Ana and Maya can feel their heartbeats pulsing in their necks. They haven’t considered Benji an enemy; he was one of the few who stayed in Beartown when Kevin and all the others went off to Hed Hockey. But if Ana and Maya have learned anything, it’s that loyalty around here can switch in an instant, and that they can never trust that a man won’t try to hurt them.
But Benji stops a few yards away with the hammer swinging gently in his hand. He seems to be waiting for them to react. He’s always been muscular, but this summer has given his body something else, an aura of cruelty. Ana didn’t bring her rifle with her; she regrets that now. She’s seen Benji play hockey; she knows that what makes him better and more dangerous than the others is that he’s unpredictable. On the occasions when it has gone wrong and he hurt someone, no one ever saw it coming in advance.
But his upper body is barely moving now. When he finally opens his lips, the words come quietly and jerkily from a larynx that sounds as though it hasn’t been used in weeks. He drops the hammer in front of Ana’s feet with a dull thud and says, “You’ll need this. I’ve got something. For you.”
It will take a long time for the young women to realize that he had the hammer with him because he knew Ana and Maya would need to be armed before they dared go with him. It can be an unbearable sorrow for someone to know that he’s regarded as such a wild animal in other people’s eyes.
* * *
The men in black jackets stop inside the door, accustomed to their presence alone being enough to suddenly remind a stranger that he’s left his clothes in a machine at the laundromat or has to give blood at a medical center three or four hundred miles away. Over the next few months the stranger will realize that there are plenty of stories about the people who usually drink in the Bearskin, just not many people who are prepared to tell them. They have no symbols, no website; when it’s game day in Beartown, there’s no way to tell them apart from other men on their way to the rink. But the stranger will learn that “the Pack” make sure that no one runs their hockey club without their blessing or curse, and you don’t notice how many of them there are until they’ve become your enemies. The stranger seems either too smart or too crazy to care.
“Are you a journalist?” Ramona asks.
She isn’t sure if the stranger simply chooses to ignore her aggressive tone or has some sort of condition that prevents it registering. So she adds, “We’ve had a few journalists here before you with ‘questions,’ and they always go home with them unanswered. But they usually end up getting better home insurance.”
The direct threat seems to fly straight over the stranger’s untidy hair; who calmly spins around on the barstool and looks at the decor, the walls covered with photographs and pennants and jerseys.
“I don’t suppose you serve lunch here?”
The men by the door don’t know if this is a veiled insult or a polite question. But Ramona suddenly starts to laugh. She makes a slight gesture, and the men disappear through the door.
“You’re no journalist,” she declares to the stranger with her head slightly tilted.
Then her tone shifts quickly to one of displeasure again. “So what the hell are you doing in Beartown?”
The stranger’s hands settle neatly on the bar. “I thought I might start by eating lunch.”
* * *
Kira calls Peter again but gets no answer. Seriously? She’s had a feeling that something like this would happen, that the council would find a way to turn against Peter. He’s a romantic, but Kira’s a lawyer, and she figured out a while back that the easiest way for the council to bury the scandal would be to bury the club.
The whole of the Andersson family, Peter and Maya and Leo and she herself, agreed at the start of the summer that they were going to stay in Beartown. Stay and fight. But she is no longer feeling so sure. How long can you stay in a place that keeps trying to reject you like a hostile virus? And if Peter doesn’t even have a club here anymore, what have they got left?
Her colleague is back, sitting quietly on the other side of the desk, but of course Kira can remember all the things she’s said about Peter. “He’s an addict, Kira. You might think addicts always drink or take drugs or gamble on the horses, but your husband hasn’t got a problem with alcohol or gambling. He’s got a problem with competitiveness. He can’t stop trying to win. He can’t live without that rush.”
How many times has Kira lain awake wondering if that’s true? She calls again, again, again. Eventually Peter answers. Angry, even if that isn’t audible in his voice. Only to her. The tiniest little change in the way he says her name. She whispers, “I’ve been trying to call, darling, I . . . heard what happened . . .”
He doesn’t reply. So she asks, “Where are you?”
And then it comes: “In the office, Kira. I’m in a meeting. Let’s talk later.”
She can hear from the noises in the background that he’s in the car. He always used to do that when he lost games as a player: get into the car and drive for hours. He never used violence against anyone else, only himself. So he would drive out into the darkness without considering that there was someone sitting at home waiting for him, someone who was terrified that this would be the evening when the phone rang and it wasn’t his voice at the other end. That a police officer’s voice would ask, “Are you Peter Andersson’s wife?,” and she would hear the voice take a deep, sympathetic breath when she whispered “Yes.”
“I don’t know what to say, darling. I’m so very sorry,” Kira says now.
“There’s nothing to say,” he replies bluntly.
She hears the background noise, wonders how fast he’s driving. “We need to talk about it . . .”
“There’s nothing to say. They won. They wanted to kill the club, and they found a way to win.”
She takes a cautious breath, the way she always does, as if she’s done something wrong. “I . . . maybe . . . I know it feels like the end of the world right now, but—”
“Don’t start, Kira.”
“What do you mean, ‘Don’t start’?”
“You know what I mean!”
“I’m just saying that this could finally be a chance for us to talk about doing something . . . else.”
How many times has she asked him that? “When does hockey stop?” How many times has he said “Next year”? Next year he’ll cut back, next year he’ll work less, next year it will be her turn to really focus on her career. She’s been waiting twenty years for next year. But something always happens that makes him indispensible, a crisis that makes him essential and her selfish for demanding something so unreasonable as normal office hours, as his actually coming home.
He flares up now. It probably isn’t intentional. “What am I supposed to do, Kira? Become a house husband or what?”
So she gets defensive. That probably isn’t intentional either. “Stop taking your frustration out on me! I’m just saying that perhaps there’s . . .”
“There’s what, Kira? This club is my whole life!”
Peter can hear nothing but the sound of her breathing. She bites her cheek to stop herself screaming. He tries to calm down and apologize but is suffocated by everything else he’s feeling, and the only thing that comes out is “You know what I mean . . .”
How many years has she given it? They moved to Canada for his hockey career, they moved to Beartown for his hockey career, how many times has she thought that he of all people ought to understand her? All hockey players are driven by the need to find out how good they can become, but the same thing applies to lawyers. After they moved to Beartown she drank too much wine one evening and blurted out the truth: “Living here basically means accepting never reaching your full potential.” Peter thought she was talking about him, so he felt hurt. He felt hurt.
“You know what I mean!” he repeats now, and yes, she knows exactly.
And that’s the problem. Hockey is his whole life, so she hangs up.