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“He cried again.”
David’s hand stills just as he’s about to turn the page of his magazine. He doesn’t look up at Yuna yet. “At practice?”
“After. In the car.” Yuna had planned an offhand delivery for this information, but she can hear the worry creeping along the edge of her voice.
Now David looks at her. He dog-ears his place in the New Yorker and puts it carefully on his bedside table. “Did he say why?”
“David.”
His mouth quirks at her in helpless acknowledgment of their son’s reticence.
Yuna looks down at her hands on the bedspread. Smooths the crisp percale over her lap. “I didn’t even ask this time.”
“Well, some of those guys are a lot bigger than Shane. You know kids get rough.”
“He can take that.” She crosses her arms, looks hard at her husband. “Shane’s always handled that. Even last year with that little shit Caron chirping him all the time.”
This gets a low laugh. “We’re calling a nine-year-old a little shit now, Yuna?”
“Ten.” She laughs, too. “You know I’m right.”
David pats her gently on the arm, already reaching to turn out his lamp. “Shane’s a good kid. A happy kid. Probably just being hard on himself over something he’ll have forgotten tomorrow.” He rolls over on his side, the slope of his back putting an end to the conversation.
For a few minutes, Yuna sits in the yellow glow of her bedside light. She’d like to believe it’s as David says, a botched play Shane’s still feeling sore over, but she can’t stop seeing his face in the car. Shane always looks so serious when he’s about to cry.
She turns out the light.
*
“The reporter is coming at three?” David asks, raising his eyebrows towards the couch.
Shane is fast asleep, swaddled in sweats, one big, bruised fist balled up against his downy cheek. Sometimes these days she barely recognizes the awkward boy-man her son is becoming. Fourteen has taken them all by surprise.
Yuna sits down on the couch and lightly shakes his arm. “Shane, honey. You have to get ready for your interview.”
He scrunches his nose in response. She feels a sudden urge to reach out and smooth the tiny wrinkle that appears between his brows, but she leaves her hand on his arm. It would be nice if he could rest, Yuna thinks. It’s nice to see him resting.
“Shane. Get up.”
“I’m awake.” He shoves his face into the couch cushion, and Yuna laughs and grabs him harder. “Okay, Mom.” He sits up next to her and she pushes his hoodie back from his flushed face. Instantly, he’s launching himself up and out of her grasp.
“I had Lenore iron your navy chinos, so wear those, okay? No sweats.”
Already almost down the hall, Shane turns and looks at her with fond irritation. “I know, Mom.”
While he’s clattering around the bathroom, Yuna moves restlessly through the living room of the cottage, straightening picture frames and running her hand over the dust-free furniture. This will be a big profile of Shane, not the cute little rink-side stories that they’ve done for years. The word prodigy gets thrown around more than it should, yes, but after Shane’s last OMHA championships, there are no doubts left. Shane Hollander is one.
“Um. Can you help me?”
Yuna turns and looks her son over. She prides herself on seeing him objectively. He’s neatly dressed, handsome, a good boy and a better sportsman. There’s a cowlick of thick black hair sticking up from the crown of his head. Shane presses it down and it springs back into place immediately. He has the same stubborn hair as Yuna’s father. If her son didn’t look so anxious, she’d tease him, call him her blue jay like she had when he was small.
Instead she gets a comb and some pomade to coax his hair into place. Shane has to duck his head down a bit for her to do it.
“So,” Yuna says, pressing fingertips against his cowlick to test the pomade’s hold. “Do you want to go over anything?”
His eyelashes flicker. “Sure. Okay.”
“Right. What do we always say?”
“It’s not my job to be the best. It’s my job to keep working hard."
“And — being the best is what happens naturally when you do your job.”
“Mom.” His voice cracks on the word, mouth wavering indecisively between a smile and a frown.
“What? It’s true.” Satisfied with her work, she straightens his collar, stands back, and smiles at him.
Shane sits down heavily on the couch. “What if they ask me about other stuff?”
Yuna checks her watch. 2:44. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like not-hockey stuff?”
There’s something in his face that reminds Yuna of the fox she’d seen caught in a trap when she was a child. It had an almost glassy stare, bracing against its own fate. She has the feeling he’s asking her a different question and that neither of them know what it is.
“They'll want to talk about hockey, honey.”
*
When Shane moves into his own place in Montreal, it takes some getting used to. Of course it’s what they’ve been working for since the first time Shane’s Timbits coach gestured Yuna over after practice. And of course Yuna still reviews everything with him — the diets from his nutritionist, his physical therapist’s plans of care, the pre-game strategy and post-game assessments, the brand contracts and the financial statements.
“Shane’s not our kid anymore. He’s a full-blown business,” she’d remarked to David after the draft.
But he is her kid, and she misses him. It feels like a gift that he keeps coming back to the family cottage in the summers. She knows other players travel, party, take advantage of their fame. Did she want that for Shane, once?
“Is Jessica coming up this summer?” David asks one night, when he and Yuna have finished a bottle or two of wine between them and moved on to scotch. Jessica had visited with Shane for two days last summer. She had wavy honey-colored hair and gray eyes, and she and Shane barely touched in front of his parents. After she left, they didn’t hear about her again.
Shane glances up from his phone. “Oh. No.”
David throws up his hands. “Uh oh, I’m getting myself in trouble.”
“It’s not like that. Nothing bad happened,” Shane says. “She just didn’t like me, I guess.”
“Well then, to other fish in the sea,” David toasts, throwing back the last of his drink and standing up. “I’ll start the dishes.” He’s gone in a flash, arms laden with plates.
Yuna shakes her head. “Look at your dad. Stirs up trouble and then he vanishes!”
Shane’s pressing his phone face down onto the table so hard his fingertips are white. “It’s okay.”
They sit there for a moment. Shane flicks the side of his can of ginger ale. Yuna pours herself a little more scotch, wonders not for the first time if it’s normal for the parents of elite athletes to feel judged by their preternaturally disciplined children. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out. You’re a catch, sweetie. Another girl will see that.”
Her son crosses his arms and almost glares at her across the table, chin angled down towards his chest. He opens his mouth, closes it. Looks away from her. Stands up.
“Sure. I’m gonna go for a walk, Mom. Check out the stars.”
“It’s overcast,” Yuna points out, but the door’s already clicking shut behind him.
In the kitchen, David’s buried himself in the dishwasher. “Now why the fuck did I say that?” he asks, voice echoing slightly against the silverware.
Yuna leans against the counter next to him and swirls the liquor in her glass. “It’s not weird to ask. No, that’s not true. It wouldn’t be weird, if it were anyone but Shane.”
“When did Jessica enter the picture, again?”
“Mmm. Sochi, I think. Curling team.”
“That could have been nice. Two Olympic gold medalists in the family.” David shuts the dishwasher and straightens up, shrugging. He takes Yuna’s glass for a moment, sips, hands it back. “That’s the good stuff.”
Over the years, Yuna has stored up a collection of secrets on Shane’s behalf. Things she’d glimpsed shoved to the back corners of his teenage sock drawer. Web searches he’d forgotten to erase from the family computer, which she’d deleted from the browser history with her face half turned away. There are some things too private to look at directly, too dangerous to invite out into the open.
“Do you think he’s gay?” David asks.
My husband the mind reader, she thinks. “It’s certainly possible.”
“It — is — a — possibility,” David agrees, punctuating each word with a nod of his head.
The loopy, cozy pleasure has gone out of the evening. Night sounds — crickets, leaves rustling, the solitary call of a loon — flow in through the open window over the sink. She thinks about her son walking the familiar paths around the cottage alone.
Yuna steadies herself. “Well,” she says, rinsing her glass. “If that were the case, we’d have to adjust our expectations. I don’t think we need to until Shane says otherwise.”
*
Ilya Rozanov emerges from her son’s bedroom, just-washed curls clinging to his head, sporting Shane’s Metros sweatshirt and a garish pair of orange basketball shorts.
“Hi Mrs. Hollander,” he says. “Shane is back soon.”
“Yuna, Ilya. Please — Yuna.”
“Yuna, yes. Sorry.” Ilya makes his way past Yuna to the fridge. He takes out two cans of ginger ale. “You want? It is only thing in this fridge.”
“That would be lovely.” She puts her car keys down on the kitchen island and watches Ilya pour the soda into a glass. “So you fly back to Boston tomorrow.”
“Yes. Early. Shane will drive me.” He scratches the side of his neck, and Yuna notices what can only be a hickey blooming on the tender skin just beneath his ear. She knows Ilya sees her eyes flicker towards it and away. He has the courtesy to seem embarrassed.
“We’ve enjoyed having you here. Getting to know you. We’ve never — well, Shane never — he’s so private,” Yuna finishes lamely.
Ilya smiles at her. “It is very nice here.”
“I’m sorry, this is all still new for me.”
“Is okay.” He shrugs. “It is new for me, too.”
The sound of the door opening makes them both jump slightly. “Hi Mom,” Shane calls. He’s carrying multiple bags of groceries in each hand, and Ilya springs up to greet him.
“Thank god you are back! Here I am, and I have nothing to offer your mother except this boring ginger ale.”
“Shut up,” Shane says, foolish and radiant in a way Yuna can still only take in sidelong.
Ilya turns to her and shakes his head in mock dismay. “Yuna, you are seeing this? A terrible son. And a worse boyfriend!” He leans in and kisses Shane lightly, smacks the side of his waist, grabs some of the bags.
“That’s not true.” The unguarded adoration in Shane’s voice triggers the drumbeat that’s been going off a hundred times a day in Yuna’s head. We need a plan, we need a plan, we need a plan for this. “You have what you need, Mom?”
“Yes, honey.”
More than once that week, she’d asked David: “Who is that? Is that our son?” And, unasked: had everything else been worth it, if everything else had meant never knowing Shane could be like this? If they do what Shane and Ilya are proposing, this week and all the others after it will stay hidden for another ten, fifteen years. It will hurt.
Ilya’s ringtone jolts her.
“Sveta,” he says, waving the phone at Shane and opening the door out to the porch. He slides it carefully shut behind him.
Shane has paused from folding the grocery bags to watch Ilya through the glass door. His jaw tightens, just barely. There are already ten years of history between the two of them that Yuna won’t ever know.
“You like him, Mom?”
“I do.”
“Good.” He turns to her with that stern boy’s face she’s scrutinized his whole life, the threat of tears glistening along his waterline. “Because I love him. I really, really love him. More than hockey, maybe.”