Another text message from her classmates at the party. Maya crosses another street so she can cut through the big park, thinking that it would be quicker, not about what might be hiding in there. That’s how much she’s changed.

  * * *

  SDS.

  * * *

  She walks along the narrow gritted pavement and is halfway into the park when the letters on the license plate crash back into her consciousness. Her memories fight over which emotions to summon up, she thinks about Ana and almost starts to laugh, almost starts to cry. It feels like she hasn’t thought about her for ages, but they spoke on the phone just the other day, didn’t they? Or was it a week ago?

  The distance between the lights in the park gets longer, the sound of traffic and humanity thins out, and she walks slower without reflecting upon it. She forgets to look around, doesn’t notice the man a little way behind her slow down too. When she speeds up again, so does he.

  She really ought to be missing Ana less and less the longer they are apart, but the reverse seems to be happening. She remembers every detail of the look on her face the time she exclaimed: “You know? Shoot… dig… silence? SDS!”

  “What?” Maya said, and Ana, never able to hide her astonishment at all the things Maya didn’t know about the world, exclaimed: “Have you seriously NEVER heard that? That Toronto where you used to live is still on the planet EARTH, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels like you were made in a laboratory, that’s why you’re so pretty, but there are some seriously loose connections in there!” She grinned, tapping the top of Maya’s head.

  Maya felt like an alien. She remembers feeling confused and scared for the whole of her first year in Beartown, as much of the wilderness as of the people, as much because this new place seemed to have grief in its heart as the fact that there always seemed to be violence in the air. She couldn’t for the life of her understand how anyone would choose to live there voluntarily, in a little cluster of houses besieged by darkness and cold and trees, trees, trees, nothing but millions of trees in all directions. The narrow road through the forest that you drove along to get there seemed to go on forever, into a world with no horizon, so long and deep that in the end it seemed to curve downward and disappear into the abyss. Maya was only a child, and in all the stories she had read only witches lived in places like this. She thought she would never get used to it, but children get used to almost everything.

  During the years she grew up and became a teenager she never really realized how much Beartown had changed her. She didn’t even know she had the local accent until she moved away. There in the forest Ana teased her for pronouncing her vowels wrong, but whenever Maya’s new classmates at the College of Music wanted to tease her, they made fun of her grammar, the way she never conjugated verbs. She pretended it was funny, even though they were mimicking a dialect from hundreds of miles away in Beartown.

  So she tried to sing the way the teachers wanted, smoothing off her rough edges until she sounded like everyone else. Most of her classmates had attended music schools and had had expensive private tuition since they were young, they knew all the secret codes, knew exactly what was expected of them. Maya had gotten there on raw talent alone. She cried a lot at night during those first months, at first from insecurity, then out of anger. It felt as if all the other kids had to do to get into the college was to have rich parents and be able to sing adequately, whereas all Maya had to do to get there was to be the best. Best of all.

  When one of the teachers talked about the music industry during her first term, he said you needed to bear in mind that “we live in a small country.” Maya thought that something like that could only be said by someone who had never noticed two-thirds of the map. She was astonished to realize that some of her classmates thought they lived in the middle of the country when they actually lived pretty close to the bottom. She thought about Ana’s father, and how he would sometimes bump into tourists from the south in the forest who were surprised how far you could walk without seeing a house, and how when he got home he always muttered: “They think they own this country, and they don’t even know that seventy percent of it is trees? Only three percent of the entire country has been built on! Three percent!!!” One time he roared: “There’s less agricultural land than bog in this country, but they probably don’t even know what a bog is!” at Maya, then Ana had to whisper to Maya what a bog was, so she could nod in agreement. And now she herself was surrounded by people who didn’t have a clue. In the end she realized that it was her classmates, with their expensive clothes and complacent smiles, who were the real uneducated ones, not her. That was when she stopped crying at night. Stopped waiting and started to make a space for herself, stopped imitating other people’s voices and started singing with her own. Everything changed.

  Last winter she found a small, artificial skating rink in the middle of the apartment blocks and rush hour traffic, and the next day she took some of her classmates there, and remembers how shocked she was that so many of them couldn’t even skate. Every child in Beartown can skate, probably more of them than can ride a bike. After all, how could anyone not know how to skate? When the autumn came, her new friends complained about the cold, and said the darkness made them depressed. Maya felt ashamed of herself when she realized how quick she was to judge them for their weakness. Depressed by the darkness in a city where the lights are always lit? Cold? This wasn’t cold!

  She can remember how the breath was knocked out of her when she fell through the ice at the age of six when she was skating alone in Beartown. That was just after they had moved there, no one even knew she was down at the lake, she would have died if that hand hadn’t suddenly appeared out of nowhere and pulled her out. Ana, as scrawny as if she was never fed at home, but already incredibly strong, sat wide-eyed on the ice beside her, wondering what on earth she was doing. Couldn’t she see the variation in the color of the ice? Didn’t she understand anything? Ana thought Maya was stupid, and Maya thought Ana was an idiot, and they became best friends instantly. Ana taught Maya to use a rifle, and Ana’s dad muttered that the pair of them were “the smallest hunting team in the area, and probably the most dangerous.” Sometimes, if only for a moment, Maya managed to convince herself that she belonged in Beartown. That never lasted long.

  Once when they were little, she had a sleepover at Ana’s, almost every other time during their childhoods it was the other way around, but this time they were going to sleep out in the forest, only the weather turned bad and they set off for the nearest house: Ana’s. Later that evening they heard Ana’s dad answer the phone. Someone had seen a wolf. Ana’s dad asked tersely: “You haven’t called it in yet, have you?”

  Maya didn’t understand what that meant, so Ana explained in a low voice: “You’re supposed to report wolf sightings to the authorities, but if you do that, it means the wolf exists. Get it?” Maya really didn’t, so Ana sighed: “If the wolf exists, the authorities will miss it if it disappears. But something that doesn’t exist can’t disappear. So… SDS.”

  Then a man came and collected Ana’s dad, he had a rifle on the front seat of his pickup, and shovels in the back. When they returned at dawn the next day they had soil and blood on their boots. Shoot, dig, silence. That was how Maya learned about that.

  When Kira came to collect her a few hours later Maya pretended nothing had happened, and it wasn’t until several years later that she realized that her mother was also pretending. She knew perfectly well what had happened to the wolf, everyone in Beartown knew. Maya wondered if her mother still thinks about that, the way that silence reflected all the other silences that Beartown taught its children?

  The only person who didn’t keep quiet was Ramona. Maya only remembered that recently, it was the sort of memory her brain had archived, only for it to pop up suddenly one day when she was at the other end of the country. A few days after Maya learned what SDS meant, she had to go with Ana to the Bearskin pub to pick up Ana’s dad’s car keys, because sometimes he got drunk enough to sell his car for a couple of last beers, and Ramona always let him do it because it was better for him to walk home after two more beers than drive home without them. Unfortunately Ana’s rucksack was in the car and she needed her math book the following morning, so the girls had no choice but to trudge to the pub. Naturally, Maya’s parents would have gone crazy if they’d known she’d been to the pub, it was full of the men in black jackets who fought with the opposing team’s supporters on hockey nights, and with each other pretty much every other night. Ramona handed Ana the keys across the bar counter, and told her not to forget to take the rifle home as well, because her dad had left it in the pickup as usual. Ana promised. Then Ramona looked down at Maya, the old woman looked far too much like a witch for the girl to be able to look her in the eye.

  “I heard you saw the shovels. Those stupid old men could have spared you that. But I guess sooner or later you have to learn that predators need to be dealt with. Maybe it isn’t like that everywhere, but that’s what it’s like here,” Ramona hissed, then gave them both a chocolate cookie, coughing so much she almost couldn’t carry on smoking. But only almost.

  Then a fight broke out right next to the bar between two men and sixteen beers, Ramona swore and swung her broom and Maya pulled Ana away, terrified. Ana, of course, was so unconcerned by the violence that all she was annoyed about was dropping part of her chocolate cookie on the way out. The girls had different types of parents, they were used to expecting completely different things from adults. Maya learned more slowly, but she did learn.

  * * *

  Shoot. Dig.

  * * *

  Ramona was wrong, Maya thinks now. It wasn’t predators that people in Beartown got rid of, it was problems. Because when Maya came running out of Kevin’s bedroom several years later, it wasn’t the predator that most people wanted to attack, it was her. Because it would have been much easier for everyone if she had just disappeared rather than Kevin. She was the problem.

  * * *

  Silence.

  * * *

  She slows down. The park is so quiet she can hear the movement of every piece of grit beneath her shoes. She glances over her shoulder. No, it isn’t her imagination, that man is following her. Damn. She suddenly feels so stupid that for a moment it stops her feeling scared. How could she let her brain lose itself in memories and not notice the danger. “Pull yourself together, Maya! Think!” she snarls to herself. One of the streetlights in the park isn’t working, she’s been moving between circles of light, but now she’s swallowed up by the shadows. “What the hell am I doing? Why did I take the shortcut through the park? If anyone should know better, it’s me!” she yells inside her head. That’s how much she’s changed, how well she’s taught herself to be naive again. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the man a short way behind her, a bit closer now than before, black jacket, hood pulled up.

  * * *

  Damn damn damn.

  * * *

  She has time to think of her mother. Has time to wish she was home.

  9 Mothers

  “Home.”

  * * *

  There really ought to be several different words for that, one for the place and one for the people, because after enough years a person’s relationship to their town becomes more and more like a marriage. Both are held together by stories of what we have in common, the little things no one else knows about, the private jokes that only we think are funny, and that very particular laugh that you only laugh for me. Falling in love with a place and falling in love with a person are related adventures. At first we run around street corners giggling and explore every inch of each other’s skin, over the years we get to know every cobblestone and strand of hair and snore, and the waters of time soften our passion into unfailing love, and in the end the eyes we wake up next to and the horizon outside our window are the same thing: home.

  So there ought to be two words for that, one for the home which can carry you through your darkest moments, and one for the home which binds you. Because sometimes we stay in towns and marriages simply because we would otherwise have no story. We have too much in common. We think no one else would be able to under-stand us.

  * * *

  Kira Andersson is alone in her office over in Hed when the storm gets going for real. She sent all her employees home when the radio first started reporting that trees had fallen on the roads. In the end even Kira’s best friend and colleague, the woman she owns the business with, set off for home. She refused at first, of course, declaring that “those old men on the radio get incontinent the minute we get a puff of wind,” but Kira pointed out that when there’s a storm people usually stockpile important groceries, and that maybe all the wine would run out, and that’s when her colleague panicked and left.

  Kira’s husband, Peter, wanted to stay too, of course, but Kira insisted he go home to their house in Beartown so that Leo wasn’t on his own. Not that it would really make that much difference, the teenage boy will just sit at his computer hidden under his earphones, and as long as there’s electricity the storm could have been an alien invasion and he still wouldn’t notice anything. They live in the same house but his parents barely see him, he’s fourteen now, meaning that they no longer have a child but a lodger.

  Peter gave up and set off before it even turned into a discussion, Kira isn’t sure if it was disappointment or relief she saw in his eyes. Two years ago he stepped down as general manager of Beartown Hockey to work with Kira instead, drawing a line under a whole life that had been about nothing but sport, and now he’s married to her when they’re at home but employed by her when they’re here. Sometimes they both forget the difference. From time to time she asks him if he’s okay and he smiles and nods. But she can see that he’s unhappy. She’s so angry with herself for being so angry with him about that.

  Today she promised him that she was just going to do a few last things before she went home, but she hasn’t actually turned her computer on since the door closed behind him. Nature is tearing itself to pieces outside the window and she’s sitting on the other side of the glass with the tips of her fingers on a framed photograph of her children.

  Her psychologist told her, not that long ago, that she often returns to the idea that she’s a bad mother. Not that she feels bad, but that she is bad. She replied that it was true, because she could have had just a job, but chose to have a career. You have a job for your family’s sake and a career for your own. She’s selfish with her time. She could have lived for them, but that isn’t enough for her.

  “We’ve talked about your extreme need to control things before…”

  “It isn’t extreme!”

  She’s only been seeing this psychologist for a couple of months. She hasn’t mentioned it to anyone because it’s nothing serious, she’s just been having panic attacks again. She pays the psychologist in cash so Peter won’t find any invoices in the mail and think she’s got problems. She hasn’t got problems.

  “Okay. But both your children are older now. Leo is… fourteen, is that right? And Maya’s eighteen? She’s even left home now, hasn’t she?” the psychologist said.

  “She hasn’t left home! She’s studying at music college, she lives in a student residence, that’s not the same thing!” Kira snapped, close to tears, she felt like yelling at him that she doesn’t have two children, she has three: Isak, Maya, Leo. One in Heaven and two who barely answer the phone. But instead she mumbled:

  “Please, can we just focus on the reason why I’m here?”

  “Your panic attacks? I’m inclined to think they’re linked to the fact that you’re…”

  “What? A mom? Am I supposed to stop being that because I have a business to run?”

  The psychologist smiled.

  “Do you think your children would describe you as overprotec-tive?”

  Kira sulked in silence. She felt like yelling, asking if the psychologist knew what the worst thing about being an overprotective mother is. Sometimes being RIGHT! But she kept quiet, because she hasn’t told the psychologist about what happened to Isak, nor about what happened to Maya. She doesn’t want to talk about that, she just wants to sort out the panic attacks, get some medication or whatever it’s going to take. Even with psychologists she wants to be efficient and show how clever she is.

  But he’s right. The children are small in all the photographs on the desk in the office, to help her forget how big they are now. Leo is a teenager, and soon Maya won’t even be that anymore. It’s been two years since she moved away to the big city to study at her beloved College of Music. Two YEARS, it’s almost as incomprehensible that her daughter has been gone so long as it is that Kira has started using the phrase “big city.” She used to chuckle at how provincial it sounded when the people around here said that sort of thing when she and Peter and the children moved here. Now she’s become one of them. Forest folk. The sort of person who mutters that “even the elk are lazy down south,” and is only half-joking when she says: “There’s nothing wrong with the big city, it’s just so damn hard to get to.”