“Why not?”
She rubs the back of her glove across her eyes, and it comes away stained with eyeliner. Amat is crying, too, now. They are fifteen years old and the entire world has collapsed in the course of a single evening. A solitary car passes them; Maya’s eyes flare with the reflection of the headlights. When it’s gone past, something goes out inside both her and her eyes.
“Because this is a fucking hockey town,” she whispers.
Amat is left kneeling in the snow as she disappears down the road. The last thing he sees before night swallows her is her silhouette against the sign that says, “Welcome to Beartown.”
*
Soon she won’t be anymore.
*
Ana opens the door to the house. It swings open without a sound on freshly oiled hinges. Her dad is asleep; her mom no longer lives here. She walks through the kitchen toward the storeroom. The hunting dogs greet her with cold noses and warm hearts. She does what she has done a thousand times in her childhood when the house stank of alcohol and her parents were screaming at each other. She sleeps with the animals. Because the animals have never done her any harm.
*
For people who have never lived where darkness and cold are the norm, where anything else is the exception, it is hard to understand that it is possible to find someone who has frozen to death with their jacket open, or even naked. But when you get really cold your blood-vessels contract and your heart does all it can to stop blood reaching the frozen parts of your body and then coming back to your heart cold. Not unlike a hockey team suffering a penalty and playing at a numerical disadvantage: prioritize resources, play defensively, defend the heart, lungs, and brain. What happens when the defense finally collapses, when you get cold enough, is that your box play falls apart, your goalie does something stupid, your backs stop communicating with each other, and the body parts that were previously shut off from circulation are suddenly switched back on again. And then, when warm blood from your heart flows back to your frozen feet and hands, you experience an intense rush of heat. That’s why you suddenly imagine that you’re overheating and start to take your clothes off. Then the chilled blood goes back to your heart and it’s all over. Every couple of years or so, someone in Beartown goes home drunk after a party and takes a shortcut across the ice, or gets lost in the forest, or sits down to rest for a moment, and is found lifeless in a snowdrift the following morning.
When Maya was little she often used to think how strange it was that her mom and dad, the two most overprotective parents in the universe, chose to settle here, of all places. Somewhere where even nature itself tried to murder their daughter every day. As she’s gotten older she’s come to realize that the admonitions “don’t go out on the ice alone” and “don’t go into the forest on your own” are almost designed to promote team sports. Every child in Beartown grows up with the constant warning that the threat of death is ever-present if you’re alone.
She tries calling Ana, but gets no answer. She can’t force herself to walk down the main street through town, so she wraps her jacket more tightly around herself and takes the narrow road through the forest instead.
When the car drives past her in the darkness and stops abruptly fifty yards ahead of her, panic hits her with full force. The adrenaline in her body reacts instantly, convincing her that someone is about to run up and grab her and do it to her all over again.
*
One of the many things snatched from the girl that night is the place where she never needed to feel afraid. Everyone has a place like that, until it gets taken away from us. You never get it back again. Maya will feel afraid everywhere from now on.
*
Benji sees her through the car window with newly woken eyes. No one walks this way of their own volition at night, and he can see that she’s limping. He makes Katia stop, and is out in the darkness before the car comes to a halt. Maya is hiding behind a tree. You can’t do that for more than a minute or so in sub-zero temperatures—the cold forces you to move about in order to keep your circulation going, whether you want to or not. Benji has been hunting in these forests with his sisters since he was big enough to hold a rifle, so he sees her. Maya knows he’s seen her. Katia calls from the car, but to Maya’s surprise Benji shouts back:
“It’s nothing, sis. Sorry, I saw . . . I thought I saw . . . Oh, I’ve probably just smoked too much.”
Maya looks directly at him then; he’s standing ten yards away. Her tears are freezing at the same rate as his. But he merely gives a curt nod to the darkness, then turns around and disappears.
He knows too much about how it feels to have to hide to give away someone else doing the same.
*
As the red taillights of the car fade into the night, Maya stays where she is, with her forehead against the tree trunk, sobbing hysterically without making a sound, with no tears.
*
There are thousands of ways to die in Beartown. Especially on the inside.
23
Peter and Kira wake up happy. Laughing. That’s what they will remember about this day, and they will hate themselves for it. The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moment before everything fell apart. The second before the crash, the ice-cream at the gas station just before the accident, the last swim on holiday before we came home and received the diagnosis. Our memories always force us back to those very best moments, night after night, prompting the questions: “Could I have done anything differently? Why did I just go around being happy? If only I’d known what was going to happen, could I have stopped it?”