33 Returning home

  “It’s so easy to fool people. They’re happy to believe so much crap that you can make them believe pretty much anything if you make enough effort.”

  That was what Adri Ovich told her little brother many years ago, after their father had taken his rifle and gone out into the forest, and some of the older kids on the street where they grew up were spreading rumors about why. Each rumor was more ridiculous than the last, of course, suggesting that Alain Ovich owed the mafia money, or that he was actually murdered because he was a war criminal in hiding here who had finally been found by his enemies. “People are stupid. Don’t listen to them. Punch them in the face if you want to, but don’t listen to them,” Adri told her little brother, and he did as she said, and both suggestions turned out pretty well.

  But people really are still stupid if you ask Adri, that’s why she prefers animals. That’s also why she lives a fair way out in the forest and not in town, which is usually a blessing, but not in the days after a storm. She’s had help from her sisters Gaby and Katia, but even so they’ve barely made a start on clearing up the destruction. They’ve repaired the fence around the kennels and cleared all the debris littering the yard, but the barn that was converted into a martial arts gym took a severe battering and is going to need a lot of work. The electricity is still intermittent out here, and the roads are still impassable in many places. But Adri isn’t complaining, telling herself that she’s gotten through it better than most people, after all. The hunters who buy their dogs from her, and these days that means almost every hunter in both Beartown and Hed, know every tree out here. They told her in advance which ones she needed to saw down. They saved her, the house, and the dogs.

  She can hear them barking now. They do that all the time, of course, but on this occasion she stops what she’s doing and straightens her back, aware of what’s happening before she sees him coming. If you devote your life to dogs, their barks are full of nuances, Adri can tell at once if they’re barking at an animal or a person, and if they’re doing it to mark their territory, for protection, or out of fear. Often it’s the younger ones who need to assert themselves, but this time it’s only the oldest dogs barking, the ones she never sold, the ones who have been in the family since they were puppies. They’re barking because they’re happy.

  It’s so easy to fool people, Adri thinks as she starts running. Benji is cycling along the gravel track, she knows it’s him before she even sees his silhouette, she recognizes him from the happy, bubbling, euphoric barking and the eager scrabbling of paws against the fence. So many rumors have circulated about her little brother in the past two years, because it’s so easy to fool people: that he’s a disappointment, that he wasn’t prepared to stand up for who he was, that he gave up hockey and moved away because he was a coward. That he’s nothing but a drunk and a junkie these days, that he isn’t worth anything. But you can never fool dogs.

  * * *

  They know all that’s best in you.

  * * *

  Maya hasn’t even thought about how she’s going to get home to Beartown from the last station. She stands on the platform for a few seconds, confused, thinking how stupid it was not to let Ana pick her up after all, but then she hears someone calling from the road.

  “Maya? Lovely to see you! Do you want a lift?”

  It’s one of their neighbors from the same street leaning out of his car, and Maya remembers what living here is like, there’s always someone going the same way as you. It doesn’t matter where you are, things always work out in the end, there’s always someone willing to help. She hadn’t known she was going to miss that.

  She makes polite conversation with the neighbor during the drive, but the closer they get to Beartown, the less she says. By the time they’re passing through Hed, she can barely breathe.

  “Incredible, isn’t it? It’s looks like there’s been a war here…,” the neighbor nods.

  Maya has woken up on days after storms before, but none of them was ever like this. She can’t see how everything is going to be repaired again, and can’t begin to imagine how much it’s going to cost.

  * * *

  Benji comes cycling along the little forest road, a couple of years older than when his sisters last saw him, and much thinner. His skin is browner and his long hair paler, but the grin is the same. Adri drops everything and runs, pulling him off the bicycle and kissing his hair and telling him he’s a brain dead moron and that she worships him.

  “How did you get here? Why didn’t you call? Whose bike is that?” she wants to know.

  He shrugs, without making it clear which of her questions this is a response to. The dogs force their way out of the fenced yard and throw themselves into his arms, quickly followed by Gaby and Katia. When their mother hears the commotion up at the house and comes outside, at first she can barely stand, then the next second she’s rushing across the yard, already in the middle of a scolding, in the language of her homeland seeing as this country doesn’t have anywhere near enough adjectives to describe the curses and threats her son deserves after drifting around the world like a tramp and not calling his mother often enough. Then she hugs him so hard that her spine creaks, and whispers that she’d die without his heartbeat, and that she’s hardly dared breathe since he left because she didn’t want to exhale the last of his air from her lungs. Benji grins like he’s only been gone a couple of hours and whispers that he loves her, and then his sisters lay into him because he’s so emaciated and if he’d died of starvation they’d never have heard the end of their mother’s moaning about it and how could they have put up with that, so why does he only think of himself, the little brat? Then they sob into his hair, and then they eat.

  * * *

  Maya gets dropped off outside her house, and thanks the neighbor so effusively for the lift that he retorts: “It was hardly that much trouble, so you can drop all that big city nonsense.” Maya thinks to herself that it’s a good thing she didn’t offer to pay for the gas or she’d probably have gotten a slap, and can’t help smiling. She picks up some broken pieces of wood and other debris from the flower bed before opening the door of her childhood home. It’s been left unlocked, as usual. She used to think that was completely natural, but now she can’t help thinking it’s the sort of crazy, eccentric thing that people only do in Beartown.

  Everything in the house is the same as usual. The same furniture, the same wallpaper, the same everyday life. As if her parents thought they could fool time by refusing to admit that it was passing. Maya stops on the stairs, inhaling deep breaths of home, running her fingertips over the photographs that hang all over the walls of her and her brothers. The oldest picture is of Isak. Parents who lose a child never trust the universe again. Once Maya heard her dad admit that on the phone, she didn’t know who he was talking to, saying that he sometimes thought all the blessings he himself had received were the reason why God or whoever needed to redress the balance, and took Isak from them. Peter Andersson had a wife who loved him and three beautiful children and a career as a professional hockey player in the NHL, then the job of general manager in the club that had raised him, and no one can have everything—presumably that was how he was thinking. It’s simultaneously both remarkably unselfish and absurdly self-centered, Maya remembers thinking. As if children only live good lives or have a terrible time because their parents are in either debt or credit to some system of cosmic rules. But perhaps that’s what having children is like, she doesn’t know, perhaps you can’t avoid going completely stupid.

  She takes a deep, deep breath alone on the stairs. Sometimes the memories of everything that happened are like electric shocks, sometimes she wakes up screaming at night, but every time she comes home she gets a bit better at not thinking about Kevin. Every time she grows a little and gains stronger, thicker armor. She can still hear in her parents’ voices every time she calls that the same thing isn’t true of them. They’re stuck in that moment, still believing that everything is their fault. When Maya’s dad was sitting with her in the hospital after the rape, he asked what he could do for her, and the only thing she could whisper in her despair was: “Love me.” And he did. The whole family did. Sometimes she feels that she dragged them with her into a black hole, and when she climbed out they were left at the bottom. It doesn’t matter that she knows that isn’t true. Guilt is always stronger than logic.

  She walks silently up the stairs that only she and Leo can step on without making them creak. She goes into her parents’ room. Her dad is standing in front of the mirror practicing knotting his tie, but fingers won’t do what he wants and his face is heavy with grief.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  His favorite word. “Dad.” He doesn’t even turn around, because he thinks he’s imagining it. She has to say it again, louder. He looks at her in the mirror, blinking hard in confusion.

  “Darling…? DARLING! What… what are YOU doing here?”

  “I want to go to Ramona’s funeral on Sunday.”

  “But how… how did you get here?”

  “I got the train. Well, as far as I could. Then I got a lift. It’s chaos out there on the roads, it must have been completely unbearable during the storm. How are you doing, Dad?”

  All the words pour out of her at once and he is still trying to comprehend that she is actually here.

  “But… what about college?” he manages to say as he hugs her, ever the dad.

  “College will be fine,” she smiles.

  “But how… how did you even know that we were having the funeral this weekend?”

  Maya smiles condescendingly at his naiveté.

  “The elk hunting season starts next week. Then hockey starts. When else were you going to bury her?”

  He scratches his hair with the tie.

  “But darling, you didn’t have to come home for Ramona’s funeral. She…”

  “I’m here for your sake, Dad,” she whispers.

  She feels him almost collapse into a heap of dust.

  “Thanks,” he struggles to say.

  “What can I do, Dad?”

  He tries to smile and shrugs his shoulders, so slowly and listlessly that they look like badly hung barn doors on old hinges. When they hug again, she’s the adult, he the child.

  “Love me, Pumpkin.”

  “Always, Dad.”

  They hear the sound of the front door opening downstairs. Kira comes home, steps through the door and stops for just one breath when she sees her daughter’s shoes on the hall floor, and her mother’s heart skips a beat. Upstairs Maya lets go of her dad with a sympathetic little smile when she hears the thuds and cries, and stands with her back to the bed, because when her mother rushes up the stairs and flies into the bedroom and wraps her arms around her daughter’s neck, Maya wants to have a soft landing.

  * * *

  That night, before anyone except his family even knows that he’s back in town, Benji creeps out of his sister’s house and cycles down to the ice rink. The roads are strewn with fallen trees and the parking lot is full of debris, but the rink looks almost entirely unscathed. As if God Himself had revealed who He supported. Benji forces open one of the bathroom windows at the back and climbs in, then drifts about, assaulted by childhood memories. How many hours has he spent here? Will he ever again be as happy as he was then? Will anything else ever feel as good as gliding out onto the ice with his best friend and playing against the whole world? How could it?

  He feels his way in the dark and finds the switch for the lights down by the boards, he doesn’t turn on the main lights in the roof because the caretaker would see them from home and rush down here and then there’d be a hell of a fuss. At the back of the storeroom Benji finds an old pair of skates his size, he laces them so tightly that they make his feet feel numb, then sets off toward the light. He knows exactly how many steps he can take before he has to lift his foot from the floor to step onto the ice, out of all the things he loved about hockey there probably isn’t anything he ever loved more than this, a thousand games and a million training sessions, but his lungs and stomach still think he’s stepping off a cliff every time. Everything else disappears with that first glide out onto the ice, out to where he was free his whole childhood. Only there. That was the only place in the entire world where he always knew exactly who he was and what was expected of him. No confusion, no fear.

  He glides in slow, painful circles, wider and wilder. He stops by the penalty box, taps nostalgically at the glass. It was all so simple when he arrived at the rink for the first time as a child, so obvious, the sport was like a magical language that he had been specially selected to understand. He loved the rhythm of the other bodies, the collisions, the breathing, the cuts on the ice, the desperate cries of the crowd when the game suddenly turned. The frenetic banging of sticks, the roar in his ears as they flew forward together: unstoppable, inseparable, immortal. He doesn’t know where that part of him has gone, when he lost himself so completely, but it was never the same without Kevin. Benji was never quite able to forgive himself for still feeling that way.

  So two years ago he put a puck in his bag and kept on traveling, only stopping when he could put the puck down on the counter of a bar in a part of the world where no one knew what the hell it was. There were no tourists there. He left one place where he had always been different on the inside and found another where he was different on the outside. He doesn’t know what he was hoping that would lead to. Nothing, maybe. Perhaps he was just hoping that the noise in his head would stop. The chaos in his chest. In some ways perhaps he even succeeded, because now, as he looks over at the huge picture of the angry bear painted around the center circle, he expects to feel something, anything at all, but nothing comes. No longing, no hatred, no belonging, no exclusion. He’s just tired. So very, very tired.

  He takes the skates off, puts them back in the storeroom, turns the lights out, and climbs out of the same window he came in through. Then he slowly wanders across the parking lot, away from the town and out into the forest. The ground is torn and churned up. He left the bicycle at the ice rink, it isn’t his, nothing here is really his anymore. When the wind turns away from the town he is sitting at the top of a tree, the way he used to as a child.

  * * *

  Matteo spends all day looking for his bicycle in the part of town where he left it during the storm after the chain came off. He doesn’t find it until the following morning, much farther away than even the wind could have carried it: neatly propped up against the wall down by the ice rink. Someone found it, fixed the chain, then rode off on it without even feeling guilty enough to try to hide it afterward. Matteo isn’t surprised, not when he finds it precisely here, by the ice rink. Hockey guys are taught as children that everything belongs to them. That everyone belongs to them.

  * * *

  The first frost arrives in Beartown and Hed that night. The universe’s silencer. It stupefies in a way that words can never encompass, if you ask anyone who’s moved away from here what they miss most about the forest, they’d probably say that first foretaste of winter, the gentle sorrow of a summer gone by, autumn that seems to last no more than an instant here. The birds become wary, the lake freezes, soon we will see our breath in front of us and our footsteps behind us. The air gets fresher, everything crunches each morning, the snow doesn’t really settle for a while yet, but you still have to brush the first thin white dusting from the stones in the cemetery to see whose graves they are. One headstone will soon read “Ramona,” no surname because there’s no need, everyone knows. Another, a little farther away, reads “Alain Ovich,” in an almost forgotten corner up by the wall. His whole name, because considerably fewer people remember him. Sometimes weeks go by without him getting any visitors, but when the sun goes up this time his son is sitting there smoking.

  Tales of boys and their fathers are the same in every age, in every place. We love each other, hate each other, miss each other, hold each other back, but we can never live unaffected by each other. We try to be men and never really know how. The tales about us who live here are the same sort of tales that are told about everyone, everywhere, we think we’re in charge of the way they unfold but of course that happens unbearably seldom. They just carry us wherever they want to go. Some of them will have happy endings, and some of them will end exactly the way we were always afraid they would.

  34 Competitive people

  “Things happen fast in hockey.” “Keep your head up.” “Hubris always gets punished.” Clichés may be clichés, but they often start out as truths. This is a sport that is constantly finding more and more imaginative ways to humble the most self-confident of us, but somehow we still manage to forget that every victory is merely part of the countdown to the next defeat.

  When the season was approaching its end back in the spring, Beartown was top of the league, but Lev could see how swollen Amat’s wrist was, it was just getting worse and worse. “You shouldn’t be playing,” he said. “I have to, we need to win our final games,” Amat said. Lev put one hand on his shoulder and asked seriously: “If you damage it even more and don’t get drafted to the NHL, who’s going to buy your mom that dishwasher?” Amat had no reply to that. At that training session the same guy who had joked about Lev in the locker room hit Amat on the arm in a futile gesture of frustration. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional, Amat was flying past him and was so much faster that the guy just lost his temper, fed up with being humiliated. Amat exploded and they fought like crazy, and if Bobo hadn’t thrown his large frame between them it could have ended with something much worse than a few bruises and wounded egos. “What are you doing? It was hardly that hard, was it?” Bobo asked Amat tentatively when they were on their way off the ice, and because Amat didn’t know what else to say, he replied with the very worst he had within him: “Do you think this is a game? Do you think this shit team would be anything without me? That no-hoper shouldn’t touch me! I’m going to play in the NHL, what’s he going to do? Get a job in the storeroom at the supermarket? Work at the factory? End up as some goddamn… some goddamn…”