The man in the polo shirt watches Katia come rushing out of the office and throw herself into the group of men. She pushes the man with the beer bottle up against the wall and yells, “One single swing in here, and you’ll be drinking at home for a year!”

Then she spins around toward Benji and sees a very familiar look in his eyes. The same as their older sister Adri’s, the same as their father’s: if there isn’t a war, they start one.

“Benji . . . not here, not today, please . . . ,” she whispers.

She puts her hands on his chest, feels the beat of his heart. His pulse is calm, his breathing steady. Four grown men want to beat him up, and he isn’t even scared. Nothing frightens Katia as much as that.

Benji looks her in the eye. She has their mother’s eyes, and she doesn’t often ask her little brother for anything. So he kisses her on the cheek and laughs scornfully at the four men in the doorway. “Are you coming in or going out? I’m going home, so if you’re not too busy feeling each other’s dicks maybe you could get out of the way?”

The men glance at Katia and the bouncers, and eventually they step back. The point has already been made: it’s no longer acceptable to show up in Hed with a bear tattoo. Beartown may have a “Pack,” but there are men here who are prepared to take a stand, too.

As Benji walks through the door, he lets out a loud laugh. The men he’s left behind are quivering with rage. One of them mutters to Katia, “It’s lucky for your brother that he’s got you. You just saved his life.”

Katia glares at the man. “You think? Really? You think I saved his life?”

The man tries to smile confidently, but his mouth is dry. Katia snorts. She goes and gets her things from the office, then fetches her car, but Benji has already disappeared into the night, where she won’t find him.

* * *

All sports are silly. All games are ridiculous. Two teams, one ball, sweat and grunting, and for what? So that for a few baffling moments we can pretend that it’s the only thing that matters.

That night Hog and Bobo clear the floor of the garage. They’ve never talked much as father and son, and perhaps they’re both worried that they might take to the easiest alternative now. There are bottles of drink in that house, as in everyone else’s. So they choose a different option, drive the cars out, move the tools and machinery until the garage is empty.

Then they fetch hockey sticks and a tennis ball. They play against each other all night, sweating and grunting, as if it were the only thing that mattered.

* * *

When the door closes behind Benji, he walks alone a couple of hundred feet into the forest. Then he stops with his hands in his pockets and looks around. As if he’s considering whether or not to try to find another way of complicating his evening or if he should pick a tree to climb and smoke weed in until he falls asleep instead. The voice behind him is both expected and unexpected.

“I’ve never been in a fight, not once, so I won’t be much use if that’s what you’re after. But I’d be happy to have a beer somewhere else,” says the man in the polo shirt.

Benji looks over his shoulder. “Do you know any good clubs around here, then?”

The man laughs. “Like I said, I’ve only been living here for the past four hours. But . . . I’ve got somewhere to stay. And a fridge.”

He’s never done this before, asked someone home right away, it’s never worked that way for him before. But Benji has a way of encouraging people to be spontaneous. Foolhardy, too.

They take the path through the forest. The man is renting a cabin at a campsite on the outskirts of Hed, in the direction of Beartown, far enough away not to be within sight of either town. They kiss for a long time in the hallway. When the man wakes up in bed the next morning, Benji is already gone.

The man finds his book where he dropped it, between the front door and the bedroom. He leafs through it until he finds the quote he’s looking for: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

* * *

Some distance away a young man is standing in a cemetery firing pucks at a gravestone. He has scraped knuckles, and worse things are going on inside him. Alain Ovich is dead, and Kevin Erdahl may as well be. Benji is a man who loves men, and he loses everyone he loves.

* * *

It’s hard to have more chaos in oneself than that.

11

One Last Chance to Be a Winner

It’s impossible to measure love, but that doesn’t stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: How much space am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become?

Kira once made a valiant attempt to discuss this with Peter in terms of ice hockey: “A marriage is like a hockey season, darling, okay? Even the best team can’t be at their best in every game, but they’re good enough to win even when they play badly. A marriage is the same: you don’t measure it by the holiday where you drink wine before lunch and have great sex and your biggest problem is that the sand is too hot and the sun is shining too brightly on the screen when you want to play games on your phone. You measure it from everyday life, at home, at its lowest level, from how you talk to each other and solve problems.”

Peter got cross, as if she were trying to spark an argument, and asked what she wanted. She said she wanted to have “a grown-up conversation about our problems.” He considered this for an unreasonably long time before he finally said, “I have a problem with you always leaving a tiny dribble of milk in the carton and putting it back in the fridge because you can’t be bothered to rinse it and put it in the recycling bin.” She just stared at him and asked, “You think that’s the biggest problem in our marriage?” Insulted, he muttered, “So why bother even asking if you’re only going to criticize my answer?” She massaged her temples. He slammed the door behind him and went off to a hockey game. It’s not without its complications, having a relationship that works like that.

Kira is sitting at the kitchen table this evening. She’s seen the announcement of her husband’s death in the newspaper. The bottle of wine in front of her is unopened; there are two glasses beside it. She spins her wedding ring, around, around, around, as if it were a nut she was trying to tighten. Sometimes she tries taking it off, just to see how it would feel. Cold, it feels cold, as if her skin has grown thinner there.

It’s late when she hears the Volvo pull up outside. It’s ridiculous, she knows it is, but she goes and stands right behind the door. Because when she hears Peter’s footsteps outside she wants to know if he puts the key in the lock straight away or if he pauses first. If he hesitates. If he stands out there and takes some deep breaths before summoning up the courage to go inside.

* * *

Peter stops with his hand on the door handle. Rests his forehead gently against the door, as if he were trying to hear how the house is breathing, if anyone’s awake inside. Not long ago, when she thought he was asleep, he heard Kira talking on the phone to someone in the kitchen: “For twenty years he’s said that next year it will finally be my turn to focus on my career. Next year. Does he really think he’s the only person driven to find out how good he can be at something?”

For twenty years Peter has told himself that he’s doing this not for his own sake but for other people’s. He became a professional hockey player in Canada so he could provide for his family. He took the job as general manager in Beartown because the family needed a safe place after they’d lost Isak. He fought for the club because he was fighting for the town. Because Beartown Ice Hockey was the pride of the community, the only way for this whole chunk of the country to remind the big cities that there were still people living here. That they could still give them a thrashing.

But he isn’t sure anymore. Maybe he’s just being selfish? He tries to stop thinking about the death notice. He’s always been prone to worrying, anxious about everything from bills to whether the coffee machine is switched off, but tonight is something different. Tonight he’s scared.

He’s just put the key in the door when a metallic click makes him start. A car door swings open out in the street.

* * *

A black-clad man gets out and walks toward him.

* * *