody and the men in black jackets sit in the waiting room at the hospital for almost twenty-four hours. They’re surrounded by men and women, old and young, in white shirts, green T-shirts. They stay long after the doctors emerge with somber faces to shake everyone’s hand and convey their condolences, as if Vidar won’t be properly dead until they leave the hospital.
No one in either town will know what to say. Sometimes it’s easier to do something instead. When the cars leave the hospital in Hed, Teemu and his mother drive at the back of the convoy, so at first they don’t understand why everyone is slowing down. Not until they look at the trees.
Someone has knocked the snow from the bare branches and hung thin strips of fabric all the way back. It’s no big deal, just strips of fabric fluttering in a forest in the wind. But every second one is red, and every second one is green. So that the families in the cars will know that Beartown isn’t grieving alone.
* * *
When Teemu and his mother get home, there’s someone sitting on the steps waiting for them.
“Is that Kira Andersson?” Teemu’s mother wonders.
Teemu gets out of the car without saying anything. Kira doesn’t speak, either. She just stands up and goes inside with them, goes straight to the kitchen, and starts to clean and make food. Teemu takes his mother to the bedroom and sits with her until the pills grant her the respite of sleep.
He goes back out to the kitchen. Kira hands him the brush without a word. He washes, she dries.
49
Everyone Gets a Stick. Two Goals. Two Teams.
Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control. We will never forget this year, not the best of it and not the worst. It will never stop influencing us.
Some of us will move to different places, but most of us will stay. This isn’t a uncomplicated place, but when you grow up you realize that nowhere is. God knows, Beartown and Hed have plenty of faults, but they belong to us. This is our corner of the world.
* * *
Ana and Maya are training in the barn up at the kennels. Hour after hour. Things aren’t good, things will never be all right for either of them again, but they will still find a way of getting up each morning. When Ana falls apart and just screams and cries, Maya holds her best friend tight and whispers in her ear, “Survivors, Ana. Survivors. We’re survivors.”
* * *
Early one morning, as soon as the sun has struggled above the horizon, there’s a knock on the door of a mechanic’s workshop. It’s the middle of winter, toward the end of a childhood, and when Bobo opens the door he finds Benji, Amat, and Zacharias standing outside. They go down to the lake with sticks and a puck and play together, one last time. As if it were all just a game and nothing else mattered.
* * *
In ten years’ time, Amat will be a professional player, playing in huge arenas. Zacharias will be a pro as well, but in front of a computer. Bobo will be a father.
* * *
By the time they finish playing down on the lake, it’s almost dark again. Benji gives the others a brief wave and shouts good-bye. As if they’re going to see each other tomorrow.
* * *
Hed Hockey plays Beartown Ice Hockey for the second time this season in a game that means absolutely everything and nothing at all.
* * *
In the kitchen of a house up on the Heights, Maggan Lyt is making pasta salad and potato salad. She places them in big bowls and covers them with plastic wrap. She doesn’t know if she’s a good or a bad person, she knows that most people assume that they’re good, but she never has. She has always seen herself first and foremost as a fighter. For her family, for her children, and for her town. Even when this town wants nothing to do with her. Sometimes good people do bad things out of good intentions, and sometimes the reverse happens.
She takes her salads and drives through the town, past the ice rink, and out along the road. She stops outside the home of the Rinnius family and knocks on the door.
* * *
Say what you like about Maggan Lyt. But she’s someone’s mother as well.
&n
bsp; * * *
It’s nearing the time for the puck to drop in the rink, all the players should be in their own locker rooms, but despite this, William Lyt is heading the other way along the corridor. He stops in the doorway and waits until Amat and Bobo catch sight of him.
“Have you got any more of those?” he asks quietly.
Amat and Bobo look confused, but one of the older players understands what William means. He fetches a black armband, the sort all the Beartown players are already wearing, and hands it over. William pulls it on over his sleeve and nods his thanks. “I’m—I’m truly sorry for your loss. Our whole team is.”
The Beartown players nod curtly in response. Tomorrow they’ll hate each other again. Tomorrow.
* * *
Benji stands outside the ice rink for a long time. He’s smoking in the shade of some trees, his feet deep in the snow. He’s played ice hockey his whole life, for so many different reasons, for so many different people’s sake. Some things demand our all, and choosing this sport is like choosing a classical instrument, it’s too difficult just to be a hobby. No one wakes up one morning and just happens to be a world-class violinist or pianist, and the same applies to hockey players: it takes a lifetime of obsession. It’s the sort of thing that can absorb your entire identity. In the end an eighteen-year-old man is left standing outside an ice rink thinking “Who can I be, if I’m not this?”