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Shane knows the woman at the door is Irina Rozanov before she even opens her mouth.
She has wildly curly hair, strands falling on her face and winding down her back, defying all laws Shane understood about hair and Ottawa heat. She is dressed in well-fitting trousers and a cotton vest, so different from the few photographs Ilya had shown of her from his childhood, billowy skirts and hand-knit sweaters. The slope of her nose, the rigidity of her posture, the collection of spots and moles from one cheek leading down to her neck, the look in her eyes that betrayed kindness — this woman made Ilya Rozanov.
“Hollander?” she asks, dumping her bag on the floor and not moving otherwise. She crosses her hands over her chest, wrists heavy with braided bands. Shane can only nod dumbly, moving sideways too late to be polite, and letting her walk through.
“No, I will wait for my son,” she denies the entry, shrugging slightly and again, Shane can only move his head up and down.
“Do you speak?” she asks, resting her weight on one side. “Sveta did not say you were a mute.”
“I do,” he finally joins the two words together. “Svetlana did not say you were coming.”
“Do I need to be announced?” she asks, and Shane is not quick enough to defend her because she is speaking again. “In my own son’s home? Do I need to write email before?”
“No, of course not. You are welcome anytime. I would love if you came in and sat down too”
She looks like she is considering it, but Shane can see that she is a woman with a plan. It is the same expression his own mother made the one and only time he had snuck a girl into his room in high school and she was waiting to confront him about it the next morning. Shane prayed his husband would come out of it alive if this conversation was to go down in the same way.
Her bag is still by the door where she dropped it and he notices it properly for the first time, large and soft-sided and stuffed full. She flew with that bag, he realized. Checked it, or carried it on. She booked a flight.
“No,” she repeats. Then, after blatantly staring at him for a few moments, she says — “Ilya said you are the best center in the league.”
Shane doesn’t know how to retain such a compliment, not before he can decipher if it is a trap or a compliment at all. He shrugs, feeling like a child doing so, and stops himself from nodding again like an idiot.
“I didn't know you two were speaking,” he says, because he did not. Since Ilya returned from Russia and had not attempted to go back home again. It was difficult, those years when they were finally together in every real sense of the word, but hiding from the world. Svetlana was back in Ilya’s life, and Shane knew that occasionally Ilya’s niece sent him a happy birthday or congratulations on the win text which usually went unresponded. But he missed his mother, in the way he said her name sometimes in his sleep or the way he eased himself into Yuna Hollander’s maternal spirit. For someone with more money than he needed, and with most resources available to him at the tips of his finger, it was frustrating for Shane to not be able to provide the one thing Ilya truly wanted.
“We are not,” she says, decisively. “He told me years ago, when he first came to America. Has that changed?”
This time, Shane couldn’t help but blush like a teenager. The praise didn’t come lightly from Ilya, the only real competition Shane had ever had in this sport. It was more believable to him that Ilya would compliment him like that now, than over a decade ago when they were fighting against each other at every step.
“I think he might be biased,” Shane says, and Irina shakes her head.
“He is not biased about hockey,” she says, which is also true. Ilya Rozanov did not have a bias about hockey. Ilya had a mortgage-sized opinion about hockey that he expressed loudly and without concern for the feelings of others, and if Ilya told his mother when he was teenager that Shane was the best centre in the league then Ilya believed it as fact.
"How long are you—" he starts then stops. He can see Ilya run towards the house from his usual trail.
Ilya is staring at something on his phone until he reaches the porch, which is careless and dangerous considering he is wearing headphones, but now is not the time to deal with this crisis. He yells something short and sharp in Russian, words Shane recognises, ya doma, moy vodonagrevatel! And then another word Shane recognises very well too, yebat
Shane watches something happen in Ilya's face that he does not have a name for. It is not quite any one thing. It moves through him like weather — shock first, then something that flinches, then something much more complicated that settles in his jaw and around his eyes, and underneath all of it, so quick Shane almost doesn't see it—
After that, Shane is lost. Ilya and his mother exchange rapid Russian, going too fast for Shane to even translate the basic words or verbs. Neither raise their voice, or their hands, but their words are sharp and dripping with anger, and hurt, and a third thing Shane can only recognise as honesty. He moves away when Ilya starts moving again, pushing his mother in with the bag thrown over his shoulder as they keep talking over each other.
Whatever Shane had expected their relationship to be like, this was not it.
Shane watches them argue with each other in the living room, where they stand on opposite sides of the table and finally start raising their volumes to a level Shane knows is rage. He thinks it is best to give them a minute, so he goes into the kitchen to start working on coffees for all three of them, assuming and hoping that Irina takes it the same way Ilya does.
It takes a few minutes for the coffee, so Shane leans against the counter to watch the pot go and listen to the highs and lows of Ilya and Irina Rozanov. Whatever she says is dripped in sarcasm, and whatever he says is clipped and usually ends in a question mark. When they fight, Ilya is always quick to jump to jokes and dismissals, blaming his lack of fluency or Shane’s stubbornness to fully understand the conflict in their fights. In his own language, he holds no prisoners. Shane is glad he does not understand what is being said, but he’s still nosy enough to try to eavesdrop.
When the coffees are ready, he puts them on a tray and waits another minute until there is silence in the living room.
“Thank you, Shane,” Ilya says quietly when Shane enters the room. She is sitting on the couch, looking out of the window to find respite somewhere. He timed it exactly right, he thinks, because this might be a break in their fight.
“Yes, spasibo, Shane, moy zyat,” she says too, voice still sarcastic but this time slow enough that Shane can translate. He nods, even though her tone has a certain bite to it. “moy zyat, s kotorym menya nikogda ne priglashali poznakomit'sya.”
“Khvatit, mama! On ne govorit po-russki.”
A moment of silence falls. Shane sits between them both and watches the steam rise in his coffee cup.
“Have you been here long?” Shane tries to ask, and he sees Ilya’s posture stiffen with the need to interrupt but one look from Shane shuts him up. You tried and failed, let me handle this now.
“Not long. I visited Svetlana in Boston. My first time in America. She is our friend from home.”
“I know Svetlana. She is a good friend to us here too.”
“I know, she was at the ceremony,” Irina says, pointing at a photograph over Shane’s shoulder on the mantle below the television screen. Svetlana and Rose, on the shoulders of Boodram and Hayes, dressed in bridesmaid dresses. Shane thinks he maybe understands the shape of the conflict between her and his husband.
“I’m sorry we did not invite you. It was a rushed ceremony, we had it in a backyard. We didn’t even have chairs. That is no excuse, but I hope you can forgive Ilya for it. He really wanted you there.”
She nodded, not forgiving but understanding. Clearly, this conversation was not over. Ilya considered something on the other side of the room, watching this exchange. Irina looked out of the window again to breathe with her eyes closed. They both bit the side of their cheeks, and Shane privately smiled to himself.
The silence lasts approximately four seconds before Irina slides off the couch and begins to walk around the apartment.
Not toward anything in particular. Just — around it. Hands clasped behind her back, a slow circuit of the living room, pausing at the bookshelf, at the photographs on the wall, at the kitchen counter where Shane has left three mugs and is now standing very still with his hand on the coffee pot.
"She's doing a walk-around," Shane says quietly, not moving his mouth much.
"I know what she is doing," Ilya says, equally quiet, from somewhere behind his left shoulder.
Irina stops at the bookshelf. She tilts her head to read the spines. Shane watches her finger hover over a row of them without touching, then move along. She pauses at one. Pulls it out an inch. Pushes it back. He cannot tell if this is good or bad. Her face does nothing useful.
She moves to the photographs.
This is the part that makes Shane's stomach do something unpleasant, because the photographs are — well. They are what they are. There are a few from games, team shots, the Cup — they won it two years ago and he will never take that photograph down, Ilya's gap-toothed grin and the way he is gripping the back of Shane's neck in it, both of them soaked and screaming. There are some from the wedding, small and unobtrusive, tucked among the others like they belong there, which they do, because they live here. There is one that Harris took on someone's phone at a lake house three summers ago, before any of this, before they were anything official, just Shane and Ilya on a dock in bad light, leaning into each other's space the way they always had, the way they'd spent a decade pretending was simply how they stood.
Irina looks at the wedding photographs for a long time.
"Who chose these frames?" she asks.
Shane and Ilya say simultaneously:
"He did."
"He did."
A pause.
"You have same taste," she says, and moves on before either of them can respond.
She inspects the guest bathroom next. Shane does not know what she finds objectionable in there but she comes out with a look that communicates something. She opens the hall closet, which is Ilya's, and surveys it with the expression of a woman who has suspected something for a long time and has now been proven right.
"You are still doing this," she says to Ilya.
"It is organized—"
"It is organized like a disaster." She closes the closet. To Shane: "He did this as a child. Everything in piles. Very neat piles, he said." She demonstrates, stacking her hands. "I said to him, Ilyusha, piles are not—"
"Mama."
"I am talking to your husband." She looks back at Shane. "Did you know about the piles when you married him?"
"We lived together first," Shane says.
"So you knew."
"I had my own feelings about the closet, yeah."
"And you married him anyway." She nods slowly, as though this tells her something important. "Okay."
Ilya makes a sound in Russian that Shane doesn't need to speak the language to understand.
The day is not very awkward after that. Ilya goes to shower, then goes to prepare lunch. In this time, Irina showers and changes into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that should look too juvenile on any other woman her age, but on her makes complete sense. Again, their curly hair dries in the same wily way, and Shane almost wants to click a photo. She naps for a few hours, recovering from her flight, before lunch is served.
“She is different from what I imagined,” Shane said, on his knees looking for the special silverware to put on the table. Ilya tuts, clearly too lost in his own thoughts as he chops vegetables too quickly.
“She is insane,” Ilya mutters, then something in Russian, and then the peppers are ready. “Who shows up without warning?”
“This is her son’s house. You never invited her, what was she to do?”
“Are you taking her side now?”
“I’m taking the side that lets me eat my meal in peace. I don’t want a cold war over lunch.”
Ilya protests some more before Shane kisses him into silence and starts rinsing the plates.
“You are Japanese?” Irina asks, sitting on one end of the table. The glass of wine in her hand remains the same as it was when Shane filled it, but she gives it an occasional swirl.
“On my mother’s side. Canadian on my father’s. I grew up in Ottawa, then lived in Montreal until we got married.”
“From Montreal to Ottawa, big change. You did this for my son?”
“He did it first,” Shane said, snaking a hand over the table to hold Ilya’s. Their fingers willingly crossed, accepting warmth. Irina watched this and then finally took a sip of her wine.
“Sweet. Does your mother live in Canada too?”
"She’s in Ottawa too, with my father. Very close to here" Shane says. "Well — close enough. About half an hour out."
"Mmm." She moves to the kitchen island and rests both hands on it, fingers spread. Her rings catch the light. "So half an hour. I am still in Moscow, in a big house on a nice street. Have you visited Moscow?"
“We haven’t had the privilege,” Ilya says, just close enough to a chide that has both his husband and his mother giving him twin glares. “On account of my marriage. To a man.”
There was nothing Shane wanted more than to be able to visit Ilya’s hometown, to see where he grew up and where he went to smoke in privacy and what clubs he went to and what his school looked like. He knew it was a secret desire for Ilya too, something he would never say out loud because the largeness of the desire would ruin him.
"Your mother is thirty minutes away," Irina says, "by taxi. Perhaps twenty five, if the lights are good." She raises her eyebrows at him. He has seen that exact expression on her son's face. He has seen it across faceoff dots and in the mirror over Ilya's shoulder and once, horribly, in game seven of the second round when Shane had turned over the puck in their own zone. "So your mother could enter this cottage whenever she likes. Yes?"
"She would call first," Shane says, and immediately understands that this is the wrong answer. The worst possible answer. He watches Irina's mouth press together at the corners.
"Yes," she says. "I imagine she would."
They eat quietly for a while after that, Ilya resolutely taking his frustration out on his vegetables, fork scraping the plate hard enough that Shane has to jab him in the shin with his foot. Irina doesn’t drink too much, barely half the glass as he dedicates her entire attention to eating. If Shane notices that they both avoid the peas, he doesn’t say anything.
He thinks about his own mother, standing in the middle of the living room, trying to configure the difference between Rozanov the Rival and Ilya the Boyfriend. The tears welling in her eyes as she said sorry, a word she had never had to say before, especially to Shane. That look of suspicion in her eyes when Ilya said easily that he would leave everything he had built to join a shitty team in a boring city so he could be close to Shane. You would do that? You would do that for my son, my Shane?
The truth of her question went unsaid, What’s the catch, Ilya Rozanov?
There was no catch. There was struggle, there was unnamed resentment occasionally, and one horrible fight Shane would never return to, even in his worst nightmares. But there was no catch, no gotcha moment. There was only Ilya Rozanov and his inability to do anything halfway, even loving Shane when it seemed impossible.
Shane smiles around a piece of broccoli, thanking a god he doesn’t believe in. Ilya gives him a weird look, is this funny to you?, and he can only grin at his husband.
It is later, when Irina declares that if they have a dishwasher they must put it to use, and orders them both to head to bed. Shane watches the back and forth for a while, Ilya explaining that Shane may have a dishwasher but does not trust it, Irina mocking how soft the North Americans have become, Ilya reminding her that he too is a North American now, and Irina pointing out that that may be true, but she was still his mother.
Ilya boiled with anger for a minute, hands crossed over his chest and lower lip almost pushing out in a pout, before he turned on his heels and marched towards the bedroom. Shane stood still, completely in awe of this version of his husband he’d never seen before.
“He used to wear holes into his shoes when he was kid, always stomping his feet like that.”
Shane laughs as he follows his husband to the bedroom.
Ilya wakes up before anyone else, and wastes half an hour staring at the ceiling before he decides to move. Shane will not wake up for another hour, so Ilya decides to make their routine breakfast for the two — three — of them in the meanwhile.
He thinks that against all odds, Irina loves raw tomatoes. He leaves one to soak in water for a while, while he boils Shane’s eggs and cuts fruits into the exact shape Shane likes (thin slices of the apples, grapes sliced in two, one bowl of watermelons cubed. He’s fluent in Shane’s diet).
Soon, Irina walks out. She sits quietly on the barstool at the kitchen island, placing a pack of cigarettes and a square lighter on the slab before leaning back to examine her son properly, that same gaze that always found Ilya when he’d done something mischievous he was hiding from his father. It unsettles him to this day.
“Shane does not like cigarettes in the house. And it is too early in the morning.”
“How domestic of you,” she says in Russian, but pushes the pack away regardless. “In deference to your husband.”
Ilya nods in gratitude, though they both know it doesn’t mean much. He pushes two slices of bread into the toaster, cleans the tomato and cuts fine slices to layer up on buttered toast, sprinkles salt and paper on it, and places the plate in front of his mother.
He watches her eye the plate, then him, and then she smiles. It is not a real smile, but it means just enough to him that he has to turn around to focus on something else.
“You remembered my breakfast,” she says, and he can almost hear her smile. “After all these years, and after all that complaining.”
“It is the only thing you let me cook in your kitchen.”
Because the kitchen was the only space free of his father, her husband. He refused to enter it, refused to help with the cooking. It was the only time in the day, the measly twenty minutes between school and hockey practice, when Irina would cook, or bake when the supplies were there, and Ilya would recount his day or talk about his friends or tell her stories from a book he was reading, and there would be no booming voice demanding to know if he had nothing better to do with his time. Irina would sometimes make him stand on a stool, hold his hands in place with a knife in one hand and the tomato in the other, and teach him how to slice without cutting his fingers off. Remember, Ilyusha, one wrong move and there goes your finger.
It doesn’t think about what being in the kitchen alone with his mother does to his heart.
"You should have told me you were coming," he says.
"I did not have your number. No way to contact you."
"You are a better liar than that. You had Svetlana’s number."
"I visited her first. Met her new boyfriend. She was much nicer to me than you have been. She gave me your address, so I came."
"Mama."
She looks up at him then. Her face is not unkind. It is also not letting him off.
"Sit down," she says. "You are making me tired, standing there like that."
He puts the boiled eggs in cold water, and all the cut fruit on a plate. He considers leaving, but does not want to give Irina the satisfaction of witnessing another tantrum from him. So, he sits next to her at the bar.
"I did not know how to tell you to come," he says, because it is the truth and he is too old to avoid it.
"So you did not tell me at all."
"I thought—"
"I know what you thought." Her voice is even. This is somehow worse than if she were angry. "Ilyusha, I know exactly what you thought. You thought I would be ashamed. You thought I would be like your father."
Ilya says nothing.
"Look at me," she says.
He looks at her.
"I am not your father," she says. "I have never been your father. And I am — I am angry, yes, a little angry, that you looked at me and you saw him. After everything." She folds her hands in her lap. "That is a hard thing."
"I didn't—" He stops. Tries again. "It wasn't about you being like him. I knew you weren't like him. I just thought— there are things that are — values that are—"
"I am a person," she says. "Not a category. I am your mother. I have read books. I have lived a long life. I have had a great deal of time to think, especially—" She pauses. "Especially these last few years."
"You are still in Moscow," Ilya says.
"Yes."
"Do you want to leave?"
"I do not think it is possible, but I wanted to. After your father died, I had packed my bags. But, I love home too much"
He has not let himself ask her this directly. He does it now. "Why did you come here? You could have gone anywhere. Svetalana told you, yes, but—"
"My baby is here." She says it simply. "Where else would I go?"
Something happens in his chest that he does not entirely have the bandwidth to deal with. He looks at the window.
"After the funeral, I thought you would pack your bags and finally come home," she says, not accusatory, just factual. "I thought this whole time, it was your father holding you back."
"I didn't think you wanted—"
"Ilyusha." And now, for the first time, there is something that frays slightly at the edge of her composure. Not much. Just enough. "I have always wanted you to come back. I have spent twenty years wanting and not knowing how to — there was so much in the way. Your father. The life we had. All the things that—" She stops. Smooths her cardigan, unnecessarily. "I used to watch you on television. Your games. I watched every one that I could find."
He stares at her.
"You did not know," she says. "How would you know? But I watched." A short pause. "You play beautifully. You have always been beautiful to watch."
Ilya has been told by many people in many languages and various states of emotion that he plays beautifully. His mother has never been one of them. He does not know where to put this information so he just holds it there, in the room with both of them.
"Does Alexei trouble you?" he says finally.
"He knew there was nothing I could give him after the will was read. He got the apartment in St Petersburg, and decent money from your father. So, he shifted his family there. I live alone in the house now." She does not soften the words. "Your brother is — I love him. He is my son. But he has chosen, very deliberately, what kind of man he wants to be. I could not watch that any more. Not after your father. Not twice."
"I used to beg you," Ilya says. He does not mean it to come out as it does, low and twenty years old. "When I was little. I used to ask you to leave him."
"I know."
"You never—"
"I know, Ilyusha." And here her voice does something careful. "I know you did. I remember." She looks at him steadily. "I am not going to tell you I was right. I don't think I was right. I think I was — I was someone who did not know how to quit. I did not have much choice in the matter either. I thought if I stayed I could — manage it. Shape it somehow. I thought leaving was a failure."
"You stayed for us," Ilya says.
"I told myself that," she says. "I am not sure it was true. Or not the whole truth." She is quiet for a moment. "I think it would have been better for you if I had gone. I have thought about this many times. I have come to — I have had to make peace with not being able to go back and do it differently."
Ilya thinks about his therapist, the way Galina says we work with what we have, not what we wish we had. He has been in that office for two years now and is still not always sure what to do with the things that come up there, but they come up less like emergencies and more like weather now, and that is something.
"I see someone," he says. "A therapist. Here, in Ottawa."
His mother does not look surprised. "Is she a woman?" she asks.
"Yes. She is Russian too. Makes it easier for me, discussing some things."
"She must tell you I was horrible. All the ways your father and I messed everything up for you."
“We used to discuss Papa a lot, but not anymore. There are more important things. My future, my marriage, possible retirement soon. I have a life here.”
I escaped, he says but stops himself. It would be too cruel to dismiss how much his mother tried to do better even in the worst of circumstances.
"I think sometimes about—" He chooses the words slowly. "Papa had bad seasons. Dark ones. You remember."
"I remember."
"I have had them too. Not the same. Not the— I am not him." He says this as much for himself as for her. "But there are things I have had to learn are not normal. The way the dark comes. The way it thinks." He looks at his hands. "Galina says sometimes these things run. In families."
Irina is very still.
"I think," Ilya says carefully, "that you have had hard seasons too. I think you have had many of them and you have always managed them alone because that was—" He stops. "That was what was available."
"Ilyusha—"
"I am not telling you what to do. I am just—" He looks at her. "It is not too late. To talk to someone. It helped me. It is still helping me. I think you deserve—" He pauses, because this is harder to say than he expected. "I think you deserve the same."
His mother looks at him for a long moment. There is a particular expression she has had his whole life, reserved for moments like this, when he has managed to outgrow himself in a way that surprises her. He does not see it often and it always undoes him slightly.
"When did you become so wise," she says, not really a question.
"I have a good therapist," he says. "And a husband who made me go."
At that, something breaks open in her face, slow and genuine, and she laughs. Really laughs, something Ilya had forgotten the sound of, low and sudden like it catches her off guard. She covers her mouth with one hand in that way she has, the way Ilya cannot do because he never learned to contain his laugh, and something in him that has been braced for days— weeks— longer, loosens without warning.
That night, Shane walks out to the patio to announce that dinner is ready, but finds himself unable to do so.
They are both watching the fire, a cigarette being passed from hand to hand, Irina’s legs in Ilya’s lap. They are whispering in Russian, but for once Shane doesn’t try to translate. He wonders what they would’ve looked like twenty years ago, identical curly hair, the big laughs and too-smart smiles. He thinks, thank you for saving him, but he doesn’t know who he is thanking.
He goes inside and invites his parents to lunch soon.