Every night recently Ana has dreamed that she’s being suffocated in a coffin, someone is sitting on the lid so she can’t open it, and no matter how hard she bangs, no one hears her. She hasn’t told her best friend, because Maya seems to be getting a bit better and Ana doesn’t want to upset her. She doesn’t say anything about the text messages, either, because Maya doesn’t seem to be getting them anymore and Ana doesn’t want to remind her of how horrible they are. Ping, ping. Pictures of boys’ dicks. Sometimes worse. She can’t imagine what kind of sick satisfaction they get from doing it or if they even think of her as human. Maybe she’s just an animal. A product to consume.
This isn’t what Ana thought life as a teenager would be like. Adults say you should enjoy being sixteen, that it’s the best time of your life. Not for Ana. She loved her childhood, when her best friend was happy and her dad was an untouchable hero she could worship. When Ana was little, four or five years old, two men on snowmobiles disappeared in a winter storm north of the town. The emergency services called the best local hunters, people who knew the terrain, and Ana’s dad packed his things and set off in the middle of the night. Ana stood in the doorway, begging him to stay. She’d heard about the storm on the radio, and she was old enough to know that dads didn’t always come home from things like that. But her dad crouched down, took her head in his hands, and whispered, “We’re not the type who let other people down, you and me.”
One of the lost men froze to death, but the other one survived. It was Ana’s dad who found him. A couple of winters later, when Ana had just turned six, she was playing down by the lake just after dusk when she heard a cry. A child the same age as her was in the water, already chilled through. All the children of Beartown know how to move across the ice to help someone who’s fallen through, but that doesn’t mean all the children would dare to do it alone in the dark. Ana didn’t hesitate for an instant.
Her dad has done a lot of stupid shit in his time, but he raised a daughter who saved the life of someone else’s daughter. When she got home, she was wet through and chilled and her lips were blue, but when her mom cried in horror, “What on earth’s happened?” the little girl just beamed and said, “I’ve found a best friend!”
Her mom left them a few years later. She couldn’t bear the forest and darkness and silence. Ana stayed. She and her dad played cards and told each other jokes, and sometimes when he was in a really good mood, he used to make her jump. He was brilliant at that; he could stand behind a door in a darkened room hiding just so he could jump out with a yell, making Ana shriek and laugh until she was breathless.
She always loved him, even when he was sad. Perhaps he always was, deep down. Ana doesn’t know if he got sad when her mom left or if her mom left because he was already sad. Some people just have a core of sadness. He would sit alone in the kitchen, drinking and crying, and Ana felt sorry for him because it must be a terrible thing: being able to cry only when you’re drunk.
She tends to think that she’s got two dads, one good and one bad, and she made up her mind that it was her job to make sure that when her bad dad took himself out in the evening, he wouldn’t damage his body so much that her good dad couldn’t use it the next morning.
She finds him around the back of the Bearskin now; he’s leaning against a wall, asleep. For a few terrible moments Ana can’t find his pulse and is overwhelmed by panic. She slaps his cheeks with the palm of her hand until he suddenly splutters and opens his eyes. When he catches sight of her, he slurs, “Ana?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Di . . . did . . . did I scare you?”
She tries to smile. He falls asleep again. It takes all the sixteen-year-old daughter’s strength to lift his top half so she can pull off the vomit-covered shirt and put a clean one on him. Most people probably wouldn’t have bothered, but Ana knows her good dad is in there somewhere. The dad who read her stories after her mom left them and knows there are other lullabies than whisky. She wants that dad to wake up in a clean shirt tomorrow morning. She puts her arm around his shoulder and pleads with him to stand up.
“We’re going home now, Dad.”
“Ana . . . ?” he slurs.
“Yes. It’s okay, Dad. You’re just having a bad evening. Things will be better tomorrow.”
He sniffs. “Sorry.”
That’s the worst thing. Daughters have no defense against that word. He stumbles, and she stumbles, too.
* * *
But someone catches her.
* * *
Kira’s voice echoes through the whole police station. How can you draw a dividing line between the lawyer and the mother when the boy is twelve years old? She didn’t yell at Leo in the car on the way here, because Peter has already done enough yelling for both of them. For everyone. So she’s yelling now instead, venting all her anger and powerlessness on the police officers.
Peter is sitting slumped in a room next to Leo. His son is sitting straight-backed, confrontational, while his dad is shrunken, drained of life and energy. When did he last yell at Leo? Several years ago? Peter’s dad used to fight, and Ramona at the Bearskin once told Peter that “fathers and violence are like fathers and drink—either the sons fight and drink even worse, or you don’t do it at all.” Once Peter tried to explain something similar to Leo: “I don’t believe in violence, Leo, because my dad used to hit me if I so much as spilled a bit of milk. That didn’t teach me not to spill milk, it just made me afraid of milk.” He doesn’t know if Leo understood. He doesn’t know what to say anymore. He’s called his son some terrible things this evening, but Leo doesn’t seem remotely bothered. He soaked up his parents’ scolding without blinking, and when the police ask the boy their questions his father shudders, shivering as if the windows were open. That’s the moment he realizes he’s losing his twelve-year-old son.
Leo used to pay hockey because his dad loved hockey. He never fell in love with it, but he joined the team because he liked the sense of belonging, the solidarity. Peter can see that he’s found the same things now, in a terrible place. When the police ask Leo what happened in the forest during the fight, Leo replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” When the police ask how his shoe and keys ended up there, the boy replies, “I was climbing trees, I might have dropped them.” The police ask if he saw anyone from the Pack fighting. “What pack?” the boy asks. The police show him a picture of Teemu Rinnius. Leo says, “I don’t know who that is. What did you say his name was?”
* * *
The boy is lost, Peter knows it. Because Peter is afraid of milk, and Leo isn’t afraid of anything.
* * *
Benji walks out of the back door of the Bearskin with the garbage, and it’s his hands that catch Ana. As he picks up both her and her father, she starts to cry. She breaks in all directions at the same time. Benji hugs her, she buries her face against his chest, and he pats her hair.
She says nothing about how used she is to carrying her dad. Benji says nothing about never having the chance to carry his.
“Why does everyone drink so much?” Ana sobs instead.
“Because it makes everything quiet,” Benji replies honestly.
“What?”
“All the crap you can’t stop thinking about.”
Ana slowly lets go of Benji and runs her fingers through her dad’s hair as his head bobs in time with his snoring. She says, so quietly that it’s almost a song, “It must be terrible to only be able to bear to feel things when you’re drunk.”
Benji picks the stocky hunter up from the ground, draping one of his arms around his own neck. “Better than nothing, I suppose . . .”
Then he half carries, half drags Ana’s dad home, while she walks alongside and eventually plucks up the courage to ask, “Do you hate Maya?”