Johnny spends the whole night by the kitchen window, and this is the first time he truly experiences what his wife has felt every hour of every night without him since they first fell in love: What am I going to do if you don’t come home again?
* * *
Hannah knows when something is wrong. It’s the result of training and experience, sure, but after enough years it’s also something else. If the midwife didn’t know better, she’d say it’s almost spiritual. It can be such tiny things, the slightest change in skin color, or a fragile little rib cage that’s rising and falling a fraction too slowly. She knows when it’s happening before it happens. Giving birth to a child ought to be impossible, the ocean is so vast and our vessel so fragile, none of us ought to stand a chance.
Even Ana is frightened now. When the wind snaps a tree a yard behind them it sounds like a pistol shot inside the car, and when it falls and misses the car by just a handsbreadth, the branches scrape the chassis with such a shriek that the sound echoes in her head for several minutes. The ground shakes and when the worst gusts of wind come they think plenty of times that more trees have fallen on them, then something comes flying and hits the windshield, it’s a miracle it doesn’t break, it was probably just a stone or a large stick, but the force is so great that it sounds like hitting an elk at a hundred miles an hour.
But through the chaos and noise the midwife’s voice is still calm, intimate, promising that everything’s going to be fine. The man is sitting ashen-faced in the front seat beside Ana now. Then the baby cries for the first time and the world stops turning. The midwife smiles warmly to the mom and dad, and it isn’t until she glances at Ana that the girl realizes that something is wrong. The midwife leans forward from the backseat and whispers:
“How close can you get your dad’s truck?”
“Close!” Ana promises.
“What’s going on? Why are you whispering?” the man exclaims, panic-stricken, he grabs the midwife’s arm and the midwife lets out a cry, and Ana reacts instinctively and hits him in the jaw.
He tumbles back against the side window. The midwife stares at him, then at Ana. The girl is blinking in embarrassment.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. I’ll get the truck.”
The man is huddled up in pain, half on the seat and half on the floor, blood trickling from his lip. The midwife’s voice is gentle, her words all the harsher:
“Your baby and your wife need to get to the hospital. Right away. I’m pretty sure you can’t paint us there. That kid out there is pretty crazy, sure, but she’s all we’ve got right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The man nods in despair.
“Will it… please, will the baby, will it…?”
“We need to get to the hospital,” the midwife whispers, looking him in the eye until his heart stops beating.
Ana rushes through the trees with her arms stretched out, so that her fingertips can memorize where they stand. Then she reverses her dad’s pickup blindly back between the trunks. Gently, gently the midwife and the new dad move the newborn baby and the new mother from one vehicle to the other. Then Ana drives on instinct through the darkness, she can only see a few yards in front of her, but that’s all she needs, a few yards at a time, then a few yards more. They don’t see the biggest tree sway and bend before it falls with terrible force over the car they have just left behind them in the darkness. Perhaps that’s just as well. It isn’t always a blessing to know how close to death you have been.
The mother in the backseat tries to whisper something, feeble and terrified, the midwife has to lean close to her mouth to hear.
“She wants you to know that she’s sorry about your boyfriend,” the midwife says, placing a gentle hand on Ana’s shoulder.
The man in the passenger seat has blood on his collar, and is beside himself with shame.
“What… happened to your boyfriend?”
“Well, he died, but it was two years ago so it’s okay, I mean, I loved him, but he was a right pain in the backside at times!” Ana blurts out.
She swerves between two tree trunks, and for a few seconds it feels as if all four wheels have left the ground, the man sees nothing but black outside the windshield, but suddenly Ana turns in to what seems to be a path.
“WHAT WAS HIS NAME? YOUR BOYFRIEND?” the man yells, mostly just so he could yell something.
“VIDAR!” Ana shouts, then accelerates, the others all grab hold of the doors in panic, so perhaps this isn’t the best moment for her to say:
“HE DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT!”
8 Hunters
“LOOK OUT! FOR GOD’S…”
The car stops abruptly, the tires clutch desperately at the pavement, the man yells through the wound-down window and blows the horn hard. But the young woman in front of him calmly carries on crossing the street as if nothing has happened. It’s evening down here in the capital, almost no wind, no one knows anything about storms in the forests up to the north. Not even Maya Andersson. Do you want to understand Beartown? Then you need to understand her, the girl who moved away from there.
The driver of the car blows his horn again, more resigned than angry now, and at first Maya doesn’t even notice that it’s aimed at her. She crosses the road even though the light is red and skips up onto the pavement on the other side, weaving between the tower blocks and the roadworks. It took two years to become a different person. A big city person.
The driver of the car yells something at her, she doesn’t hear what, but she turns and notices the first half of the license plate.
* * *
SDS.
* * *
It feels like a whole lifetime since Maya thought about those letters, she’s changed so much. The driver of the car gives up and accelerates demonstratively away and she realizes several seconds later that she’s standing in the middle of the pavement daydreaming, and people are having to elbow their way past. She doesn’t know what’s got into her today, she’s been in such a good mood all evening that she feels… light. She’s on her way to a party with her classmates at the College of Music, carried along on a gentle rush of anticipation, it feels like she’s only just learned not to feel guilty about that. She’s allowed to feel happy, she’s kept telling herself over and over again during the last few months, she’s allowed to have fun. She’ll hate herself for that a few hours from now. She’s always wondered how far her musical talent might be able to carry her, and this is the answer: far enough that she doesn’t even know that the whole of Beartown is on the brink of being blown to pieces while she goes to a party.
She has one missed call on her phone, from Ana, but she can call her later. They live so far apart these days that she doesn’t call her back at once. They’re no longer so closely connected.
She sets off again, quicker, when she first moved here she couldn’t understand why everyone walked so quickly, and now it drives her crazy when she goes back to Beartown and the whole world is so slow there. She’s already forgotten the man in the car, she’s become so good at living in a big city: you have to forget everyone you meet in an instant here, our brains don’t have room for so many impressions otherwise, no one is allowed to mean anything.