* * *
Late that evening, a policeman is standing at the door. Peter knows him, his son used to play hockey in the same group as Leo. Perhaps that’s why the policeman’s words are tinged with regret when he says, “Sorry to bother you this late, Peter, but we’ve had some trouble in the forest outside Hed, a fight. Several people seriously injured. The Pack was involved.”
Peter leaps to the wrong conclusion. “You know very well that the club has nothing to do with the Pack, if you’re—”
The policeman cuts him off by handing over a shoe. “We found this at the site of the fight.”
Peter takes his son’s shoe and holds it in his trembling hand. When did he last hold a shoe his son had lost? When Leo was two years old? Three? How did his feet get this big?
The policeman says regretfully, “I wouldn’t have known whose they were if my son hadn’t been nagging me for weeks about wanting a pair exactly like that. I told him they were too expensive for a twelve-year-old, and he yelled at me and told me I was stupid because apparently ‘everyone’s got them!’ I asked him to name one person, and he said Leo.”
Peter tries to keep his voice steady. They really were far too expensive for a twelve-year-old. Kira and Peter got them for Leo back in the summer only because they felt guilty about . . . everything.
“I . . . they’re just ordinary shoes . . . there must be loads of twelve-year-olds who—”
The policeman holds out something else. A small key ring. “We found these as well. If you were to close the door in my face, I have a feeling I’d be able to open it again.”
Peter doesn’t make any more objections. He takes the keys. Nods silently.
“Leo will have to come to the station for questioning,” the policeman says.
“He’s only twelve . . .” Peter manages to say.
The policeman feels for him but doesn’t back down. “Peter, this is serious. The guys from Hed had fought the Pack before, but this was different. Three of them are still in hospital with serious injuries. They’re going to get revenge, and then the Pack will get revenge. This isn’t a game. Sooner or later someone’s going to get killed.”
Peter clutches the shoe and keys unconsciously to his chest. “I . . . Leo’s only . . . can I at least drive him to the police station myself?”
The policeman nods. “Your wife’s a lawyer, isn’t she?”
Peter understands what he means. It frightens the life out of him. Once the patrol car has driven off, Peter doesn’t open the door to his son’s room. He kicks it open.
* * *
A moment later father and son are standing face-to-face shouting at each other, but they’ve never been farther apart.
* * *
Maya locks herself in the bathroom. She hears her dad shouting at Leo, then her mom shouts at her dad to stop shouting, then they shout at each other about who has more right to shout. They’re frightened, angry, powerless. Parents always are.
Maya’s seen photographs of them before they had children. They were young and happy then; they don’t laugh like that anymore, not even in photographs. They used to be so in love that they hungered for each other, her dad’s fingertips brushing her mom’s bangs, her mom who could raise the hairs on her dad’s arms with a single glance. Children have a purely biological reaction against their parents’ love for each other, but when it disappears, they hate themselves.
Maya is sitting on the bathroom floor, opening and closing the dryer door, click, click, click. The sound feels almost meditative, until she sees the T-shirt inside it. It’s Leo’s. Only he would be stupid enough to tumble dry a cotton T-shirt, because he never does the laundry, he doesn’t know how to do it. Maya pulls the shirt out; the bloodstains are still visible. She knows what he’s done; she burned her own clothes after that night at Kevin’s because no one at home would have understood. Leo has been fighting, and Maya knows who for.
She hears her dad shout louder, “You want to play gangsters in the forest with hooligans? Have you lost your mind?” Leo shouts back, “At least they’re doing something! What the hell are you doing? You’re just letting all the goddamn cocksuckers in Hed trample all over our town!” Then her mom yells, loudest of all, “YOU DON’T USE THAT KIND OF LANGUAGE IN MY HOUSE!”
Click, click, click. Maya opens and closes the tumble dryer. She knows her family aren’t arguing about words or about the fight or about anyone’s town. They’re arguing about her. Everyone is.
She used to count butterflies with Ana, talking about “the butterfly effect,” that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can have such a devastating effect on the universe that the tiny air current it creates can cause a hurricane on the other side of the earth. Maya sees a whole town failing in the wake of her decision now. She’s the cause, and all the fighting and violence are the effect. If she hadn’t been here, if she’d never met Kevin, never gone into his room at that party, not been drunk, not been infatuated, if she’d just said yes and not put up a fight. That’s what she’s thinking, that’s how guilt works. If only she hadn’t existed, none of this would have happened. Her dad is shouting “We haven’t raised you to be a fighter!” Leo yells back, “SOMEONE IN THIS FAMILY HAS TO FIGHT, AND YOU’RE TOO MUCH OF A COWARD!”
* * *
Maya hears a door slam. Realizes that it’s her dad who’s stormed out. Blinded by grief.
* * *
That night Maya writes a song she’ll never perform. It is called “Hear Me.”
Every man I know, every father and brother and son,
Always these clenched hands. Where did you get that idea from?
Always this violence, always round holes and a square block,
The absurd idea you were sold, that we want you to fight for us.
If you want to do something for us,
Put a weapon down for me,
Close the maw of hell for me,
Be a friend to me,
Try to be good men for me.
You boast about all you’re going to do for me.
So when are you going to stop ruining things for me?
Do you want to know what you can do for me?
Start by hearing me.
* * *
Her mom is standing outside the bathroom door, asking Maya in a whisper if she’s okay. Maya lies: “Yes.” Her mom says, “We have to go to Hed. To . . . sort something out.” As if Maya doesn’t understand. So Maya lies, “Don’t worry, I need to study, see you later.”
When Leo’s mom fetches him tersely from his room, he doesn’t protest. He’s already got his coat on and puts on his new shoes. They set off for the police station, the door closes behind them, and Maya sits on the bathroom floor, unable to breathe. She gets up, feeling a desperate, panicky need for air. She suddenly has to get out of the house, away from the town. She knows only one place for that, and only one friend. So she texts Ana a single word: “Island?”
She starts to pack a backpack and puts her phone into her back pocket. She doesn’t wait for an answer, she knows Ana will come. Ana would never let her down.
30
They Aren’t the Kind of People Who Get Happy Endings
Of course Ana will be there. You can’t set out to grow a friendship like theirs. But there are other things you can’t grow either: parents are a sort of plant you can’t choose, with roots that go deep and catch your feet in a way that only the child of an addict can understand.
Ana is already in the forest on her way when her phone rings. It’s Ramona. The old woman is hard but never cruel; she has made many such phone calls over the years and always speaks the same way: sympathetic but not patronizing. She says Ana’s dad has “drunk his way out through the door,” which means that someone had to throw him out of the Bearskin and he isn’t in a fit state to get home on his own. “It’s starting to get cold,” Ramona says, because she doesn’t want to have to embarrass Ana by saying that her dad has been sick all over himself and needs fresh clothes. She knows the girl understands. Ramona has
watched people drink themselves into the gutter for half a century, and she has learned that some children need to see the worst aspects of alcohol so that they leave it the hell alone.
So she says, “Your dad needs company on the way home, Ana,” and Ana stops in the forest, nods, and whispers, “I’m on my way.” She always goes. She’d never leave him.
* * *
Anxiety. It owns us but leaves no trace.
* * *
Ana doesn’t call Maya, because Maya has perfect parents. A mom who never abandons her family and a dad who’s never been sick all over himself when drunk. They’re like sisters, she and Maya, but the only thing they haven’t had in common is that shame. Ana can’t bear the thought of Maya seeing her dad like that.
* * *
Maya sits alone on the island all night. Looking at her phone. Eventually she gets a text message, but not from Ana. Another anonymous number, again. She’s still getting messages, but she’s stopped telling Ana about them, she doesn’t want to go on making her friend sad. It’s Maya’s secret now: “Do you suck cock for 300 kronor?” this one asks. She doesn’t even know if the people writing them know why they’re doing it anymore. It could just as easily be someone in Hed who wants to break her as some girl at school who hates her or a gang of kids who are daring one another to “text that girl who got raped by Kevin Erdahl.” That’s all Maya will ever be for those people. Victim, whore, liar, princess.
Back in the summer Ana buried an expensive bottle of wine out here; her dad had been given it by an elderly neighbor in the Heights because he’d given him some meat after a hunt. Ana didn’t have the heart to throw it away, but she didn’t dare leave it in the kitchen among all the fragments of her dad’s heart, either. So she hid it out here. Maya digs it up and drinks it. She doesn’t care if she’s being selfish; being drunk doesn’t bring relief or peace, just bitterness. “I always rely on you to come,” she thinks about her best friend. “I was relying on you when Kevin pushed me down on the bed, too. My best friend will come, I thought, because my best friend would never leave me!” She throws the empty wine bottle at a tree. It smashes, and one of the pieces flies back and cuts her arm. Blood drips from the wound. She doesn’t feel it.
* * *
Every night recently Ana has dreamed that she’s being suffocated in a coffin, someone is sitting on the lid so she can’t open it, and no matter how hard she bangs, no one hears her. She hasn’t told her best friend, because Maya seems to be getting a bit better and Ana doesn’t want to upset her. She doesn’t say anything about the text messages, either, because Maya doesn’t seem to be getting them anymore and Ana doesn’t want to remind her of how horrible they are. Ping, ping. Pictures of boys’ dicks. Sometimes worse. She can’t imagine what kind of sick satisfaction they get from doing it or if they even think of her as human. Maybe she’s just an animal. A product to consume.
This isn’t what Ana thought life as a teenager would be like. Adults say you should enjoy being sixteen, that it’s the best time of your life. Not for Ana. She loved her childhood, when her best friend was happy and her dad was an untouchable hero she could worship. When Ana was little, four or five years old, two men on snowmobiles disappeared in a winter storm north of the town. The emergency services called the best local hunters, people who knew the terrain, and Ana’s dad packed his things and set off in the middle of the night. Ana stood in the doorway, begging him to stay. She’d heard about the storm on the radio, and she was old enough to know that dads didn’t always come home from things like that. But her dad crouched down, took her head in his hands, and whispered, “We’re not the type who let other people down, you and me.”
One of the lost men froze to death, but the other one survived. It was Ana’s dad who found him. A couple of winters later, when Ana had just turned six, she was playing down by the lake just after dusk when she heard a cry. A child the same age as her was in the water, already chilled through. All the children of Beartown know how to move across the ice to help someone who’s fallen through, but that doesn’t mean all the children would dare to do it alone in the dark. Ana didn’t hesitate for an instant.
Her dad has done a lot of stupid shit in his time, but he raised a daughter who saved the life of someone else’s daughter. When she got home, she was wet through and chilled and her lips were blue, but when her mom cried in horror, “What on earth’s happened?” the little girl just beamed and said, “I’ve found a best friend!”
Her mom left them a few years later. She couldn’t bear the forest and darkness and silence. Ana stayed. She and her dad played cards and told each other jokes, and sometimes when he was in a really good mood, he used to make her jump. He was brilliant at that; he could stand behind a door in a darkened room hiding just so he could jump out with a yell, making Ana shriek and laugh until she was breathless.
She always loved him, even when he was sad. Perhaps he always was, deep down. Ana doesn’t know if he got sad when her mom left or if her mom left because he was already sad. Some people just have a core of sadness. He would sit alone in the kitchen, drinking and crying, and Ana felt sorry for him because it must be a terrible thing: being able to cry only when you’re drunk.
She tends to think that she’s got two dads, one good and one bad, and she made up her mind that it was her job to make sure that when her bad dad took himself out in the evening, he wouldn’t damage his body so much that her good dad couldn’t use it the next morning.
She finds him around the back of the Bearskin now; he’s leaning against a wall, asleep. For a few terrible moments Ana can’t find his pulse and is overwhelmed by panic. She slaps his cheeks with the palm of her hand until he suddenly splutters and opens his eyes. When he catches sight of her, he slurs, “Ana?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“Di . . . did . . . did I scare you?”
She tries to smile. He falls asleep again. It takes all the sixteen-year-old daughter’s strength to lift his top half so she can pull off the vomit-covered shirt and put a clean one on him. Most people probably wouldn’t have bothered, but Ana knows her good dad is in there somewhere. The dad who read her stories after her mom left them and knows there are other lullabies than whisky. She wants that dad to wake up in a clean shirt tomorrow morning. She puts her arm around his shoulder and pleads with him to stand up.
“We’re going home now, Dad.”
“Ana . . . ?” he slurs.
“Yes. It’s okay, Dad. You’re just having a bad evening. Things will be better tomorrow.”
He sniffs. “Sorry.”
That’s the worst thing. Daughters have no defense against that word. He stumbles, and she stumbles, too.
* * *
But someone catches her.
* * *
Kira’s voice echoes through the whole police station. How can you draw a dividing line between the lawyer and the mother when the boy is twelve years old? She didn’t yell at Leo in the car on the way here, because Peter has already done enough yelling for both of them. For everyone. So she’s yelling now instead, venting all her anger and powerlessness on the police officers.
Peter is sitting slumped in a room next to Leo. His son is sitting straight-backed, confrontational, while his dad is shrunken, drained of life and energy. When did he last yell at Leo? Several years ago? Peter’s dad used to fight, and Ramona at the Bearskin once told Peter that “fathers and violence are like fathers and drink—either the sons fight and drink even worse, or you don’t do it at all.” Once Peter tried to explain something similar to Leo: “I don’t believe in violence, Leo, because my dad used to hit me if I so much as spilled a bit of milk. That didn’t teach me not to spill milk, it just made me afraid of milk.” He doesn’t know if Leo understood. He doesn’t know what to say anymore. He’s called his son some terrible things this evening, but Leo doesn’t seem remotely bothered. He soaked up his parents’ scolding without blinking, and when the police ask the boy their questions his father shudders, shivering as if the wi
ndows were open. That’s the moment he realizes he’s losing his twelve-year-old son.
Leo used to pay hockey because his dad loved hockey. He never fell in love with it, but he joined the team because he liked the sense of belonging, the solidarity. Peter can see that he’s found the same things now, in a terrible place. When the police ask Leo what happened in the forest during the fight, Leo replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” When the police ask how his shoe and keys ended up there, the boy replies, “I was climbing trees, I might have dropped them.” The police ask if he saw anyone from the Pack fighting. “What pack?” the boy asks. The police show him a picture of Teemu Rinnius. Leo says, “I don’t know who that is. What did you say his name was?”
* * *
The boy is lost, Peter knows it. Because Peter is afraid of milk, and Leo isn’t afraid of anything.
* * *
Benji walks out of the back door of the Bearskin with the garbage, and it’s his hands that catch Ana. As he picks up both her and her father, she starts to cry. She breaks in all directions at the same time. Benji hugs her, she buries her face against his chest, and he pats her hair.
She says nothing about how used she is to carrying her dad. Benji says nothing about never having the chance to carry his.
“Why does everyone drink so much?” Ana sobs instead.
“Because it makes everything quiet,” Benji replies honestly.
“What?”
“All the crap you can’t stop thinking about.”
Ana slowly lets go of Benji and runs her fingers through her dad’s hair as his head bobs in time with his snoring. She says, so quietly that it’s almost a song, “It must be terrible to only be able to bear to feel things when you’re drunk.”
Us Against You Page 26