So she bowed her head and devoted herself to Beartown’s real traditional sports: shame and silence. They were what drove her mom mad. Ana very nearly went with her when she moved away, but changed her mind and stayed. For Maya’s sake, for her dad’s sake, and perhaps because she loved the trees at least as much as she sometimes hated them.
She always thinks it was the forest that taught the people of Beartown to keep their mouths shut, because when you hunt and fish you need to stay quiet so as not to scare the animals, and if you teach people that lesson since birth, it’s going to color the way they communicate. So Ana has always been torn between the urge to scream as loud as she could, or not at all.
*
They’re lying next to each other in Maya’s bed. Ana whispers:
“You’ve got to tell.”
“Who?” Maya breathes.
“Everyone.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise he’ll do it again. To someone else.”
Over and over again they have the same quiet argument, with themselves and each other, because Ana knows it’s an unreasonable demand to make of another person: that Maya of all people should feel some sort of responsibility for anyone else right now. That she, of all people, should stand up and shout in the quietest town in the world. Scare the animals. Ana hides her face in her hands so that Maya’s parents won’t hear anyone crying in here.
“It’s my fucking fault, Maya, I should never have left you at the party. I should have known. I should have looked for you. I was so fucking, fucking, fucking weak. It’s my fault, it’s my f . . .”
Maya cups her friend’s face gently between her hands.
“It’s not your fault, Ana. It’s not our fault.”
“You’ve got to tell,” Ana sobs desperately, but Maya shakes her head.
“Can you keep a secret?”
Ana nods and sniffs and promises: “I swear on my life.”
“That’s not enough. Swear on techno!”
Ana starts to laugh. How much wouldn’t you love someone who could make you do that at a time like this?
“I swear on all forms of electronic music. Apart from really shit Euro techno from the nineties.”
Maya smiles and wipes Ana’s tears, then looks her friend in the eye and whispers:
“Right now, Kevin has only hurt me. But if I talk, I’ll be letting him hurt everyone I love as well. I can’t handle that.”
They hold each other’s hands. Sit beside each other in bed and count sleeping pills, wondering how many it would take to end their lives. When they were children everything was different. It feels like only yesterday, because it was.
*
Benji sees it from a distance, the black object on top of the headstone. It’s been there a couple of hours. He shakes the snow off it and reads what’s written on it. One single word.
When Kevin, Bobo, Lyt, Benji, and the other players were young, David used to give them pucks before the games, with short messages that he wanted them to think about extra carefully. Backcheck harder or use your skates more or be patient. Sometimes he wrote things just to make them laugh. He could hand a puck to the most nervous player on the bus and look deadly serious, until the player glanced down and saw that it said: Zipper’s open. Cock hanging out. He had a sense of humor that only his players were allowed to see, and it made them feel special. Jokes are powerful like that, they can be both inclusive and exclusive. Can create both an Us and a Them.
More than anything else, David could give his players the feeling that he saw every single one of them. He invited the whole team to dinner and introduced them to his girlfriend, but when the club organized a “fathers against sons” game for all the boys’ teams, David was the only coach who didn’t show up. He went and picked up Kevin and Benji, one from his garden and the other from the cemetery, and drove them down to play on the lake instead.
He fought for them, literally. When Benji was nine or ten he already had a style of playing that used to make his opponents’ parents furious. In one away game against the little league team in Hed, one player shouted that he was going to get his dad after Benji had checked him. Benji thought no more about it until a large man appeared in the darkened players’ tunnel after the game and picked him up from the floor by the scruff of his neck and threw him violently against the wall, yelling: “Not so tough now, are you, you little gypsy brat?” Benji wasn’t scared, but he was convinced he was going to be killed at that moment. There were plenty of other adults who saw the incident and didn’t intervene. Benji never knew if it was because they were scared or because they thought he deserved it. All he can remember is David’s fist, knocking the father to the floor with a single punch.
“If I see a grown man lay one finger on a small child in this rink, I’ll kill him,” David said, not to the father specifically, but to all the adults who had stood there in silence.
Then he leaned toward Benji and whispered in his ear:
“Do you know how to save someone from Hed if they’re drowning?”
Benji shook his head. David grinned.
“Good.”
In the locker room David wrote a single word on a puck and tucked it in Benji’s bag. Proud. Benji still has it. In the bus on the way home that evening, all his teammates were telling jokes. The laughter got louder and louder, the punch-lines cruder and cruder. Benji can only remember one of the jokes, one that Lars told:
“Boys, how do you fit four gays on a chair at the same time? You turn it upside down!”
Everyone laughed. Benji remembers glancing surreptitiously at David, and saw that he was laughing, too. It’s just as easy to be exclusive as it is to be inclusive, just as easy to create an Us as a Them. Benji has never been worried about being beaten up or hated if anyone finds out the truth about him; he’s been hated by every opposing team since he was a child. The only thing he’s scared of is that one day there will be jokes that his teammates and coach won’t tell when he’s in the room. The exclusivity of laughter.
He stands by his father’s grave and weighs the puck in his hand. David has written a single word on it.
*
Win.
*
Benji doesn’t go to school the following day, but he does attend the training session. His jersey is sweatiest of all. Because when he no longer knows what anything in the world means, this is the only thing no one can take from him. The fact that he’s a winner. David pats his helmet twice without needing to say anything more.
Lyt had been sitting in Benji’s place in the locker room, next to Kevin. Benji didn’t use words, he merely stood in front of Lyt until Lyt gathered his things together and skulked unhappily back to the opposite bench. Kevin’s face remained motionless, but his eyes betrayed his feelings. They’ve never been able to lie to each other.
David has never seen his two best players perform better in a practice session.
*