When she and Ana were younger, they used to count butterflies all summer. It’s different now, Maya counts them in a different way. She knows they die when the leaves fall.
Anxiety. It’s such a peculiar thing. Almost everyone knows what it feels like, yet none of us can describe it. Maya looks at herself in the mirror, wonders why it can’t be seen on the outside. Not even on X-rays—how does that work? How can something that bangs away at us so horribly hard on the inside not show up on the pictures as black scars, scorched into our skeletons? How can the pain she feels not be visible in the mirror? She’s become so good at pretending. Goes to school, sits in classes, does her homework. She plays her guitar, perhaps that helps, unless she’s just imagining that. Perhaps her fingers just need to be kept busy. She’s looked into the books her dad reads about “mental coaching,” and they talk about the brain having to steer the body but that sometimes the reverse is the only way to survive. She’s seen depressed adults do the same thing: keep moving, exercising, and cleaning and renovating their summer cottages, finding things that force them to get up in the morning: plants to be watered, errands to be run, anything so they don’t have time to think about how they feel. As if we hope that physical activity, tiny everyday rituals, might lull the anxiety to sleep.
Maya has learned to master her own skin, not let it burst with the fire that’s burning inside her. She imagines that if she can just fool everyone else, she might eventually be able to fool herself. But the slightest little thing can set her back: a lamp that looks like the one Kevin had in the corner of his bedroom or the brief creak of a floorboard that sounds like someone finally coming up the stairs in his parents’ house after she had spent a lifetime screaming. She can go for weeks where everything is okay, then suddenly there’s a noise or a smell and she’s back there again. On his bed. With his hand around her neck and his overwhelming force pressing against her mouth.
The boy in the cafeteria line just brushed against her; it meant nothing to him but flared like fire for her. She held the panic attack inside her like a bomb.
* * *
When people talk about rape, they always do so in the past tense. She “was.” She “suffered.” She “went through.”
* * *
But she didn’t go through it, she’s still going through it. She wasn’t raped, she’s still being raped. For Kevin it lasted a matter of minutes, but for her it never ends. It feels as though she’s going to dream about that running track every night of her life. And she kills him there, every time. And wakes up with her nails dug into her hands and a scream in her mouth.
* * *
Anxiety. It’s an invisible ruler.
* * *
The police station in Hed is overloaded and understaffed, like every other small-town police station. It’s easy to make fun of delayed response times and never-ending investigations, as if the staff were doing it on purpose. But the police officers aren’t all that dissimilar to any other professional group around here: if you give them the time and opportunity to do their job, they’ll do it. Give them a group of hockey fans dressed in red who show up battered and bruised at the hospital, and they’ll ask the right questions. Give them a forest they know, and eventually they’ll find something in it.
“Over here!” one of them calls after they’ve spent over an hour fine-combing the clearing where they’ve figured out that the fight took place.
He tosses something to one of his colleague.
* * *
A shoe. Just the right size to fit a twelve-year-old.
* * *
Leo is sitting on the steps in front of the house. Maya looks surprised. “Why are you sitting here?”
“I’ve lost my keys,” he mumbles.
Maya peers at him suspiciously. Notices that he’s wearing a tatty old pair of shoes. “Where are your new shoes?”
“I’ve gone off them,” her brother lies.
“You nagged Mom for months to get them for you!”
Maya is expecting her brother to give as good as he gets, but he just sits there staring down at the ground. His face is swollen, he’s got a black eye, he has been telling everyone he got hit in the face by a ball in PE, but no one saw it happen. And Maya heard whispering at school today about a black jacket hanging on his locker.
“Are you . . . okay?” she asks cautiously.
He nods. “Don’t tell Mom I’ve lost my keys,” he begs.
“I’m not going to tell on you,” she whispers.
They’ve done a lot of mean things to each other, but they’ve never told on each other. She was the one who taught him that, one night when she was twelve and had been to her first big party and came home later than she’d said she would but didn’t get found out by her parents because she knocked on Leo’s window and climbed into the house that way. “We don’t tell on each other,” she told her sleepy little brother back then, and he was smart enough to realize that one day he’d benefit from the agreement.
* * *
Late that evening, a policeman is standing at the door. Peter knows him, his son used to play hockey in the same group as Leo. Perhaps that’s why the policeman’s words are tinged with regret when he says, “Sorry to bother you this late, Peter, but we’ve had some trouble in the forest outside Hed, a fight. Several people seriously injured. The Pack was involved.”
Peter leaps to the wrong conclusion. “You know very well that the club has nothing to do with the Pack, if you’re—”
The policeman cuts him off by handing over a shoe. “We found this at the site of the fight.”
Peter takes his son’s shoe and holds it in his trembling hand. When did he last hold a shoe his son had lost? When Leo was two years old? Three? How did his feet get this big?
The policeman says regretfully, “I wouldn’t have known whose they were if my son hadn’t been nagging me for weeks about wanting a pair exactly like that. I told him they were too expensive for a twelve-year-old, and he yelled at me and told me I was stupid because apparently ‘everyone’s got them!’ I asked him to name one person, and he said Leo.”
Peter tries to keep his voice steady. They really were far too expensive for a twelve-year-old. Kira and Peter got them for Leo back in the summer only because they felt guilty about . . . everything.
“I . . . they’re just ordinary shoes . . . there must be loads of twelve-year-olds who—”
The policeman holds out something else. A small key ring. “We found these as well. If you were to close the door in my face, I have a feeling I’d be able to open it again.”
Peter doesn’t make any more objections. He takes the keys. Nods silently.
“Leo will have to come to the station for questioning,” the policeman says.
“He’s only twelve . . .” Peter manages to say.
The policeman feels for him but doesn’t back down. “Peter, this is serious. The guys from Hed had fought the Pack before, but this was different. Three of them are still in hospital with serious injuries. They’re going to get revenge, and then the Pack will get revenge. This isn’t a game. Sooner or later someone’s going to get killed.”
Peter clutches the shoe and keys unconsciously to his chest. “I . . . Leo’s only . . . can I at least drive him to the police station myself?”
The policeman nods. “Your wife’s a lawyer, isn’t she?”
Peter understands what he means. It frightens the life out of him. Once the patrol car has driven off, Peter doesn’t open the door to his son’s room. He kicks it open.
* * *
A moment later father and son are standing face-to-face shouting at each other, but they’ve never been farther apart.
* * *