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Yuna Hollander is sitting alone in the smoking area of the Rinkside with her head in her hands when Ilya slides into the seat across from her with all the grace of a lumbering idiot who learned how to walk yesterday, and he gives it exactly three minutes of silence while she pulls herself together and then fails completely at nonchalance once she meets his eyes and looks like the mouth of an open wound instead of a woman. Her eyes are red and bloodshot and she’s making the exact same face Shane makes when he’s in pain and trying desperately to hide it.
Tactless and unable to help it, Ilya swallows the litany of one-liners he’d thought of opening the conversation with, like don’t feel sorry for me about what I said at grief support group today, I am a dick and I mostly deserve what’s coming to me and does Shane Hollander know you smoke, but instead, he does a double-take, blinking slowly at her like he can’t quite believe it, and he asks, “Are you drunk?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, definitely a little drunk. There’s three drinks lined up in front of her—a truly repulsive pint of the shit that the Rinkside bartenders consider a decent IPA, the paint stripper that the Rinkside bartenders consider decent vodka and a tall glass of ice water—and the only thing untouched at the table is the water. It’s 11 PM on a Friday night, and Yuna Hollander is getting drunk off of the terrible alcohol at the terrible sports bar she and her husband met in nearly thirty years ago instead of going home or thinking about Montreal. “I’m not drunk. I’m just drinking. Where did you even come from?”
“Mom,” Shane says, even as he knows that she won’t hear, even as he knows that he and his mom are doomed forever to run parallel to each other from now on, never to intersect. “Be nice.”
“I like the Rinkside,” Ilya says, forcing himself to look at Yuna again. He’d like the Rinkside more if he was inside and the cold wasn’t threatening to swallow him whole, but whatever. He can read a hint from the universe when he gets it, and if he’s meant to spend the rest of this night across from this table with Yuna Hollander talking about his dead dad and her dead son, then so be it. “It’s charming. I used to come here when I was twenty to get shit-faced on two-dollar alcohol specials and start fights about how much the Centaurs suck.”
Almost like it’s instinctive, the corner of Yuna’s mouth twitches. “David and I used to come here once a year. Maybe we’ve seen each other before.”
Ilya thinks about being very young at this terrible bar with Harris and saying, you know, Shane Hollander isn’t even all that, after three rounds on a dare and nearly getting punched in the face for it. “I’d hope not.”
“No?”
“Not even a little.” His eyes flicker to Yuna’s left, where Shane Hollander’s ghost is sitting next to her with his head in his hands, trying to breathe through a panic attack he isn’t having, colored blue in the moonlight and as beautiful as he was the first time Ilya saw him, standing by the railing of a hotel rooftop with eyes like stillwater. “I think it’s nice that we met each other as grown-ups,” he says, clumsily, and Yuna’s eyes soften like he’s said something strangely sweet. His ears burn. “We wouldn’t be friends otherwise, yes?”
Shane exhales, shakily. His eyes are screwed shut, but some of the tension drains out of his shoulders like he’s allowing himself to forget the burden of being so close to his mom and yet so far from her and he’s just letting himself be, for a moment. Over the sound of Yuna’s breathless laughter, he says, “This is not helping those affair allegations, you dick.”
Ilya watches the shape of his ghost hands in the moonlight. The joints of his fingers and his wide-set, neatly trimmed nails. The dusting of hair on the back of his knuckles, the open width of his palms. In 2010, while Ilya was at the booth at the Rinkside with two of Harris’ sisters trying not to laugh at Harris for having a very obvious crush on Shane Hollander, these hands had scored a goal against the Nomads that had nearly knocked the air out of Ilya’s lungs. Ilya’s first ever memory of Shane Hollander comes stitched together with the static on that ancient box of a TV, watching the camera feed turn to the force of his victorious grin seconds before his teammates crashed into him to celebrate his tenth goal in an NHL game. Ilya hadn’t wanted to play hockey in years at that point, the open mouth of this wound calcified under layers and layers indifference and resentment, but watching Shane skate on the TV—fast like the blades of his skates were an extension of the soles of his feet, maneuvering the puck like it was attached to his stick, precise, powerful, strong—had made the skin of his palms itch, just like it would when he played and the score was tied and he didn’t want to go into overtime and he just wanted to win. Ilya had always liked the look of a pretty boy, and he remembered thinking that Shane Hollander was incredibly pretty, burning with adrenaline and chewing on his mouthguard as he came off the high of scoring.
“Charmer,” Yuna says, affectionately, and Ilya shrugs.
“I live to please,” he says, and smiles when Yuna does.
The quiet that follows this is comfortable and a little cold, like most of the quiet with Yuna is. Shane had often described his mother as someone who was hard to get through to, a little too no-nonsense and a little too tough, but sometimes, when she sat with Ilya like this and their shared grief came home to the spaces between their shoulders, he remembered the bodies of hermit crabs and how soft they could be underneath their exoskeleton. They listen to the wind together, heavy with the promise of snowfall, and then, out of the blue, Yuna asks, “What was your mother like?”
In Ilya’s earliest memory of his mama, he’s just a few months shy of turning twelve. The canine tooth in his upper jaw began to give him trouble, his mother had sat him down at the kitchen table with a roll of gauze and a small tray of ice. It’s better than waiting for someone to slam your face into the boards and lose it that way, she said, which was what had happened to the last three teeth he had to lose. He didn’t mind losing his loose tooth to hockey and all the fights and scuffles he instigated because he didn’t like losing at hockey, but it was a cold, miserable morning and his mother’s hair was church-bell brass against the beige of the house’s uninspiring paint job and he loved her, so he said, if you say so, mama, and let her fuss.
The tips of her fingernails were a deep, cherry red as she pressed some of the ice to the gum over his aching tooth. It hurt only for a second, but she still smiled when he tried to school his face into something more neutral, and then she pinched his cheek like he was still six years old and said, you’re okay, my baby, in a tone so warm and full of love that it landed right in the softest part of his bones. He watched her pack some gauze around her thumb and her index finger. Let her tilt his head back, gently brush the curls out of his eyes. And then she pinched his offensive, loose tooth between the gauze, murmured, this might hurt, and twisted it cleanly out of its own root. The pain—he was no stranger to it, had braced himself for it, but it had still shocked him to find that it didn’t bite at him as much as it did the last few times. She packed the space the tooth left behind with more gauze and he bit down on it until his jaw ached. It was nice to share a quiet morning with his mother, letting her take care of him as if he was a toothless cub with no angry man in his house.
How does he begin to tell Yuna that his mama had been so young and so wonderful and so giving when it came to love? How does he tell her that his tooth didn’t grow back in time for her funeral, that he’d sat through the service with an ache in his mouth, filled with cold fear knowing that she would never sit him down in the kitchen and run her hands through his church-bell brass hair and help him lose another tooth, gentle like the wind? How does he tell her that she used to call him her firefly because they were her favorite bugs? That she twisted his tooth gently like she was worried that the pinch of pain would linger and build a home in his mouth forever? That for all her pain and all her hurt, the only thing that had touched him through her hands was love?
“Ilya,” Shane says, and the moment cracks, eggshell-fragile. Ilya’s eyes flicker to him, and—he’s making this awful face, equal parts sympathetic and devastated. The ache comes back home to Ilya’s heart. An old friend. Sometimes, he wonders how Shane can miss this awful, terrible want that Ilya feels for him now, after knowing him beyond the TV screen. How he can feel it buried in his chest, somewhere quiet in the cavity of their shared existence and not name it hunger. “You don’t have to tell her.”
“She was nice,” Ilya says, in what might be the greatest understatement of the century. He looks away from Shane and looks at Yuna instead, because it makes him sick to talk about this, but he wants Yuna to know, and he wants Shane to know too. He wants Yuna and Shane to know that he still loves his mama over a decade after she died, and that his grief is superimposed over all this love he has for her, that he survives it, everyday. That it could be the same for Yuna too, even if Shane never came back. Yuna’s eyes flicker in surprise, like she hadn’t expected him to answer, and then her eyes grow warm, just like Shane’s does when Ilya tells him something about himself that he wants to hold onto for a while. “She laughed a lot and she was beautiful. She liked strawberries. I look like her, I think. When I complained about not winning a game, she’d always say that I was a sore loser.” He’s been walking around with a stifled chest for so long that the pressure that builds in his throat nearly claws at him. “I think she would have liked Ottawa. I hope she would’ve liked Ottawa.”
Yuna, much like her terrible, perceptive son, sees through him. She looks at him with Shane’s eyes, suddenly very sober, and says, “Any mom would be happy to see their son live a good life, Ilya.”
“Even if it’s in Ottawa,” Ilya concedes. The cold is biting at him, and Shane is still looking at him with that awful look on his face, and he has never said this out loud because he had never realized that it needed to be said, and he says, “I used to be so mad that she was gone sometimes, but it’s okay. I forgive her. I would forgive her every time.”
Something in Yuna’s eyes fractures, like a bird bone under the sole of a shoe. “Your mother is very lucky, then.”
“Yuna,” Ilya says, and he tries very hard to not look at Shane, to not see the unforgiving, enduring hurt in his eyes when he looks over at his mother, so far away from her that he can’t come home, even though he desperately wants to. He looks at Yuna instead, and somehow, even as he braces against the ice-cold concrete and lets the sound of the whistling wind settle in his ears and has been looking at her for a long time now, he finds himself entirely unprepared for familiar Yuna’s eyes will be when she turns her gaze from the distant streetlamp to him. “You’re very lucky too.”
Yuna doesn’t say anything to him for a while. She twists her fingers together on the table and all Ilya sees is the echo of Shane in the action. The ghost of the joints of his fingers and his wide-set, neatly trimmed nails. Then, she says, “I was so hard on him sometimes. I wish I had been nicer.”
Shane stills. “Mom.”
“I just—Shane never wanted anything like he wanted hockey,” she says, and the force of her grief nearly chokes Ilya. Turns him inside out, rattles his bones. “I thought I was being kind, you know? By reminding him of what the stakes were all the time. But he didn’t need me to remind him of what the fucking stakes were. He needed his mom to tell him that he was fine just the way he was and that it was okay that he was gay and that he had nothing to apologize for. And I was never there, was I?”
“Mom.” Scraped raw, like an open wound. Ilya’s hand twitches, and—isn’t it ridiculous? That he wants to cradle Shane’s face in his palm, hold him close so he’ll stop hurting? That he wants, even now? “Mom, you’re wrong. Ilya, tell her she’s wrong.”
“He should’ve been able to come to me, even if there was no one else. I did everything wrong. I did everything wrong, and now he’s never going to come home. He’s never going to walk back into our house and ask if there’s anything he can do to help, he’s never going to forget his scarf on the coat hanger so he’ll have an excuse to drive down on the weekends, he’s never going to think he’s being slick by ask if we have plans of getting a dog now that he’s moved out, he’s just—he’s just never coming back.” They look the same, Ilya realizes, when they’re hurting and they don’t want to be. “When I go see him the day after tomorrow, it’ll be my first time visiting him in weeks. I don’t think I’ll ever earn it, but I do wish I’d gotten to ask him to forgive me.”
“Mom,” Shane repeats, choked up and hurting and overwhelmed. Underneath all the turmoil and the agony crawling up his throat is a feeling that Ilya thinks he would know in the dark if he was blind and deaf and unable to make a sound. He has known this everyday since he was twelve and he walked into house in Moscow after hockey practice and found his mother in her bedroom with a bottle of pills in her hand and vomit on the corner of her mouth, has known this everyday since then, when he had to sit with The Colonel at the dinner table and play happy family for whichever audience they had to cater to, has known this everyday since he got on the flight to Canada and wanted nothing more than to be ten years old and chasing butterflies with Svetlana in the botanical gardens again. It’s the thing that makes his chest hurt and his stomach squeeze and everything in him run bloodless, the thing that simply, at its bones, just boils down to this: I want my mom. I want my mom. I want my fucking mom. “Mom, I forgive you. Even if you never come to visit me again, I’ll still forgive you.”
Ilya burns. “If he loves you like you love him,” and he does—he does love you, like birds love flight and the sun loves everything it touches, “then I think he would.”
Yuna closes her eyes, and breathes. “I hope he will. God, I hope he will.”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world after love,” Ilya says. He remembers wanting to crawl into his mama’s casket with her at her funeral. Remembers falling asleep on her bed on her first death anniversary, even when he was so unspeakably angry at her for making him be without her by his side. “To forgive your mom. It’s easy.”
“It’s easy,” Yuna repeats, and then, for a while, they don’t talk again. All that’s left in the quiet is the sound of Shane’s shaky breaths, like he’s trying to remember that he’s real, too.
In the end, Yuna calls David to come pick her up, and Ilya keeps her company until David’s horrible, boring car pulls up into the parking space and he jogs across the concrete to come see them. He isn’t wearing a hat and his ears are red, and he breaks into a tentative, sweet smile when he sees Yuna, and something in Ilya twists by the handful. Yuna stumbles to her feet, and there’s little dignity in how she all but throws herself into David’s arms, burying her face into his shirt and squeezing until her knuckles run white, but he catches her all the same. Ilya watches them hold each other without a shred of awkwardness, and he thinks that fucking marriage counseling must be working for them. The next time he sees them, maybe Yuna will be wearing her ring. That’ll be nice. Shane’s parents really love each other, in that once-in-a-lifetime, forever kind of way.
Ilya hands Yuna her purse when she lets go of David, and they do introductions. David, this is Ilya from St. Nicholas, Ilya, this is my husband, David, Yuna says. Ilya tries to seem like a whole person and says, nice to meet you, sir, because he knows North Americans love their manners and he wants Shane’s dad to like him, but David snorts and says, just call me David, Ilya. They talk briefly about nothing—the Rinkside, the fucking weather, Yuna’s drinks —and Ilya tries very hard to not notice the fact that Shane isn’t blinking where he’s standing, like he wants to drink in every detail of his mom and dad together and immortalize it in his head so he never forgets. David looks like Shane when he smiles. Ilya’s heart is in a vice. The force of it is paralyzing.
Before she leaves, Yuna hovers for a second, and then very carefully, giving him time to pull away, she pulls him into a hug. It has been a terribly long time since someone hugged Ilya just for the sake of hugging Ilya, and he melts into it, like an idiot. Like a dog.
“Thank you,” Yuna murmurs, and Ilya knows that this is why Shane is the way he is, so full of light and love, “for telling me about your mom. And everything else.”
“Yes,” Ilya says. He’s burning on the inside, and he can’t begin to parse out why it is that he feels like he’s going to cry. This is goodbye, he knows. Maybe he’ll never see Yuna again, or maybe he’ll never see this version of Yuna again—the one that is still raw with grief, who still misses Shane like a limb, who survives this everyday. The next time Ilya sees her, Shane will be gone, somewhere neither of them can follow. “Take care, Yuna.”
“You too, Ilya,” she says. Shane comes up to stand next to him, and they watch her interlace her fingers with David as they walk back to his car together.
Ilya’s hands are shaking, and before Shane can say anything, he wordlessly turns to walk home. He hadn’t wanted a beer anyway, and he’s exhausted. He could do twelve minutes on the road, and then he wants to be in his bed, tucked under the blankets and pretending nothing had happened. He hadn’t wanted to talk about his mom at grief support today—it had just come out. I don’t miss my father. I miss my mother, but I don’t miss my father at all. He had wanted to tell Yuna and Shane, but that didn’t make it easy. He’s tired. He wants to put his head down and remember how to breathe. Shane follows him, because he can’t go anywhere else and because he’s weird about leaving Ilya alone and because they’re a little bit in love with each other in a bad way, and they make it all the way to the front door of Ilya’s house until Ilya can’t go on anymore. He folds himself unceremoniously on the top stair leading to his front door, and Shane follows.
They don’t talk, but eventually, Shane says, “You didn’t have to do that.”
In the horrible silence that follows, Ilya imagines that the rest of the world has fallen apart and left him four years old again. He is a boy once more, sitting on the stairwell with his elbows resting on his knees and his feet planted on the unforgiving concrete, and he’s somehow figured out how to tie his laces without his mama or Alexei needing to help him. He is standing up on wobbly legs like a newborn fawn discovering gravity and walking out of his house and into the woods. He walks and walks and walks until he doesn’t want to walk anymore, and he turns around and finds that the trail he had taken to get where he was had turned hopelessly cold. In the distance, there is the unmistakable sound of a bear’s paws on the ground and nothing else for miles. He can’t go back home and he is alone and something is coming to kill him, just like Alexei always said it would if he left home without telling their mama.
“I’m a generous man,” Ilya says. His heart isn’t in it, and the worst part is that Shane can tell. Shane, Ilya is starting to realize, can always tell. He looks away from his own hands and Shane is right where Ilya had left him, sitting with his back to the left side of the railing and his cold, dead thigh pressing against the apex of Ilya’s shoe. It’s going right through him, and it’s freezing where they touch. The world is coming back to him in pieces now. He isn’t back in Moscow and there are no imaginary woods and Alexei hasn’t spoken to him in months. He is twenty nine years old and he is sitting outside his house and the cold is starting to seep right into his bones and Shane Hollander’s ghost is sitting with him on the staircase and watching him with careful, careful eyes. “Say thank you, Hollander.”
“I’m getting there, idiot,” Shane says. His heart isn’t in it either, Ilya thinks. Whatever Ilya’s face is doing must be really bad, then. “I’m trying to say that—I know it was hard. You don’t talk about your mom and I know it’s because it isn’t easy, but you told my mom about her anyway, and it means—it means a lot, that you could trust her with it.” Shane swallows around his own words, like he’s not sure if he should be saying any of this. “And it means a lot that you didn’t ask me to go away. That you trust me with it, too. Thank you, Ilya.”
“It’s no big deal,” Ilya says, and the phrase fits strangely in his mouth. It’s too fucking Canadian and it is also a lie, because everything about this is a big deal to Ilya. He is horrified to find that his hands are trembling again. He wants Shane to stop talking. He wants Shane to never shut up at all. His own teeth ache from the force of needing to turn this around because he only has two hands and he can’t put down all of Shane’s sincerity anywhere else. “It was a long time ago. We don’t have to talk about it again.”
Shane exhales. “Ilya—”
“Please,” Ilya says, and he hates how it comes out, a little too fast and eggshell-fragile in all the wrong places. He’s tired. He wants to force his legs to work and he wants to go back to his too-cold bedroom and he wants to lie on his bed in all his outside clothes and he wants to let whatever horrible thing that’s trying to choke the air out of his lungs move into the rest of him and cannibalize him completely, until he’s just a skeleton wrapped in his warmest jacket and a nice shirt gifted by Svetlana and the jeans he hasn’t worn anywhere since he met his father’s funeral director ten months ago. He wants his head to go completely quiet and he wants to be gone, just for a little while, until he remembers who he is without the burden of the dead.
Shane closes his eyes, exhales like he’s forcing his ghost-body to remember that he isn’t really dead in a damning, final way, and he murmurs, so quiet that the sound of his voice might as well as be the hum of the wind: “I’m going to go away once my mom comes to see me, aren’t I?”
Something crawls into the column of his throat again. It has teeth and legs like pins and needles and he can’t tell if it belongs to Shane or if it belongs to him or if it’s an amalgamation of both their hurt and their grief and their misplaced love for their unreachable mothers. Suddenly, Ilya is sixteen years old again, sitting outside the house he grew up in, trying to memorize the bite of the crucifix in his hand even though he knew, somewhere in his bruised, mangled heart, that he would never believe in God again. It would’ve been the fourth anniversary of his mama’s death then and he had nothing to keep of her save for her necklace and a collection of static-filled, weathered memories, and the anger had been so abrupt. She was gone and she was never coming back and Ilya was right where she left him, growing into a man she would never know. She would never come to one of his games again or wheedle Alexei into taking multiple photos of the two of them at Ilya’s shitty high school graduation in two years or his hypothetical, incredibly gaudy wedding in a nebulous future he only really thought about when he was very lonely. The crux of it all was that she had left. She had gone, and he was right where she had left him, unable to put one foot in front of the other. Sitting there with the resentment lodged high in his throat, angry at a dead woman who had been sick until the day she had died, Ilya had never felt more like his own fucking father, and he had hated himself for it.
Ilya’s hands are shaking and he clenches his fingers into a fist, willing it to stop. He is not in Moscow. He is not in Moscow, and he will never be in Moscow again. Instead, he’s in Ottawa. The wind is heavy with the promise of snowfall. A boxy pack of cigarettes is in the pocket of his jacket, weighed down by a disposable lighter in red. The merino wool of the toque is pulled over the shell of his ears. And, in a turn of events that has changed him so wholly and completely that he is worried that he’ll never recall what his life used to be before this, Shane Hollander’s ghost is sitting by him, close enough to touch and miles away at the same time. Always somewhere Ilya can never follow.
“Shane,” Ilya says, and stupidly, he thinks: I wish you were real. I wish you were real, and I wish we had more time. “Wherever you end up, it will be okay.” It’s like he’s swallowed crushed glass, and he can hardly breathe around the force of it. “You’re braver than you think you are.”
Shane turns to him, and for a moment, all Ilya sees in him are Yuna’s helpless eyes and the unhappy downturn to David’s mouth and all the places on Shane’s face where someone, in a past life somewhere, had held him and kissed him with so much affection that he carried it all the way here, to this life where he’s sitting by Ilya like they have all the time in the world even when they don’t. He should be used to the way Shane can never hide what he’s really thinking, and he should be used to how devastatingly beautiful he is, but it kneecaps him every time, and he is realizing, too little and too late, that there was never going to be an ending to this that leaves his heart whole.
“It’s not fair,” Shane says, and his voice cracks, fragile like an eggshell, and then, blessedly, he clenches his jaw and says nothing more. He says nothing more, and the rest of the world begins to slip away like dry sand on an open palm.
On Shane’s last day on earth, a mere twenty-four hours after Ilya last talked to Yuna Hollander and told her that forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world after love, Shane begins to fade away while he’s watching Ilya tie his shoelaces for his evening run. It is the ugliest sight in the world, the way he flickers in and out of existence for a while, and he doesn’t seem to realize it’s happening until Ilya stops tying his shoelaces and Anya starts barking at him. For a moment, he is completely blank. His face settles into the same look he gets when he’s about to take the center ice. Then, he looks down at his hands just as he flickers again, and true, genuine fear dawns in his eyes like the morning sun in the sky before he makes a horrible sound that Ilya never wants to hear again, and he says, “Fuck. Oh, no.”
It is, by all metrics, a wonderful day for him to die. The rain in the morning was mild and Ilya had only found a reason to complain about it because he had nearly slipped and eaten shit in front of his car. Shane had given him shit about it until they made it to the store, and then he’d given his opinion on everything Ilya bought at the store—you really shouldn’t be eating this garbage, Rozanov, at least read the label to see what’s in it—and then he’d been able to focus long enough to possess a singular snow-covered pebble in the parking lot while Ilya loaded his groceries onto the car. He told Ilya that the music he put on was really unfortunate, and Ilya told him to go fuck himself, and the little bout of playing pretend only stopped when they drove past the Rinkside and Yuna’s car was still parked right where she and David had left it last night. Then, Shane didn’t want to talk, and Ilya didn’t want to push him to say anything, and they drove the rest of the way in complete silence until Shane asked, can we just not talk about it today? And Ilya, who has always been a fool, too soft-hearted to put his foot down even when it matters, said, okay, and asked him about fucking hockey. They went home and Ilya got all the groceries in one trip. Anya ran in circles around Shane until he gave in and let her chase him down the hall and into Ilya’s room and then all the way down to the basement and then right back up. Ilya put the groceries away and listened to the sound of Shane’s laughter and Anya’s excited barking. Their joy filled the house with light, and something in him squeezed. They did everything that they usually do on days like this, and they did not talk about Yuna and David even once.
The run was for Anya, mostly. A loop around the neighborhood, maybe a lap in the dog park so Anya could socialize with the other dogs, and then back home so Ilya could eat dinner and watch another awful episode of MTV Cribs on his iPad while Shane offered commentary on the real estate side of it, as if Ilya gave a fuck about the property value of Nicole Scherzinger’s home, and then Ilya would tell him that he was incredibly boring and Shane would argue, I’m practical, like that was any better, and then Ilya would get caught up with watching Shane’s stupid freckles in the harsh light of the screen while he frowned at the subtitles and he would feel his heart in his throat like an idiot. Maybe he’d be brave enough to say something this time around. Something high-risk, high-reward, like: your brand of boring makes me want to sit by this kitchen counter with you forever. Something high-risk, high-reward, like: Hollander, I’ve never really been in love before—
—but now none of it would happen, because Ilya’s left shoe isn’t tied yet and it is, by all metrics, a wonderful day for Shane to die.
He says goodbye to Anya first. Crouches by her even as she barrels through him and back like she’s waiting for him to become a real, tangible person so he can scratch her behind the ears like Ilya does all the time. “Anya,” Shane says, devastated in a way that makes the back of Ilya’s teeth ache. She runs in a circle around him, and when he holds his hand out, she sits on her haunches and tries to press her nose to the back of his knuckles and nearly topples over when she can’t touch him. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can go on that run with you this time around, sweet girl.”
Anya yips at him again. Shane says something else to her, but Ilya can’t hear any of it over the sound of fracturing ice in his ears. He puts his head in his hands and tries to remember how to breathe. He closes his eyes and—he thinks about the imaginary woods again, the ones in fucking Moscow that Alexei had invented to scare him out of trying to run off on his own. He is four years old and nothing bad has happened to him yet and he has tied his shoelaces, somehow unassisted, and he’s going for a walk. He’s walking and he’s turning back to find that the trail behind him has gone completely cold. He can’t get back home, and no one is looking for him. That, he thinks, is what this feels like. The trail is going completely cold. The trail is going completely cold, and Shane is going to go away. For good this time, like Zuzanna after her son finally came to collect her belongings from the Vertrova’s home after all those weeks or the headless ghost that followed him to the museum when he moved here and passed on only when he walked by the ugly art she had spent her life making. Like Ilya’s mama had the minute she laid down in her bed and went to sleep forever, never to be seen by anyone else again.
Shane sits next to him on the couch. Ilya can tell because the temperature drops as soon as he does even though the couch doesn’t shift in the slightest, and because his skin erupts into gooseflesh where Shane’s arm brushes against his. Then, because he is a very terrible person who has no regard for Ilya’s feelings, Shane asks, “Will you call someone after I leave?”
He won’t. He’s probably going to get off this couch and stumble to his bedroom and fall asleep in his running clothes, his headphones still his pocket and his left shoe still untied, and then he’s going to do that thing where he feels like his mama for a long while, operating through things he absolutely has to do through sheer willpower alone. He’s going to crawl back into bed every time he leaves it to feed Anya or walk Anya or shower or force himself to eat. After a few days, he’ll realize that the pressure building up in his chest isn’t ceasing, and then he won’t talk to anyone, Anya included, and he’ll lie in bed again and wait for the horrible thing trying to choke the air out of his lungs to resurface and bite him until he bleeds. He might look it in the eyes and name it after his least favorite English word—almost. He could analyze it like it’s an ugly painting at a no-name museum and he could name it the summer I came back from hockey practice and I found my mother dead in her bedroom, or he could name it Sveta, I keep thinking that I miss Russia but I think I might just miss the days we were kids together, or he could name it I wish I could keep you. Or he could name it grief. He could name it anything, and he still knows, like he knows his own hands, that while he’ll hate it for the rest of his life, he’ll hate surviving it even more.
Ilya stops digging the heels of his palms into his eyes and glances over at Shane, his vision still spotty and buzzy in some places, and fuck, there it is. The pinched, terrible look in his eyes like he’s trying very hard not to cry. His mouth is pursed into an unhappy grimace, and his hands are wrung together. He flickers again. In and out of existence, like a dream. Ilya’s chest tightens.
“Maybe,” Ilya lies. His favorite word when he didn’t think he deserved to say yes, even when he wanted nothing more than to agree. He’s supposed to make this easier on Shane, but he feels like he’s doing everything wrong. “Maybe.”
“Call someone,” Shane repeats. His voice crackles. White noise underwater. “And go on the work trip Wyatt keeps trying to convince you to go on. I know you’re not sold on the idea of camping, but Anya would probably love it and Chiron will be there and—it might be nice to go away for a while.” His throat works like he’s talking around a lump, and maybe he is. “And anyway, it’s glamping. It’s not like you’re going to be sleeping in the woods or anything. I doubt you’ll even do like, a campfire—”
The thing is, when Ilya found his mama dead, he hadn’t immediately cried. He hadn’t cried when he reached out to touch her hand and it was cold, he hadn’t cried when Alexei had yanked him down the stairs and asked him what he saw and he was horrified to find that his voice wouldn’t come out, and he hadn’t cried when The Colonel had slammed cabinets and yelled at him because he wouldn’t talk for days afterwards. He’d cried later, when he was living with the Vetrovas and Svetlana’s mama thought he was asleep on the couch and tucked a blanket around his shoulders and kissed his forehead, just like his own mama used to. He hadn’t cried when The Colonel had died, either. He hadn’t cried on the second plane out of Istanbul when Svetlana dropped into the seat next to him and gave him her hand like they were kids again. He hadn’t cried at the funeral director’s office when they talked about cremation and he hadn’t cried when he sat outside the incineration room with his brother and he hadn’t cried at the wake. For this one, he hadn’t cried at all. His father was a terrible man, and Ilya was glad that he was dead.
But here, sitting in his own living room with an untied shoe and his dog and the ghost of a man he was sure he was in love with, the crawling, violent ache he’s been carrying alongside his heart since the day he looked at Shane for the first time twists and twists until it’s the only thing he can feel, and to his horror, his face crumples and he begins to cry. Shane makes a terrible sound like Ilya has dug a knife into him and Ilya’s throat burns. He turns his head so he doesn’t have to look at Shane anymore and it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help when he digs his nails into the skin of palms or when he braces his feet against the carpet or when he tries to breathe around it. It doesn’t help anything at all.
“Hey,” Shane murmurs, and the temperature plummets again when he comes closer. Ilya closes his eyes and leans away so he doesn’t have to see the cold, dead hands landing gently on his face and then going right through him despite all the focus Shane is trying to put into keeping them there. He doesn’t want to see that Shane’s legs are going through him and that their chests are touching but only in a way that doesn’t come close to mattering. He doesn’t want to know that Shane is trying to hold him. “It’s okay.”
It isn’t, but Ilya is very good at pretending, and maybe Shane is too. “Sorry,” Ilya says. His voice cracks, and it’s awful. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”
“Crybaby,” Shane says, and—this is the worst part, maybe. That Shane’s voice is colored with fondness, that he says it like he’s trying to say something else entirely, that he sounds like he loves Ilya too, against all odds. Crybaby, he says, like Ilya says, boring. For a split second, Shane’s thumb runs against Ilya’s cheekbone. Just for this moment in time, the touch is grounding and real and tangible, and then his concentration slips or he flickers again and the fuzzy, visceral cold returns, shapeless and damning. When Ilya opens his eyes, his face is so close to Ilya’s that he can count every cluster of freckles across the planes of his face individually. If Shane were real, the tip of his statistical anomaly of a nose would be brushing Ilya’s. Ilya would be able to feel his breath on his face every time he exhales—a constant reminder of how alive he is. Shane’s face does something complicated, devastated and crushed in a way that makes him seem incredibly young, and then he says, “I waited my entire life for someone to see me like you see me, you know?”
“Hm?” Ilya’s chest tightens. It’s like he’s breathing around a rock.
“I know people,” Shane says, patiently. His voice is fading too, the clarity to it drowning in white noise. His hands, still on Ilya’s face, are burning cold. “So it’s not like I was alone or anything. I have the organization and I have hockey and I have J.J and Hayden and the other boys and my friends and I had my sometimes-man, and—you know my parents. They’re great. I’m lucky and I have so much, but I was lonely. I was so lonely, especially after things with the guy ended before the accident—” Ilya tries not to make a face at that, “—and I thought that was it for me. I was always going to have hockey and my friends and the boys and I might have a few sometimes-men, but I wasn’t ever going to have anything whole. I was never going to have my once in a lifetime, Yuna-and-David kind of love.” In his voice and in the rest of him, the static grows warm. “And then I kind of died and you looked at me for the first time, and everything changed for me.”
The rooftop of the hotel in Montreal. Shane Hollander, comatose for over a month, leaning against the railing of the roof, thirty two floors above the busy street. Freckle-stained, perfect, and dead. Ilya’s voice turns into something he can hardly recognize, raw and festering like a wound. “There’s never been anyone like you for me. I don’t want there to be anyone else either.”
Shane smiles, a little sweet and a little sad and a lot beautiful, and—hadn’t Ilya tried? Hadn’t he tried so hard, putting his ugly, bleeding heart back together year after year and then placing it into a jar, leaving it to gather dust on the top shelf, somewhere out of reach, somewhere cold and unfeeling and dark? Hadn’t he tried so hard to shield himself from the inevitability of this outcome? And still, Shane is looking at him with big, glassy eyes like he thinks it doesn’t count if he isn’t actually crying, like he’s seeing right through Ilya, and Ilya is finding that it wasn’t true at all. The jar on the top shelf is completely empty and Shane’s fingers are covered in blood and Ilya’s chest is carved wide open and facing the sun. His ugly, bleeding heart is right where it should be, drenched in sunlight and the gentle touch of Shane’s hands. He’s awfully, inevitably, and terribly in love with someone who will always be somewhere out of reach, and there isn’t a single thing he can do about it.
He lets Shane rearrange himself just as the first traces of the cold begin to leach away from his living room for the first time in months. Shane’s concentration doesn’t slip this time, and he takes up the couch and puts his head on Ilya’s stomach like Ilya used to do with his mama when he was a kid and everything threatened to choke the air out of his lungs, like Ilya still does when he’s with Svetlana, reaching out for a sense of shapeless comfort that doesn’t exist anymore. Anya comes and tries to bite Shane, but he doesn’t move away, and she rests her head on Ilya’s thigh and closes her eyes, sweet and real. Ilya breathes, slowly and steadily, and all he can see of Shane is the view from the top of his head. His messy hair, the shape of his ears, his long lashes from the side as his eyes flutter closed. Heart in his throat, Ilya is horrified at how badly he wants to tangle his fingers into Shane’s hair and find an excuse to brush his fingertips along the shell of his ear and show him exactly how Ilya would feel when he was in the safest place he’s ever known.
Shane fades away eventually, taking with him the familiar, shapeless cold, and he doesn’t turn to look at Ilya as he does. Instead, he’s just gone like he was never there at all, leaving Ilya with a handful of nothing. The quiet after settles around Ilya like overwhelming, hungry waves around a drowning man. He sits there for a very long time, Anya’s head in his lap and an untied left shoe on his foot, and he knows, even as he closes his eyes and breathes around the force of it, that he has run out of time and Shane has gone somewhere he can never follow. Warmth spills into Ilya’s home for the first time in two months, and the crawling, violent numbness comes home to him in his chest, stitched close to his ugly, bleeding heart.
After that, he spends a long, long time choking on the same sadness that choked his mama all those years ago. The days begin to blend together. He doesn’t have the recurring nightmare about the night of the crash again, but he does dream about a hospital room that he thinks might be Shane’s. There are tulips in a vase. David’s jacket thrown over the back of a chair by the bed, Yuna’s purse on the side table along with medication and papers. The bed is empty. Ilya has this horrible thought that maybe they’ve already buried Shane like The Colonel had buried Ilya’s mama before he could take a second look at her face, and then he’s waking up in his own bed filled with dread. One day, he drives by the Rinkside and Yuna’s car is gone. He doesn’t watch hockey again. Ilya had always thought that he was very good at being sad, and he had always thought that he was very good at tolerating the unspoken weight of grief. He had also thought that he was very good at being on his own.
And still, every time he wakes up and finds his apartment warm like something dead isn’t lingering in its four walls anymore, the numbness nearly eats him whole, and he finds that it isn’t true. It isn’t true at all.
One night, right before he forces himself to get out of the house and drive to Galina’s pleasant office so she can dissect him like an unfortunate frog suited less for grave dirt and more for a biology class where children play with scalpels, he calls Svetlana and asks her if she’ll come down to stupid Ottawa soon, and she says yes. He thinks he’s gotten away with it until she asks, “Is everything okay? You know you can tell me anything.”
He almost, almost gives in. Nearly tells her about the recurring nightmare he used to have when Shane was around about the night of his car crash—the truck with the drunk man in the driver’s seat and the little girl sleeping in the passenger seat, heading right at him with no sight of slowing down, about the wheel lurching under the palm of his hands, about being punched back from the force of the collision, about feeling his teeth come loose in his mouth. About how he’d always wanted to ask Shane if he imagined that the girl was sleeping because it made him feel better to think that she might not have been scared if she wasn’t awake for it. He wants to tell her about Yuna. About how Ilya had borrowed her lighter that first time and braced his feet against the concrete and still found himself wholly unprepared for how much she looked like Shane, about how she’d told him that she knows that Shane might never forgive her for having failed him but that she would’ve liked to ask for his forgiveness anyway. He nearly tells her about Shane, about the shape of his mouth when he says, Ilya, like it’s a gift, like it’s something worth treasuring. About how he’d laid his head on Ilya’s stomach when it was time for him to go and waited the rest of his life out there, lying in the sun with Ilya, like he wanted Ilya to hold him even when he knew that it wasn’t a possibility. About how it was love all along, in the once in a lifetime, Yuna-and-David kind of way. About how it matters even when he has nothing to show for it.
But he doesn’t come clean about any of it, and instead, over the staticky sound of the phone line in his ears and the back of his neck itching from the warmth in his house, he says, “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
A pause, real and heavy, and then she said, “We’ll talk about it when I come by.”
“Maybe.” Ilya’s favorite word when he didn’t think he deserved to say yes, even when he wanted nothing more than to agree.
Somehow, Ilya completes his stupid grief support group homework, and then he starts seeing Galina again and does his stupid regular therapy homework too. He turns up at her office, he talks about his last visit to Russia eleven months ago when the Colonel had an awful night and blinked himself awake from an ill-advised nap that Ilya had shaken him out of and how he had ruined it by calling Ilya his mother’s name and how it made him want to die, just a little, and then he turns up at grief support group and commiserates with Zahid, who made a lot of jokes about being the only Muslim in the church and had a dead dad who was also a piece of shit. At the final session, he even writes the Colonel a letter for closure and then chooses the option to hurl it into the fireplace when he goes home. Yuna doesn’t come back to any of the meetings. He doesn’t see her again, which means he never sees Shane again either. Not in her eyes or her smile or the way she says, Ilya.
Winter thaws and gives way to spring, and spring begins to give way into summer. Ilya goes on the work trip, carpooling with Wyatt and Harris because Bood was forcing Troy to carpool with his five million pieces of barbecue equipment. It’s a very Canadian affair that isn’t very Canadian at all. There is no campfire because no one knows how to start one, but Anya and Chiron chase each other in the open from sunset until sundown and Luca nearly tackles Nick when he gets scared by a moth landing on the back of his shirt, and it is a good two days. At some point, Harris says, “This isn’t even real camping,” and grief finds Ilya in the middle of nowhere two hours and forty five minutes out of Ottawa surrounded by people he considers his friends, because it’s exactly the kind of thing Shane would say and he doesn’t know where to put that down, even now.
The fireflies emerge at some point during their last night. Leaning against Harris as Harris protests the made-up rules of the made-up card game that Wyatt swears are real, Ilya takes a look at the flickering lights buried in their firefly bodies and thinks that they look like shooting stars. He closes his eyes and imagines that Shane is somewhere very warm and that he’s taping his stick the way he likes it. He imagines that Shane is skating a lap around the rink with his mouthguard hanging between his teeth and that his skates are comfortable. He imagines Shane in his cottage, sitting on the dock with sunlight in his hair and his feet in the lake. He imagines watching the pattern of freckles on Shane’s shoulderblades and the freckles on his back in the light of the setting sun.
He wishes for the same thing he wishes for every time he has a chance to ask for something, for mama and now Shane: that the other side is quiet and kind and easy, and that nothing hurts over there at all.
And then—
—everything changes on a completely ordinary day. Troy talks Ilya into going to the Rinkside. For old time’s sake, he says, which means he wants to watch a hockey game and drink awful beer and then not think about something that’s bothering him, which is exactly the type of thing Ilya does, so he goes along with it. He hasn’t actually seen any hockey since Shane and he hasn’t been back here since Yuna, but it hasn’t changed much. The seats in the smoking area that he, Shane and Yuna occupied are still there and they have the Admirals game on and he imagines that Scott Hunter has only gotten more ancient since the last time Ilya watched him play. He and Troy choose a booth and Troy brings the UNO cards because he’s been weird about beating Ilya at it since they first met and they nurse their awful beers for a while, until Troy remembers that he left his fucking phone in his car and has to go out back to get it.
Ilya busies himself with texting Svetlana about how awful Scott Hunter’s wristshot is and has barely managed to haha-react the picture of a dinosaur she sends as a reply when Troy bursts back through the door with a slightly crazed look in his eyes, clutching his phone in one hand, and briskly speed-walks to the booth and says, “Someone is looking for you in the parking lot.”
“Someone is looking for me in the parking lot?” Ilya repeats, just to be sure.
“Yes,” Troy says. His entire face is red, like he’s going to throw up on the Rinkside’s disgusting, sticky floor or spontaneously combust, and when Ilya makes no move to get up, he lightly kicks the chair and makes a jerking, aborted motion at the door. “Will you go? I think you should go. I think it might be important.”
“Why do you look like—?”
“Go, man,” Troy says, slightly more forceful. He still has that slightly crazed look in his eyes, like he might actually scream if Ilya doesn’t get up and leave, so Ilya gets up and snatches his coat off the back of his chair with only a bewildered look sent Troy’s way. Troy, still clutching his phone to his chest, says, “No one is going to murder you outside, I think. Just go, okay? And call me if you need anything.”
Ilya puts on his coat. Jesus, Troy is so weird sometimes. “Is it the police? Immigration?”
“Might make more sense if it was,” Troy says, and then he refuses to elaborate.
So, Ilya leaves the toasty warmth of the Rinkside and trudges out into the evening cold. The sun is barely just beginning to set over the horizon, and it’s colored a sweet, blue-purple-pink that reminds Ilya of cotton candy. The noise in the bar dissolves into a muted, soft static when he steps out and makes his way to the back of the compound, where the parking lot is. Everything about the Rinkside is dated in a way that reminds Ilya of those ridiculous Twitter posts about diners still serving coke in the old-fashioned way. This fifty-five year old hockey bar still makes patrons park at the back of the compound in neat rows, even though they have a perfectly functional basement parking unit. It makes sense, though. The only people keeping the Rinkside in business are older people like Yuna and David who have genuine, emotional connections to this once-famous bar and young-ish people like Ilya and Harris who only know it exists because they went to university in Ottawa and would’ve gone anywhere if they could get a beer for two dollars and talk about hockey. Nostalgia keeps the place running.
Today, for example, the parking lot only has five cars, and Ilya can tell, with astounding clarity, which car belongs to which of the patrons milling about inside. Troy’s pretentious Audi—his first big-boy purchase, paid for by the ridiculous bonus that hit his bank account a while back. Ilya’s own car—his Spyder, because it didn’t snow anymore. The Honda that Dr. and Dr. Mukherjee always drove, even though it was on the small side for two medical doctors who clearly loved shoving their shit in their backseat. The beat up Toyota Corolla that the group of six university kids who came every trivia night somehow managed to cram into. And
—Yuna Hollander’s British Land Rover, with the driver’s side door wide open. The second half of the mother-son present Shane had told Ilya he spent his first NHL salary on—matching fucking cars for him and his mom. That might explain why Troy had looked like someone had tilted his world on its own axis and moved everything by just half an inch, leaving the world familiar and unfamiliar at once. Ilya had never told anyone about knowing Yuna, mostly because it just never came up and mostly because then he would open up entire cans of worms he had no interest in opening up to give context to it. Yes, he can see ghosts. Yes, Shane Hollander briefly haunted him for nearly two months. There was a lot to say about that, so Ilya won’t. Yes, Ilya and Yuna Hollander are friends, kind of. Yes, they met at a grief support group via the medium of the meddling forces of the universe. What was Ilya doing at the grief support group? See, his abusive father died nearly a year ago and Ilya had a lot of complicated feelings about it. No, please don’t tell him you’re sorry about that. It’s fine. It’s fine, and Ilya doesn’t care anymore.
Ugh, annoying. Ilya tightens his coat around him and briskly sets off towards the very sensible, very boring Land Rover. Strangely, she doesn’t emerge from the other side of the car when she hears his footsteps like she always does. She doesn’t come out at all. So he pauses, and when he’s close enough, and tentatively, he calls, “Yuna?”
“Not Yuna,” a voice says, and—the ice is fracturing in his ears again. The ice is fracturing in his ears again, and he can’t tell if his heart is stalled halfway through contracting or if he’s been walking around with a stifled chest for months. For a moment, the circuitry of his body forgets to relax and drive his ribs down, and he stands there with an inhale suspended in his lungs, the air crystallizing inside him like ice. Then, unnecessarily, like Ilya would have forgotten, like Ilya wouldn’t recall at all, like Ilya might have learned to put one foot in front of the other and move on in the time that he was gone somewhere Ilya could never even hope to follow him to the voice says: “It’s, uh. It’s Shane. Shane Hollander.”
Ilya exhales with an ugly choke he can hardly recognize, sick like he’s been punched, and then he’s taking a step towards the car. One, and then two, and then three. The car door is open like Shane had forgotten to shut it when he got out, and, insufferably enough, the first thing Ilya sees of him in months, across seasons and beyond the forces of the universe, is this: a pair of ugly fucking boat shoes where he’s crouching on the concrete. They’re hideous, neither tan nor brown but a secret third thing, ill-fitting in the worst way possible, and they’re the best sight Ilya has seen since that night in his house when Shane put his head on Ilya’s stomach and closed his eyes, because ghosts don’t wear shoes like that. Ghosts don’t make sounds like crunching gravel when they shift their weight and they don’t have the slight gap between their heel and the back strip of the shoe. Ghosts don’t breathe like Shane does, shallow and fast, steeped in panic. Suddenly desperate to see his face, Ilya closes his hand around the handle of the door and shuts the door. He’s scared of closing his eyes just in case this is a cruel and unusual punishment, and then—
—from where he’s crouched on the ground with his head between his knees, Shane Hollander looks up at him. Not Shane Hollander as a ghost, translucent and stuck between planes and blue and glowing, transparent and going through things, but Shane Hollander as a real, tangible person. His eyes are red-rimmed and he’s wearing reading glasses, but it’s him. Freckled, perfect, and present. He’s lost a lot of muscle and he’s thin, like he’s still sick, and Ilya’s heart is in a vice. The force of it is paralyzing. Shane’s back is pressed against the body of the car and it’s pressing on him right back. He’s holding a phone in one hand. His shadow is growing on the concrete the longer he lingers. All proof that he’s here, in the parking lot of the Rinkside, holding his mother’s car keys in the hand that isn’t holding his phone—
Ilya stills, suddenly very sick. The truck with the drunk man in the driver’s seat and the little girl sleeping in the passenger seat, heading right at Shane with no sight of slowing down. The wheel lurching under the palm of his hands, being punched back from the force of the collision, feeling his teeth coming loose in his mouth. “Did you drive here?”
“I’m not thinking about it,” Shane says. His fingers tighten around the keys. “I didn’t think about it when I left. It’s so stupid. I’m sure mom is going to notice that I stole her car while she was sleeping and I really don’t know what happens to a license when you like, medically die for a while, but I, uh. I couldn’t remember your phone number.” His ears are red. Ilya is starting to think that he might die here tonight, in the parking lot of the Rinkside while Shane Hollander ties himself into knots about driving a vehicle for the first time since his crash because he wanted to see Ilya. “So I thought I’d just—drive around until I found you somewhere, and then try my luck at your doorstep once I was sure you’d be home. But I ended up here because I was starting to remember why I don’t drive anymore and I needed to get off the road and take a breather, and then I panicked and had to sit down and I saw Troy, so I thought—I didn’t crash into anything. Nothing crashed into me. Everything is fine. I just need to,” he makes a vague gesture at his legs, “figure out how these work, and then I’ll be up and about.”
“Up and about,” Ilya says, slowly. The hysteria is starting to creep in. “You have nightmares about driving. I used to have them for you, and they were so real every time. Why were you driving?”
Shane swallows. Averts his eyes, and sullenly says, “I just wanted you to know that I was back in Ottawa.”
Ilya’s knees nearly buckle from the force of this admission, and he’s horrified by it. “How long?”
“How long have I been back in Ottawa?” Shane’s eyebrows pinch. “I don’t know? Four hours, give or take a few—”
“No,” you stupid, beautiful, terrible vice around my heart, you wonderful, wonderful man, “how long have you been …” real, whole, tangible, no longer running in a line parallel to me but hurtling yourself into my path so we can collide, and collide, and collide, “ … here?”
“Oh,” Shane says and then he’s biting his lip and saying nothing at all. He’s wearing a nice, unassuming linen shirt under his practical jacket. Eggshell white and serious—something Yuna would wear. Shane is so beautiful under the twilight sky, all sincere eyes and warm skin and lovely hands, and he’d turned up here four hours after he got to Ottawa in a car he wasn’t supposed to be driving because he wanted Ilya to know where he was. His eyes are careful, tucked under lock and key, and for a moment, Ilya thinks that he might not talk again. Then, out of the blue, he reaches out and grabs an entire handful of the sleeve of Ilya’s coat—hard enough to pull, hard enough to ground him and so unlike what ghosts could do—and then he’s turning the force of those binary star eyes on him, and he says, “Months. I don’t know. It was pretty touch-and-go for a month or so, and then I woke up and the specialists and doctors and rehab started. I haven’t been in Canada since March, at least. This is my first time coming back since the crash.”
Ilya’s throat is lined with crushed glass. “That’s good. That’s great.”
“Yeah,” Shane says. He sounds strangled, and his eyes are so sad. “Yeah, it is.”
It’s all so inadequate, and like an idiot, the first thing he thinks to ask is, “What’s with that face you’re making, then?”
Shane exhales and the look in his eyes turns soft and sweet like the feeling of coming home. He tugs at Ilya’s sleeve and Ilya sits with him on the concrete in the parking lot with his back to Yuna’s car. Shane presses their shoulders together, and he doesn’t let go of Ilya’s sleeve. Instead, he pulls Ilya’s arm close to him and twists his fingers into the material of his coat, like he’s unsure if Ilya will let him hold his hand—really hold his hand, pressing his palm to Ilya’s and and tangling their fingers together like something out of a lovely, lovely dream. When his shoulder presses into Ilya’s, he’s warm and alive. In the cave of his chest, Ilya’s heart turns into a fist. He rests his forearm on Shane’s knee and turns his palm up to the sky, and gingerly, like he’s being handed something made of glass, Shane presses his palm into Ilya’s and tangles their fingers together. Like something out of a lovely, lovely dream.
“I’ll play hockey again,” he says, out of the fucking blue. Ilya blinks. “I might not be as good as I used to be and I need to work really hard if I want a shot at recovering in the next year and it’s going to fucking suck for a long time. My shoulder is fucked but managable and I was lucky that my brain survived the two months of inactivity, but I just—I hurt all over sometimes, you know? I get mad and I get cranky and on the flight back to Canada, the altitude made my fingers stiff and I couldn’t pull the tab on my stupid ginger ale and my dad offered to do it for me and I started crying like an idiot. It’s like I’m sixteen and six again except I’m almost thirty.” His throat works around the words. “I’m so annoying to be around right now. I lose time sometimes, and if something doesn’t go my way, I get mad. I’m not patient with myself and I’m not patient with other people. I hate therapy because I’m not good at it. And I know I shouldn’t ask, but can you just—?” Shane chokes, like the words are clawing at him. “Will you be around me anyway? We can be friends if you don’t want to—”
It’s unbearable. It’s unbearable, is the thing, and Ilya, somewhere in his heart, is convinced that he is going to remember this moment in time forever. He’s going to remember that Shane’s hand was in his and that his hand was shaking, just a little, and that his voice was threatening to crack and that he looked just like Yuna when he tried to hold back tears. He’s going to remember that Shane’s freckles brought out the imploring, sincere glimmer in his eyes and that his nails were neatly clipped and that his knees are kind of knobby for a professional athlete. He’s going to remember that Shane could have been anywhere and he was here, in the Rinkside with his hand in Ilya’s like he didn’t want or need to be anywhere else.
“Hollander,” he says, and it’s a little too fast and eggshell-fragile in all the wrong places. Suddenly, he just needs Shane to understand. He just needs Shane to understand that seasons have changed and circumstances have changed and he still thinks of Shane every time his house gets quiet. He’s desperate for Shane to understand that he could have chosen to never look for Ilya or he could have died that day and never returned to this plane again and Ilya would still have wished, day after day, that he could’ve had just one chance to hold him properly. “Shane,” he thinks he might be choking, and—hadn’t he tried so hard? Hadn’t he tried so hard to shield himself from this? The quiet after you was awful, he nearly says, and I resent that I survived it at all. “I can’t be your friend. I don’t want to be your friend.”
“Ilya,” Shane says. His voice is shaking, raw and flayed open like a nerve, and his hand in Ilya’s grows warm. “I’m fucked up. I’m so fucked up, especially now.”
The closest Ilya has ever been to his mama is when he’s choking on the same sadness that killed her and left him motherless. “I’m fucked up too. We can be fucked up together. Please—” don’t go somewhere I can’t follow, but there are no words for this that are adequate, and Ilya, his chest stifled with love and sadness and so much hope, says, “—just don’t make me watch you go again.”
Shane makes a terrible, wounded sound, and then, suddenly, Ilya finds himself hearing nothing over the sound of the wind as Shane unceremoniously lets go of Ilya’s hand and scrambles to throw his arms around him and bury his face into Ilya’s shirt. It’ll embarrass them both later down the line—they’re in the parking lot of the fucking Rinkside and sitting on the ground and Ilya is sure the seat of his pants is going to have dust and gravel on it when Shane lefts him up, but he can’t bring himself to care when Shane is scrambling to try and eat away at the space between them like he’s less of a man and more of a black hole. He’s insistent, plastering himself anywhere he can reach and pressing his face into the crook of his neck, inhaling sharp and quick, like he’s trying to categorize all his observations before he has to let go. Ilya twists his fingers into Shane’s hair, memorizes the feeling of the strands against his skin, and he cradles him to his chest and holds him, as easy as thirst holds water.
“It must have been scary,” Ilya murmurs, and he feels Shane’s jaw click as he bites back a sound. He runs his knuckles against the knobs of Shane’s spine and Shane’s fingers fist into his shirt. It’s ugly, and he feels cracked open, like an egg or the crust of the earth. It feels redundant, but Ilya thinks he’ll keep saying it over and over again until Shane believes it. “Told you, didn’t I? You’re braver than you think you are.”
“I’m not.” Shane melts into it like he isn’t meant to be anywhere else. His voice is wrecked. “I’m not brave, asshole.”
“You are brave.” Ilya presses a shaking, open-mouthed kiss to the first place he can reach—Shane’s neck, over the collar of the eggshell-white button down—and Shane’s hands tighten around him, like a vice or a promise or a confession on its own. When his ribs press into Ilya’s, Ilya can feel the steady, rhythmic beat of his heart. Proof that he’s alive. A sure thing, Ilya thinks, and for the first time in a long, long time, he’s warm in a way he doesn’t resent, like he’s swallowed a kindling or an open flame, keeping it safe right next to the ache in his heart. In a once in a lifetime, Yuna-and-David kind of way. “I’m glad,” Ilya says, “that you got in your mom’s ugly car and drove to the worst fucking hockey bar in this city.”
Shane sees right through him. Shane, Ilya is starting to realize, will always see right through him. “I’m glad I found you here too. I’d try to find you anywhere, I think.”
The imaginary woods in Moscow. The cold trail, his tied shoes. “Anywhere?”
“Anywhere,” Shane says, and he’s the loveliest dream Ilya has ever had. He presses a kiss to the corner of Ilya’s mouth, a little chaste and a little sweet and a little boy-next-door. He repeats, “Anywhere, okay? Anywhere.”
Something in Ilya comes undone, unspools hard and fast like pain around a bruise. He wants to build a home out of wishbones in the frail skeleton of this moment, with a bed shaped like a jar that has enough room for two. He wants to close the blinds and he wants to live here with Shane until time catches up to them on a quiet day. He wants time to turn into molasses so he can hold Shane a little longer and the world can still retain some of its color. He wants Shane to tell him again that he’d find Ilya anywhere. In graveyard of memories and a funeral for the decade-long aches he can’t breathe around and fucking Ottawa. He wants this quiet and this peace, and for once, he wants this to be easy.
He’s selfish and he wants, and he wants, and he wants. Ilya exhales shakily, and he murmurs, “I’ll drive you back.”
Shane sighs, relaxing in Ilya’s hold, a marionette with no strings—the lightest weight Ilya will ever have to carry. “In a minute,” he mumbles, summer-sweet and alive. All the world Ilya has ever wanted, right where he’s meant to be. “In a minute, okay?”
fin.