Us Against You Read online

  “I don’t know what to say, darling. I’m so very sorry,” Kira says now.

  “There’s nothing to say,” he replies bluntly.

  She hears the background noise, wonders how fast he’s driving. “We need to talk about it . . .”

  “There’s nothing to say. They won. They wanted to kill the club, and they found a way to win.”

  She takes a cautious breath, the way she always does, as if she’s done something wrong. “I . . . maybe . . . I know it feels like the end of the world right now, but—”

  “Don’t start, Kira.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Don’t start’?”

  “You know what I mean!”

  “I’m just saying that this could finally be a chance for us to talk about doing something . . . else.”

  How many times has she asked him that? “When does hockey stop?” How many times has he said “Next year”? Next year he’ll cut back, next year he’ll work less, next year it will be her turn to really focus on her career. She’s been waiting twenty years for next year. But something always happens that makes him indispensible, a crisis that makes him essential and her selfish for demanding something so unreasonable as normal office hours, as his actually coming home.

  He flares up now. It probably isn’t intentional. “What am I supposed to do, Kira? Become a house husband or what?”

  So she gets defensive. That probably isn’t intentional either. “Stop taking your frustration out on me! I’m just saying that perhaps there’s . . .”

  “There’s what, Kira? This club is my whole life!”

  Peter can hear nothing but the sound of her breathing. She bites her cheek to stop herself screaming. He tries to calm down and apologize but is suffocated by everything else he’s feeling, and the only thing that comes out is “You know what I mean . . .”

  How many years has she given it? They moved to Canada for his hockey career, they moved to Beartown for his hockey career, how many times has she thought that he of all people ought to understand her? All hockey players are driven by the need to find out how good they can become, but the same thing applies to lawyers. After they moved to Beartown she drank too much wine one evening and blurted out the truth: “Living here basically means accepting never reaching your full potential.” Peter thought she was talking about him, so he felt hurt. He felt hurt.

  “You know what I mean!” he repeats now, and yes, she knows exactly.

  And that’s the problem. Hockey is his whole life, so she hangs up.

  * * *

  Her colleague only just has time to duck before the phone hits the wall.

  * * *

  The stranger lays a creased sheet of paper on the bar, a list of names. “Do you know these people?”

  The old bar owner looks at the list without touching it. “Today’s lunch is meat, potatoes, and sauce. When you’ve finished, you’re welcome to leave in any direction of your own choosing.”

  The stranger’s nose wrinkles. “Do you have a vegetarian option?”

  Ramona swears and disappears into the kitchen. A microwave oven pings; she comes back and carelessly puts a plate down on the counter. Meat, potatoes, and sauce.

  “I’m vegan,” the stranger says, as if it were perfectly natural and not something a normal person should ever have to apologize for.

  “You’re what?” Ramona grunts.

  “Vegan.”

  “In that case we’ve got potatoes and sauce,” Ramona says. She picks up a knife and starts pulling the pieces of meat off and putting them down directly on the counter, like an irritated mother.

  The stranger watches this process, then asks, “Is there cream in the sauce?”

  Ramona finishes her beer, swears again, snatches up the plate, and vanishes into the kitchen again. She returns with a different plate, one that contains nothing but potatoes.

  The stranger gives an unperturbed nod and starts to eat. Ramona looks on irritably for a while before putting a glass of beer down next to the plate. “On the house. You need to get some sort of nourishment inside you.”

  “I don’t drink alcohol,” the stranger says.

  “Nor do I, I’ve given up!” Ramona says, pouring herself another beer and hissing defensively, “This? Not even five percent alcohol! It’s practically milk!”

  The stranger appears to ponder asking Ramona what sort of cows she gets her milk from but decides not to. Ramona pours two shots of whisky and downs one of them. The stranger doesn’t touch the other glass.

  “It’s not for the alcohol. It’s good for the digestion,” Ramona declares.

  When the stranger still doesn’t touch it, Ramona downs that one, too. Twice as good for the digestion. The stranger glances at the pennants and jerseys on the walls. “Have you always been this fond of hockey in this town?”

  Ramona snorts. “We’re not ‘fond’ of hockey here. People in the big cities with their bloody popcorn and VIP boxes, they’re ‘fond’ of hockey. Then the next day they’re fond of something else. This isn’t a big city.”

  The stranger doesn’t react. That frustrates Ramona, because she’s usually better at reading people. The stranger finishes eating and stands up, puts some money on the counter, tucks the list of names away in a pocket, and is halfway out of the door when Ramona bellows, “Why are there only men on that list?”

  The stranger turns around. “Sorry?”

  “If you’ve come to Beartown to ask about hockey, why have you only got men on that list of yours?”

  “I haven’t. You were on the list as well.”

  The door opens and closes. The stranger pushes past the men in black jackets outside. Ramona stays where she is, confused. It’s not a feeling she’s used to and certainly not one she likes.

  8

  When a Relationship Breaks Down

  When he was younger, Benji was always running away from home once the trees had turned green, and he would walk for hours before climbing up into one of them. If the wind was coming from the town, he would scream as loudly as he could, roaring out everything that hurt. If the wind was coming from the other direction, he would sit still until it numbed his cheeks so much that he could no longer feel the tears.

  It was his three older sisters who taught him to hunt. Not because they wanted to, but when their mom was working, the boy clearly couldn’t be left alone at home without causing all sorts of chaos. The only reliable thing about Benji has always been that he’s unreliable. But to everyone’s surprise, nature managed to get through to him where people failed. When someone learns to be in the forest as a child, it’s like gaining an extra language. The air talks here, and Benji understands. It’s mournful and wild.

  His sisters were taught to hunt by their father, and Benji hated them for that, for being able to remember him. So when he met Kevin, it was the first time he had anything in his life that was his and his alone. In the summer they would disappear to their secret place, a small, overgrown island in a lake that not even the hunters went to. The boys could be themselves there. They swam naked and let themselves dry in the sun on the rocks, they fished for their supper and slept under the stars, sometimes not saying a word to each other for several days. The first summer they spent twenty-four hours there, but by the time they were teenagers, that had stretched to weeks, every moment until hockey training started again.

  During the first years of their friendship Benji still wet the bed when he dreamed about his father. But never on the island. Once he’d rowed out and knocked a stake between the rocks and made the boat fast, the dreams couldn’t reach him there. Kevin meant everything to Benji. The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.

  Benji leads Ana and Maya to the tangled, overgrown shore. There’s no jetty in the lake, but he pulls out a rowboat hidden under the bushes and throws his backpack into it. Then he dives into the water and swims.

  At first the girls don’t understand what they’re rowing toward; there are just some
overgrown rocks in the middle of the lake, a few low trees, and from the water it doesn’t even look possible to go ashore. But Benji appears behind some big rocks and pulls the boat toward the island with water dripping from his arms and his bare feet pressed hard against the ground.

  Ana finds some metal stakes in the backpack and uses the hammer Benji gave her to knock them into a crevice in the rocks and ties the boat fast. Maya gets out after her, and only then do the girls realize what they’re looking at. In the middle of the little island is a cleared rectangle in the grass, impossible to see from anywhere on the water, just large enough for a two-man tent.

  “It’s a good place to hide,” Benji mumbles quietly, looking down at the ground.

  “Why are you showing it to us?” Maya asks.

  “I don’t need it anymore,” he says.

  He’s lying, she can see that. For a fleeting moment he looks as though he’s about to admit it. But instead he points, almost shyly, and adds, “If you swim over there, you can’t be seen from the forest.”

  Maya and Ana don’t ask who he used to share the island with. It’s theirs now. The best thing about nature is that it isn’t nostalgic; rocks and trees don’t give a damn about their previous owners. Benji walks toward the water, but just before he jumps from the rocks Maya calls after him, “Hey!”

  He turns around. Her voice breaks. “I hope you’re one of the people who gets a happy ending, Benji.”

  The young man nods quickly and turns away before she has a chance to realize how much that means to him. The young women stay on the island as he dives into the lake and swims away.

  Ana follows his arms as they break the water, peering at the taut body as it climbs up into the forest on the other side. Mournful and wild. She bites her bottom lip happily. When Maya shoots her an accusing glare, Ana snaps, “What? I was just thinking . . . he didn’t have to go off right away, did he? I mean, he’s welcome to watch while I go for a swim . . .”

  Maya taps her temple. “You’ve got serious mental problems.”

  “What? Did you see his arms? All I’m saying is that he’s welcome to watch when . . .”

  “Thanks! That’s enough! If you keep going on about it, you can’t stay on my island!”

  “What? So now it’s your island all of a sudden?”

  Maya bursts out laughing. Her best friend is the craziest, smartest person she knows, and in her own screwed-up way Ana is struggling to get everything back to normal again: boys, sex, life, the world. She starts where she always does when it comes to survival: with humor.

  They stay on the island almost all summer. Ana makes sporadic trips home to fetch supplies but mainly to clear away the empty bottles from her dad’s kitchen. She always comes back before it gets dark, and she always makes sure that Maya has enough to eat. One morning Maya wakes up to find her friend standing naked at the edge of the water, swearing as she tries to catch fish with her bare hands, because she’s seen some idiot in a survival program on TV do it; from then on Maya refuses to call her anything but “Gollum.” In return, Ana watches Maya the first time she takes her clothes off and, noting the tan line made by her T-shirt and shorts, says, “You’re going to make a great dad someday. You’ve already got every dad’s beach holiday T-shirt tan.” They spend one last summer singing loudly and dancing badly, sleeping without nightmares beneath the starry sky. Maya plays her guitar, calm and free. She doesn’t know it yet, but in ten years’ time one of the songs she writes here will be the first thing she plays at every concert when she goes on tour. She will have tattoos on both arms then, a guitar and a rifle, and will dedicate the song to her best friend. Its title is “The Island.”

  * * *

  Benji is running alone in another part of the forest. He finds new hiding places; he’s had a lot of practice over the years. He’s become a man who doesn’t take anything for granted; only children think certain things are self-evident: always having a best friend, for instance. Being allowed to be who we are. Being able to love who we want. Nothing is self-evident to Benji anymore; he just runs deeper into the forest until his brain is gasping for oxygen and he can no longer feel anything. Then he climbs up into a tree. And waits for the wind.

  * * *

  You have to keep your promises. That’s one of the first things children learn when they start to talk. When Maya was little, she made her dad promise that she could be an astronaut, and Peter promised, because that’s what parents do. He promised everything else as well: that no one would ever hurt her. That everything would be all right. Even though it isn’t true.

  After everything that happened in the spring Peter asked his daughter if she wanted to move away from Beartown. She said, “No. Because this is my town, too.” He asked what he could do for her, and she said, “Build a better club, for everyone.” So he promised.

  He’s never been good with words. Never been the kind of dad who could tell his kids and his wife how much he loves them. He’s always hoped that just showing them he did would be enough. But how can he show them anything now? Beyond the fact that he’s a loser?

  He pulls up at a pedestrian crossing. A young father is crossing the road with his daughter, eight or nine years old. The father is holding her hand, and the girl is making it very plain that she thinks she’s way too old for that. Peter has to stop himself getting out of the car and shouting at the father to never let go. Never let go! Never!

  When Peter and Kira had their first child, Isak, Kira said to him, “This is what we are now. Everything else comes after this. First and foremost, we’re parents!” Peter already knew, of course. All parents know. It’s not a voluntary process, it’s an emotional assault; you become someone else’s property the first time you hear your child cry. You belong to that little person now. Before everything else. So when something happens to your child, it never stops being your fault.

  Peter feels like leaping out of the car and shouting at that father, “Never let her out of your sight, never trust anyone, and don’t let her go to that party!”

  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 h
er 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?