Benji wakes up to find Kevin shaking him. Being able to sleep through both Maggan Lyt’s tactical talk and Lars’s sense of humor is one of his foremost talents, and getting a chance to do so is definitely a privilege. There have always been parents who have questioned Benji’s behavior, both on and off the ice, but David always says the same thing: “If the other players gave me even an ounce of what Benji gives me on the ice every time, I wouldn’t give a damn if they all slept on the team bench.”
When Bobo sits back down again, destroyed in the way that only a teenager can be by an adult in front of his best friends, another adult sits down next to him with his hand on his shoulder and his thumb against his neck. Bobo looks up. David is smiling at him.
“You’re the least selfish player I’ve got on this team, you know that?”
Bobo presses his lips together. David leans closer to him.
“You’re going to be playing in the third defensive pair tonight, and I know that’s going to be a disappointment to you.”
Bobo fights back tears. Throughout his early childhood he was the best back in this team because of his size and strength, but in the past few years his poor skating has let him down. First he slipped into the second defensive pair. Now the third. David holds his hand gently on his neck and looks at him intently as he says:
“But I need you. Your team needs you. You’re important. So I want you to give me everything you’ve got tonight, at every changeover. I want every last drop of blood. And if you give me that, if you trust me, I promise I’ll never let you down.”
By the time David stands up Bobo’s feet are drumming against the floor again. If David had asked him to go out and kill someone at that moment, he would have done so without hesitation. When the coach stands in the middle of the room, after ten years with them, there isn’t a boy in there who doesn’t feel the same. He looks each of them in the eye in turn.
“I’m not going to say much. You know who you’re up against. I know you’re better than them. So I expect just one thing. I will only tolerate one thing. Don’t come back to this locker room until you’ve given it to me.”
He seeks out Kevin’s gaze and holds it like a vise:
“Win.”
“Win!” Kevin replies with dark eyes.
“WIN!” David repeats, punching his clenched fists in the air.
“WIN!!!” the whole locker room roars with one voice.
They fly up from their benches, a stamping, banging, panting horde, ready to be led out by their team captain. David walks past and slaps each of them hard on the helmet, then when he gets to the front and has his fingers on the door handle he whispers so that only boy number nine can hear:
“I’m proud of you, Kevin. No matter what happens this evening, if you play your best match ever or your worst, there isn’t another player in the world I’d have picked over you.”
*
The door opens. Kevin doesn’t walk out onto the ice.
*
He takes it by storm.
18
Loneliness is an invisible ailment. Since Holger left her, Ramona has become like the animals in the wildlife documentaries she watches on the nature channels on the nights when the sleeping pills don’t work. The ones who have been held in captivity for so long that you can remove all the barriers without them making any attempt to escape. Any living thing that is kept behind bars for long enough eventually becomes more scared of the unknown than its own captivity. At the start she only stayed indoors because she could still hear his laughter in here, his voice, and the way he used to swear when he stubbed his toe on the low step behind the bar. A whole life together in this building, and he still couldn’t figure out where that damn step was. But isolating yourself happens faster than you might think: the days blur together when you live more on the inside than outside, and the years continued to pass by on the other side of the street while she desperately tried to make everything inside the Bearskin and the apartment above it carry on exactly as it was when he died. She was frightened she would forget him if she went out into the world, that she might go to the supermarket and come home to find that his laughter was no longer there. Then suddenly one morning, eleven years had passed and everyone but her boys thinks she’s lost her mind now. She became a time traveller trapped inside her own machine.
People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.
She is standing in the snow just outside the door, smoking. Three in a row. The roof of the rink is visible from here, the roar when the Beartown juniors make it 1–0 sounds like it’s going to blow every building along the main street apart, as if it’s going to pick the whole forest up and dump it in the lake. Ramona tries to take a step toward the street, just one step nearer the pavement. Her whole body is shaking uncontrollably as she fumbles for the wall behind her, sweat drenching her clothes in spite of the sub-zero temperature. She goes back into the warmth, closes the door, switches the lights off, and lies down on the floor in the bar with Holger’s photograph in her hands. Right next to the step.
People say she’s gone mad, because that’s what people who know nothing about loneliness call it.
*
Amat is terrified, even though he hasn’t played for a second. When he followed Kevin and the rest of the team out onto the ice, when the crowd stood up and the roar made his ears pop, he headed straight for the bench absolutely convinced he was about to throw up. One day he’ll look back on that moment and realize that the feeling never disappears. No matter how successful you become.
Kevin scores the first goal in the opening minute of the game. That’s no coincidence; in every game he seems to get a short window before the defense realizes just how good he is, exactly how fluid his wrist action, how swiftly he can skate around them. He does that with laser-like precision. They won’t make that mistake again; for the rest of the game they shut him down by shadowing him so closely they may as well be sharing the same pair of skates. The opposition turns the game around to 2–1. They deserve it, they’re astonishingly good, powerfully and methodically mounting attack after attack until Amat ends up surprised that they’re only leading by one goal every time he looks up at the scoreboard. They’re the strongest and most technically proficient team he’s seen; he’s pretty sure they could have beaten Beartown’s A-team. And everyone can see it. With every line change, the players around Amat slump more heavily on the bench, their sticks pound the boards less often and less aggressively, and even Lars is swearing more quietly. In the second intermission, on his way to the locker room, Amat hears some adults in the stands laugh forlornly: “Well, a semifinal’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll just have to hope for a better team next season.” He’s surprised at how angry that makes him. It rouses something inside him. By the time he enters the room he’s ready to smash something. David is the only person who notices.