A Woman

Summer in Beartown is capable of enchanting anyone: the way the scent of roses gets stronger in darkened rooms, the way the light in a place so used to darkness is emotionally overwhelming. Greenery suddenly froths around us, it’s light almost all night through, warm breezes chase one another around the corners of buildings like calves let out to pasture. But we have learned never to trust the heat; it’s fleeting and unreliable and always lets us down. The trees shed their clothing quickly in this part of the country, all at once, like a nightdress; the days soon grow shorter, the horizon comes closer. Sooner than we realize, winter falls, white, and erases all the color of the other seasons, the world becomes a blank piece of paper again, a frozen, freshly ironed sheet when we look out of the window one morning. We’ve pulled our boats from the lake, leaving parts of ourselves in the bottom of them. The people we were in July, those summer people, will rest on a bed of wood deep below the snow for so many months that we will almost have forgotten them by next spring.

* * *

September is on its way. A time that belongs to those who love hockey. Our year starts now.

* * *

Fatima and Ann-Katrin are finishing their shifts at the hospital. Every doctor who passes wants only to talk about hockey; the local paper’s revelation that there’s a “mysterious new sponsor” who’s going to save Beartown Ice Hockey is the big topic of conversation in both Beartown and Hed. “What a season this is going to be!” one nurse exclaims in the staff room and immediately falls out with a nurse who supports the other team: “Hed should have gotten that new sponsor instead!” “This district isn’t big enough for two hockey teams,” one of them says. “Ha! Why not close down Hed if you can’t survive without council money?” the other suggests.

It starts off as friendly squabbling, but Fatima and Ann-Katrin have followed hockey in these towns long enough to know that it will soon lead to genuine conflict, not just in the hospital but everywhere. People’s best and worst feelings about one another will explode when Beartown and Hed play each other. Sports is so much more than just sports around here. Especially this season.

* * *

When Fatima and Ann-Katrin emerge from the hospital at the end of their shifts, a man in a tracksuit top is waiting in the parking lot.

“Peter? What are you doing here?” Ann-Katrin asks in surprise when she catches sight of Beartown Ice Hockey’s general manager in the distance.

“I need to ask you both for something,” Peter says.

“What?” Ann-Katrin wonders.

“Your sons.”

Fatima and Ann-Katrin start to laugh; then they realize he isn’t joking.

“Are you feeling okay, Peter?” Fatima asks anxiously.

He nods sternly. “We’ve got a new coach, as you may have heard. And she wants to build the club . . . around your boys.”

Ann-Katrin tries to read his tone of voice. Asks, “And you don’t think that’s a good idea?”

The corners of Peter’s mouth twitch, but he lowers his gaze. “I’ve always tried to build a hockey club that was . . . more than just a hockey club. I wanted it to foster young men as much as it did hockey players. I didn’t want winning to be the most important thing. But . . . we’ve got a new sponsor now. And if we don’t win this season . . . if we don’t manage to beat Hed and get promoted to a higher league . . . then I don’t know if we’ll still be here next year.”

“Just say what you came to say,” Ann-Katrin says impatiently.

Peter’s chest rises and falls.

“I’m afraid the club might demand more from your sons than it can give back to them.”

“How?” Fatima asks.

Peter turns to her. “Amat stopped me when I was driving awhile back. He asked if he was going to be able to play in the junior team and I . . . I wasn’t very nice to him . . .”

“Everyone has their bad moments, you’re no worse than anyone else.” Fatima smiles, but Peter cuts her off. “He asked about the junior team, Fatima, but dear Lord . . . we don’t want Amat on a junior team. We want him on the A-team!”

Fatima swallows. “With . . . with all the grown men?”

Peter doesn’t attempt to hide the truth from her. “It’s going to make huge demands of him. And all the older players will go for him extra hard. There have been plenty before him who’ve been broken by that. Being the youngest in the team, surrounded by adults . . . it won’t be easy for him.”

The look in Fatima’s eyes is implacable. “No one’s ever promised my son that it would be.”

Peter tugs his beard in embarrassment. “I should have told Amat that my daughter and I still owe him a huge debt of gratitude for standing up at that meeting back in the spring and telling the truth . . .”

Fatima shakes her head. “You can give him your thanks, but Maya doesn’t owe anyone anything. We should be asking her forgiveness, the whole town. As far as my son is concerned, he just wants to play hockey. So he’ll play if you can give him somewhere to do it.”

Peter nods gratefully. Then he turns to Ann-Katrin. “I’m not going to lie to you . . .”

Ann-Katrin smiles. “You wouldn’t dare.” She’s married to Hog, Peter’s childhood friend, and has seen Peter get older almost as closely as she has her husband. So Peter tells it like it is: “We need Bobo this season. We’ve got a shortage of defensemen. But to be completely honest, he’s not good enough to play at a higher level . . . so if we win, if he helps us move up to a higher league . . . he won’t stand a chance of making the team next season. This season will be his last. I’ll demand blood, sweat, and tears from him, he’ll have to prioritize hockey ahead of everything else, school, girls . . . everything. But I can only offer him one year in return.”

Ann-Katrin breathes through her nose. Her body hurts; in hindsight Peter will think she looked thin and exhausted because she’d just worked a difficult late shift. Like almost everyone else, he doesn’t know about her illness. That’s as it should be; she doesn’t want their sympathy. But she does want to watch her son play hockey one last time. So she smiles. “One year? A year is an eternity.”

Her husband, Hog, had to stop playing hockey after suffering one too many concussions. The doctors forced him to give up, and he was quiet for weeks, grieving for himself as if he’d attended his own funeral. For months he couldn’t bring himself to go near the rink because he felt he’d let his team down. Let them down! Because he wasn’t immortal. Bobo has inherited his broad shoulders and brute strength from his dad, but he’s also inherited his need to be part of a gang. They both hate being alone. They need a context in which they feel loved and accepted, so when Hog no longer had the locker room to go to, it was as if part of him had been amputated. What wouldn’t he have given for one more year? One last game? One last moment where you can feel your whole life in your gut and the spectators are roaring and everything is at stake?

Ann-Katrin will hardly be able to stand when she gets home tonight, and Hog will fetch her from the car, that big, clumsy lump of a man will carry her into the house and when she’s too tired to dance he’ll spin her around slowly and tenderly in his arms across the kitchen floor. She’ll fall asleep with his lips against her neck, his still infatuated hands beneath her top. Bobo will read Harry Potter to his brother and sister in another room. Early tomorrow morning, Ann-Katrin will go back to see her doctor again.

* * *

One year? What wouldn’t we give for one more year? A year is an eternity.

* * *

Five old uncles are sitting at the counter in the Bearskin again. They’ve got something new to argue about.

“A woman, though? As a hockey coach? Is that really a good idea?” one of them asks.

“Can’t help thinking this whole equality thing has gone a bit too far,” another says.

“Oh, shut up! That woman’s probably forgotten more about hockey than the pair of you have ever known, you senile old fools,” a third protests.

“You think? You can’t tell the difference between icing and ice cream, all last season I had to sit there like a guide dog telling you where the puck was!” the fourth chuckles.

“Can you get talking guide dogs these days, then? It’s bad enough that you keep lying about watching the 1987 World Championships in Switzerland,” the fifth says.

“I did!” the fourth insists.

“Really? Pretty impressive, seeing as the 1987 World Championships were held in Austria!” the fifth points out.

They laugh, all five of them. Then the first, or possibly the second, says, “But a woman as coach? Is that really a good idea?”

“She sleeps with women too, they say. Are we really going to have one of those in this town?” wonders the second, unless it’s actually the first.