Is he happy? If you’re asking that, perhaps you don’t understand him at all. Happiness was never what he hoped for.
He will stand at the window of the small hotel room, hungover and barely awake, looking down on the world outside without being a part of it. Two cars will have collided in the street below, that was the bang that woke him. People screaming. Benji’s ears will ring. Ring, ring, ring, until he eventually realizes that it’s his phone.
“Hello?” he will manage to say, his voice hoarse from not having been used for many hours, and used far too much before that.
“It’s me,” his eldest sister will say at the other end, heavy and tired.
“Adri? What’s happened?”
She’ll choose her words carefully, he’s too far away for her to be able to hold him the way a sister wants to hold her little brother when she has to say this. He’ll listen in silence, he’s spent his whole life training not to let on whenever something dies inside him.
“Dead?” he will finally manage to say, and his sister will have to repeat herself, as if he has forgotten parts of the language.
In the end he will simply whisper “okay,” and the crackle on the line as he breathes out will be the only indication of the little pressure wave as his heart breaks.
He will end the call and pack his bag. It won’t take long, he’s been traveling light, always ready to leave everything behind.
“What’s going on? What time is it?” another voice will whisper, from the bed.
“I have to go,” Benji says, already on his way out through the door, his chest still bare. The large tattoo of a bear on his arm seems paler after months in the sun, and his many scars glow pink against his suntanned skin, the way they do on savages. More on his knuckles than on his face, because he’s better at being savage than most other people.
“Go where?”
“Home.”
The voice will yell something after him, but Benji will already be halfway down the stairs. He could call back and promise to call the man upstairs, but if there’s one thing Benji learned where he grew up, it’s that he can’t be bothered to lie to anyone anymore.
5 Midwives
A storm sweeps in across two hockey towns tonight, felling trees and people. Tomorrow a young man and a young woman, he with a bear tattooed on his arm, she with a guitar and a rifle tattooed on hers, will turn homeward to attend a funeral. That’s how everything starts this time. In communities surrounded by wilderness people are connected by invisible threads, but also by sharp hooks, so when one turns too suddenly, it isn’t always just their shirt that someone else loses. Sometimes it rips the heart out of all of us.
* * *
Johnny runs through the house in Hed with his wife, up the stairs and into the bedroom, and she tells him the basics as she packs her work bag: a young couple from a farm north of Beartown is expecting their first child, and when her water broke they set off from home for the hospital in Hed, unaware of how violent the storm was going to be. They tried cutting through the small roads over to the east instead of taking the main road, and were in the middle of the forest between the two towns when they swerved to avoid a fallen tree. They didn’t see the next tree fall, and now the car is pinned down somewhere out there. They managed to call the hospital, but there were no ambulances nearby and no one knows if they’d even be able to get through the chaos now that the forest roads are impassable. The best hope for the woman and baby in the car is if a midwife who isn’t on duty tonight and who lives close enough can get herself there, even if she has to walk the last part of the way on foot.
Johnny stands by the bedroom door, wanting to ask his wife if she’s completely mad, but after twenty years he knows what the answer would be. She turns around so abruptly that her forehead hits his chest, and his arms fold tenderly around her and she disappears into him.
“I love you, I love you so damn much, you stupid idiot,” she whispers.
“Good thing too,” he replies.
“There are extra blankets in the loft, and the flashlights are…”
“I know, don’t worry about us, but you really need to… I mean, you can’t…,” he begins, and when she buries her head in his sweater she can feel that he’s shaking.
“Don’t be angry with me, darling. I’m the angry one, you need to be the sensible one,” she mutters into his rib cage.
“You have to take someone with you. Someone who knows the forest, darling, it’s going to be dark and…”
“You can’t come with me. You know that. Never both on the same plane, never out in a storm together, the children need…”
“I know, I KNOW,” he whispers disconsolately, he’s never felt so powerless, and that’s a terrible thing for a fireman to experience.
His silly superstitions always stop her saying “come back safe” when he goes out on a call, so she usually thinks of something banal that he needs to do the next day, so that he has to promise to be home for that: “Don’t forget that you’re going to the dump tomorrow” or “We’re having lunch at your mom’s at twelve o’clock.” It’s become their secret little ritual.
So he doesn’t say “come home safe” now. He doesn’t even tell her not to go, because he knows what he would have replied to that. He may be strong, but not even he can stop the wind blowing. She can deliver babies, she’s the one who’s needed now. We help if we can, when we can, to the extent that we can. As they leave the bedroom he just takes hold of her arm, he wants to say something banal and everyday, so that she remembers that there’s a tomorrow, and all he can think of is:
“I’m going to have sex with you tomorrow!”
She bursts out laughing, in his face, right at him.
“There’s something seriously wrong with you.”
“Just be absolutely clear about the fact that I’m going to have sex with you tomorrow!”
He has tears in his eyes, she does too, they hear the force of the wind outside and know better than to imagine that they’re immortal.
“Do you know anyone who can help me find my way in that part of the forest?” she asks, trying to control her voice.
“Yes, I know someone, I’ll call and say you’re on your way,” he replies, and writes down the address even though his hand is shaking.
She takes the van and sets out, into the night and into a storm that’s snapping tree trunks and killing people at will. She doesn’t promise to come home safe. He stands at the kitchen window with the children.
* * *
It’s the dogs that eventually react to the fact there’s someone at the front door, maybe it’s more instinct than the doorbell that makes them start to bark. Ana goes warily out into the hall and peers through the window. Who the hell is out in this weather? There’s a lone woman standing on the steps, the hood of her raincoat pulled up, her thin frame bent double by the wind.
“IS YOUR DAD HOME?” the woman yells when Ana forces the door open, the whole forest is roaring, as if they were standing inside a jar being kicked around by giants.