Archive of Our Own

"This nonhome was a fixed and solid building, full of domestic things, but it was all beginnings and incomplete projects, with no sign of coming out of the state of confusion that would lead one day to the regular cycles of home life. So a home is not only a space, it also has some structure in time." - The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space / Mary Douglas

-

In Seventh grade, one week before summer break, Kyle Murphy shows up with a massive orange stain right in the middle of his bright blue shirt. Sarah G, who sits beside Cliff in Social Studies, points it out, loudly and in the middle of class. My dad doesn't know how to do laundry - is Kyle Murphy's whined out response, followed by the shrug of his shoulders and a bright red blush burning across his face. Kyle Murphy has a crush on Sarah G (everyone knows this) and Kyle Murphy's parents are divorced (everyone knows this too). Kyle Murphy's dad can't do laundry and Kyle Murphy's dad was the only dad who didn't show up for field day three weeks ago.

On that same field day, over orange slices during a break in the class relay competition, Cliff Marlow's dad told him he was leaving his mom or rather – they were separating. Amicably. There were grass stains on his knees and his right shoulder kind of hurt from when he tried to run Sean over during the soccer game. Two feet away, Sarah G had a popsicle dangling from her hand, her hair pulled tight in two messy pingtales, and her lips stained an impossible fruit punch red.

In July, Cliff comes home after hockey practice to find a box truck uhaul sitting in the driveway. His dad is outside, leaning up against the book shelf from the basement they use to store Vhs tapes and his dad's CD collection. He's wearing a jean jacket. It's eighty two degrees outside in Boston and only getting warmer as the sun beats down.

Cliff spends the afternoon sweating through his t-shirt and trying not to yell at his dad when the reclining chair (also from the basement) keeps slipping out of his grasp. He notably does not swear when he stubs his toe against the metal base of it, only readjusting his grip and using every ounce of his pre-teen strength to drag the heavy monstrosity of the thing over the lip of the truck. The chair gets slotted up against a stack of two barstools and a box labeled clothes in his mom's neat curling hand writing.

On the porch, his mom crosses her hands over her chest as she watches them carry out the old wood smoker's table that has sat in their living room since before Cliff was even born. The wood stain is chipped on the corner from the time his older sister tried to throw a plastic cup at his head and missed, and the legs rattle ominously as Cliff pushes it along the burning asphalt outside. The table had belonged to his Dad's mom before she passed, but Cliff wouldn't have known that if his dad hadn't told him between gritted teeth and the sound of Cliff's slides shuffling backwards across the driveway.

They order pizza around eight, eating it on the couch without plates, and then his dad spends the night sleeping on that same couch. Apparently, according to his mom, there was no use in his dad driving halfway across the city if he was just going to come back the next morning to finish up anyways. The split was mutual (whatever that means) and this is still his dad's house (whatever that means). 

Around midnight, Cliff comes downstairs to grab a glass of water only to see his dad's sprawled form covered by the scratchy blanket they keep under the coffee table. He's wearing the same shirt he'd been wearing all day and his hair is mused, sticking to the woven fabric of the couch arm beneath his head. Cliff goes back to his room without making it to the kitchen.

In the morning, Cliff opens the utensil drawer with one hand, balancing his sloshing cereal bowl in the other, only to find that his favourite spoon, the one that is particularly good at scooping ice cream straight from the pint, is gone. Half of the spoons are missing along with half the forks and the decorative salad tongs that Cliff has never seen either of his parents touch once.

Cliff stares at the open drawer for a second, at the overlapping forks all in different shades of silver and the butter knives that are somehow all varying lengths, then grabs one of the remaining spoons (dented on the handle, tastes like metal in his mouth). The cutlery jingles together when he slams the drawer shut.

It takes barely an hour for Cliff and his dad to finish stacking furniture and boxes into the truck and then another hour for his dad to be satisfied that nothing will fall over while he drives. The sliding door on the box rattles when it's yanked down and his dad leans out the window of the cab, denim jacket pulled over his shoulders again, and says, "see you soon, bud."

The "soon" turns out to be every other weekend for two years until hockey starts to take up too much time to justify the hour commute from his dad's place to the rink.

At sixteen, Cliff spends the year billeting in Pittsburgh with a family that has two dogs and the type of house that kind of looks like every room was added in after thought. He comes home to Boston to find that John (his mom's boyfriend of two years) has moved in and his older sister has moved out.

  At twenty, he starts renting a bachelor pad in the city. The day after he moves in, he drives to Costco and buys a ten pack of ice cream spoons that all line up perfectly when shoved into his plastic utensil tray placed in the drawer just to the right of his brand new stainless steel sink. He gets a bar cart too, because that feels like something he should do, and lines the bottom row with the cheap type of whiskey his dad drinks and the top with a set of glasses his sister got him (also from Costco). 

The girl he brings over after the first home-ice win of his rookie season laughs at the bar cart shoved into the corner of his open concept living room, but she still lets him make out with her on the couch in between sips and then fuck her into the mattress on the sheets his mom ordered for him from pier one imports.

Three years later he pours two fingers of black label scotch into an imported european made glass tumbler and hands it to Ilya Rozanov who has a wad of toilet paper shoved against his nostrils to keep the blood from dripping onto Cliff's couch.

Roz downs it and then tilts his head back, hair sticking this way and that to the gun metal gray fabric beneath, and says fuck into the high, mock-supported, steel lined ceiling of Cliff's apartment.

Cliff laughs, downs his own glass, echoes his own fuck back into the room, and that's that.

-

Cliff was standing in the cracked out parking lot of a motel off the i-89 watching Roz chainsmoke his way through half a pack of smokes. It was raining and Roz’s hair was soaked, the curls plastered across the front of his forehead and dripping water into his eyes. He kept wiping at them with the back of his hand every couple of minutes like clock work but it didn't make a difference, the water kept coming anyways. 

Cliff had the passenger door propped open so he could stretch out his legs while keeping the top half of himself mostly dry and was treated to a puff of acrid smoke whenever Roz leaned into the car to relight his cigarette out of the rain.

After the fourth time he did it, Cliff gave up and exited his tin can of protection to make his way across the parking lot to the vending machine propped up beside the front office. The blown out images of pop cans on the front were so faded that he had to squint his eyes to survey his options. One of the buttons on the bottom right had been rubbed off completely. It made sense for a place like this; he couldn’t imagine they got enough clientele to justify the cost of replacing the machine. But then again maybe it would be a good idea, extra income or whatever. Maybe they could pay for a new paint job next.

He got a coke, pressing the sun-burned orange decal twice just to make anything happen, and didn’t bother getting one for Roz. The two remaining quarters in his pocket clinked together as he walked back towards Roz’s dark smudge of a form leaning up against the car.

It was Cliff’s car, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now felt increasingly foreboding the further and further they got away from Boston. The tobacco would linger. He’d have to drive around with the windows open for weeks just to get the scent out.

The rain was slowing. He read somewhere that you get less wet walking in the rain than you do running – or maybe it was the inverse, maybe he was supposed to run instead of walk. Regardless, his shirt was soaked through by the time he reached the car again and leaned up against it, slotting his shoulders a healthy distance from Roz’s bent ones.

Roz didn’t look at him, didn't even acknowledge him, just kept staring out at the motel with its off white walls and tacky blue doors.

The motel was one of those two floor ones with the balcony running along the top. Cliff had stayed in a similar one in Florida once as a kid. The whole place had been themed with pink flamingos everywhere – hanging on the walls, stuck in the thin strip of grass out front, and one memorable painting in the bathroom that stared at you while you pissed.

This motel wasn’t like that. You didn’t take your family to the middle of nowhere Vermont on vacation. The gimmick was the motel itself. The theme was the transaction of seventy dollars in exchange for a room to sleep in that probably didn’t have bed bugs. It was first and foremost a place for traveling through and there was something clean about that –  the transparency of it all.

Still needed a fucking paint job though.

A light flickered on in one of the rooms on the bottom level, a thin slice of off putting yellow streaming through the crack in the curtains. He waited for someone to come out, for something to happen, but nothing did. The light stayed on and the door stayed shut.  

At some point, maybe two smokes later, Roz turned his head, the rest of his body still facing forward, oriented towards the motel like if he moved too far from its general direction it might crumble. He blinked water out of his eyes, staring at Cliff as if they hadn’t spent the better half of three hours in the car together listening to a random indie rock CD that Cliff’s sister had given him.

His jaw clenched and he didn't say anything for a couple seconds, so Cliff stared back, took another sip of his coke, and let the silence sit. When Roz went quiet, you didn’t say shit – that was the rule, and Cliff wasn’t about to break a hard earned decades long routine that easily.

Eventually Roz must have gotten sick of staring at the motel doors and their unmoving occupants or at Cliff’s face, or at both. He flicked his halfie to the ground without putting it out, and made his way towards the front office.

“It’s broken,” Cliff called out after him, a little uselessly because he was already half-way across the parking lot by then. “The vending machine’s fucked. Everything's warm.”

Roz didn’t look back at him, but he didn't stop in front of the vending machine either. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket and dumped his unfinished pack of smokes into the garbage bin.

Cliff took another sip from his lukewarm coke can. He fucking hated Vermont.

They gassed up a couple miles out of St. Albans about thirty minutes from the border. Cliff didn’t really want to think about that so he got out as soon as they pulled up to the pump, wallet already in his hand. Roz didn’t argue, just popped the tank cover and stayed in the car.

Cliff filled it up to full and was about to head inside to pay when Roz opened his door a crack.

“Get garbage bags.”

“What? Why?”

Roz waved his hand in dismissal and shut the door without answering.

Cliff went inside, paid for the gas, a box of heavy duty garbage bags, and a cold can of coke from the back freezers, then tried his best not to feel like he was becoming an accessory to murder.

-

It is Sunday. More specifically, it is the last Sunday of May, and Boston lost 3-4 in the second round series against Carolina two days ago. The first game of the conference final is on Wednesday, and Cliff will be watching it on Roz's couch (hopefully a couple beers deep) unless the league decides to postpone for Montreal's sake. For now, he is only watching his niece attempt to push his nephew down the stairs in a laundry basket. There is still a beer in his hand, but it is first of the night and most likely his last, and the stakes are only as high as the risk of Sammy getting another broken wrist. (Last summer he jumped off the roof of the neighbour's shed. Cliff told him he only gets one wrist and to be careful on the drive to the emergency room. Sammy rolled his eyes and held up both wrists like Cliff was an idiot. And old. An old idiot.)

Something is burning in the kitchen, the sound of the overhead fan flicking onto high, and Cliff decides to cut his losses, following his mother into the kitchen as she passes him, slotting neatly on her heels. 

"You a firefighter now, Cliff?" Laury calls out from her spot on the couch, and Cliff flips her off neatly behind his mother's scurrying back.

Smoke is filling up the air and fogging up the little window just above the sink, so he cracks it open first then grabs a drying towel of the oven door and begins swatting at the air above the burning pan while his mother ushers his youngest sister out to somewhere that does not involve heat and fire and his mom's Sunday night chili. 

His mom comes back in, shoving him off the stove and taking the pan off the heat – which in retrospect, probably should've been Cliff's first course of action. 

"You can grab the plates. Should be about ten minutes if your sister doesn't come back in," his mom says, now participating in some complicated choreography of shifting pans and turning knobs.  

Cliff nods and moves to open the cupboard where said plates are stored, but just as he does, his elbow hits a wine glass balanced precariously on the edge of the counter below. It shatters on the ground with little fan fare, forcing him back to avoid the spray of shards two inches from his feet.

The stem is still intact, cut off neatly from the rest of the mess – cheap manufacturing – and he reaches down to pick it up, but before he can, his mom slaps his hand away, a tight tutting sound slipping from her mouth. 

"You'll cut yourself. I'll grab the broom."

She's gone before Cliff can protest, so he's just sort of stuck there, marooned on a kitchen tile island surrounded by cheap glass and disadvantaged by the thin make of his worn through socks.

Under the cabinet, just to the left of the largest shard, is a collection of crumbs stuck to the floor. There's a splotch of something brown against the cheap vinyl coating of the tiles. Someone, probably his mom, will sweep after dinner is done. His place never gets like this. He doesn't do enough cooking for the food to leave the counter and build up on the floor beneath. In his second year with the Bears, he survived entirely off of nutritionist planned pre-packaged meals and take out from the Thai place down the road.

When his mom comes back in she has a pair of pink plastic flip flops on her feet and a broom brandished in her hand like a weapon. The glass gets swept up into the dust pan and deposited into the trash. The crumbs under the cabinet stay where they are.

She prods at his feet with the plastic bristles once she's done, and he steps back.

"Sorry," he says, but he's not really sure what for. When he was ten, he broke their dvd player while shoving his sister out of the way after she tried to put in Clueless for the fifth time in as many days. It took his parents four months to replace it.

His mom smiles at him then whacks him in the knee with the broom again.

"You're okay?"

Cliff looks at her and leans back against the counter. "It's just some glass, ma. If that was enough to take me out, I'd be out of a job."

"I heard about that boy. It was on the news this morning." 

It takes a moment for her meaning to register. That boy. His mom always does this – refers to grown professional hockey players as if they were still grade school children, but he supposes she's sort of earned it after seeing him through four concussions and spending the better half of his life driving him back fourth from the rink.

"Yeah," Cliff says, but then feels kind of stupid and not particularly in the mood to be prodded at with a broom again. "I mean, I didn't really know him. I've never even had a conversation with the guy."

Her eye brows raise, like he, too, is still just a grade schooler getting picked up from school early with a split lip and a pink slip hidden in his back pack. 

"And Ilya? How is he?"

"What do you mean?"

"They're always talking about the two of them online. He is your friend. You should check in with him."

"You have got to stop listening to Locked On."

"Cliff." Her tone is dotting, half a second away from clicking her tongue in the way she is so fond of.

"I don't know, Ma. He's fine, probably."

She hums and Laury sticks her head into the kitchen, her normally loose black hair now done up in the most atrocious braids he's ever seen in his life. Apparently Mia has finished turning the stairs into her own personal amusement park ride and moved onto other worthwhile pursuits. 

His mom pokes at him (calves this time) and informs Laury she needs to set the table seeing as her two other siblings are useless.

-

They hit the border around five. The line was short with only a few cars ahead of them, a reliable looking commuter followed by a red minivan with luggage piled up and strapped down on the roof rack. Part of him hoped the family crammed inside was hiding something, maybe smuggling undeclared cases of fruit and firearms across the border, just so they’d be delayed a little longer. Or maybe the border guard would bring out a dog and find the half smoked joint that Cliff may or may not have forgotten in the inside pocket of his jacket. That would certainly buy them an hour or two at the very least.

A gnawing pit of unease had been growing in his stomach since they passed Burlington and kept heading north. Handing his passport over at the gate felt just a bit like having a gun pointed straight at his head. Sooner or later he was gonna have to start making some decisions, and he really really hated being the guy to push. 

The miles switched to kilometers and the road signs switched to French. Farms stretched out in between their car and the horizon, dotted with the occasional chip truck and roadside stand selling the type of curds that squeak beneath your teeth. The sky started toying with the concept of dusk around the time they reached the satellite suburbs surrounding Montreal. His niece’s cd had played through five times already, filling the rapidly shrinking cab with some guy’s whiny vocals and half-thought out metaphors. Normally, Roz would’ve switched it out half-way through the first song without even asking.

The neighbourhood they pulled into was on the edge of quiet, out of the loud compact chaos of the island. They passed through a mix of duplexes and condominiums and a few large houses all placed carefully along a straight line of planted trees and flower boxes. Roz took each turn without any sense of hesitation, a predetermined route set in his head without any need for the tinny voice of his phone’s gps.

A couple blocks from the St. Lawrence, the car slowed to a stop, engine humming low in idle, the music continued through the speakers, and Roz still silent beside him. 

“This it?” Cliff said, casually, as if it wasn’t the first thing either of them had spoken to each other in hours.

Roz nodded, tight and controlled.

“You want me to come?”

Roz let out a breath of air like the question exhausted him, like the very thought of Cliff speaking at all exhausted him.

“I don’t care.” He trailed a lazy hand through the air. Easy. Nothing happened. Cliff didn’t find Roz with vomit dried on his living room carpet. There was no glass smashed across Roz’s kitchen. Roz hadn’t gone missing for two days. It was all good. “Do what you want.”

Roz turned the car off, leaned into the back seat to grab a garbage bag from the newly bought box of them lying there, and then started walking without waiting for Cliff.

They walked for a block and then another. Roz’s shoulders tight and low, a steady determination in his gait that was mechanical in its efficiency, and Cliff started wondering at which point, if any, he should start doing damage control. 

If he was careful enough, he could imagine them on a different kind of road trip; he could picture, easily, a spur of the moment bang at his door and Roz, with too much energy and nowhere to put it, shoving him into his car to go find trouble where trouble liked to live. All good fun with a pretty girl in his lap or a bet on his lips and a couple thousand dollars hanging loose in his wallet, waiting to fill the ambiguous time between the end of their play-off season cut short and the start of summer training.

This was the third time in the near decade he'd known Roz that he found him like that; dead-stare set at the tv, limbs numb on the couch, trash filling the counter, and a body filling the role of living without much care lent to the authenticity of the performance. Trouble liked to live where it could squeeze in between the cracks, and sometimes those cracks were in Roz's house. Never on the ice though, certainly not, and so it was never enough to leave the tight confines of Cliff standing in the doorway – settled between the modern ambiguity of Roz's airy kitchen and his glass-box living room like he might somehow bridge the gap between the Roz on the couch and the Roz that had to be at practice in three hours. 

Reasonable deniability was the only thing Cliff could offer then. A laugh. A comment about having too much fun the night before. A garbage bag in hand, clearing trash off his friend's coffee table, while knowing full well that Roz had a cleaner come by once a week so it hardly even mattered if he picked his way through cans packed with ash or abandoned plaster containers still half full of meal-prepped portions. And that was kind of the point – right? None of it mattered. Cliff was Roz's guy, but he didn't know where he went during the summers anymore. Cliff had a trash bag and a car that he could force Roz into, but Roz had a cleaning service and a garage full of whips that cost more than his mom's house. Cliff had a joke and the kind of questions that never reached too far, but Roz had the room at his back and a sharp cut grin that never wavered. Nothing mattered so far as the nothing did not stretch into the room or the ice or the bars at two am. So Cliff did not worry the trouble over longer than the time it took to make the fifteen minute drive to the training facility.

Two blocks down and one to the left, Roz slowed his pace in front of a large, half stone - half metal house. The kind of house that looked like it was designed while everything else around it just looked built. Roz flicked his gaze up and down the street, searching for something, and then walked off the sidewalk onto the grass and straight past the front door. He rounded the edge of the house, ducking through the hedge of artistically planted trees with a familiarity that felt distinctly wrong.

Cliff stayed rooted to the sidewalk, feet feeling uncomfortable in his own shoes. He toed at a crack right in front of him, the bare hints of a weed beginning to poke up between the sandy colored cement and flicked his gaze down the street, trying to spot whatever it was that Roz was looking for but found nothing. A cat wandered lazily down the center mark of the road, weaving back and forth with no cars around to scare it off, but it was seemingly the only living thing around. There were no kids in driveways throwing balls into the street. No sound of neighbours chatting idly on their way back from wherever they spend their days. No scent of barbecue and smoke emitting from an unseen back yard. There was just quiet and empty space. Rows and rows of manicured yards and secluded driveways and nothingness.

The air still smelled like rain. It stopped raining somewhere around the northern part of Vermont, but Montreal was drenched in its after effects. Maybe it had traveled downwards, trapping them in the cross fire for a miserable three hours of splashing semis and cool air slipping in through the cracks of the windows.

He cut onto the grass, following Roz's path around the side of the house and dipping through the landscaping in a place where the landscaping was not intended to be slipped through. The back door pushed open with no resistance at all.

Clean was an understatement. There was a doormat right inside the entrance, the scratchy kind that seemingly appears in front doorways without any thought to who purchased it in the first place. The plain beige of the fibers was entirely uniform, no evidence that mud had ever encroached on its immediate vicinity, and Cliff felt a minor pang of guilt as he grinded the soles of his trainers against the mat.

A coat rack to the left, built into the wall in a custom made cabinet, held a winter jacket, a few wool peacoats in varying colours, and a handful of sweatshirts on identical hangers. The distinct blue and red shoved between a tan overcoat and a black sweater pulled at his attention with the same growing wariness as the border and the dairy farms and the suburban bleed of box stores outside the city limits.

The rough tile of the mudroom entrance turned into the clean white of modern marble. The kitchen was empty, and it sat in the middle of the living room which consequentially sat in the middle of the kitchen. An endless loop of bright and airy and "less is more" as if walls might somehow detract from the quartz countertops and the hanging industrial light fixtures.

I don't know what I'm doing here was his only thought as he made his way to the off white couch in the center of the room. I don't know what Roz is doing here came shortly after as he sat down. I hope to fucking god no one calls the cops was his continued mantra as he shuffled his body onto the center cushion and tried not to think about his shoes on the matching rug below. 

A thick hardcover copy of a visual guide to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts sat perfectly askew on the coffee table in front of him. He thought idly of picking it up just to have something to do, but the thing looked like it had never been touched before and Cliff was not about to be the first person to crack the spine.

A collection of framed photographs hung in his peripheral, but he was not going to turn his head far enough to see who they contained. He was going to sit here, on the center cushion of the couch, and think only about the drive home – what his strategy might be for convincing Roz to let him drive.

Cliff's foot had begun tapping, his posture slumping despite his best efforts, by the time Roz finally came down the stairs. He had a garbage bag slung over his shoulder, weighed down slightly by the contents inside. He did not come over to Cliff, he did not seem to notice him at all.

Roz went first to the kitchen, ripping two bright orange sticky notes off the stainless steel fridge which he crumpled and stuck in his back pocket. He then made his way to Cliff's left to stand in front of the framed pictures, staying there for too long to be considered a curious glance, but not long enough to be called a careful study.

When he made his way over to Cliff, standing just above him, his eyes flickered down to Cliff's trainers pressed to the fibres of the rug and then back up. Something drawled and sarcastic about Americans and shoes came out of his mouth, but Cliff wasn't listening. Instead, he was looking at Roz's eyes, the blown out pupils, the hazy shifting of his gaze as if he were not really in the same room as Cliff looking at the same walls. His body hummed with it too – something twitchy and feverish like too much pre-workout mixed in with his coffee, a heart attack or a PB deadlift waiting to happen.

And he should've brought it up then– the elephant in the room, the three time stanley cup elephant with four identical pea coats in four different colours in the elephant's hallway closest. Except Cliff's knees were bent at a ninety degree angle on an overly expensive couch and his heels were slotted back against the base in a way they have never once been in his life, and Roz had a look in his eyes that Cliff had only ever seen after four shots and just as many lines in the back corner of an LA club.

When Roz turned to leave, not waiting for a response of any kind, Cliff followed, taking the long way around to avoid stepping on the rug anymore than was absolutely necessary. 

In the car, after four blocks of deadly silent streets, the radio turned back on, low and waning, and Cliff found what he hoped to be some sort of middle ground.

"Im not gonna get a call from the cops tomorrow morning, right?" Cliff asked, and Roz laughed and laughed and did not turn back onto the ramp for the autoroute 35 south towards the I-89.

-

"Really?"

Cliff shrugs. It's eleven already and he's itching for something to do, but they're stuck in the suburbs – or his dad is stuck in the suburbs at least.

"Yeah, sure. It'll be funny." He says, 'cause it will be, probably. "I'll grab em. Give me a sec."

His dad is asleep on the couch and has been for at least an hour now. The blue light of the tv is lighting up the dividing wall between the entry and the living room, the low buz of a late night host filtering in across newly put up dry wall. He likes to leave the tv on, Cliff's noticed. And it makes sense, probably, filling the house with noise. His dad has always been loud, but he doesn't think that matters so much as the fact that his mom has always been loud and so have his sisters (Lorey especially) and their neighbours with their garage door that never shuts and the stream of traffic that pushes up like waves against the brick.

He pads carefully into the office, not that his dad would wake up even if he were to bang the door and drop his shoes. The smoker's table sits in the corner, papers piled up with dizzying intensity all across the top. The hinges groan softly as he opens the decorative door of the front compartment. They used to shove family photos in there, never organized, just stacked together, the shiny veneer sticking to the bottom of the photo above. His mom didn't have the patience to make albums or anything and it was his dad who took most of the photos anyways. He never cared much what happened once they made it off the film, only ever looking through the tiny window in the top of the camera, squinting his face into something square shaped.

There are no photos now, just a pack of pre-cut cigars, lying next to one of those cheap lighters you buy at gas stations – atrociously yellow and loud. 

He grabs one, thinks better of it, and then grabs another. He sort of wishes his dad was the type to light up matches instead if only because Sean would probably think it was a lot cooler than the dirtied, half-thought purchase of the lighter, but he has to make do.

Outside, Sean is sitting in the grass a foot from the fence that backs up into the neighbours yard. It's dark enough that he can just barely make out his shoulders and his bare feet poking at the dirt.

Cliff chucks the lighter at his head. Sean catches it a half a second late, fumbling for a moment, before he tosses the lighter up and down and up and down.

"You know Devin's brother could probably get us weed next time."

Cliff scrunches up his face, trying to work out if his dad would care if they smoked weed in the back yard and then trying to work out if he should care if his dad cares if they smoke weed in the back yard.

"Yeah sure, man."

The tip of Sean's nose lights up red as he flicks the lighter on then dips back into darkness. On and off and on and off again. 

"How's hockey?"

"What?" Cliff says as he sits down next to Sean, grabbing the lighter out of his hand with flame still burning. 

He lights the tip of the cigar, sticking it in his mouth for a second to help the flame catch. He's never actually done this before. The smoke tastes bad, something acrid and bitter but he inhales it deeply anyways and nearly hacks out a lung.

Sean laughs, loud and mean. Cliff shoves the cigar into his hand.

"It's fine."

"Alright, man," Sean says, a moment of silence between responses, like Cliff said something weird. The lighter clicks on. Sean doesn't choke on the smoke, but his face scrunches up anyways.

"I might go to Pittsburgh. Next year."

"Why the fuck would you do that?"

A shrug, again. A whatever. Cliff is taller than Sean, but he's taller than most people in his class and the second tallest on his team despite being the second youngest.

"Can't stay in Boston forever."

"I guess." Sean is digging a steady dent into the grass with his heel, leaving holes like a dog. The grass is dead back here, odd patches of yellow where there should be green. "Just don't forget about us, yeah?" 

Cliff doesn't know who us is, and Sean doesn't elaborate. He never does, usually. It's all oneliners and clipped shoves from him. All "that was a shit pass" followed by a basketball thrown his way not two minutes later.

Sean is staring at the fence in front of them, cigar pinched between his finger and his thumb like it's a particularly large joint, his other hand flicking the lighter absentmindedly, and his heel still making slow grinding motions into the earth. The fence came with the house. It's sort of ugly with deep worn grooves and sun-rotted edges. His dad suggested that Cliff come over and help him rip it out. They could make an afternoon out of it and put up a new one. He said the same thing about their front porch when Cliff was eleven, but Cliff is fifteen now and the paint's still peeling and the third step still caves in.

"Not my fault if you're a forgettable kinda guy."

Sean laughs again, the sound nasally, coming up through his nose. "Fuck off, Cliff."

And yeah, sure, fair. He's pretty good at fucking off.

Cliff throws up half way through the second cigar. Sean spits up bile not a minute later. Apparently, supposedly, you are not supposed to inhale cigar smoke. They're for taste only (whatever the fuck that means).

-

The city both compressed and expanded as they crossed over the St. Lawrence and onto the island. The hazy lights of gridded up déps and the bright white of late night shops blinked in and out as they passed blocks of duplexes smashed into each other, their spiraling metal fire escapes crossing up and over until the whole block looked like one big amalgamation of brick and rusted steel. It looked a little bit like Boston at night – more french, but with the same bleed between space. Your driveway was your neighbours driveway, and if you shoveled your own steps, you better make damn sure you shovel your neighbours too. It was the kind of place that made privacy feel like a concept of theory rather than actionable reality. An opt-in not an opt-out. You had to make the active choice to close your blinds if you didn't want the whole street sitting in for dinner.

Roz navigated them easily up one-ways and through crossing lanes of four way traffic, ignoring the constant honking and the weird way Quebec sets up their traffic lights. Eventually, he pulled into a city parking lot that turned into an alleyway which turned into another alleyway. They came to a stop behind a concrete apartment building, beside a metal service door.

"So, same deal, right?" Cliff asked because he was stupid, probably, or antsy, or a little bit sick of the silence.

Roz glared at the alley thinning out in front of them, and if he kept looking Cliff feared the bricks might begin to collapse in on each other, one after the other until the dim glare of passing headlights was cut out entirely.

"Jesus, Marley. Do whatever the fuck you want. If you want to come, come."

As if Cliff had any choice in the matter at all.

The car door slammed shut and Cliff found himself standing next to Roz in front of the painted metal door, the entire box of garbage bags in one hand and a set of keys in the other. Their shoes clanged on the steps on the way up, the metallic sound echoing across the stairwell and following them up to the third floor.

The apartment was smaller than the house, but it was structured in the same open concept flow which crushed the kitchen and the living room and the entryway into one continuous space like every other overpriced bachelor pad built in the last ten years.

Roz did not wait for Cliff; he kicked off his shoes in the entry way, not bothering to line them up on the neatly organized shoe rack beside the door, and immediately shouldered past to head up the stairs. Cliff was once again left down stairs to do something or anything that did not involve questions or answers or a Roz that was not shifty about the details for once in his god damn life. 

A nauseating image of an endless amount of Montreal apartments dogged Cliff, and he could imagine then, standing alone in consecutive open concept living rooms, each one smaller than the last but no less expensive, until they finally made it to one no bigger than a box. Wooden and polished and six feet down.

He stared at the couch and did not linger on the thought. It was smaller, a simple L-shape instead of the sprawling sectional that had taken up the floor space of the house, but with the same collection of ugly decoration pillows lining the corners. One of the cushions lay flat as if thrown there rather than placed. There was a rug under the couch just the same, but Cliff could make out the barest hint of ware patterns beginning to form from the outer edge leading to the coffee table (stained wood instead of glass) on which a book sat, coloured tabs poking out the sides and front. Next to it, a notebook was shoved with loose papers, a pen rolling off the edge.

He could sit on the couch – wait patiently again, fuck off until Roz came downstairs with another garbage bag full of stuff that was not his to shove into a garbage bag to begin with, but he knew with the sort odd sense of premonition that made it's way down from his ankles and into the soles of his runners that he wouldn't be able to stomache it. He knew, more so than in the house with its clean counter tops, that he should not be here. He would have to walk across that rug on the same path that had already been worn in by someone else and sit on the guy's couch that had been sat on many many times before. He was a stranger here, even if Roz, for some reason, was not. 

A carve out of occupancy crossed the apartment that no one was around to clean up. On the kitchen counter sat a bundle of bananas, already beginning to brown. A seat was pulled back just slightly from the table as if pushed back in a rush of a busy morning. Dust collected along the edges of the trim boards, not from lack of presence but from the kind of unavoidable dirt that clung to the daily slog of coming and going without time to run a vacuum cleaner. He wondered, if he were to duck his head under the kitchen counter, if he would find a small pile of crumbs there, straight from the pan to the floor.

Slung over the middle section of the back of the couch, was a dark hoodie folded over itself and thrown off without care. Half of the logo was visible, and Cliff did not mean to study it but the gold caught his eye and some engrained part of him built over the past decade leaned in like a homing signal. It was the old design; the Bear's marketing team had retired it five years ago and with another five it would probably be considered vintage.

He cut around the back of the couch, and flipped the hoodie until it was spread out fully. There, right under the logo, where he knew it would be, was a blotchy bleach stain about an inch long. Flores had asked five different girls that night if they had a tide pen before Roz had come back from the bar. The sleeves were fraying and the thick fabric was soft under Cliff's touch, thinning across the chest. Roz had that same hoodie since his rookie season, refused to wear a new one.

He looped around to the front of the couch and flipped open the book on the coffee table. The tabs were all accompanied with neatly written sticky notes, questions and short analysis summaries, but every so often a messy scrawl joined the printed comments. Some serious additions, some not. Some in Cyrlic, some in English. A notable addition simply depicted a shit poor attempt at drawing two stick figures playing hockey with the comment – words are hard for you, I know – put puck in the net.

He shut the book and went to toe off his shoes in the entryway. Two sets of trainers sat on the rack, one pair of Rebooks and the other Adidas. There was an empty spot on that top rack right in between a sensible pair of leather boots and casual slides, and he was no less than certain that if he were to bend down and pick up Roz's carelessly flung shoes in the door way that they would fit perfectly right into that gap.

Then he was in the kitchen, flinging open cupboard doors with abandon, and staring at two carved japanese glass whiskey tumblers that belonged to a matching set of four in Roz's liquor cabinet back in Boston. He was in front of the opened fridge, staring at the top shelf that contained three cans of ginger ale and a half pack of Molsons. Hollander didn't drink during the season, he read about that somewhere– he must have. The Voyagers had just finished the second round series. There were too many forks in the cutlery drawer and too many mugs above the sink. On the fridge door, a magnet, the shitty touristy kind you pick up from a gas station in middle-America, held up a note in that same thoughtless scribble that littered the pages of the coffee table book. Out of greek yogurt, left you something upstairs for when you get back.

Then he was at the far wall, directly across from the floor to ceiling windows and staring at a collection of photos that looked more like a shrine than anything else. A messy collection alternating between Roz and Hollander, some framed, but most pinned up in after thought, bare against the beige of the walls. 

A photo of Roz, his face only half in frame with one brow cocked in question, sitting in a car that was clearly not his. The image was blurry as if whoever took it had done so quickly and with little finesse. Next to it was a photo of Hollander with a backwards cap on and his bare arms crossed across his chest shot from the waist up standing on a trail surrounded by trees. Another pair depicted Roz with a boyish grin plastered across his face, wet hair dripping down his forehead and a lake in the background. The one beside it, clearly taken in the same location showed Hollander, equally drenched, with a disapproving grimace beginning to tug up ever so slightly at the corners of his mouth.

There was only one photo of the two of them together: a framed selfie of them both in ill-fitting suits with stage lights glaring above, looking younger than Cliff ever remembers Roz being. It was printed out on paper, and a folded crease cut vertically and horizontally through the middle, dividing the image in quarters and flattened by the glass of the frame. In the bottom corner was a scrawled cyrillic note followed by Roz's ostentatious signature like he had signed the photo for a fan. 

Almost all of the photos, excluding the one of the two of them together, were taken during the summer. 

Cliff didn't know where Roz spent his summers. Cliff once drank so much vodka out of Roz's stupid expensive imported whiskey tumblers that he threw up in his upstairs' toilet before they even made it out for the night. Cliff was sitting right across from Flores when he spilled a blowjob shot on Roz's favourite hoodie in a shitty bar in Buffalo. 

He grabbed the hoodie off the back of the couch. It was soft, catching against his calluses the way over washed things did, and he did not have the slightest clue what he was going to do with it. Throw it at Roz, maybe. Hang it up like some fuck you painting in a hotel, abstract lines pixalated across a cheaply made canvas that meant absolutely nothing. A white stain like abstract splash art. Ten years and also here is a dead man's home. Here is a dead man's couch and a dead man's coffee table and a dead man's book shelf. Five hours in a car, five hours of silence, and a stained hoodie that could not have possibly made the journey with them but was here all the same.

The stairs did not creak as he went up them though he felt as if they should, and it's odd to be angry at the silence of well built architecture, but he felt like slamming his heels into the polished wood regardless. 

His mother had invited Roz over for Sunday dinner, once and then a couple times more. That boy was what she called him. That Russian boy because he could not possibly be Ilya Rozanov, youngest captain in major league hockey in her home with its no shoes rule that constantly got broken and its carpet covered steps matted down to the bare wood underneath. He did not pass on the invitation. He did not think Roz could fit through the door frame.

At some point, probably, Cliff should've fixed his mom's front porch steps. A couple years ago, John spent a weekend shepherding wood and paint back from the home hardware in his sister's truck – or at least, Cliff assumed he did. Cliff was in North Carolina and hadn't noticed the replaced boards until September.

The stairs of the loft opened up directly into a bedroom. Roz was standing right there in the middle, every drawer flung out around him, his feet anchored to the only spot of floor that was not covered in a sea of crumpled clothing.

Cliff added one more to the pile, throwing the hoodie at Roz's feet. 

"What is this, Roz?"

Roz wasn't facing him, but he turned his head just a fraction to glance at the black fabric by his feet. "A hoodie. Have the concussions finally done you in? Is sweater with hood attached that you –"

"Fuck you, man. You know what I mean."

It was like prying teeth or something worse, like a molar knocked around enough to taste blood but not enough to spit out into your palm, and maybe that was Cliff's fault. He never should've let Roz get in his car, he never should've offered up his car in the first place. His perpetual need to sit passenger while Roz ate miles like they meant nothing. Never asking further than the next fifteen minutes would allow.

"I'm cleaning." Roz said as he leaned down to grab the hoodie and shove it into the empty garbage bag sitting in front of him. There was something feverish about it, the motions too fast on the wrong beat and then too slow on the next. "Hollander can not do it, so."

Roz shrugged, easy as nothing – like they weren't in a dead man's bedroom, like Hollander would walk up the stairs at any moment. Cliff sucked in a breath and watched Roz throw in another item of clothing without even glancing at it. No pattern, just a man possessed by a clock that Cliff could not see. One and then the next, the bag slowly beginning to droop with weight, the black plastic dropping closer to the ground each time.

"Can you look at me?"

Roz did not stop, only picking up a black t-shirt and smashing it into a ball before adding it to the bag.

"You are not as pretty as you think you are, Marley." 

"Fuck, okay." And then he walked over and grabbed the bag out of Roz's hand. It went with no resistance, slipping out of his slack grip. "You're starting to freak me out here. I know you respected him. I get that, and I didn't say shit when the Rose Landrey thing happened, but your face is plastered on his living room wall and this is –" he gestured at Roz, at his still form, at the mess of Hollander's shit around him as if that might somehow bring words to whatever was happening. It didn't and Roz just stared at him, irritation ripe across his face. 

He dragged a hand through his hair, the strands parting easily. He hadn't had time to put product in this morning. "I don't know what this is."

"Nothing. It is nothing."

"Don't give me that. I drove across the fucking border for you, so don't do that. I know you. Believe it or not, Roz, but I think I've known you long enough to know when something is going on. And this. This is not nothing."

"You would think after all this time, you would know when to shut up then, yes?"

"Roz–"

" – No, I did not ask you to come. It is not my fault that you follow me like a fucking dog."

" – If I let you drive yourself, you would've been a headline before you even hit the border."

"No, I don't think this is it. I think you are thirty years old and have nothing better to do. Didn’t feel like going home alone again and jacking off until you passed out for once, so you had to follow me like always because you can't fucking think for yourself. It's pathetic, Marley. It's sad. And I don't want you here.”

And shit, yeah okay, that kind of hurt. But that was the thing about Roz, he knew how to hit where it would sting and then keep needling at the wound until it cracked right back open. Cliff was used to it, he's seen it happen a dozen times over – he just never thought Roz would turn that on him. But what did he know, right? Nothing, apparently. Just enough to drive a car, but not enough to know where they were going. And that was the thing that really got him, because if he thought about it, really thought about it, it's always been that way. Roz ahead and Cliff behind like some dog on a lead.

"Fuck you. Do you know how many times I've picked you up so coked out you couldn't even walk. And I don't say shit. I never say shit."

"Then fuck off and don't say shit." 

Roz was shouting now, or something close to it, teeth flashing white, and red blooming across his face. His body was posed taught, half way between bolting and something much worse, and fuck it if Cliff didn't feel the exact same way. That was how they worked right? Roz pushed so Cliff did too. Roz set the play and Cliff followed.

"You know what. Maybe next time I will. You can choke on your own vomit because you're too fucking stubborn to admit anything is wrong. The guy is dead, Roz. Okay? He's fucking dead."

For a moment Cliff was convinced Roz might finally give in and hit him, shove his knuckles straight through flesh and bone and cartilage, but Roz only brought his hands up to scrub at his face. The tension of his muscles slack and undone with the single motion.

“Fuck,” Roz said softly, lips barely moving. And then louder – “Fuck. You're a fucking asshole, you know that?” 

And then he was crying. Big fat tears rolling down his blotchy red face, mouth paused open as if still holding on to the words stuck in the back of his throat. He wasn’t looking at Cliff – he wasn’t really moving at all, just violent sobs racking through his body, the sound echoing around the mess of the room, bouncing off every pile of clothes and every thrown open drawer.

“Fuck.”

Cliff had never seen Roz cry. He’d seen him angry, sure, and silent, looking like he could gut every guy in the room on pure impulse, but he’d never seen him cry – and Cliff didn’t know what to do with that. He wasn’t precise. He didn’t solve problems. He was the large solid body you put on the ice to make sure problems didn’t happen in the first place, blocking out guys before they could even think about touching Roz. He did not know how to do this.

He moved closer, thought about putting a hand on Roz’s shaking shoulders but didn’t.

“I’m sorry. He was your friend. I should’ve,” he paused for a second, searching for anything that might communicate what he meant – that it was okay, that whatever was happening was okay, that he could cry in front of Cliff and he wouldn’t tell a soul. “I shouldn't have said that. I’m so sorry, man.”

Roz looked at him through red rimmed eyes for a long moment. Then he laughed, the sound an awful sort of hollow scratch against his skin. Roz’s face was still flushed an ugly red and his eyes were still fucked out and glassy. His mouth was half way between a smile and a grimace like it couldn’t decide on either expression in a way that made Roz look like he was two seconds away from calling it quits altogether and just collapsing right there on the carpet.

The strings cut, knees bending, Roz’s back sliding down against the foot of the bed until he was sat on the floor amongst the sea of clutter. Every one of his limbs went lax.

“What is the point of this?” He wasn’t looking at Cliff, wasn’t even talking to him, training his eyes on a white sock a foot from his ankle. It looked new, freshly plucked from a clean pack. “What am I doing here?”

Cliff sat down next to him, pressing his back into the bed. He tried his best to pretend he did not want to pry the answer out of Roz, and he did his best to pretend like the floor wasn’t slipping out from under him just a bit and this was fine and normal and not at all like careening his head out of a car in bumper to bumper traffic to stare at a flipped semi in a ditch.

“You okay?” He asked, because he needed to fill the space somehow and any question was probably a stupid question so might as well just pick something that wouldn't take too long to get out.

Ilya turned towards him, eyes hollowed, something left out and picked through. “I love him, Marley. Fuck -" His head dropped back against the bed, curls sticking to the white sheets. "I loved him. I didn't even - I didn't even know I could have that. But I did. I fucking had him. He let me have him. And now what? What am I supposed to do with this?"

And then Roz was crying again, and Marley didn’t have to think before leaning into him and pulling his large frame tight against his own.

"I don't know," he said into the shape of Roz's curled back, as if it that could do anything at all.

He felt small in his arms, paradoxically so because Roz was only a couple inches shorter than him, but still, Cliff felt like he could break him if he squeezed hard enough. He was reminded of his sister then, back when they were kids. He hadn’t even hit his growth spurt yet and she was still taller than him and about a million times smarter, but he remembers holding her one night when their dad went banging out the front door and feeling as if she were much much smaller. He wrapped her up completely and fit his body into the space around them, and prayed to god he’d never have to see her cry again.

It sucks a bit when there’s a problem you can’t solve just by throwing your fists into it. Shane Hollander was dead and Roz loved him apparently and Cliff couldn’t do anything concrete in a way that mattered. So he just sat there and let the front of his shirt grow wet, trying not to feel permanently unmoored by the sight of his friend crying in his arms like a kid.

Cliff’s ass was numb and his knees were aching by the time Roz lifted his head. He had stopped crying a while ago, just the occasional shaky breath brushing against his shoulder.

Roz’s eyes were puffy and there was a smudge of dried spit around his mouth which was objectively kind of gross, but Cliff wasn’t going to say anything. Roz scrubbed a hand across his face soon enough anyways and then stood up.

“Good?” Cliff asked, which in retrospect was another stupid question. Of course Roz wasn’t good. His – his person – was dead.

Roz seemed to agree because he didn’t dignify the question with a response, instead he tipped his head towards the rest of the room.

“I need to finish.”

Cliff still didn’t know what they were doing here, but he wasn’t going to ask. He had some assumptions, sure, but they were going to stay assumptions until Roz told him otherwise. So far assuming anything all had turned out to be disastrous. He did know, however, that Roz looked dead on his feet and about ten seconds out from falling over completely.

“Maybe, we should finish tomorrow.”

It had to be close to midnight at this point. Tomorrow wasn’t even that far away.

Roz shook his head, glancing around the room. “No. I don’t know how much time I have.”

And well, Cliff wasn’t going to push him on it.

“What if I help?”

Roz looked a little sick at the thought.

“I won’t touch anything unless you tell me to. I’ll just put stuff in bags, okay?”

They started in the bedroom. Roz went through the clutter on the floor, making piles and pointing to them occasionally to indicate they needed to be shoved into a garbage bag while he folded clothes back up and placed them neatly into drawers. It was all very mechanical, a steady rhythm of movement without much speaking, and Cliff got the impression that Roz wasn’t really looking at what he was doing, categorizing items on some low level automatic impulse instead. Or at least trying to. 

Most things went back where Roz found them. A pile of shirts and pants that looked an awful lot like Roz’s typical brand of sports wear and ostentatious patterned shirts went into the bag while the rest were hung back in the closet. A few books, taken off the top of the bedside table, some in Russian and some in English followed. A text book on introduction to beginner’s Russian was pulled out of the top drawer on the right side, and Roz stared at it for a moment before he started laughing loudly, an odd break of staccato to the previous silence which then morphed into an awful wretched sound in the back of his throat that made Cliff sort of feel like throwing up. That went in the bag too. There was a notable collection of equipment in the bottom drawer that Roz handled on his own, and Cliff tried his best not to feel too guilty about the relief that brought him. He wasn’t homophobic or anything but – another guy’s sex stuff was another guy’s sex stuff.

It wasn’t until they made it down the stairs into the kitchen that Marley realized how little they were actually taking with them.

Roz grabbed the book off the coffee table, followed by the cluttered notebook, and then he stood in the kitchen long enough for Cliff to get antsy. He wound up pulling the two tumblers out of the cupboard and wrapping them up in a kitchen towel. Roz didn't say anything to contest the action, so he considered it acceptable in the moment. Perhaps not helpful, but at least not sacrilege in the name of the task at hand.

Kitchens were tricky; the way useless things pile up without origin. Three renditions of a can opener because they kept breaking and at some point it becomes increasingly difficult to pin down where they even came from. A cheap build up of plastic and metal and garlic presses that never get touched because you're gone for six months of the year and the garlic has rotted through and all your meals are prepped by the team nutritionist anyways. No one scrawls their name across a pre-ordered set of standard water glasses. There were no finger prints on a properly washed pair of wine glasses. 

So Cliff took his time, rolling the two glasses separately and then stuffing both with more fabric to reduce the risk of cracking on impact, and Roz wandered over to the adjacent wall, ripping photos off out of order, fingers smearing across the glossy finish. 

In the end, the kitchen was still mostly full of mugs and plates and the half finished case of ginger ale in the fridge, and the wall was bare – just pock marked holes where nails had gone and a large gap of empty drywall.

They sat on the couch because presumably there was nothing else left to do; Cliff with a stiff set of discomfort in his knees that could've been attributed to too many years in a full-contact sport but wasn't, and Roz like a puppet beside him, loose and sinking into the cracks.

He tapped the base of the coffee table in front of him with his toe and asked Roz about it. That's what you did when you visited someone's home; lovely place and that's a great colour for the walls and how long, exactly, have you been quasi living with the most famous name in professional hockey again? He tried to be polite whenever he could remember to be. 

"Nice table," he said.

And it was – a deep stained colour leading into smooth sanded lines, not a single joint in sight. His brother-in-law had a sort of shop set up in his garage which always smelled vaguely of saw-dust and aspertain, and if Cliff were a different person, he might've been able to point out what type of wood the table was built from. Maybe when he retired, he'd get into wood-working; it seemed like the thing to do once his legs stopped working.

Roz shrugged. "Not mine."

"No?"

There were two garbage bags sitting by the front door. Combined with the wrapped glasses still sitting on the counter and the box of garbage bags that had barely been opened, it wouldn't even take them two trips to bring everything down to the car.

"Is smoked oak."

" – what?"

"The table. Is a Scandinavian design, but built by a wood worker out of Monterrey, Mexico. Dark wood contrasts glazed walls. Clean lines for open space," Roz raised a hand, batting it through the air, lazy and trailing. "Is small company, but Shane's designer thinks Mexican made furniture will become a larger luxury industry with US tariffs on EU imports."

Cliff blinked for a second, staring at the table, because yeah, it did fit nicely in the space, modern in a way that matches the hanging light fixtures and the wide windows without becoming overbearing, and then he started laughing.

"You're shitting me."

And then Roz was laughing too, and Cliff felt distinctly like he might start crying – something he decidedly did not want to do at the moment. He hadn't cried in three years, maybe longer, and it had been so incredibly stupid that he had immediately chased the feeling with three fingers of bottom shelf whiskey. He was half convinced that he might not be able to get anything out if he tried, and then he'd just be stuck with this awful wrung out slog of something wedged between his ribs forever, stagnant until the next time he managed to make it out onto the ice and even then it might not disappear completely. 

"You should take it," he said, if only because that was better than the alternative.

Getting a relatively small coffee table down three flights of stairs should not have taken the amount of effort it did and yet, somehow Cliff managed to scrape the legs across the narrow walls of the stairwell three times and grind his knuckles into the metal railing twice. They tilted the table on its side, sliding it in diagonally over the flipped down backseats of his car, squeezing the garbage bags in between the legs and under the headrests of the seats. Every time Cliff hit a pothole, the table shifted loudly to the left, rattling despite Cliff's best efforts to keep a steady hand on the wheel.

By the time Cliff pulled into a Petro Canada, it was nearing four in the morning. Roz looked dead beside him in the passenger seat and Cliff was not fairing any better.

"We getting a hotel?"

Roz stared at him with red rimmed eyes and said nothing, so Cliff went inside to take advantage of the two for seven redbull deal advertised across the gas station windows. When he got back, Roz let him slide into the driver's side without protest, which was in equal parts relieving and unnerving.

They ate up the highway in a low simmering quiet, just the occasional direction from Roz telling him which exits to take as they crossed the island heading west towards Ottawa. The pattern was not lost on Cliff, but the exhaustion settling in behind his eyes was making it difficult to work the thought over in his brain. Most days he imagined himself as something steady, an unyielding wall of sorts, a particularly persistent stake in the ground, but at some point the stillness looped back around and dragged instead. 

Probably, they should've stopped for the night back in Montreal, but Cliff had seen Roz through enough sunrises not to find issue with one more on the list. He owed him that much at the very least.

About an hour into the drive, once the lights had spread out and then disappeared completely and the trees pushed in to bury the second lane in the darkness of evergreens, Roz stopped responding. When Cliff looked over, his head was lulling back against the window, mouth slack and eyes shut. 

He gave it ten minutes before pulling off into a gravel patch leading out into a service road. Briefly, he considered shaking Roz awake for directions, but he had no idea when the last time he slept was and an hour or two might be good for him.

Cliff leaned his own seat back as much as he could without crushing the garbage bag shoved up against it, then tried his best to lull into some amalgamation of sleep, failing completely. Eventually he gave up and grabbed a bag of spitz from the center console.

He watched the road, leaning against the car and sucking salt off the seeds, cracking them along the seam and spitting the shells to the dusty ground in an odd sort of fugue state. He was vaguely aware of the sky lightening and of the steady stream of eighteen wheelers becoming increasingly segmented by commuters, but he didn't study it – didn't take note of the ads plastered on the truck sides or the make of the cars.

By the time the passenger seat door cracked open, a dusty pink was beginning to seep in between the pines and Cliff was itching for a cigarette tucked between his fingers, an urge he hadn't experienced in nearly a decade.

Roz echoed the sentiment, voice bleeding out from behind the car before he came into view.

"I need a fucking smoke."

Cliff only shrugged and held up the bag of bbq spitz in offering. Roz grabbed it and leaned up against the car, slotting their shoulders into one unending line.

A seed cracked beneath his teeth, spit to the ground a moment later. Roz gestured out to the two-way highway in front of them, gripping the bag in one hand. A truck shot by, the tied tarp flapping from the force of motion and a chunk of gravel pinging up as it passed.

"This doing it for you now?"

A rusted out CRV passed, an ominous rattling sound proceeding it and then lingering once it disappeared. Guy should check his ball joints or maybe his control arm bushes.

"Was waiting to see if anyone crashed."

"Ah," Roz shoved another couple seeds in his mouth, "I see. So little excitement in your life, you must seek it out in the misfortune of others."

"You're a delight, Roz."

Roz shrugged and deposited a mouthful of shells and saliva at Cliff's feet. Cliff took the offered bag from him, tucking a couple seeds into the pocket of his cheek and keeping a handful in his palm before passing it back.

"So where we headed?"

"Cottage. We go there during the summer sometimes. Left my socks, probably."

"Same one from that documentary Hollander did? "

Roz grinned. It was small and fleeting and nowhere close to the shark-toothed split that usually dogged his features, but it was the closest thing to a smile he'd seen in nearly twenty-four hours.

"You've seen it?" Roz turned to him, eyes crinkling just slightly, turning the blue to slits. "He has nice ass when he does yoga, yes? I was surprised they let it air on tv."

Under any other circumstances, Cliff would've laughed. As it stands, he simply sucked his teeth, digging a seed out from the corner of his gums. 

It was not a difficult stretch to slot likes fucking men into the black box of characteristics that made up Ilya Rozonav. The only shocking part, really, was finding out how little work Cliff had to do to shift that particular perspective into place. 

It was a numbers game, pound for pound – eventually you run out of hot girls in Boston and you gotta broaden your horizons. The physicality was the point for Roz, and Cliff always knew that to some degree. It follows that after twenty eight minutes on the ice of convincing your body over and over again that it's dying just to push the thin line of adrenaline a little longer that you might then want to continue the high for a couple more hours, trading a bloody nose and the cut of your blades for a hot tongue and a nice pair of tits. And so it follows, with very little resistance, that fucking the only person whose ever challenged you on the ice might do the job well enough. More than well enough, probably.

At the end of the day, an ass is an ass and a mouth is a mouth and there's not that much to it. The love thing, though – that's a whole other beast entirely, and not something that Cliff was in the particular mood to prod at anytime soon. It was a good thing for Roz or perhaps, considering they were both standing in the middle of nowhere Quebec, an absolutely terrible thing, and Cliff just had to leave it at that. He could worry about the coffee table in his trunk or about getting Roz back to Boston without crashing into a ditch and then maybe getting sleep for a few hours. Fifteen minutes at a time. Easy in, easy out.

If Roz was bothered by his silence, he didn't make note of it – just shook the spitz bag and continued on.

"His parents have a place up the road, ten minutes."

"You worried about it?"

Selfishly, Cliff hoped the answer was no. The whole thing still felt distant even if it shouldn't. He helped Roz clean out the guys place, watched him strip pictures of the wall with a mindless determination, and yet, he could still, if he wanted to, imagine that apartment as someone else's home. The bedroom of some guy with black hair and an impassive face who was learning beginner's Russian and had a hobby for reading academic texts on hockey development, but not Shane Hollander. A reflection of him, maybe, or the burned image on an old CRT tv, but not the man himself.

He's not sure he could stand in front of Hollander's mom and keep up the illusion.

"They will not be there. Death is very busy, you know? Service in Ottawa. Lawyers in Montreal. Yuna Hollander likes a schedule," Roz said dismissively, no different then he might explain away an excuse for not heading out to a bar with the team.

It was morbid, but then again what did Cliff know. Maybe that was the only way to face this, reducing loss down into a steady list of actions to be taken care of. Drive to Montreal, clean out his house, drive somewhere new, clean out his apartment. He was not dead, he was just a point on the to-do list.

It was obvious, also, through the vagueness of Roz's words that he himself was not involved in the plan or in Yuna Hollander's schedule.

"They don't know."

Roz pressed his lips together. "No."

“You think they’d be chill?”

Roz watched the highway for a second. A red prius darted by, a loose strap trapped in the trunk dangling like a dead thing behind it.

“I don’t know,” he said, but it felt more like an admission of failure than an answer. “Yes, probably. They are –” He waved his hand around, searching for something, “very Canadian. But I do not know them. I never met them, so I can not say. Is different when it is your kid and I will not make it any better.”

Cliff didn't know what to say to that. He tried to imagine if it was his own mother, standing outside his house just three days past his death, listening to some person she'd probably only ever seen on the tv tell her that they were one half of a relationship she had no idea about. How did you even go about explaining something like that? I'm sorry you're grieving. Here's a casserole, and also your son is into men. We were thinking about marriage, but something came up. Fuck off, probably. He can't imagine his own mother would take that with her chin down.

Cliff dug the toe of his shoe into the gravel, feeling woefully unprepared to deal with this conversation. “You don’t want to risk it.”

“Maybe, but is not about that.” 

Roz looked over at Cliff, his eyes flicking over his face, studying it for a moment. His eyes were clearer today. The nap must have done him good, even curled as he was in the tight space of Cliff's passenger seat.

He shook his head once, before continuing, “Shane does not get to choose a lot of things. He is very pretty canadian boy and he smiles when he’s supposed to smile, looks very good on tv, but you know, he’s in here alot,” Roz said, tapping his temple, “People look at him and they assume things – he should say this, he should do that, he is only in the room because of this and that or whatever. He is terrified of doing the wrong thing but he is also terrified of doing the right thing. Like little rabbit who can not run, very cute, yes, but not so much fun.

So he thinks, if he can control what’s in here," he raised a hand, loosely gesturing towards his head again, "if he can work it out in his brain like a puzzle, then maybe everything outside will follow. But the world does not work like this. People will keep talking and shit will keep turning and Shane can not do anything. He knows this and he hates this. He just wants to be.”

Ilya leaned further back against the car, holding the spitz out in a loose demand for Cliff to take them.

 “He would be happy to play hockey and sit by the lake for the rest of his life, I think, but he can not. So I will not ruin this for him.”

Cliff grabbed the bag, but made no move to shake out anymore seeds, letting it hang loosely at his side. 

“So what? No one's going to ever know?”

Ilya clicked his tongue, “I don’t know. Maybe in the future something will come out. Maybe we made mistake somewhere and everyone learns about us," he waved a hand through the air, dismissing the lot of it – the single-lane highway, the thick tree-line, the dust and the scent of burning oil, the pressing what if of the world finding out what Ilya Rosanov did in his off hours. "but I will not be the one to do this. All I can do is remove myself now.”

Thirty minutes later, Cliff pulled off a dirt road onto a tightly packed gravel driveway leading up to a home made entirely of equal parts treated wood and floor to ceiling glass. The structure existed as an odd sort of break point in the middle of tall leaning green, just the hint of a lake peeking through around the side. The inside smelled distinctly of pine in contrast to the clean modern furniture decorating the interior.

Roz was quiet again, taking his shoes off the entrance and not saying anything to Cliff, but not running away either. He wandered slow enough through the living room for Cliff to stick by his side, stopping in the main room, facing the windows and the sliding door which led out into a carefully manicured patio and to a stone lined path towards the lake.

It was off-putting to see him like that. Even if Cliff knew the reason for his stillness, he wasn't used to seeing a Roz that was not in a perpetual state of motion. Even off the ice, he was always doing something, pacing, talking loudly with one hand and sloshing his drink in the other, a sort of possession that could not bear to exist without making itself known. Roz was bigger than any room he existed in, something that Cliff appreciated for the way it made him feel smaller in contrast. Well not smaller necessarily, but contained – grounded in his body, rooted to the tail end of Roz's slinking steps.

Here he was condensed, framed up as a silhouette against those endless windows.

"So what's the plan?" he said.

Roz turned to him, gaze shifting around the room, catching on threads, "I don't know. There is not much. We had to be careful here, too. With his parents."

"Right. Okay. You want to start in the bedroom?"

Roz nodded. The question seemed to pull his focus in, as if he could separate himself from the space with the guidance of some ambiguous concept of work that needed done. Playing through the injury and all that.

"You want me to come?"

Roz shrugged and started making his way towards the steps that led up to what was presumably Hollander's bedroom, but he seemed calmer than he did at the apartment, so Cliff let him go by himself.

He could use a breather, probably. Cliff could too, if he was being honest.

While Roz did whatever, Cliff set himself to the task of finding something to eat. There was nothing in the fridge, which was unsurprising seeing as Hollander was supposed to be in New York for the play-offs right now, but he did manage to unearth a box of KD from the very back of the pantry.

When Roz came back down, he placed a bowl of the chemically yellow-coloured noodles on the counter, pushing it towards him without asking. Cliff hadn't eaten anything solid for nearly a day at this point, and he was entirely uninterested in thinking about how much longer it had been for Roz.

He watched him take the first couple of bites, just to make sure he would, before shoving a forkful in his own mouth. He hadn't eaten boxed mac n cheese since he was a kid; it didn't taste as good as he remembered it being, mostly just salt and the unidentifiable flavour of artificial cheese.

Roz didn't finish his, but he made a sizable dent before putting his fork down and watching Cliff devour the remains of his own portion. He scrunched his face up at the sight, but Cliff had seen Roz shove a seven-eleven taquito in his mouth in one bite, so he really didn't have much ground to stand on. 

"I just wanted to see it, I think." Roz said, while Cliff was mid bite into a forkful of noodles. 

"See what?"

"Nothing. Is stupid. Finish your breakfast," he said with an obnoxious emphasis on the word breakfast. Roz always did have a particular way of utilizing the English language. "We can leave when you are done."

Roz looked restless again, caught out for some reason. His curls were matted up on the sides, frizzing out in the front over his eyes. The rest of him wasn't much better. His shirt was wrinkled, slipping sideways at the collar, and a hint of purple was beginning to form under his eyes. More than anything, he looked tired, the feverous sort of tired that your body enters after staying up all night. The kind that blurs your vision while sitting in a mcDonald's at seven in the morning with the clothes you wore the night before still sticking to your skin. A second wind of sorts right before the crash.

Cliff looked behind him, peering over Roz's mused curls to stare at the lake through the wide expanse of glass. The morning was coming up in full swing, the sun bleeding through the trees and lighting up the water. Roz wanted to come here for a reason, and if it wasn't to clear his stuff out, then it had to be something else. Cliff couldn't do much, but at the very least he could give Roz the excuse of more time.

"Let's go swimming," he said, dropping his fork into his bowl. "You smell like shit."

The water was freezing, the type of cold that made your balls shrivel up just at the thought of going under, but Cliff was determined. He had abandoned his jeans on a rock somewhere up on the shore and was currently standing ankle deep in the water in just his boxers.

He took another two steps forwards, the silt and decaying leaves of the lake floor squishing up between his toes. It was admittedly kind of gross, but he wasn't going to let Roz know that the entirety of his childhood swimming experience took place in city pools and nowhere else.

"Water's nice. You should try it," he shouted towards Roz, who was sitting at the edge of the small dock.

Roz didn't call him out for his shit, but he did glance up at him, and then eventually dropped his bare feet over the edge and into the water. Guy didn't even flinch, that same blank expression still resting on his face, steady as ever.

He took another couple steps in, now up to his knees with patches of weeds beginning to poke up and brush against his skin. The temperature certainly wasn't getting any warmer, so he figured at some point he might just have to say fuck it and dive in.

The cold was a straight shock to his system, freezing almost to the point of burning. He came back up above the surface with a harsh sucked in breath, but didn't stand up fully. Instead he held his body still, water just above his chest, letting himself get used to the feeling, breathing in and out until it didn't hurt to move.

He swam around for a bit, plunging in and out of the water, trying to ignore the god awful feeling of weeds pulling at his ankles whenever he let his feet drop too low. The water felt good on his skin. He hadn't really realized how tired he was up until now. The redbull had done enough to stop him from falling asleep at the wheel, but the icy feeling of cold water moving around his limbs was a full body reset. He always felt better after moving, never one to stay seated when he could help it.

It was fucking cold though, so he didn't stay in for long before swimming over to the dock and pulling himself up beside Roz. He flopped onto his stomach, the rough wood scratching across his skin, and then rolled over to his back, flinging one arm over his face to block out the sun and peering up at Roz through the small remaining gap.

He was staring off across the lake into the distance, his feet still dangling in the water. Cliff wondered if they were starting to go numb with the way he was holding them there, stock still like a continuation of the dock itself sinking down into the mud.

Cliff nudged Roz's knee with his own a couple times, but he didn't make any move to pull them up.

"You ever see a loon?" Roz said eventually, gaze steady in the mid-distance

"No?"

"They have these beady red eyes, look like they want to kill you. Very angry birds."

"Right."

Cliff pushed himself up, leaning on his hands to be level with Roz. He hadn't noticed before, but Roz had the beginnings of smile lines forming just at the very edge of his eyes. They were subtle, but there all the same, and they made him look older than twenty-nine.

Roz never looked young, not really, and it had nothing to do with his face and everything to do with the way he held himself. The guys picked up on it, everyone did, or he never would have made captain so young, even with the franchise riding on his back. Cliff never thought about it before – maybe because he'd always been just as young as Roz when it mattered – but he wondered now, if being old when you were supposed to be young added up. Or maybe it was the inverse, maybe everything looped back around and made you young when you were supposed to be old. Cliff didn't know. He hardly felt his age these days anyways, stuck in the same place he'd always been.

He kicked at the water, dipping his foot back into the cold for a single second of sacrifice. The motion must have pulled Roz's attention, because he looked over at him, blinking when he found Cliff already looking.

"Marley, do you think, maybe this was always going to happen?

He didn't need to guess what he was talking about. The meaning was sunk so deep into Roz's eyes that Cliff would have to be an idiot to miss it.

"What? Fuck no, Roz. Of course not. It was an accident. You know that."

Roz turned his head, a fast jarring motion.

"Yes, these things are always accidents. A whole world made of accidents."

He felt like he fucked up, but what was he supposed to say to that. Shit happened – this was the tried and true method of the world. God knows that Cliff was not the one to do anything about it, but he didn't like the look that was settling across Roz's face. His whole expression splitting open and turning lax like coming home after a brutal roadie to crash face first into your bed. It could've been good, maybe, to see Roz like that - if it were not for the place they were and the person Roz was. 

"Stuff just happens," Cliff said, the words already feeling useless on his tongue even as he kept speaking them, "It's shit, but you can't think about it like that. It won't do you any good."

Roz hummed and finally pulled his feet out of the water. 

"I don't think I can do this."

He sounded tired, but maybe that was a good thing. It had been Cliff's idea to stay longer, but clearly Roz couldn't be here anymore, and if Cliff could do anything for him at all, it would be driving him back home.

"Yeah, sure. Let's go home then."

He brought his foot back up onto the dock, pushing himself up to stand and starting to make his way off the dock when Roz spoke again.

"Cliff?"

"Yeah?" He said, half turning to look at him still sitting at the edge of the dock.

"You should keep the coffee table. And the glasses too. Just don't put your shitty American whiskey in them, yes?"

"What, no, man. Those are yours. I'm not gonna take them."

"Is okay. I won't need them, so if you want, they are yours." Roz nodded to himself, something small but no less decisive and pushed up to his feet, turning back to follow Cliff.

"Okay. You drive."