Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward. When a child is born, its parents dream of it being as unique as possible, until it gets ill, when suddenly all they want is for everything to be normal. For several years after Isak died, Kira and Peter felt a terrible, lacerating guilt every time they laughed. Shame can still catch them when they feel happy, making them wonder if it’s a betrayal of their child that they didn’t disintegrate entirely when he left them. One of all the terrible effects of grief is that we interpret its absence as egotism. It’s impossible to explain what you have to do in order to carry on after a funeral, how to put the pieces of a family back together again, how to live with the jagged edges. So what do you end up asking for? You ask for a good day. One single good day. A few hours of amnesia.
So today, the morning after a hockey game, Peter and Kira wake up happy. Laughing. He whistles as he potters about in the kitchen, when she gets out of the shower they kiss each other the way adults do when they forget that they’re parents. Leo, twelve years old, runs from the table in disgust. His mom and dad laugh into each other’s mouths. One single good day.
*
Maya hears them from her room; she’s lying deeply cocooned under the covers. They haven’t even discovered that she’s home yet; they think she spent the night at Ana’s. When they open the door and look surprised, she will explain that she isn’t well, she’s wearing two pairs of jogging clothes to make sure her forehead feels warm enough. She can’t tell her parents the truth. She hasn’t got the heart to do that to them; she knows they wouldn’t survive. She’s not thinking like someone who’s been the victim of a crime, she’s thinking like someone who’s committed one: all she can think is that no one must ever know, that she must get rid of all the evidence. So when her dad drives Leo to practice and her mom goes to the supermarket, Maya creeps out of bed and washes the clothes she was wearing yesterday, so that no one will see the stains. She will put her shredded blouse in a plastic bag and walk toward the door. But there she will stop, and she will stand there in the doorway shaking with terror, unable to bring herself to walk to the garbage bin.
A thousand wishes yesterday, one single one today.
*
Benji’s three sisters have always communicated in different ways. His youngest sister, Gaby, talks, and his middle sister, Katia, listens. His eldest sister, Adri, shouts. If you have three younger siblings when your dad goes out into the forest with a rifle, you grow up faster than you should, and maybe become harder than you would really like to be.
Adri doesn’t let Benji sleep off his hangover, and forces him to get up and help her with the dogs all morning. When that’s done, she drags him over to the outbuilding that’s been fitted out as a small gym, and makes him pump weights until he throws up. He doesn’t complain. He never does. Adri could lift more than him until a couple of years ago, but when he passed her he did so at astonishing speed. She’s seen him take down three fully grown men over at the Barn when they’ve said something inappropriate to Katia. The sisters often talk about it when he isn’t there, the things they see in their little brother’s eyes when he gets really angry. Their mom always says that she doesn’t know what would have happened to the boy if he hadn’t found hockey, but his sisters know all too well what would have happened. They’ve seen men like that, in the Barn and at the gym and in a thousand other places.
Hockey gave Benji a context, a structure, rules. But above all it rewarded the best sides of him: his boundless heart and unshakeable loyalty. It provided a focus for his energy, channeling it into something constructive. All through his childhood he used to sleep with his hockey stick beside him, and sometimes Adri is pretty sure he still does.
When her little brother lets go of the bar and rolls off the bench to throw up for the third time, she hands him a bottle of water and sits down on a stool next to him.
“So. What’s the problem?”
“I’m just hungover,” he groans.
His phone rings. It’s been doing that all day but he refuses to answer it.
“No. Not the problem with your stomach, you donkey, what’s the problem up here?” She sighs, and points to his temple.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and drinks small sips of water.
“Oh . . . just a thing. With Kev.”
“Argument?”
“Sort of.”
“So?”
“Just crap.”
His phone goes on ringing. Adri shrugs and lies back on the bench. Benji stands behind her and spots her as she lifts the bar. He has always wished she could have played hockey longer; she would have beaten the shit out of the whole junior team. She played for the girls’ team in Hed for a few years when she was young, until driving there and back several evenings a week got too much for their mother. There was no girls’ team in Beartown, never has been. Sometimes Benji wonders how good his sister could have been. She gets the game—she yells at him for making the same sort of tactical mistakes that David tells him off for. And she loves it. The way her brother loves it. When she’s done she pats him on the cheek and says: “You hockey boys are like dogs. To do something stupid, all you need is the opportunity. To do something good, all you need is a reason.”
“So?” he mutters.
She smiles and points at his phone.
“So stop being such an old woman, little brother, and go and talk to Kevin. Because if I have to listen to that ringtone one more time, I’m going to drop the bar on your face.”
*
Amat calls Maya’s number ten times. A hundred times. She’s not answering. He can still see every detail, thinks about it so intently that he starts trying to convince himself that he might have imagined it all. A misunderstanding. God, how wonderful that would be, if everything he thought he’d seen hadn’t happened. He was drunk, after all. Jealous. He calls Maya’s number, over and over again, doesn’t leave any messages on voicemail. Sends no texts. He goes out running in the forest until he’s too tired to think, running all day so he can collapse with exhaustion that evening.
*
Kevin is standing in the garden. All hockey players are used to playing through pain. There’s always some little injury somewhere. A groin-strain, a sprain, a fractured finger. Not a week passes in the junior team without someone talking about how they can’t wait until they’re old enough to play without a grille on their helmet. “Get rid of the shopping cart,” they plead. Even though they’ve all seen A-team players who’ve been hit in the face with pucks and sticks, they’re not afraid of it, but are actively looking forward to it. When they were small they all saw a player standing after a game with twenty stitches in his lip from splitting his cheek open. But when asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?” he merely grinned and said, “Can’t pretend it doesn’t sting a bit when I chew tobacco.”
It’s Sunday afternoon and the Erdahl house, empty and silent, has been cleaned to perfection. Kevin is standing in the garden firing puck after puck after puck. Even in little league he learned to play through any pain. Even to enjoy it. Blood blisters, fractures, cuts, concussions: they never affected his game. But this is different. Now two deep scratches on one hand are making him shoot his pucks high above the net.