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FORTY:
Ilya really doesn’t notice much difference in Shane, after the diagnosis. His husband is still neurotic, still obsessed with hockey. Still panics when the twins’ babysitter doesn’t call every hour, even when that babysitter is David Hollander or one of the more responsible Pike children. Still frets and stress-cleans and calls Yuna to review Ilya’s contract when he signs on to coach in Ottawa once the girls are old enough for preschool, even though Ilya insists he doesn’t really care about merchandising or any of that bullshit. Shane cares, and he takes care of it. And most days, he’s just Shane.
Ilya looks over from the kitchen table, where Shane is slicing a banana into the blender. He spins around, hands open but holding nothing.
“What do you need?” Ilya asks.
“The, uh, the what’s it called–”
“Milk?”
“No, fuck, uh, shit, no, sorry.” He cringes at the swear, looks over at the girls, who are luckily too engrossed in their Cheerios to hear it. It’s their first day of kindergarten and Shane has been freaking out all morning. That’s certainly nothing new. Their twins won’t be in the same class, and he’s worried the teachers will mix them up at recess, and he’s worried that they’ll miss each other, and he’s worried about Amelia’s epi-pen and Irene’s coat, which she refuses to wear under any circumstances.
“Strawberries?” Ilya offers again.
“No, the, what's-it-called. I just had it.”
Shane takes antidepressants, now, and a couple experimental things that Ilya doesn’t really understand. All in all, he’s doing quite well, the doctors say. He’s not showing signs of middle-stage dementia yet, still has sensorimotor control and orients himself well. He can still drive and he gives the girls piggy back rides when he’s not too tired and grumbles about the biased umpire at Irene’s t-ball games even when he is too tired. A lot of the time, Ilya can pretend like their lives are normal, like a doctor in a shitty Toronto suburb didn’t ruin their future with three little letters.
“Your phone? Watch? Or is it food?” This exchange is their daily routine, now, when Shane gets flustered and can’t remember what he needs or where he is or that he retired last year and doesn’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn. Ilya supposes it snuck up so gradually that it’s just become a part of being Shane and Ilya, playing ‘20 Questions’ when Shane’s memory fails him. But then again, he’s not sure if there’s ever been a Shane and Ilya without that stupid diagnosis, without symptoms congruent with CTE and early-stage dementia. The warning signs could have started as early as his twenties, masked by stress and parenthood and aggression typical in your sport, Mr. Hollander. That’s the thing about CTE. It can start at any time, and it can worsen at any time. It’s possible that they spent Shane’s final few years of being his true self using fake names and pretending not to care. The only thing they really know is that, god willing, he will live long enough for the CTE to kill him. It’s so fucking unfair.
“I don’t know.” Shane’s head drops into his hands. The girls are fidgeting now, hitting each other with placemats. They’re in matching little pinafores, Amelia in purple and Irene in yellow. Ilya’s getting pretty good at braiding their hair, as long as Shane reads to them or plays patticake to keep them still.
“Is ok, Shane. We will find it after girls go to school, yeah?”
Shane has come a long way as a dad. Their first few years as parents had been brutal, before they had those three little letters. Sleepless nights and fighting over the right kind of stroller. Shane would get so sad and so angry, angrier than he would ever admit. But Ilya knew anyway, saw the clench of his jaw and the confusion in his eyes that mingled with tears when he broke down over the littlest things. In a way, the diagnosis calmed Shane, knowing that he wasn’t irrational, wasn't going crazy. Now that he could typify his irritability and mood swings and his paranoia about forgetting how many ounces of milk the girls had taken, it was getting easier for him to relax, fall asleep with Amelia’s little fist in his hand, let Ilya buy them little glittery lip gloss tubes and not fret about the forever chemicals. Ilya hates that it took a death sentence to get Shane back to being Shane.
“Ok, yeah. Sorry.” Shane sits down at the dining table and starts chattering with their daughters, reminding them that they have to leave the teddy bears at home but that he and Papa will take good care of them while the girls learn all day. He’s such a good father, Ilya thinks. And the banana is still sitting in the blender, waiting for whatever Shane forgot. It’s so unfair. He sets about cleaning the dishes in the sink. It’s so fucking unfair.
Amelia asks what Dad’s job is as they’re rushing out the door. They know that Papa is maybe-famous, that he teaches hockey to the guys on TV and that he’s won a lot of awards and if things go well this year he might win another. They know Papa takes them to the ice rink and lets them skate around early in the mornings on Sundays, sometimes, and some of his friends will filter in and swing them around while Dad watches on nervously and Papa laughs. But they’ve been more tight-lipped about Shane around the girls, trying to keep them from finding out about Shane Hollander’s Shock Retirement! and Shane Hollander Reveals CTE Diagnosis and Shane Hollander Proves that Hockey isn’t Safe for Anyone: Read More Below.
“Well, I’ll be taking you to school now, yeah? Like I took you to nursery last year.”
“But what do you do after that?”
Shane pulls a knit hat onto her head, tugs the flaps down over her little ears.
“Well, I’ll wait for you to come home, silly. And watch the teddy bears.”
Shane’s routine is as strict as ever. He runs and bikes the same loop around the neighborhood, eats his Mediterranean diet that the dementia specialist recommends, takes his pills and drinks decaf tea and goes to appointments. He can’t run as fast or eat as much as he used to, but then again, he’s not a professional athlete anymore. Ilya always figured he would be the one to retire first, get fat and go on ESPN once a year after the Cup final. But Shane accepted the head coaching job on Ilya’ behalf, packed Ilya’s duffel the night before his first day and remembers the new rookies' names better than Troy. They both still need hockey, and Ilya’s the only one who can have it. And it’s not fair, not fair at all, but he has to do it for Shane. So he does.
Ilya lets Shane walk the girls in alone. He doesn’t want to turn the car’s heater off, he reasons. Shane nods and doesn’t buy it for one second, but he unbuckles Amelia and Irene anyway and stoops so they can hold his hand as they walk up to the teacher waiting at the door. They’re barely forty and their girls just had a Tinkerbell themed fifth birthday party and there’s a banana forgotten in the blender. Shane’s blank expression, grabbing at nothing, plays on a loop in Ilya’s mind. There’s really no way of knowing when Shane will go, when his mind will stop remembering. It’s not fair at all, and he wants to cry or scream or break the steering wheel in half when he sees Shane swipe away tears as he jogs back to the car. He says the cold makes his eyes water, and Ilya knows they’re both thinking about how long Shane will be able to walk their beautiful daughters to school, to play goalie and dive on the ground while Irene cackles with her tiny hockey pads swallowing her up, how long he’ll be able to lay on the sidewalk and collect worms with Amelia after it rains. But they can’t talk about it, and Ilya has to be strong and put the car in drive and take Shane to another appointment where he’ll sit in the waiting room, scrolling his phone and pretending like his Shane isn’t going to disappear. It’s torture, but he has to do it for Shane. So he does.
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FORTY-SIX:
He’s been doing well, recently, Shane thinks. They should go on vacation.
Ilya vehemently disagrees. “It will be too much,” he says. It confuses Shane, because he’s usually the first to insist that his husband is fine, that they have everything under control.
“Ilya, I really think the new drugs are working, I mean, I’ve been less tired.”
“I know,” Ilya says. “But the girls–”
Shane is so jealous, and he feels terrible about it. He’s jealous that Amelia and Irene turn to their Papa first when they need someone to get a glass off the highest shelf, that Ilya tells them to turn down their CD player when Shane’s having a bad day and can’t stay awake. He’s jealous that Ilya gets to take the girls to Osaka in February for the Olympics, and that he’ll be watching his beautiful, perfect family with Canadian flags painted on their cheeks from thousands of kilometers away. He’s jealous that Ilya still gets to coach, that he’s loved by the new generation of Cens and that wide-eyed kids from all over the NHL dumped a cooler full of ice on him and his navy pressed suit at the All-Stars last year, a rookies vs. vets game. He’s jealous that Ilya spent months deciding between staying in Ottawa or going to Team Canada for a shot at those upcoming Olympics, even though he acted flippant about the whole thing, pretending not to care for Shane’s sake.
Shane’s glad it’s him, at least, and not Ilya. He wouldn’t change their places for anything, even though the jealousy sits heavy in his stomach. He runs through his whole career at night, trying to sleep. Tries to think of his worst hits, the times in juniors when he should’ve sat out and didn’t. Wonders which concussion did him in, which game should have been his last. He wouldn’t wish it on Ilya for anything. His husband already has such trouble sleeping.
And parenting has always come easier to Ilya. He’s glad that he’ll still be there, when Shane is gone. Suicide rates among athletes with CTE are 40%, and even when he first met Ilya, Shane knew he seemed ready to take the extra risk, drink an entire fifth and take more aspirin than he should and drive his motorcycle faster, so fast that he could flatten himself on the asphalt. So he’s glad it’s him, and not Ilya.
“The girls are my girls too,” Shane says. “And we will make a plan. It will be a normal vacation. For them.” And Ilya nods and disappears into the shower for an hour. And when he comes back, he opens Expedia.
They end up agreeing on the Grand Canyon. They’ll drive, and there will be a hospital every hundred miles along the route in case something happens. Shane remembers when Ilya would pout at his taped ribs and call his teammates pussies for skipping morning skate to get their heads checked, and he wonders where that reckless kid went. But then again, Ilya will still happily stay up all night when Amelia can’t stop vomiting, and he will still insist on waiting in the car at Shane’s 9 AM neurologist appointment, take four ibuprofen with coffee and repeat again and again that he can handle it. He’s just a different kind of reckless now.
They’re staying in some tourist trap place, done up like a Western saloon with Route 66 signs everywhere. Shane thinks it’s horribly cheesy, and Ilya buys himself the largest cowboy hat he can find. The girls are mortified, but they still dance with him, stopped in front of a busker dressed up as an old-timey bandit with an accordion and an upturned cap full of quarters. Shane watches them, Amelia rolling her eyes but obliging Ilya as he twirls her around. Irene throws her head back and cackles, fishing through her purse for some American coins.
Shane’s afraid to die in a way that he can’t even articulate. He looks at his girls, dust kicking up under the cowboy boots Ilya agreed to spend a truly ridiculous amount of money on, and he thinks about being dust, one day, about being the dust under his girls’ feet. And it scares him. To leave them with such a scar. They’re barely eleven. Shane remembers being that young, when the only constant thing in his life was hockey and hockey camp and his mom calling him at hockey camp to make sure he was eating enough and still doing his homework. He can’t imagine what it will be like for them, to only have one parent, and he can’t imagine what it will be like for Ilya to be a widower decades too early, and he can’t imagine what it will be like for him to stop being. He wonders if it will be peaceful, if Ilya will have to make the decision to let him go. He likes knowing and he hates forgetting, and it scares him so fucking much.
Ilya ambles over, offers Shane his elbow. Shane’s been pushing through the fatigue and the pain in his joints the past few days, and he’s worried the new cocktail of drugs isn’t the miracle he’d hoped for. But his girls are smiling and Amelia has stopped complaining she doesn't have enough time for homework. Shane takes his husband’s hand and lets him spin him around while the girls groan and roll their eyes, pretending to gag.
The next day they drive to Maricopa Point. Shane wakes up in the passenger seat while the sun is just cresting over the mountains and forgets where he is, for a moment. He jolts up and grabs Ilya’s arms and opens his mouth to shout. He might as well be in the showers after that CCM shoot, or lining up for his first NHL faceoff, or holding Irene for the first time and telling Ilya to relax, lubov, I thought I was the scared one. You can hold her, Ilya, she’s your daughter and she’s gonna love you.
Ilya squeezes his arm and then puts a finger to his lips. He glances back. He’s not on the ice, he’s not waiting in the hallway for Rozanov to open his hotel room door, and he’s not watching as Ilya picks their daughter up from her crib for the first time and gently splays his fingers over wispy hair on the back of her head. Eleven-year-old Amelia and Irene are dozing in the backseat, their heads slumped together. They’re so strong, and beautiful, and kind. Their girls.
He’ll miss them, so fucking much. It’s maybe the only thing that scares him more than dying, knowing that one day he’ll kiss them for the last time, knowing that they might be the ones to find him. Ilya squeezes his arm again, points out the windshield. The sun is just coming up, casting its pinkish glow across delicate layers of red and brown rock. His heart fills with something stronger than that fear, for a second. And that will have to do.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
FIFTY-FIVE:
David’s just gotten out of the hospital when Ilya calls him. It’s odd, because Ilya’s more the texting type; he supposes it comes with the territory of raising two teenage girls. Their family groupchat is full of updates from Yuna during David’s bypass and updates from Ilya on Shane’s first month at the memory care facility; there’s a separate groupchat the girls are in, where Amelia is sending photos of her dad moving her into BU from a few weeks ago, a ballcap pulled low over his face. She hates when he gets photographed, hates when they get stopped and asked about her other father and why he wasn’t at the last IIFH World Final, but David had been there to see her face fall when Ilya suggested skipping it. They’d all been crammed in David’s hospital room, eating dinner out of plastic containers.
“I am still known in Boston,” Ilya had said, eyeing her from across the room. Amelia fiddled with her earrings, chopsticks idle.
“But you will need me to carry boxes,” he added.
“I don’t need you to carry any boxes, Papa,” she had groaned. But then he had said something in Russian, something softer that made Irene and Amelia glance at each other and grin, quickly. And David supposed it had been decided.
Yuna has made several attempts to learn Russian over the years, always tapping through Duolingo lessons to keep her nerves occupied in the neurologist’s waiting room, waiting for Shane. But David likes that Ilya has something that’s just for him and the girls. He and Yuna and Shane have the language of hockey, and he supposes Ilya and his parents never had much of anything. He’s glad they have a language that’s just for them. Shane still remembers some Russian words on his good days, and he calls the girls dochenka on bad days when he can’t tell them apart. David walks into the kitchen and answers the call.
“David,” Ilya says. “Can you come over.” It’s somewhere between a question and statement.
“Sure, let me get Yuna–”
“David, don’t tell her, please.” Something in his voice makes David grab the spare key and slip out the side door despite his doctor’s orders to rest.
The house is quiet as he walks through the foyer. Ilya is lying on the couch, staring into the fireplace. The embers are glowing orange, almost burnt out.
“I called you again,” Ilya says. His voice is rough.
“Sorry, kiddo, I was kind of rushing–”
“You did not need to come, David. I called again because I changed my mind. Sorry you drove over.”
There’s a bottle of pills upturned on the coffee table. Half of them are spilled onto the carpet.
“I’m sorry, David,” he says again, scrubbing his face. “I did not want Yuna or the girls to find me.”
“Son–”
“Was stupid. Mistake. I changed my mind.”
“Ilya.” His son-in-law is looking everywhere but at him.
“I have been sleeping without him for a month,” Ilya says. “I come home and there is no one here.”
“Come stay with me and Yuna tonight. You can sleep on the couch.”
Ilya doesn’t even seem to hear him. “He did not remember me yesterday. Said he was waiting for his husband. He got angry when I held his hand.”
“He didn’t mean it, son. Let’s–“
“I know he didn’t mean it.”
“Ilya–”
“I know he didn’t mean it,” he says again, louder. “If he had meant it, it would hurt less.” He pulls himself upright, stares up at the ceiling. “The girls are not ready.”
The couch dips under David’s weight. “You can’t be ready for something like this, kiddo.”
“I did not do a good job of getting them ready. Amelia learns more about dementia in pre-med than she does from me.” Ilya shakes his head. His eyes are glassy and glowing orange from the reflection of the dying embers. David doesn’t know what to say.
“I promised Shane to give them normal life,” Ilya says finally. He stands and picks up the fire poker, tries to relight the charred wood.
“You’ve given them a great life, Ilya,” David says quietly.
“They’re still so young.” He puts down the poker and sighs. The fire’s dead, anyway.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
FIFTY-SIX:
Yuna knows it’s time. Her son-in-law doesn’t say it, just tells her the girls are coming up from college even though their second semester just started and that the hospice nurse called him last night. And she knows it’s time.
They go to visit Shane together most days. Ilya’s switched to being an assistant coach this year, so he can stay at home even more. She was there when he had called the Cen’s GM; he had made sympathetic noises and told Ilya to take all the time he needed.
“Well, we’ll be ready to have you back,” the GM had said. And it fills her with anger to know what he really means. She pores over Ilya’s new contract anyway. No matter how angry she is, she will not let her family get ripped off.
She can hear Ilya blinking back tears over the phone, telling her that Amelia will get in tomorrow night, and that he’s still waiting to see if Irene has to take her midterm before she can leave, but he has a flight booked for her tomorrow afternoon anyway.
“I might go see a friend in Toronto for a few days,” she says. She hates it, and long car rides make her legs ache these days, but the girls deserve their own time with their father. They’ve gotten so little time with him, in the grand scheme of things.
She waits two days, and then she drives the familiar route to the care home. Shane mostly sleeps, but when he wakes up he’s surprisingly lucid, considering he hadn’t recognized Rose two weeks prior and nearly gave himself a black eye trying to stand out of his wheelchair to run away from his dinnertime. But mostly, he sleeps.
Shane’s eyes, her son’s eyes, crack open. His hand is warm, and she squeezes it.
“Honey, don’t try to get up. Ilya and Irene and Amelia will be back soon.” She tries to say their names as many times as she can now. She knows it calms him to remember.
“Ilya found her, mom,” he says. His voice is clear. She’s surprised he recognizes her. Last year at David’s funeral, he’d thought she was the one who died, or that it was Ilya, or that David was the one standing over him saying it’s ok, buddy, it’s Hayd, Rozanov will be here in a sec, ok?
“Honey, he’ll be back in a minute.”
“I kissed them ‘fore they left?”
Ilya and the girls went to get lunch fifteen minutes ago, at Yuna’s urging. She could tell Irene was getting upset, fidgeting with her arms crossed, her bottom lip bleeding between her teeth. She had thought of herself at twenty, a naive college student with too much concern for her GPA and an unhealthy obsession for this guy, Dave, in her macroeconomics class. She couldn’t imagine getting the call Ilya had made to each of them five days ago. So she had shooed them out. Shane had been half asleep, his fingers restlessly clutching the blanket, but he had woken up enough to press his lips to the girls’ foreheads, say ‘I love you’ once, twice, three times.
“Yes, Shane, you did.”
“Good.” And those are his last words, though Yuna can never bring herself to say them to anyone. Shane had told the girls ‘I love you’ once, twice, three times, and he had whispered something in Ilya’s ear as he bent down to kiss his husband, to kiss her son, to kiss his beautiful girls’ father for the last time. She wanted them to remember that. So she keeps his last words for herself.
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FIFTY-SIX:
There’s lights on the Christmas tree, but no ornaments. Ilya had promised himself, had stood at Shane’s grave and promised that he would give the girls a normal Christmas. But the ornaments were still in the attic, the box open to reveal the girls’ thumbprints pressed into clay and Shane’s neat script marking which thumb was which, and Ilya had driven to the gas station, bought a pack of Camel Blues, and then threw them away in the parking lot. And the tree would be just fine with just lights, he decided.
He buys Amelia a new laptop and Irene a tennis bracelet. They both hug him and tell him he shouldn’t have. And it’s the same as any other Christmas, except that he writes the girls’ names on the gift tags and leaves the FROM: line blank. Shane was always the gift wrapper, and he had neater handwriting until the tremors started. Ilya tries his best anyway. He has to. He owes the girls a normal Christmas.
Yuna comes over before the girls are even awake, her own armfuls of presents wrapped with surgical precision. She gives Ilya a photo of the girls around age four, squirming in Santa and Mrs. Claus’s laps. Shane is standing off to the side, rolling his eyes as Ilya takes the photo. The frame is made by a local Ottawa artisan, she says. Ilya stares at it and it feels strange, for a moment. He almost forgot that there had been a time when his husband could walk without a cane. Yuna rummages through her purse.
“He made these a couple years ago,” Yuna says. “I haven’t opened them.” And she hands each of them a red envelope. Irene sniffles.
He opens the envelope. Two plastic rings fall out, and a card.
For my husband. Merry Christmas it says on the front. His handwriting is shaky but still more legible than Amelia’s.
I don’t know when you’ll open this. Ilya, I wish you didn’t have to. He snatches up the rings and blinks, and then he’s outside, staring at the frozen lake. The letter is shaking in his hands.
I hope the lake freezes over and the girls can skate on Chrimst Christmas. I hope you’re happy, and that you know it’s ok to move on when you’re ready. I’m sorry you have to take care of me as long as you will. I love you, Ilya. Since we met and I told you not to smoke. Please don't start smoking now that I can’t stop you.
And a jolt of anger runs down his spine. Shane doesn’t get to tell him he has to be happy, or that he has to move on. It’s been eight months, and every time Ilya goes to visit his husband there are new bouquets of flowers from fans, former teammates, former WAGs who thought he was nicer than whatever player they were with. They’re still thinking of things to put his name on. Hollander awards, Hollander scholarships, Hollander commemorative jerseys. The Cens wear his number on their sleeves. The world is still mourning Shane Hollander and he's just supposed to move on, be happy, pretend like he doesn’t see Shane in strangers’ faces at the grocery store, doesn’t catch himself when he tells rookies to work on their backhand because he wants to tell them to just be more like Shane, shoot more like Shane, skate faster like Shane. He hates that he has to share his grief with the rest of the world, that his daughters will go back to school and everyone will think they lost Shane Hollander and not that they lost their father. It’s so unfair and it makes him feel sick.
You’re in Minnesota as I write this. It’s your second season back at Boston Ottawa. I watched you coach at the last All-Star cup final in Toronto. The girls are fourteen. Amelia just left to visit Rose in New York. Irene is sitting across from me and we’re watching Mighty Ducks. How have our kids never seen Mighty Ducks? I’m waiting for you to come home. Always. I will be waiting for you, Ilya.
Know that however much you miss me, I miss you more. Shane
He’s even angrier. It’s the last thing Shane will ever write to him, the last thing Shane will ever say. He wishes there was another page, ten pages, another ten years of cards to open. He wishes he didn’t have to buy the girls’s presents alone. He wishes Shane would open the sliding glass door and yell at him to put on a coat. He wishes they would get rid of Christmas, and Easter, and birthdays, and the Stanley Cup final, and hockey altogether, really. He doesn’t want to go through more things without Shane. He doesn’t want to be happy without Shane, move on without Shane. Eight months has been enough.
Yuna comes out onto the porch, wrapping her shawl tighter. Now they’re both staring out at the frozen lake.
“I’m sure your mother would have loved him.” She had caught him staring into the fire in the morning before the girls came down to open presents, tracing the gilded details of his cross with his eyes unfocused.
“She would have liked his style of hockey better than mine, less violent.” Yuna huffs out a laugh, and he should be the one who got sick, the one who had one too many concussions and has to suffer for it. It’s so fucking unfair.
“She’d love the girls.”
“Oh, yes,” he chuckles, sliding the plastic rings onto his thumb. “Yes.”
He swallows, thumbing the cardstock in his hands. He thinks about his mother every Christmas, thinks about her smile and the long, thick braid of her hair. The Christmas she gave him a Valeri Kamensky jersey and let him wear it at the dinner table, even though his dad had broken his little nine-year-old button-nose for leaving it thrown over the couch the next day. That same Christmas she gave him her golden cross in a small felt box for Epiphany, told him to remember it when he got famous in America. He had thought she meant to remember to take communion every Sunday, to remember to pray. He knows better now.
“She would be so proud of you, Ilya.”
He shakes his head, acid in his throat. “No, I don’t think. She was very, uh, religious. She would have begged me to find a wife. So I could come to Russia and be married in family church.”
“Ilya–“
“Is ok, Yuna. I miss her but she cannot tell me what to do.”
He has developed a lot of rules for himself as a father, promises he keeps in his mind. His daughters will never call him sir. His daughters will always be allowed to leave the house, go for a walk or a run or a drive to cool down. His daughters will never have coaches that hit or scream. His daughters can yell up the stairs for ‘Dad’ as many times as they want while they’re home for Christmas this year, can set four places at the table, and he won’t correct them.
Hollander really rubbed off on him, huh? Rules and listing and stuff.
He adds another promise. He will never read what Shane wrote in their daughters’ cards. They deserve their own piece of grief, too.
Neither of the girls have been on the ice in a good few years, but they lace up their old skates gathering dust in the basement and etch figure-eights into the lake surface that afternoon. Ilya skates most days during the season–the other coaches call him a show off–but when the wintry sun hits his face, he hears his husband telling their daughters he’s going inside to get them each a scarf, and he nearly faceplants whipping around to find the source of his voice. He only sees his girls in a squealing pile on the ice, their laughter visible in the freezing air. He wonders if this is how Shane felt at the end, hearing and seeing and feeling things that weren’t there.
In his mind, his mother will always be holding his nine-year-old self, back when she came to all of his pee-wee games and yelled at the ref the same way as Yuna, loud but precise. He thinks of her and he sees her whole and healthy and happy, and she’s not sleeping through the day or telling him to forgive his father because he does love you, Ilushka. Maybe Shane will always be seventeen in his mind, telling him not to smoke there, or twenty-two and asleep in Ilya’s hotel room, or twenty-nine and wearing a Centaurs jersey for the first time. Or maybe he’ll be forty and walking the girls into their first day of school, or fifty-four and leaning against Ilya at their graduation. Right now, he wants to hold on to all of those versions of Shane, even as he feels them slipping away.
The girls skate back to the edge of the ice, pick up the beaten up sticks and an orange plastic puck they’d played with as little kids. He thinks of Shane playing with Irene when he could still balance, telling her how to angle her feet differently and keep her eyes up. Back when he could swallow down the concern that she would follow him into illness, when he could remember that CTE was random and unfair and in all likelihood, his daughter wouldn’t suffer like him. Back before he got too confused and they had to keep her hockey gear hidden in the trunk of the car. He hopes their girls will remember Shane like that.
“Careful, dochenki,” he calls.
“Papa, come play goalie!” Irene yells. Amelia rolls her eyes. Ilya thinks he could just scream, with how unfair it is that he’s still here, that he gets to remember, that Shane left them knowing hockey killed him but still wanted the lake to freeze over so their girls could skate on Christmas.
“Ok, ok, let me show you how is done.”
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TWENTY-SEVEN:
Irene is going to strangle her sister. As if giving birth wasn’t painful enough. She knows Amelia isn’t happy about the whole single-mother thing, and she wants to prove that she’s learning something in her residency at Presbyterian. But still…
“I want everyone out,” she says through gritted teeth. Irene should have known it was a mistake to tell Grammy when she was only six-centimetres dilated, because now Amelia and her husband are here and Jackie is here and apparently Hayden is on the way and is so excited because none of the Pike kids have given him a grandchild, and Sveta is here and on the phone with Rose, who is bitching about being cast as a witch for the first time and what that means for her career. The nurse is saying something but she can’t hear it.
And then she’s bleeding, and everything else could be real, could be a dream. She doesn’t know if she’s still awake and machines are beeping everywhere. Amelia’s voice is talking quickly and someone is crying and there are doors opening and closing. Emergency C-section. DNR. Next of kin.
Papa is standing over her, petting her hair. She cracks open one eye.
“Dochenka,” he says quietly, squeezing her hand. His face is tight, the same face he’d made when he kissed Dad goodbye at the wake and fitted his wedding ring onto his cold finger. And then, for the first time in her life, she sees her father take off his necklace, take off his gold chain where his cross and his own wedding ring hang. And he clasps it around her neck. Her whole body is covered in sweat and she’s flushed bright red and the cool metal somehow feels even better than the ice chips Jackie had been feeding her. He kisses her forehead. And then she’s moving and he’s gone.
She thinks she might die. Dad will be waiting for her, if she does. Dad and Grandpa. She spent her whole first trimester crying about Grandpa, maybe because it was just too painful to think about Dad waiting for Papa, waiting for them, and not getting to hold her baby. She and Amelia weren’t raised religious, but she sees the way Papa stands on the back patio of the cottage and looks up at the sky or out into the lake and crosses himself when he thinks they’re not looking, and it seems like it gives him the strength to come back inside and laugh and yell that he wants next game on the Xbox. And that’s all the proof she needs that Dad’s out there, waiting.
There’s a paper curtain between her and whatever’s happening to her. She thinks she might be dying.
She misses Dad. So much. Amelia had visited him more in the care home, told him about her shitty first dates and her roommate cheating off her in CH2001. Irene had spent a lot of time just being angry, being angry he was getting further and further away, angry at how relieved Papa was when she quit hockey. Angry he was going to leave, and that everyone else acted like they had made peace with it. So she would usually visit Dad alone, sit with him in silence until the anger subsided. But she couldn’t find the words like Amelia, still can’t. She has so much to tell him, if she dies. Dad, I love you. Dad, I’m pregnant. Dad, I’m worried about Papa. He sees a therapist and he thinks we don’t know. We all go to Hayden’s or Rose’s for Christmas dinner because it’s too painful for Papa to have it at home. Dad, every day I turn around and expect you to be there. Dad, I’ve missed you.
Irene didn’t think she would ever stop crying after Dad left them. The anger and fear and despair just kept hitting her, wave after wave, and an expression hadn’t flitted across Papa’s face since Jackie had wiped the bile from the corners of his mouth at the funeral and told him that it would be ok, Ilya, be strong for them now. She had cried in front of her math professor and the cute TA, cried in the dining hall, cried on the Amtrak home from Cornell after applying for a Leave of Absence. She cried in Papa’s arms from the moment she woke up until he coerced her into tea and toast and tucked her into her childhood bed. And then she cried until he knocked hesitantly on the door, came in and laid next to her until she fell asleep.
She misses Dad so much that she thinks it could kill her, even though it’s been seven years. When they went home for Easter last year, she and Amelia ended up sleeping on the couch together because Irene couldn’t stop crying, even six years later, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars in her bedroom. Dad helped her stick them up there when they were ten and he was still strong enough to lift her so she could reach the ceiling.
She thinks she might be about to die. Through the haze of drugs and numbness and pain, she thinks maybe Dad’s standing over her, that he’s happy to see her and wherever they’re going, there’s no dementia and no CTE and he remembers everything, remembers her first pair of skates and her first box of tampons and kissing her forehead the day he left.
And then Irene decides that she will not make her father bury someone else. She will not make him drive home with his suit covered in mud and his eyes blank, not again. She will not make him hold Amelia in the reception line at the wake, tell her to just keep breathing, dochenka, it will be over soon, not again. She will not make her father lie, say that he’s fine and work is just stressful because the new rookies don’t listen, not again. She will not make her grandmother mourn a husband and a son and a granddaughter. She can’t feel anything, but she knows the cross is still around her neck. Sorry, Dad, you’ll have to wait a little longer.
She lives, and she names her son Shane. He’s small and fragile and perfect.
“Don’t be so nervous,” Amelia says. She’s holding baby Shane and bouncing on her toes, waiting for Papa to come take over.
She can count on one hand the number of times Papa has actually cried in front of her. The day he told them that Dad wasn’t just a little tired, that he was pretty sick and his habit of forgetting things might get worse, once you’re big girls, so we have to help him remember when we can. The first time she and Amelia visited Dad in the care home and he had worked himself into tears running around and talking about how he would bring another box of clothes and some books from their bedroom and flowers from the garden and they could make it really nice, make it feel like home. And right now, Papa is crying silently, and she’s thrown back to the day they buried Dad and it had taken Hayden and Jackie and Cliff and Svetlana to get him off the ground, get his knees out of the cemetery dirt. Amelia stops bouncing.
“Papa, seriously. It’s ok, come hold him.” He scrubs at his face and wets his shirtsleeves. Sniffs a few times.
“C’mon, you held both of us,” Irene says. She knows she’s still high as a kite and everything is slightly fuzzy.
“Shane held you first. Both of you. And you were not so little when we…”
Silence for a moment. Irene reaches up and fumbles at her neck until she undoes the clasp of Papa’s chain, holds it out to him looped around her shaking fingers.
“Hold him, Papa.”
“You did so well, Irochka. You did so well.” He squeezes her hand. His breathing evens out as his wedding ring settles against his chest, finally calm enough to pull himself upright. His hands are freckled and there are wrinkles in the corners of his face as he presses baby Shane against his chest.
Irene’s father holds her son and her sister comes to the other side of the bed and takes her hand. Auntie Sveta and Aunt Jackie and Hayden are in the waiting room, and Grammy will surely be standing with her walker in the hallway. And Dad is waiting for her. She thought maybe it would kill her, to be so close to him and not run into his arms. I’ll see you soon, Dad, she thinks, watching Papa walk over to the hospital window and look up over the treeline with their grandson in his arms. Soon.