“He must be so pleased he’s going to this game!” someone says, and Kira nods even though she knows he hates travelling. He has hardly left Maya and Leo overnight since the night Isak fell asleep for the last time. Kira has had to travel far more with her work, and for a while she always kept a ready-packed bag in the hall cupboard. Peter used to joke about it, saying he was worried that she also had “a safe-deposit box containing hair dye, fake passports, and a pistol.” She never told him how much that hurt her. She knows she’s being selfish and hates herself for it, but she almost wishes Leo weren’t going along on this trip. Because it’s something that Peter is doing as a dad, it’s not just a work trip, it doesn’t balance out any of the times she’s been away. It doesn’t make her the slightest little bit less self-absorbed.

She picks up an avocado from the ground and puts it in another bag. When Isak fell ill the family slipped into an almost military routine: doctor’s appointments, dates of operations, journey times, waiting rooms, treatments, lists, and protocols. After the funeral Peter couldn’t find a way back out of himself—the pain became too great for him to move at all. Kira carried on taking Maya to play in the park, carried on cleaning and making dinner, carried on going to the store with her list. She once read a book that said that after a deeply traumatic event, like an assault or a kidnapping, the victim often doesn’t break down until much later—in the ambulance or police car—when everything is over. Several months after Isak’s death Kira suddenly found herself sitting on the floor of a supermarket in Toronto with an avocado in each hand, unable to stop crying hysterically. Peter came and carried her home. For weeks after that he was like a machine: cleaning, preparing meals, looking after Maya. That may have been how they survived, Kira realizes: thanks to their ability not to fall apart at the same time.

She smiles in the car on the way home. Puts on the louder-louder playlist. She’s going to have a whole weekend with her daughter, and what a blessing that is. It’s no time at all since Maya was a little red raisin wrapped up in a blanket, with Kira staring at the nurses in the hospital as if they’d told her they were going to dump her and the baby alone in the Indian Ocean on a raft the size of a postage stamp made of beer cans when they suggested it might be time to go home. Then the little whining bundle suddenly became a complete person. Developed opinions and characteristics and her own taste in clothes and a dislike of soda. What sort of child doesn’t like soda? Or sweets? She can’t be bribed with sugar and, dear God, how can anyone function as the parent of a child who can’t be bribed? It’s no time at all since she needed help to burp. Now she plays the guitar. Dear God. Will this love for her daughter ever stop being unbearable?

*

The sun has settled above the treetops, the air is clear and light, it’s a good day. One single good day. Kira gets out of one car just as Peter and Leo are getting into the other. Peter kisses her, taking her breath away, and she pinches him and makes him embarrassed. He’s still clutching his coffee cup, and she picks up the bags of shopping and wearily shakes her head, and holds her hand out to take it from him just as Maya comes out onto the steps. Her parents turn toward her, and they will remember this moment. The very last moment of happiness and security.

*

The fifteen-year-old girl closes her eyes. Opens her mouth. Speaks. Tells them everything.

*

When the words stop, there are avocados on the ground among the fragments of a dropped coffee cup. On one of the biggest pieces you can still see parts of the pattern from the front of the cup. A bear.

30

Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that. Everyone is just doing their job. The police say it all the time. “I’m just doing my job here.” That’s why no one asks what the boy did; as soon as the girl starts to talk they interrupt her instead with questions about what she did. Did she go up the stairs ahead of him or behind him? Did she lie down on the bed voluntarily or was she forced? Did she unbutton her own blouse? Did she kiss him? No? Did she kiss him back, then? Had she been drinking alcohol? Had she smoked marijuana? Did she say no? Was she clear about that? Did she scream loudly enough? Did she struggle hard enough? Why didn’t she take photographs of her bruises right away? Why did she run from the party instead of saying anything to the other guests?

They have to gather all the information, they say, when they ask the same question ten times in different ways in order to see if she changes her answer. This is a serious allegation, they remind her, as if it’s the allegation that’s the problem. She is told all the things she shouldn’t have done: She shouldn’t have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn’t have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn’t have showered. Shouldn’t have drunk alcohol. Shouldn’t have put herself in that situation. Shouldn’t have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn’t existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn’t she think of that?

She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman.”

*

Words are not small things.

*

Kira shouts. Makes calls. Causes trouble. Gets told to calm down. Everyone is actually just doing their job here. Peter sits with his hand on top of Maya’s fingers at the little table in the interview room in the police station in Hed, and he doesn’t know if his daughter hates him because he isn’t shouting too. Because he hasn’t had legal training, he doesn’t know what to shout about. Because he isn’t out trying to kill someone, anyone. Because he’s powerless. When he takes his hand away from hers, father and daughter are both freezing.

Maya sees the nameless fury in the eyes of one of her parents, the eternal emptiness in the other’s. She goes with her mother to the hospital. Her dad heads in the other direction, toward Beartown.

There will be days when Maya is asked if she really understood the consequences of going to the police and telling the truth. She will nod. Sometimes she will believe that she was actually the only person who did understand. Much later, in ten years’ time, she will think that the biggest problem here was actually that she wasn’t as shocked as all the adults were. They were more innocent than she was. She was fifteen and had access to the Internet; she already knew that the world is a cruel place if you’re a girl. Her parents couldn’t imagine that this could happen, but Maya simply hadn’t expected it to happen to her.

“What a terrible thing to realize,” she will think, in ten years’ time, and then she will remember the most peculiar details. Like the fact that one of the police officers was wearing a wedding ring that was too big, so it kept slipping down and hitting the table. And the fact that he never looked her in the eye, just kept his gaze focused on her forehead or mouth.