There are many types of leadership, the sort Big City, Amat, and Bobo demonstrate this year isn’t the sort that goes forward, but rather goes backward. Back to everything we are. Sometimes the greatest leadership is knowing the way home.

  * * *

  A few months from now, Hannah will be holding a newborn baby again. It is a good day, it’s incredible that days like this will ever happen again, but they do. She goes home and packs a picnic together with Tess. Johnny is repairing the van down at the fire station with Lev’s spare parts and Bobo’s help. When they’re done they go out into the yard in front of the fire station with all the other firemen and have a snowball fight with their children and younger brothers and sisters.

  Tobias is there, he already looks like a fireman, he’s going to be exactly like his dad, so his dad is trying to be as good as he can possibly be. Tess will move away from here in a few years’ time, but she’ll come home again in the end. She’s too much forest folk for other places, but she doesn’t know that until she sees the world.

  One evening Ted’s coach calls to tell Johnny and Hannah that he’s started to get calls from coaches from bigger clubs, men from hockey academies and even a few agents, to ask questions about Ted. The coach says his parents “should be prepared for the lad’s life to change.” Ted is one of the brightest talents Hed has seen. One day he will be the best.

  Johnny spends hours in the kitchen after that, looking at the whiskey in a glass that’s really a tea light holder. He doesn’t touch it. Instead he gets in his car and drives to Beartown. Knocks on a door. Eats croissants in Peter’s kitchen and confesses in a low voice:

  “People are saying my boy could go a long way. Maybe all the way. I was just wondering if you have any… advice.”

  Peter shakes his head apologetically.

  “I don’t think I can give you any advice about his career. I don’t know anything about money and contracts and all that. But I can give you the phone numbers of some old friends of mine, they can…”

  The fireman on the other side of the table looks up, his eyes glossy with uncertainty. He sounds very small when he whispers:

  “No… no… I don’t mean like that. I didn’t mean advice for him. I mean for me. I need to know what I have to do to be a good dad. I want to know what you wish you could have had back when you were his age, when your phone started to ring…”

  Peter is silent for a long time. Then he talks more about his childhood than he has done with any other man. A few years later Ted becomes the youngest team captain in Hed’s history. A few years after that he becomes a team captain in the NHL. When he is asked by a reporter where he thinks he got his leadership qualities from, he will reply simply:

  * * *

  “From home.”

  * * *

  Teemu and other black jackets are going to the hockey games again. Are singing again. Always with slightly heavier voices and a greater sense of loss now, always with a beer in their hands after the game when they walk all the way to the churchyard. Then they sit there and talk to Vidar and Benji and Ramona and Holger and all the others who couldn’t come, so they know how it went. Every detail. Every shot. Every goal and every wrong decision by the referee. The beer in Heaven is expensive and the whining is the same as always, hardly anything changes, but one day Teemu brings his newborn son here and introduces him.

  His son will grow up and decide that he doesn’t like hockey, he likes soccer, and there’s a hell of a lot of laughter in Heaven then. Oh, so much laughter.

  * * *

  Elisabeth Zackell becomes a famous coach. She wins hundreds of games. She wins leagues, titles, and trophies. The only thing she never really wins back is that first, uncomplicated joy. Hockey never really becomes a game for her again. But one day in many years’ time she will coach a national team, the one Alicia plays on, and then Zackell will make an exception to her strictest rule.

  She lets someone play with the number 16 again. For one single game.

  Alicia gets up from the bench in the locker room and leads her team out and storms the ice, and Zackell watches her and for a single moment forgets that it isn’t him.

  * * *

  Leo spends several days sitting in his room after Benji’s funeral, with his headphones on, inside his game. He plays and plays and waits the way he has done, night after night, for a particular name to appear on the screen. For a player he has never met in real life but encountered here so many times in recent months that it now feels as if they know each other. That stranger has killed Leo every time, almost as if he sought him out every day and hunted him down. Leo can’t let go of the desire get him back. If he’s just a bit quicker, a bit more focused, he’s sure he can get the bastard. Whoever he is.

  But his opponent never shows up. Never again. Leo will never know why, but for years, long after he has stopped playing this game, he will log on from time to time just to look for that particular username. If he had looked it up online perhaps he would have found a page in a foreign language that explained that the username is the literal meaning of the name “Matteo.” But he never does.

  There’s a knock on the door to his room. Maya is standing there with her guitar in her hand.

  “Can I come in?” she asks quietly, the way he always did when he crept to her room when he was younger after he had a nightmare.

  He nods, of course. She sits down on his bed and plays her guitar and he sits in front of his computer and plays his game. It’s the last night before she goes back to music college. She will be alone down there for a while, she will be angry and she will write some of the best songs she has ever written.

  “I’m proud of you,” she whispers to her brother.

  “I’m proud of you too,” he whispers back.

  Leo will do great things in life, he will go far and give her every reason to really be proud of him. She’s just being proud in advance. That’s the job of big sisters.

  When the two Andersson siblings have families and children of their own, one night they will sit in a house much like this one, a Christmas Eve when the generations above and below them have all gone to bed, and they will talk about the people they might have become if their circumstances had been worse. Just a little worse. If they had been born a little poorer. Been hit a little harder, a little earlier, by how violent people can be. If they hadn’t had a mom and a dad who would fight anyone for their sake, who would rush through the forest and take on hooligans, the whole town if they had to. Who never gave up, who only backed away when they were getting ready to attack, who knew no limits when it came to what they were prepared to do to protect their children. Even when they knew it wasn’t really possible.

  Leo will smile and pat his sister’s hair gently.

  “Without Mom and Dad? You’d have been fine. You’re a survivor. But me? I wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  * * *

  The police never find the rifle that killed Matteo. No one manages to prove where the pistol that killed Benji came from either. The police go door-to-door from one end of Beartown to the far side of Hed, but no one says anything. There will be one or two people around here who will be happy to point out to the authorities after the event that they put more effort into tracking down that rifle than anything else. As if the man who killed a murderer with a hunting rifle was a bigger criminal than the man who gave the murderer an illegal smuggled pistol in the first place.

  The trouble between us and those who aren’t from around here never really stops. We’re that sort of town too.

  * * *

  Lev carries on living in Hed. Running his scrapyard. Every winter he travels to another forest far away, with his cases full of toys and cuddly animals. There he drinks strong liquor out of small glasses with his nieces, and plays hockey with their children.

  All the things people say about him are true. This part as well. That’s why he fits in so well in the towns deep among the trees. They’re also capable of being both their best and their worst at the same time.

  * * *

  Perhaps it is grief that brings Tails down. Or perhaps his conscience finally catches up with him. Richard Theo goes to see him a week after the funeral and tells him about a series of articles that the local paper is about to publish. It will uncover a corruption scandal that will crush Theo’s political opponents but spare the hockey clubs and Peter Andersson. Theo has built an alliance of businessmen who find him useful and politicians who are scared of him. He’s untouchable. But sadly, he explains with what appears to be genuine sympathy, not all of his political allies accept that the hockey clubs should get away entirely scot-free. Everyone needs a small victory, he says. Everyone needs to feel that they’ve won something. So Theo suggests the simplest solution: give them a few of the contracts Peter signed. Not the ones concerning the training facility, not the very worst ones, just the basic graft so they can feel that they’re uncovering something. But then, of course, a scapegoat will be required, and if it isn’t going to be Peter, then the story needs to be told in such a way that someone is revealed as having deceived him. Theo holds his arms out amiably:

  “I suggest Ramona. She’s already gone now anyway. And from what I’ve heard of her, I can’t imagine she’d have anything against being used to save Peter Andersson. If we pin the blame on her, the whole scandal will be forgotten in a couple of weeks and everyone can carry on as if nothing happened.”

  Tails sits at his desk and looks at his hands for a long time. Then he whispers:

  “Peter was my best friend all through my childhood, did you know that? He was so good even before he went to the NHL that opposing players who came here for games would sometimes ask for his autograph for their younger siblings. So I learned to imitate his signature, so I could sell ‘signed’ photographs without him knowing about it. I can still do an almost perfect imitation of his handwriting.”

  Theo sits with his eyebrows raised and a look of confusion that’s extremely unusual for him.

  “What are you saying?”

  Tails replies calmly:

  “I’m saying that we do as you suggest. We give the paper and your political allies a small victory. We give them some of the contracts and say Peter was tricked. But not by Ramona. I’m going to say it was me who signed those contracts in his name.”

  Richard Theo looks both appalled and impressed. By the time the story reaches the local paper it has already been leaked to the police. Tails is convicted of fraud. He is sentenced to a few months in prison. He doesn’t let anyone take even a fraction of the blame. When he gets out he goes straight home to Beartown and starts building, but not Beartown Business Park or a fancy training facility next to the ice rink, as he had planned. Instead he helps his best friend from childhood build a cathedral. Tails pays for the roof with his own money, he works on it with his own two hands, and afterward he and Peter drink beer sitting right at the top while a hundred kids play down below. It’s a simple little ice box, not a luxurious rink, it’s reminiscent of the one the factory workers built in Beartown three-quarters of a century ago when they founded the club. When there was nothing but storms and longing around here, love and dreams, hope and struggle. The Cathedral isn’t much to look at, it really isn’t, but it’s the start of something.

  It wouldn’t have been completed without Tails’s help, but no one apart from Peter knows how great his contribution was. Tails never tells anyone. That’s his atonement.

  * * *

  The editor in chief and her dad go away on holiday. She takes him with her to the sun. They eat good food and take long walks, look at churches, and fall asleep on shaded terraces. It’s their last trip together. Her dad passes away not long after that. The editor in chief returns to Beartown and Hed, but soon moves on to work for larger papers in bigger places. She gets more power. It takes a while, longer than she would have liked, but one day she gets the chance to take on Richard Theo. She grabs it.

  He too is living in a larger town by then, sitting on higher pedestals, which makes the fall all the harder. In the end she digs up so many scandals about him that she destroys his whole career and ruins him.

  She doesn’t do it for justice. Nor even for the satisfaction. She does it because she can. She does it because people like him shouldn’t always be allowed to win.

  * * *

  Amat makes it to the NHL in the end. The night when he scores his first goal the whole of Beartown is awake, despite the time difference. In fact the whole of Hed is probably awake too. And if they aren’t, they probably get woken up when Amat scores and the whole damn Hollow explodes.

  * * *

  A few years from now, far away from here, a young man will be sitting on a sofa at a party. Everyone around him will be dancing and drinking but his eyes will be glued to the television. It’s just a short clip from a concert by one of the country’s most famous female performers right now. Her name is Maya Andersson, and the young man has always loved that name. How ordinary it sounds. He’s never thought about her accent, has never reflected upon why it sounds so familiar to him. But now he sees her on television and she’s singing a song about someone she loved, because it’s his birthday, and on the huge screen behind her a photograph of him flashes up for a moment. She knows no one will really see it, a thousand more images flash past right after it, she just included that particular photograph for her own sake.

  But the man on the sofa recognizes it. Because he remembers fingertips and glances. Beer bottles on a worn bar counter and smoke in a silent forest. The way the snow feels as it falls on your skin while a boy with sad eyes and a wild heart teaches you to skate.

  The man on the sofa packs almost nothing. He takes just a light bag and the case containing his bass guitar and travels to the next town on Maya’s tour. He elbows his way past her security guard and almost gets knocked to the floor, and he calls out:

  “I knew him! I knew Benji! I loved him too!”

  Maya stops mid-stride. They look each other in the eye and see only him, the boy in the forest, sad and wild.

  “Do you play?” Maya asks.

  “I’m a bass player,” he says.

  From then on he is her bass player. No one plays her songs like he does. No one else cries as much each night.

  * * *

  Mumble plays hockey. That’s all anyone will ever really remember him doing. He’s either at the ice rink or at home with his mother. He never tells anyone who Matteo’s bullets were really meant for. How could he explain? Who would let him say all he needed to? He’s too scared. Too small. So he says nothing, upsets no one, lives his life quietly and tries to save every puck each time Beartown Hockey puts him in goal. The crowd loves him, the people in the seats as well as those in the standing area, and in many ways he becomes one of the club’s true legends. He never plays for any other club, only here, he becomes more bear than anyone else. He was born in Hed, but Beartown becomes his place on earth. When he eventually has to stop playing hockey as a result of an injury he is a little over thirty, and half a lifetime has passed since the event he has spent every day trying to forget happened. He has played every minute as if he is trying to be forgiven. As if he could just be good enough and valuable enough, and possibly even a little loved, to somehow be able to live a life without always feeling that he doesn’t deserve it. He plays as if the ice is a time machine. It never is. The club hoists his jersey up into the roof of the rink and thanks him with a grand ceremony after his final game. The following day he climbs on board a bus with a large hockey bag over his shoulder. He travels many miles to another town, walks through it until he reaches a small cemetery, then moves through the gravestones until he reaches a small, ignored memorial tucked away in a corner. It’s positioned beneath a beautiful tree, the sort that gives protection in winter and shade in the summer. Mumble clears the weeds from around it, and lays flowers beneath the name “Matteo.” No surname, because his parents were too scared that the people who can never stop hating him would come and vandalize the grave even though it’s a long way from Beartown. Mumble traces the letters with his fingers and whispers:

  “Forgive me. You should have lived my life. Forgive me…”

  Then he opens his hockey bag and loads the rifle that’s inside it. He wipes the tears, picks up the rifle, and goes into the forest.

  * * *

  Is that punishment enough? No one can answer that. No one will know.

  * * *

  What is life, other than moments? What is laughter, other than a small victory over sorrow? A single moment, just one, when everything inside us isn’t broken.

  There’s a tentative knock on the door of the house where Ruth and Matteo grew up. When their parents open the door, the old couple from next door are standing there. The woman is holding an apple pie, the man a flask. He says quietly, perhaps embarrassed about how little he knows about the people who live only one fence away:

  “You can talk if you’d like to. We can sit quietly if you’d rather. But we thought it might be good not to be alone.”

  They sit in the little living room.

  “So many beautiful books,” the old woman from next door says.

  “I’m better at reading than living,” Ruth and Matteo’s dad whispers.

  A little later there’s another knock on the door. Outside stands the priest who buried their daughter. They didn’t dare bury Matteo in the same churchyard. The priest comes anyway. That’s a special kind of job, but also a special sort of person. They sit in the living room and the priest’s eyes wander slowly over the spines of the books.