She remembers sitting there and thinking of a physics lesson in high school about liquids and cold. Water expands when it freezes; you need to know that if you build a house in Beartown. In the summer the rain seeps into the cracks in the bricks, then when the temperature slips below zero the moisture freezes to ice, and the bricks break. She will remember that that’s how it felt to grow up as the little sister of a dead big brother. A childhood that was one long, desperate attempt not to be liquid, not to seek out the cracks in your parents.
When you grow up so close to death, you know that it can be many different things to many different people, but that for a parent, death, more than anything else, is silence. In the kitchen, in the hall, on the phone, in the backseat, on Friday evening, on Monday morning, wrapped in pillowcases and crumpled sheets, at the bottom of the toy box in the attic, on the little stool by the kitchen counter, under damp towels that no longer lie strewn across the floor beside the bath. Everywhere, children leave silence behind them.
Maya knows all too well that this silence can be like water. If you let it make its way too far in, it can freeze into ice and break your heart. Even then, in the police station in Hed, she knew she would survive this. Even then she knew that her mom and dad wouldn’t. Parents don’t heal.
What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others. There will be days when Maya is asked if she really understood the consequences, and she will nod yes, and of all the feelings inside her then, guilt will be the greatest. Because of the unimaginable cruelty she showed toward the people who loved her the most.
They sat there in the police station. She told them everything. And she could see in her parents’ eyes how the story made the same terrible sentence echo through them, over and over again. The one every mom and every dad deep down most fear having to admit:
*
“We can’t protect our children.”
*
There’s a bus, painted green, parked outside the rink. There’s already a large crowd—parents and players and sponsors and board members. They’re all hugging and waving.
Kevin’s dad drives right up. Gets out and shakes people’s hands, takes time to talk. Kevin’s mom hesitates for a long while before putting her arm around her son’s shoulders. He lets her do it. She doesn’t say she’s proud, he doesn’t say he knows.
*
Fatima is standing unhappily in the hall, asking Amat several times if there’s something wrong. He promises that there isn’t. He walks out of the apartment with his skates in his hand. Lifa is waiting outside the door; he looks like he’s been waiting for a while. Amat smiles weakly.
“Do you want to borrow some money, or what? You don’t usually wait for me.”
Lifa laughs and holds out his clenched fist, and Amat touches his to it.
“Kill them!” Lifa demands.
Amat nods. He pauses, perhaps thinking about saying something, but decides against it. Instead he asks:
“Where’s Zach?”
Lifa looks surprised.
“At training.”
Amat’s face fills with red shame. Now that he’s been promoted to the juniors, it’s taken no longer than this for him to forget that the boys’ team always has a training session at this time. Lifa holds out his fist again, then changes his mind and hugs his childhood friend hard.
“You’re the first person from the Hollow to play with the juniors.”
“Benji’s from the Hollow, sort of . . . ,” Amat says, but Lifa shakes his head firmly.
“Benji lives in a row house. He’s not one of us.”
Amat thinks of how he can see Benji’s house from his balcony, but that’s not enough. Lifa arrived in Beartown a few years after Amat. His family lived in Hed first, but the apartments here were cheaper. He played hockey with Amat and Zacharias for a couple of years, until his older brother told him to stop. It was a snobs’ game; only rich men’s kids played hockey, according to his brother. “They’ll hate you, Lifa. They hate us, they’re not going to want someone from around here to be better than them at anything.” He was right. They kept hearing that in the locker room and on the ice when they were young. No one in Beartown ever lets you forget where you’re from. Amat and Zacharias put up with it, Lifa didn’t. While they were at middle school some of the older players snuck into the locker room with markers, scribbled out Beartown Ice Hockey from their tracksuits, and wrote Shantytown Hockey instead.
All the boys knew who had done it. No one said anything. But Lifa never played again. Now he stands outside an apartment block in the Hollow, hugs Amat with tears in his eyes, and whispers:
“I saw some little kids, six or seven, playing with hockey sticks outside my block yesterday. They were pretending to be their idols. One was Pavel Datsyuk, one was Sidney Crosby, one was Patrick Kane . . . and you know what the last one shouted? He shouted, ‘I’M AMAT!’?”
“That’s a load of crap,” Amat says with a smile, but Lifa shakes his head, holds his friend tight, and says:
“Kill them, bro. Win the final and turn professional and kill them all. Show them you’re one of us.”
*
“You can tell the guys there’s a surprise in the locker room,” Kevin’s dad says surreptitiously into his son’s ear.
“Thanks,” the boy replies.
They shake hands, but the father puts his other hand on the back of the boy’s shoulder as they do so. Almost a hug.
The locker room is already echoing with cheerful swearing when Kevin arrives, his teammates bouncing about like sparky little fireworks. Bobo slaps Kevin on the back, clutching his new stick happily in the other hand, and roars:
“Do you have any idea what these cost? Your dad’s a fucking LEGEND!”
Kevin knows exactly what the sticks cost. And there’s one for every player on the team in the box on the floor.
*
Zacharias is last to leave the ice after the boys’ team’s training session; he’s gathered the pucks and cones on his own. He manages to duck at the last moment, and the impact behind him makes the Plexiglas sway. He looks around wildly. The puck came whistling toward him from the wrong direction—from the corridor rather than out on the ice.
“Watch out, fatso!” Lyt mocks, waving his new stick.
Zacharias knows exactly how much it cost; if there’s one thing teenagers know the price of, it’s all the things they can’t afford.
“Suck cock,” he mutters.
“What did you say?” Lyt snarls instantly, his face darkening.
“I said: Suck. Cock.”
Bobo is standing behind Lyt in the corridor, and mumbles something like, “It’s only a joke,” and tries to hold him back. Says something like, “Think of the final.” Lyt restrains himself, at least superficially, and snorts derisively toward Zacharias.
“Nice stick! Did Social Services buy it for your mom, or what?”
Zacharias raises his head instead of bowing it.
“Has your mom been in the locker room putting your jockstrap on again, little Willy? Does she cup your balls carefully, the way you like it? Does she still buy far too big . . .”
Lyt rushes at him with his stick at head height before he can finish the sentence, and if Bobo hadn’t gotten in the way he would have sent a player two years his junior to the hospital. Amat rushes in behind them, panic-stricken, and stands between them, addressing Lyt as much as Zacharias.