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The paramedics tell him there’s nothing they can do. Nothing they can do. Sometimes these things just happen, they say in low voices, as if that’s comforting to hear. They’ve done their twenty minutes of CPR and declared asystole and called a deputy to come investigate any foul play, called a medical examiner to declare a time of death. That’s all they can do.
A woman in a navy blue shirt with a little silver badge rattles this information off to him. Her forehead is lined with sweat and she won’t meet his eye. He wonders if she knows who they are, recognized the cottage from that stupid documentary. Nothing they can do.
He’s standing in the upstairs hallway, staring into the overhead light. His vision is starting to blur at the edges. Maybe if he passes out he’ll wake up in bed with a warm arm around his chest and lips pressed softly against his temple. Maybe he crashed the car driving home from school drop-off, maybe he took a bad hit on the rink and something got knocked loose and the doctors at Queensway Carleton will set him straight. Except that school’s out for Christmas vacation, and he retired years ago. There’s nothing he can do.
They’re supposed to have more time, he thinks. They spent so long hanging on to their careers, hanging on to the lifestyle of roadies and power plays and 48-hour trips to Europe for Range Rover campaigns. He was just getting used to being a player development coach, watching most games from the couch and fielding calls from Team USA, telling them he’s waiting until she’s a bit older to start travelling more. Moving the motorcycle into the back of the garage and getting into fights with the other parents at practice every Saturday. Their lives just began, really, and now it’s ending, and there’s nothing anyone can do. He lowers his head and stares through the bedroom door.
His arms ache from the CPR before the ambulance arrived, and his temples are throbbing. The cross around his neck feels heavy, like it’s pulling him through the floor. Someone must have opened a window, he thinks, his shoulders shaking in the December air. A different paramedic tells him the police will be there any minute, that he needs to sit down and take some deep breaths. He’s pulled onto a chair and someone fits an oxygen mask over his face. His skin feels wrong and he tears the mask off, fumbling with the slick plastic.
“Tell them no sirens,” Ilya gasps weakly. “Our daughter is asleep. She’s twelve years old.”
“She’s almost two years old,” Shane says. “Fuck, we aren’t ready for a toddler.”
“You will teach our child to say ‘fuck’? Hollander, who knew you would be such cool dad?”
“Fuck you, I’m being serious.” Shane flips through the paperwork, those sexy glasses perched on the edge of his nose. The lenses have gotten thicker, over the years, but Shane hates the way the contacts feel in his eyes. Ilya’s not complaining.
They’d gotten the call that morning. Emergency placement, indefinite stay. General neglect, we really need a decision by the end of the day. And they probably aren’t ready for a toddler, Ilya can admit. They have a crib and their former guest room is now painted pale yellow with a stack of Mozart CDs on the bookshelf, but the IKEA toddler bed is still in pieces in the attic.
“Oh god, I need to cover all the outlets. And the baby gate, it’s only rated for up to 18 months, I’ll see if Hayd or Jackie know anything–”
“Because Pike is best father now?” Ilya puts the last clean glass away and walks over to Shane’s desk.
His husband’s monologue doesn’t even pause. “We should put the bed in our room, in case she doesn’t want to sleep alone. Or if she wants to be alone? Ilya, shit, they wouldn’t give me any more details than–”
“Grace,” Ilya reads, standing over the pile covering Shane’s keyboard. There’s a little photo of her paper-clipped to the top of a form. A little girl with a little mouth and little blue eyes and a little mess of curly hair pulled into two little pigtails. She looks so small, her gaze fixed on something just above the camera. And all of the sudden Shane’s crying, head falling against the stack of paper.
“Hollander, is ok. Let’s make a list.” He presses a kiss to the nape of Shane’s neck.
They’ve been married long enough for Ilya to know that a list will calm Shane down. They’ve already been through the foster parenting classes– Shane could change a diaper faster than any of the women in the class and took notes with Trauma- Informed Parenting in his neat scrawl at the top of the page– and they’ve read all the books on attachment and responsive parenting and everything else. Well, really, Shane had read them and Ilya had scowled his way through the book jacket summaries. Sue him, there weren’t any Russian translations and the teachers at his hockey academy were more concerned with beating his knuckles raw with his stick after he missed a shot than they were with his ability to read a novel in English. Shane summarizes them for him, though, and he thinks it doesn’t seem so difficult that you would need to write a book about it. Damaged kids just want to be treated like kids, for once.
“It’s ok, Ilya, it’s ok, just…Are we ready? Are we really ready?” Shane stands up and wraps himself around Ilya. His chest is warm and his shoulders are shaking.
They’d been asking that question for a while now. And the answer had been no, not yet, for years. But Shane’s knee snapped for the last time last year, and Ilya’s decided his current contract would be his last contract, and no, not yet became if not now, when? Ilya used to think children would be a liability. A kid would keep him tied to Russia, back in the days when he played through concussions from fights on the ice and broken ribs from his father’s boot. A kid could inherit his bad days, the magnetism that pulled him down on mornings when the world was too bright, that suspended him above the pit of his grief and forced him to look down into it. And when he was fucking Hollander eight weekends a year, well, a kid would have ruined that arrangement quickly. He never counted on having kids. Grace’s little photo is staring back at him.
“I think she is ready for a home.”
Ilya’s staring at the baby section of GAP, trying to think. How big is a two year old? Emergency placement, general neglect. Will she be too small for her age? Malnourished, afraid? He feels nauseous.
He thinks of his childhood. Ilya’s earliest memories are on the ice, listening to his father brag about his former hockey glory and Alexei’s figure-skater girlfriend as he fumbled with a stick. Brief flashes of Mama laughing as the bathroom door rattled in its frame, pretending his father was just playing a game, playing a pirate who wanted to kidnap them and take them to Neverland. Fuzzy recollections of the time Mama had woken him up in the middle of the night, forced him and Alexei into three layers and that itchy hat he always complained about, and shoved them onto the train. Their Polish vacation, she had called it, her left cheek mottled purple and blue. They’d stayed in a hotel for three days in Warsaw, squinting at the street signs, and then his father had showed up in the hotel lobby. The rest of it was a colorless blur.
He looks at the row of tiny patent-leather shoes. If he had grown up in Canada, he might have been in a photo clipped to a form, like little perfect Grace. He was three or four then, during their Polish vacation. Two years old will be too young for her to remember, he hopes.
She’s quiet, and Shane is nervous. They’d been warned she was mostly nonverbal by the social worker who’d brought Gracie’s things, two trash bags stuffed into the trunk of a Honda Civic. She swings her feet on the couch as Shane bounces around nervously, juice from a purple popsicle dripping down her chin. She’s so little, so little.
Shane is hurrying to dispose of the trash bags, putting Grace’s stuff into purple plastic bins. Ilya crouches down next to her.
“That’s my favorite kind, too,” he says. He hopes she can understand his accent. She stares at him, blue eyes wide.
“Hey, grape sort of sounds like Grace, yeah?” he tries again. Her eyes narrow slightly.
“Gracie,” she says, voice impossibly high and quiet.
“Gracie is really pretty name. Or, uh, it is a very pretty name.” She giggles.
“I talk funny, yeah?” And she giggles again. Ilya decides then and there he will do anything for her, kill and die for her, make sure every memory she ever has is perfect if he has to mold it with his bare hands.
They check on her an hour after putting her to bed. She’s asleep in the closet, pressed tight into the corner with her thumb in her mouth. Shane picks her up, holds her against his chest tenderly, and tucks her back under the quilt patterned with smiling zoo animals. She’s so, so, so little.
Ilya falls back asleep and dreams of his mother. He’d slept under her bed, the night after she died. He supposed he had thought, maybe, that he wanted to be there in case she came back. Or maybe he had been hiding from his father, hiding from the sound of another bottle cap hitting the bottom of the sink. He couldn’t sleep in his own bed, either way, but he had finally dozed off under hers and came to hours later, with the rug pattern pressed into his cheek.
He jolts up in his own bed, breathing heavily, and glances at the clock. Shane’s not there and his side of the bed is cold. Ilya throws the covers back and waits for his vision to unblur before he pads down the hall.
They’re both asleep in the closet. Gracie is curled in Shane’s lap, face obscured by the clothes hanging on the bottom rack. Shane’s head is lolled to one side and drool runs down his chin. Ilya sits down lightly in the rocking chair next to the bed, watches his husband and their little girl breathe in unison.
He will give her a good life if it kills him, he thinks. And then he’s asleep, too.
Ilya doesn’t know how to talk to a thirteen-year-old girl. There’s a pair of blood-stained jeans in the outdoor trash can and the bathroom door is locked.
“Pchelka,” he starts, knocking lightly. “Do you want to open door, maybe?”
“No.”
“Gracie, is–“
“Grace, Papa, ugh! Just Grace!” And his eyes are heavy with tears. He knows she’s growing up, that she texts some kid on the boy’s volleyball team Ilya doesn’t care for. Sveta takes her to buy a training bra when she’s in town, and he’s thrown out of the house for the ensuing fashion show. Their girl is growing up, he knows logically. But Shane never called her Grace, always Gracie, and the name feels wrong on his tongue. It’s only been a year and time is moving too fast.
He sold the cottage last month, too painful for him to visit even after the realtors moved all their furniture into a storage unit to stage it. He hasn’t driven past the Centaurs rink, too painful to even think about Shane’s parking spot and Shane’s stash of extra laces and Shane’s bashful grin as he glanced at Ilya from across the locker room. Gracie is their daughter, and Grace is someone else, and it’s too painful for him to even think about it. Everything has been moving too fast, all year, and he’s not ready. It hurts, a physical weight on his chest, a flare in his temples. Right now, he sits against the closed door, slumps, back against the wood, and clutches his chest. There’s nothing he can do.
“Pchelka,” he tries again, in Russian this time. “We can figure it out, yes? Tell me what you need, lubov.”
They’ve spoken a lot of Russian in the house the past few months. Shane’s not there to complain, tell Gracie that she can’t teach the younger kids at the rink Russian curse words and that her grandmother would just be delighted if she would take French this year, instead. Ilya wishes he never taught her Russian in the first place. He’s losing another thing that made them a family of three, another thing that makes it too painful to sit still for too long or stare at the empty dining room chair.
Shane would know what to do, he thinks. Well, no, probably not. Shane would be freaking out right now, running around buying every kind of tampon and calling Yuna and Rose and Sveta and Jackie and whichever Pike daughter was within a hundred-kilometre radius. Ilya would probably end up shooing Shane away with instructions to make something warm for dinner, no salads Hollander. But he knows, as he listens to Gracie’s ragged breathing on the other side of the door, that if Shane were here he would find them reading on opposite sides of the couch later that evening, feet tangled together. Shane’s silence would be good for her, once the tears dried on her face, and it would calm them both down to sit in the quiet together, dad and daughter. Ilya hates the quiet, now.
Gracie didn’t cry at the funeral, didn’t cry at the wake. She and Ilya made a right pair, really, both sitting in the front of the funeral home and staring straight ahead, eyes blinking heavily. Yuna didn’t lift her head through the whole service, and Ilya had heard Hayden shushing Jackie’s sobs in the next row while David gave the eulogy. They had both been numb, eyes unfocused, Ilya’s arm around her shoulder. Gracie mostly fiddled with the braid Ilya had plaited loosely into her hair when she came down the stairs in her black dress because he couldn’t find the words, any words, in any language. They both threw their handfuls of dirt and sat through the dinner–the funeral was so rushed that half of Ilya’s old Boston team stumbled into the restaurant half an hour late, straight from the airport–and drove home in silence. Ilya had put on the TV, and Gracie sat next to him as the programming went from news, to black and white movies, to some European soccer game. And they both stared and stared and stared and waited for tears that didn’t fall.
But now, Gracie finally unlocks the door, standing in front of him in sweatpants and an Edmonton Oilers t-shirt that had been a gag gift from Harris for Shane’s birthday, and all but falls into Ilya’s arms. The tampon box is ripped open on the bathroom counter. And the funeral, and the wake, and Ilya’s arms aching as he broke Shane’s ribs during the CPR, mumbling apologies as snot ran down his face and into his mouth, and waking Gracie up that next morning, telling her he’d already called the school and I need to tell you something, lubov, it all comes pouring out. And they’re crying in a heap on the bathroom floor, Ilya’s arms wrapped around his daughter. She fists the back of his shirt and heaves against his shoulder.
“Papa, I don’t know what to do,” she chokes out, gasping for air.
“I’m sorry, pchelka. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, Papa.” Even with tears running down her face, her hands shaking as she presses her nose into his shoulder and hyperventilates, she thinks of Ilya.
“We’ll make list, ok? Number one on list is we breathe.” And she laughs at that, though it turns into a wet cough. She’s so much like Shane, caring and quiet and introspective in a way Ilya can never hope to be. Loves the ice, loves her lists. They furrow their brow the same way, ever so slightly, when Ilya says catty things about the other girls in Gracie’s figure skating program. Really, their relationship hasn’t changed since Shane crawled out of the closet after that first night and didn’t complain about his knee for once. And they both need Shane’s silence, need his lists and his quiet reassurances and his soft footsteps down the hallway. Their house is too loud and too quiet now, and Ilya can’t do anything about it but hold Gracie and cry.
“Can number two be my jeans, then? I really like them.” She’s still sobbing, but her breathing slows against Ilya’s neck. “I don’t know if it will come out, though.”
“It will, Gracie.”
“You don’t know that, Papa.”
“It will. We will do whatever it takes.”
Gracie’s fourth birthday is Sleeping Beauty themed, and Hayden punches a photographer outside the trampoline park for pointing his lens at the kids. Shane puts his head in his hands and moans that this will be their last birthday party. Ilya thinks they’re off to a great start.
His daughter is shockingly popular at nursery school. Ilya couldn’t be prouder. Pchelka, he’s taken to calling her. Little bee, always buzzing around, being sweet to everyone. Their little girl, raised by a stoic, cocky Russia’s-Ilya-Rozanov and an awkward, quiet Canada’s-Shane-Hollander is friends with every kid on the preschool playground and, as Ilya hears from a mom of two who is most definitely trying to flirt with him, is worth missing a Boy Scout trip to the aquarium for.
“She is very special,” he tells the mom. She swats his shoulder, batting her eyelashes. “I think your sons will kill each other,” he adds. And she skitters away to pull them apart.
Ilya digs out a digital camera and takes a picture of Shane and Gracie, crouched over the cake once everyone is well and truly jumped out and Ilya’s gotten in trouble for throwing the foam blocks, which, sue him, the kids were loving it and they nailed him in the face way harder. Her little face glows in the light of the candles, smiling with all her teeth. Shane, struggling to cut the cake with a plastic knife, catches Ilya’s eye and smiles. His heart wobbles with the weight of watching Gracie push a spoonful of ice cream into Shane’s mouth, smearing it across his nose while Yuna and David sort through the stack of presents on the folding table. He has so much now, and it really hits him all at once in the back room of a trampoline park in suburban Ottawa. He used to have nothing, and now he has so much.
Shane fits himself against the wall next to Ilya, and they watch Gracie flip through Where the Wild Things Are, a group of little girls from her pee-wee figure skating class clumped around her. Their popular, beautiful, kind little girl. Their daughter.
The weird mom ambles back over to Ilya once the kids are converting the sugar into more jumping, fluffing her hair. He wonders if she knows that they’re both Gracie’s fathers, or if she knows that her hair is beyond saving.
“My Liam told me about Gracie’s, er, family situation. I think it’s so beautiful that you foster–”
“She’s our daughter.” And he jerks his head towards Shane, who is trying to gather scraps of wrapping paper into a paper grocery bag. “She’s adopted. Grace Hollander.”
They had signed the papers last week in a stuffy room at the local courthouse. Gracie insisted on wearing all pink for the occasion, though Ilya hadn’t been sure she really understood what the occasion was. She had called them Dad and Papa since she found her voice a few months into the foster placement, even when they told her the story of meeting her, of getting the call that there was a little girl who was looking for a nice new home. ‘The Gracie call,’ Shane called it.
So she was probably too young to understand, but Yuna had wept anyway, hugging Ilya so hard in the parking lot he had thought she might break his already cracked ribs. He still doesn’t know if she was old enough to remember any of it, but she had giggled as David threw her up onto his shoulders and made a gagging sound as Ilya kissed Shane in the parking lot with his hands on his husband’s waist. There would never be another ‘Gracie call,’ Ilya had thought, pressing his forehead against Shane’s. Her nice new home was their home.
“Hollander. Why not Roza-“
“Just Hollander. My husband’s name,” Ilya says. He smiles politely–or maybe impolitely–and walks over to Shane, who has moved on to picking up little plastic utensils. Ilya falls into a rhythm next to him, stacking the paper plates that are sticky with neon frosting.
His daughter will not be a Rozanov, he had decided from the first time the social worker called them about adopting out of foster care. She will be his, be theirs, but she will not be a Rozanov. She will not carry a name that made Ilya stand in the mirror and try to stare himself to being better, playing better, the name that made him press his thumb against his worst bruises to test how much pain he could stand. The name that made him sneak cigarettes behind the rink to calm his nerves when his dad came to games and made him sneak cigarettes behind their church in Moscow before his brother’s wedding, because he hadn’t been inside since Mama’s funeral. She will be a Hollander, Grace Hollander. Their perfect little daughter. She deserves better than Rozanov.
Gracie turns fourteen, and Ilya decides they’re ready to have Christmas again.
Shane died three days after Christmas almost two years ago. The garland was still strung up on their patio railings when the body bag was hauled out. Ilya had taken it down two days later, while Gracie was asleep, threw it all into the plastic bins in the attic without bothering to follow Shane’s ornament sorting system. He never wanted to see any of it again. Gracie came downstairs an hour later to see the Christmas tree sitting next to the bins at the curb. And they hadn’t discussed it past that.
But it’s been two years, and they can have a good Christmas, Ilya decides. He owes it to their little girl.
But Gracie is well and truly a teenager now and doesn’t wake up until it’s almost noon to open gifts. Thank god. Ilya had spent the morning trying to make cookies, and then burning those cookies, and then staving off angry tears as he scraped them into the trash can. In the two years since Shane left them, he just kept discovering new ways he didn’t know how to be a father. He and Shane had really been a pair, a team. Ilya washed her figure skating outfits and Shane remembered to put them in her duffel. Ilya called her from his away games to remind her to return her library books and Shane remembered to pack her extra food for lunch when she had student council after school. A team, a pair, and he couldn’t even make Christmas cookies without Shane setting the oven timer and fishing out the containers of sprinkles buried somewhere deep in the pantry. He’s a broken half, now, and there’s nothing he can do. But Gracie sleeps through the smoke alarm, and she doesn't come downstairs in her snowman sweater until Ilya has gone for a run around the neighborhood and showered the tears off his cheeks.
He buys her a few Russian novels that he thinks she’ll be able to get through, and he has a Yumi Couture skating costume made for her in pale blue. It’s been her favorite color since she left her all-pink phase. It’s Shane’s favorite, too. She throws her arms around him and says thank you, thank you, Papa. He tries to let it be enough. He can get through one good Christmas.
She gives him a tie, made out of scraps of red, white and blue fabric. Made out of Dad’s old jerseys, she explains. Ilya looks away from her into the fireplace. The smoke makes his eyes water.
“Don’t worry, I only used the linings of the jerseys, so they’re not–”
“It’s perfect, pchelka.” His perfect, thoughtful daughter. He didn’t even know she knew how to sew. By fourteen, his father didn’t know him at all. And it makes him swallow thickly and hide his face for a minute, to think that she’s not the little two year old who’d fallen asleep against Shane’s chest on her first night. He hopes, prays to whoever’s up there, that he will always know enough of her.
They putter around quietly in the afternoon, waiting for Yuna and David to arrive. Gracie talks him into Die Hard, even though Shane always says it’s not a Christmas movie. They’re halfway through Die Hard 2 when the doorbell rings.
Sveta shows up first, holding a bottle of sparkling cider. Her little smirk really should have been a warning sign. She jumps up out of the recliner fifteen minutes later and lets Rose in, her heels clacking on the hardwood. She brings Gracie a Tiffany bracelet, and then runs upstairs with her to show her how to make a scarf into a shirt.
“Sveta, what–”
“We all just thought you would want some people around, yeah? For Gracie.” She switches to Russian, even though there’s no one around to overhear them.
“Wait, who is ‘we all’–”
“You don’t have to be sad always, darling,” she cuts in. His eyes burn.
The doorbell rings again. Marleau and Price and Carmichael are standing on his stoop, and he recognizes one of Gracie’s skating teammates’ minivans parking down the street. His phone buzzes with a text from Troy. hey man what’s ur add again? no rzn. He only bought enough food for two people, he thinks distantly. At least there’s vodka in the freezer.
Yuna and David show up dutifully at seven, the only two who were actually invited to Christmas dinner. David’s holding a roast turkey, the pan wrapped in foil, and he looks around warily. Gracie is playing Celine Dion from her laptop, singing with a few of the girls from her figure skating program. Dykstra's son and Cliff's twins are losing miserably to Rose and Harris at billiards. Someone is shouting about Die Hard with a Vengeance not being part of cinematic canon.
“I guess I should have made more, huh?” David grumbles.
Pike and Jackie show up last, bringing their nine million children and a set of guilty expressions. Of course it was that asshole’s idea. And of course he’s late to his own surprise.
“Amber just mentioned that Gracie didn’t seem excited for Christmas,” Jackie says, kissing Ilya on the cheek. And he feels like the worst father alive, letting his daughter be miserable, not knowing his daughter sews, burning her Christmas cookies and crying about it. Forcing other people to come to his house like they’re some kind of charity case. He just wanted to give her a normal Christmas, but he doesn’t even know what that means without Shane. He steps aside to let Pike into his house, snide remark dying in his throat.
As much as he hates to admit it, it had been Pike who finally convinced Ilya they were ready for a child. Three months before Gracie came into their lives, Ilya had been playing in Montreal and Shane coaxed him into dinner with the whole Pike family and their nine million children, and after winning and scoring a hat trick and getting a very sloppy blowjob against Shane’s big glass windows, he had agreed to be civil for a few hours. Amber had climbed into Ilya’s lap, chattering about her first day of grade one, and Shane had given him this look that made all those fostering classes and parenting books and paperwork feel less like an idea and more like a concrete thing, like a feeling they could have for the rest of their lives. So really, Hayden is the reason that Ilya had become a father to their thoughtful, beautiful daughter. And Hayden’s the reason his beautiful girl is asleep, melted into the corner of the couch several hours and her first flute of sparkling cider later, a bow perched on top of her head by a giggling gaggle of Pike children. Not that Pike needs to know that, the asshole.
He sits down next to Gracie and strokes her mop of curly hair. She stirs, wraps her arms around him.
“Merry Christmas, pchelka.”
“Do you think he’d be sad we’re so happy?” she mumbles, scrubbing sleep from her eyes.
Ilya blinks heavily. He doesn’t feel happy at all. Even with all the noise and the laughter and the way his heart swelled, seeing their house full of life for the first time in two years. He looks at the recliner where Shane should sit, which currently holds Rose and Svetlana, squished together and giggling at a photo album they’d found in the cabinet under the television, and he feels so fucking alone. His house is full of people who came all the way to Ottawa on Christmas, who brought him and his daughter food and presents and made sure they weren’t alone on Christmas, and he might as well be in outer space with only his daughter, their daughter, tethering him back to earth. He sees Jackie digging through their pantry, laying out the ingredients for Christmas cookies. And he feels happy, and grateful, and loved, but also like his heart is frozen in his chest, like he’s not happy at all and he never will be again.
But Gracie’s happy, so happy, snuggled against him in her Christmas sweater. He hasn’t heard her say that in two years.
“No, pchelka. He wants you to be happy, always.”
“I miss him, Papa.”
“That does not mean we can’t be happy.” And he doesn’t even believe the words as they leave his mouth. But he will do anything to make their daughter smile. He’d promised fourteen years ago he would kill and die for her. He can lie for her, too.
“Merry Christmas, Papa.”
Their little girl is just starting to understand that the whole world knows Dad and Papa when Ilya plays in his last hockey game, the cup final against Detroit. To be fair, she hasn’t left Canada yet, and the intricacies of fame are probably lost on a five-year-old. But she understands now that the guys who stop her fathers on the street are not their friends, and she heard Ilya yelling on the phone that he would do all sorts of bad things if they showed his daughter on the arena screens. Shane had to pull her into the living room and tell her that Papa was just a little upset and not to repeat any of those words, please Gracie.
She’s been skating for about a year now, and she’s pretty good. Well, neither of them really know what it means to be good at figure skating at five years old, but Shane seems to think she’s better than the other girls.
Ilya’s not super hot on his daughter skating, to be honest. He started playing hockey around the same age, and he still has a scar on his shoulder from the first time he missed three shots in the row and his coach taught him what happens to players who are too sloppy with their backhand. Hockey was his way out of Russia, his way out of his mother’s missing presence and his father’s anger, kicked up like dust when he tiptoed down the hall to sneak out with Svetlana. The ice was an escape. He never wanted his daughter to need an escape. Two years in her previous home, without ‘the Gracie call’, with fuzzy details and general neglect and emergency placement, that was enough for Ilya. He would never let her get any more scars, if there was anything he could do to help it. But she likes the ice, and she begs to go with Papa to morning skate and watch him and his friends practice, puts her little arms above her head and jumps and spins next to the swings at their local playground. So Ilya just promises himself if it ever stops being fun for her, she will stop.
It’s the least nervous he’s ever been for a Game 5. They could win it all and the stadium is absolutely roaring–Shane bought four pairs of little hot pink earplugs for Gracie for the occasion–but once he’s out on the ice, yelling instructions down the bench and gesturing wildly at Wiebe and fiddling with the C stitched into his jersey, he feels a pure calm wash over him, as blinding as the arena lights. His little girl is here, watching her Papa do his job, and he feels giddy, really. He used to have nothing, and now he has so much. He’s lost a lot of hockey games and won even more, and it doesn’t even really matter to him, anymore. He doesn’t need hockey to escape anything, anymore. He can just have fun. He lines up on the face-off.
He gets knocked flat by Detroit’s idiot rookie right winger in the second period, battling for the puck behind the goal. His wrist twists uncomfortably and he smacks his head hard enough on the ice to see stars, but he pops right back up anyway. Spins around until he sees Gracie looking at him with her eyes wide. Her little arms are drowning in the smallest Centaurs jersey Ilya could find. Shane is cringing, trying to play it cool as he scans Ilya for blood or vomit or concussion symptoms, even with the glass between them.
He winks at Gracie. She laughs and kicks her feet, her little ruby-red Mary Janes, and all the pain in his body is gone. And then he gestures at Shane while he pulls off his gloves, and his husband has the good sense to shove a coloring book in front of her before she can watch Papa beat the shit out of Detroit’s idiot rookie right winger.
Ilya wins his last Stanley Cup, and he doesn't even get drunk about it. He mostly feels relieved, relieved that his contract is over and he can go home with his little girl and never have to leave her for a morning skate ever again, never having to wave his daughter and husband goodnight through the television broadcast again. He’s gotten quite a reputation, these days, for switching to Russian in the post-game interviews. A secret message for my little bee. I love you, go to bed and don’t worry if Dad doesn’t check for monsters, I left traps under the bed yesterday. He would probably get a lot more shit about it if he didn’t also have a reputation for breaking noses.
Ilya wakes up in his own bed, which is a first for him after winning a Cup. He hears giggling downstairs, along with Shane’s hearty laugh. He would never play, never coach, never leave the house again if it meant he gets to wake up to that sound for the rest of his life.
HAPPY RETIREMENT! There’s a banner strung across the living room. Shane and Gracie are hiding behind the couch, though her giggles give them away. He plays along anyway, looking under the dining room table and in the fridge, muttering Gracie, Gracie, where did my little bumblebee go?
“Papa!” She screams, springing out from her hiding place, wraps herself around his leg. Shane’s flushed red, holding a plate of pancakes. Ilya’s heart could just explode with how lucky he is. A safe home where Gracie only hides under the couch to surprise him, where she can shout and not be afraid that someone will shout back, where there’s hot food for breakfast no matter what.
He scoops her up and throws her into the air. She throws her head back and laughs. Shane fumbles with the maple syrup cap.
“Thank you, pchelka. And Shane, thank you.” He kisses his husband on the cheek, plopping Gracie into her chair.
“Who’s Shane?” Gracie asks, looking up at him with those little wide eyes. He’s never been so happy in his life. Maybe hockey wasn’t what saved him after all. Maybe he knew that hockey would get him to this, somewhere deep in his chest. Whatever brought him here, fate or hockey or Mama or Yuna Hollander poring over his first Centaurs contact, he looks out the dining room window, stares up into the cloudless sky and says thank you. Thank you for bringing me the only family I’ll ever need.
“Ilya, you know I wouldn’t be saying anything if I thought it was too soon. But Gracie’s eighteen now, and you’re gonna be an empty nester soon–”
He slams his palm on the table. The wine glasses rattle and Svetlana gives him a harsh look.
“Ilushka, behave! I’ll drop it, fine.”
Sveta comes up to visit every few months, when she’s not too busy with her business-of-the-month or her boyfriend-of-the-week. She knows he’s been miserable, that he’s been throwing himself into his new job coaching with McGill despite the killer commute and that he and Gracie have been fighting about whether she’ll keep skating in college. She calls him most days, but he can never think of anything to say.
Right now, she’s trying to set him up with a guy Rose knows through her latest indie flick. He’s not sure when his best friend and his husband’s ex-girlfriend started conspiring against them. It was really a mistake to let them sit next to each other at the NHL award ceremony all those years ago.
“I’m not interested in men,” he says, letting his fork clang against the plate. The restaurant is too expensive for him to be acting like this, but he doesn’t care.
He’s given up on being happy. Gracie is happy, or at least she seems it, most of the time. That’s all he can ask for. She’s looking forward to Penn, so he’s looking forward to Penn and definitely doesn’t feel his heart fracture every time he thinks about living in their empty home, just him and Shane’s favorite recliner and Shane’s wallet, stuffed with a polaroid of Ilya and Gracie at the park that Ilya couldn’t bear to remove, and Shane’s navy suit still hanging in a dress bag in their closet, and the boxes of Christmas ornaments he’d thrown into the attic three days after Shane left him, six years ago now. Maybe he needs to move.
“You’re not interested in men, all the sudden? You really think I didn’t know about Sasha–”
“Sveta, please.” He grips his wine glass.
Six years has barely even started to heal the wound. He’s not even interested in trying to be happy, most days. Just wants Gracie to have the best life he can manage, and as she gets older it means letting her go more and more. He has enough space in his life to be happy, to find something happy, if he wanted it.
“It could be good for you, to have something good in your life.”
“The guys are playing a good season,” he replied petulantly. He likes coaching college kids. They’re young and brave and stupid, like he was at eighteen. He makes all of them do their assignments before they’re allowed off the bench, brings in a nurse from the health centre to show them pictures of lungs before and after smoking. He wants them to have options other than hockey, other ways to escape. He turns a blind eye when one of their defensemen, a wide-eyed sophomore, skips three days of practice to be in Guys and Dolls. He knows two of the freshmen had sex in the team bus on the way to play New Brunswick. He turns a blind eye to that, too.
“You know what I mean, Ilya.”
“I don’t want something like that.” He’s raising his voice again and the table next to them stops their conversation to listen in. “There’s no one else.”
“Ilushka, you don’t know that–”
“There’s no one else.” Shane was everyone. Shane was the only one. He’s known that pretty much since the day they met, thinks about it every morning when he wakes up, rolls over to the empty sheets, and sleepily thinks that Shane and Gracie are probably downstairs making breakfast together. Thinks about it every night when he hears the neighbors pull into their driveway and thinks that Shane and Gracie must have gone to a movie or something after their figure skating practice. There’s nothing anyone can do. “Sveta, there’s no one else.”
Six years isn’t even close to enough to heal the scar, heal the gash left when that paramedic shoved the oxygen mask against his nose and told him there’s nothing we can do. He’ll never be ready to say goodbye to Shane. He’s still alive in Ilya’s dreams, still alive when he’s half-asleep, still alive when he takes that first step into the rink and sees Shane’s smile behind the glass. Still alive in Gracie’s little laugh, in Gracie’s eyes as she sets her shoulders on the ice, waits for her program music to begin.
Sveta looks into his glassy eyes and flags down a waiter, asks for the check even though they haven’t even eaten. People keep telling him about the five stages of grief. He doesn’t think he’s ever even moved on from the denial part, most days. Sure, he feels depressed and angry, almost all the time. But he’s always looking for Shane, reaching for Shane, looking at their daughter and thinking about their perfect family of three. Everytime the phone rings it could be ‘the Gracie call.’ Everytime the doorbell rings, it could be Shane pressing it with his hip because he can’t reach his keys, a grocery bag in each arm. The nursery is a guest bedroom now, but Shane could very well be asleep in the closet with their little girl in his arms.
He’d driven them, but Sveta deposits him into the passenger seat and turns on the car. He clicks his seatbelt, eyes still unfocused. There will never be anyone else. Ilya can’t believe he spent years trying to convince himself there could be someone else, that he could fuck any guy in Boston and pretend he wasn’t closing his eyes to think of Shane, Shane, Shane.
Sveta asks him for his house keys. He wonders if it would hurt as much if he had gotten to say goodbye. If it hadn’t just been a random Tuesday in December, three days after Christmas, a night like any other night. If he had held Shane’s hand, told him it was ok to let go, said I love you one more time. He wouldn’t have been able to do it, he thinks. He would never have been able to tell Shane it was ok to go. It wasn’t ok. It isn’t ok.
He hands her a pack of cigarettes instead of his keys, and gets the earful of his life for taking up smoking again. He’s not listening, though. Six years isn’t long enough. He thinks he'll probably die waiting for the wound to heal.
He wakes up the next morning and hears Shane and Gracie giggling downstairs. Turns out, it’s just Gracie, returned early from a sleepover, frying eggs and waving an oven mitt frantically as they start smoking.
“Thought you were staying over at Mitchell’s,” he says.
“Auntie called me, said you weren’t feeling well.” She cuts the heat, rinses her hands, and flicks Ilya with the water. He never wants her to stop her life for him, for his unhappiness. The only thing that keeps him going is knowing that he will wake up every day and mold her the best life he can.
“You should think about it, though. The guy.” She gestures at her phone. “I saw a picture, and…”
There aren’t enough years left in Ilya’s life to make the wound heal.
“I’ll think about it, pchelka.”
It’s any other Tuesday in December, and Gracie is mad at Shane for saying twelve-year-olds can’t go to Quebec City alone.
“I wouldn’t be alone, Dad,” she whines, spinning around on a stool next to the kitchen island. Shane’s shredding cheese more aggressively than usual. “Some of the girls in the program will come, and Mitchell–”
“Who’s Mitchell?” Shane grates even faster, somehow.
“Plays hockey at the same rink. Fourteen,” Ilya cuts in.
“Fourteen?!” Gracie shoots Ilya an angry look.
“Barely fourteen, Dad. He’s in my grade!” Shane is still looking at her with his eyebrows knit together. She huffs and stomps upstairs.
Preteen girls are difficult, crazy, hormonal, everyone warns him. Ilya doesn’t really think it’s that complicated. He was crazy and difficult once, and he was a lot older than Gracie, and with a lot less hormones. He gives her twenty minutes to sulk, and then he knocks on her door.
She’s buried in headphones and homework, and she ignores him as he cracks open the door and sits on the edge of her bed.
“I broke my arm jumping off a pier when I was twelve,” he says in Russian. They always switch to Russian when they don’t want Shane to understand, when they want to plan a late-night trip to McDonalds or sneak away to skate at the cottage when the lake freezes over. It usually makes her laugh, and even now she cracks a smile and turns to look at him.
“That’s really dumb, Papa.”
“Well, I was really dumb. So you can see why Dad would be worried. There’s lots of water in Quebec for you to drown in.” And she actually laughs at this, and his heart swells.
“Time for dinner, pchelka. And I will talk to dad about your trip, tonight.” He holds out his pinky to her, a promise. He has every intention of keeping it. He doesn't know the Quebec trip will be forgotten by tomorrow.
It’s any other Tuesday in December, as far as any of them know, and Ilya looks at his husband and his daughter chatting about something they read on a fantasy hockey Reddit thread across the dining room table, and realizes that his twelve-year-old self gets to eat family dinner every night. And his daughter, his twelve-year-old perfect, beautiful, smart daughter eats family dinner every night, and it’s the most normal thing in the world for her. He hopes desperately that she can’t remember a time before ‘the Gracie call.’ He wants to remember this, wants her to remember this, and forget about all the scars that came before.
She’s still pouting, though, so she stomps back upstairs without doing the dishes. Ilya lets it go and opens the dishwasher.
“She’s a good kid,” Ilya says. Shane is draped across the couch, looking nervous.
“You think you want another one?” Shane asks, eyes trained on the pop tab of his ginger-ale can. Ilya wonders how long he’s been sitting on that one.
Ilya would love to have another girl, he thinks. Sons, sure, but daughters…He never thought of having girls before Gracie. He was one of two boys, his father was one of three boys, his grandfather one of five. There weren’t any girls in the Rozanov line, just anger and waiting for his father’s boot to connect with his cheekbone.
“Maybe we give the next one good Russian name, hmmm? Dmitri, or Vlad.”
“You’re such a good dad,” Shane says. Ilya’s face flushes. He walks over and slots himself into Shane’s arms on the couch. They’re both older, now, and Shane has streaks of grey peppering his hair–which Ilya can’t think too hard about, because it turns him on beyond belief–and they’ve both lost some muscle tone, replaced it with fat from birthday cake and Halloween candy, but they still fit together like they’re seventeen and pressed against a hotel room door.
“You’re a great dad. 10/10 would fuck again.”
“Fuck yourself, you’re not getting me pregnant.”
“Have been trying for many years, Hollander.”
Shane cranes his neck to kiss Ilya’s neck. “I’m serious, Ilya. We’re too old for a baby, but there are lots of teenagers who need homes.” And he thinks about how desperately he would have wanted ‘the Gracie call’ as an underweight twelve year old, bruises on his back and his next cigarette on his mind. They have such a quiet home, now, such a peaceful home.
“It would be nice. I like having family with you.”
“We can talk about it in the morning," Shane says, kissing the corner of Ilya’s mouth and scrambling up from the couch. “And we can take the Christmas decorations down tomorrow.”
Ilya never thinks about more kids, after that night in December. Not once.
He’s glad Gracie made it to twenty before she really gets her bell rung on the ice. She’s been home for a week on concussion protocol, her leg in a neon pink cast covered in signatures. Ilya took the week off from work, McGill’s winning season be damned.
His heart had nearly stopped, watching her fall. His heart snapped him back to watching Shane collapse all those years ago, watching them load him onto the spinal board while the ref pushed him back, and just as quickly he felt like he was breaking Shane’s ribs from the CPR, trying not to cry out and wake Gracie as he begs him to please, Shane, please, breathe for me, lubov, or maybe he was stumbling out of the house as the ambulance pulled away, hearing Svetlana’s distant voice through his phone, asking him why he was calling so late, as it fell from his hand.
He had rattled off her entire medical history in the ambulance. Blood type, previous surgeries, eyeglass prescription. The paramedics seemed too nervous to tell him to shut up but he just couldn’t stop himself. He would not be responsible for another scar on his beautiful daughter if he could help it. And he had all but collapsed in the hospital room when she came to, loopy and smiling, and the doctors said that the surgery was successful, that she would be able to skate again next year if she kept up a rehab regimen.
“Papa, Dad says you need to sleep,” she had slurred. And then she started giggling and simultaneously crying about her fantasy hockey team coming in last in her league this year. Ilya gripped her hand and laughed until he had started crying, too.
But now, she’s getting stir crazy in the house, and she won’t stop complaining about missing her lectures at Penn. He’s secretly glad she agreed to stay another week, so he can keep an eye on her. He misses her so profoundly, but he’ll never hold her back. She deserves every happiness, even if that happiness is in Pennsylvania.
He brings her a plate of breakfast in one hand, a hamper of clean laundry tucked under his other arm. She’s got a mess of papers spread out around her, glasses perched on her nose. She looks so much like Shane, biology be damned. They were always meant to be father and daughter, he thinks, his Gracie and his Shane.
“Oh, thanks Papa.”
“Eat a lot, pchelka, you need to heal.” He starts to fold the laundry.
“Ugh, you sound like Dad.” And he wonders if Gracie still finds herself in the denial stage sometimes, if she still expects to see Shane waiting in the car when she leaves her skating practices, still looks for his contact to call him when she gets her exam results. He remembers when she was just a little mess of curly hair on photo paper clipped to her forms, praying that two years old was young enough to forget. Now all he wants is for her to remember, to remember her dad, to remember the birthday parties and the vacations and the night light Shane turned on after she went to bed on that Tuesday night, three days after Christmas, because even though it had been ten years since she had slept in the bedroom closet, he didn’t want her to be afraid to come down the hall to their room.
“You slept in the closet, your first night here,” Ilya says. He’s not really sure why.
“Did I?” she asks idly, pulling the laundry hamper towards her and wincing as her leg shifts slightly. She pairs two socks together and throws them into the pile.
“You don’t remember?”
Gracie thinks for a moment, fiddling with the drawstring of a sweatshirt. “I think I was too young.” You’re still too young, Ilya thinks. You’re so young, and so much has been taken from you, and I promised you I would give you a good life if I had to mold it with my bare hands. The world was too big, and I couldn’t hold it all in place for you. I should have done more. I did everything I could.
“Papa, what is it?” Something wet runs down his cheek, drips off his chin.
“Pchelka–”
He swallows, hard. Gracie gapes at him for a moment, then pushes the papers and the laundry off the bed and gestures for him to sit down. He hugs her, as tight as he can without moving her leg that’s propped up on a throw pillow, and strokes her hair. He can't breathe, all the sudden.
“I’m so sorry Gracie. I’m so sorry," he gasps.
“Don’t be sorry, Papa. Whatever it is–”
“I’m sorry Shane is dead.” And they never say it like that, always say that Shane is gone or passed on or, when Gracie doesn’t feel like getting into it with nosy moms at the rink, that her other father isn't in the picture.
“Papa, there was nothing you could do.”
“You slept in that closet with him, your first night. I wish you could remember, pchelka. I came in here to find him and you were asleep in his lap. We didn’t know if you would trust us enough to sleep. You seemed very scared. But you fell right asleep with him.”
“I was too young to still remember, Papa.” And his whole face is wet now as he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. It’s been eight years, and the wound will probably never heal.
“What year did we have the princess party?” she adds.
“Hmm?” Ilya’s definitely not crying, but he sniffles anyway.
“The princess party. I think that’s one of the first things I remember. ‘Cause you guys had just adopted me. We went to the courthouse, and then at the party I had this big pink dress, and I kept telling people a judge said Dad and Papa were the best Papa and Dada in Ottawa. I think I thought they were giving you guys an award for being my parents. I was so happy.” She chuckles.
Ilya’s chest trembles as he looks at their beautiful perfect daughter. It’s not fair that she only got ten years with Shane, that she remembers even less. But that party…he had gone from having nothing to having everything. And his everything, his Gracie, is still whole and warm and holding him close in the too-small guest bed. He kisses her forehead.
"Sorry I'm too young to remember the closet, Papa."
“Pchelka, you will always be too young to me.”