“And today you’re here to talk about my husband?”

  Kira puts her hands in her coat pockets and nods.

  “I understand that it must look like a strange coincidence.”

  Hannah looks at her for a long time to see if there’s anything there she can’t trust. She doesn’t find much. So she says:

  “My daughter wants to study law. She doesn’t know anyone who’s done that. I assume that’s why she was asking you.”

  Kira can hear the pang of jealousy in the mother’s voice. She recognizes it, she sounds the same every time Maya mentions one of her teachers at music college. She knows how it feels to have a child who lives in a world you don’t understand.

  “She just wanted some advice about courses, I…”

  “I’m a midwife. We have to study for our job too,” Hannah points out.

  Kira blushes.

  “I know. I didn’t mean it like that, Tess is extremely smart and well-brought-up. I appreciate that that comes from you.”

  Hannah snorts.

  “You don’t have to flatter me. I was angry when I found your business card, but Johnny says I need to let go of the kids. So I’m trying. You have an office in Hed, right? If Tess goes away to study, can she come back and work for your company then?”

  The question comes so abruptly that Kira is taken aback. This wasn’t exactly how she had imagined this conversation going.

  “Of course. Of course… I mean, if she’s good enough.”

  Hannah replies like someone who knows nothing about law, but everything about her daughter:

  “She’ll be the best.”

  Kira lets out a short laugh. Lord, grant me the self-confidence of a mother from Hed, she thinks, but deep down she knows she’s just the same. She and Hannah have very little in common, yet somehow still almost everything.

  “She’s welcome to come by the office whenever she likes if she has more questions.”

  Hannah nods, jealous but grateful. Then she says, without sounding impolite but certainly not the opposite either:

  “Do you want coffee or are you going to get to the point? Why are you here?”

  Kira is on the brink of asking for coffee, but doesn’t want to risk being unnecessarily provocative. So she explains everything as simply as she can:

  “Some friends of mine saw our husbands collide in the ice rink yesterday. It made them… anxious. Peter is something of a symbol for hockey in Beartown and I think your husband is the same here. My friends are worried that people will think they were fighting. That could trigger even more trouble. But then one of them had the idea that our husbands might actually prefer to promote… peace. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that the council wants to close down both hockey clubs?”

  Hannah drives her son’s hockey stick into the snow as if she was trying to plant it.

  “All I’ve heard is that the council wants to shut down Hed Hockey. That they don’t want to pay to rebuild the ice rink here.”

  “My friends are pretty sure the real plan is to shut down both Beartown and Hed and start a whole new sports club. We want to try to get the politicians to change their minds. So that we can save both clubs.”

  Hannah lets slip a doubtful snort.

  “Why would you want to save Hed?”

  Kira sighs so deeply that she leans forward and puts her hands on her knees, not even looking at Hannah.

  “Can I be honest? I don’t even want to save Beartown! But it is what it is. I’m just trying to keep everyone happy here, damn it!”

  She doesn’t mean to come across as angry, she’s just very, very tired. Hannah smiles, because she’s never heard anyone sound more like a mother.

  “Are you from down south?” she asks.

  “Mmm,” Kira replies distantly with her hands on her knees and her eyes focused on the snow.

  “You can only tell when you get angry, otherwise you sound like one of us,” Hannah says.

  It’s a big compliment. Very big. Kira glances up at her.

  “Be careful. One day your daughter will come home from university with a different accent.”

  “As long as she doesn’t show up in one of those silly cars I think it’ll be okay,” Hannah replies, nodding scornfully toward Kira’s car.

  “Next time I’ll smash the window before I arrive so I fit in,” Kira replies.

  Hannah laughs loudly and disarmingly. She leans against the fence. Hesitates a long time before she can bring herself to ask:

  “Do you know a young girl over in Beartown by the name of Ana?”

  Kira starts to laugh.

  “Are you kidding? She’s my daughter’s best friend!”

  Hannah’s eyes look glossy as she tries not to reveal the extent of her emotions.

  “I was the midwife she helped deliver a baby in the forest during the storm. I’d just like to thank her again.”

  “What baby?” Kira wonders.

  “She hasn’t… she hasn’t mentioned it?”

  “No, no, but that’s actually exactly the sort of thing I’d expect from Ana.” Kira smiles.

  “That she helps mothers give birth in the forest, or that she doesn’t bother to mention it?”

  “Both.”

  The women laugh quietly. Kira straightens up, and her back lets her know how old she is. Hannah looks down at her fingers.

  “Ana’s welcome to come down to the hospital whenever she likes. If she has any questions about… my job.”

  Kira nods appreciatively.

  “I promise I’ll tell her. She’d make a wonderful midwife. And she… needs strong female role models. As many as possible.”

  The two women’s eyes meet in a truce, at last.

  “Okay. So what do you want my husband to do to help you?” Hannah asks.

  “It isn’t our husbands who are needed right now. It’s you and me,” Kira replies.

  95 Songs

  The fire next to the campervan bounces up into the darkness, as stubborn as a three-year-old refusing to go to bed. Benji’s phone buzzes and he lifts it up. It’s Ana and Maya. They’re bored. Want to know where he is. He says he’s at the campervan and they reply simply: “On our way!” Even if Benji would rather be alone with Big City for a while longer, if he has to accept more company, there were certainly worse options. He’s missed those two goofballs, they’re like two crazy squirrels darting through the world, they seem to live every moment and he hopes they never stop. Never stop laughing as they embrace, never stop sleeping back-to-back. They drive down in Ana’s dad’s pickup, with Ana swearing the whole time because he’s left his rifle in there again when he was drunk. Maya has called Amat and Bobo and ordered them to come as well, and they evidently don’t disobey in spite of the game tomorrow. So Bobo parks his car up at the road and lumbers down through the trees with Amat and Mumble following him, because they weren’t going to let Mumble escape if they couldn’t, so they picked him up from Hed first. They get one last evening, the whole gang. They laugh so much, they’ll be grateful for that in hindsight, that every time they look back they’ll start laughing like Benji and Ana when the grass really got to them, when they started making really atrocious puns. Later on Benji and Amat go off to pee and as they stand there leaning against their respective trees, Benji says to his friend:

  “Listen, never forget that you’re from the Hollow.”

  “You’re drunk and high, I’m not listening to you,” Amat laughs, but Benji grabs him by the shoulder, almost making him fall in the snow.

  “I said, never forget that you’re from the Hollow. Because those bastards in this town have never let you forget it, so don’t let them forget it now. When you’re playing in the NHL and someone asks where you’re from, say, ‘I’m from the fucking Hollow!’ Okay? That will mean everything to those scruffy little kids playing hockey out of the yard behind your apartment.”

  Amat promises. They hug each other beside the tree one of them just peed against. Amat will never break his promise. As he walks back to the campervan Benji stands back and looks out across the lake. After a while Bobo wanders over to pee, and Benji pees once more to keep him company.

  “If you could manage not to turn Aleksandr into an alcoholic out here, that would be great, Zackell and I are going to need him this season!” Bobo says, as sternly as he can manage.

  “I can’t promise anything. Who knows, maybe drink will save him from the sport?” Benji replies.

  Bobo laughs his deep rumble of a laugh, and if, against all odds, there was any game left in these forests, there wasn’t after that.

  “I’ve missed you so much, mate. I hope you’re going to stay here now. You know, one day you and I and Amat will be like Peter and Tails and the guys from the old team twenty years ago. We’ll be sitting in the Bearskin and will be fat and rich and we’ll own the whole town and talk about old times.”

  Benji coughs out some smoke.

  “Time is relative, Bobo. This is now, but it’s old times… NOW! What you just said: already old.”

  Confused, Bobo scratches his head.

  “How much did you say you’d smoked?”

  “Just enough!” Benji declares.

  “Just stick around this time, promise?” Bobo repeats.

  Benji shakes his head.

  “No, no, I’m not going to do that. But I’ll try not to forget to come back home.”

  “I fucking love you,” Bobo whispers, and the best thing about him is that he makes no attempt at all to laugh it off with a “but not like that.” He’s more than capable of just loving someone, the gentle giant.

  Benji smiles.

  “I love you too. But not like that, so don’t go getting any ideas.”

  Bobo rumbles with laughter again. They walk back to the campervan. Benji grabs a beer, Bobo takes one too, there have to be some advantages now that he’s a coach and not a player. They drink a toast and look into each other’s eyes. Everything is perfect.

  * * *

  Ana gets it into her head to go down to the lake “to see if the ice will hold.” Restless, as usual. The others go with her, of course, because what else are they going to do? Benji and Maya hang back, sharing a cigarette. She tucks her arm under his.

  “You look happy. That makes me happy.”

  “You too,” he says.

  She takes some deep breaths with her eyes closed, trusting him not to let her fall.

  “Do you think we’ll be able to make peace with this town in the end? Just come back and live here as if nothing happened?”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “I don’t know where I belong.”

  He kisses her hair tenderly.

  “You belong on a big stage in front of a hundred thousand people, all around the world.”

  She holds his arm as if she’s scared it’s the last time.

  “You can do whatever you want to, as long as you never hurt yourself. Promise me that.”

  His heart is beating slower now, his blood is calm, as if it might actually be possible: to make peace with everything.

  “If I fancied girls I might have fallen in love with you,” he says.

  “If I fancied donkeys I might have fallen in love with you!” Maya retorts, and his body bubbles with laughter.

  “When are you going back to college?” he asks a few moments later.

  She sighs.

  “I don’t know. I pretty much fell out with everyone before I left.”

  “Great!” Benji declares.

  “Great?”

  “Yes. You write better songs when you’re angry and alone.”

  “Worst compliment ever!”

  “You know I’m right. Sing something for me,” he asks.

  “I haven’t got my guitar here.”

  “I’m not sure you know what a ‘song’ is,” he points out, and she hits him in the ribs.

  “Stop being such a muppet! You know what I mean! I can’t sing if I don’t play at the same time. It doesn’t work. It’s… unnatural.”

  “All of you is unnatural.”

  “Hmm. Says the most normal person in the universe, obviously.”

  He smiles that smile. Free from cares, they walk down to the shore. Ana and the guys are competing to see who dares walk farthest out on the ice. She wins, of course, by a mile. Maya leans her head against Benji’s shoulder and promises:

  “I’ll sing for you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  She’ll sing for him every night from now on.

  * * *

  In the darkness farther away a lone boy is standing far out on the ice. He hears the laughter from Ana and the others as they dare each other to go farther out, one step at a time. When Mumble slips and starts to laugh, it’s obvious how happy he is. Matteo stands alone and lets his anger course through him. He almost enjoys it. When the youths in the distance go back up toward the campervan, Matteo walks so far out on the ice that in the end it feels like he’s walking on baking parchment. He stops there, both feet firmly on the ice. Makes himself as heavy as he can. Thinks calmly to himself: “If the ice breaks, I die. If the ice holds, you die.”

  * * *

  It holds.

  * * *

  He walks back home and climbs through his neighbors’ window. The house is dark and empty tonight, perhaps the elderly couple have gone away somewhere, so Matteo walks all around their house, looking at their lives. Imagines who he might have been if he had had people like this. On a chest of drawers in their bedroom there’s a row of photographs of their only grandchild, a blond boy, apparently always so happy he could almost burst. The most recent picture shows him in ice hockey gear, his green top is a little too large, the look in his eyes euphoric. The oldest picture is from when he had just been born. The date is engraved on the frame. Matteo looks at it for a long time. Memorizes it. Then he goes down into the basement and enters the code on the lock, and the gun cabinet opens.

  96 Torches

  Richard Theo’s idea is simple, but not simplistic. Kira and Hannah shake hands over the fence, the lawyer and the midwife, one from each town. Then Kira goes home and Hannah goes to see her neighbors. She starts with the ones who are the worst gossips, says nothing about whose idea it is, that way it will soon come to seem spontaneous.

  Cell phones start buzzing in Hed. When Kira gets home and goes around to her neighbors, the same thing happens there. The words that start it all are so simple, but there’s nothing simplistic about them:

  The council wants to shut down both our hockey clubs. Whether you like hockey or not, you have to resist. Because these clubs are just the first step, then the politicians will come for everything else. They’ll start by pulling down the ice rink in Hed and replacing it with houses that no one who grew up here can afford to live in, but before long they’ll have built on the whole forest, because then we won’t notice when our towns merge together. In the end there won’t even be a Beartown or a Hed anymore—first they’ll create a new hockey club, then they’ll create a new town. If we let the politicians decide how we watch hockey, they’ll soon decide how we live our lives too. They have no respect for us or our history, they just want to turn this whole area into their personal cash machine. Don’t let them get away with it!

  No one remembers if it’s Hannah who says it first, or Kira, or someone else entirely. But the message gets repeated until everyone has heard it. Richard Theo sits in his office and waits. All the other politicians have gone home for the day, but he knows they’ll soon come running back in panic. It will be too late by then, they will have missed their chance. It would have been enough if the people who set out had numbered in the dozens, but many more join in. It’s one of those rare occasions when the combination of events in the past week, every little part of the chain reaction, has affected everyone, one way or another.

  Tails raises the flags outside Beartown ice rink and the caravan of cars sets off along the road through the trees. Row after row of workmates, teammates, childhood friends, and families. In the space of just a few hours the message seems to have reached everyone, the oldest are pensioners, the youngest still in their strollers. Even Teemu and his guys show up, it’s the first time anyone has seen them in jackets that aren’t black. They could be anyone in the crowd now. Hockey supporters. Citizens. Voters. At the edge of the forest the cars stop and everyone gets out and stands in a line. It took a few hours to get hold of all the torches, the last ones are homemade, fashioned from twigs and chicken wire. Then the forest burns.

  The editor in chief sees it from the roof of the newspaper building with her dad. Richard Theo is standing alone in the window of his office. He will never be asked exactly how he managed to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together, but if he were he would have answered: “In my experience, most people can only cope with having one enemy at a time.” So instead of letting the towns fight with each other, he gave them a shared opponent. Politicians. “Because everyone hates politicians, even politicians,” he would have said if anyone asked. But no one will, because all of this looks so spontaneous. Like a popular movement. Grassroots. All those words that make it sound as if change just grows naturally.

  The torch-lit procession from Beartown heads toward the council building like a never-ending flaming snake. The second procession, with just as many families and neighbors and hockey supporters from Hed, is standing waiting a few hundred yards away. They meet just below Richard Theo’s window, he’s the only politician who is still at work, so he’s the first one who can go out and meet them.

  “I understand your frustrations. Believe me, I share them!” he promises the people at the front before they have even presented their demands.

  Most of them never even realize that they haven’t really formulated any demands, but that doesn’t matter. Richard Theo has already done it for them. He climbs up onto a wall and gives a speech. Simple words: