*
All through their childhood boys are told that all they need to do is their best. That it will be enough, as long as they give their all. Peter looks himself in the eye in the photograph; he’s so incredibly young. He met Kira for the first time the evening they lost that last game down in the capital. The fact that they’d made it as far as that was a miracle, but that wasn’t good enough for Peter. For him it was more than a game, it was a chance for a small town to show the big city that not everything can be bought. The papers in the capital had patronizingly decided to label the game “The Call of the Wild,” and Peter had looked each of his teammates in the eye and roared: “They may have the money, but hockey belongs to us!” They gave it everything they had. It wasn’t enough.
That evening the team went out to celebrate winning silver. Peter sat on his own all night in a little family-run restaurant next to the hotel. Kira was behind the bar. Peter broke down in tears in front of her, not for his own sake but because he wouldn’t be able to look his town in the eye again. Because he’d let them all down. It was a pretty weird first date, but he’s able to smile about it in hindsight. What was it she said to him? “Have you ever considered not feeling so sorry for yourself?” That made him laugh, and he didn’t stop for several days. He’s fallen for her every day since then.
And once, a long time afterward, when Kira had been drinking and was a bit too loud, the way she gets after too much wine, she held his ears so tightly that he genuinely thought they were going to come off, and when he lowered his head to hers she whispered: “You adorable stupid idiot, don’t you realize that’s when I fell in love with you? You were a lost little kid from the backwoods, but I knew that someone who was second-best in the country but was still crying because he was worried about disappointing the people he loved, that person was going to turn out to be a good man. He’d be a good father. He’d protect his children. He’d never let anything happen to his family.”
*
Kira remembers every inch of the descent into darkness. The greatest terror of every parent, waking up and listening out for small breaths. And every night you feel so foolish when you hear them, as usual, for worrying about nothing. “How did I become someone like this?” you think. You promise yourself that you’ll relax, because of course you know that nothing’s going to happen. But the following night you still lie there wide awake, staring up at the ceiling and shaking your head, until you tell yourself, “Just tonight, then.” And you creep out of bed and put your palms to your children’s little chests to feel them rising and falling. And then one night one of them falls and doesn’t rise again as strongly.
And then you fall. All the hours in the waiting room at the hospital, all the nights on the floor beside the boy’s bed, that morning when the doctor told Peter because no one dared tell Kira. They simply fell. If they hadn’t had Maya, would they have been able to go on living? How does anyone do that?
Kira was so pleased when they moved away; she could never imagine that she would feel so happy to move back. But they could start again there. She and Peter and Maya. And then Leo came along. They were happy, or at least as happy as a family can be when it’s burdened by a grief too large to be absorbed by time.
*
But Kira still doesn’t know how to deal with it.
*
Peter puts his hand on the glass of the frame. Kira never stopped making his pulse throb in his throat; he still loves her the way you do when you’re a teenager, when your heart swells in your chest and makes you feel like you can’t breathe. But she had been wrong. He couldn’t protect his family. And not a single day goes by without him wondering what he could have done differently. Could he have made a deal with God? If he had sacrificed all his talent? Given up all his success? His own life? What would God have given him in exchange? Could he have changed places in the coffin with his firstborn son?
*
At night Kira still goes around the house, counting their children. One, two, three.
*
Two in their beds. One in heaven.
10
Say what you like about Beartown, it can take your breath away. When the sun rises above the lake, when the mornings are so cold that the oxygen itself is crisp, when the trees seem to bow respectfully over the ice in order to let as much light as possible reach the children playing on it, then you can’t help wondering how anyone could choose to live in places where all you can see are concrete and buildings. Four-year-olds play outdoors on their own here, and there are still people who have never locked their front doors. After Canada, Maya’s parents were overprotective to a degree that might have appeared a bit unusual even in a big city, so in Beartown it seemed almost psychotic. There’s something very peculiar about growing up in the shadow of a dead older brother: children in that situation become either terrified of everything or nothing at all. Maya fell into the second group.
She parts from Ana in the hallway with their secret handshake. They were in their first year at school when Ana came up with it, but Maya was the one who realized that the only way to keep it secret was to do it so quickly that no one had time to see the different elements: fist up, fist down, palm, palm, butterfly, bent finger, pistols, jazz hands, minirocket, explosion, ass-to-ass, outbitches. Ana came up with the descriptions. Maya still laughs every time they bang their backsides together at the end and Ana turns her back on her, throwing her hands up in the air and yelling: “. . . and Ana is OUT, bitches!” and walks away.
But she doesn’t do it as loudly anymore, not when they’re at school, not when other people can see her. She pulls her arms in, lowers her voice, tries to fit in. Throughout their childhood Maya loved her best friend because she wasn’t like any other girl she had met, but life as a teenager seems to have acted like sandpaper on Ana. She’s getting smoother and smoother, smaller and smaller.
*
Sometimes Maya misses her.
*