Chapter 47 A Love Story We Will Never Forget #2
Benji rushes straight at him. For a moment William thinks he’s going to attack him, but Benji stops abruptly as if he’s realized something.
People are running back and forth across the road, there are sirens in the distance now, on their way through the forest. Benji turns to William and snarls, “You and me. Now. For real. No friends, no weapons. Just you and me.”
William could have protested, could have tried to calm Benji down and explain that he had nothing to do with the fire. But Benji is too wound up now to believe that, and perhaps William still hates him too much to back down. So he merely whispers, “Where?”
Benji thinks for a moment. “The running track on the Heights. No people, even ground, lights.”
William nods stiffly. “So I won’t have any excuses afterward, you mean?”
Benji’s actions have always been worse than his words. For that reason, his reply is particularly loaded. “There won’t be an ‘afterward’ for you, William.”
They run to the jogging track. Through the whole town.
They’ve done it a thousand times before; when they played hockey on the same team, they used to compete in every training session.
Benji could never let William be best at anything—he used to take things from William that he didn’t even want.
Now, as they run with snow up to their ankles, they’re those same boys again.
They even run a few feet apart, as if Kevin were still running between them.
When they reach the running track on the Heights, they stop and catch their breath for a few seconds; thick clouds billow from their mouths.
Then, still wearing his red tracksuit, William rushes straight at Benji, who’s standing there waiting in his green shirt with his fists clenched.
No friends, no weapons, just the two of them. A bull against a bear.
Spider and Woody find Teemu outside the Bearskin.
Their first instinct is to help put the fire out, to protect people.
This pub is their home, more than their homes have ever been.
But Spider whispers in Teemu’s ear, “We know who they are, those bastards from Hed. Woody’s girlfriend saw them through her kitchen window.
They left their cars down by the supermarket.
If we set off now, we can catch up with them! ”
When the men in black jackets pull away from the crowd outside the Bearskin and run toward Teemu’s Saab to hunt the enemy through the forest, hardly anyone notices them. The only person watching is a teenage boy. Leo Andersson. He follows them.
William and Benji don’t pull their punches.
Their blows are frenzied, they’re both so strong that their faces are bloody after just a few seconds.
William lets out a yell every time he swings and lands a punch, from a mixture of exhaustion and fury.
He’s taller than Benji, the only advantage Benji has never been able to take from him, and can punch downward while Benji has to punch up.
It’s harder to punch upward. They swing wildly at each other for what seems an age, until lactic acid forces them both to back away, gasping for air, streaming with blood.
Benji has lost a tooth, and William can hardly see with his right eye.
“Were you in love with him?” he suddenly snarls.
“WHAT?” Benji shouts, spitting blood onto the snow.
They’re standing a few feet apart, their lungs heaving. William puts his hands on his knees. One of his fingers is broken, and his nose is bleeding like a tap. He lowers his voice, as pain and exhaustion hit him. “Were you in love with Kevin?” he pants.
Benji says nothing for several minutes. He’s got blood in his hair and on his hands; it’s impossible to tell where he’s bleeding from and where he’s just wiped it off. “Yes.”
It’s the first time in his life that Benji has admitted that. William closes his eyes and feels his nose throb as he tries to breathe through it. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have hated you so much,” he whispers.
“I know,” Benji says.
William straightens up. Stands with his hands by his sides, his tracksuit top torn and stained with sweat. “Do you remember that summer when we were little, when it rained nonstop for a whole month? When the ice rink flooded?”
Benji looks surprised but nods slowly. “Yes.”
William wipes his nose with the back of his hand.
“You and Kevin were always out in the forest in the summer, but when it rained you both used to come to my place and ask if we could play hockey in the basement. I don’t know why you didn’t go back to Kevin’s, but—”
“Kev’s parents were having their house renovated that summer,” Benji reminds him.
William nods in acknowledgment. “Oh, yeah. That was why. We played hockey in my basement every day that month. And we were friends then. You were okay. We didn’t mess with each other.”
Benji spits more blood on the snow. “We slept on mattresses on the floor so we could start playing the moment we woke up . . .”
William’s smile is heavy with missed opportunities and lost years. “When other people our age talk about their childhoods, they always seem to remember the sun shining the whole time. All I remember is constantly hoping for rain.”
Benji stands still. In the end he sits down in the snow. William doesn’t know if he’s crying. Doesn’t know if it shows that he is.
Then the two men go their separate ways. Not as friends and not as enemies. They just go their separate ways.
It’s late by the time Maya and Ana finally stop training at their martial arts club.
Far too late, in Maya’s mother’s opinion, but she still picks her daughter up without protest. She offers Ana a lift, but Ana shakes her head secretively and Maya teases her: “She’s going over to see Viiiiiidar . . .”
It makes Maya so happy, because that’s the kind of thing ordinary sixteen-year-old best friends do. Tease each other about boys. Maya gets into the Volvo, waves to Ana through the rear window.
Vidar is waiting at the edge of the forest. He and Ana walk hand in hand through the night.
He’s humming and whistling, he can’t stop drumming his fingers against his leg, and if they had lived a whole life together perhaps Ana would have started to get irritated by his lack of impulse control.
But right now she loves it, the fact that all his emotions live inside him in the same way: instantly.
If they had lived their whole lives together, perhaps they would have gone walking in other places.
Perhaps in sunshine in some other country.
Perhaps they would have moved away from here and started again somewhere else, grown up and built a home together.
Perhaps had children, aged, and grown old together.
Ana stands on tiptoe to kiss him. His phone rings. She notices the smell of smoke.
When she sees the sudden look of horror on Vidar’s face and he starts to run, she doesn’t try to stop him. She runs alongside him.
A white car is driving along the road, far too fast. The men from Hed inside it are little more than boys. Can we forgive them for that? How old do we have to be to be held accountable for our actions, even when the consequences end up being so infinitely worse than we imagine?
When the Saab appears in the rearview mirror and the men in the white car realize that they’re being pursued, they panic.
They speed up, the Saab behind them does the same, the driver of the white car takes his eyes off the road, and a moment later the headlights of a third car shine through the windshield and dazzle him.
It’s a large Volvo heading the other way.
The white car skids on the snow; the men from Hed inside it scream. The tires lose their grip on the road. Thousands of pounds of metal take flight, just for a moment, hanging silently in the darkness. Then comes a collision so terrible that we will never really stop hearing it.
Kira and Maya are sitting in the Volvo; they’ve just left the kennels when Kira’s phone rings. It’s Peter. He’s already run into town.
“THE BEARSKIN’S ON FIRE! I DON’T KNOW WHERE LEO IS!” he roars.
The kennel is located a fair way into the forest. There are only two routes back to Beartown: the ordinary winding road that all normal people use, but also a barely maintained track through the trees with no lighting that’s occasionally used by hunters.
The track leads directly to the main road that runs between Beartown and Hed.
Never have a mother and a sister driven that track faster than they do tonight.
A few minutes later the Volvo slides out of the forest with its engine roaring, down onto the main road. Some way down the road an old man is driving toward them from Hed and blows his horn angrily. Kira couldn’t care less. She puts her foot down.
Then she sees the white car; it’s coming toward them far too fast. Maya lets out a scream before Kira has time to react.
The driver of the white car loses control, and the car skids across the road.
Kira slams on the brakes, steers the Volvo toward the ditch, and throws herself across the seat to protect her daughter.
The white car loses its grip on the road, takes off, and smashes into a tree.
Leo Andersson is running through the forest, darting between the trees to get there before the cars. He isn’t fast enough. Thank God.
He isn’t fast enough.
There’s an old man who’s a regular at the Bearskin; he usually sits with four other old men arguing about hockey.
His eyesight isn’t good, the other old men sometimes swap his spectacles for cheap reading glasses to make him think he’s gone blind when he puts them on.
As Ramona usually snaps, “So if he does go blind, how the hell is he going to know about it?”