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Shane Hollander didn't speak a word until he was three years old.
At first, his parents, Yuna and David, weren’t concerned about his development. He would babble as a baby and reach out for anything he could grab with his tiny hands. He cried a normal amount and loved being held. When he was a year old, Yuna and David started competing to get him to say either "mama" or "dada.” This game was intended as a challenge that would have one parent emerge as the victor, yet end with both ultimately winning. Shane, however, seemed to have his own plans because he didn’t respond to any of their encouragement. Their attempts went from joyful enthusiastic competition to more desperate imploring for their son to say something… to say anything.
By the time Shane was almost two, his parents took him to his pediatrician. They got a referral to a speech-language pathologist. Autism was a possible explanation, but nothing was certain; it was clear Shane preferred gestures over words. Yuna and David kept bringing Shane to speech therapy and prayed he would catch up with others his age.
As with most things, Shane spoke when he was ready.
"Did you see him fumbling the puck like that? He definitely injured his left shoulder during the last game." Yuna gestured strongly towards the Montreal game playing on the TV; she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her entire body angled at the game as if she could jump inside and shake some sense into the players herself. David leaned back casually beside her, an amused smile curling at the corner of his mouth at her antics. Shane sat on the floor in front of them with his blocks organized by color and size rather than stacking them.
"Puck." The word was so quiet that, from anyone else, it might have gone unheard. But since it came from three-year-old Shane Hollander, eyes fixed on the screen with eerie focus for someone so young, and given how desperate Yuna and David had been to hear his voice, the word "puck" sounded like a thunderclap in the middle of the Hollander living room.
David could sense that Yuna was about to create a great commotion in her excitement, so he placed his hand gently on her thigh to restrain her. They both watched in silence as Shane crawled to the TV and pointed as if he could see the puck perfectly as the tiny dot moved down the ice. Yuna felt a sensation lodge in her chest that would only continue to grow in size and strength as her son got older: pride.
Yuna and David hoped this one word would open the floodgates for all of Shane's missing words to come pouring out. Instead, his talking came more like a trickle; there was a new word here and there, as Shane learned to communicate more with his mouth than with his hands, and his vocabulary slowly built from one word to full sentences. The first time Shane called for his mom, Yuna broke down in sobs as she rocked a confused Shane back and forth in her arms. It was a slow process that eventually led to a day when both parents realized Shane could speak just as well as his peers.
After some discussion, the specialist's visits stopped, and from then on, it was as if duct tape was placed over an unmended rip in cloth; the tear was no longer visible, but the hole would always be there, unacknowledged. This chasm was evident in the way Shane struggled with eye contact, the way he couldn't quite understand the subtext underneath the text, the way he would take a moment to respond as he planned what he was going to say, and the way he struggled to understand sarcasm or metaphors.
Shane learned to mask these aspects of himself as best he could, but the fissure would always be there even if he had forgotten its name. Instead of hearing words like autism, spectrum, or savant, Shane grew up hearing words from his peers such as robot, slow, or retard. To defend against these slurs, Shane built up an impenetrable wall filled with politeness, routine, and, most of all, hockey.
Shane’s interest in hockey didn’t end with his first word being puck; his fascination grew and grew until he found himself dreaming of hockey at night and thinking about it as he stared off into space. While kids around him started getting crushes and forming cliques, Shane daydreamed about wearing a hockey jersey with a C. It didn’t take him much effort to convince his parents to enroll him in a class, and Shane spent the next thirteen years building his entire world around the sport. Not only did he love hockey, but hockey seemed to love him back just as much. Shane was the best in his class from age four and on. By the time he turned thirteen, people were whispering MLH his way, and his classmates looked at him with undisguised envy. None of it fazed Shane, however, because he saw his future laid out before him with complete clarity: MLH, multiple Stanley Cups, and his jersey in the rafters as a legend. This destiny was one that Shane had been manifesting since he was three years old and couldn’t keep his eyes off the puck sliding across the ice on TV.
There wasn’t anything that could take Shane’s focus off that puck.
Then, at age sixteen, Shane Hollander saw his first game clip of Ilya Rozanov.
Ilya Rozanov started speaking before he was two, and once he started, he never wanted to stop.
Ilya wasn’t shy, wasn’t reserved, and he plainly thought everyone should want to know what he had to say at all times. It didn’t take him long to recognize that this was far from the truth. His brother started calling him an annoying chatterbox with disdain, his father started telling his mother to “get her son to shut the fuck up,” and even his mother would sometimes put her fingers against her temples and groan out, “Please, Ilyusha, can Mama have some quiet time?”
There was even one time his mother snapped at him as he was rambling on and on about a kid at school who had a dog and how badly Ilya wanted one as well. When he was mid-sentence, Irina snapped, “Ilya! Please, stop talking!” The words died in his throat, and he couldn’t help but stare at her in blindsided silence. Ilya anticipated his father and brother snapping at him and getting annoyed, but he never imagined his mother getting tired of him. Although she immediately apologized, tears in her eyes, dark circles highlighting the blue depth, Ilya found himself growing fearful of his mother. He wasn’t afraid of her in the way he was of his father; he instead felt this dread build in his core that someday his mother would get sick of him and not love him anymore. This dread would find itself growing in Ilya’s gut throughout his life; love and fear becoming so entangled in his mind that he would find himself constantly expecting the drop while he was feeling the high.
So, Ilya learned how to keep quiet.
With careful practice, Ilya began to control what he would say and when he would say it. He was still loud, funny, and opinionated, but he chose the right moments to let these words escape. He was often quiet at home and more boisterous at school with his friends when he could focus on making them laugh and feel appreciated for his humor. Around people he truly loved, though, Ilya became careful with his words.
“Ilyusha, do you see them? Don't they look like angels?" Irina thumbed the gold cross around her neck and brought the symbol to her lips as if she could taste the divinity directly from the cold metal.
To eight-year-old Ilya, his mother was the true angel. Her golden hair framed her face in cascades of silky waterfalls, her cheeks held a smattering of flattering freckles which contrasted with her pale face, and her blue eyes held tears at the corners, which Ilya knew would never escape because he had seen them there for most of his short life. When she cooked, when she cleaned, when she looked at her husband or her children, there were always these unshed tears in her eyes that seemed to hold on through sheer force of will alone. It took great effort to look away from his mother to the people on the screen who were donned in sparkling green. They looked as if they were flying across the ice with absolute ease and grace.
The bodies on the ice latched onto his brain, and he found himself watching figure skating whenever he could; sometimes he'd watch with his mother if she wasn't hiding away in her room, but most times he just watched on his own. Whenever he saw a man lifting a woman in the air on a triumphant spin, he couldn't help but think maybe when he was bigger, when he grew taller and gained that type of strength, he could be the one on the ice to lift a beautiful woman in the air and make his mother look at him the way she looked at the screen. Maybe then the tears in her eyes would leave for good.
Sometimes, when he was alone with her, he would reach up his fingertips to trace the freckles along her cheeks. He thought they were like the stars in the sky, up where he figured his mother's angels were also dancing, and he imagined becoming a famous figure skater and taking his mother away with him.
A few weeks into his fascination with skating, Alexie caught him watching with his nose nearly pressed to the screen.
"You are watching this faggot shit? Want to be a girl, Ilya?”
The teasing was relentless from that point on, and Ilya found himself no longer getting the same joy from watching figure skating. One day, while he was flipping through channels aimlessly, Ilya saw a flash of ice. He turned the channel back quickly, expecting the beautiful dancers to appear, but instead his vision landed on a hockey game. There were a lot of the same movements from figure skating, but the essence of the sport was entirely different.
Where the figure skating was delicate and poised, the hockey was loud and violent. Masculinity oozed from the TV, and Ilya's brother did not make fun of him when hockey was on. Ilya’s father even patted his shoulder one night when he caught Ilya watching a game, and it felt as if his father was proud of him for the first time in his life. So, Ilya watched hockey, learned hockey, and began to dream of hockey. Ilya’s father was pleased when Ilya asked him if he could start learning how to play and join a team. Ilya was a natural, coaches said, and his father’s eyes started getting a gleam in them that Ilya wouldn’t immediately recognize; this expression, however, grew as Ilya’s skills grew, and it wasn’t until he was much older that Ilya realized this glint was greed.
There was something sad in his mother's eyes when she watched hockey with him, as if she were grieving the absence of the angels on the ice. Ilya pretended not to notice; his father and brother's approval were a balm that he wasn’t ready to give up.
One day, when he was twelve, Ilya was lacing up his shoes while his mother sat stiffly on the couch. Ilya had hockey practice in a few minutes; although he was the youngest in his team, he was also the best. Luka, one of his closest friends on the team, was coming with his mother to pick Ilya up and give him a ride. Irina was in an introspective mood as she gazed at her son getting ready.
"Do you remember, Ilyusha? The angels on the ice? I used to be a figure skater when I was younger. I was very talented for my age, and my parents thought I could go all the way and maybe skate in the Olympics one day. Then, I met your father."
“Okay, Mama,” Ilya responded, not even registering her words in his distraction. It was a story he’d heard before.
"You're going out with the team to dinner after practice, right, Ilyusha?" She questioned hesitantly.
“Yes, Mama. Luka will give me a ride home after.”
"I love you, Ilyusha. So much. I just want you to remember that you don’t have to be like your father and brother. It’s okay to just be yourself." She reached out and held him tightly. If Ilya hadn’t been in such a rush, annoyed at his mother for being in this mood when he had somewhere to be, Ilya may have noticed the tremble in her frame. “Your father will be home before you.”
Ilya shook off this weird statement, as well as his mother’s arms, and nodded. “Goodbye, Mama.” She only smiled in response, tears in her eyes, as she watched him get up and walk from the house without looking back.
That was the last time Ilya saw his mother alive.
Practice was cut short, the team dinner was canceled because of a stomach flu making its way through the kids, and Ilya was dropped off hours earlier than expected. The house was silent as he entered and called out for his mother. He knew if he got showered in time, there was a KHL game starting on the TV.
When his mother didn’t respond, Ilya approached his parents' bedroom door that was left ajar.
“Mama?” Ilya asked as he pushed the door open.
Her hand dangled from the bed, reaching out gracefully with her fingers lightly curled toward her palm, almost as if she were reaching out for her son to join her.
But her eyes were open, and they were empty. Ilya could see streaks of dried tears down her cheeks which set the freckles in blurred focus.
After that, it was as if Ilya's vision had lost one of the primary colors; it was not a color you could name or really notice until its absence. Everything still looked mostly the same, people acted the same, moved the same, but whereas the dial of saturation used to be turned to max, now it clicked down to minimum. The world looked mostly as it used to, but it wasn't quite as bright or colorful as before.
And Ilya... Ilya played hockey.
He played hockey with a determination and grit that hinted at a need to prove his mother wrong; prove that hockey was the right choice, that hockey was the only choice, and that he would be the best at it. He may be different than his father and brother, but he wanted to prove to her that that only meant he was better than them. He was going to be the best, even if he no longer got the same rush from being on the ice as he did when he would watch figure skating on the couch with his mother.
When Ilya was fifteen, he started using sex and alcohol to help himself feel something more than the monotony of every day. The sex made him feel confident and alive in a way that he’d only gotten from hockey before, and the alcohol helped dull the moments when he felt himself sliding into a place of loneliness and isolation. So, his world became a routine of hockey, alcohol, sex, and sleep. The older Ilya got, the more important it felt for him to get out of Russia and find a fresh start somewhere that wasn’t drowning in the absence of his mother. He began to realize that if he stayed in Russia, he would inevitably end up in the same place as his mother.
This cycle continued throughout his life until he was nineteen, trying to light a cigarette while the wind blew in his face in fucking Saskatchewan, and he felt a presence approaching hesitantly behind him.
"Ilya Rozanov?"
Ilya's eyes landed on Shane's face for the first time, and the only thing he could think was…
Freckles.
Suddenly, as if being jolted awake from a deep sleep, the saturation in Ilya's vision started seeping into the world again. Like the click of a lighter finally catching on the end of a cigarette, warmth and color flickered to life in Ilya's chest for the first time in seven years.
“Okay.”