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There are three cards that Ilya holds close to his chest. One: before Shane’s incident with Marleau on the ice, he’d planned to permanently end the relationship between them. Two: when he was thirteen, he ran away from home and got as far as the bus stop near their apartment before Sveta and Sasha found him and walked him back home, where his father was furiously berating Alexei for not knowing where Ilya had gone. Three: in the bottle of Tylenol they keep inside the bathroom cabinet, there are enough pills to kill a man his size and weight, and he knows this because one night, while Shane was away, he’d counted.
He wishes there was some noble reason for why he doesn’t tell Shane these things. It’s not like Shane isn’t already painfully aware of all the baggage that comes with being with him. Maybe he just doesn’t want to make it a big deal. Maybe he doesn’t want Shane to ever look at him with pity again. Maybe he doesn’t want Shane to throw the pills away.
Five days after he’d turned twenty, Ilya called Sveta in a drunken stupor to tell her that he was going to tie weights to his legs and jump off a bridge into the Charles River. The call went straight to voicemail. You know what the drinking age is, Sveta? Ilya had said, furiously wiping the tears off his cheeks while staring at the river’s sweeping currents. In America it’s twenty-one, but they don’t fucking care about that. And I’m so drunk right now, I can’t really see straight. I won’t even have to tie weights. I’m so drunk I could just sink. If I jump, I could just sink. Make it look like an accident. They’d see how much alcohol was in my body and rule it an accident.
He’d woken up the morning after in his apartment with no memory of how he got back there. There were thirty missed notifications on his phone: twenty-eight calls from Sveta, one from his coach. One text, from his brother, that he deletes without reading.
In the year after his mother died, Ilya slowly developed a habit of locking himself inside his head and conjuring up scenarios where she was alive and happy. Then a year after that, he started to think about what it would be like if she was still sad and she still tried to kill herself, but that Ilya had gone home from school right away, found her early, and gotten the chance to call for help. And then the years after that, he started to wonder what it would be like if his mother hadn’t let him go to school that day and instead poisoned his breakfast. Or forced him to swallow the pills too. Or made him drink the drain cleaner they kept under the sink. Anything she could have done to take him with her.
That last one had stuck for a while, up until he was eighteen. He’s mostly over it now, but sometimes he still dreams about it. Sometimes, he wakes up with the bitterness of rat poison in his mouth even if he’s never tasted it.
Galina had called it maladaptive daydreaming. Ilya’s father just called it crazy, like his mother. Whatever it was, they could quibble what to call it. If Ilya was dead, in the end, there’d ultimately be no way of knowing.
Here’s a story to contemplate: the night Boston won the cup, on the way back to his apartment, Ilya lost control of the car he was driving. A quarter after three, hitting a pothole, skidding across the asphalt and almost crashing into the concrete barrier island. He’d thought of many things in those few seconds between the spin and the halt. He’d thought about how awful it would be to die and have Cliff Marleau’s playlist be the last thing he hears. That it would be so awful if he died and Sveta, still hungover, had to identify his mangled body. Or worse, that they’d call up his father to identify his mangled body when he couldn’t even tell who a living Ilya was most of the time. That it would have been so awful if he died and his last memory of Shane Hollander was him teary-eyed in Sochi, only wanting to reach out, and Ilya thanking him by pushing him away.
And, also, that he wouldn’t really mind if he saw his mother again that night. If he could finally run up to her, wherever she’d been staying all that time, and say, Mama, see? You see mama? I finally have something to show for it.
Was there anything they could have done? He asks it in his head all the time. Could Ilya have been a better son? Could Alexei? If his father were a better husband, and if he’d loved her like he ought to have, would she still have ended it? Ilya wants and has always wanted somebody to blame for it. For someone, anyone, to look at the version of himself that found her splayed out on the bathroom floor and apologize for what had happened to him.
Even if it makes him a hypocrite. It might not be something to fix, he told Shane once, and meant every word. You cannot blame yourself if it gets bad. I could think about it.
Ilya had extensively read about suicide attempts when he finally left Russia. A weird thrill. Emboldened, perhaps, by the idea of his father and Alexei finally being as far away from him as possible. Or under the influence of the inexplicable sadness that came with being away from a home one has always wanted to leave. Whatever it was, it found Ilya in the dark of his barely-furnished apartment looking up the success rates of suicide attempts depending on the method used. He’d learned that sometimes, when you kill yourself by inhaling carbon monoxide, first responders are going to find your body covered in vomit. And if you’re planning to kill yourself via hanging, it’s better to have the rope snap your neck from the force of the drop than to die slowly from suffocation. He’d learned that suicide rates spike during the holidays because of increasing feelings of isolation, and more often than not they’re committed via a gunshot wound to the temple. But even that method wasn’t a hundred percent effective; Ilya had read about cases where people survive an attempt—maybe the gun only blew off their jaw, or maybe damaged only a portion of their brain—and have to continue living with the knowledge that they almost made it out, and then try to make something out of that.
Swallowing pills? Easy enough. He’s not his mother, but he could be.
Men are more likely to die by suicide, but women are more likely to attempt suicide. That, too, is a fact that Ilya learned. What does that say about him, alive? What does that say about his mother, dead? What does it say about anything at all?
He and his brother become orphans the year Ilya turns twenty-six. They bury his father in mid-March, while the ground in Moscow was still in the process of thawing. There’s an irony to it, dying in spring. His mom at least had the decency to die in the fall. On the way back to the house from the cemetery, Ilya almost splits his skull open, slipping on a sludge of ice and mud on their driveway. Sveta, inside, hands him a frozen bag of peas for his bruised elbow and then cracks a joke, saying that somebody must be out there fighting tooth and nail to keep him alive. Neither of them laugh.
In the morning, he wakes up to Alexei shoveling the pavement clean. Until either of them dies, it’s the last time he’ll ever see his brother.
Ilya does almost get what he wanted while he’s in a plane flying to Tampa. That hunk of metal accelerating down, dropping several feet, engine malfunctioning. Ilya remembers the fear coursing through his veins, thinking this is it, finally. Remembers thinking that it would be nice to finally see his mother again as a consolation prize, if he doesn’t get a chance to live the life he wants with Shane.
And then he remembers thinking that no, he doesn’t want that, actually. Ilya almost gets his wish on that damn plane and then finds that it’s not his wish after all. And while he’s standing on the runway surrounded by flashing lights from emergency vehicles, he finds it in him to thank his mother for listening. Then he promises to her that he won’t waste what he’s given.
But Ilya is Ilya and he’s a hypocrite, isn’t he? All that’s always easier said than done.
The thing about making your bed is that eventually, you’d have to sleep in it. The thing about making wishes is that at some point, you’d have to live in it. And the thing about Ilya, well, the thing about him is that he’s always going to want an out, isn’t he? Sorry, милый, you are always competing against my mother in my head and in my heart and half the time she wins. I let her win.
Here are three cards, laid out on the table. It’s only for the coming morning. One: Ilya is going to sit up from his side of the bed and kiss his husband awake. Two: he’s going to pad over to the bathroom, brush his teeth, and pretend that the bottle of Tylenol isn’t there. Three: he’ll go to the garden and tend to the flowers that he’d grown from the gift he was granted. He will live, and live, and live, so when the day finally comes that it happens, Shane would understand that he could have done nothing to prevent it.