So, early in the morning when the storm finally sweeps past he sits on the edge of her bed and wishes he had told her that she was right. We have two families. She was the one he chose.

  He takes a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table and smokes with her one last time. He suddenly starts laughing, because she looks so angry, even when she’s dead. If she’s in any sort of Heaven now, Vidar is also there, and his little brother will be getting one hell of a telling-off for daring to die before her, he thinks. Then he gently closes the old woman’s eyes and pats her on the cheek, and whispers:

  “Say hi to the little shit. And Holger.”

  Then Teemu just sits there, not knowing what to do with the body or who to call. Ramona was the nearest thing to a normal adult he had in his life, so he doesn’t know what normal adults do when they lose other normal adults. In the end he calls Peter Andersson.

  Perhaps that’s as incomprehensible as it is obvious. They hated each other for years, when Peter was general manager of Beartown Hockey and the foremost symbol of everything the Pack hated: the privileged little elite of wealthy men who governed the club as if it belonged to them. Things went so far that the Pack placed an announcement of Peter’s death in the paper, and arranged for his wife to get a call from a moving company about emptying their house.

  It was in the bar at the Bearskin that Teemu and Peter finally stopped being enemies, under Ramona’s watchful eye, after Peter had resigned from his job as general manager, but they never became friends. Even so, Teemu has no one else right now. He’s half-expecting Peter to hang up instantly, but instead he replies softly:

  “Hold on, hold on, what are you saying, Teemu?”

  The words tumble out of Teemu once again.

  “She’s dead, for fuck’s sake,” he sobs.

  “Dead?” Peter whispers.

  “Mmm,” Teemu manages to say, as if all he has left are conson-ants.

  “Bloody hell. Bloody hell, Teemu. Are you okay?” Peter asks.

  Teemu doesn’t know what to say, because he’s never been asked that by a grown man before.

  “Mmm.”

  “Where are you now?” Peter asks, as if he’s trying not to startle a deer in his garden.

  “In the car with her,” Teemu sobs, barely audibly.

  “With… with who?” Peter asks.

  “With Ramona!”

  Peter just breathes into the phone, waiting to hear that this is a joke. It isn’t.

  “You’ve got her in the CAR, Teemu?”

  “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I’m on my way to yours, but I didn’t want to leave her alone!” Teemu sniffs, snapping defensively down the phone.

  Peter sighs very, very, very deeply at the other end. Then he tells Teemu to stop at the side of the road. He isn’t entirely sure what sort of crime driving a corpse around in an old Saab would be categorized as, but he’s pretty sure there’ll be something.

  “Just stay there, I’ll come and get you.”

  Teemu does as he says, which feels strange, not just because Ramona is sitting next to him and is dead, but because he has never in the whole of his life had anyone come and get him.

  * * *

  So many phone calls get made, first from one neighbor to another, then another, and another, until one reaches Adri Ovich up at the dog kennels. When she hears about Ramona, she has to make a call to as far away as is possible.

  “Benji,” she whispers, then tells him everything as gently as she can, and hears him break.

  He gets up and packs and sets off, without hesitating, and now he’s asleep on a bench in an airport on the other side of the planet. One of his eyes is a single, red-blue bruise, and his nostrils are black with dirt and dried blood. He’s twenty years old, and has spent the past two years living drunk and free in a way that only a self-medicating liar can, young and immortal. Outside the windows in this part of the world the sun is on its way up toward another day warm enough to go topless on endless beaches, but Benji is on his way to the far north, toward hockey towns and temperatures below freezing.

  The proof that time machines will never exist is that if one is ever invented at some point in the future, someone who loved Benji would use it at once to go back to this precise moment and stop him. Someone would stand here and take his arm and grin: “Oh, screw the flight! Come on, let’s got to the beach, grab a beer! Let’s buy a boat!” Because then everything that is going to happen would never have happened. If only someone had appeared now and stopped him from going home. That’s why we know time machines don’t exist. Because they’re far more plentiful in Beartown than Benji believes, the people who love him.

  * * *

  Leo Andersson can’t remember the last time he felt such pure, uncomplicated joy as when the electricity comes back on in the house in the center of Beartown the day after the storm and his computer starts up again. Life begins once more. His dad gets a call from someone and Leo doesn’t care about the content of the call, but he hears his dad hang up, then call Leo’s mother right away and tell her that someone’s dead. Leo doesn’t hear who. His mother drives home at once from her office in Hed, where she’s spent the whole night, and as soon as she walks through the door Peter sets out. They look at each other very briefly, as if love could wait while they’re busy, as if they imagine that all the time they need to say everything they’re longing to say will just magically appear one fine day. Leo hasn’t told anyone how often he has thought about how to solve all the practical problems when they get divorced, how they’re going to live and how he can move his computer back and forth. Because it feels like a count-down.

  The front door closes behind his dad and his mom goes to the kitchen to make more phone calls. Leo closes the door to his room and returns to his computer game, and breathes out like he’s been given painkillers, free to stop thinking, the flicker of the screen and the gunfire in his headphones would be unbearable for other people, but for him they’re a form of meditation. He takes his eyes off the screen for just one moment when the text message arrives. It’s from his sister. I’m coming home, it begins. He smiles.

  In another part of Beartown, in a much smaller house, Matteo is sitting in front of his computer. The boys are the same age, they’re playing the same game, Matteo’s sister is also on her way home. But he isn’t smiling.

  * * *

  I’m coming home, Maya’s text message begins. Her mom has just called and told her, and explained that she doesn’t have to come home, that everything’s fine. So Maya packs her bag and writes to her brother: Don’t say anything to Mom and Dad or they’ll just come and get me. I’ll take the train. Be nice to Dad because he’s sadder about Ramona than he seems, okay? Love you! Leo merely replies Ok, but he’s smiling. He misses his sister. He got her room when she moved out, he’s arranged it entirely around his computer: an ergonomic chair that he asked for at Christmas, new headphones, new screen. He’s become good at the fact that even if his parents don’t like the violence in his gaming world, they like it better than him being out all night in the real world.

  Matteo is sitting on the floor in a small room on the other side of town, he’s hooked up to the neighbors’ Wi-Fi and his computer is a mishmash of parts he’s rescued from discarded machines when the office department of the factory where his parents work tossed their old computers in a dumpster. Naturally his parents don’t know he’s got it, they’d never allow that. No one plays games in Matteo’s family, they barely even watch television, not that Matteo has ever figured out exactly what God has got against that, but he’s never questioned it. His family lives in silence and terror. Not that Matteo is afraid of his parents, they’ve never hit him, their control over their children is of a different sort. Shame and guilt and disappointment, the Devil’s most effective tools.

  On the other side of town Leo takes his eyes off the screen for a few seconds while he reads Maya’s text message. The smile fades from his face when he turns back to the computer again and sees that someone’s shot him in the head.

  Matteo clenches his fist in front of his screen when the shot goes off. He goes to the same school as Leo but he’s fairly sure Leo doesn’t even know who he is, they’re the same age but live in different realities. One gets sandwiches made for him without even having to ask for them, the other sits hungry in an empty house. One’s parents are barely religious, yet he still got an expensive ergonomic chair for Christmas, the other’s parents do nothing but talk about God and Jesus, but don’t even celebrate Christmas. Leo has everything Matteo doesn’t have, in every sense, so computer games are fair in a way that the real world never is. There a boy with a secondhand computer sitting on the floor can seek out a boy surrounded by the newest, most expensive technology, wait for him to lose concentration and shoot him in the head.

  For a single second Matteo is able to clench his fist and feel like a winner. Then the power goes off again.

  * * *

  Peter comes hurrying along the side of the road, his hair a mess and dressed in tatty jeans and a dirty green hooded top with the bear on it. Teemu rolls the Saab’s window down, as shamefaced as if he’d been caught speeding.

  “You always think of safety first,” Peter says with just a hint of irony when he sees that Teemu has fastened the safety belt around Ramona.

  Teemu doesn’t know how to interpret that, so he mumbles:

  “I didn’t know what to do. It felt wrong to put her in the trunk.”

  Ramona is sitting in the passenger seat, and looks like she might wake up any moment and yell at Teemu for driving like an old woman. Peter quickly closes his eyes, opens them slowly, and for a moment looks as if he’d like to rest his hand gently against her cheek, but resists.

  “It’s okay, Teemu. We’re going to sort this out,” he whispers instead.

  Teemu spent his whole childhood practicing not crying in front of other people, as did Peter, and they both put that knowledge to good use today. Peter makes all the phone calls a normal adult would make, they carefully lay Ramona on the backseat and drive slowly toward the center of town. The undertakers don’t have set opening hours, just a sign on the door with a telephone number, around here those who work with death only do so when required. They have to wait several hours before someone shows up, it’s that hard to get through the forest roads.

  Throughout the whole time they’re waiting Peter hears a buzzing sound, at first far off, like an annoying insect trapped inside a glass dome, but it grows to a roar and he rubs his fingers over his ears in case it’s his imagination. Only when he hears cries and sees a tree fall not far from the car does he realize what it is: chain saws. A whirring symphony that rises and falls in all directions around them. It’s barely even daylight yet, the storm has only just abated, but the forest is already full of people clearing fallen trees and debris. Peter notes that many of them are firemen, but none of them needed to be ordered to go and help. The teams are always uneven, storms against humanity, but humanity’s persistence wins in the end.

  “I didn’t know Ramona was ill, I wish I’d been there,” Teemu suddenly says tentatively.

  Peter gives a curt nod and wishes he knew what to say to comfort him.

  “She was old, Teemu. It isn’t anyone’s fault. Ramona loved you,” is the best he can manage.

  The tip of Teemu’s nose moves almost imperceptibly up and down.

  “You too.”

  “Not like you and Vidar, Teemu. You were like sons to her.”

  Teemu’s eyebrows bounce.

  “Are you kidding? Do you know how much the old bag used to boast about you? Damn, I hated that. I thought you were an arrogant bastard who believed you were better than the rest of us just because you don’t drink and stuff. But she… well, you know… until she explained what sort of dad you’d had. Then I got it. You had a really shit childhood and turned out well in spite of it. That was why she boasted.”

  “It was a long time ago, things were different then, dads were… different,” Peter says quietly, even though he knows it isn’t true, Teemu is half his age and his dad was just the same.

  “It’s okay to say your dad was an asshole,” Teemu says, not surprised, but like a boy who, when he was a child, never met a grown man who wasn’t violent.

  Peter looks at him and is astonished, as he always is, at how thin Teemu is. He may be the most feared man in the forest, but from a distance he could pass as an upper-class kid at boarding school. His hair is neat, his posture relaxed, his eyes aren’t labyrinths of darkness. On the contrary, he often looks almost cheerful, like a mischievous little kid. It’s funny the way the potential for violence works, Peter thinks, you can’t see it on someone, you just feel it in their presence.

  The older generation of hockey fans in Beartown often talk about players who have “the dog in them.” Peter knows what that is because of its absence from descriptions of him when he was young. “Peter Andersson? Sure, he’s good with a stick, but he doesn’t have the dog in him.” Peter refused to fight, even when he was attacked on the ice, which meant that a fair number of men didn’t trust him, and others challenged him, he learned to recognize the difference. Plenty of men can talk about being up for a fight, but when it comes to it everyone has a bridge they have to cross, from the peaceful creatures we’ve learned to be, to the animals we need to become to physically attack another person. The length of that bridge varies for different people, those with the shortest bridge behave like Peter’s dad, but Teemu? Peter has never sat next to anyone like him. He has no bridge, the two different shores within him are just a stride apart. On the outside you couldn’t tell the difference between him and a hundred other men, but on the inside he’s nothing but dog.

  So Peter rubs his stubble awkwardly and replies vaguely:

  “Oh, there were worse dads. Now I’ve got kids, it often feels like I’m not so damn great at it myself…”

  Teemu turns away and looks through the window, and perhaps he should have said what he was thinking: that he’s seen a lot of bad dads, and Peter isn’t one of them. Perhaps Peter should have said something to Teemu too, ask him how he’s feeling. But neither of them can figure out how to formulate their thoughts, so in the end they just talk about hockey instead.

  “So what do you think about the team this year?” Peter asks, almost as a polite formality, but partly out of genuine curiosity. There was a time when everyone forced their opinions on him, and now he can’t help missing that a bit.

  “Surely you should be telling me?” Teemu chuckles, before he realizes that Peter probably knows less about the team now than he does. He almost feels like apologizing.

  Peter shakes his head slowly.

  “You know how people always gossip in this town, Teemu, and when you ask ‘How do you know that?’ they just say, ‘You know, people talk.’ I never hear that anymore. It was never me people talked to, they just talked to the general manager.”

  Teemu nods with a degree of sympathy. Two years since Peter left, and the club still hasn’t appointed a new general manager, they replaced his position with a “leadership committee” consisting of the coach and a handful of committee members, which ought to have been a disaster but instead has coincided with the club’s best seasons for years. It’s hard for someone like Peter not to feel that perhaps he was the problem. Teemu understands that, because he knows what it’s like to love a club that would rather not have anything to do with you.

  “Can I ask… what do… I mean, what do you do all day? Without hockey?” Teemu asks.

  “I bake bread,” Peter says.

  “Br-bread?”

  Peter nods. He looks at the time, then at the deserted road.

  “And, to be brutally honest, I don’t even like bread much. So if we’re going to talk about anything, you might as well tell me what you think of the team, because with Ramona gone there’s no one else I can ask.”

  For a moment Teemu looks like he thinks it’s a trap.

  “Okay… I think the team has two problems. The first is that Amat’s a great player, but no one seems to know what’s wrong with him. The second is that… oh, what the hell… you know, we almost won the whole league in the spring, but when it really mattered we buckled. We need someone who doesn’t back down. Someone who… someone with…”

  He searches for the right words, like a parent trying to avoid the swear jar.

  “Someone with the dog in him,” Peter says helpfully.

  Teemu laughs.

  “You sound like Ramona.”

  Peter shakes his head.

  “No. I just sound old.”

  Teemu grins.

  “But you’re right. That’s who we’re missing. Number sixteen.”

  * * *

  He doesn’t have to say the name, Peter knows. The whole town knows.

  23 Sisters

  “BENJAMIN OVICH,” a tired voice calls over a crackling loudspeaker at the airport. “BENJAMIN OVICH TO GATE 74.” Benji wakes up on a bench, half because of his name being called out and half because tears are stinging the wounds on his face. He doesn’t know what time it is in Beartown, he can’t remember if the time difference is six or eight hours, but he assumes that one advantage of drinking all night and sleeping all day for the past few months will mean he’s immune to jet lag. He sits up, groaning from the pain in his body.

  Ramona once told him that his biggest problem was that he had an unused brain and a worn-out heart, and that his feet only went in one damn direction. She was right, of course, people in the airport are taking detours around the bench, his nose and mouth are bloodier than his fists. On the way to the airport he got into a situation where he ought to have gone into reverse, and this is what happens when you never learn how to do that.

  The departure board is flashing as he drags his body and bag up from the bench and limps toward his plane. There are many things that people have thought about him over the years that have been wrong, but if Ramona was still around she would probably have said that no lie has been bigger than the idea that this boy has the dog in him. If there was ever one there, if got frightened away a long time ago. Benjamin Ovich has nothing but demons left now.