When Peter got his contract with the NHL and was about to move to Canada, his dad told him in no uncertain terms not to think he was “anything special.” It’s possible that the old man meant it more gently than it came out, that he intended to say that humility and hard work would take the boy just as far over there as they had here. It’s possible that drink made his words sharper. It’s possible that Peter didn’t mean to slam the door quite as hard as he did. It doesn’t matter now. A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.
Peter remembers walking alone down all the small streets where he grew up and realizing that people he had known his whole life looked at him differently now. He remembers how they would suddenly stop talking when he walked in the room. He was relieved when that passed, when they stopped seeing him as a star and started to see him as general manager. Then, as the club went on tumbling down through the divisions and people told the GM what they really thought, he discovered that that part of him wished they still saw him as a star. Because a hockey crowd knows no nuances, only heaven or hell.
So why does he carry on? Because he’s never considered any alternatives. It’s hard for a lot of people to remember the reasons why they started to love the thing they love, but it’s easy for Peter. The greatest reason for his love of hockey, from the very first moment he stood on a pair of skates, was the silence. Everything outside the rink, the cold and the darkness and the fact that his mom was ill and his dad would be drunk again when he got home . . . it all went quiet inside his head when he stepped onto the ice. He was four years old that first time, but hockey told him straightaway that it was going to demand complete devotion from him. He loved it for that. And still does.
*
A man who is the same age as Peter but looks fifteen years older sees Peter’s car pass through the town. He pulls his camouflage jacket more tightly around him and scratches his beard. When they were seventeen years old there was only one person in the whole of Beartown who thought Peter was more talented than Robbie when it came to hockey. “Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbs fastest, but which one has the longest string,” that old bastard Sune used to say. He was right, of course. The board and the sponsors forced him to move Robbie up to the A-team even though the coach insisted that the boy wasn’t ready mentally. Robbie kept getting hammered with hard checks, got injured, got scared, and spent the rest of the season hitting the puck into the boards rather than risk a fight. The first time the crowd booed him, he went home and cried. The second time he went home and got drunk.
When he turned eighteen he was worse than he had been when he was seventeen, while Peter was better than anything this town had ever seen. When Peter was offered the chance to move to the A-team, he was ready. Robbie started to doubt himself every time he stepped out onto the ice, while nothing scared Peter. He went off to the NHL the same year Robbie started work at the factory. There are no almosts in hockey. One player achieved his dreams while the other now finds himself stamping his feet in the snow until the pub door finally opens.
A short flight of stairs leads down to the bar, five steps. From down there you can’t see the roof of the rink.
*
Sune hears David leave his office. He waits until the bathroom door opens and closes, then the old man writes four words on a yellow Post-it note and stands up. He goes into David’s office and sticks it onto the screen of his computer. Sune isn’t a religious man, but at that moment he prays to all the powers he can think of that he’s not making a mistake. That those four words aren’t going to wreck another young boy’s life.
For a moment he thinks about waiting until David comes back, then looking him in the eye and telling him the truth, as he sees it: “I hope you never stop arguing, David. I hope you never stop telling us to go to hell. That’s how you’ve made it to the top.” But he goes back to his own office instead and closes the door. Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.
*
When David gets back from the washroom he reads the four words on a Post-it note stuck to his computer monitor: Amat. Boys’ team. Fast!!!
*
It’s only a game. It can only change people’s lives.
9
All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.
*
When the members of her family are asleep, Kira still goes around the house and counts them. Her own mother always did that with her children, Kira and her five siblings, counting them every night. Her mother said she didn’t understand how anyone could have children and not do that, how anyone could live without being terrified of losing them at any moment. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” Kira would hear her whisper through the house, and each child would lie there with his or her eyes closed and feel that they had been seen and acknowledged. It’s one of her most treasured childhood memories.
Kira is driving from little Beartown to the larger town beyond the forest. Her commute to work takes longer than most people could bear, but it feels surprisingly quick to Kira, since she has the sense of having crossed the entire universe when she gets out of the car. Even though the larger town is many times smaller than the city where she was born, it’s a different world from the one among the trees. A larger world with colleagues to be spurred on by, friends to discuss culture and politics with, opponents to analyze and fight against.
She is often told that it’s odd that a woman who doesn’t understand hockey ended up marrying a hockey player, but that’s not entirely fair. She finds the game perfectly logical, it’s just the intensity of the training she doesn’t understand. The adrenaline, the hunger teetering on the brink of fear, throwing yourself off the edge of the abyss and either floating or being swallowed up—Kira understands all that. She experiences it in the courtroom, in negotiations. Law is a different sort of game with a different set of rules, but you’re either a competitive person or you aren’t. Like they say in Beartown: Some people have the bear in them.
Perhaps that’s why Kira, who up to the age of nineteen had never lived anywhere with fewer than a million inhabitants, has been able to make a home for herself among the forest-dwellers in spite of everything. She understands their love of the fight, she shares it. She knows that one of the funny things about fighting for success—and God knows, Kira fought her way through her legal training alongside kids from rich families who never had to do the washing up in the family restaurant in the evenings—is that you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.