“All teenagers think their moms are overprotective. I could be in prison and they’d still think they saw too much of me,” she eventually muttered to the psychologist.

  He clasped his hands together in his lap, because by now he had learned that if he made any notes, Kira would immediately demand to know exactly what he was writing. Not that she needed to be in control, obviously. No, not at all.

  “You sound like my own mother,” he said gently.

  Kira’s eyelashes quivered.

  “That’s because you don’t get it. We’re your mothers. We loved you first. Maybe everyone else loves you now, but we loved you first.”

  “Doesn’t feeling like that make you a good mother?”

  “It just makes me a mother.”

  The psychologist chuckled.

  “Well, you’re right about that, of course. I’m almost sixty and my mom still worries that I’m not eating properly.”

  Kira raised her chin but lowered her voice.

  “We’re your mothers. You can’t stop us.”

  The psychologist really wished he could have written that down.

  “What about your husband, Peter? You gave up an awful lot for his career for many years, and now he’s given up his career for you for a while. Do you still feel guilty about that?”

  Her breath whistled in her nostrils.

  “I don’t see why we have to talk about that. I’ve told you that I… well… yes, I feel guilty! Because I don’t know how to make him happy. That’s the only thing I never needed to do for him in all the years he devoted to hockey, I did everything at home and I fitted the whole of my life around his career, but I never needed to make him happy. Hockey did that. And now I don’t know if I can.”

  The psychologist asked, the way psychologists do:

  “Is it really your responsibility to make him happy, then?”

  Kira’s voice may have wavered, but her answer was firm:

  “He’s my husband. He can’t stop me.”

  She meant it, she still means it, yet she’s still sitting in her office on her own right now. She still has time to get home, but she doesn’t leave. She just looks out of the window and sees the storm approaching, not frightened even though she knows she should be.

  * * *

  You can learn everything you need to know about Ana from her way of driving tonight. She’s driving as if it’s her fault if they don’t all make it, her fault if everyone isn’t happy, her fault if something goes wrong. Anything at all. The midwife sees it, recognizes it, she reaches forward and touches the girl’s shoulder and brushes her hair aside so it isn’t hanging in front of her eyes. Ana probably doesn’t even notice, she’s peering through the windshield with white knuckles clutching the steering wheel and her feet dancing across the pedals, and the pickup surges through the darkness. Afterward the others will barely remember how they got out of the forest, but all of a sudden the vehicle is on a road, and soon they see the lights outside the hospital.

  Ana stops right in front of the entrance and then everything happens incredibly fast: hospital staff seem to rush out from every direction to help them. All the pickup’s doors are opened, the wind is roaring outside, nurses shout at one another and Ana sits in the middle of the chaos, feeling so much in the way that she daren’t move at all. Hannah, the dad, the mom, and the baby disappear in the tide of people and the truck doors close behind them and suddenly everything is silent. So unbearably silent.

  Ana takes out her phone and calls Maya. She wants to tell someone about all this, but how on earth can she even start? She doesn’t have to. Maya doesn’t answer. Ana slips her phone into the compartment in the door and leans her head on the steering wheel.

  It takes an hour before the mother and baby are stabilized to the point where it occurs to Hannah that Ana is probably still sitting outside in the parking lot. When she goes out, the girl is still sitting with her forehead on the wheel, her eyes wide open. The midwife gets into the passenger seat, it takes all her strength to close the door and stop the wind breaking the hinges and tossing it away like a glove. The pickup is rocking, the rain arrives, and they sit in silence beneath the clatter on the roof for a long time before Hannah says:

  “You did really well, Ana.”

  Ana blinks hard.

  “Is the kid okay?”

  “Yes, everything’s going to be fine. Thanks to you. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah… Yeah. That was… I mean, when you delivered that baby there in the car, and when he cried for the first time, I don’t know how to describe it… it was like being high! Do you get what I mean? I mean, I’m not saying I do drugs! But you know? I mean… you do know?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is it like that every time?”

  “Not every time.”

  “Because you get used to it?”

  The little lines in the skin around the midwife’s lips are the scars of relief rather than laughter lines when she replies:

  “Because not everyone always makes it. You have to make the most of the happy endings whenever you get the chance.”

  The silence that follows presses them deep into their seats.

  “I need to get home to Dad,” Ana whispers.

  “Is your mother home?”

  “She doesn’t live with us.”

  The girl says this so matter-of-factly that the midwife doesn’t ask anything more. There’s no mother. There was a woman who gave birth to Ana once upon a time, she lives somewhere else now and has a new life, but there’s no longer a mom. When the midwife carefully touches her fingers to the girl’s cheek, her shock eases and tears trickle over Hannah’s hand.

  “You promise the kid’s going to be okay?”

  “I promise, Ana.”

  “I’m sorry I hit that stupid painter. And I’m sorry I drove so fast. And I’m…”

  The midwife hushes her gently.

  “You saved a baby’s life tonight, Ana. You’re a bit daft, sure, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I wouldn’t even let you use my sewing machine if there hadn’t been a storm, I can tell you that much. But you’re also really, really brave. You’re the sort of person who runs toward fire. Believe me, I recognize the type.”

  Ana tries to nod like she believes that. Her dad is still asleep in his chair when she gets home, a bottle still in his hand, he hasn’t even noticed that the world is falling apart outside the windows. Ana finishes the dishes, then checks the batteries in the flashlights before lying down under a blanket on the floor in front of the open fire with the dogs huddled closely around her. She’s left her phone in the truck, where it lies, ringing and ringing and ringing.

  The next day Ana doesn’t tell anyone what she did the previous night, not even Maya.

  * * *

  In the hospital a woman is lying in a bed. No one told her how it would really feel to be someone’s mom. Which is just as well. She’s going to be scared forever now.

  “Vidar is a good name,” she whispers.

  “It’s a brilliant name,” the dad sniffs.

  And it is. A name for a boy born far out in the forest between two towns that hate each other, on a wild night during the worst storm anyone can remember. A child of the wind, saved by a hunter’s daughter. If that boy ever starts to play hockey, it will be one of our very, very best fairy tales.

  We’re going to need them. Fairy tales are what help us cope with funerals.

  * * *

  Hannah goes back inside the hospital, into the locker room, where she gets changed and leans her forehead against the door. Then she allows herself to have a minor breakdown, just a small one, only for a moment. She lets all that is brightest and darkest sing inside her without struggling against it. Then she closes all the dampers and hatches inside herself and opens her eyes, so that she doesn’t take all those feelings home. No one can bear to feel everything all the time. She’s only a few miles from home, but as she walks toward the parking lot she realizes that the van is still parked outside Ana’s house in Beartown. It’s far too dangerous to walk home in the storm now, especially when she’s so exhausted, so she calls her husband, hardly able to speak: “It all went fine, darling, but I haven’t got the car here so I’m going to stay until the storm…” But Johnny has already hung up, he carries all four sleeping children to the neighbors’ and borrows their car to drive to the hospital and collect his wife. Not even a natural disaster can stop her idiot from doing that.

  * * *

  Kira is sitting on her own at her desk in the office, she can see nothing but herself in the window, the other side is pitch black, the sky has swallowed the earth. She thinks a hundred times that she’s going to phone her daughter, but it’s so late and she’s probably at some party with her classmates, Kira doesn’t want to worry her. But most of all she doesn’t want Maya to hear in her voice how frightened she is. How lost.

  The storm is going to be worse than they said on the news, much, much worse. But Kira doesn’t go home. She ought to, but she doesn’t.

  Towns and marriages consist of stories. Where one starts, another one ends.

  10 Migrating birds

  Maya has heard many times back home in Beartown that “in a crisis you find out who you really are.” People love their damn aphorisms in hockey towns. “When your back’s against the wall you find out what you’re really capable of,” they declare, without ever questioning what that really means. After all, the vast majority of people never find out what they’re capable of, most of them don’t even know if they’re the sort of animal that runs, or the sort of animal that hunts. Maya envies them. She envies them so much.

  She walks a little faster through the park but without starting to run, she knows that the man behind her would catch up with her in a matter of seconds if she did that. She’s trying to buy some time, get as close to the exit of the park as possible before making a break for it, hopefully get him to underestimate her.

  * * *

  Idiot.

  * * *

  Maya used to watch the migrating birds as they passed over the forest between Hed and Beartown in the spring, and wonder why they did that. “I mean, I understand why they leave but not why they come back,” she said to Ana, but Ana just shrugged her shoulders and said: “They’re gone for the whole of the hockey season. Smart!” She always used to laugh off anything painful, but when Maya left to attend music college she whispered: “You’re like those birds now. Flying away.” Maya dearly wished it could have been so easy.

  They spent their first night on opposite sides of the country talking on the phone until the sun came up, Maya was making a huge effort to pretend that she was normal to her classmates, but everything crumbled when she was on the phone. She admitted in a low voice to Ana that she wondered if she was a psychopath who no longer even regretted holding that rifle to Kevin’s head. Ana groaned at the other end: “God, you were a psychopath WAY before that!” Maya smiled. It always ended with a joke from one or other of them, so that they wouldn’t dig too deep. Maya hated herself for having been in that room with Kevin, Ana hated herself for not being there. Maya spared him out on that jogging trail, but Ana would never have done that. “All animals fight for their own survival first, they hunt if it’s in their nature, and they die if they have to,” Ana said, and Maya thought for a while before she replied: “But not all animals want revenge, we’re the only ones who do that, waiting in the darkness all night so we can get back at someone for something. Only we do that.” Ana snorted and told her about how her mom had hit one of her dad’s hunting dogs on the nose, then a few weeks later the dog crept out and pulled down all the white laundry Ana’s mom had hung on the clothesline. “It was getting its revenge,” Ana grinned.

  They continued talking on the phone, but less and less frequently, and less and less about animals. Maya really did try to forget everything. Her new classmates knew nothing about her, so she decided to become someone else, someone nothing had happened to. It almost worked.

  * * *

  Idiot idiot.

  * * *

  “You never tell us anything about yourself, we’ve known you for two years but it feels like we hardly know anything about you!” one of her classmates exclaimed recently when they were studying in the library. Maya was shocked when she saw that all the others around the table agreed. There was no malice in the remark, just curiosity, they had no idea what doors they were trying to open. She tried to laugh it off and said she was really a contract killer for the mafia, adopting her strongest Beartown dialect because she knew that always made them laugh. What else was she supposed to say? Where could she start? Their world was far too small for them to understand, they were still children, they got drunk at every party because they weren’t worried about not being in control, because nothing had ever happened to them. They’ve never hated themselves so much that they wanted to kill themselves simply because they went to a party when they were fifteen in a town where afterward everyone wished that they had never existed, because someone who doesn’t exist can’t be raped. They’ve never wondered what would have happened if they simply hadn’t gone to the police, hadn’t said anything, had just let life go on without turning the entire world upside down for the people they loved. They’ve never dreamed of a rifle against a forehead and woken up as relieved as Maya does, because she’d rather dream about what she did to him than about what he did to her. They’ve never wondered if perhaps they should actually have followed the advice the town had given her: Shoot. Dig. Silence.

  At a party a few months ago one guy asked Maya why she never drank more than one or two glasses of wine, and what could she say? Because of guys like you. Because you’re everywhere.

  But she almost succeeded in becoming a different person in this city. She almost succeeded in changing. She succeeded to the extent that one evening she decided to take a shortcut across the park in the dark without thinking about it.

  * * *

  Idiot idiot idiot.

  * * *

  She quickens her pace on the gravel path, just a little, and the man behind her speeds up too. Perhaps she’s wrong? Perhaps it’s her imagination? So she slows down, and he almost stops then. When she starts to move again she is no longer in any doubt about what he wants, and by then it is already too late. Her hand fumbles in her bag but her fingers feel clumsy and her phone slips from her grasp and lands on the path. He’s approaching so quickly. She hears his breathing and the next second she feels his breath against her cheek.

  She has time to get so angry with herself, so furious with everything and everyone, but most of all herself. Because she already has the knife in her hand. That was what she was looking for in her bag when her phone fell out, she knows she wouldn’t have time to call anyone anyway, only defend herself. The blade is thin and not particularly long, she tells herself that she’ll aim at the man’s hands, he isn’t wearing gloves, so if she cuts him there the pain might be bad enough to give her a head start when she starts running. They’re so small, his hands, she finds herself thinking. The last thing that flits through her mind is the wish that she had tied her sneakers tighter. That’s how much she’s changed: she’s become the sort of person who doesn’t tie her shoes properly when she goes out. As if the world weren’t full of men.

  * * *

  He moves. She lashes out.

  * * *

  She hears herself scream, not with fear but rage. Two years. She almost succeeded in becoming another person here. But in a crisis she finds out the truth about herself, and then she remembers Kevin’s breath, his hard grip, her pounding heart. But she also remembers his gasps, his trembling fingertips when he saw the rifle, the smell of urine when he pissed himself with fear. Is he still out there on the jogging track at night, the way she’s still in the room where he raped her? Did he ever come home from the forest? Is he still scared of the dark? She hopes so.

  * * *

  The man in front of her in the park screams, a pathetic little whimper. Did she get him with the knife? God, she hopes so.

  * * *

  It was Ramona who gave her the knife, on the morning of Maya’s last day in Beartown before she left. “Take this and keep it in your handbag. Down there in the capital people are so damn touchy that they probably don’t even let you take a shotgun with you if you’re going into town. But for God’s sake don’t mention this to…,” she began, and Maya misunderstood and hurried to promise: “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to Dad!” Whereupon Ramona snorted so hard that the candles went out on the other side of the bar: “Why the hell would you think I’m scared of your FATHER? Now, your mother, on the other hand… if she hears I gave you a knife, I’ll probably get it in the ass. Literally.”

  Ramona wasn’t good at hugs, so Maya did most of the work, but it was at least a hug. Maya has thought of getting rid of the knife a thousand times, but it’s stayed in her handbag. “I daresay everyone has already asked you what the point of moving away from here is,” were Ramona’s parting words, “so all I’ll say is that you need to be damn clear that the only people who move away from Beartown are smug bastards who think they’re really something. And that’s good. I want you to think you’re something, girl.”

  * * *

  “Wait. WAIT!”

  * * *

  Maya doesn’t realize it’s the man yelling at first, the voice is too young, too thin. He’s leapt backward and Maya stays the knife at the last moment. He’s standing with one hand in the air, the other is holding out her phone, trembling so much that it almost falls to the ground again. Shame washes through Maya when she realizes that it isn’t even a man, it’s a girl, about thirteen years old or so. A little kid. She stares at the knife in Maya’s hand with tears streaming down her face.