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Ilya holds the binoculars up one handed, still babying the shoulder the surgeons had put back together for him only recently. Twenty years in this league and it was a shoulder injury that knocked him onto LTIR for the first time and not—as he’d always suspected—someone punching him in the face one too many times.
“What are you looking at?”
Shane’s voice, coming from the vicinity of Ilya’s elbow, is so unexpected that Ilya shrieks (he will deny this later) and almost drops the binoculars. “Chto za—What are you doing sneaking around like a cat?”
“I’m not sneaking, I just walked in here normally. What’s with the binoculars? In our—” Shane gestures broadly, “bedroom?”
“It has the best view of the dock.”
“Why do you want to look at the dock?”
“Because there’s a loon on the dock.”
“On the dock or near the dock?”
“It’s sitting on the dock.” He passes the binoculars to Shane, who looks at them for a long moment.
“Okay, but where did you get the binoculars?”
“Oh, David gave them to me. For bird watching.”
“Dad gave you binoculars for bird watching?”
“Yes, we talk about birds.”
“You talk about birds?”
“Why are you repeating everything I say, is this a boring Canadian thing?”
Shane’s cocked eyebrow says that he doesn’t quite believe Ilya but the best part is, everything Ilya has said is completely true. He and David have spent hours on the back porch of the Hollander’s lake house, especially in the early years when Shane was still in Montreal, and surprisingly, David has never talked much about hockey with him. He seems perfectly happy to leave that to Yuna and Shane. Instead, they sip vodka and watch the sun set and talk about anything and everything but hockey.
The first summer Ilya lived in Ottawa full time—fuck eleven years ago, the passage of time does not seem real—the variety of birds near the lake became a topic of conversation. Moscow has birds, of course, but Ilya had mostly noticed the enormous flocks of pigeons, which Boston also had. David identified the colorful varieties that visit the bird feeders near the porch, which lead to Ilya asking more questions about birds. Then David confessed to having a bird book and occasionally going on birding trips and while Ilya is never—probably—going to reach that level of interest, birds are pretty and, yeah, fun to look at, and a fun and easy topic of conversation with David.
And yes, he does occasionally use the binoculars to count the freckles on Shane’s nose when he naps on the couch, but he has also looked at so many birds.
Shane eventually raises the binoculars to his own eyes in what Ilya can only describe as a skeptical manner. “There’s another one,” Shane says, moments later. He passes the binoculars back, pointing through the window where, sure enough, another loon is pulling at the tall grass along the shore. “I think they’re nesting.”
“Nesting?” Ilya is delighted. “We will have baby loons?”
Shane moves behind him, links his arms around Ilya’s waist and hooks his chin over Ilya’s good shoulder. “Why have I never seen you use the binoculars before?”
Ilya lets himself lean back into Shane’s bulk. “David gave them to me for Christmas, he said since I was missing games for surgery I had more time for bird watching now. You’ve been busy winning games.”
“Not enough,” Shane mutters, likely still thinking about their shitty series against Detroit.
“It’s okay.” Ilya pats Shane’s hands, clasped over his stomach. “Can’t win the Cup every year.” Shane doesn’t say anything to that. “So,” Ilya eventually says. “Baby loons?”
Shane shakes out of whatever shame spiral he’d been on about their aborted playoff run. “Probably, keep Anya on a leash when you let her out or she’ll bother them.”
Anya, hearing both her name and leash in the same sentence, pops up from where she’d been lounging on her bed to sit at Ilya’s feet, gazing up at him expectantly.
“My perfect girl would never,” Ilya says, leaning down to pet her and kiss her shaggy forehead. Thanks to Shane’s rigid household schedule, she gets regular baths during the playoffs but trips to the groomer tend to be put off until after. Yuna will probably handle it while Anya spends the two weeks of camp with them. She loves what Ilya lovingly refers to as her “grand dog” but does not love the shaggy red hair that ends up everywhere in her house, so most of Anya’s extended stays begin with a trim.
Ilya grabs the leash to reward his perfect shaggy girl with a walk.
—
LTIR is boring, Ilya’s never done well sitting still and the rehab exercises to keep his shoulder limber while it heals are painful and boring.
“They’re painful because you’re healing,” Shane always says when Ilya complains. Which yes, thank you, Ilya knows. It’s not that he’s never recovered from injury before, of course he has, but the process gets slower every time. He’d hesitated to say yes to the recommended shoulder surgery after the playoffs last season, but after a hard hit into the boards in December and the slow, slow recovery after, surgery became unavoidable and it had meant the end of his season, maybe more.
It’s the slow recovery from the surgery that Ilya is trying not to think about. Training camp starts in September, a short four months away, and then the season will start and he can’t imagine taking his shoulder, the way it is now, into a game.
He doesn’t know how to tell Shane that the surgery he’d put off for months might have only gotten him to “not actively in pain all the time” and not “game ready.” He doesn’t even know how to admit it to himself yet.
He’d rather think about loons.
After their expedient first round exit from the playoffs, Ilya had gently bullied Shane into taking a long weekend at the cottage. Shane had wanted to stay in Ottawa to prep for camp next week, but with the camp in its eleventh year and the people the foundation pays to run the logistics, their physical presence the weekend before isn’t necessary.
Also, while Ilya loves their house in Ottawa, it just isn’t the cottage. The house in Ottawa doesn’t hold their first I love you’s, doesn’t have the well that Shane is still so proud of, doesn’t have the lake right outside their back door.
Ilya’s been cleared to swim, since it’s good exercise for his shoulder, but with the loons near the dock he hasn’t wanted to disturb the nest building process. He tried to walk down there one morning, just to look at the nest, but the loons hissed at him and made creepy warbling noises and he’d backed way the fuck off up to the house.
So no swimming until baby loons come.
Instead of swimming, Ilya gets his cardio going on long runs with Anya, does the boring, terrible exercises prescribed by their personal trainer and pesters Shane until he moves the couch in front of the window.
“But why,” Shane asks, carefully making sure he doesn’t scrape the feet over the floor.
Ilya looks up from where he’s petting Anya and also holding her collar so she doesn’t get in the way. He gestures to his shoulder. A bit disingenuous since it’s really only twinging now, but he’s pretty sure his doctor would balk at him moving heavy furniture.
“No I know, why do you want the couch in front of the window?”
That seems kind of obvious to Ilya, but . . . “So I can watch the loons.”
“You’re just going to sit here and watch the loons?”
“I told you, I’m a bird watcher now.”
“Name a bird.”
“The common lo—”
“Other than a loon.”
Ilya lives for this version of Shane, this exasperated but fond Shane. “A goose,” he says, grinning. Shane just rolls his eyes.
—
The loons finish the nest. Shane tells him that the actual mating is aquatic, not in the nest, but several days later Ilya watches the girl loon lay her first egg. “Do you think the nest is too close to water?” Ilya asks. “What if the eggs fall in?”
“I imagine the loons know what they’re doing.”
Ilya makes a noise passed down from generations of Russian fish wives before him, startling a laugh out of Shane.
“What?”
“Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they need help.”
“Ilya, you can’t help the loons.”
Three days later, a second egg is laid alongside the first. Through the binoculars, they look roughly the same size, a light brown mottled with darker brown specks. Ilya tries to memorize the patterns on the specks so he can keep straight which was laid first, if the loons move them around in the nest.
That evening, a summer thunderstorm washes what Ilya thinks was the first egg into the rocks along the shore. He knows he couldn’t have helped, that the loons would absolutely not have understood his assistance if he’d moved them further back.
But he still wishes he could have done something. The loons turn their singular attention to the remaining egg, so Ilya does the same.
—
“What did you order?” Shane scootches Anya off the couch and dumps a handful of packages into the spot she’d occupied next to Ilya, a couple with bright red lithium battery warning labels. “Also, you know she’s not allowed on the furniture.”
Ilya waves him off and starts sorting the packages, letting an interested Anya sniff them. “That’s your rule, not mine.”
“Then use the fur scraper, Ilya.” Shane plops down on the other side of the mound of boxes. “What are all these?”
“Oh, cameras.”
“For what?”
Ilya waves at the window. “For the birds, lapochka. We’re leaving in two days but I want to keep watching them.”
Shane looks down at the mound of boxes. “Wait, how many cameras did you order?”
“Well, reddit was very helpful with very many links so I got one of each to compare.”
“One of each?”
“Yes, I am very rich, it’s okay. Also, I used your amazon account.”
—
The cameras all come with a variety of apps to watch their feeds on. Ilya had carefully—without getting close enough to upset the loons—set up all of them to catch different angles of the nest and lake front. He spends most of the first morning of camp flipping through the various apps, trying to check on the health and safety of his remaining egg.
With the kids spread out in various sections of the Centaurs practice facility, the most efficient way the coaches have found to keep in contact is just by texting. Ilya had wanted walkie talkies so he could learn radio lingo like he’d seen in the movies but he’d been outvoted. Apparently no one else wanted yet another thing to have to carry around all day.
What Ilya had not planned on was how much a live videostream would eat at his battery life. During his fourth trip to the office to spend some time plugged into the wall, a flurry of texts start coming in from the coaches.
Boodram: has anyone seen roz, he’s got fans out here
Hayes: he’s not over here with the goalies, usually with the forwards, no?
Pike: he was in the office earlier
The office door crashes open and Ilya drops his phone, which pulls the plug out of the wall, which also crashes to the floor.
“Have you been in here all day?” Shane’s hair is wildly out of place, like he’s been attempting to pull it out all by himself. The first day of camp is always chaotic, which usually Ilya loves but which gives Shane heartburn.
This year, seeing the kids, their excitement about playing, about meeting their favorite Cens skaters, about life in general, just makes Ilya feel old. No amount of reminding himself that thirty-nine isn’t old in normal people years works, because it is ancient in hockey player years. Ilya had watched one kid, all of six, go careening into the end boards, bounce off, slide back into the net, and pop back up giggling. Ilya’s shoulder had ached just watching it.
That same kid had skated over to the bench later to tell Ilya that his dad had a puck that Ilya himself had personally signed his rookie year, when his dad was 10. Ilya’s entire soul ached after that.
“Not all day,” he says, in answer to Shane’s question.
“Ilya! The birds aren’t going to start doing tricks while you help me run this hockey camp that you co-founded! The egg won’t even hatch for another week!”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I looked up the incubation period of a common loon! I thought you were a bird watcher now!”
“I watch them, I didn’t say I read about them. Reading is boring.”
Shane throws his hilariously overfull clipboard onto the desk and drops into a chair, head in his hands. Ilya can see why his hair looks the way it does. He picks his phone up off the floor and pockets it after checking the screen for cracks before making his way around the desk, sitting on the edge of it.
“I’m sorry, kotik, I will come help.” He pulls Shane’s hands out of his hair, holding them together in one of his while he smooths Shane’s hair down with the other. Shane slumps into his touch, resting his forehead against Ilya’s stomach.
“Honestly, it’s fine. The camp runs itself pretty much. I don’t know why I’m this stressed about it.”
Ilya drops Shane’s hands to work his fingers into the knots gathering in Shane’s neck and shoulders. “Because it’s important to you, because you care.”
“It’s important to you too, right?”
Ilya uses the excuse of working on a particularly tough knot under the wing of Shane’s shoulder to ask himself if that’s still true. The Irina Foundation is, of course, that will never not be important to him. And the camp funds the foundation, but still.
The structure of the camp has never meant as much to Ilya as it does to Shane. Ilya likes goofing off with the kids, playing keep away with the puck, building elaborate obstacle courses on the ice for them to navigate. Shane likes order and discipline and blowing his whistle and making them do shooting drills. Ilya knows he’ll make an amazing coach some day, and this camp is just the beginning of that.
So, yes. The camp is important to Ilya because it’s important to Shane, because some day Shane is going to win the Jack Adams and Ilya is going to sit in the audience, clapping and crying, and point to this camp and say of course, of course he did, and this is where it started.
And that’s his answer. “Of course, dorogoy. I swear I haven’t been in here all day.” Just half the day. Cumulatively. “I got distracted by the loons.”
Shane leans further into Ilya, hugging his arms around Ilya’s hips. “I’m so tired.”
“Tired like you didn’t sleep enough and forgot your cup of coffee on the counter or tired like . . . what is the word like your whole being and your whole life is all made up of tired?”
“Existentially?”
“Yes, that word. Are you tired because of no sleep or existentially tired.”
“Just coffee tired, I think. I feel like these kids have more energy than last year.”
“You say that every year.”
“You used to be able to match them.”
“Well,” Ilya says, smoothing his hands down Shane’s back. “We’re getting older, and they’re staying the same age.”
Shane lifts his head a little, just enough to look up at Ilya, chin propped on Ilya’s stomach. “It’s kinda weird to hear you say that.”
“Why?”
Shane shrugs. “You never talk about getting old.”
“Eh, I did not say old. I said older and I said it in English so you should have understood.” This earns him a quiet, tired chuckle. Ilya runs his hands through Shane’s hair, longer now and with a hefty scattering of gray that Ilya personally finds irresistible.
But it’s also just another reminder of the passage of time. Ilya knows that a decision and its subsequent conversation are coming, but in the office on the first day of camp is not the right time for it, and he isn’t anywhere close to ready. “First day is almost done, yes? We can go home, order take out from that health food place with the noodle bowls you love so much, fall asleep on the couch?”
“Sounds perfect,” Shane says, with such a beautiful sleepy smile that Ilya simply must lean down to kiss it.
—
Of course, everyone wants to know why Ilya spent most of yesterday afternoon in the office when, famously, Ilya does not like doing paperwork and also hates sitting still. And that’s how every coach in the entire camp, some of the kids, and even some of the parents end up tapping into Ilya’s feed to track the loons’ progress.
“I had no idea you were so into birds,” Pike says. Shane gestures wildly in a see, I fucking told you kind of way that Ilya finds endearing.
“Pike I know you are boring so you might not understand this but birds are very cool. They have wings. With feathers. They fly. That’s cool.”
Amber, Pike’s youngest daughter and Ilya’s favorite of the entire clan, slides to a stop next to her dad, spraying ice over his skates. “Penguins don’t fly,” she says.
“Yes, you are so right. Very smart, you take after me,” Ilya says.
Pike sputters. “She does not, you’re not even related!”
Ilya just smiles at Amber and she grins back and Ilya thinks it’s lucky she gets her looks from Jackie.
“They’re not doing much,” Boodram says. “Just sitting on this egg.”
“Well yes,” Ilya says. “That’s how birds work.”
“What are their names?” Amber asks.
Ilya looks at Shane, and Shane looks at Ilya, and both of them shrug. “They don’t have names? They’re not pets,” Shane finally says.
The kids start suggesting names, everything from Mario and Luigi to Disney classics like Rapunzel and Eugene. Ilya would have at least suggested Flynn Rider. Boodram suggests Zane and Cassie, Barrett suggests Harris. The suggestions quickly devolve into pandemonium.
Eventually, Shane blows a whistle and calls the frenzy to a temporary hold, sending everyone back out onto the ice. Ilya, who has not been cleared for slippery surfaces lest he fall and reinjure himself, shouts directions from the bench.
Unfortunately for Shane, the clamoring over names didn’t stop with the whistle, and by afternoon has reached a fever pitch. Barrett and Hayes break up two fights between kids vehemently defending their name choices and drag all four offending campers to the penalty boxes. The penalty boxes are divided by team Luke and Leia—“That’s gross! They’re brother and sister!”—and team Judy and Nick—“Zootopia is lame!” Ilya privately thinks all four names suck.
“Enough!” Shane finally yells, loud enough and in a pitch so unusual for him that all movement on the ice stops and every face turns in his direction. “That’s enough. No one is naming the birds. The birds have no names.”
Ilya clears his throat. “Actually, that is not correct. They have names. Their names are Ilya and Shane.” He grins at the human Shane, who does not grin back.
One of the goalies cowering behind Hayes raises her hand. “Isn’t one of them a girl?”
Ilya waves away her concern. “It’s fine. Besides, Shane is a pretty girl’s name.” He winks at Shane and Shane, predictably, rolls his eyes.
“Plus,” Boodram says. “Shane has those childbearing hips.”
Ilya closes the camera feed to go to his translation app, and with only a few seconds delay laughs so hard that it’s probably a good thing he isn’t allowed on the ice, because he’d definitely have fallen.
—
Egg watch starts the second week. Shane does his best to keep everyone on track, parents actually pay for the privilege of being coached by these assholes, but Ilya catches him looking at the nest feed regularly throughout the day. By the second day, Shane bans phones on the ice, including the coaches, and collects them all in a basket.
Ilya very ostentatiously holds his phone up and when Shane glares at him, shrugs. “What? I am not on the ice.” He holds out his arms. “See? I am on the bench. You would not deprive an injured man of his birds, would you?”
“Yeah, Hollzy, have a heart,” Hayes yells from the other end of the ice.
Shane glares but seemingly decides not to take on the entire camp at once. Plus, someone should be up to date on egg watch.
—
Three days later, in the middle of the afternoon, Ilya checks his phone while Barrett leads the kids in skating drills and notices the egg twitching. He immediately blows his whistle and yells, “The baby is hatching!”
Shane tries to tell everyone that it can take eight to twelve hours for a chick to actually break out of the shell, but apparently even he would rather be watching an egg twitch in a nest than attempt to corral a bunch of children who have no interest in hockey right now. He redistributes everyone’s phones and kids sprawl across the ice, bundle up in the net, and fill up the penalty boxes watching the twitching egg.
Parents come streaming in an hour later to pick up their little hockey players, some of them with the feed going on their own phones.
Ilya, having long since gotten an external battery pack so he isn’t stuck by a wall all day, doesn’t close the app for the rest of the day. He wishes he could drive out to the cottage now, sit by the nest and be there when the little loon fully hatches and pass around cigars like a proud father.
When the baby finally breaks completely out of its shell in the middle of the night, Ilya is still up, watching the feed. Shane had stayed up as long as he could, but his sleep schedule hates a disruption and he’d fallen asleep hours ago, curled up against Ilya’s back.
The exhausted baby lies amongst the wreckage of its home for the last 27 days, tiny little feathers still gooey. Ilya watches its tiny little wings flutter as it struggles around the nest, tiny little legs still too wobbly to get underneath its tiny little body. He’s never watched anything be born. His niece came into the world during the middle of the season, he hadn’t seen her until she was several months old already. And he doubts Sofia would have wanted him in the room anyway, if he had even thought to ask.
There’s a reverence to new life that he hadn’t been expecting, like he’s connecting to something bigger than himself, bigger than this tiny new baby, a chain going all the way back to the dawn of time.
Ilya rubs at his twingy shoulder and thinks about that connection, about the enormity of life outside of the thing he’s been solely focused on for the last twenty years. He and Shane have made so few plans for after hockey, like Shane can’t imagine a life without it, and Ilya’s been unwilling—so far—to burst that bubble and remind him that they are, in fact, mortal men with an expiration date attached. He wonders how much more connected he’d feel to whatever this is (the universe at large?) if this was a human baby, maybe his and Shane’s, and not just a bird.
In the beginning, watching the loons had been half an interesting nature thing and half a fun way to confuse the fuck out of Shane. But now he wonders if it all wasn’t just a distraction from the decision he knows he needs to make. It’s a lot to place on this baby. He watches its tiny chest flutter as it catches its breath in the pile of eggshell and for a moment forgets about his shoulder, about hockey, about his uncertain future. For a moment he just revels in new life.
“You did it, baby,” he says to his phone. “Welcome to the world.”
—
The next day, thankfully, is Saturday. Camp is over and they have no responsibilities, and Ilya only has to beg a little bit to convince Shane to make the two hour drive out to the cottage to see the baby in person (or at least, via binoculars). Ilya is determined to get as close to the dock as he can without the loons noticing or getting mad.
They stop and pick Anya up from the Hollanders and head over to the cottage. Shane doesn’t even complain when Ilya holds her in his lap for the ten minute drive, just buries his free hand in her much neater coat. She takes turns licking Shane’s arm and Ilya’s chin and sometimes it makes Ilya catch his breath, how happy he is.
Immediately upon arriving at the cottage, Ilya lifts the big green adirondack chair without thinking. It isn’t until he’s put it down at the edge of where the loons start hissing that he realizes it hadn’t hurt at all. It had twinged, sure, but the pain that had been lingering on the edge of movement for months is gone.
It’s progress, at least, but Ilya finds himself annoyed at his own body anyway. The decision felt so much easier when his shoulder hurt all the time.
The baby already looks different than it did last night, covered in soft, downy little black feathers, like a little black puff ball. Shane told him on the drive out that it will likely have already gone swimming for the first time, since loon hatchlings can within a few hours. Shane has obviously done more reading about loon babies. Ilya decides, based solely on how cute and delicate the little loon looks, that the baby is a girl.
He watches as the loons all hop into the water again, mom and dad and little baby. The baby swims around, ducking her head under the water and shaking the water off. Ilya is still marveling at this miracle baby when Shane brings him a cup of coffee. He’s got Anya on a leash, which he hands to Ilya.
“Brave of you to bring her along with two cups of coffee,” Ilya says.
“I told her to be on her best behavior or she’d be sitting inside again.” Anya does indeed seem to be on her best behavior. She sees the loons, of course, but she seems more invested in licking Ilya’s kneecap. “Did you put bacon grease on your knee or something?” Shane asks.
Ilya looks down at the dog. “No? Russians just taste better than maple syrup.”
“Not possible.”
“You’ve licked me, you would know.”
Shane snorts. Waves from a passing jetski push the baby further away from her parents and her little legs churn under the water to chase them.
“Look at what a strong swimmer she is! Already! This is the Russian in her.”
Shane perches on the arm of the chair, sipping his own cup of coffee. “So many things wrong with this. First off, there’s no way you could know she’s a she.”
“But she’s so little and cute, look at her!”
“All babies are little and cute.”
Ilya waves him off.
“Also, you know the baby isn’t, like, Russian, right?”
Ilya groans. “Yes, I know baby born from stupid Canadian wolf birds isn’t Russian. But also, she is Russian, look at her.”
Just then, the baby swims over to loon Shane and hops up on her back, flopping a little as she gets settled in. Ilya startles all three of the loons and also Shane with his gasp of delight but how could he help himself? “This is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I won’t tell Anya.”
Ilya looks down at Anya, who has stopped licking his knee and has instead propped her head on his thigh for pets. “No, sorry, I have made a mistake. Anya is cutest, but this is close.”
—
The two camp sessions typically take up a large chunk of July, which means Ilya has all of August to watch the baby loon through her growing phases. He cheers when she starts diving on her own, when she catches her first fish. He coos at her when she jumps on either of her loon parents, and sings Russian lullabies before he turns in for the night.
David and Yuna come over for dinner occasionally and Ilya walks them both down to the water to show off his very smart and precious baby.
“She isn’t catching her own fish yet but she tries!” Ilya says. The baby chooses that moment to execute a very uncertain and very shallow dive and Ilya claps encouragingly. Yuna looks as baffled as Shane usually does but David claps a hand on Ilya’s shoulder, for all the world like a proud grandfather.
The birds let Ilya get closer now that they’ve abandoned the nest. The baby can’t walk on shore anymore and they’re full time in the water now. He doesn’t want to risk making them leave the area entirely so he doesn’t actually go to the shore, but he has Shane carry the chair down to within a few yards. Close enough that the binoculars are completely unnecessary.
—
The baby enters her incredibly awkward phase around six weeks. Her adult feathers are coming in but her baby fuzz is still there and she looks so patchy that at first Ilya thinks she has some sort of disease and makes Shane google chick development again. Apparently this awkward phase is just normal.
It’s the beginning of September, and Ilya’s loon summer is almost over. Soon they’ll head back into Ottawa for training camp, though Ilya still has yet to be cleared by the team’s doctor to play. His shoulder feels good enough for day-to-day and he’s been keeping up with his exercises, but when he thinks about getting the verdict he can’t decide which he’d rather hear more: cleared or not cleared. That almost feels like an answer.
They’ve mostly packed the car with the things they’ll be taking back to town. They leave a lot here, what Ilya thinks of as his lake wardrobe, mostly old Raiders shirts or sherseys from previous All Star Weekends. The last dinner at the lake is usually a smorgasbord of all the perishables and leftovers they won’t be taking back with them but that won’t survive until their next trip out.
After dinner they finish cleaning out the fridge, dumping what they won’t take, packing up what they will. Ilya and Shane take Anya on one last walk along the lake, holding hands as they watch the sunset. It’s a beautiful, perfect summer night.
The loons are floating near the dock when they get back to the cottage. The baby is far too large to climb onto loon Shane or Ilya’s backs anymore, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. Anya barks as they splash around and Shane takes her back up to the house while Ilya says goodbye to the birds.
“You’re a good, brave, big girl,” he says to the baby, who is so close already to not being a baby anymore. It makes him a little sad to realize that the next time he comes out here, he won’t be able to tell which loon she is.
It reminds him that change is inevitable, that all things must end, but new things always begin. And now he knows what he’ll do next. “You helped me make a big decision,” he says, voice thick with tears he hasn’t let fall. “Be safe. Catch lots of fish. Remember me.”
He looks at loon Shane and loon Ilya. “You are the best parents,” he says. “She made it because of you.”
—
Ilya is sitting in the corner of the couch playing Subway Surfers on Shane’s phone and Shane is reclined against his chest reading a biography of Canada’s own Marie-Philip Poulin. It’s been about five minutes since Shane turned the page though, so it’s pretty clear that Shane isn’t actually reading but is, instead, using his big beautiful mind to work through something. Ilya could ask, but whatever conversation will follow normally goes better if he gives Shane time to work through it in his head first.
An hour later Ilya’s left leg has fallen asleep and Shane has abandoned even the pretense of reading his book. He finally sits up and turns to face Ilya.
“Okay, so I have to ask. Why the loons?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been coming out here for a decade, and you’ve never paid much attention to birds before.”
Ilya takes Shane’s hand in his, needing that point of connection for what he says next. “I’ve been thinking all summer. About my shoulder, about our schedules, about all the things that hockey keeps from me because it takes so much. And I think that even if I’m cleared to come back, I think I’m done.”
Shane’s gasp would be comic at any other time. “What?”
Ilya shrugs. “I’m thirty-nine. I played twenty seasons in the NHL, it’s a good career. It’s more than a lot of other players get.”
“I don’t care about other players, I care about what you get.”
“Lyubimy moy.” Ilya cups Shane’s precious, beautiful face with its precious, beautiful freckles in his hands, absolutely undone by the fact that Shane still doesn’t always understand what he is to Ilya, even after all these years. “I get you. Yes, I had hockey, hockey got me out of Russia, away from my terrible family, and it gave me you. Hockey was the beginning, but you are the rest of my life. I had all I wanted out of hockey eight seasons ago. Maybe twenty seasons ago.”
Shane’s mouth drops open. “The way you just say things like that.”
“What? It’s true.”
Shane kisses Ilya then, kisses Ilya like they’ve kissed a thousand times but each one is different and perfect. Ilya will never be done kissing this man. Eventually, almost reluctantly, Shane pulls away from the kiss but stays close, his thumb brushing along Ilya’s cheekbone. “I always—” he starts. “I always kinda thought we’d retire together.”
“Sweetheart, you are not done. You still have seasons in you.”
“Maybe.” Shane frowns. “At least one. But if you retire and I keep playing, that means time apart, road trips where you’re not there with me. I’ll be in hotel rooms by myself again and you’ll go back to just being a face on a phone and we won’t—”
Ilya can feel the panic spiral starting and he kisses Shane again to interrupt it. The kiss is bitter and brittle at first, full of Shane’s panic and memories of loneliness, and Ilya keeps on kissing him until Shane slumps against him, soft and warm and sweet and—most importantly—not panicking.
“I have been talking to Wiebe about this.”
“You’ve been talking to Wiebe about retiring?”
“Well, no, that’s a recent decision. But I’ve been talking to Wiebe about life after retirement, yes. It’s good to have a plan.” He winks at Shane.
“What’s the plan then?”
“We’re still working on the plan.” Shane rolls his eyes. “It’ll be a good plan. Some official capacity that will let me travel sometimes and stay home sometimes. Maybe just until you retire too.”
Shane slumps against him, wrung out by the last few minutes, Ilya can tell. “Wait,” Shane says, popping back up. “What does this have to do with the loons?”
“It doesn’t, really. The loons just got me thinking.”
“About what?”
“Retirement. About life after retirement. About things I’ll have time to do if I retire. Things we’ll have time to do. We’ve talked about starting a family but it’s never been the right time, having kids with two dads in the NHL. It would never have worked before.”
There’s a quiet, almost breathless inhalation from Shane, a heavy but welcome weight to the conversation.
“And I keep thinking about loon Shane, with her baby on her back. I think about how safe that baby feels, knowing his mama is there to carry him when he’s tired, to give him a place to rest. And I think about—I think about my mama. How hard she tried to be that for me. Until she couldn’t. And I think about you—you are that for me. You have been that for me from the beginning, even when I didn’t think you could be.”
“You too,” Shane’s voice is soft and low, just on the edge of tears he hasn’t yet let fall. “You’ve been that for me too, even when I pretended you weren’t. Loon Ilya carries the baby too.”
Ilya smiles and again cups Shane’s face in his hands, thumbs gently grazing his cheeks. “And I think,” he continues, smiling into the face of this beloved man who’s been his home for longer than he could have imagined, “we could be that for someone, someone who needs us. And I think maybe I am ready to meet that person.”
“I am too.”