Shortly after that one of their neighbors in the Hollow told Fatima that the neighbors were upset by the “rumors,” and that they were all on Amat’s side. “What rumors?” Fatima wondered, and was told that people in the town were saying on the internet that they thought Amat was faking his injury. That he was only bothered about the NHL draft and wasn’t “loyal.” Loyal? To what? As if his body belonged to them.

  So many men showed up at the rink and in the supermarket, all keen to give Fatima advice, until in the end she didn’t listen to any of them, not even Peter. Amat went to North America and lost everything and came home empty.

  She has no idea how long she lies there on the ground, but when she eventually gathers her strength one last time and crawls up, she feels so sore that the wind hurts her skin. For a moment she regrets being so proud when the bus didn’t come, she should have gone back to the rink and asked Tails for a lift. The fact that she’s thinking that reveals how frightened she is.

  The storm is whistling in her ears so hard that she hardly hears Amat cry “Mom!” Sons never understand that that’s the biggest word in the world. “Mom. Mom. MOM!” It takes such a long time for her to see that he’s running along the road toward her. He doesn’t really look like himself anymore. He’s always been thin as a stick, but now he looks plump, and he hasn’t shaved and smells of alcohol. But his hands are as strong as a man’s as he lifts her up on her feet.

  “What are you doing here?” she wonders anxiously.

  “What are YOU doing here, Mom? Why are you WALKING home?” Amat roars over the wind.

  The caretaker of the ice rink is the best thing you can be in a hockey club, so he’s not stupid enough to take Fatima for granted. When she left the rink he called the bus company and asked to be put through to the bus driver, to make sure she had caught the bus. When they said they had canceled the bus because of the storm, the caretaker called Amat at once. The old man was about to set out himself to search, but Amat persuaded him not to, so that he wouldn’t end up having to look for both of them. It was an awkward conversation, the caretaker used to see Amat in the rink every day, but the boy hasn’t been there since he injured his foot back in the spring and missed the end of the season. He hasn’t even left the Hollow since he got back from the NHL draft in the summer, has hardly been outside the apartment. This is actually the first time since he got injured that he’s done any running at all.

  * * *

  But how he runs. Like a cat out of a sack.

  * * *

  From the Hollow, along the road, through the storm until he sees his mother. He tears his jacket off and wraps it around hers. Then they walk home, huddled against the forces of nature, she with her arm tucked under his.

  “Are you hungry? Should we go and get some of that bread you like?” she yells above the wind.

  “The supermarket’s closed, Mom! Stop talking, we have to get home!” he yells back.

  “You shouldn’t have run here, you need to take care of your foot!” she cries.

  “Stop worrying about me!” he says.

  He can say that as much as he wants, of course, but she’s his mother. Good luck trying to stop her.

  21 Names

  When the Bearskin was rebuilt after the fire two years ago, Ramona didn’t bother putting a sign up again. It doesn’t make any difference, after all, everyone knows where the Bearskin is, everyone knows where Ramona is.

  No one could call her “pleasant,” no one could call the pub “welcoming,” that isn’t what this sort of pub is for. Ramona swears at you if you take too long to order, because there isn’t any damn choice anyway, and then she swears just as much if you try to rush her. You’ll feel unwelcome, but you’ll know where you are, because there are green scarves all over the walls that tell you that in this town we stick together. There’s an envelope behind the bar with the words “the Fund” written on it, where anyone who has any money to spare at the end of the month puts a note or two so that Ramona can give it to someone who’s on the ropes. There’s a lot of gossip about the old bag behind the bar, but the worst lie anyone can say about her is that she’s lost her marbles recently. She hasn’t had any marbles for at least thirty years. Her heart, on the other hand, that’s right where it should be.

  She and Holger used to run the Bearskin together, they did everything together, they went to every hockey game together. “Lethal in the forest and useless everywhere else,” she used to mutter about him when he put the beer glasses in the wrong place, and he would grin and reply “I love you,” because nothing made her more angry than that when she was already angry. But he really did love her, the way only a thoroughly kind man could, quietly but beyond measure. The only thing he ever demanded of her was that she should stop smoking. “You have to live longer than me, because I couldn’t bear to outlive you,” he said, and she patted him tenderly on the cheek and whispered: “Shut up!”

  One of the regulars at the Bearskin used to tell an old joke about a man who was sitting in a full-capacity crowd at a hockey game with an empty seat next to him, and the person on the other side asked why it was empty, and the man replied sadly: “It’s my wife’s, but she passed away recently.” Visibly moved, the other man said: “I’m sorry to hear that. But isn’t there someone in your family or a friend who could come to the game with you?” The man replied: “No, they’re all at the funeral.” The joke, of course, was that Holger would be that man the day Ramona was buried, so no one has told that joke since he died, years ago now. She was the one who smoked, he was the one who got cancer. She never says he died, she says he left her, and somehow that shows that she’s the worst loser in a town full of them. She still hasn’t forgiven the old bastard for going first. “Men go and lie down and women carry on working,” she used to mutter if anyone mentioned the subject, and then it doesn’t get mentioned again for a while.

  She still smokes just as much, drinks even more, the only thing she stopped doing was going to watch the hockey, because her lungs couldn’t take it. They wasted away without him. For a long, long time she couldn’t even get to the supermarket when she couldn’t feel his pulse in her hand, his nagging in her ear, so the young men in black jackets who regarded the Bearskin as their second home went shopping for her, keeping her going so she could keep everyone else going. They wrote the words for the announcement of Holger’s death in the paper when she was crying too much to do so: “Damn, Holger, how are the players going to know when to shoot when you’re not there to yell at them?,” it said. She laughed quietly at that and poured more beer. The death notice was still hanging on the wall in the bar, between match jerseys and scarves from Holger’s beloved, hated, worthless, wonderful Beartown Hockey when the fire took the building. It almost took Ramona too, and sometimes she wishes it had. People can bury so many of their loved ones during a lifetime and still get up the morning after, but something inside gets a bit heavier each time. She’s had more than a few mornings when she’s woken up and wondered if she can be bothered to get up once more.

  Then suddenly, one day early last summer, she raised the price of the beer. Naturally that caused a huge fuss among the regulars in a bar where there isn’t any other sort of customer, because the last time she raised the prices was fifteen years ago. All she ever does is raise the prices, the old bag.

  The only people who didn’t complain were actually the young men in black jackets. Because Teemu, the biggest idiot in a large gang of big idiots, hadn’t looked so happy for a long time.

  “What are you grinning about?” Ramona snapped at him, and Teemu confessed:

  “If you’re raising the prices, you’re thinking of the future.”

  People like him and her need a future, otherwise they sink. The same night as the fire at the Bearskin they lost Teemu’s younger brother, Vidar, in the car accident. The boy used to do his homework in the bar at the Bearskin when he was little, forced to do it by the older brother who had never done any homework in his life because no one made him do it. Their dads were long gone, and their mother was at home but disconnected by pills, Teemu and Vidar had seen so much violence and abuse before they even started school that the bar was their haven. They were safe at the Bearskin, they found all their friends there, Teemu found a new sense of belonging with the black jackets there who would always protect his little brother. Ramona never had kids of her own, but these boys were hers, when Vidar died she and Teemu were like old trees that have been torn out by the roots, they couldn’t find any meaning to the next day at all. Apart from hockey. That moved life on, one game at a time, one noisy argument at the Bearskin afterward at a time, about which player ought to have tried which shot. There are no two people in this town who can argue like Ramona and Teemu, because most people don’t have the energy to like each other enough as much as that demands. They rarely said the words to each other, they didn’t need to, the old bag behind the bar raised the price of beer and the hooligan almost started to cry, and that was enough. They belonged to each other.

  When the storm sweeps in over Beartown and darkness envelops the buildings, Ramona thinks of him. Of her boys. She probably thinks of Holger too, of course, because she always does that when evening turns to night. He used to like going to bed, Holger, the lazy bastard. When the wind starts to rattle the windows and all the lights go out, she puts the beer glasses in their place below the bar and fumbles for the flashlight in the dark. Behind a weak, fluttering beam of light she feels her way upstairs to her bedroom, slowly on old feet, passing pennants and scarves and the hundreds of photographs that people in the town collected for her after the fire. Silent greetings from an entire life lived in and around a hockey club.

  She was one of the first sponsors. In recent years she has sat on the committee. Oh, how she has fought with the old men there, and oh, what fun she has had! Beartown Hockey is better than it has been for years, and Hed is completely useless, and you probably can’t have more fun than that without being naked, if you ask Ramona. She goes to bed with Holger’s photograph in her arms. The storm shakes the building until it rocks her to sleep.

  A fair way into the forest the same storm, not long before, shook a small car on its way to the hospital in Hed. The pregnant woman inside had cried, “It’s time, it’s time, it’s coming now!” to her husband, and they had set off. A falling tree hits the car in the forest and they get rescued by a midwife and a crazy eighteen-year-old called Ana. They’ll end up naming the child after a boy both Ana and Ramona loved. Vidar. The end of life is as unstoppable as its beginning, we can’t stop the first and last breaths we take any more than we can stop the wind.

  Ramona doesn’t change into her nightdress, she sleeps with her clothes on so no one will have to carry her out when she isn’t decent. And as little Vidar is born in the forest, she dies in the Bearskin. There’s nothing untoward about it, it’s time.

  When she is buried, so many green scarves will be laid on the grave that the name on the stone can’t be read. It doesn’t matter, everyone knows who she is. All that holds us together in the forest is our stories, and we will never stop telling hers.

  22 Losses

  The most unbearable thing about death is that the world just goes on. Time doesn’t care. The morning after the storm, the sun goes up as if it’s mocking us, over a wrecked forest and a battered town. Two, in fact. If she were still with us, Ramona would no doubt have pointed out that there are always two of everything, “one that wins, and one that’s all the other bastards.” There are two towns and two clubs and always two hockey players: one who takes a place on the team, and one who takes a place at the bar in the Bearskin. “Two of everything, one we see and one we don’t, an upside and a downside,” she used to grunt, and it could possibly be claimed that she had often drunk a fair amount of breakfast by then, and that she sometimes added a few last drops so sneaky that they were almost embarrassing. But when she was focused she could reach out across the counter and pat someone tenderly on the cheek and say: “Everything and everyone is connected around here, whether they like it or not.” She was right, invisible hooks and threads, that’s why everything and everyone stopped when she died.

  “Cheers for faithful women and reliable men, wherever they may be, but for you other ne’er-do-wells it’s time to go home!” she used to shout when she rang the bell for last orders. The small oasis of alcohol between dusk and dawn was over, the second hand started ticking again and cell phones were reluctantly pulled out of pockets so that angry text messages could be read. Heading home through the darkness, the opposite of upsides and winners stumbled back to reality, secure in the knowledge that they could return tomorrow, but one tomorrow Ramona was no more, and it was incomprehensible that the sun still rose. That it could bear to. That it dared to.

  * * *

  So many phone calls are made the day after the storm to share what has happened, it’s as much of a shock for everyone who picks up and gets the message, but the most unexpected phone call is probably the very first one.

  It’s Teemu who finds Ramona, because he’s the first person who misses her. We will say that it was early in the morning after the storm, but the storm is actually still going on. Teemu was half a day’s drive away, when the storm swept in he was engaged in the sort of buying and selling that Ramona wouldn’t let him do in Beartown. She knew how he made his living, she knew better than to let him do it anywhere near her, because just like all kids he would only find something even worse to do when she wasn’t looking. Teemu has never had a real parent, and there was no way in hell that Ramona was going to try to be one either, but insofar as she could express feelings and he could express them back, they did so by her laying down a few rules, and him sticking to them.

  He called her when he saw the weather forecast, when she didn’t answer he knew something was wrong, she’d never admit it but she always kept her phone close when he was out on the road. He turned his old Saab around and drove all night on barely passable roads, straight into the wind, as fast as it would go, and kicked in the door of the Bearskin. And in the dawn, when the storm finally lifted its hand from the shattered towns and all that remained was the rain against the windows, he sat by Ramona’s bed and wept like a boy, and like a grown man. When we are little we grieve for the person we have lost, but when we’re older we grieve even more for ourselves. He wept for her loneliness, but also his own.

  “Everyone I know with any sense has two families, the one they were given and the one they chose. You can’t do anything about the first, but you can damn well take responsibility for the second!” Ramona yelled at him every time anyone in the Pack caused trouble after a hockey game, stole a snow scooter from the wrong store, or punched the wrong person in the face and Teemu hadn’t stopped them. She always held him personally responsible for all the idiots who followed him, and when he got angry and asked why, she roared:

  “Because I think better of you!”

  She never let him be less than he was capable of. Everyone else only saw a violent madman, a hooligan, and a criminal, but Ramona saw a leader. He loves the guys in his Pack, but he has to direct them. He loves his mother, but is always responsible for her. She likes pills that let her not feel anything at all, so he has to feel everything instead. When his little brother, Vidar, died, his mother said that sometimes she saw happy families down on the lake in winter, a mom and a dad and a child skating and laughing, the sort of family that functioned and lived in a house where everything was intact. “I pretend it’s Vidar, that little kid, that he had a family like that,” she whispered through her drugged fog to her eldest son. Not that she wished that for Teemu, just Vidar, she needed Teemu too much even to fantasize about a different life for him.

  Ramona knew that, understood that constant responsibility for others weighs a young man down, it isn’t visible on the outside, but he is slowly being filled with lead. Teemu is far too many people’s first phone call whenever something goes to hell. It was only at the Bearskin, late in the evening just before the lights were turned out and the door locked, that he could relax and let his shoulders drop a few inches. Unclench his fists. He would get one last beer and a pat on the cheek and Ramona would ask how he was. No one else ever did that.