Tears are running down Lifa’s face, but he makes no attempt to hide them. “You selfish bastard! Can’t you see what everyone else here would give to have your talent?”

Amat’s hands are shaking. Lifa walks over and hugs him as though they’re eight years old again. He kisses his hair and whispers, “We’ll come running with you. Every mad sod here will come running with you all summer, if that’s what it takes.”

He’s not joking. Lifa runs up and down along the road beside Amat that night until he collapses, and after Amat has carried his friend home on his back, Zacharias starts running in his place. When he can’t run anymore, others kids show up. Two dozen certifiable lunatics who promise Amat not to smoke and drink as long as he needs someone to train with.

In ten years’ time, when Amat is playing hockey professionally, he won’t have forgotten this. Some of the guys here will have died of overdoses, others will have died violently, some will be in prison, and some will just have made a mess of their lives. But some will have lives—big, proud lives. And they will all know that here, for just one summer, they were running for something. Amat will be interviewed on television in English, and the reporter will ask where he grew up, and he will say, “I’m from the Hollow.” And every single bastard here will know that he remembers them.

* * *

He had no team. So they gave him an army.

14

A Stranger

Peter is walking alone through Beartown. Past the row house where he lost his mother and dodged his father’s grief, past the rink where he found a new home, along the lake, and across the parking lots where he found his best friends, Tails and Hog. When Peter was given a professional contract, he played hockey with them that last evening before he went to Canada, with a tennis ball on the tarmac, just like when they were kids. He was almost paralyzed by nerves, but his friends said, “Come on, hockey’s a simple game. If you strip away all the crap around it, the stands and the crowd and the rankings and the money, it’s simple. Everyone gets a stick, there are two nets and two teams.”

Naturally it was Sune, their coach, who had drummed that into them. They always went to Sune for good advice, about both life and hockey: the coach was more of a father to them than their real dads ever were. So that’s where Peter’s going now. Through his town to the home of his old coach, to tell him that he’s been given one last possibility of saving their club.

The old man has lost a lot of weight as a result of heart disease; his shoulders have slumped, the T-shirt with the bear logo on it is hanging lower over his stomach. He isn’t married and has no children, like an aged general who has lived his whole life in the service of hockey. “When did he get so old?” Peter wonders, and Sune seems to read his mind, because he grins wearily and replies, “You don’t look much like a sweet little rosebud yourself these days, you know.”

A puppy is yelping happily around the old man’s feet, and he snaps at it, “At least try to pretend you’ve been trained!”

“How are you?” Peter asks.

Sune pats him paternally on the shoulder and nods at the deep circles beneath Peter’s eyes. “You look like I feel. What can I do for you?”

So Peter tells him everything: how he can save the bear on Sune’s T-shirt, but only with the help of a powerful sponsor he doesn’t know anything about and a politician no one trusts. And only if he gets rid of the standing area and throws the Pack out of the rink, the men who saved his job in the spring.

Sune listens. Then he says, “Do you want coffee?”

“I’m here for your advice,” Peter insists impatiently.

Sune shakes his head and snorts, “Rubbish. When I was your coach and you were going to take a penalty, you always came back to the bench so that everyone would think you were asking my advice. That was kind of you, a way to show your old coach respect, but you and I both know that you’d already made your mind up. And you’ve made your mind up now as well. Come in and have some coffee. It tastes awful, but it’s strong.”

Peter remains stubbornly where he is in the hall. “But even if I can save the club . . . if you can’t train the team, then I haven’t got a coach!”

Sune replies with a rumble of laughter. Only when Peter follows him into the kitchen does he realize why. The two men aren’t alone. There’s a stranger sitting at the kitchen table. Sune blinks happily. “This is Elisabeth Zackell, you probably recognize her. She came around a little while ago to tell me she’s here to take my job.”

* * *

Kira Andersson is sitting on the steps outside the little house. Waiting for a man who never comes. She knows what her colleague would have said: “Men! You know why you can never rely on men? Because they love men! No one loves men as much as men do, Kira! They can’t even watch sports if it’s not being played by men! Sweaty, panting men fighting against other men, with ten thousand men in the stands, that’s what men want. I bet you they’ll soon invent a type of porn featuring nothing but men but aimed at heterosexual men who don’t really get turned on by men but don’t think women are actually capable of having sex properly!”

Kira’s colleague makes her laugh, a lot. Like the time a man in a suit sneezed in the middle of a meeting, deafeningly and shamelessly, without making any attempt to cover his mouth, and her colleague exclaimed, “Men! Imagine if you had periods! You’re incapable of keeping a single bodily fluid inside you in public.”

But today Kira’s colleague didn’t manage to make her laugh, just feel ashamed. Throughout their friendship, her colleague has kept on saying that they ought to start their own business together. Kira has never really needed to make any excuses because it’s been just an entertaining fantasy, something to talk about once every few months over a box of wine and increasing amounts of hubris. But today her colleague thundered into Kira’s office waving a sheet of paper: “The premises are empty!” The premises they’ve fantasized about for years, in a location where Kira and her colleague wouldn’t have any trouble luring the biggest clients away from their current firm. It would be perfect.

But Kira replied the way she always does: “I can’t right now, not with Peter’s job and the children, I need to be there for Maya.” Her colleague leaned over her desk. “You know our clients would come with us. I’ve got enough money saved up. If not now, when?” Kira tried to make excuses, but the only one she could find was time. Starting a new business would demand sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, and how could that work with picking up and dropping off at hockey practice and guitar lessons and lottery ticket sales and the volunteer parents’ rotation in the coffee stand at the ice rink?

Her colleague looked her sternly in the eye. “You’re four different women, Kira. You’re trying to be everything to everyone, the whole time. A good wife, a good mother, a good employee. How long are you going to carry on like that?”

Kira pretended to stare at an important document on her computer screen, but eventually gave up and muttered, “You said four. Wife, mother, employee . . . who’s the fourth woman?” Her colleague leaned over the desk and switched off the screen, tapped the glass sadly, and said, “Her, Kira. When is it going to be that woman’s turn?” Kira sat and stared into the eyes of her own reflection in the dark monitor.

* * *

Now she’s sitting on the steps outside the house. Drinking wine. Waiting for a man who never comes.

* * *

Peter holds out his hand, and Elisabeth Zackell shakes it as if she doesn’t really want to. Her body language is odd, as if there’s a much smaller Elisabeth Zackell sitting inside her, trying to steer this one with a joystick.

“I saw you play in the Olympic Games . . . ,” Peter admits.

Zackell doesn’t seem to know what to do with that information, so Sune jumps in. “For God’s sake, Peter, you’ve got two hundred and forty international appearances standing in front of you! Olympic and World Championship medals! And she’s got her coaching license! If she’d been a man, you’d be on your knees begging her to take my job!”

Peter takes the cup of coffee, sinks down at the kitchen table, and looks apologetically at Elisabeth Zackell.

“But if you were a man, you’d already have a job at one of the top clubs, wouldn’t you?”

Zackell agrees with a curt nod. “I’ve never been given a chance to coach a good team, so I’ve decided to take a useless team and make it good instead.”

Peter’s eyebrows twitch in indignation, Sune bursts out laughing, and Zackell doesn’t appear to know what she’s said to warrant either response.

“You are useless, aren’t you?”

Peter smiles reluctantly. “How did you know we needed a new coach? Sune’s kept very quiet about his illness . . .”

He breaks off when he realizes the answer. Zackell doesn’t have to say “Richard Theo.” Peter drinks some coffee, then exclaims, half to himself, “He’s smart, Theo. A female coach . . .”