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Shane had told his parents, somewhere in the sunscreen-sticky summer right after he turned nine, that he’d buy the cottage next door and vacation next to them as an adult someday.
“Oh yeah?” his dad smiled. “You don’t think you’ll be sick of us by then?”
“That’s why I’ll have my own cottage,” Shane answered. “So I can see you as much as I want. But I’ll be too big for my room here, so I’ll need more space.”
“That sounds very reasonable. Best of both worlds,” his mom commented as she topped off everyone’s lemonade and joined Shane and his dad at the table.
“And I can build a practice rink, so I have one in Ottawa and one here.” It’s a small point of contention - Shane’s parents had converted 80% of their basement at home into plywood walls and synthetic ice, but the vacation cottage had no basement, so there simply wasn’t the room. Shane had suggested a few options, like sacrificing the family room or building an edition, but his mom said it was only for two months out of the year, and he could shoot pucks into the dryer.
“You could take out the entire first floor and just live in a hockey rink,” his dad joked. Not that this sounded bad to Shane. “Join us for meals, since your kitchen’s in the penalty box.”
“The real trouble is getting the MacDonalds to sell. I think they’re three generations into their cottage,” his mom pointed out. That did sound like a complication to Shane; he understood the concept of moving houses in general from his classmates, but he’d never had to do it himself with his parents’ government jobs 20 minutes away from their main house in Ottawa.
“Okay, maybe a little further down the road,” he allowed.
“Maybe you build, since you’re looking for a custom hockey-rink-video-game-den situation,” his dad suggested. “That sounds like a sweet bachelor pad,” he added to Shane’s mom.
Shane ignored the unfamiliar term, trying to really think about the houses and empty land along the lake he’d noticed from his parents’ canoe.
“Maybe Shane will have a family to share his home with,” his mom pointed out. Also ignored, because that seemed correct but Shane didn’t have any interest or skill in picturing it.
“There aren’t any houses over past the big, blue cottage yet,” he remembered.
“Oh, looking at the million-dollar lots?” his dad chuckled. “I guess if hockey works out, you can make that happen.”
It was early enough that this could be said as a joke. Possible, but statistically unlikely. Later, they would stop joking about a professional hockey career, wary of pinning too much hope on a dream that still had so many opportunities to bust. But eventually, they’d talk about it with certainty.
*
“Bienvenue à Lanaudière, Monsieur Hollander! Félicitations pour votre maison au bord du lac. Et permettez-moi de dire que nous sommes de grands fans des Metros…
*
Building the cottage quickly becomes his third-favorite thing. First, obviously, is anything on the ice. Second is sex, specifically with Rozanov. The less said about that, the better.
But after that, Shane falls a little bit in love with the particulars of picking everything out for the cottage. Emailing back-and-forth with his builder to tweak blueprints and, later, choose features. Shane WILL look through 40-plus pages of faucet options. He’s taking pictures in restaurants and teammates’ houses of exposed beam configurations. He’s reviewing wood stain samples in person, taking them home so he can sit and ponder without anyone seeing this cerebral exercise from the outside.
Even when it comes time to furnish the cottage, he’s more involved than usual. Rather than sending a few pictures to the interior designer he’s hired and calling it a day, Shane asks for approval of every chair, end table, and throw blanket before it makes its way to the cottage. Some he even rejects - the texture looks scratchy or the color looks too bright.
In his Montreal high-rise, he hadn’t been so involved. His main concern was that everything looked grown-up and tasteful, and he’d figured that the designer had a better grasp on that than he did. But over the years, Shane has soured on some of the designer’s choices - not enough to make substantial changes, but enough that he feels a bit more confident in his own style and preferences when designing his second home.
And this home feels like it matters more, in terms of comfort. This is where Shane wants to relax after each season and become Shane again, if only for a little bit, after being Captain Hollander for months on end.
*
On the topic of being himself, things do come up in the building process that require some soul-searching, or a deliberate choice to avoid doing that.
First, it’s the master bathroom sink situation. In his Montreal apartment, Shane has a double vanity, because it had come with the apartment. He’d not put any thought into it; this was a grown-up apartment, and most adults lived in pairs, so there were two sinks. He’d naturally gravitated to using the one closest to the toilet for washing his hands and the one closest to the door for brushing his teeth, shaving, everything else.
But when choosing the features for his cottage, he has to be deliberate about the number of sinks. Realistically, he doesn’t need two, and only having one will give him more counter space, which will make the whole ordeal feel less cluttered. He knows that two sinks makes the most sense for resale value, but he’s not planning to sell. That’s the point of the cottage; his Montreal apartment (and his other Montreal apartment, which he tries not to think about when his thoughts veer toward the long term) is probably not where he will live for the rest of his career. At some point, a house might make more sense for his age or status.
But the cottage is supposed to be for him, probably forever. It’s been in the cards since he was nine. So, no need to think about anyone but himself when designing it.
Should he allow for the eventuality that a second person, or more, lives here someday?
In the truest part of him, he doesn’t know if he wants to or knows how to share his favorite space with anyone else, and he doesn’t see how his life or his personality would make room for anyone to want that with him.
In the avoidant part, one sink looks cleaner, and renovations are always a possibility.
One sink. Then, it’s seating.
Of course the dining tables, indoor and outdoor, will seat several people. That’s just how many chairs come in a dining set, and Shane has no problem sitting at his dining table in Montreal by himself, surrounded by empty chairs. They’re great for holding coats and sweatshirts, though he tries to usher all of that into the coat closet.
But what about the cozy sitting nooks where he’ll read and play Chel and probably scroll on his phone? Couches end up being preferable to armchairs, so he has the option to stretch out and nap.
What about seating around the firepit? It’s important to have seating for his parents, too, since they love to sit around a firepit with a glass of wine or beer, and he likes to join them on occasion.
What about the dock? For as long as he can remember, his parents’ dock has held two sturdy Adirondack chairs, slightly angled towards each other. Even when Shane lived with his parents, two chairs. He’d spent plenty of time sitting in them and looking at the water as a child, but it was always with the thought, ‘I’m sitting in mom’s chair,’ or ‘I’m sitting in dad’s chair.’ Marriage chairs, his dad called them instead of their actual name. And most docks that they passed in the canoe had the same setup; it seemed to be a given of cohabitation on lakefront property.
Shane only signs off on one chair. Two feels like deliberately leaving a space, or worse, announcing to the sparse community of water neighbors that he knows the space exists and wants to fill it. Three feels like the ideation of a child who doesn’t realize his parents do have a life outside of him and his cottage.
And he’s not looking for their company, constantly. They’d even talked about this, during a dinner shortly after he’d bought the land with their input and approval. How often do you see us over here, Shane? How much space to decompress do you want?
Maybe a few times a week, dinner or lunch, he’d said. Canoeing with his dad and business meetings with his mom on the terrace. He had plenty to keep him busy when alone - all the cozy things, plus his gym, plus his rink, plus his hot tub.
One chair it is. Before the very first night sleeping in the cottage, he sits on the dock and watches the sun set. The house gleams behind him, freshly-stained and mostly-furnished, and Shane feels happy and accomplished. He has achieved many dreams, and he’s completed a project, and he is aware that the shape of his wonderful, hard-won life doesn’t hold room for someone beside him, so he doesn’t miss their presence.
*
His dad didn’t get the memo about Shane’s many quiet realizations while building the cottage, or the peace he feels with them.
“Now I like the wood and glass myself, bud, but it’s pretty masculine. Right, Yuna?”
“All I said was that I’d have done shiplap. That’s all I said,” his mom claims with her hand up in innocence, a wineglass in the other.
They’re sitting at the table on the terrace, enjoying burgers cooked on Shane’s expensive grill and an orzo salad brought over by his parents, a week into Shane’s first summer at his cottage. Everyone’s had some amount of wine, chilled in Shane’s expensive fridge, and there’s some gentle teasing going on about the cottage’s amenities. Shane knows his parents are very proud of what he’s built and how hard he worked to earn it, so each playful jibe about his new place lands as softly as it’s meant, and he can’t fight his wide grin.
His parents are the people who know him best, and he doesn’t have anything to hide from them - not his awkward wealth, or his neuroticism in picking out appliances, or his probably-boring decorative taste.
Well. Their knowledge of Shane, actually, may not be complete.
“I’m just saying, this place is beautiful. I think you should take that documentary crew up on their offer, and the architecture magazine, and anyone else who wants to film it. Because one day, when you finally get a woman up here, she’s going to think this looks like a glorified man cave.” His dad sounds delighted by the idea – so funny and so inevitable.
“David, stop,” his mom swats her husband on the arm. “Shane’s not going to marry someone who comes in and paints the place pink.”
“Who puts up wallpaper,” his dad teases in the tone of an often-referenced joke.
Shane’s stomach feels a little tight, lifting him out of the bubble of goodwill. Suddenly he’s very aware of the heat of the evening and the screaming insects in the trees.
“Everyone put up wallpaper back then, David! And your apartment didn’t have much going for it.”
“Girlfriends, they say they’re just going to change one thing, and then-“
“Sorry,” Shane cuts into the giggles, “but we all know that’s not happening, right?”
It goes silent. Not the bugs, but every sound at the table stops with a heavy fork clink.
He doesn’t know why he says this after years of intentionally never talking to his parents about his love life. Or, he does know, because he doesn’t want them to really expect this and invest actual hope into it. And because a part of him still expects and wants them to understand the broad strokes of him, even if he keeps the details close to his chest.
“What’s not happening, bud?” his dad asks gently, so gently. Shane suspects that he’s shifting into the mode of a parent who has practiced, or at least thought about, this conversation in advance.
Which makes Shane flush with anger, briefly. Why tease this little tableau about Shane’s domestication if they’ve already scented something abnormal about him? Maybe had conversations about him and his failed, or nonexistent, relationships with women?
“The theoretical woman who hates this cottage. Let’s stop pretending. I built this place knowing I wouldn’t ever have a girlfriend or wife up here.” He focuses on keeping his face and his tone stoic, ignoring how his pulse picks up and floods him with adrenaline in the direction of his bedroom, or maybe his Range Rover.
This is his house, and he keeps his seat, no matter how nice it would be to hide under his covers or leave the province right this moment.
His mom raises her fingers to her mouth, so visibly sad that Shane’s anger evaporates. She seems to catch herself and deliberately lowers the hand. Her voice is, impossibly, even gentler than his dad’s when she asks, “So, honey, no girlfriend, or…or no partner at all?”
And Shane doesn’t have a lot of experience with his mom looking heartbroken, because he wasn’t the type of kid to cause that. He’s seen her spitting furious at his coaches, crying elatedly at his Cup wins, and steely-eyed through hundreds of lost hockey games, but not this.
Probably there was some of this when he was too young to remember and his parents tried to conjure a second baby out of love and medical appointments, but Shane barely knows the shape of that sadness. He thinks he’s maybe unknowingly treading on it in this - the deliberate answer that their family is done growing and they’ll have to make their own milestones in place of weddings and babies, because no one new is joining the team.
He wasn’t expecting to make his mom sad today, just like he wasn’t expecting to reveal this secret piece of himself. But since these things are happening, he checks in with himself to make sure he means them.
He really works to imagine a Mrs. Shane Hollander at the cottage, her chair on the dock and her products on the bathroom counter. His only reference for a woman’s bathroom is his mom or Jackie Pike, and he’s not marrying his mom, so he focuses on Jackie. Age-appropriate, active-WAG, kind, pretty Jackie. The type of woman everyone in his life, especially Hayden, has always pushed at him. Jackie’s bathroom sink is an explosion of makeup tubes and spray bottles bowled over by a series of electronic contraptions that do…hair things. Curling, straightening, hair things.
And these hair things help Jackie look radiant, but Shane cannot make himself picture these things on his counter. That certainty feels concrete within him.
That’s probably sexist to think, though. The first thing he thinks about when he pictures a woman in his cottage is to reduce her to a beauty regimen and assume she’s incapable of tidying a shared space? Wow, Shane. There are women out there who don’t wear makeup or spend much time on their hair - granted, Shane has never seen one of them as an NHL WAG - and he’s running away with his assumptions.
He makes himself imagine, as a thought exercise, the possibility of a man with his own products in Shane’s life and bathroom. Just to play Devil’s advocate. He assigns this man a simple pump bottle of lotion, an electric razor, a water pick, a few other things like Shane’s own bathroom products, and then adds in some extra tubes and bottles, just to commit. Some men take more care with their skin, or their hair, like if it’s curly-
Rozanov floats into his mind like he was never very far off anyway.
Fucking Rozanov, whom Shane has constructed mental walls around while planning the real, glass walls of his cottage. Rozanov, who has no place in this world of family and permanence he’s built here. Or so he’s told himself a hundred times. Do not assign Rozanov to the space beside Shane - be realistic, and keep things in the clearly-marked spaces they’ve tested, broken, and rebuilt. Do not disappoint or confuse yourself.
Most unfortunately, the blurry vision of the man in his cottage pops into clarity like turning on autofocus. Suddenly, Rozanov is in his bathroom, curl creams and colognes taking up space just like they do at his Boston penthouse, without really bothering Shane. Rozanov is on his dock, soaking up the sun and complaining about something. Rozanov is at this table swilling wine, or making fun of how he temps the burgers before pulling them off the grill, or napping on the comfy couch under a throw blanket, or, or, or.
And fuck, Rozanov is obviously in his bed, simmering gold in the lamplight against Shane’s beige sheets.
Rozanov. Totally impossible and the only non-family Shane can actually imagine being here.
But, he reminds himself, this line of thought is completely useless. So, maybe thoughts of Rozanov have followed him through the building of the cottage just like they pop up before non-Boston games or during mundane moments in his apartment.
That’s a problem Shane already knew about.
That’s his brain recognizing patterns and extrapolating his next move, only his inexperienced, dumb brain can’t remember that this is, and that this has to be, casual. It sees a bit tenderness after sex and jumps forward to ‘two chairs.’ It predicts the play from nothing more than the angle of a skate.
For so many reasons, Rozanov is not coming here. But, Shane can kind of see the image of someone Rozanov-like spending time here, surrounded by all the care he put into creating it.
Who this Rozanov-like person will be is completely a mystery. And likely does not exist, because of how singular Rozanov is.
But.
It’s definitely not a woman.
His parents are still looking at him, and he doesn’t want his mom to be sad. He can’t rule out the Rozanov-like person, so he allows the truth to settle over the dinner like some sort of charter for the new house.
“Maybe a man. But not until after I retire,” he tells them. He’s still straining against the fight-flight-freeze and they can probably hear it in his shaky breathing, but his face and his voice do what he wants them to. He thinks he would have kept his sunglasses on for this part, had he known it was coming.
He can tell that he shocks them, maybe more that he voiced it than the actual fact of the thing. He’s shocked himself, too. He knows he’s right, and he’s probably been on the cusp of knowing this about himself for a while now, but it’s never been something that felt relevant or appropriate to share. But now he’s said it.
His mom reaches forward and puts her hand over his. She’s still very emotional but smiling through the tears gathering at her waterline.
“Thank you for telling us,” she says, probably like all the websites told her to. He huffs a laugh.
“You don’t have to do a script. It’s just me,” he tells her. Then, oh, his dad’s hand is on his other arm, and Shane could easily get emotional if they keep this up.
He’s not up for that right now, since he didn’t plan for this to be any sort of deep conversation, and he really just wants to get back on track with enjoying the meal and the view.
“Thank you both of you for being cool. Let’s - let’s not do a whole thing.”
“Retirement, though?” his mom asks, taking a sip of her wine. That, at least, settles things back into the current of the familiar. Everyone shifts back to their own spaces. The world seems to quiet down as the Hollanders resume the sounds of eating. “That’s so far away.”
Shane’s fingers creep towards his face with the unconscious intent to bite a knuckle or twirl his eyebrow. He doesn’t know how to respond to that. But his dad steps in, as quick to smooth the tension now as he was to open this box in the first place. The duality of Dads.
“How often are you planning to get landscapers out here?” he asks, gesturing towards the grassy, manicured slope down to the lake.
Grateful, Shane starts to talk about the maintenance schedule he envisions for the cottage during his residence and then the season while he’s away, and his mom lets her statement sink into their family psyche like a stone in the lake.
It is a long time. And it is pretty sad.
But, there is also this, and sunsets with a cold ginger ale, and the sound of the rain against all the glass of the cottage, and knowing that Shane eventually leaves this paradise to return to a Cup-winning team and the only thing he loves more than the cottage and sex.
There’s purpose and joy in being by himself. This is what he chooses for now, while his body can keep up with hockey at the highest, most exhilarating level.
Who knows what his life will look like after this all ends, but he’s pinned something true about himself for later.
The conversation turns to Remember Whens about a cottage opening service they’d blacklisted while Shane played in Juniors, and Shane finds himself smiling again and even suggesting they open a second bottle of wine.
The sun falls lower and lower in the sky as they talk and light the citronella candles, and the smell reminds Shane of every prior summer at their cottage, all leading up to here and now. His cottage now, where he gets to be himself as much as he really understands what that means, and apparently he gets to be known.
There is a lot more stressing to do around this topic, he knows. He’s experienced his overthinking brain before, and the edges of his desire seem as murky as ever. What he said tonight feels like it probably should have taken a few years to surface, but the right people asked the right question in this place he built to exist as himself, and Shane feels okay about them knowing, tonight.
The full panic of anyone knowing and possibly revealing things, without meaning to, will doubtlessly creep in later, but it hasn’t hit yet. Maybe it won’t come at all until he’s back in the pressure cooker of Montreal.
They wander down to the water after eating, still chatting, and Shane admires the lit-up cottage from the bottom of the hill. It’s all his, for now.
A loon wails over the water, looking for its mate.