He rests his forehead against hers.
“You and I know the truth. Your family and you and all decent, sensible people know the truth. And we’re going to get justice, somehow, I promise you that. I just . . . I just want . . . You mustn’t . . .”
“It’s okay, Dad. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not! It never will be! You must never, ever think it’s okay, that what he did . . . I’m scared, Maya, I’m so scared that you think I don’t want to kill him, that I don’t want to kill him every minute of every day, because I do.”
The father’s tears trickle down his daughter’s cheeks.
“I’m scared too, Dad. Of everything. Of the darkness and . . . everything.”
“What can I do?”
“Love me.”
“Always, Pumpkin.”
She nods.
“Can I ask for something, then?”
“Anything.”
“Can we go out to the garage and play Nirvana?”
“Anything except that?”
“How can you not like Nirvana?”
“I was too old when they made it big.”
“How can you be too old for NIRVANA? How old ARE you?”
They laugh. How powerful that is, the fact that they can still make each other do that.
*
Kira is sitting alone in the kitchen, listening to her husband and daughter play in the garage. Maya is so much better than him now; he keeps losing the beat but she matches him to stop him feeling stupid. Kira is longing for alcohol and cigarettes. Before she has time to look for any someone puts a pile of playing cards on the table. Not the normal sort, but the children’s version they had in the trailer they rented when the children were small. Naturally, the children stopped playing because their mom and dad could never agree on the rules.
“Let’s play. I might even let you win,” Leo says, sitting down.
He puts two sodas on the table. He’s twelve years old, but he lets his mom hug him fairly hard anyway.
*
In a run-down rehearsal space on the edge of Hed, a single lamp is shining above a boy in black leather, sitting on a chair playing the violin. He’s still holding the instrument in his hand when someone knocks on the doorframe. Benji stands there leaning on his crutches with a bottle in his hand. The bass player tries to be fetchingly silent and mysterious, but his smile is having none of it.
“What are you doing here?”
“Went for a walk,” Benji replies.
“Don’t tell me that’s moonshine,” the bass player smiles at the bottle.
“If you’re going to live around here, you’re going to have to learn to drink it sooner or later,” Benji says.
The bass player assumes that means “sorry” in these parts. He’s noticed that they like communicating through the medium of drink.
“I have no intention of settling down here,” he promises.
“No one does. They just get stuck here,” Benji says, hopping into the room.
He doesn’t ask about the violin. The bass player likes that, the fact that Benji’s the sort of person who isn’t surprised that someone can be more than one thing.
“If I play, you can dance,” the bass player offers, moving the bow gently across the strings.
“I can’t dance,” Benji replies, without realizing it was a joke about his crutches.
“Dancing’s easy. You just stand still, then stop standing still,” the bass player whispers.
Benji’s chest muscles are shaking with exhaustion. That helps. It makes his insides feel calm by comparison.
*
Ana is woken by the phone. She snatches it up from the floor but it’s not hers ringing. It’s her dad’s. She hears his voice; he’s talking as he gets dressed, fetches the dogs and the key to the gun cabinet. The sounds are like a familiar tune to her, a childhood lullaby. She waits for the finale. The front door closing. The key in the lock. The rusty old pickup starting up. But they don’t come. Instead, a gentle knock. His voice, tentative, her name, a question through the door:
“Ana. Are you awake?”
She’s dressed before he finishes the sentence. Opens the door. He’s holding a rifle in each hand.
“There’s a search, up by the north road. I could call some good-for-nothing in town, but . . . seeing as I’ve already got the second-best hunter in Beartown in the house . . .”
She feels like hugging him. Doesn’t.
*
The boys are lying on their backs on the floor of the rehearsal room. The bottle is empty. They take turns singing the worst drinking songs they know. Roar with laughter for hours.
“What is it with hockey?” the bass player asks.
“What is it with violins?” Benji counters.
“You have to switch off your brain in order to play it. Music is like taking a break from yourself,” the bass player replies.
The answer is too quick, too straightforward, too honest for Benji to retort with something sarcastic. So he tells the truth.
“The sounds.”
“The sounds?”
“That’s the thing about hockey. When you go into a rink. All those sounds you only recognize if you play. And . . . that feeling when you walk from the locker room to the rink, that last inch when the floor turns to ice. The moment when you glide out . . . you have wings then.”
The boys say nothing for a while. They daren’t move, as if they were lying on a glass roof.
“If I teach you to dance, will you teach me how to skate?” the bass player smiles eventually.
“Don’t you know how to skate? What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Benji exclaims, as if the bass player has just said he doesn’t know how to make a sandwich.
“I’ve never seen the point. I’ve always thought that ice is nature’s way of telling people to stay away from the water.”
Benji laughs.
“So why do you want me to teach you, then?”
“Because you love it so much. I’d like to understand . . . something you love.”
The bass player touches Benji’s hand. Benji doesn’t pull away, but he sits up and the spell is broken.
“I have to go,” Benji says.
“No,” the bass player pleads.
Benji goes anyway. Out through the door without another word. The snow falls with his tears, the darkness takes him, and he gives up without a fight.
*
When a window breaks, a room can be filled with such an astonishing amount of broken glass that it seems impossible that it all came from a single pane. Not entirely unlike the way a small child can turn a carton of milk upside down and flood an entire kitchen, as if the liquid expands to infinity the moment it leaves the carton.
The person throwing the stone was close to the wall, almost right next to it, and threw the stone as hard as they could to get it to fly as far into the room as possible. It hits a chest of drawers and lands on Maya’s bed. The glass follows, raining so gently, light as a butterfly, as if it were ice crystals or tiny, shimmering fragments of diamond.