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THIRTY-SIX.
Shane should’ve realized it back when he spent a whole year wanting to kill himself. That’s one of the first signs, apparently.
It happens at the worst possible time, to be fair. They have two newly-adopted daughters at home and Shane is irritable and confused and starts misplacing things around the house, and they both just assume that’s what happens when you have identical-twin babies. They’re thirty-six, and they’re new dads but they’re also both still trying to work, which is probably a stupid idea. Shane isn’t ready to give up on the ice, and his stomach drops at just the idea of not having a daily routine, a weekly routine, a season and a preseason and a postseason. So Shane becomes the Centaur’s captain and Ilya gets hired as a player development coach. Shane doesn’t really understand it, because it’s such a step back for a guy like Russia’s-Ilya-Rozanov who could be coaching pretty much anywhere, or commentating or modelling, the way he’s managed to keep fit despite retirement. Shane can’t say the same; he knows he’s slowing down and Calvin Klein doesn’t want him shirtless anymore, but he wants to hang on. The Centaurs have three cups now, under Captain Rozanov, and they’ll probably never win another. But he wants to hang on. Has to.
“I’m tired of traveling,” Ilya says simply, setting baby bottles on a dishrag. And the guilt of not feeling the same weighs heavy on Shane’s shoulders.
So he chalks his bad moods up to Ilya’s retirement, to his first year playing in the NHL without his rival. He’s happy, so happy to have a family and a home and he tears up watching his own father play with Amelia’s chunky little baby feet and pretend to steal Irene’s nose. But once his parents leave, even though his heart floods with affection watching Ilya pass out on top of the duvet with the baby monitor clutched in his fist, he runs outside and sobs until he’s heaving, and then until he’s vomiting over the patio railing.
Through the fog of fatigue and irritation and mood swings that he really should have recognized as symptoms, he eventually realizes that hockey isn’t the most important thing in his life now, and that maybe he should think about retiring too. Being a dad comes far more naturally to Ilya, and Shane feels like he’s falling behind. He tries to quantify parenting too much, tries to write everything down in a baby book and freaks out when he has to give Amelia and Irene their first bath, has to call his mother to stand over his shoulder and tell him that they’re not going to drown. Jealousy burns sour in his throat even though he knows, logically, that they’re a great pair; Ilya hums while he feeds the girls and Shane remembers how much they’ve been fed and they take turns getting spit up on, even though it makes Shane queasy. He knows they’re good parents. But he doesn't want to fall behind.
He’s home on concussion protocol when he brings it up to Ilya. “I think next year should be my last year.”
“Ready for career as, what is it, PILF?”
“It’s DILF, who taught you that? And no, I just, uh, want to be a better dad,” he says. His temples are throbbing from the light of the setting egg-yolk sun. He screws his eyes shut.
“Is not competition, Shane.”
“I know but…” he sighs in relief as Ilya closes the blinds. “I don’t want them to miss me.”
“You can become, uh, tiger mom? Make sure they are both President one day.”
“We have a Prime Minister, Ilya. Jesus, I can’t believe they let you live here.” Ilya waves him off with a smirk.
His last season is a disaster. The team is discombobulated and they lose their first three games. That calm feeling when it’s just him and the stick and the puck, when the other team are just chess pieces for him to weave through, it’s further and further away. He drives to his parents’ house instead of the rink a few times, and he forgets the same poor rookie’s name three days in a row. It makes him so fucking angry, to feel like he’s losing his edge, but that anger is irrational. So he pushes it aside.
On the other hand, his daughters are starting to pull themselves up and stumble around and giggle, and they know the difference between ‘Dada’ and ‘Papa’. Ilya delights in their love for a Russian picture book of farm animals, a Christmas present from Svetlana. The girls are two, and he and Ilya are thirty-eight and finally starting to figure this whole parenting thing out, and Shane is throwing a wooden block at his husband’s head anyway. Ilya ducks, cringes as the block shatters a water glass on the dining room table.
“Hollander, what the fuck?” And for a millisecond, Shane can’t remember where he is. He could be on the ice with Rozanov checking him into the boards, or maybe they’re on that rooftop in Vegas, or maybe he’s getting yelled at by his Canada juniors coach for missing a shot and giving Russia the gold. And then he blinks, and Ilya also looks like he’s been transported back to his childhood, hunching his shoulders and covering his face like he’s waiting for another hit.
“I–” There’s tears in his eyes and Shane slumps against the couch. He feels angry, so angry, and he’s not really sure why. “Sorry, fuck. I’m so sorry.” They weren’t even really fighting. They just put the girls to bed and Ilya was pouting about not being allowed to take them to a Blue Jays game. Shane was insisting they’re too young and it will be too loud, toddlers can have their hearing permanently damaged, and the ballpark food will make them sick. It was barely a fight, and even hot-tempered Ilya Rozanov doesn’t yell in the house when his daughters are asleep. He was just moping and putting toys away, and Shane snapped and threw something at him, at his husband.
“Shane–”
“Fuck, oh my god, fuck.” He’s starting to feel like he’s not in control of his body or his mind or anything anymore. He’s rocking back and forth slightly, hands pressed to his ears.
“Shane, is ok. It just happened. I understand.”
“Ilya, I don’t know what’s happening with me.”
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
THIRTY-NINE.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE. Ilya has to look it up. The doctor explains it, explains the symptoms and the stages and the treatment, but he looks it up just to be sure.
It’s so unfair, really. Ilya’s suffered dozens more concussions than Shane, one or two nasty ones a year since he started skating and countless more from his dad’s bottles, and his dad’s shoes, and his dad’s fists. He’s the one who snorted cocaine in the back of a Moscow nightclub at 16, and he’s the one who drank and smoked the pain away for well over a decade, trying to make himself feel something and nothing all at once. He’s the one who always played rough, whose teeth are more fake than real at this point. Shane mostly ran and dieted the pain away, and Wiebe jokes after Shane’s last game that they should rename the NHL sportsmanship award the Hollander Prize. It’s so fucking unfair.
He watches Shane toss a softball between him and Irene in the backyard. It’s so unfair. He would switch their positions in a heartbeat. He hopes Shane would, too, if it was possible.
Ilya can tell it drives Shane crazy, not knowing. The doctors at Toronto General tell him that it’s not really something we can diagnose without postmortem neuropathological analysis and the doctors at the Boston University CTE Research Centre tell him that there are experimental tests, experimental drugs, but the only way to know if they work is to take them for however many years and monitor his degeneration. Ilya feels like he’s eighteen and scouring Boston for an English grammar book that’s not for children, the way all these new words make his head swim. He doesn’t really want to understand, wants to avoid associating his husband with words like portmortem and experiment and degeneration. But it calms Shane down, to know. So he tries.
Shane rolls over in bed the week after they get the diagnosis, those three horrible letters, and asks if Ilya thinks he’ll remember their daughters, since he didn’t meet them that long ago.
“You will, Shane. You love them.”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Shane mumbles. And he’s right. Ilya’s the one with the loaded genetic gun. He’s the one who dreams of his dead mother holding their girls, of Irene and Irina, of her hand hanging limp over the edge of the bed with Amelia’s little fingers wrapped around her wrist. Wiebe calls Ilya to ask him about coming back as a real coach, as head coach, and Shane snatches the phone out of his hand and tells him that Ilya will take it. For a second, Shane’s smile reminds him of their first All-Star game on the same team, of the smile he and Yuna shared when he first signed with Ottawa all those years ago. And then Wiebe asks what Shane’s up to next season, and Shane’s dorky little grin is nowhere to be found as he replies he’s thinking about taking a year out to decide, and it’s so fucking unfair.
Everyone has always assumed Ilya is the strong one between the two of them. He looks at himself in the bathroom mirror. He has to make it true now.
Shane starts forgetting the words for things, which makes them quite a pair. They’re both standing in Farm Boy, a checkout girl staring at them with her brow furrowed, and neither of them can produce the word for asparagus. Ilya can remember it in Russian, and in Polish. Shane is just standing with his head down. He gives up and opens Google Translate.
“Are you Shane Hollander?” the clerk says, leading them down the produce aisle.
‘Oh, uh, yeah,” Shane grins. Then she asks him why he retired when the Centaurs are playing so well, and he flushes down to his collar.
They tell Yuna and David over spaghetti and a Red Wings game, the girls asleep in David’s recliner. Ilya’s the one who actually gets the words out, Shane’s gaze fixed in his lap. Yuna gasps.
“Oh my god. I knew something was wrong. I thought it could be drugs–” she looks at her husband.
“I’m not on drugs, mom.”
“You are on drugs, Shane,” Ilya says.
“Not that kind of drugs!”
“So this is why you’re retiring.”
“This isn’t why, Mom! Jesus, I’m a dad now and–”
David just pulls his son to his feet and crushes him into a hug. Shane presses his face into his dad’s shirt collar and just like that, he’s crying. Yuna is still frozen, mouth open. Ilya feels like he shouldn’t be here for this. He feels guilty for having to break the news, for sitting across the table from the Hollanders, whose lives have just ended, while he’s perfectly healthy and gearing up for his first head coaching job and he’s scheduled to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated next week. Player. Coach. Dad. What’s next for Ilya Rozanov? It’s so fucking unfair.
Shane will be the one to get dementia, in the end, once the disease progresses. He’ll be the one who forgets, in the final stages. It’s unfair, so fucking unfair, but Ilya can’t cry about it in front of their daughters or in front of Shane’s parents. So he gets up from the table and slams the patio door, pats himself down for a cigarette he knows won’t be there until his fingers find his mother’s cross laying heavy against his collarbone.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
FORTY-TWO.
Ilya ends up coaching the Canadian national team for a few years, and it fills Yuna with pride to watch her Russian-born son-in-law who barely passed his citizenship test stand with one hand over his heart for ‘O Canada’. She’s been his manager for years, used to get him shirtless billboard gigs for vodka companies and reveled in his toothy smile when she negotiated him a free Lamborghini the summer after he and Shane won their first cup with Ottawa. Now he’s the spokesman for Forty Creek Whiskey and there’s ads with him and Milos Raonic on TV for Destination Canada, both of them posing with their severe Soviet expressions with the maple leaf behind them. Canada is for everyone, the tagline reads.
He takes that Canada team to gold at the Olympics as a baby-faced forty-two-year-old head coach, an astonishingly young team that Ilya whips into shape, because of course he does. He gets hoisted onto the shoulders of their new star rookie at the medal ceremony, their new Shane Hollander. There’s kids on that team from everywhere, from Serbia and Russia and Poland and America and every Canadian province, except Prince Edward Island. Ilya keeps calling Prince Edwin Island in the post-match interview but she cries anyway. Her Russian son-in-law, with new laugh lines painted onto his face but his same curly haircut, has a gold medal around his neck and he knows what it is to belong somewhere. She thinks it must feel awfully similar to her first Voyageurs game as a kid, not really knowing the language or the culture but knowing that she and her own father were dressed in the same jersey as everyone else, that they all cheered the same. She’s got two true-blue Canadian sons now.
Except that her first son, her Shane, is forgetting more and more now. They’re watching the gold medal game in Ottawa because Shane stayed home to ‘watch the girls,’ even though they all know he doesn’t trust himself alone with them anymore. He can still tell them apart by just their footsteps, and he reads to them in his own stilted Russian because Ilya wants them to learn but he’s too embarrassed to admit it. He’s a good dad, a great one, but the effort of being alert and remembering to not forget drains him. He gets tired pretty easily now. He stays awake for the Canada game, and he and Yuna still play off each other the same way they always have. Biting commentary, David calls it. He pets Amelia’s hair and points out to Irene when ‘Coach Papa’ is on the screen. He falls asleep during the medal ceremony, though, and he walks down the wrong hallway trying to find the bathroom once he wakes. Her throat feels tight, watching him putter around with his brow furrowed, but she had read an article about maintaining independence in the early stages of the disease, so she lets him turn himself around and find the toilet himself.
Ilya calls her a few hours later to tell the girls goodnight. They’re in third grade and Amelia is going through a princess-dress phase, which means Irene is going through a hating-princess-dresses phase. He talks to both of them separately, a fond mix of Russian and English that makes Yuna’s eyes prick with tears yet again, and then asks Amelia to give the phone back to Grandma, please dochenka.
“Quite the game, Ilya,” she says. “You’ve got one hell of a right winger on your hands.”
“He’s an asshole,” Ilya replies. “I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“He really can’t stay awake for very-“
“He’s fine,” Ilya interrupts. “I’ll be back soon. Sorry I was gone.”
“Don’t be sorry for winning, Ilya.”
“I hate being away. I want them to have normal life.”
They haven’t told the girls about the CTE yet. Ilya said they’re waiting, though he hasn’t said how long. But they’re both smart, and they know that Dad is forgetful sometimes, and that he has to take naps sometimes. They know that Grammy comes over when Papa has to travel for work and that Papa is the one who drives them to school when he’s in town. They know that Papa and Dad both freak out whenever either of them take a tumble, and that a bunch of people came over to get Dad’s signature when they were slumped in plastic chairs at the hospital after Irene took a softball to the head, and that Papa had to yell to get them to go away. They’re smart girls, inquisitive in a way she remembers Shane being as a little kid. They could never get away with anything around him.
“I’m going back to Ottawa next year. I can stay at home more. Will have it written in my contract.”
She understands Ilya a lot better now. He’s not addicted to hockey in the way Shane is. Well, was. But Ilya always has to be addicted to something. The smoking and the drinking and the speeding tickets from riding his Ducati down the T-Can, it’s all the same as Shane’s performance diet and his obsession with tying his laces in just the right way. Ilya gave up smoking and drinking years ago–Yuna lost a lot of money to her husband, betting that he wouldn’t last a month without a cigarette–and she’s starting to think he’s switched to being addicted to pretending their lives are normal. Pretending that he just wants to be home for his daughters and not because they installed a child lock on the back door at the cottage so Shane can’t wander out into the water.
“Do not worry, Yuna, I will have you read it before I sign,” he adds.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
FIFTY-FOUR.
He’s pretty lucky, the doctors keep saying. Shane’s fifty-four and he can still walk with a cane and mostly feed himself. The dementia is progressing faster than they were expecting, he’s having more and more bad days, and sometimes he puts up a fight when Ilya tries to get him to take his pills. But he still knows to keep it down so the girls don’t hear them as they fight over the curling iron in the rush to get to school. So Ilya tries his best to feel lucky.
But mostly Ilya feels guilty, standing in their backyard the night before their daughters’ graduation as the party winds down, looking out around at the people who love his family, who love his daughters. It took a lot more than two dads to raise them. It took two dads and two grandparents who are too overbearing for their own good. And it took the nine million Pike kids, who are running around this party somewhere, babysitting so Hayden can take Shane to see Ilya coach his former team. And it took Aunt Sveta, who is always good for a secret trip to Burlington Mall or an even more secret trip to the gynecologist. Ilya knows about Irene’s Plan-B and the condoms and he doesn’t say anything. They’re good girls, good kids, and they’ve been dealt a shitty hand with Shane’s illness. And he’s not his father. He can let things go. His daughters will never, ever be afraid of him. He lets it go.
He had found Amelia’s diary open two months ago, just a scrawl about some boy she met through student council, how he offered to buy her weed and she doesn't know if she should text him back. He had slammed it shut and found hot tears stinging his eyes. Because Shane would have been flipping out, probably making a presentation about safe sex practices and substance abuse. He’d have installed a tracking app on her phone or bought her a safer car with all-wheel drive. But instead, Shane had been laid up in bed that week, his ankle in a brace from tripping over a curb, and the pain medicine had been interacting with his normal cocktail of drugs in a way that left him limp and more delirious than usual. So Ilya had just texted Rose to see if she had a weekend off from filming, because she had always been able to make Amelia open up in a way that he admires and resents in equal measure. He’s bitter that they needed so many people to raise their girls, and he feels ungrateful for being bitter, and he feels so guilty for being ungrateful.
They have to be careful not to mention Irene’s hockey team these days. Shane is still lucid enough to tell stories about winning his cups with Montreal most of the time, which means he’s lucid enough to know that hockey is what makes him forget in the first place. He never yells at the girls, but he gets flustered, tries to talk to them with stats and blurry logic about concussions and TBIs. Sometimes he thinks it’s Amelia he’s arguing with, even though she hasn’t worn a hockey helmet since they were two giggly five-year-olds in matching parkas.
Ilya goes to Irene’s games whenever he can. She’s good, and she gets embarrassed when he yells louder than anyone every time she scores. She skates in a way that reminds him of his younger self, reckless but single-minded. And he thinks about his twelve-year-old self, about how hockey numbed the pain of his mom’s hand, cold in his for the first and last time, quieted the sound of his father uncorking another bottle, softened the feeling of his own knuckles in his mouth, biting down so he wouldn’t cry out. He had needed hockey then, and he sees the way Irene looks at their family photos, pictures of Shane before he needed a cane, back when he would give her pointers on passing and shooting. He thinks she might need hockey now. He still tells her not to be stupid like him, not to take hits when she can help it.
“No one knows how many concussions it takes, Papa,” she says, in her own perfectly imperfect Russian. “It’s basically totally random.” And it’s so fucking unfair, and she’s sticking out her bottom lip at him. So he lets it go.
He’s still staring out at the party when Shane wobbles up behind him, cane clicking. “What are you thinking about?” His voice has gotten a lot softer, lately.
“I don’t want these drunk children in my house late,” he replies. Shane laughs.
“I thought you were all about don’t-ask-don’t-tell.” Ilya winds an arm around Shane’s waist. He’s gotten a lot lighter, too.
“Why is everyone here?” Shane asks.
“The girls graduate tomorrow.”
“Oh, yeah, right.” Shane always plays it cool when he can’t remember, desperate not to make a scene. He wrinkles his nose. “And when do we take them to the final?”
Ilya blinks a few times, hard. His throat is tight. “They don’t move into college until fall, Shane.”
“Right, of course.”
Shane can’t really get up and walk at the graduation reception, so Ilya socializes the best he can. Alone. He has to go to events without Shane more and more now, and it feels new and absolutely terrifying. Even when he was a seventeen-year-old douchebag who couldn't understand Americans’ dumb hick accents, Shane had been there. He hates that his English has gotten better because he’s been the one to read the girls’ field trip permission forms and call Shane’s doctors and help Irene with English homework.
He poses for a picture with a couple of Irene’s friends who are on the guys’ hockey team. Ilya coaches their Sunday league with some of the other dads, when he gets the chance. The other dads don’t like him at all, probably because he teaches their sons the worst Russian swears he can think of, but all the boys do. A few of them are going to McGill and New Brunswick to play, and he signs a couple trading cards with his younger face on them. He would have liked to have sons, he thinks. A big, big family. Amelia and Irene would be great older sisters. Someone’s mom takes a picture, hand on her heart. Her mascara is smudged and she says that the twins really look just like him, just like their dad, that their mom must be jealous that he won the genetic battle.
“They’re adopted,” he says, blunt. Irene cringes and hides her face. He dashes into the bathroom and wills the tears back down. A big, big family. It would have been a dream, to grow old with Shane and adopt more kids with no other home. Give them somewhere safe, give them what he never had.
But logistically, it was never possible. He thinks about pushing their double-wide stroller while Shane tried to remember which street would get them from his parent's house to the park. Carrying Irene into the ER after she got hit in that softball game, Amelia on his other hip. Watching the bronze medal match at the last Olympics, braiding sixteen-year-old Amelia’s hair while Irene talked the Canadian goalkeeper into letting her wear his gold medal. And he is growing old with Shane, but they don’t call it ‘growing old.’ The doctors call it ‘degenerating’. So they couldn’t possibly have had more kids.
Irene is waiting for him in the hallway once he leaves the bathroom. She’s in a white dress identical to her sister’s; they haven’t dressed the same like that since they were toddlers. She’s so beautiful, his daughter, and smart, and strong. Stronger than he ever was, and she’s texting her sister and trying to keep Ilya from seeing her phone screen. She looks up.
“I’m done with hockey, Papa,” she says.
He will not cry at his daughters’ graduation. “Thank you, dochenka,” is what he manages.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
FIFTY-FIVE.
Jackie’s the one who finally convinces Ilya that Shane needs to be in a facility. They’ve become pretty good friends over the years; he jokes that he’s secretly the father of one of the million Pike children and she laughs and they both love that it makes Hayden angry. She’s been coming to visit on her own for a while now, because Hayden always comes home after visiting Shane and showers for an hour, and once he comes out he doesn’t want to talk about how Shane forgot Hayden’s name or thinks Ilya’s in Tampa for the weekend when he leaves the room for a minute to take a call.
So she likes to visit on her own, sometimes. Shane squints at her and can’t quite remember who she is, but he knows that he’s excited because his old hockey friend–who happens to be her husband–is taking him to see the Centaurs play the Kings on Friday, and he still smiles when she asks about his daughters. He knows that one of them goes to Cornell and one of them is coming to visit next week, and the rest of the details sort of fade in and out.
“I’m so proud,” Shane says. He says that a lot. “I’m so proud.”
She’s a nurse now that all her kids are in school and Hayden only commentates during the playoffs. She loves it, to be honest, and she has friends who aren’t from the PTA, which is pretty great. And one of her friends, a Polish woman who works in labor and delivery, knows someone who knows someone who works in a facility that would be perfect for Shane’s needs.
“He doesn’t have needs,” Ilya says bitterly. As if Shane’s not asleep in an armchair, a bottle of pills on the table next to him that Jackie heard him shouting he didn’t need to take as she stood on their front porch, hand hovering over the doorbell. As if Ilya doesn’t have a massive bruise on his cheek that he refuses to discuss.
“He threw something at you again?”
“He doesn’t mean it.”
“Hayden told me he called the police last month. Thought you were kidnapping him, or something.”
“Pike should keep his mouth shut.”
She shouldn’t be surprised that Ilya's stubbornness extends to this. “It’s only half an hour from here. You could go every day, to see him.”
“He is fine here. He is safe.” The house is essentially baby-proofed, these days, complete with a baby gate on the front door. They didn’t even have one of those when the girls were little.
“It’s too much for you, Ilya. If you’re going to keep working–”
“I will quit.” Her own husband deeply resents that Ilya has won two cups as a head coach while dealing with Shane’s disease at the same time. They have a lot of help, Jackie always reasons back at him. A home health aide comes twice a week, and Yuna basically moved in last year. But Hayden, who turned down an offer last season to be an assistant coach in Vancouver, a team that hasn’t been to a Stanley Cup final in twenty years, resents him anyway.
“What do the girls say about it?” she asks. He stands up abruptly and stalks into the kitchen.
“They’re too young to worry about this.”
“They worry now, I’m sure.”
He curses and smacks the side of the coffee machine. There’s silence for a minute.
“You think he would be happier there?” He sets down a mug in front of her. His eyes are red.
“I think you could spend more quality time with him, if you weren’t worried about keeping him safe.”
Shane stirs in the armchair. Ilya throws down his own mug of coffee and rushes over, brushes his thumb over Shane’s cheek.
“How do you feel, lubov? Ready for pills?”
“I don’t take pills, Ilya. I already got cleared by Wiebe. I’m ready to leave for the game.”
“You’re going with Hayden tomorrow, Shane.”
“Right, right, yes.”
“He’s taking you to watch me coach, remember? Amelia is coming up from school to watch with you.”
“Amelia shouldn’t play, she’ll get hurt. She’ll get hurt.” His voice is getting louder. He flails his arms and knocks the pill bottle off the table.
“She’s going to sit next to you and watch, Shane. Maybe they put you two on the jumbotron, hmm?” He speaks slowly and clearly, and she has to blink to make herself believe this is the Ilya Rozanov who she used to flip off on TV when he checked Hayden into the boards.
“Oh yes, ok. But her helmet will be too small, she can’t play like that.”
“I will make sure she has the right helmet, lubov. Are you ready to take your pills?”
“I don’t take pills, Rozanov. Stop asking.”
He falls back asleep eventually, after Ilya convinces him that Irene and Amelia sent the pills as an early Christmas present. The coffee has gone cold. Jackie stares down at her lap.
“I will go look at the place,” he says. The, uh–”
“Memory care residential facility.”
“Yeah.” He drinks the coffee anyway.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
FIFTY-SIX.
“I want to donate my brain,” Shane says, on one of his better days. “They said they can use it to help people.”
“Ok, I’ll talk to them.” Ilya doesn’t know who them is, but Shane is somewhat lucid and calm and that’s really all he can ask for. Shane’s always looking for a way to be a better man. Who is Ilya to deny him that?
They’re both fifty-six and Ilya just got a clean bill of health for his annual physical. He honestly feels great, physically at least. He hasn’t smoked in years, except the occasional spliff when his old Boston pals come into town, and he’s been forced to learn to cook since Shane stopped being able to remember the stove was on.
It’s so fucking unfair. The doctor tells Ilya that his cholesterol would be impressive for a thirty-year-old and four hours later, the memory care nurse is telling him that Shane had a good weekend, that he remembered that Ilya was away visiting their daughter for Cornell parents’ weekend, but that he wasn’t taking much food and the incontinence was getting worse. It’s not fair at all.
It’s Yuna who holds him together. She’s in her eighties now, still whip-smart and sharp and walking her 5K loop around their neighborhood every morning. They’ve really only ever had one major fight, a blowup about bringing Shane to David’s funeral earlier that year. Ilya had insisted he would be fine and Yuna had insisted that he would be confused and distressed. And ultimately she had been right, as always, and Irene had to take Shane out into the churchyard because he thought Ilya was in the coffin and Ilya couldn’t comfort him, too busy keeping Yuna upright. But at the reception, his eyes had been clear as he told a story about David taking him to see his first hockey game in Montreal, and about the infamous dinner party where Ilya and his dad burned the hotdogs so bad the neighbors called the fire department and Amelia had laughed so hard she cried, or maybe she was already crying.
Being a dad to his girls, to their girls, is the greatest honor of his life. When he was sixteen and he had decided that America was his only way out, he swore he would never be a father. Intentionally, at least. He would never pass that anger on, pass on the slap, the punch, the kick that he was always expecting, even when he was thousands of kilometres away from Russia. But Shane made it safe to dream about a family and a home and bouncing a baby on his knee. He feels cheated, in a lot of ways. He got that family and that home, but his family doesn’t even live at home anymore. Shane lives half an hour away, and Ilya has to fill out a form to take him and his wheelchair to the ice rink to watch the guys practice during morning skate. Games are too loud for him now.
The hospice nurse calls a few weeks before Easter to let him know that they should all come visit, and he’s already bought the girls’ plane tickets before he calls them. Irene has to reschedule a math test, but her professor is a huge Voyageurs fan, so she gets away with it.
They spend a few days mostly cramming into Shane’s bed at the residential home, the four of them piled on top of each other, or wheeling Shane around the garden. He’s surprisingly clear, asking them about their classes and if they're eating enough. Amelia quietly warns Irene in the hallway that seemingly rapid improvement can be a sign someone with dementia is about to go. They both think Ilya doesn’t hear it. They’re both so much stronger than him. He strokes Shane’s hair.
Yuna insists on giving Ilya and the girls two days before she comes to see her son. She won’t stop complaining about her compression socks and her thyroid, but she still wakes up earlier than any of them and does her 5K loop around the neighborhood before she visits. And then Shane starts to sleep for longer periods of time, and the nurse kindly tells Irene not to force food onto him, that it’s mainly just important that he stays hydrated now.
Yuna sends the three of them away to get lunch, on the fourth day. They sit in an empty KFC. Ilya asks about their spring break plans, and it devolves into an argument about a trip to Miami and Irene’s nerdy boyfriend that Amelia hates. She shows Ilya a picture and he wrinkles his nose, asks how it’s possible to have Shane Hollander for a father and still no taste in men. And they both snort when they laugh, and he’s reminded that he’s been a dad for twenty years now, and that maybe he’s pretty good at it. Irene throws a balled up napkin at him. All three of them smile all the way back to the car and it feels normal, for just a minute. He wishes he could have given them a normal life. But their laughs are the same as when they were little girls getting thrown up onto Shane’s shoulders, and that will have to be enough.
They come back down the hall, still giggling, and Yuna is holding Shane’s limp hand. He’s gone. Ilya holds his girls tight against his chest, and he looks to the sky and thanks Shane, or God, or his mother, or whoever’s up there listening, thanks them that he wasn’t there to watch his husband go.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
FIFTY-SIX.
Rozynov calls Hayden three days before the funeral to ask him to do the eulogy. Jackie’s standing next to him, rubbing his back and eavesdropping.
“The girls cannot do it. I don’t speak well enough,” Ilya says. He sounds far away.
“Of course, Rozy, yeah. Of course.” The line goes dead.
He sits in front of his laptop for a long time. He feels like he doesn’t really know Shane at all anymore, even though they’ve seen each other more in the last few years than the previous two decades. Hayden had been distant, back when Shane and Rozanov were playing at Ottawa, when they started their perfect little family with their millions of dollars and their Netflix miniseries about how fucking perfect their lives were. He was resentful of their success, back then. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself for that.
He tries to write something. Deletes it. Forgets that Hollander’s name is technically Hollander-Rozanov. Was technically Hollander-Rozanov. Opens Shane’s Wikipedia page, sees the tab labelled Personal Life. Closes his laptop again. All of the anecdotes about Shane seem inappropriate for a funeral. He and Comeau had nearly pissed themselves laughing that time when a bachelorette party pulled Shane on stage to do karaoke with them. Shane was a surprisingly good singer, and he knew every word to Man, I Feel Like a Woman. But that’s not a good eulogy story, probably. He could talk about how happy Shane was to watch his husband coach, how excited he got when Hayden took him to Ottawa’s semifinal three years ago and was so busy trying to remember the name of Ilya’s first coach at Boston that he missed a step and gave himself a busted lip. But Shane won’t want him to talk about his disease. Wouldn’t want him to.
The funeral is huge. It’s not open to the public, but a dozen Voyageurs are scattered throughout the pews, and at least a hundred current and former Ottawa guys are clumped together near the back. Hayden doesn’t really remember giving the eulogy, but he remembers being embarrassed that he was crying more than Rozanov, and that he kept saying God bless you, which was stupid because Shane isn’t even religious. Wasn’t even religious. Rozanov doesn’t even cry when they lower the casket into the ground, but he steps away as people start throwing their handfuls of dirt. Everyone is too focused on Mrs. Hollander and Amelia and Irene clutching each other and whispering little stories about Shane, trying to smile even as their faces crumble. Amelia keeps saying Dad, Dad, Dad did this, Dad would have loved that, and Hayden thinks about his own kids and he turns around and swallows hard. Sees that Rozanov is still walking away from the group, pressing his knuckles against his mouth. His shoulders are shaking.
Hayden doesn’t know what he’s thinking, but he walks over to Rozanov and puts a hand on his shoulder. There’s tears tracked across Rozanov’s face, and he glances back once, quickly, to make sure no one is watching them.
“It was good speech, Pike.”
He glances back again, and Hayden’s brow furrows. “I do not want the girls to see,” Rozanov explains.
“He loves them, so much. The last game I took him to, he kept going on and on about his daughter the doctor and his daughter the engineer,” Hayden says. Never mind that they were still undergrads. Ilya smiles, just a little.
“He talks about you too, all the time. Or, uh, talked.” Pike adds. And Ilya’s hands ball into fists once, twice, three times. And then he’s on his knees in the dirt, head bowed against the ground, and he’s really sobbing. Amelia and Irene rush over, Shane’s mom following right behind them holding Harris’ arm, and Ilya tries to stand up but his knees fail him. He and Jackie lunge for him, and Hayden will never, ever, forgive himself for that decade he spent resenting Shane and Ilya. The girls are each whispering into their father’s ear, just Russian now, and Hayden’s starting to think he has them mixed up, that Amelia is really Irene. Mrs. Hollander looks like she might faint. One of their daughters, one of Shane’s daughters, is holding Ilya’s shoulders up as he vomits into the grass.
He will never, ever, ever, forgive himself.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
TWENTY-FIVE.
Amelia tries not to be annoyed when her father insists on a big wedding. Her boyfriend, well, her fianceé, now, didn’t ask for Papa’s blessing before he proposed, and by some miracle he doesn’t make a big fuss, just shakes Michael’s hand and says he’ll buy some good vodka to celebrate. But now Papa wants them to have a big wedding and he wants to pay for it all, and since Michael is too proud to accept any money for a future down payment, she decides to let it go and have the big wedding.
She’s never really wished she had a mother. Her fathers were good parents, great parents. And Rose and Jackie and Svetlana and Amber had always been around, taught them how to do eyeliner and use a DivaCup when Papa was on the road and Dad was asleep. Nothing has ever made her wish she had a mom, until she’s wedding planning and trying to scrape through med school at the same time. Papa doesn’t have any opinions about anything and Grammy has too many opinions about everything. So she gives up and calls Aunt Sveta, who goes with her to buy a dress, cries into her champagne and insists on paying for the gown, and then insists she has a wedding planner friend who will take care of everything, and don’t worry about how much it costs. She knows it will make Papa mad, but she has rotations on Monday and she can’t really be stressed about it.
The wedding is stressful anyway. Irene keeps rubbing her eyes and smudging her makeup and her dress doesn’t fit quite right. Everyone is having trouble finding the venue, which is admittedly in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. She’s trying not to have a breakdown right as the violins start. There’s two knocks on the bathroom door.
It’s her father, standing in his tux with his bowtie askew. Amelia doesn’t remember when his hair started to go gray. He still looks young for sixty, almost sixty-one, according to her friends that send her screenshots of #DILFAlert Twitter accounts. She just thinks he looks like Papa.
“Dochenka,” he says, hands gently finding either side of her face. “Now is the easy part.”
Papa is strong, steady, and she grips him harder and harder as her stupid heels start to chafe her feet halfway down the aisle. She expects him to say something, but his mouth is pressed into a tight line, and Amelia knows he’s trying not to cry. So she lets it go.
Her fianceé, well, her husband now, says half of his vows in broken Russian. Papa stares straight ahead in the front row but his eyes are full of tears. There’s an empty seat next to him for Dad. Her own eyes sting, too.
Irene catches the bouquet and then hands it back to their father. She’s obsessed with him getting remarried, and Amelia doesn’t really know why. Papa still coaches at Ottawa and visits Grammy after every home game and he recently went to Vail with some old hockey buddy named Cliff-something to ski. Papa’s happy.
Well, she knows he’s not happy. Her parents were so in love, and she remembers making gagging sounds to break up their kissing in the morning when Papa was supposed to be taking them to school. Unfortunately for both of them, she and Irene knew they were still having sex pretty much up until Dad moved into that residential thing. Remarrying isn’t going to fix his kind of unhappy.
The music is just a little too loud and Amelia’s dress is just a little too tight, so she sneaks away, toes off her shoes and walks down the stone steps into the grass. The Cha-Cha Slide fades away. She slumps against a wrought iron bench and looks up at the darkening sky.
Papa finds her a few minutes later, sits down next to her. She leans her head on his shoulder and breathes deep. They both stare out into the forest.
“I wish your father and I had a big wedding,” he says quietly, fiddling with the cross and the ring hung around his neck. It occurs to her all at once that her father is really just a man.
“I miss him,” Amelia says. Dad was always the right kind of quiet, the kind that calmed her down even after the worst days of sixth grade, even after she failed her first test. And even when he would get a little confused, he was still more of a help with math homework than you, she thinks. “He would have loved to be here with you.”
Her father tuts. “He doesn’t like parties. He’d be out here with us. He would be getting mad at me for smoking cigar.” And he produces one from his jacket pocket and lights it. She wonders if he knows about the Marlboro Reds in her coat pocket when she came home for Christmas. She takes a puff.
“It was not fair,” he says.
“I know.”
“I’m proud of the woman you are, Amelia. Even though it was not fair.” He says it in Russian, but he pronounces her name like a true Canadian, the way that Dad always said it. “And Michael is ok.”
Her laugh is choked with tears. “He’s still scared of you, Papa,” she answers in Russian. Her father looks away with the cigar between his lips.
“He loves you, dochenka.” She knows who he means. He turns his head back and smiles, a tear rolling down his cheek.
“I know, Papa.”