*

Ann-Katrin and Hog are standing in the parking lot waiting for the team bus to get back from the final. Ann-Katrin will always remember how it sounds, the silence in the town tonight that still hums like a dense buzz of voices, the darkened houses all around where she just knows people are awake, phones and computers sending words to each other, more and more angry, more and more vile. People don’t talk much in Beartown. Even so, sometimes it feels like it’s the only thing they do. Hog touches her arm gently.

“We have to wait, Ann-Katrin. We can’t get involved in this until . . . we really know.”

“Peter’s one of your best friends.”

“We don’t know what happened, darling. No one knows what happened. We can’t get involved.”

Ann-Katrin nods. Of course they can’t get involved. There are always two sides to every story. You have to listen to Kevin’s version. She tries to convince herself of that. By every god and heaven and all the holy mothers of eternity, she really does try.

*

Ana is standing on the floor with her hands covering her face in shame. Maya is sitting in bed, shocked, and the remains of the computer are spread about the room. Kira goes in and takes each of their hands in hers.

“Ana, you know how much I love you. Like one of my own.”

Ana wipes her face as big drops fall to the floor from her nose. Kira kisses her hair.

“But you have to go home for a little while, Ana. We need to be . . . on our own as a family.”

Maya wants to protest on Ana’s behalf, but she’s too tired. When the front door closes again, Maya lies down and goes back to sleep. And sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

*

Peter drives his daughter’s best friend home. The houses are all dark, but he can still feel eyes looking out of the windows. When Ana gets out he wishes he could say something, be a wise parent offering comfort and encouragement and instruction. But he has no words. So all that comes out is: “It’s going to be okay, Ana.”

Ana tugs her jacket tight around herself and pulls her woolly hat down over her forehead, and tries to look like she believes it, for his sake. She doesn’t succeed. Peter can see the girl shaking with silent rage, and thinks back to a time, several years ago, when Kira and Maya had had an argument. Their daughter had one of her first teenage outbursts, and Kira was left sitting in the kitchen, crushed, sniffing: “She hates me. My own daughter hates me.” Peter held his wife tight and whispered: “Your daughter admires you and needs you. And if you ever doubt that, just look at Ana. Of all the people your daughter could have chosen as her best friend, she’s picked one who’s just like you. One who wears her heart on her sleeve.” Peter feels like getting out of the car and giving Ana a hug now, telling her not to be frightened, but he’s not that sort of person. And he’s too frightened himself to be able to lie.

*

When the car has gone Ana creeps into the house and wakes the dogs, then takes them as far out into the forest as she can. Then she sits there with her face buried in their fur and cries. They breathe on her neck, lick her ear, nudge her with their noses. She will never understand how some people can prefer other people to animals.

*

The Ovich family house has no empty beds tonight. Gaby’s two children are sleeping in their uncle’s bed, Adri and Katia in their mother’s, their mother on the sofa. The daughters insist that they can sleep on the furniture in the living room, but their mother yells at them until they back down. When Gaby gets back from the hospital with Benji early the next morning, his sisters and mother look at his crutches and his foot in a cast and hit him over the head and shout that he’ll be the death of them and that he means the world to them and that they love him and that he’s an imbecile.

He sleeps on the floor beside his bed, below his sister’s kids. When he wakes up the pair of them have both moved down with their covers and have curled up next to him. They’re sleeping in their hockey jerseys. Number “16” on the back.

*

Kira is sitting on the edge of her daughter’s bed. When Maya and Ana were children, Peter used to joke about how different they were, especially when they were asleep. “When Maya’s slept in a bed you don’t even have to make it afterward. When Ana’s slept there you have to start by moving it back to the right side of the room.” Maya would wake up with the body language of a sleepy calf; Ana like a drunk, angry middle-aged man who was trying to find his pistol. The only thing anyone could think of that the two little girls had in common was how protective they were of their names. Maya has never been more angry than the first time she realized there were other children with her name, which is saying a lot seeing as she was at the age when it was perfectly normal to demand that the plastic handles on her cutlery always matched the color of the food, or to have a tantrum at bedtime because “Daddy, my feet are the same size and I DON’T WANT THAT!!!” Nothing made her more angry than the fact that she wasn’t alone in being called what she was called. For both her and Ana, a name was a personal possession, physical property in the same way as lungs and eyeballs, and in her world all the other Mayas and Anas were thieves. These girls wanted to be anything but ordinary.

*

People grow up mercilessly fast.

*

Peter closes the door without a sound. Hangs the keys to the Volvo on the hook in the hall. He sits in the kitchen with Kira for a very long time without a word being spoken. Eventually Kira whispers: “This isn’t about us now. It’s all about how she’s going to get through this.”

Peter stares fixedly at the table.

“She’s so strong,” he says. “I don’t know what to say to her; she’s already stronger than me.”

Kira’s fingernails dig fresh grooves in her skin.

“I want to kill him, Peter. I want . . . I want to see him die.”

“I know.”

Kira is shaking as he crosses the force field and holds her, and they whimper and sniff together, holding back hard so as not to wake the children. They will never stop blaming themselves for this.

“It’s not your fault, Peter. It wasn’t hockey’s fault. What is it they say . . . ‘it takes a village to raise a child’?” she whispers.

“Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we picked the wrong village,” he replies.