“Do you feel like doing something? We could drive to Hed and go for a coffee,” Kira suggests, with all the training in rejection of a mother of teenagers, so her heart skips a beat when her daughter unexpectedly replies, “Okay.”
They drink coffee. They talk. They even laugh, as if this were all normal, and of course Kira is the one who spoils it. Because she can’t help asking “How are you getting on with . . . counseling? Or with the psychologist? I don’t know the difference, but . . . I know you don’t want to talk to your dad and me, but I just want you to know that you . . . that you can if you want.”
Maya stirs her coffee. Clockwise, anticlockwise, in turn. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m feeling good.”
Kira dearly wants to believe that. She tries to keep her voice steady. “Your dad and I have been talking. I’m going to cut my hours for a while, so I can be home a bit more . . .”
“What for?” Maya blurts out.
Kira looks confused. “I thought you’d be pleased! If I’m . . . home more?”
“Why would I be pleased?” Maya wonders.
Kira squirms. “I haven’t been a good mother, darling. I’ve been so focused on my career. I should have spent more time with you and Leo. Now your dad has to focus all his effort on the club for a while, so—”
“Dad’s always focused all his effort on the club!” Maya interrupts.
Kira blinks. “I don’t want you to remember me as an absentee mom. Especially not now. I want you to feel that you’ve got a . . . normal mom.”
Maya puts her spoon down at that. Leans across the table. “Stop it, Mom. You know, I’m so damn proud of your career! Everyone else had a normal mom, but I had a role model. All the other moms have to say to their kids that they can be whatever they want when they’re older, but you don’t have to say that, because you’re demonstrating it every day.”
“Darling, I—” Kira begins, but her voice breaks.
Maya wipes her tears and whispers, “Mom. You taught me that I don’t have to have dreams. I can have goals.”
* * *
Perhaps William Lyt doesn’t want to hurt anyone. There’s a particular type of person who enjoys harming other people, but it isn’t clear if he’s one of them. One day he might wonder about that himself, how we end up the way we do. Unless he becomes the kind of person who goes through his whole life surrounded by excuses for violence: “You shouldn’t have provoked him.” “You know how he gets.” “You were asking for it.”
His friends are with him, but he doesn’t have their unconditional support. They’re not with him out of love or admiration, the way they followed Kevin and Benji; they’re just going along with him because he’s strong. So he needs to crush everyone who challenges him, because a lack of respect is like sparks in a summer forest: if you don’t trample them out at once, the fire spreads until you find yourself surrounded.
His guys stand at the ends of the tunnel. William goes in. It didn’t need to get out of hand, because William starts by saying “Not so tough now, are you?”
If Leo had looked frightened, it could have stopped there. If the twelve-year-old had just had the sense to tremble and sink to his knees and beg William for mercy. But it isn’t William who sees fear in Leo’s eyes, it’s Leo who sees it in William’s. So the twelve-year-old says mockingly, “How tough are you, little Willie? You wouldn’t even dare fight Benji! Are you going to wear a diaper when you play Beartown or what?”
Leo may not really know why he says this. Unless he doesn’t care. The girl tricked him; he’s going to carry a lump of black fury in his gut forever to remind him of how he felt when she ran and he realized that they’d planned this and how they must have laughed when they did. And there’s something about violence, about adrenaline, about the different frequencies in some people’s hearts.
Leo takes something out of his pocket and throws it onto the ground in front of William Lyt. A cigarette lighter. William lashes out instantly, and his fist hits Leo’s face as hard as a block of wood. Leo collapses and rolls around on all fours to keep the blood out of his eyes. He knows there’s no way he can fight William and win. But there are many ways to avoid defeat. He sees that William has tears of rage in his eyes as he gets ready to kick him. He manages to dart out of the way in time, and in the same movement he kicks out as hard as he can and hits William in the crotch. Then he gets to his feet and hits as hard as he can.
That might have been enough if he’d been bigger and heavier and William smaller and lighter. But Leo’s punches are weak, half of them miss, and William merely sways. The boys at the ends of the tunnel stand motionless. William’s fingers grab hold of Leo’s top and close like a claw. Then the eighteen-year-old head butts the twelve-year-old in the nose. Blinded, Leo falls to the ground. And then? Dear God.
* * *
Then William Lyt doesn’t stop stamping.
* * *
Mother’s Song
You asked “Am I a good mother?,” always the same, the same . . .
. . . answer that you were seeking, when you should have known that
You were the strength inside
You were all that I could become
You taught me the value of “sorry,” but the only time you retreated was when you were taking aim
You taught me the humility of tears but never let me apologize for existing
You didn’t dress me up in fragile garments, you gave me armor
You taught me that daughters don’t have to have dreams—we can have goals.
* * *
The boys at the ends of the tunnel stand silent. Perhaps some of them feel they should intervene, call out that that’s enough, that the kid’s only twelve, for God’s sake. But it’s easy to become desensitized; you can see something happen right in front of you without it having any greater effect than if you were seeing it in a film. Perhaps you have time to feel scared, think, “Good thing it isn’t me,” unless you’re so shocked that you feel paralyzed.
* * *
Could William have killed Leo in that tunnel? No one knows. Because someone stops him.
* * *
Jeanette, the teacher, has lots of little bad habits that she does her best to hide from both the pupils and the other staff in the school. She cracks her knuckles when she’s nervous; she started doing that when she played on Hed Hockey’s girls’ team. When she got older, she took up boxing, then martial arts, and she has plenty of strange habits left from those days. She stretches when she feels restless, warms up before classes each morning as if she were preparing for a game. For a while she was good, really good. Maybe she could even have become the best. For a single wonderful year she was a professional fighter, but hardly anyone in this town knows that because she got injured and things went the way they always do: either you’re the best, or you’re everyone else. She studied to become a teacher, lost the fire in her heart, the killer instinct. She had a coach who told her, “Jeanette, you have to want to go into the ring and crush another girl’s dream, because if you don’t, you’ve no business being here.” That may have been true, she wishes it weren’t, but perhaps sport really is precisely that merciless.
She doesn’t miss the pressure and stress, just the adrenaline. There’s nothing in normal life that can replace it, that life-affirming fear when she climbed into the ring and there was just her and her opponent. You against me. Right here, right now.
She tries to find other ways of getting kicks. Working as a teacher often feels hopeless, but every now and then there are tiny, shimmering moments that make the long hours and humiliating wages worthwhile, when she manages to get through to someone. Maybe even save something. There aren’t many jobs that give you the chance to do that.