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The phone rang at Harris and Troy’s late on a Tuesday night. When Harris picked up, he was met with Shane’s worried voice. It was thin with fear, frayed around the edges.
“Is Ilya at your place?” Shane asked, his voice trembling. “Have you seen him, or heard from him?”
“No… no he’s not here. I haven’t seen him since yesterday at work butI don’t know if Troy has. Hang on a second.” Harris called for his husband. “Troy? Have you talked to Ilya recently?” He turned his attention back to Shane. Troy didn’t answer, but Harris didn’t want to leave Shane on the line to go look for him. “What’s happening,” he asked. “You sound worried.”
He could hear it clearly now, the way Shane was trying and failing to keep himself together. Shane’s answer came out almost a whisper. “I don’t know where he is and I can’t reach him.” Harris could swear he heard Shane swallow through the phone, how each word seemed to be pushed out past something struck in his throat.
“It’s been so long since something like this happened and I –“ Shane said and took a deep breath, “I fear, fuck I fear it’s getting worse again. His phone just goes straight to voicemail when I call him.”
Harris closed his eyes for half a second. Shane could be an overthinker, he knew that, but he knew even more that Shane always tried to stay calm and manageable and that made Harris think that Shane had spent way too long trying to talk himself down. That just made the fear in his voice sound more alarming. “Shane, I understand that you’re terrified. I need to put you on hold for a second so I can talk to Troy, is that okay?” Harris asked.
“Yes, that’s fine.”
Harris put his phone down on the counter and made a silent mental note to get a new one, since the batteries for the one he had now were long since done. He jogged over to the door leading to their patio area. “Babe,” Harris shouted again, “do you know where Ilya is?” Troy didn’t seem to hear him from the noise of the lawnmower, and Harris went back inside to put on shoes.
He had not come far inside the house when Troy stuck his head in from outside and took off his headphones. “What’s up?”
“Oh gosh,” Harris said, “Thank goodness. Honey, Shane is on the phone. He can’t find Ilya. Have you seen or heard from him tonight?”
At first, Troy only looked confused, flushed from trying to fix their lawnmower. His hand curled around the headphones he had just pulled off his head. Troy furrowed his brows, seemingly searching for something on his mind. “No, not since this morning. Why?”
Then Harris saw Troy grip his headphones even tighter, and recognition moved behind his eyes. Harris stood quiet, observing his husband. In the three years since he has known him, and since he got to know Ilya Rozanov, he has seen both men go through big changes. Harris would even say that the changes were on a fundamental level. “I need to say something to Shane, Troy, okay?” he whispered to Troy, who nodded as answer.
“Shane, honey, you’re on speaker,” Harris said. “Can you tell us exactly what happened, maybe? And we’ll do everything we can to help.”
Troy stood very still while Harris spoke, stripped of the evening he had been in a second ago, his whole attention narrowed and fixed.
Shane started talking, and it was clear that he was on the verge of tears. “Okay, so – uh where should I start.”
“Take a deep breath, Shane. We’re here for you. Don’t hyperventilate,” Troy said.
“Okay, I can’t reach Ilya,” Shane continued. He took a deep breath again before he started. “I was out walking Anya for her evening walk and when I came back home, Ilya was gone. He’s not answering his phone.” His speech was hurried but still coherent. “Fuck. Fuck, Harris, I’m so scared. I know it’s been worse lately and I’ve asked him, and he said that he talks about it with Galina but when he gets like this I just.. I fucking can’t reach him. It’s like he shuts down. I tried calling my parents and I, fuck, I can’t reach him and you know our car broke down last week and we haven’t fixed it yet. I don’t know what to do. There’s no one left to call.”
By the end, Shane was barely sounding rational at all, his words tumbling over one another in a rush. Harris’s chest tightened at the helplessness in it. Troy’s face changed completely as he just stood there, quietly, and Harris could see the gears grinding in his mind. “Wait, I’m thinking,” Troy said.
“Think faster, Barrett,” Shane said.
Troy got quiet. The time passed. Then his eyes shot wide. “What’s today’s date?” he asked and ran to the window and looked out at the sky, simultaneously plucking his phone from his pocket and typing something on the screen. It was a regular summer night, and the sky was dark and clear.
The movement had been so sudden that it startled Harris, like something had struck Troy all at once. “August 13, why?” Harris asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“What time is it?” Troy asked, clearly a rhetorical question said as he was looking at his phone at the same time. “10:45 pm”, he muttered under his breath, “there´s still time.” Shane was usually in bed before 10 pm, Harris thought, so he must’ve looked and called for a while.
“I know where he is. Don’t worry, Shane,” Troy said as he started undressing his workwear dungarees that he wore for all their garden work. “Harris, can I take the truck?” he shouted, and ran up the stairs, taking two steps at a time. After a minute he came sprinting back down in sweatpants and a hoodie, a backpack slung over his shoulder. “I wish I could explain everything now, but I need to go. I don’t have time to stay longer.”
The urgency in Troy’s voice changed the trajectory of their evening. One second he had been there in his work clothes, dirt-streaked and ordinary, and the next he was moving so fast Harris could barely track him, and Harris knew his husband well enough to see that Troy tried to stay calm but the clipped way he moved and spoke told Harris that every second was too expensive to waste.
“Yes, of course,” Harris said. “I trust you. Call me?” he continued, a calmer feeling settling in his stomach. “Shane, don’t worry. I mean, I understand that you’re worried, but Troy said he got it and I trust him. Okay?”
“Okay,” Shane said. “Thank you.”
“Do you want me to come over?” Harris asked. “I don’t know if I want you to be alone right now. What did you say, that it’s been worse lately? Did Ilya change in any way?”
“Yeah,” Shane answered. “That would actually be nice. Thank you.”
~
Troy zoned out a little bit as he looked through his backpack again to see if he got everything he needed, then he put on his shoes. “I got it,” Troy said again, both to himself and his husband. “It’s 20 years this year.“
“Yeah… I know, but I thought the date his mother died was in, like... June?” Harris looked at him with confusion. “Or am I wrong?”
“Yes – I mean no – you’re not wrong. But August is different. I’ll text you later, I gotta go. I love you,” Troy said and kissed Harris quickly on his cheek. “Shane, it will be all right.” He wanted to say that he promised Shane that it would be all right. But he wasn’t sure.
The uncertainty sat like a stone in Troy’s chest, and he hated that he could not give Shane the one thing Shane most needed to hear in a voice that would make it true. He hated the image growing in his head of Ilya somewhere alone in the dark, unreachable, closed off inside himself. Because he knew what it was like to feel stuck with no way out and sometimes not seeing any alternatives, and he knew Ilya well enough now that his silences and clenched smile saying ‘I am fine,’ were nothing but lies and more lies. Troy also remembered a memory of a told memory from his friend that conveyed that August was a wound that had never healed straight.
Troy got in the truck and texted Ilya, though he knew he wouldn’t get an answer. He tried to call. Straight to voicemail. Fuck fuck fuck.
He sent a text. It wasn’t delivered.
I won’t let you walk alone.
Then he sent another one, though he knew it wouldn’t be delivered either. Troy’s fingers shook as he typed, and every undelivered message felt like being shut out of a room he was desperate to get into. The absence of any sign back made panic climb higher in his throat.
You’re stronger than you think. I packed my bags, I’ll meet you where you are.
I won’t let you walk alone. He wrote again as he started the car and took off.
The engine roared loud in the night; the headlights cut across the driveway and the low edge of the flowerbed he and Harris had spent the afternoon working on and over their sleeping street in their tranquil neighborhood.
Troy drove fast out of their neighborhood. Ilya probably hadn’t gotten very far, he thought, but they lived in a less populated neighborhood than Troy and Harris. He stopped the car, briefly, to open Google Maps before he would come to the forest, where the reception was poor. The blue-white glow of the phone lit up his face in the driver’s seat and he forced himself to breath in through his nose, hold it, then out of his mouth, forced his hands to remain steady enough to work the map on the screen, but his thoughts were already racing ahead of him, outrunning the truck, outrunning the reason. He was unsure exactly what direction to drive and zoomed in and out a few times before he found the right spot. There. The mountain by the small lake. He dropped a pin and started the GPS, then opened his text messages again, no answer.
I know it feels like you’re losing the war in your head
Where are you? I’ll meet you where you are
The messages weren’t delivered, but if there was some kind of chance that Ilya would see them, he had to at least try.
And because he had to, not because he thought Ilya would do it, he sent another one.
Just don’t do it, please.
We got each other.
The words made his stomach churn the second he sent them. He hated them, hated the bluntness and hated what they admitted about the terror he was trying not to name too fully. Fear did not care about any of that.
He sent another one.
Please.
That one felt worst of all. Just a single word hanging there helpless and bare.
Troy swallowed hard, started the car again, and kept driving. He wasn’t sure he was taking the same route as Ilya but crossed his fingers. After a few minutes of driving, he exited the suburb where he and Harris had bought their house earlier the same year. His fingers thrummed nervously on the steering wheel as he tried to keep himself from speeding, but as soon as he saw the trees and that there was no one around, he sped up and when he started driving through the forest, on a small road with no asphalt, he turned on the bright headlights. The forest looked different at this time of year, during the late summer, with lush green trees on the sides. The potholes left from the thawing of the ground in the spring had made the road bumpy, but Troy didn’t slow down.
The road narrowed and darkened the deeper he went, the truck swallowed by trees on both sides and the forest changed from lush and green to pale pine trunks in vertical blurs and the gravel spat under the tires whenever he hit a rut or a pothole too hard. His breaths were heavy and his heart was beating with panic. Tears burned and prickled behind his eyes, and he hoped he wasn’t too late. He really didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t think Ilya would do it, but still, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The long and straight and narrow road stretched in front of him, and it felt like he’d been driving for forever when he saw the contours of a body far ahead. In the midst of the night, on the broken road, he saw his best friend walk alone. It had to be his best friend. It had to be Ilya. He didn’t know what he would do if it wasn’t him. The shape appeared almost ghostlike at first, only a darker shadow inside the dark. For one terrible second he thought he might be wrong and that he might have followed the wrong road or arrived too late or imagined his fragile logic that had brought him here. But then the familiar set of Ilya’s tall body made recognition hit him so hard that the lump releasing in his chest almost hurt.
Oh thank god, he thought. It was him. Troy released his breath and noticed how hard he’d been gripping the steering wheel. He slowed down and rolled down the window.
“Get in,” he said.
“Go home, Barrett,” Ilya snapped.
Even in the dim wash of the headlights, Troy could see how wrong Ilya looked. Not physically or visibly falling apart, but all hard edges and exhaustion and fury, shielding something more breakable underneath.
“Yeah no, buddy,” Troy chuckled, though nothing was funny. “In your dreams. Get in the car.”
Ilya glanced at him sideways. “I’m fine.”
He had heard too many versions of those words in his life, from himself, from people he loved. A knot formed in Troy’s stomach. He knew that Ilya was lying because he had lied so much himself. To himself. To others. For so many years. “No, you’re not.”
“Stop it,” Ilya snapped again as he kept walking next to the truck.
“No, Ilya. You stop it.”
Troy kept the truck crawling beside him, window open, the night pressing cool and damp air into the cab. Ilya would not look at him properly.
Ilya sped up his walking a bit, as if he could outwalk the car. “You can go home, I am fine.”
“No, the fuck you’re not. I know you, Ilya.”
That was the truth at its core and maybe it was the thing that Ilya least wanted to hear right then. But it was true: Troy knew him and the way he withdrew when the inside of his mind turned hostile.
Ilya stopped and turned toward the car, eyes wild. Troy could see his fingers vibrating. “What the fuck is your problem, Barrett? I don’t fucking want you here.”
The words were harsh but the damage in them was more tinted by desperation than anger and Troy heard that too because he heard the plea inside the rejection. Leave me alone, because if you stay I might crack open and I cannot crack open in front of you, in front of anyone. Troy gripped the steering wheel hard and took a deep breath. He knew that Ilya was hurting and that his words were nothing personal. Still, they hurt. “I don’t fucking care. Get. In. The. Fucking. Car.”
“No.”
Stupid fucking stubborn Russian idiot, Troy thought as he stopped the car and got out. The night air was brisk and clean and humid and a little chillier than it had been only a week ago. But it was not cold outside. Ilya’s skin was pebbled and he wore only shorts and a hoodie. Troy rounded the front of the truck quickly, gravel crunching under his shoes and the sight of his best friend standing there in the road made something fierce and protective rise in him.
“For fucks sake Ilya, get in the car.” He placed a palm on Ilya’s chest and when Ilya looked down and then up, Troy could see that the waterline of Ilya’s eyes was brimmed with tears.
“Please, Barrett? Just go.” Ilya’s voice almost broke. The plea came out small compared to the force of the rest of him, compared to the wide stature of Ilya’s tall frame. There was no snapping or anger in his voice and that hit Troy harder than any shouted insult could have.
“I’m not going to let you walk alone here in the middle of the night,” he said. In the silence, all they could hear was the rustling from the trees, and humming cicadas. His own voice came out gentler that it had been in the truck. It was still firm but less combative now, less fighting, because this close he could see too much – the shine in Ilya’s eyes and the trembling in his fingers.
“If you don’t get in, Ilya, we’re going to miss it.” Troy did his best to try and meet Ilya’s gaze, so he would understand that Troy knew, that he remembered. “Do you hear me? We will miss it.”
Ilya just stared at him, silently. Like he couldn’t fathom what he just heard.
“You remembered,” Ilya whispered and looked his friend in the eyes. It was something there, behind the sadness. The change in him was immediate, cut through his defensive fury.
Ilya’s golden curls moved in the wind and he looked so, so tired. Troy reached out and squeezed his shoulder gently. “How could I forget?”
“What time is it?” Ilya asked.
“Where is your phone?”
“It died.”
“It’s 11:25. Get in,” Troy said and opened the door on the passenger’s side.
Ilya got in the car. They sat in silence while Troy drove fast over the bumpy gravel road until they came to a clearing, where he stopped.
The night was silent there. No cars in the distance, no cicadas. Just the rustling of the pine trees. The truck went quiet and the tree trunks were pale where the headlights struck them, and beyond the windshield, the clearing led to a path. When Troy switched off the lights and they got out of the car, the dark night pooled over them and the air smelled of damp soil and pine sap and that moist scent of dew drops in the grass. They could not see the lake from here, could barely see their own feet in the darkness until their eyes adjusted.
They walked into the forest on the path trampled down by feet and paws, and above them, the sky seemed so close, and though it was like a thick blue-black duvet cover that peeked out between the branches, the light pollution from the city didn’t make it out here and the sky was freckled and crowded with so many more stars than they were used to seeing.
In the corner of his eye, Troy saw Ilya’s profile and the line of his nose and clenched shut mouth and empty eyes. Troy opened the back door and reached for the backpack in the backseat.
“Hey, you gotta help me out with these,” he said.
Ilya turned his head a little, eyes red-rimmed in the dark. “You packed for this?”
“I didn’t know what to bring, so I only packed to find you,” Troy answered, softer this time, and handed the backpack to Ilya. “There’s more things in the back of the truck.”
Ilya breathed out through his nose, and it was not as sharp as before, Troy noticed, then went around back to grab the sleeping bags and one of the rolled-up air-mattresses.
Troy knew the place only from the few times Ilya had spoken about it over the years. One time they had planned to go here, but everyone except Ilya got sick so he went alone. The hill rose steadily ahead of them and the low branches brushed against Troy’s sleeves and sometimes against his cheek and he could feel a spiderweb getting caught in his hair which made him shiver and then think well, buddy, you’re along for the ride now because his mother had told him once that all Earth’s creatures were important and a part of the matter and all the things that matter, that also makes up the world and everything in it, and that’s why Troy never kills the little critters sneaking into the house, and always gently picks them up on a newspaper and puts them down in the lawn even if Harris rolls his eyes and thinks he’s silly. Because his mother told him that. Because he still has a mother that can tell him important things. The forest floor gave under their shoes with muted crunches when layers of old pine needles and damp moss swallowed the sounds or their footsteps. Here and there, rocks pushed out of the earth in smooth grey lumps that they could use for leverage as they climbed.
Somewhere farther off, they could hear the faint clucking of water against a rocky shoreline and soon, below them, through gaps in the trees, the lake flashed with glittering reflective pieces like broken glass. It was small and dark and the tiniest winds rustled small waves on the surface. It held the reflections of the stars in the night sky already.
The climb got steeper before they reached the top, and they had to help each other out so they didn’t drop the air mattresses and sleeping bags and the backpack. The path curved around the hill and opened abruptly into a wide, open ledge, a granite shelf jutting out above the lake, high enough that it would take a considerable amount of bravery to run and jump off the edge and down into the water, but not high enough that you would hurt yourself if you landed wrong.
The lake lay below as an inky pool of darkness, the crescent moon reflecting in the still surface, and up here, the sky opened above them, enormous and vast and the entire universe looking down at them like a field of glowing light and even the tiniest constellations were visible and the stars were scattered so densely that it made Troy’s chest ache just by looking at it.
Ilya stopped and set his things down without saying a thing, without looking at Troy. A little closer to the edge was a spot where old fire-blackened stones still formed a ring. Somebody had used it before, maybe strangers, maybe Ilya years ago. Troy unrolled the air mattresses and Ilya crouched to help him in silence. Then they laid out the sleeping bags, one on each mattress, before Troy pulled a lighter and small kindling from his backpack.
“You brought all of this?” Ilya asked, kneeling by the fire ring and putting some collected twigs in the middle of it.
“Well, most of it was packed since our last camping trip,” Troy said and glanced at his friend. “But you think I was gonna let you spend the night out here with nothing but a dead phone battery, a deadly level of stubbornness, and…” he looked at Ilya’s clothes, “athletic shorts?”
For the first time that night, an expression flickered over Ilya’s face. It was tired and broken around the edges. “Not funny.”
“No,” Troy said, arranging the twigs so he could put the kindling underneath. “But I was fucking worried, man, you almost made me throw up in Harris’s truck, so I’m giving it to you straight here. Shane was terrified when he called us. You can’t do shit like that, you know. Just walk out.”
Ilya stared at him for a second, then looked down. “Sorry.”
Troy clicked the lighter, which only sparked. He shook it a few times before he tried again, and the small light lit up their faces. “I know.”
He touched the flame to the kindling and it caught the twigs with a small crackle, the flickering flames shining a warm light on their faces. “Can you check my phone and see if there’s any service here?”
Ilya turned around and grabbed Troy’s phone from where it was lying on top of the empty backpack. “You have one bar,” he said.
“Text Shane, please. Tell him where we are, that you’re all right and that we will be back tomorrow morning.” Troy sat back on his heels and watched the small fire grow stronger, the thin ribbon of smoke carrying away in the small breeze. “Harris is with him. You can turn it off afterwards.”
“Okay,” Ilya said, and started typing on the phone.
When he looked up, Ilya was already looking at the sky. Below them, the lake reflected a diluted version of the heavens, like a trembling second sky. They lay down on their air mattresses and around them the only sound came from the crackling firewood and the rustling of the trees.
The first one came suddenly and white, a brief clean incision across the dark sky.
Troy pointed. “There.”
It vanished before the word was fully out. For a second they lay there in silence, as if they had done this a thousand times. Ilya lifted his fingers to the cross around his necklace and rubbed its sharp edges. He looked at the sky and said quietly: “I wish Shane gets to sleep through this night without anxiety, and that he will forgive me tomorrow.” His voice cracked slightly on Shane’s name.
Troy turned his gaze back to the sky and let out a sigh. “I wish the apple orchard gets a big yield this year so Harris’s parents can retire next year.”
Another streak flashed, shorter this time, and Ilya answered immediately. “I wish Anya lives forever and never has bad hips.”
Troy grinned despite the ache lodging behind his ribs. “That’s cheating. You can’t wish immortality on a dog.”
“Watch me.”
The next starfall burned bright and long and fast over the sky. “I wish my father could go to therapy because even though he hurt me, I miss him in my life.”
When the next white streak across the sky came, Ilya grinned and said, “And I wish for pigs to fly.”
Troy rolled his eyes in the dark. “Yeah, that is probably more realistic than my dad going to therapy.” They laughed.
The meteors came quicker then, with their burning bright lights painting the sky and disappearing almost as fast. They voiced their wishes loudly, and Troy could hear a smile in Ilya’s voice. The wishes became sillier and increasingly absurd and simple and small and everything in between.
“I wish that our lawnmower would stop being a pain in my ass.”
“I wish that Yuna makes chicken parm pasta next weekend.”
“I wish that no one on the Centaurs gets injured this season.”
“I wish that we win the Stanley cup this season.”
Troy wanted to say that Ilya couldn’t wish for that because that would jinx it. But fuck it. “I also wish that we win the Stanley cup this season.”
They made wishes for their loved ones, for themselves, for people around the world. After a while they turned silent. Not because there were no more wishes, but because their weary hearts had slowed down. Troy put his hands behind his head and in his peripheral vision, he saw his friend keeping his hands folded over his stomach, his face still turned up to the sky. Firelight flickered over the underside of his jaw and above them the stars burned on.
A big meteor passed, long and pale and brighter than all of the ones before. Ilya spoke into the dark. “I wish my mama could see me now.”
Troy turned his head but didn’t answer.
“She loved this.” Ilya’s eyes stayed on the sky. “That is why August is…” He exhaled and started again. “June is when she died, yes. So I remember June. Shane remembers June. People ask how I am and how I feel and everyone thinks June is the worst because it is when everything ended.” He was quiet for a moment. “But August is worse sometimes because August is from before that. August is still hers.”
The fire crackled beside them.
“When she was good,” Ilya said, “She was very good. So light and so bright and she made everything seem easy, even when I am old enough now to know it could not have been.” He pressed his lips together tightly. “She would wake me up before sunrise and say, get dressed Ilyusha, wake up your brother, we are going somewhere. Just like that. Sometimes it was only a train ride to another town, to get ice cream and then go home. Sometimes it was the beach and sometimes it was the park.” His mouth twitched. “When she was good, it was like she was deciding that something would be beautiful and nothing could stop it and the day just molded around it and it became beautiful just because she wanted it to be.”
Troy could picture it too easily. A younger Ilya with skinny legs and too much hair.
“In the winters, she took us skating when it was not practice,” Ilya went on. “Just for fun. That mattered. With papa, skating was always with intent and purpose, so I think that maybe it is why hockey never became only pressure in my head, even later when it became everything and so big. She took us to public rinks where the ice was bad and there were children everywhere and they were so terrible at skating, but she just said that they were having fun, too. There was stupid music playing and she would lace my skates way too tight and when I complained she said that loose laces were how ankles got broken.” He gave a tiny breath of laughter, and in the corner of his eye, Troy could see a small tear running down toward Ilya’s ear. “She was not even very good herself. She would wobble and still insist we race and then she would joke and say that she only let me win because she is, was, a very good mama. And when I fell she laughed first and then picked me up and kissed my helmet and when I said I was bad at skating she would say that you only learn because you fall. And that would fix anything and erase all my embarrassment.”
Troy’s throat tightened.
Another meteor cut the sky, a bold swift silver line.
Ilya lifted his hand and pointed after it even though it was already gone. “She liked making wishes out loud and when I said that they should only be inside your head she said…”
Ilya released a sigh, then laughed loudly, a loud cackle sprinkled with his cracking voice from tears. “…if the wish is silent, then how will the universe hear it?” The smile faded from Ilya’s face almost as soon as it appeared, but his voice was steadier now, not constricted by fear or sadness any longer. Like he had opened a door he could not close again now that the memories started coming through.
“In summer we went to the beach, like I said,” he said. “Nowhere expensive. Just wherever we could go over one day. She always went into the water with me even if it was cold, and she hated cold water, I know she did. But she did it anyway and then we built sandcastles.” He turned his head a fraction toward Troy. “She took it so seriously and when another child ran too close she would look at them like this,” Ilya said and widened his eyes in a clenched angry expression, “but she would never say no if another kid asked if they could join us.”
Troy let out a quiet laugh.
“She would bury my legs in sand and tell me I was trapped forever. Then when the wave came too high she acted shocked, every time, and yelled she would save me from the quicksand. Every time.” Ilya shut his eyes for a moment. “I can still hear her laughing. Sometimes I remember her laugh better than her face.”
A small gust of wind came across the cliff and the fire shifted and sent a brief wash of smoke over their faces.
“When I got hurt,” Ilya said more quietly, “when I was little, I mean, and I came crying to her, she never told me to stop. She never told me to man up or something like that. She would always hug me first and kiss my forehead or wherever it hurt, even if it was ridiculous. And then she would say, there, now go be brave, it is okay. Because heroes and princes and knights get hurt sometimes when they are on adventures and slaying monsters, she would say.” His voice roughened. “I did not understand until much later how rare that is, that I was allowed to cry and still be brave.”
Troy stared up at the sky because looking at Ilya then felt too intimate, too much, somehow. Because he had never heard those words from his father and his mother never followed them to the ice-rink. He had only ever heard; ‘Stop being such a wuss. Get up again.’
Ilya kept speaking. “But sometimes, like if I scraped my knee, she would ask me if it was still attached to me or if we needed to amputate it.” He laughed again, quietly, “Then she would pretend to start a chain saw and say things like, ‘oh now you will never play hockey again, oh no, how terrible’. But she would only tickle me and kiss my knee and I would yell that I was fine.”
“She made me love hockey because it was fun. Not because I was good. That came second for her.” He swallowed. “People always say to children, oh you were talented, you were born for it, like that is the nicest story. But that is not what she gave me. She put skates on me and let me love speed and love cold air in my lungs. Later I was good, and she was proud, yes, and I thought she was silly sometimes… But if I had not been good…” He looked up, blinking slowly. “She said, Ilyusha love, it must be fun and you must love every second and every minute of the work, not only love the winning part. I thought that was stupid when I was young, but I think she still would have sat there in freezing arenas and cheered like I had scored ten goals. I didn’t understand it until I met Shane and had to really love the work so I could get better, because it was not given any more to be the best.”
Troy turned his head then. In the firelight, Ilya’s face looked so much younger, his sharp features softened by memories. Troy wanted desperately to say something that would matter. Instead, he reached over and rested his hand, lightly, on Ilya’s forearm.
Ilya looked at it and did not move away. “When she was not good,” he said after a long stretch of silence, “it was like the whole apartment lost all light and oxygen. She would stay in bed for days. Curtains closed and dishes in the sink. I learned how to be quiet and papa was so hard on her and made her get up anyway and it was like she was only a shell. She was so tired. I would make cereal and really try to not spill any milk because if I spilled I would cry and if I cried then maybe she would wake up and I would feel guilty for waking her up. I wanted her to sleep so she would not be so tired.” His jaw tightened. “And other times, when she got up, that was almost worse in a different way.”
Then Troy said his first words in a long time. “What do you mean?”
“Because she acted normal. She would get out of bed and put on clean clothes and ask me about school and make tea and suggest we do something fun and she tried to do everything right. But it was…” He searched for the word. “Forced. Like she was playing my mother. I could always tell. Even when I was small, I could tell.” He stared at the fire now. “Her smile would come a little too late and her eyes never changed with the smile. She hugged me less in those periods, and she would flinch when I hugged her. Not because she did not love me, I know that now, but because her mind was somewhere else.”
The sentence hung there between them.
“I hated those days,” Ilya said. “Not her. Just the pretending. I think as a child I almost preferred when she stayed in bed because then it was honest. But when she got up and acted like herself while she clearly was not herself, it made me feel…” He inhaled, his words shaky. “Like I was the one failing some test. Like I could not make her be normal, herself. Like maybe if I said right word she would come back fully. Like if I was better son, quieter, easier, she would come back to me.”
Another meteor crossed the sky, bright enough that both of them followed it. This one seemed to fall almost into the lake, vanishing above the far tree line. Ilya did not make a wish.
“When she died,” he said, “I knew that it was not because of me. But it didn’t feel like that back then. When you are twelve, you still count the days you were impatient. When you are twelve, you make lists of everything you could have done differently to save her.” He laughed once, harshly, without humor. “Do your homework. Do the dishes. Things like that.”
“You were just a kid,” Troy said.
“I know.”
Ilya was quiet for a moment, then continued, “And I remember that night when I was eleven,” he whispered. “She woke me up and said, Ilyusha, Alyoshka, we need to go out, hurry hurry, and it was a school night, so I knew it was serious. She brought our warmest quilted blankets and hot tea and we were so excited, Alexei and I. We sat there, in the darkness, and she said all her wishes out loud.”
For a second Ilya’s face folded in on itself, as if the force of holding himself together had slipped.
“She said, Barrett,” his voice prickled by tears, “that we were so lucky because the whole universe was being extravagant above us for free.”
Troy’s eyes burned as he stared into the deep blue-back night sky, wondering what was out there, millions and millions of light years away.
“And she said that if we were ever apart or if she was gone, we could just go outside and watch the sky because we would be watching the same stars because we were part of the same universe and that’s why we never would be really apart from each other.” Ilya’s shoulders rose on a breath and fell again. “And I didn’t understand, so I asked her why we ever would be apart. She just answered that someday we might be.”
Troy felt a tear run down his cheek, and this time he didn’t wipe it away. The fire gave a small pop, sending sparks briefly upward. They rose and disappeared among the stars.
A long moment passed between them. Troy could hear Ilya’s slow breathing, as if every inhale and exhale had to be remembered and chosen. “I think that is the version of her I keep coming back for. August. Her laughing at the sky like it belonged to us.”
The next words Ilya uttered landed in Troy, sharp and clean.
“There were so many times I wondered how she knew about the starfall that night, and so many times I tried to see one again. It was not until I was older that I found out that they come back around the same time every year. And so many times it was cloudy, or I was somewhere where the light pollution was too strong for me to see it again.” Ilya huffed a quiet laugh. “I tried for several years but did not see them again until the summer Shane and I got married. I was so stubborn.”
Another bright streak tore across the sky, almost startling both of them. This time Troy spoke first, loud enough for the universe to hear it and take it and cherish it. “I wish she knew that what she gave you stayed.”
Ilya turned his head but Troy kept going because it was true and because the sky was too open and honest for lies. “The stubborn part. The part that knows how to care for people. Maybe the sadness, too, I don’t know. But the part that knows you have to fall to learn. The brave part.” He turned his head to his friend. “That’s still her, isn’t it?”
Ilya looked at him for so long that Troy thought maybe he had said the wrong thing, maybe too much, maybe stepped where he should not. Then Ilya’s mouth trembled into a lopsided smirk and he turned his gaze back at the sky.
“Yes,” he said, barely audible. “Yes. I think maybe it is.”
Above them, the night sky was wrapped around them like a soft quilted blanket and it kept breaking open in silver lines, one after another after another, as if somewhere far beyond the meteors and familiar constellations and our solar system, something or someone sent them a message.
Make a wish. Say it out loud.