Chapter 29
29
T he 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.
“He must be so pleased he’s going to this game!” someone says, and Kira nods even though she knows he hates travelling. He has hardly left Maya and Leo overnight since the night Isak fell asleep for the last time. Kira has had to travel far more with her work, and for a while she always kept a ready-packed bag in the hall cupboard. Peter used to joke about it, saying he was worried that she also had “a safe-deposit box containing hair dye, fake passports, and a pistol.” She never told him how much that hurt her. She knows she’s being selfish and hates herself for it, but she almost wishes Leo weren’t going along on this trip. Because it’s something that Peter is doing as a dad, it’s not just a work trip, it doesn’t balance out any of the times she’s been away. It doesn’t make her the slightest little bit less self-absorbed.
She picks up an avocado from the ground and puts it in another bag. When Isak fell ill the family slipped into an almost military routine: doctor’s appointments, dates of operations, journey times, waiting rooms, treatments, lists, and protocols. After the funeral Peter couldn’t find a way back out of himself—the pain became too great for him to move at all. Kira carried on taking Maya to play in the park, carried on cleaning and making dinner, carried on going to the store with her list. She once read a book that said that after a deeply traumatic event, like an assault or a kidnapping, the victim often doesn’t break down until much later—in the ambulance or police car—when everything is over. Several months after Isak’s death Kira suddenly found herself sitting on the floor of a supermarket in Toronto with an avocado in each hand, unable to stop crying hysterically. Peter came and carried her home. For weeks after that he was like a machine: cleaning, preparing meals, looking after Maya. That may have been how they survived, Kira realizes: thanks to their ability not to fall apart at the same time.
She smiles in the car on the way home. Puts on the louder-louder playlist. She’s going to have a whole weekend with her daughter, and what a blessing that is. It’s no time at all since Maya was a little red raisin wrapped up in a blanket, with Kira staring at the nurses in the hospital as if they’d told her they were going to dump her and the baby alone in the Indian Ocean on a raft the size of a postage stamp made of beer cans when they suggested it might be time to go home. Then the little whining bundle suddenly became a complete person. Developed opinions and characteristics and her own taste in clothes and a dislike of soda. What sort of child doesn’t like soda? Or sweets? She can’t be bribed with sugar and, dear God, how can anyone function as the parent of a child who can’t be bribed? It’s no time at all since she needed help to burp. Now she plays the guitar. Dear God. Will this love for her daughter ever stop being unbearable?
***
The sun has settled above the treetops, the air is clear and light, it’s a good day. One single good day. Kira gets out of one car just as Peter and Leo are getting into the other. Peter kisses her, taking her breath away, and she pinches him and makes him embarrassed. He’s still clutching his coffee cup, and she picks up the bags of shopping and wearily shakes her head, and holds her hand out to take it from him just as Maya comes out onto the steps. Her parents turn toward her, and they will remember this moment. The very last moment of happiness and security.
***
The fifteen-year-old girl closes her eyes. Opens her mouth. Speaks. Tells them everything.
***
When the words stop, there are avocados on the ground among the fragments of a dropped coffee cup. On one of the biggest pieces you can still see parts of the pattern from the front of the cup. A bear.