“Hello? Earth calling girl! Do you want a drink or not?”

  The young men sitting a short distance away are waving at her. She shakes her head.

  “What the hell? Don’t be so miserable! Smile a little!” one of them leers.

  She looks away, he says something else but she doesn’t hear it because the bartender has already taken his tip from the bar and puts the television remote in front of her with a friendly wink. She raises the volume: BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.

  She remembers the chocolate ball that was so frozen after lying in her bag that she had to take her glove off and thaw it out in her hand, and then her hand was so cold that she had to warm it up by sticking it in her dad’s much larger glove and holding his hand. She remembers the boys, a few years older, playing hockey a bit farther away on the ice. Always hockey, everywhere, always. Bangbangbang. When one of the boys scored a goal and cheered, she asked her dad: “Who scored?” Not because she cared, but because she knew that he did. He replied so quickly that he turned bright red with shame: “Isak! No… I mean…” He fell silent. “You said Isak,” Maya said quietly. “Sorry, sometimes… sometimes that boy is so like Isak somehow…,” he confessed.

  Maya chewed the rest of her chocolate ball slowly for a long time before she dared ask: “Do you miss Isak every day?” Peter kissed her hair. “Yes, all the time,” he admitted. “I want to miss him too, but I don’t really even remember him,” Maya replied unhappily. “I think you can miss him just as much anyway,” her dad assured her. “How does it feel?” she asked. “Like having blisters in your heart,” he said.

  She thawed a chocolate ball between her fingers and ate it slowly, then she put her cold hand inside her dad’s glove, and she had no idea how long he would remember that. When half of the boys over on the ice raised their sticks and cheered again, she asked: “Who scored this time?” Her dad smiled and answered, and he had no idea how long she would remember that: “His name is Kevin.”

  The first time Maya can remember hearing that name, it was her dad who said it, with admiration in his voice.

  * * *

  Bang bang bang.

  * * *

  The young men in the bar have moved closer.

  15 Weapons

  Matteo stops outside the Bearskin pub. An old woman is collecting beer glasses on her own inside. The lights are on and when Matteo stands really close to the door he can smell fried food and cigarette smoke. He’s only fourteen years old, but he wonders if the landlady might make an exception to the rules today, he just wants somewhere to sit out the storm, anywhere that isn’t home. He tries the handle but the door is locked. He bangs on it, but the old woman doesn’t hear him.

  Then the power goes off there too. The woman goes upstairs, and the noise of the wind against the roof drowns out all the boy’s cries. Maybe things would have turned out differently if she had opened up. We’ll never know.

  Shivering, Matteo sets off for home. All the buildings on the street where he lives have no electricity now, but he can see circles of light from flashlights bouncing around upstairs in the neighboring house. An elderly couple lives there, but he daren’t knock on their door. He knows they don’t like his family, for the same reason a lot of other people don’t like his family: they’re regarded as odd. Not dangerous or unpleasant, just odd. If you spend too many years being odd, people start to find you unsettling, and if you’re unsettling enough, no one wants to let you inside even when there’s a storm.

  So Matteo digs out an iron bar in his neighbors’ toolshed and pries open their basement window. It’s as dark in there as it is in his own house, but here he can hear the old couple’s voices and then at least he knows that he isn’t dead. The little room is a mixture of guest room and office, and even if it looks like it hasn’t been used as either of those for a long time, he still finds a small bag of tea lights and some matches in a drawer. Old couples like this, who lived in Beartown long before the modern electricity grid, are always prepared for power cuts, and have matches in almost every room.

  In the flickering glow of the tea lights Matteo spends the night like a thief. The voices from the floor above have fallen silent, or perhaps are just being drowned out by the roar of the storm, when the boy finds the gun cabinet.

  He doesn’t manage to open it. Not tonight.

  16 Violence

  Night falls outside the living room window of the house while Peter leaves fingerprints on the glass of the framed photographs. Life has gone so damn fast, but he really should have been prepared for that, because hockey warned him, after all. One of the first things you learn as a young player is to shoot the moment you see an opening, because otherwise a thousand other things can happen and the chance on goal is gone in the blink of an eye. You have to be an opportunist.

  On the bookcase in the living room he catches sight of two drumsticks, he doesn’t know why he left them there, but he knows exactly when it was: the day Maya left home, the last time they played together. Peter wasn’t much of a drummer, sadly, he managed to fool her for a few years when she was little, but she was soon so good on the guitar that he struggled even to keep up with her. That’s the lot of being a parent: at first all activities are done for their sake, and in the end for ours. Eventually we realize that everything is about us wanting to be wherever they are, as much as possible, for as long as they let us. Peter weighs the drumsticks in his hand. Maya hated hockey and he was so desperate for music to bring them closer together, then she grew up and music took her away from here.

  That’s the problem, really: everything is about him, even when it’s about her. It’s a terrible thing for a grown man to have to admit to himself that not everything he did was actually for his child’s sake. Very little of it was, in actual fact.

  He was so proud of himself when he resigned from the club and started working for Kira. Before that, so many years had passed when the whole house would be asleep when he got home at night that it actually felt kind of cool now that Kira was the one who stayed late at the office and felt bad about it. Peter was the one who went home first, took Leo to his various activities and left a note on the kitchen table saying “your dinner’s in the fridge, love you” when he went to bed. He was the one who drove right across the country to Maya’s dorm room at her new college and helped her drill holes in the wall for bookshelves. They ended up a bit wonky, admittedly, but still. He was the one who was there, not her mother, and he was so pleased with himself when his daughter whispered: “Thanks Dad, what would I do without you?”

  The next time Peter visited, the shelves were straight. Maya had bought a drill and fixed them herself. Naturally she never told him because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and he coughed to clear the lump in his throat and pretended he hadn’t noticed. Our children never warn us that they’re thinking of growing up, one day they’re just too big to want to hold our hand, it’s just as well we never know when the last time is going to be or we’d never let go. They drive you mad when they’re little, yelling every time you leave the room, because you don’t realize at the time that whenever someone yells “Daddy!” that means you’re important. It’s hard to get used to not being important.

  Peter sacrificed hockey to become a better dad. But now his children no longer need a dad. He is no longer anything for anyone. The worst thing about leaving hockey was that it was only then that he realized that he’d never been anywhere near as good at anything else. He gave the game the best years of his life, and became one of the best in the world. He only played four NHL games and injured his foot in the fifth, the doctors might as well have ripped the lungs out of his body when they said he wouldn’t be able to play again, because he couldn’t breathe for several years, but he was there. Out of all the millions of hockey playing kids out there, he was the one who got to play with the best in the world. How many people get that far in anything?

  Then he came home and became general manager of his hometown club, he built up the whole youth program, turned the young guys’ achievements into his own. Now no one even calls and asks him for his opinion anymore. Nothing is as good at showing you what’s now in your past as hockey and children, they make you an old man so quickly.

  So what would he say to a psychologist? That he misses the emotions, even the disappointments, because no one stands up and cries out in either delight or frustration in an office? That now every day is like any other, the job is just a job, but hockey was an obsession for him, and a life without obsessions feels like sitting in a waiting room without any doors. No one’s going to call your name. You’re waiting for nothing.

  He gave that game his life, that was his mistake, he doesn’t need a psychologist to tell him that. He was looking the wrong way. He made the wrong children’s successes his own. By the time he resigned his job and left hockey, it was already too late, Maya and Leo could manage without him. Childhood goes so fast, if you get the opportunity and don’t take it, a thousand things can happen and then the chance is gone in the blink of an eye.

  One time he said, heavy with bitterness: “What can the sport give us? We devote our lives to it, and what’s the best we can hope for? A few moments… a few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are.” He received this reply: “So what the hell is life, Peter, other than moments?” Obviously he was talking to Ramona. The old crone doesn’t offer discounts on either beer or scolding.

  Sometimes he calls in at the Bearskin pub on the way home from work, the way his dad always did, but without getting as drunk as him. “That’s the way it is with the sons of dads who liked whiskey too much: you either drink all the time or not at all,” Ramona usually snorts as she pours scorched coffee into a beer glass for him. But on one occasion, when she had drunk twice as much breakfast as normal and happened to get a bit bogged down in emotions, she prodded him and grunted: “That’s the way it is with sons who had bad dads: you either become bad dads as well, or you end up really good. But the fact that your dad, who was such an unbelievably terrible dad, didn’t manage to turn you the slightest bit bad, that’s a total fucking mystery to me.”

  Peter just stared so hard at the counter that he could have drilled holes in it. She thought that was because he was thinking of all the times his dad came home from that very bar and tried to find reasons to beat his wife and child, so she shut up. Peter drank his coffee and felt more of a fraud than ever, because he wasn’t thinking about his dad at all, just about himself. And the sound of hockey pucks.

  One winter, when the family had only just moved back here, Maya hadn’t even started school at the time, a child, only a few years older, went missing in the forest when the temperature was way below freezing. It was a boy who had been playing in a kids’ game, and missed a shot in the final seconds. Like every other hockey player in Beartown he had already learned that nothing but perfection was good enough, so he was inconsolable and furious and that night he ran away from home. Everyone knew how quickly a small body can freeze to death in the darkness here, so the whole of Beartown was out looking for him. They found him down on the lake. He had dragged a goal and some pucks and all the flashlights he could find, and was standing out there shooting from the same angle from which he had missed the final shot of the game. He was sobbing with rage, and fought like a wounded animal with anyone who tried to get close, it wasn’t until Peter went over and grabbed his hands and hugged him that he calmed down. In those days everyone in the town looked up to the general manager who had been an NHL pro so much that he was like royalty to the boy. “I know you want to be the best, and I promise to do all I can to help you get there, but training’s finished for tonight,” Peter whispered in the boy’s ear. He was still sobbing when Peter picked him up and carried him home. In the years that followed Peter kept his promise: he led the club that helped Kevin Erdahl become the best player the town had ever seen, taught him that he was invincible, that he should never tolerate defeat. Or the word no. It was Peter who lifted him up into his arms down on the lake. It was Peter who carried the boy home.

  Ten years later Peter was sitting in a hospital with his fifteen-year-old daughter, whispering: “What can I do?” and she replied: “Love me.”

  So what could a psychologist say to him now? Nothing. He already knows that everything that happens to his children is his fault.

  * * *

  Everything.

  * * *

  “Maya?”

  Maya doesn’t hear, she’s busy with wine and hockey and the banging, from both the television and inside her. “We are the bears,” she grins to herself with intoxication’s inability to distinguish between what she’s thinking and what she’s actually singing out loud: “The Beeeears from Beeeartooown…” She thinks of how her mother used to say that “this damn place is a hockey town with alcohol problems for six months of the year, and an alcoholic town with hockey problems for the other six.” She misses them both, her mother and home. At least the way she remembers them, both of them. Things are different now.

  She thinks back to when she returned to Beartown in the summer and by chance happened to see one of those brochures that Tails, her dad’s childhood friend, had printed to attract new sponsors to the club. It was on the floor of the supermarket, dropped accidentally or discarded, she read the main heading several times: “It isn’t just easy to sponsor Beartown Hockey, it’s also the right thing to do!” Inside was a picture of Maya’s dad, and beside him a picture of a little girl from the kids’ program. Maya never told her dad she’d seen the brochure, but she understood exactly what the club was trying to achieve with it: now suddenly Beartown was her club, now that she was of some use to them. Now that there was money to be gained, suddenly they were the most enlightened and equal sports club in the whole country. She was actually supposed to have stayed in Beartown a couple more days back in the summer, but she threw away the brochure, changed her ticket, and left the following morning.

  “Maya?” the voice in the bar says again, followed immediately by another voice:

  “It IS you! Why haven’t you come up to the apartment? Why are you sitting here like some… alcoholic?”

  Surprised, Maya tears her eyes away from the hockey and stares at two of her classmates. They’re giggling nervously as if they’ve just looked at her computer and found some porn. Their hair is perfect even though they’re drunk, and she really hates them for that, they’ve just left the party to come and ask the bartender if they can buy some ice. Paying for ice, Maya thinks. What sort of planet has she actually moved to?

  “Are you… okay?” one of the classmates with perfect hair asks.

  “Yes, yes, I’m just tired, I needed to be on my own and think for a bit…,” Maya mumbles.

  “Think?” the other girl with even more perfect hair smiles, as if the word was incredibly exotic.

  The young men in the bar notice what’s going on, and one of them immediately blurts out in delight:

  “Girls! Do you know each other? Now we can have a party! And can you cheer up Grumpy over there?”

  Maya’s classmates roll their eyes at them but Maya doesn’t even hear them. She’s turned the volume of the television up again.

  “Maya, come back to the party with us now, we…,” the girls start to say, but Maya hushes them.

  “Just wait… I said WAIT!”

  The commentator on television is talking about which training matches due to be played tonight have been postponed. “Because of the storm,” he says, then lists club after club in towns up in the north, and Maya taps her forehead in an effort to make sense of the geographic references. Beartown lies at the center of all the places he mentions. She pulls out her phone and checks the newsfeed and her fingers start to shake when she sees the weather report: “Storm warning!” That was why Ana didn’t answer. Maya’s been sitting here feeling sorry for herself and back home the whole world is being blown apart?

  “Look, are you coming or what? To the party?” one of her classmates asks impatiently.

  “I don’t get it, you’re sitting here watching… hockey? I mean… is that ironic? I didn’t think you liked stuff like that!” the other girl says.

  One of the young men cheers when he hears that, and jumps down from his barstool. His scarf gets caught and almost strangles him, but in the middle of an involuntary full-body spin he manages to say:

  “Exactly what I said! What sort of girl even likes hockey? Huh? It’s not a sport, it’s just VIOLENCE!”

  “It really is!” Maya’s classmate agrees.

  Maya hears what they say this time but doesn’t respond, she just stares at her phone. “Storm could be the region’s worst natural disaster since the forest fires,” she reads on the website of her hometown’s local newspaper and it feels like she’s in a different country. The wine sloshes around in her head like a broken spirit level when she tries to stand up, far too quickly, she takes two swaying steps and almost loses her balance. The young man snatches up his scarf and holds out his hand to catch her, but she manages to find her footing and bats him away with such force that he jumps back, sadly not fast enough. Because she’s already so furious that she instinctively takes a step forward and shoves him in the chest, sending him flying into the stools behind him. Her classmates stammer her name, they make tentative moves to touch her, but when they see the black look in her eyes they shrink back and retreat.