If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have start by asking how they fell in love. Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something. Just time. All adults know, deep down, that hockey is make-believe, an invented game, but when you’re five years old your heart is fairly small. So you have to love with all of it at once.
Peter Andersson’s mom was ill, and his dad used to get so drunk that he would shout as if his son didn’t have ears and would hit him as if they were complete strangers. Peter grew up with a head full of voices whispering that he was no good at anything, and the first time they fell silent was when he pulled on a pair of skates. You can’t give a boy what he found in hockey classes and then take it away without there being consequences. Summer came, the rink closed, but five-year-old Peter marched around to the home of the A-team coach and banged on the door. “When does hockey start?” he demanded to know.
Sune, the A-team coach smiled. “In the autumn.” He was already an old man, and his stomach was so round that he could talk only in circular arguments. “How long is it until then?” the five-year-old asked. “Till the autumn?” The coach grunted. “I can’t tell time,” the five-year-old said. “It’s several months,” the coach muttered. “Can I wait here?” the five-year-old asked. “Until autumn?” the coach exclaimed. “Is that a long time?” the five-year-old asked. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.
Sune never asked about the bruises, the five-year-old never talked about them, but every blow he received at home was visible in his eyes the first time he learned to shoot a puck in the coach’s small garden. The coach was aware that hockey can’t change a child’s life, but it can offer a different one. A way out and up.
Sune taught Peter what a club is. It’s not something you blame nor something you demand things of. “Because it’s us, Peter, Beartown Ice Hockey is you and me. The best and worst things it achieves demonstrate the best and worst sides of us.” He taught Peter other things, too, such as standing tall both when you win and when you lose, and that the most talented players have a duty to elevate the weakest because “a great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”
That first evening, Sune walked home with the five-year-old. They stopped a few hundred feet from the boy’s house, and the coach said that if the boy came around the next day, he could carry on shooting practice. “You promise?” the boy asked. Sune held out his hand and said, “I promise. And you have to keep promises, don’t you?” The boy shook his hand and nodded. Then the old man sat down on a bench with the boy and taught him how to tell time, so he could count the minutes until tomorrow.
Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something, just time. Young Peter Andersson dreamed about the same thing every night for several years, the sound of a puck leaving a stick and flying into the side of a house:
* * *
Bang.
* * *
Benji Ovich’s mother hardly ever talks about his father, but on the rare occasions when it does happen, she always closes her eyes and whispers, “Some people are just like that. If there isn’t a war, they start one.”
Benji has been told that he resembles him, his father, but he doesn’t know how. Maybe more inside than out. He knows his dad was in pain, so much pain that one day he couldn’t bear it any longer. Hunters in these parts never use the word “suicide,” they just say, “Alain took his rifle and went into the woods.” Benji has always wondered if he had been planning it for a long time or if he just suddenly did it. He wonders the same thing when he sees pictures of lonely men who have done terrible things on the news: Why that day in particular? Why not another day? Did you make a choice, or did it just happen?
Benji knows that grief and anger can reprogram a brain like chemicals and drugs do. Maybe there’s a time bomb inside some people’s heads the whole time, just waiting for a switch to be thrown. Maybe his mom’s right, some people are just the sort who start wars.
From the tree he sees Maya and Ana come through the forest. He will never be able to explain what happened to him then; it was just an instinct being awakened. Something gets switched off, something else gets switched on. He climbs down and picks his backpack off the ground, takes something from it, and holds it in his hand as he starts to move through the trees.
* * *
Stalking them.
* * *
Maya and Ana are walking aimlessly through the forest, slower and slower the farther they get. They’re not talking; they already know everything each other might want to say anyway. They’ve always known that Beartown isn’t an easy place to grow up in if you’re different, and one of the worst things about becoming an adult is starting to realize that perhaps nowhere is. There are bastards everywhere.
The two young women have never really had much in common, the princess and the child of nature, the musician and the hunter. The first time they met was when Ana pulled Maya out of a hole in the ice when they were children. Maya had only just moved here at the time, and Ana had never had a friend, so they had saved each other’s lives. Ana used to tease Maya for never being able to walk quietly in the forest, saying she moved like an elk in high heels. Maya used to joke that Ana was the way she was because Ana’s mom had had an affair with a squirrel.
She stopped saying that when Ana’s mom moved away. In return Ana stopped teasing Maya about being dependent on decent Wi-Fi. For a few years they were equals, but teenage years always change the balance of power in friendships between girls. When they started high school, Ana’s knowledge of how to survive in the forest wasn’t worth anything, whereas Maya knew how to survive in the school corridors. But this summer? They’re not safe anywhere now.
Ana is walking ahead, and Maya is following, looking at her hair. She often thinks that Ana is simultaneously the strongest and weakest person she knows. Ana’s dad is drinking again; it’s no one’s fault, that’s just the way it is. Maya wishes she could take the pain away from Ana, but she can no more do that than Ana can take the rape away from Maya. They’re falling into different chasms. Maya has her nightmares, and Ana has her own reasons for not being able to sleep. She sleeps with the dogs on the nights her dad comes home late and rages about in the kitchen like a monster made up of sorrow and unspoken words. The dogs lie in a protective circle around Ana without her asking them. Beloved creatures. Her dad has never, not so much as once, raised his hand against his daughter. But she’s still frightened of him when he’s been drinking. Men don’t know their own weight, they don’t understand the physical terror they can instil in another person simply by tumbling through a door. They’re hurricanes tearing through a forest of saplings as they get up drunkenly from the kitchen table and stumble from room to room without being aware of what they’re trampling on. The next morning they don’t remember anything; the empty bottles have been cleared away and the glasses washed in secret, and the house is silent. No one says anything. They must never see the destruction they’ve left behind them in their children.
Ana stops and turns around. Maya looks at her and smiles weakly. “God, I love you so much,” she thinks, and Ana knows. So she asks, “Forced to have an operation to have a pig’s snout or one to have a pig’s arse?”
Maya laughs loudly. This is their game, has been ever since they were little. Either-or. “Snout. That curly tail would be way too lumpy to sit on when I’m playing guitar.”
“You’re so stupid!”