Saturday comes. The day of the junior team’s final. Everywhere grown men and women wake up and put on green jerseys and scarves. In the parking lot in front of the rink stands a bus emblazoned with proud banners, ready to carry a team to the capital, with a spare seat ready for the trophy that will be coming back with them.
Early in the morning three girls of primary school age are playing in a street in the middle of town. They’re chasing each other, fencing with sticks, throwing some of the last snowballs of this long winter. Maya is standing at her bedroom window watching them. She and Ana used to babysit the girls a few years ago, and Ana sometimes still rushes out to have a snowball fight with them when she gets bored of Maya’s guitar-playing, making them laugh so hard that they fall over. Maya’s arms are wrapped tightly around her body. She’s been awake all night and every minute of it she was certain that she would never tell anyone about what had happened. It takes three little girls playing in the street outside her window to make her change her mind.
Ana is asleep in her bed, exhausted, so incredibly slight and fragile, with her eyes closed beneath the thick quilt. It will be a terrible story to tell about this town and this day: that Maya finally decided to tell the truth about Kevin, not because she wanted to protect herself, but because she wanted to protect others. And that she already knew, as she stood there at the window that morning, what the town would do to her.
29
The most dangerous thing on the ice is being hit when you’re not expecting it. So one of the very first things hockey teaches you is to keep your head up, always. Otherwise—bang.
*
Peter’s phone is busy all morning, sponsors and board members and players’ parents; the nerves of the whole town are exposed. In a few hours’ time he’s going to be on the bus with the junior team, heading to the game, even though he hates travelling. It used to be such a natural part of the family’s life, the fact that he used to be away roughly a third of all nights each season, and he was ashamed to admit it but sometimes he almost thought it was a good thing. Then Isak got sick on one of those nights, and since then he hasn’t been able to sleep in a hotel bed.
Leo has pestered his way to a seat in someone’s car. Peter objected at first, but it actually makes the whole thing feel a bit better. They’re going to be staying in the capital overnight, a huge adventure for a twelve-year-old boy, and Leo is so keen to go. In secret, Peter wishes Maya were too. He stands outside her door and has to summon up all his self-restraint to keep himself from knocking.
He once heard that the best way to prepare mentally for becoming a parent is to stay in a tent at a weeklong rock festival with a load of fat friends who are smoking hash. You blunder about in a permanent state of acute sleep deprivation wearing clothes covered with stains from food that is only very rarely your own, you suffer from tinnitus, you can’t go near a puddle without some giggling fool jumping in it, you can’t go to the bathroom without someone standing outside banging on the door, you get woken up in the middle of the night because someone was “just thinking about something,” and you get woken up the next morning to find someone pissing on you.
It may be true, but it doesn’t help anyone. Because the thing you can never be prepared for when you have children is your increased sensitivity. Not just feeling, but hypersensitivity. He didn’t know he was capable of feeling this much, to the point where he can hardly bear to be in his own skin. After Isak was born the slightest sound became deafening, the slightest worry became terror, all cars drove faster, and he couldn’t watch the news without going to pieces. When Isak died Peter thought he would be left numb, but instead it was as if all his pores opened up, so that the air itself started to hurt. His chest can be ripped open by a single unhappy glance from either of the children, particularly his daughter. All the time he was growing up, the only thing he wanted was for life to speed up, and now all he wants is for it to slow down. For the clocks to stop, for Maya never to grow up.
He loves her so much because she always makes him feel a bit stupid. He hasn’t been able to help her with her homework since primary school, but sometimes she still asks, just to be kind. When she was little she used to pretend to fall asleep in the car so that he would carry her into the house. He always complained when he had to carry both her and the shopping, as well as steer Leo’s stroller, but he secretly loved the way his daughter would cling tight to his neck. That was how he knew she was only pretending, because when she was really asleep it was like carrying a bag of water, but when she was pretending she would bury her nose deep against his neck and wrap her arms around him as if she were afraid of losing him. When she got too big for that, he missed it every day. A year ago she sprained her ankle on a field trip and he had to carry her from the car to the house again. He has never felt more like a bad parent than when he admitted to himself that he wished she could sprain her ankle more often.
He stands with his hand on her door, but doesn’t knock. His phone goes on ringing. He’s so distracted that he’s still clutching his coffee cup in his hand when he goes out to the car.
*
Kira is cruising around the supermarket, sticking to her list, which is written in the exact order in which everything is located in the aisles. Not like Peter’s lists, which are entirely random, and which always lead to him shopping as if he were planning to fill a bomb shelter before the apocalypse.
Everyone says hello to her; some shoppers wave from the other side of the store. Tails comes trotting out from his office wearing a Beartown jersey with the number “9” and the name “Erdahl” printed on the back. He’s on his way to the rink, but he can’t stop talking and she listens patiently with one eye on the time; she doesn’t want Peter and Leo to leave before she gets home.
When she’s loading the bags into the car, the bottom of one of them gives way. People in the parking lot fight for the right to help her pick up her avocados. They all know her husband, the GM, so well. And yet they don’t know him at all.