It will be claimed that this happened to one person. It will be a lie.

We will say, “Things like this are no one’s fault,” but of course they are. Deep down we will know the truth. It’s plenty of people’s fault. Ours.

33

Not Waking Up

Benji is deeper in the forest than ever when he finally stops. The snow is still falling, its flakes tentatively brushing his skin before melting with his body heat and trickling angrily through the hairs on his lower arms. The freezing temperature colors his cheeks, his fingers stiffen around the rifle, the breath from his mouth forms smaller and smaller clouds. In the end he isn’t breathing at all.

* * *

There’s a long period of silence. Then a single shot echoes between the trees.

* * *

In Beartown we bury those we love beneath our most beautiful trees. It’s a child who finds the body, but the child doesn’t walk calmly through Beartown the way Adri did when she found her father, Alain Ovich, all those years ago. This child is running.

* * *

Amat and Bobo are sitting in the locker room. They’ll remember this as their last conversation, their last raucous laughter, before they found out that someone had died. It will feel as if they’ll never really be able to laugh as loud ever again.

“What do girls find sexy?” Bobo asks.

He says it the way he says everything: as if his brain is a coffee machine that someone has forgotten to put a coffeepot under, so his thoughts drip straight onto the hot plate beneath and spray everywhere.

“How should I know?” Amat says helplessly.

It’s not long since Bobo asked if it was true that contact lenses are made out of jellyfish. Another time he wondered, “You know how it’s supposed to be unlucky to leave your keys on the table? Okay, but what if someone borrows my keys and leaves them on a table when I’m not even there, do I still get the bad luck?” Back in the spring he wanted to know: “How do you know if you’ve got a nice-looking dick?” At school the other day he asked Amat, “How long should shorts be?” then almost immediately afterward, “You know, in a vacuum, like in space, if you cry there . . . what happens to your tears?”

“I heard some girls in school say an actor was sexy because he had ‘a defined chin and high cheekbones.’ How do you know if you’ve got those?”

“I’m sure you have,” Amat says.

“You think?” Bobo says hopefully.

His face is as shapeless as an overboiled potato, but Amat still nods kindly.

“I’m sure you’re sexy, Bobo.”

“Thanks,” Bobo says, clearly relieved, as if he can tick that off his list of things to worry about. Then he asks, “Have you ever been anyone’s best friend?”

Amat groans. “Please, Bobo . . . yes . . . of course I’ve had a best friend.”

Bobo shakes his big head. “No, I mean have you been someone’s best friend? I’ve had lots of best friends, but I don’t think I’ve ever been anyone else’s best friend. Do you understand what I mean?”

Amat scratches his ear. “Can I be honest? I hardly ever understand what the hell you’re going on about.”

Bobo starts to laugh. So does Amat. The loudest, most uproarious laughter for a long time.

* * *

“You’re never alone in the forest.” All the children around here learn that. Benji stops dead when he sees the animal appear, thirty feet away. Benji looks it right in the eye. He’s hunted in these forests all his life, but this is the first time he’s seen such a large bear.

Benji has been walking into the wind, it hasn’t caught his scent. The bear is close enough to feel threatened, and Benji has no chance of running. All the children around here learn the same things when they’re small: “Don’t run, don’t scream, if the bear runs toward you, curl up on the ground and play dead, and cover your head with your backpack! Don’t fight until you’re sure you have no other choice!”

The rifle is shaking in Benji’s hands; he shouldn’t fire. The animal’s heart and lungs are shielded by its powerful shoulders; only extremely skilled hunters stand any chance of shooting a bear and staying alive long enough to talk about it afterward. Benji ought to know better. But his heart is pounding, he hears his own voice roar from the depths, and then he fires into the air. Or directly at the bear, he doesn’t remember. And it vanishes. It doesn’t run away, it doesn’t slope off into the forest, it just . . . vanishes. Benji stands in the snow, and the forest eats up the echo of the shot until nothing remains but the wind, and he isn’t at all sure if he’s dreaming. If there really was a bear, or if he imagined it, a genuine threat or an imaginary one. He goes over to where the bear ought to have been standing, but there are no tracks in the snow. Even so, he can still feel its stare, like when you wake up early in the morning and don’t have to open your eyes to know that the person next to you is looking at you.

* * *

Benji is breathing hard. There’s a sense of invincibility about deciding to die and then not going through with it. A sense of power over yourself. He walks home with a feeling that his body doesn’t belong to him, without knowing who’s going to inhabit it now.

* * *

But at least he goes home.

* * *

Amat and Bobo are still laughing. But Bobo stops abruptly, before Amat has time to realize what’s happened. Bobo has always been told that he’s a bit slow on the uptake, he knows all the jokes by heart: “That boy couldn’t pour water out of a boot if it had holes in the toes and the instructions under the heel” and “Bobo’s so stupid he can’t piss his own name in the snow.” But that doesn’t mean his brain isn’t busy; his mom always says that it just works in a different way from other people’s.

So Bobo has been expecting this. Outside he may appear unfocused, but inside he has been preparing for this moment ever since his mom took him out into the forest and told him she was ill.

* * *

The child runs through Beartown, in through the door of the ice rink, gesticulating wildly at the people who ask where she’s going. Some of them recognize her, it’s Bobo’s little sister. One of them may even have realized and whispered, “Oh, no . . .”

When his little sister stands in the doorway of the locker room sobbing, “She’s not waking up, Bobo! Dad’s gone to get a car, and Mom won’t wake up even though I’ve tried shouting at her!” Bobo has already dealt with his own grief. His tears trickle into his little sister’s hair, but mostly for her sake. She was brave enough to run through the whole town, but she’s in pieces now, and there’s no one she trusts as much as her big brother.

Only then does the girl feel safe enough in his arms to dare to shatter into a billion pieces. She will always run to Bobo when she feels sad, all her life, and he stands with his arms around her and knows that he has to be strong enough to bear that responsibility now.

* * *

Amat hugs them both, but Bobo doesn’t feel it. He’s already wondering about how he’s going to find a tree beautiful enough for his mom to sleep under. That’s when he becomes an adult.

* * *

Adri Ovich wakes up from a terrible dream. She fumbles in a daze under her pillow and feels her pulse throb in her temples when her fingers finally close around the key. She’s breathing so hard that it hurts. She goes downstairs and finds her little brother sleeping on the sofa. The rifle is standing in the gun cabinet, as if nothing had ever happened.

* * *

She kisses him on the forehead. Sits on the floor beside him for hours. Can’t quite seem to get beyond just waking up.

34

Violence Against a Horse on Official Service

In many years’ time we may not know what to call this story. We will say it was a story about violence. About hate. About conflict and difference and communities that tore themselves apart. But that won’t be true, at least not entirely.

* * *

It’s also a different sort of story.

* * *