“What presents?”
The children go into defense mode, as if they’ve been accused of theft: “The presents on Uncle Benji’s bed! They had our names on them, Mom! They were for us!”
The doorbell rings. Gaby doesn’t walk to answer it. She runs.
* * *
Adri, the oldest sister, opens the door. Amat, Benji’s teammate, is standing outside. The boy doesn’t get worried until he sees how worried Adri gets, but she realizes everything all at once.
“Is Benji home?” Amat asks, although he already knows the answer.
“Shit!” Adri replies.
Gaby comes rushing out into the hall, yelling, “Benji left presents for the children!”
Amat clears his throat nervously: “He wasn’t at practice. I just wanted to check that he was okay!”
He calls the last words after Adri. She’s already run past him, heading toward the forest.
* * *
Benji occasionally skips practices, but never the first of the season. His feet are too desperate to get back onto the ice, his hands miss his stick, his brain the flight across the rink. He wouldn’t miss the chance to play today, not when Beartown is playing Hed in the first round of games. Something’s wrong.
* * *
Ramona is standing behind her counter, the way she always has, with as little emotional disturbance as possible. She’s seen this town blossom, but in recent years she’s also seen it take a beating. People in Beartown know how to work, but they need somewhere to do it. They know how to fight, but they need something to fight for.
The only thing you can rely on in all towns, big and small alike, is that there will be broken people. It’s nothing to do with the place, just life; it can beat us up. And if that happens, it’s easy to find your way to a pub; bars can quickly become sad places. Someone who has nowhere else to go can grasp a glass a little too tightly; someone who’s tired of falling can take refuge in the bottom of a bottle, seeing as you can’t fall much further from there.
Ramona has seen fragile souls come and go here; some have moved on, and some have gone under. Things have gone well for some of them, and some—like Alain Ovich—have gone off into the forest.
Ramona is old enough neither to jump with joy when things are going well nor to bury herself when things are going badly, and she’s knows how easy it is to have unrealistic expectations of a hockey team in an autumn like the one they’re facing now. Because sports isn’t reality, and when reality is hell we need stories, because they make us feel that if we can just be best at one thing, perhaps everything else will turn and start to go our way, too.
* * *
But Ramona really can’t say. Can things ever turn around? Or do we just get used to them?
* * *
The last thing Alain Ovich did before he took his rifle and went out into the forest was to leave presents for his children on their beds. No one knows why someone would get it into his head to do a thing like that, but perhaps he was hoping that that was how they’d remember him. That he could go far enough into the forest for them to believe he had just abandoned them, so that they could fantasize that he was a secret agent who had been called away on a top secret mission or an astronaut who had gone up into space. Perhaps he hoped they would have a childhood, in spite of everything.
It didn’t turn out that way. Adri, his eldest, will never be able to explain how she knew where he was. She just had a feeling about where he’d gone. Maybe that’s why dogs like her, because she has a heightened sensitivity to things that normal people lack. She didn’t shout “Dad!” as she moved through the trees; the children of hunters don’t do that, they learn that every man in the forest tends to be someone’s dad, so if you want to get hold of yours you have to shout his name as if you were just anyone. Adri never became just anyone, not entirely; she was born with something of Alain in her. He could never go far enough into the forest for her not to be able to find him.
* * *
A pub can be a gloomy place, because, taken as a whole, life always gives us more opportunities for grief than celebration, more funeral drinks than wedding toasts. But Ramona knows that a pub can be other things, too, from time to time: small cracks in the blocks of stone you carry in your chest. It doesn’t always have to be the best place on Earth, it just doesn’t always need to be the worst.
The past few weeks have been full of rumors. It’s said that the factory is going to be sold, and Beartown has been through enough setbacks to know that this could just as easily mean bankruptcy. It’s easy to call that attitude cynical, but cynicism is simply a chemical reaction to too much disappointment. The young men in the Bearskin aren’t the only people talking about unemployment; everyone is worried now. In a small community the loss of any employer is a natural disaster, everyone knows someone who’s affected, until eventually it spreads to you.
And it might be easy to call the inhabitants paranoid when they keep saying that the politicians focus all their resources on Hed and don’t give a damn if Beartown even survives another generation, but the worst thing about paranoia is that the only way to prove you’re not paranoid is to be proved right.
* * *
Some children never quite manage to escape their parents; they’re guided by their compass, see through their eyes. When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over.
Adri was a child, but she took the rifle from her father and sat on a stump holding his hand in hers. Perhaps it was shock, unless she was consciously saying good-bye, both to him and to herself. She became someone different after that. When she stood up and walked back through the forest to Beartown, she didn’t scream for help in panic; she walked purposefully to the homes of the best and strongest hunters, so that they could help her carry the body. When her mother collapsed screaming in the hall, Adri caught her, because the girl had already done her crying. She was ready to be the rock. Has been ever since.
Katia and Gaby were their mother’s children, but Adri and Benji were their father’s. Causes of conflict, finders of war. So every time Adri has set off into the forest to look for her little brother since then, she knows she’s going to find him, as if he had magnets under his skin. That’s not what she’s scared of. She scared he’s going to be dead, every time. Younger brothers never know what they put their big sisters through. Anxiety hidden behind eyes, words hidden behind other words, keys to gun cabinets hidden under pillows at night.
* * *
Benji isn’t sitting in a tree. He’s lying on the ground.
* * *
Elisabeth Zackell walks into the Bearskin. It’s long past dinnertime, but she takes a seat in one corner and Ramona takes her a large plate of potatoes without her having to ask.
“Thanks,” the coach says.
“I don’t know what vegetariables like you eat, apart from potatoes. But there are mushrooms in the forests around here. They’ll soon be in season!” Ramona replies.
Zackell looks up. Ramona nods sternly. The bar owner isn’t big on emotions, either, but this is her way of saying she hopes the hockey coach is going to stick around for a while.
* * *
Benji’s body is still, his eyes open but his gaze far away. Adri can still remember how her dad’s hand felt when she sat there on the stump as a child. How cold it was, how still without the pulse running through it.
Carefully, gently, without making any noise at all, the big sister lies down on the ground beside her little brother. Her hand on his, just to feel the heat and heartbeat within.
“You’ll be the death of me. Don’t you dare lie on the ground when I’m looking for you, you stupid pea brain!” she whispers.