Sune nods. Smiles again. Leaves her with one last thought: “Do you remember that little girl, Alicia, who was firing pucks in my garden? She came to the rink today, seven times. She ran away from her preschool to watch the A-team train. I took her back, but she ran away again. She’s going to keep on doing that all autumn.”

“Is it possible to lock children up?” Zackell wonders, possibly not quite understanding the point Sune is trying to make, so Sune clarifies: “Children take all the things they grow up with for granted. After watching you coach the A-team today, Alicia will take it for granted that women do that. When she’s old enough to play on an A-team, there may not be female hockey coaches. Just . . . hockey coaches.”

That means something to Sune. Something important. He doesn’t know if it means anything to Elisabeth Zackell, because it honestly doesn’t look as though it does: she just looks as though she wants to go and get something to eat. But hunger is a feeling, too.

Just before Zackell walks out through the door, something flashes in her eyes, something she does actually care about, so she asks, “How’s it going with my goalie? That Vidar?”

“I’ll talk to his brother,” Sune promises.

“Didn’t you promise that Peter was going to talk to Benjamin Ovich’s sisters, too?” Zackell wonders.

“Yes?” Sune says in surprise.

“So why didn’t Benjamin come to training today?”

“He didn’t?” Sune exclaims.

* * *

It hadn’t even occurred to him that Benji might not have appeared for practice. Children aren’t the only ones who take things for granted.

* * *

In a cabin on a campsite sits a man in a blue polo shirt. He has lessons to prepare, a teaching job he has spent several years training for, but can’t get anything done. He sits in the little kitchen with a book about philosophy on the table in front of him, staring out through the window and hoping to see a young man with sad eyes and a wild soul. But Benji doesn’t come. He’s lost. Today the teacher looked him in the eye and told him he was a mistake, even though the mistake was the teacher’s.

Everyone in this town knows that Benji is dangerous, because he strikes hardest. Yet few people seem to appreciate that everything about him does just that—strike hardest, beat hardest—the whole time. Including his heart.

* * *

Inside the Oviches’ home one of the sisters, Gaby, walks into Benji’s room. Gaby’s two children are playing with Legos scattered across the whole floor. Gaby can say many harsh things about her little brother, but there’s no better uncle in the world. Her children will grow up saying that this room in their grandmother’s house, their uncle’s room, was the safest place in the entire universe. Nothing bad could happen to them here, no one would dare do anything to them, because their uncle would protect them against everyone and everything. Once one of them said to Gaby, “Mom! There are ghosts in Uncle Benji’s wardrobe; they have to hide in there because they’re scared of him!”

Gaby smiles and is just walking out of the room when the thought hits her. She spins around and asks the children, “Where did you get the Legos?”

“It was in the presents,” the children reply, unconcerned.

“What presents?”

The children go into defense mode, as if they’ve been accused of theft: “The presents on Uncle Benji’s bed! They had our names on them, Mom! They were for us!”

The doorbell rings. Gaby doesn’t walk to answer it. She runs.

* * *

Adri, the oldest sister, opens the door. Amat, Benji’s teammate, is standing outside. The boy doesn’t get worried until he sees how worried Adri gets, but she realizes everything all at once.

“Is Benji home?” Amat asks, although he already knows the answer.

“Shit!” Adri replies.

Gaby comes rushing out into the hall, yelling, “Benji left presents for the children!”

Amat clears his throat nervously: “He wasn’t at practice. I just wanted to check that he was okay!”

He calls the last words after Adri. She’s already run past him, heading toward the forest.

* * *

Benji occasionally skips practices, but never the first of the season. His feet are too desperate to get back onto the ice, his hands miss his stick, his brain the flight across the rink. He wouldn’t miss the chance to play today, not when Beartown is playing Hed in the first round of games. Something’s wrong.

* * *

Ramona is standing behind her counter, the way she always has, with as little emotional disturbance as possible. She’s seen this town blossom, but in recent years she’s also seen it take a beating. People in Beartown know how to work, but they need somewhere to do it. They know how to fight, but they need something to fight for.

The only thing you can rely on in all towns, big and small alike, is that there will be broken people. It’s nothing to do with the place, just life; it can beat us up. And if that happens, it’s easy to find your way to a pub; bars can quickly become sad places. Someone who has nowhere else to go can grasp a glass a little too tightly; someone who’s tired of falling can take refuge in the bottom of a bottle, seeing as you can’t fall much further from there.

Ramona has seen fragile souls come and go here; some have moved on, and some have gone under. Things have gone well for some of them, and some—like Alain Ovich—have gone off into the forest.

Ramona is old enough neither to jump with joy when things are going well nor to bury herself when things are going badly, and she’s knows how easy it is to have unrealistic expectations of a hockey team in an autumn like the one they’re facing now. Because sports isn’t reality, and when reality is hell we need stories, because they make us feel that if we can just be best at one thing, perhaps everything else will turn and start to go our way, too.

* * *

But Ramona really can’t say. Can things ever turn around? Or do we just get used to them?

* * *

The last thing Alain Ovich did before he took his rifle and went out into the forest was to leave presents for his children on their beds. No one knows why someone would get it into his head to do a thing like that, but perhaps he was hoping that that was how they’d remember him. That he could go far enough into the forest for them to believe he had just abandoned them, so that they could fantasize that he was a secret agent who had been called away on a top secret mission or an astronaut who had gone up into space. Perhaps he hoped they would have a childhood, in spite of everything.

It didn’t turn out that way. Adri, his eldest, will never be able to explain how she knew where he was. She just had a feeling about where he’d gone. Maybe that’s why dogs like her, because she has a heightened sensitivity to things that normal people lack. She didn’t shout “Dad!” as she moved through the trees; the children of hunters don’t do that, they learn that every man in the forest tends to be someone’s dad, so if you want to get hold of yours you have to shout his name as if you were just anyone. Adri never became just anyone, not entirely; she was born with something of Alain in her. He could never go far enough into the forest for her not to be able to find him.

* * *

A pub can be a gloomy place, because, taken as a whole, life always gives us more opportunities for grief than celebration, more funeral drinks than wedding toasts. But Ramona knows that a pub can be other things, too, from time to time: small cracks in the blocks of stone you carry in your chest. It doesn’t always have to be the best place on Earth, it just doesn’t always need to be the worst.

The past few weeks have been full of rumors. It’s said that the factory is going to be sold, and Beartown has been through enough setbacks to know that this could just as easily mean bankruptcy. It’s easy to call that attitude cynical, but cynicism is simply a chemical reaction to too much disappointment. The young men in the Bearskin aren’t the only people talking about unemployment; everyone is worried now. In a small community the loss of any employer is a natural disaster, everyone knows someone who’s affected, until eventually it spreads to you.

And it might be easy to call the inhabitants paranoid when they keep saying that the politicians focus all their resources on Hed and don’t give a damn if Beartown even survives another generation, but the worst thing about paranoia is that the only way to prove you’re not paranoid is to be proved right.

* * *