She puts the coffee on, ticks a number of things off her lists and on her calendar, takes several deep breaths and feels the heaviness in her chest. “Panic attacks,” the psychologist said six months ago, and Kira never went back after that. She felt ashamed. As if life wasn’t happy enough, as if she wasn’t content, how could she possibly explain that to her family? “Panic attacks,” what did that even mean? A lawyer, wife of the GM, hockey mom, and God knows she loves being all three of those, but sometimes she stops the car in the forest going one way or the other and sits in the darkness, crying. She remembers her own mother on those occasions, the way she would wipe the tears from her children’s cheeks and whisper: “No one ever said life was going to be easy.” Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.
She wakes Leo at eight. His breakfast is already on the table; she’ll be driving him to practice in half an hour. Then she’ll come home and pick up Ana and Maya, so that the three of them can do a voluntary shift in the cafeteria during the juniors’ game. Afterward Leo will need driving to a friend’s, and Maya to one of hers, presumably. Then Kira hopes Peter will get back from the office in time for them to have a glass of wine together, maybe some heated-up lasagna from the freezer, before he falls asleep from exhaustion and she sits up till midnight answering emails in an inbox that never empties. Tomorrow is Sunday, and there will be hockey clothes to wash and bags to be packed and teenagers to be woken. Then back to work on Monday, and work, quite honestly, has been shit recently. Since she turned down the offer of promotion the demands on her have, ironically enough, gotten worse. She knows she’s only allowed to arrive last each morning and leave first in the afternoon because she’s the best at what she does. But it’s been a long time since she felt she was the best she could be. She doesn’t have time. She’s not up to it.
When the kids were little she saw so many other parents lose control in the stands at the rink, and she couldn’t understand them, but now she does. The children’s hobbies aren’t only the children’s hobbies—the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They start to symbolize other things, compensating for or reinforcing the parents’ own failures. Kira knows it sounds silly; she knows it’s just a silly game in a silly sport, but deep down she’s nervous too, as well as feeling nervous on behalf of Peter and the juniors and the club and the town today. Deep down she could also do with winning at something.
She goes past Maya’s room, picks up some clothes from the floor, and when her daughter whimpers in her sleep she puts her hand on her forehead. It’s hot. In a couple of hours Kira will be surprised by the fact that her daughter voluntarily and almost eagerly insists on going with them to the rink, regardless. She usually plays the martyr as hard as she can if she finds so much as a split end in order to have an excuse not to have to go to hockey.
*
In hindsight Kira will wish a thousand times over that she had forced her daughter to stay at home.
15
There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul. Benji has always been good at falling asleep and bad at actually sleeping. He wakes up early on the day of the game, but not from nerves—that’s never bothered him. He cycles away from home before his mom wakes up, leaves his bike at the edge of the forest, and walks the last few miles to Adri’s kennels. He sits in the yard patting the dogs until his other two sisters, Katia and Gaby, also show up. They kiss their little brother on the top of his head, then their elder sister comes out and slaps him hard on the back of the neck with her open hand and asks if it’s true that he called his teacher “sweet cheeks.” He never lies to Adri. She slaps him on the back of the neck again, then kisses him just as hard and whispers that she loves him and that she’ll never let anything bad happen to him, but that she’ll kill him if she hears he’s spoken to a teacher like that again.
The four of them eat breakfast surrounded by dogs, without saying anything much. They do this once a year, a quiet act of remembrance, always early in the morning so their mother doesn’t find out about it. She’s never forgiven her husband. Benji was too little when it happened to harbor any hatred, and his three sisters are somewhere in between. Everyone has their own struggle. When Benji gets to his feet he doesn’t ask any of them to go with him, and they don’t ask where he’s going. They just kiss his hair one after the other, tell him he’s an idiot, and that they adore him.
He walks back through the snow to his bicycle, then goes off to the cemetery, where he crouches down with his back against Alan Ovich’s headstone, smoking joints until the pain is soft enough to let his tears start to fall. The boy’s fingertips trace the worn lettering of the name on the stone. On this day fifteen years ago, early one March morning, Alan got out his hunting rifle before his family woke up. Then he took everything that hurt him and went straight out into the forest. It doesn’t matter how many times you explain it to a child. No one loses a parent that way without knowing that all the other grownups are lying when they say, “It wasn’t your fault.”
*
People feel pain. And it shrinks their souls.
The minutes are creeping toward lunchtime. Kevin is standing in the garden dribbling a puck with soft, controlled movements in complicated patterns between forty glass bottles placed around the ice. To anyone else it would have looked like it was happening incredibly fast, but to him each movement of his wrist feels leisurely. Time moves slower for him than other people, he doesn’t know why. When he was little he used to get beaten up by the older kids because he was too good, until Benji showed up out of nowhere at training one day. They slept at each other’s houses every day for several months, read Benji’s sisters’ old superhero comics by flashlight under the covers, and both their lives suddenly made sense. Their own superpowers united them.
“Sweetheart?” Kevin’s mom calls from the terrace door, pointing at her watch.
As Kevin approaches she carefully reaches out her hand and brushes some snow from his shoulder, lets her hand rest there for longer than usual, more gently than he’s used to. She bites her lower lip.
“Are you nervous?”
Kevin shakes his head. She nods proudly.
“We need to go. Your dad managed to get us on an earlier flight to Madrid. We’ll drop you off at the rink.”
“You’ll have time to watch the first period, though?”
He can see in her eyes that she’s going to pieces. But she’d never admit it.
“We’re in a hurry, sweetheart. Your dad’s got an important meeting with a client.”
“It’s a round of golf,” Kevin snaps. That’s as close as he ever gets to answering back.