Kira snapped back at her, pointing out that a woman who can’t maintain a relationship unless she glues herself to a man while he’s asleep probably wasn’t an expert on the subject. Her colleague calmly responded by saying that Kira had been married forever and that didn’t seem to have helped much either. Then Kira closed her eyes and whispered through clenched teeth:

  “Damn. Have things gone this far now?”

  “What?” her colleague wondered.

  “That even you’re on Peter’s side?”

  Her colleague said nothing for a while, before replying honestly:

  “I don’t know anything about marriage. But I don’t think you’re supposed to have sides.”

  * * *

  Damn, Kira thinks now, alone on the floor of the office. Damn. Damn. Damn!

  * * *

  She knows what everyone else thinks, of course: why doesn’t she just let Peter go back to working at the club again? Give hockey back to him?

  Because she knows how that would end up, because she’s spent half her life living in Peter’s world. You can’t be a bit involved in that club, it’s a monster, it consumes relationships like a jealous lover. Hockey will never be satisfied, no one is ever enough, and that goes for life outside the rink as well.

  Two years ago, after all the horrors of the world had landed on Maya, for a few moments Kira and Peter forgot to keep an eye on Leo. So their son found new friends, the worst sort, the sort with black jackets who drew out all the darkness in him. Kira and Peter got a sneak preview of how Leo’s life might turn out if they left him to his own devices, with his demons and lack of impulse control. After that they promised each other that one of them would have to be home more. To see him.

  Is that not reasonable? Hasn’t Kira done her bit, for all those years, isn’t it her turn to be allowed to devote herself to her work now? She starts ten different text messages to Peter but deletes them all, in the end writing just: About to leave. She almost hopes he’ll call back and yell at her because it’s such a blatant lie, but he just replies: Ok.

  * * *

  Damn.

  * * *

  There’s a flashlight in the desk drawer but she doesn’t take it out. Rain is rumbling against the windows, the glow from her cell phone is all that lights her face as she scrolls through years of saved photographs of her children, birthday parties and snowball fights and Sundays spent skating on the frozen lake. They look like the perfect family, and, like so many times before, she wonders if they were ever really that.

  She dozes off, curled up on the carpet, but never really falls asleep. Slowly her brain gets used to the banging and roaring outside, and her body stops twitching. She never hears Peter come in, he can walk so quietly, touch her with such gentleness. She feels his breath on the back of her neck, and his rough hands with the crooked fingers that got broken in all manner of different ice rinks reach around her waist. She smiles but keeps her eyes closed, tighter and tighter because she doesn’t want to wake up and realize that she’s only dreaming about him.

  “Do we have to lie on the floor?” he eventually whispers in her ear.

  “What?” she murmurs.

  “Do we have to lie on the floor, darling?” he repeats.

  She doesn’t know whether to hug him or yell at him, so all she manages to say is:

  “How did you even get here?”

  “I walked.”

  “WALKED?”

  “Yes. With a flashlight, through the forest.”

  “Oh darling, why?”

  “Leo’s with the neighbors’ kids. I didn’t want to be alone.”

  “You’re crazy,” she says, lacing her fingers hard through his.

  “So I’ve been told,” he says, and she can feel his smile against her shoulder blade.

  They lie there listening to the wind and for the first time in a very long time she feels that it might not be too late to put everything right. She drifts off. Almost forgets.

  She wakes up when her phone starts to ring. At first she just sits on the floor, confused and still half-asleep, and tries to take in the fact that dawn is breaking outside the windows. She’s slept through a storm, how exhausted do you have to be to do that? Her phone rings and rings and her heart flutters and falls just as fast when she sees Peter’s name on the screen. He was never here. She has ten thousand things she wants to say but when she answers she doesn’t manage to say any of them. No one else had heard the sob in Peter’s throat, if you get beaten as a child you learn to hold back your sobs, but not for her. Never for his wife.

  “Dead… what do you mean, dead?” is all Kira can manage to say once he’s told her, because surely there’s no way she can be dead? Not her?

  For several days after the storm Peter will stand in their bedroom trying to knot his tie the perfect length for a funeral. Kira will stand outside the door and never find a breath that’s deep enough to break the silence. The forest lost so many of its most beautiful trees that night, and what makes it even more unbearable is that it also lost one of its best people.

  18 Darkness

  Less than an hour from now Fatima will be lying in a ditch, but right now she’s cleaning the ice rink. She’s approaching middle age, she looks much younger but feels considerably older as she straightens her back up in the stands. It hurts, but she hides it well, she’s good at keeping secrets, others’ as well as her own. Every day she cleans the whole of this ice rink, and the next day she starts again, following the same strict routine. She doesn’t complain, she’s grateful, always grateful, grateful, grateful. To the job, to the town, to the country that took her and her son in so many years ago when he was still small. Grateful, grateful, grateful for everything he has received here. Everything he has been able to become.

  “Fatima!”

  It’s the caretaker, yelling again. He’s been yelling all evening, he thinks she ought to go home before the storm gets worse and the buses to the Hollow stop running. But she’s not going to leave things half-finished, the old fool knows that, he just doesn’t have any other way of communicating his concern except by moaning. Once he grinned at her and said there were loads of good things one could be in a hockey club, but none of them was better than being taken for granted. It was a beautiful thought, of course, cleaners and caretakers never get their uniforms hung up in the roof of the rink at the end of their careers, but they stay longer than anyone who’s accorded that honor. Coaches and players come and go, and the entire team can be replaced over the course of a couple of seasons, but the people in the background go to work as usual on Monday. If they do their jobs perfectly, no one will even notice how important they are until the day they disappear. And often not even then, sadly.

  The day Fatima is buried she won’t be remembered primarily for who she was, but for whose mother she was. She’s Amat’s mother, of course, the boy who went on to be the best. That’s all that counts in hockey towns.

  * * *

  The wind bangs on the door but the caretaker takes no notice of it. It’ll take more than a bit of wind to scare him into going home.

  “You have to go home now, you silly woman! You can finish the cleaning tomorrow!” he yells up at Fatima from the boards.

  “Some of us have real work to do here, we don’t just pretend, old man!” she calls back from the stands.

  “Old man? Go and jump in the lake!”

  “Oh, just be quiet!”

  There’s only one person Fatima ever raises her voice to apart from her son, and that’s the caretaker. That’s how close they are now, woman and old man, he’s worked here forever and she’ll soon have been here for so long that no one can remember when she started, and over the years they’ve developed a confidential friendship based on few words and simple humor. Not long ago the caretaker brought in a photograph of a statue in a different part of the country, and beneath it was written: “Coarse from work, soft from love.” And he thought of her.

  “You missed a spot over there!” he calls.

  “You only see spots because you’ve got cataracts!” she calls back.

  He chuckles happily, there aren’t many people who can make him do that. It’s often said that “children and drunks tell you the truth,” but if you go to a hockey town and want to know what’s really going on, you should go to the ice rink and ask the caretaker. The only problem is that he won’t tell you a damn thing, because hockey clubs need “high ceilings and thick walls,” and the caretaker takes that saying seriously. He’s seen coaches and committees come and go, he’s seen the club when it was second best in the country and he saw it two years ago when it almost went bankrupt. He’s good at closing storeroom doors and switching on the blade sharpener so he doesn’t overhear sponsors and politicians concluding shady agreements in corridors, he didn’t spend a day longer than necessary at school but he understands enough about numbers to know that no club in the country would have survived if they’d followed every accounting regulation, everyone does what it takes to survive here. Then you keep your mouth shut. The caretaker has experienced fairy tales and disasters in this ice rink, he’s seen boys become men and men become stars, but often he has seen them fade just as quickly. He saw Peter Andersson turn up here from home with black eyes but never give one to anyone else, he saw him grow up to become captain of the A-team, he waved him off when he went to Canada to become a pro in the NHL, and was still here when he came back and became general manager. Up until just a couple of winters ago it would never have occurred to the caretaker to say any other name if he was asked who Beartown’s best ever player was. But then came Amat. It is often said that a player is “an overnight success,” or “came out of nowhere,” but that’s never true, of course, Amat has had to spend every day of his whole life fighting to be better than anyone else, because nothing less will be enough if you’re a poor kid in the rich kids’ ice rink. You have to be the best. The caretaker knows, because if you love a club for as long as he has, eventually it can’t hide anything from you.

  When Fatima arrived here all those years ago with her young son from somewhere on the other side of the planet, she had never even seen an ice rink, but she quickly learned that, regardless of what your mother tongue might be, “hockey” is the most important word in the local dialect here. The caretaker and Peter himself were the ones who made sure Amat was able to borrow skates, they agreed that would be better than language lessons if he was going to blend in. When the boy grew older the caretaker had to pay for the goodness of his heart when the boy did extra training before dawn or after sunset and the old man’s working day became at least four hours longer between opening up and closing. He and Peter were almost as proud as Fatima when Amat made his debut on the A-team. “Quick as a cat out of a sack, that one,” the caretaker chuckled, and Fatima exploded inside whenever her son scored a goal. Boys never understand that, the way their mothers see them, but how could they? They haven’t had to divide their own hearts yet.

  So they can’t understand when their mothers go to pieces on their behalf either, that crushed dreams can hurt more for those who love us than they do for us ourselves. Fatima used to love the autumn, because the caretaker and Peter taught her that the Beartown year starts then, when the hockey season starts. But not this year, not for her son.

  No one really knows what happened to him, not even the caretaker. He doesn’t have the heart to ask Fatima straight out, because he can see in her eyes every day that she’s broken. Back in the spring Amat was the most celebrated star in town, he was on his way to winning the entire league with Beartown, then he got injured and they had to play the last few games without him, and lost and missed out on promotion. There were rumors at the time that he wasn’t really injured, that he just didn’t want to risk getting hurt, that the NHL draft during the summer was more important to him than Beartown. The caretaker’s blood starts to boil if he so much as thinks about that. No one—absolutely no one—has sacrificed more for Beartown than Amat! But this town really can be both the most beautiful and the most repulsive.

  Amat took those rumors personally, as did Fatima, the caretaker could see it even if he didn’t say anything. So now he doesn’t know how to ask what everyone wants to know: What happened to Amat when he went for the NHL draft in the summer? He wasn’t picked, everyone knows that, but why not? He came home, and there were rumors that he’d gotten injured again, other rumors that that was just an excuse, but an excuse for what? When Beartown Hockey’s preseason training started, he didn’t show up, but he didn’t sign a contract for any other club either. He just sits at home in the apartment in the Hollow. He was the town’s most magical fairy tale, but now he’s on his way to becoming its most impenetrable mystery, and in the middle of everything stands his mother, the woman who would die for him.

  The caretaker looks at the empty ice and sighs with the sorrow of a man who has no grandchildren of his own. The wind bangs on the ice rink’s door until he realizes that it isn’t the wind. Someone is yelling outside.

  * * *

  “I’VE BEEN KNOCKING FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES!” Tails bellows when the door flies open and almost knocks him unconscious.

  “BAMBI? WHAT ARE YOU DOING OUT IN THIS WEATHER YOU IDIOT?” the caretaker shouts back irritably.

  He’s the only person who calls Tails Bambi, because the caretaker has worked here so long that thirty years ago some joker carved a small wooden figure representing him, sitting on an ice machine with an angry speech bubble above its head, and placed it behind the nativity scene in the church so that it was yelling “GET OUT SO I CAN CLEAN THE ICE!” at Jesus’s parents and the three wise men. Naturally, the caretaker found out who was responsible at once, because the caretaker finds out everything, but he never told anyone, not even the vicar. High ceilings, thick walls. But when the joker in question was about to play his next game, the caretaker went to a lot of trouble to sharpen the joker’s skates unevenly, so he couldn’t skate straight, and every time he fell over the caretaker yelled “Bambi!” from the stands. Of course he’s known as “Tails” to everyone else these days, but the caretaker has never let him forget his first nickname. He grew up to be a fat, middle-aged grocer, but to the caretaker he’ll never be anything but a downy junior.

  “THE FLAGS! YOU HAVE TO HELP ME GET THE FLAGS DOWN!” Tails gasps.

  “YOU CAME HERE IN THE MIDDLE OF A STORM BECAUSE OF… FLAGS?” the caretaker snorts.

  Tails has always been a man with a peculiar sense of priorities, but surely this takes the cake?

  “THEY’RE TOO BIG! THEY’LL CATCH THE WIND AND SNAP THE FLAGPOLES!”

  Only then does the caretaker see that Tails’s hand is bleeding. He pulls him in through the doorway and mutters:

  “Anyone who’s allergic to dust wouldn’t be able to lobotomize you. What did I say to you when you bought those flags? Huh? I told you they were too big! I said…”

  Tails yells, even though they’re inside, as if the wind has made him deaf:

  “YES, YES, YOU WERE RIGHT! JUST HELP ME!”

  The caretaker is so shocked that Tails is prepared to admit he was wrong about something so quickly that he forgets to be mean.

  “Well, then, let’s see…,” he just mumbles, then goes and gets a bandage for Tails’s hand and a knife for the ropes.

  Then the two men go out into the storm. Not that it isn’t a stupid idea, because it is, but sometimes stupidity is the only logical option. The flags need to be taken down so they can be raised again tomorrow. That might not be important in other places, but it’s important here. As long as the flags are flying outside the ice rink, everyone knows that it’s open, and as long as it’s open, life goes on and there are no mornings when life needs to do that more than the morning after a storm. The caretaker may be stubborn, and Tails may be a pea-brain, but they both understand that. Tails lives for Beartown. He was a terrible skater even before his skates were sharpened unevenly, but he still fought hard enough to get onto the A-team, where Peter was the big star and Tails’s only talent was provoking their opponents into fighting and incurring penalties. When one opposing team from the south came to Beartown one winter, when it was twenty degrees below zero, Tails persuaded the caretaker to switch off the heating in their locker room, and if he got the chance he would hide their equipment in storerooms and ruin their sticks, the dirtier the trick the better, both on and off the ice. If you were to ask Tails, he would say: “Don’t you think I’d rather have been the star player and scored all the goals? Of course I would! But if you can’t do what you want, you have to contribute in any way that you can. We’re a small club in a small town, and if we play by the rules of the big cities we don’t stand a chance!” Then he’d grin: “Cheating? It’s only cheating if you get caught! Do you want to win or not?” That was how he and the caretaker embarked upon their long, dysfunctional friendship. Because the caretaker hates cheating, everyone in Beartown does, but they love winning even more.

  When Tails’s hockey career was over he became part of the district’s “invisible power elite,” as the local paper has called it. Of course it’s hardly that invisible, and sadly it isn’t particularly silent either, Tails has been thrown out of every hunting team in the entire district because he scares the animals away. He’s at the ice rink every day even when he doesn’t have official business there, mostly to argue about the schedule for time on the ice, which he always wants the caretaker to rearrange so that it favors one of the boys’ teams where there’s a wealthy parent Tails is trying to persuade to become a sponsor. And the caretaker snatches the pen from him when he counts the hours wrong and sighs: “It’s hardly surprising that someone like you who can’t count ends up a businessman when you couldn’t skate but still tried to play hockey…”