When Isak died, people asked, “How does anyone get over that?” Peter’s only response is that you don’t. You just carry on living. Some of your emotional register switches to autopilot. But now? He doesn’t know. He just knows that when something happens to your child, it doesn’t make any difference whose fault it is, because it never stops being your fault regardless. Why weren’t you there? Why didn’t you kill him? Why weren’t you enough?

Peter wants to shout at the dad crossing the road, “NEVER LET GO BECAUSE THOSE BASTARDS WILL TAKE YOUR WHOLE LIVES AWAY FROM YOU!”

* * *

Instead he just cries quietly, his fingernails embedded in the steering wheel.

The Island

It was summer

And the island was ours

We had had winter

For a thousand years

You were broken

I was cracked

You hung the rope

I tied the knot

How many times did we have time to die

Before we turned sixteen

How many songs about saying good-bye

That only you know what they mean

But this was summer

And the island was ours

And you were mine

For a thousand years

* * *

Kira used to fall asleep on the sofa when Peter got home late. An unopened bottle of wine and two glasses on the table, a silent little dart of guilty conscience to remind him that she’d been waiting for him. That his not coming home actually hurt someone. He used to pick her up gently and carry her to bed, then fall asleep, breathing hard against her back.

A long marriage consists of such small things that when they get lost we don’t even know where to start looking for them. The way she usually touches him, as if she didn’t mean to, when he’s washing up and she’s making coffee and her little finger overlaps his when they put their hands down on the kitchen counter together. His lips brush her hair fleetingly as he passes her at the kitchen table, the two of them looking different ways. Two people who have loved each for long enough eventually seem to stop touching each other consciously, it becomes something instinctive; when they meet between the hall and kitchen, their bodies somehow find each other. When they walk through a door, her hand ends up in his as if by accident. Tiny collisions, every day, all the time. Impossible to construct. So when they disappear, no one knows why, but suddenly two people are living parallel lives instead of together. One morning they don’t make eye contact, their fingers land a few inches farther apart along the counter. They pass each other in a hallway. They no longer bump into each other.

It’s past midnight by the time Peter opens the front door. Kira knows he’s hoping she’s asleep, so she pretends to be. The wine bottle on the table is empty; there’s only one glass beside it. He doesn’t carry her to bed, just covers her clumsily with a blanket where she lies on the sofa. He stands there for a few moments; perhaps he’s waiting for her to stop pretending. But when she opens her eyes, he’s in the bathroom. He locks the door, stares down at the floor; she lies on the sofa, stares at the ceiling. They don’t know if they have anything to say to each other anymore. Everything has a breaking point, and even though people always say that “a joy shared is a joy doubled,” we seem to insist on believing that the opposite is true of sorrow. Perhaps that isn’t actually the case. Two drowning people with lead weights around their ankles may not be each other’s salvation; if they hold hands, they’ll just sink twice as fast. In the end the weight of carrying each other’s broken hearts becomes unbearable.

* * *

They sleep out of reach of each other’s fingertips. With no lips against hair, no breath against back. And night after night a single question slowly takes root inside both of their heads: Is this how it starts? When a relationship breaks down?

9

He’s Going to Need Someone to Fight Tonight

Everyone who loves sports knows that a game isn’t decided only by what happens but just as much by what doesn’t. The shot that hits the post, the bad call by the referee, the pass that didn’t quite connect. Every discussion about sports dissolves sooner or later into a thousand “ifs” and ten thousand “if only that hadn’ts.” Some people’s lives get stuck the same way, year after year passing by with the same story being repeated to strangers at an ever more deserted bar counter: a doomed relationship, a dishonest business partner, an unfair dismissal, ungrateful kids, an accident, a divorce. One single reason why everything went to hell.

When it comes down to it, everyone has something to say about the life he should have had instead of this one. Cities and towns work the same way. So if you want to understand their biggest stories, first you have to listen to the smaller ones.

* * *

The council building is left almost empty after Midsummer as the politicians take their holidays or spend time at their regular jobs. If you want to understand how the local council is run, that’s where you have to start: politics here is a part-time occupation, and the salary of just a few thousand kronor a month makes it almost an act of charity when seen in relation to the number of hours worked. So most councillors are employed elsewhere or have their own businesses, meaning that they have customers and suppliers and bosses and colleagues. Naturally this makes it difficult to claim to be truly independent, but no man is an island, especially not this deep into the forest.

One single councillor goes on working eighteen hours a day in the council building throughout the summer, and he doesn’t owe anything to anyone around here. His name is Richard Theo, and he sits in his office in a black suit, making a stream of phone calls. He is hated by some and feared by many, and soon he will change the direction of one hockey club and two towns.

* * *

Several days of rain follow, and Beartown becomes a different place: the town isn’t as used to this sort of precipitation as it is to snow. People stay indoors, quieter and more irritable than usual.

The Jeep drives through the mud up into the forest, and the stranger stops outside a small garage beside a shabby-looking house. Cars are parked on the grass, waiting to be repaired. One of them is difficult to avoid: it has an ax sticking out of the hood.

The stranger sees an eighteen-year-old youth with fists the size of piglets jump up onto the chassis and pull the ax out of the metal, his shoulders so tense that his neck seems to retract into his guts.

A gruff-looking man in his forties, so similar to the young man that there’s no way the postman would ever have to take a paternity test, walks over to the Jeep and taps on the window. “Tires?” he grunts.

The stranger winds the window down and repeats uncomprehendingly, “Tires?”

The man kicks the front wheel. “They’re worn smooth, this one’s got grooves no deeper than an old LP, so I assume that’s why you’re here?”

“Okay,” the stranger says.

“?‘Okay’? Do you want new tires or not?” the man wonders.

“Okay,” the stranger says and shrugs as if the man was asking about ketchup on a burger.

The man grunts something inaudible and yells, “Bobo! Have we got tires for this one?”

The stranger obviously isn’t here to get the tires changed but to assess the quality of a defensive player. But if that’s going to require a change of tires, then so be it. So the stranger watches the eighteen-year-old, Bobo, whose efforts pulling the ax from the car hood remind the stranger of a cut-price King Arthur. He disappears into the workshop, where there are no pictures of scantily clad women in the walls, from which the stranger concludes that there’s a woman in the house whom the father and son are unwilling to cross. There are, however, pictures of ice hockey teams, new and old alike.

The stranger nods to them, then at Bobo when he comes back with a tire under each arm, and asks the father, “That lad of yours, is he any good as a player?”

The father suddenly lights up with the sort of pride you only have if you’ve been a defenseman yourself:

“Bobo? Yes! Toughest defenseman in town!”

His choice of the word “toughest” doesn’t surprise the stranger, because both father and son give the distinct impression of being the sort of men who can skate in only one direction. The father holds out a grease-stained hand, and the stranger shakes it with the enthusiasm of someone invited to take hold of a snake.

“People call me Hog,” the father grins.

“Zackell,” the stranger says.

The stranger leaves the workshop with an improved set of secondhand tires for a little more than the going rate and a scrap of paper: “Bobo. If he can learn to skate.”

* * *

The sheet of paper isn’t just a list. It’s a team sheet.

* * *

Amat runs alone along the road with his shirt black with sweat until his eyes are streaming and his brain is empty of all thought.