Work Text:
January 2014
David entered their bedroom with a tray holding two gently steaming mugs of hot cider and a hot water bottle in a tartan fabric cover. Yuna smiled and mouthed, “Thank you,” but she lifted the blankets and helped make space on her bedside table without breaking her attention on the e-reader perched across her lap. Once settled, with both of them sitting upright against the headboard and the hot water bottle pushed down to lay between their feet, Yuna asked, “Did I hear you on the phone with Shane?”
“Mm-hm.” David tested his mug with a tiny mouthful and deemed it too hot. “He got kind of an intense email about packing for Sochi and he was running it by me.”
Yuna rolled her eyes. “As if he doesn’t travel all the time! Who was bugging him?”
“I don’t think he said. It’s been going through Team Canada as chain-mail, apparently. I know the athletes have been getting a lot of advice about not putting themselves in a difficult position with Russia or the IOC, but this email was pretty paranoid about what ‘illegal’ or ‘act of protest’ might mean. ‘Replace all your striped gear, no matter what the colors are,’ and just on and on. Anyway, I told Shane I thought he was right to ignore it.”
His wife sighed. “I wish Pyeongchang had won the bid. Shane doesn’t need to be worrying about so many things on top of the Olympic pressure.”
David made a soft sound of agreement. Shane was always serious and responsible, but the concerns in public discourse had sharply plucked their son’s anxious streak. As reserved as his personal style was, Shane was particular about design. His travel standbys were carefully chosen and made him feel comfortable; the prospect of over-analyzing them all and making substitutes for anything with a hint of pattern or icon had pushed Shane’s stress to the point that he had phoned, he admitted, while lying nauseated on the floor of his bathroom. David was relieved that his own opinion of the chain-mail was firm enough to reassure him, but he felt bad for the handful of out athletes.
There was an unread copy of The New Yorker on David’s side of the bed. He smiled at the cover illustration of polar bears on a city street, but he didn’t seem to be able to make himself concentrate on the contents. After the third time he had restarted a paragraph without truly reading it, David put the magazine down. “Yuna,” he said slowly, “have you ever wondered…”
She glanced up. “Hmm?”
“...whether Shane might…be gay?”
Yuna blinked a few times. “Our Shane?”
“Yeah.”
A small shrug. He could tell her mind was still on her book. “I guess every parent thinks about it at some point. What if.”
“I don’t really mean as a parent, exactly. Have you wondered about Shane specifically?”
“For a reason, you mean? No, I don’t think so. I know you considered it once. Why?” When David nodded, Yuna must have seen something revealing in his face, because she said, “Oh. You mean currently.” She tapped the e-reader screen and put the device firmly aside.
David made a sound of irritation with himself. “I’m sorry, hon. I swear I didn’t set out to interrupt you.” Yuna had been looking forward all day to finishing an Elena Ferrante novel before they went to sleep.
“Shh, shh, no,” she said gently. “Tell me what’s worrying you.”
“I was surprised how anxious he was, but it’s more than that.” He took a moment to consider where to begin. “I’ve never thought he seemed very excited about any of the girls he’s dated. Have you?”
Shane had had one girlfriend, Jessica, who broke up with him not long after he was drafted into the MLH. Jessica was a lacrosse captain, and David had always thought their relationship was based on being thrown together as a teenage idea of a perfect couple, rather than having anything important in common. Yuna knew this. She had told David before that he was underestimating the power of sex appeal, but David rarely saw those two touch each other, and there was none of the angling for privacy that he expected. Yuna had heard that observation before, too. They skipped the rehash.
Instead, Yuna pointed out, “He always had fun going out with Paige and Laurine.” These were girls who were friends, but never official girlfriends, of Shane’s. When there were dances and other events where a star athlete might feel expected to have a date, Shane would pair up with one of them—until Jessica. David and Yuna were fond of them. Laurine in particular appeared in some of David’s favorite photos of teenage Shane. Paige often had her own dates, and popped up more reliably in group shots, where Shane’s smiles were more reserved.
“I know there was nothing between him and Laurine. When we were together at Christmas,” he explained, “Shane showed me a couple pictures Laurine had sent him from her wedding.” There was an especially cute one of a framed photo of Shane in his Metros uniform propped up in a chair at the reception. He’d been playing in the States that week. They were no longer close enough friends for Shane to be included in the wedding party, or however a wedding with two brides might have considered him essential.
“Gosh, it’s hard to think of any of that crew as being old enough.”
“To another woman.”
“Oh! Really? Laurine? I never would have guessed that.”
“I asked if he was surprised, and he said no, he’d known for a long time. That he was really relieved she’s happy, because she’d scared him for a bit when they were fifteen, and that was why he asked her out.”
Yuna processed this. “You mean he was covering for her?”
“Yeah. Or at least, that’s how I understood him. I said that was commendably selfless of him, and he got embarrassed and changed the subject.”
“Well, it’s not like he got nothing out of it. All the boys were so jealous of him.” Laurine had once made a boy skateboard into a street sign because he was watching her take off a sweatshirt. “The girls can’t all have been gay, David.”
“I gave him a sex talk when he and Paige had their first date, and Shane just about melted through the floor. It genuinely didn’t seem to have occurred to him that someone might think he was attracted to her in that way.” David shrugged. That was easily explained; it was Shane’s first date ever. Yuna made a well, yeah shrug back. “I’m not sure he’s ever asked anyone out, though. I think all the girls he’s gone on single dates with asked him. And that’s been a while.”
Yuna pressed one arm of her reading glasses into her lip, a recent habit when she was thinking hard. David smiled. He thought Yuna’s glasses were cute on her, but she was self-conscious about them. He doubted she was aware she’d begun incorporating them into gestures. “I think you’re right,” she agreed. “But he’s so shy.”
Shane’s shyness was another topic they had discussed before, and knew each other’s thoughts about well. He had always had a small number of close friends at any time, mostly people who were outgoing, ambitious, and patient enough to draw him out of his shell. David had always thought that Shane would end up with someone like that—sexual orientation aside. Hayden and his wife Jacki were that sort of person, but it worried David and Yuna that Shane hadn’t made any other significant friendships since going pro. Especially so because his teen years had included two fallings-out with boys who had once been very important to him. The men and women he remained in touch with seemed to his parents to be doubly precious.
“We still don’t know what happened with Ismail, do we?”
Yuna shook her head, troubled. “There was something he definitely did not want us to know about why they stopped talking.”
“I always thought there might have been something different about that friendship. Didn’t you?”
Reluctantly, Yuna nodded. “Ismail’s opinion mattered to Shane so much once they hit twelve or so. It wasn’t like that when they met.”
David compared Shane’s quiet seventh-grade heartbreak with the later blowup, after he was playing in juniors. “With Marc, we at least know there was a fight.”
She grinned. “Oh, did I never tell you? Shane told me what that one was about at some point. Marc offered him weed.”
“No! Marc, of all people? Didn’t he play the organ for his church?”
“Yes,” she said, with relish. “Shane refused, of course.” Their kid was an angel, of course. “He knew he needed to take drug tests seriously.” Her smile faded. “Marc called him a loser. That was the unforgivable part.”
That would be why neither of them told David, too. He always took it hard when people chirped Shane for his personality. He was still mad that it had reached a tv commentator that Shane struggled to make friends. On the other hand, Shane would come to him and not Yuna to vent when someone had been racist. He had a strong preference for talking nastiness out with whoever could echo less distress back to him. David was thankful that such issues were infrequent; Shane had never been subjected to anything sustained or extreme enough to call bullying. The closest he had come was when he’d caught flak for sticking up for a friend who did suffer exactly that.
“When Will was going through it,” David mused, “didn’t you tell me you thought Will might have a crush on Shane?”
She searched her memory. “Probably. I haven’t thought about that for a while. Will turned out to have a boyfriend, didn’t he?”
“That boy whose parents eventually kicked him out. Yes.”
“With the haircut that was like…” Yuna made a swoosh gesture.
“Ostrich, Shane called it. No. Emu? Emo.”
“That’s right. But it’s the same as with Laurine. Being nice to gay people doesn’t make Shane gay.”
“No. I just remember…Shane would watch Will practice, sometimes, and I would wonder…” Will trained at the same rink as Shane. Plenty of figure skaters were straight guys, but David knew from his own years playing that some hockey players would inevitably prove their own masculinity by slurring these peers for studying grace and wearing sequins. Will didn’t bother to deny the remarks aimed at him, which was widely taken as the confirmation it proved to be. Shane was quick to snap at his teammates to knock it off, and stuck by his friendship with Will even when the cruelty escalated to a panic among parents about the safety of their straight sons in the locker room. David didn’t need to assure Yuna that his pride in Shane’s character made a far greater impression than anything else about that chapter. She was proud of him, too. The relevant part would be news to her. “I’ve never seen him watch anyone else like that. Not before or since.”
Yuna hummed, considering. “When Shane was really tiny, there was a day when I took him to the rink. I’m sure you weren’t with us. I don’t remember what he was trying to learn, but he was getting frustrated, and I wasn’t explaining it well. And there was this older boy, a nice-looking Québécois boy on vacation, who came over to help.” Her voice was soft, tender as she remembered. “And he held Shane’s hand. And Shane went so pink all over his little face. He kept looking up at the other boy like he couldn’t believe it. And after he got the hang of whatever it was, he wanted to show the boy all his other little tricks. It was so precious. I guess…I guess maybe it crossed my mind that I didn’t see him make a fuss over young ladies the way my brothers did at that age.” She put a hand on her forehead, massaging her brow, and reached the other one out to be held. “But he’s always been very masculine. And he isn’t…. He doesn’t….” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine a gay hockey player, David. Can you?”
“No.”
“I mean, what if he quit?” Yuna whispered, in horror. David bit his lip against laughter. “I didn’t mean it like that!” she exclaimed, apparently realizing how she’d phrased it.
He did laugh at her then. “No, I know you didn’t.”
“But surely he would have quit years ago, if he was gay.”
“Our Shane?” he asked, borrowing her earlier words.
“In high school, probably,” Yuna said doubtfully. “Instead of going pro. Maybe even instead of going into juniors.” But that would have required Shane to know, and he was already in the Junior League when David watched him watching Will.
And Shane would have needed to be able to imagine he could love something else as much as playing hockey, which David didn’t think was possible. “That would have been a different world.”
“What a loss for hockey!” Yuna said mournfully.
“What would that Shane have done, you think? College, I suppose.”
“For architecture, maybe?”
This idea did make David feel better. Yuna was right. Hockey was Shane’s passion in life, but it wasn’t the only thing he enjoyed. Shane knew that, right? A question for another night. “He knew so young that he could be one of the greats,” David said, both proud and sad. “I don’t think he ever would have quit.”
“We didn’t make him do hockey, right?” Yuna asked with clear sincerity, searching her memory. “We encouraged him to try it, but the decisions were his?”
“Right. We always talked him through it, and he always wanted it. We’re pretty okay parents, Yuna.”
She snorted. “Don’t say it like that in front of Shane, or he’ll worry he doesn’t tell us he loves us enough.”
David smiled, then squeezed her hand, bracing himself. “I hope he would tell us if he was unhappy.”
“I think he would,” Yuna soothed, squeezing his hand back. “He trusts us.”
They sat silently for a few moments. David was sorting through other memories of little Shane, and when-did-he-get-big Shane, wondering whether he was seeing something that wasn’t there. He knew Yuna was doing the same.
She made a pained sound and shook her head just once, as if she was closing a door on her thoughts. “I really hope you’re wrong.”
David wanted to tell her that Shane would be fine even if he was gay, but David had been a hockey player, too. He wasn’t sure that was true. “It would be easier if he’s straight,” he observed, not quite agreeing.
“I don’t want to think of him being…troubled.” Yuna sniffed, not quite on the verge of tears. “You’re not going to say anything to him, are you?”
“No, no. If he’s straight, it would just make him uncomfortable, and if he’s gay, it would just freak him out.”
Yuna nodded, but whatever she was about to say next was cut off by David’s phone buzzing in his shirt pocket. Shane had texted. David angled the screen to show Yuna what he’d said: Feeling better. Got in bed with a cup of hot cider :) They exchanged a smile and reached for their own cups of cider. Whatever came to pass, Shane couldn’t surprise them much.
+++
In his own bed in Montreal, Shane turned his phone screen back on to text Ilya.