Chapter Text
The Kitchen
In the dream, it smelled of syrniki.
Ilya knew that before he knew where he was. The smell came first — fried farmer's cheese, vanilla, hot butter — and only then did the kitchen take shape around him. Six square meters. An oilcloth with a lemon print, worn through at one corner down to the white threads. A fridge that hummed as if it were thinking about something of its own. A radio on the windowsill, murmuring under its breath. Tulle curtains, and through the tulle, light — thick and golden, like honey in a jar.
Mama was standing at the stove.
She was flipping the syrniki with a fork. Not a spatula — a fork; she always did it that way. Ilya had forgotten that for twenty years, and now it came back whole, all at once, along with the sound: the soft sizzle, the click of the fork against the rim of the pan.
"Ilyusha," she said without turning around. "Did you wash your hands?"
He was about five. He could tell because his feet didn't reach the floor. A blue stool with a crack down the middle of the seat, his feet in wool socks dangling in the air. His hands on the oilcloth — small, covered in scratches.
"Yes," he lied.
Mama laughed. She laughed as if someone had just told her very good news and she wanted to share it with everyone. He had forgotten that too.
She set a plate in front of him: syrniki, sour cream, a spoonful of cherry jam on top — so that it ran down the sides. She sat down across from him, propped her cheek on her hand, and watched him eat. Her hair was pinned up with a pencil. She was younger than he remembered. Much younger. Almost the same age as the other Ilya — the one who was asleep somewhere.
"Good?"
He nodded, his mouth full. It was good the way things are only good in childhood and in dreams.
She didn't ask him anything else. Not how his head was. Not when he'd be back on the ice, what the doctors said, whether he'd slept, whether he'd eaten, why he wasn't answering his phone. She just sat across from him, and the light lay on her hands, and the radio sang something old, and Ilya was five years old, and nothing hurt.
He woke up in the dark.
The curtains were drawn — heavy blackout curtains; Shane had ordered them the very first week. His head hummed, dull and familiar, like a transformer box. The ninth day since he'd been slammed into the glass. The ninth, he thought — he'd started losing track of the days. Concussion. Rest, darkness, no screens, no ice. Time.
Shane was asleep beside him, facing the wall: he'd driven in overnight after a road game and hadn't even fully undressed.
Ilya lay there staring at a ceiling he couldn't see, and felt that his face was wet. He hadn't cried for his mother in a very long time. He'd thought he'd forgotten how.
His hand went to his chest on its own — out of habit, without thinking — to where his little cross had hung since he was a child.
His fingers found only skin.
The taste of cherry jam was still in his mouth.
Light
The hardest part turned out to be the light.
It was everywhere. It sliced in under the bedroom door, glared off his phone screen, bounced off the snow outside so that even through the curtains the room was full of a whitish haze. Ilya walked around the apartment in sunglasses like an idiot. Shane had unscrewed every bulb except the one in the hallway and put electrical tape over the little green light on the router.
Sound wasn't much better. The dishwasher roared like a jet engine. Shane's keys in the lock — like a gunshot. Words started failing him too. Once Ilya stood in the middle of the kitchen with a spoon in his hand and couldn't remember what it was called in English. All his head would give him was lozhka, lozhka, lozhka, stubborn as a woodpecker, and he wanted to throw the spoon at the wall.
The doctors said: time. Rest. Don't rush it. A head isn't a knee — you can't stitch it up or put it in a cast; it heals on its own, when it feels like it. Every week: a little longer. Just wait a little longer.
The team played without him. He didn't watch. He couldn't — screens. And he didn't want to.
He never did find the cross. He tore apart the bed, the bathroom, his jacket pockets, the car. He couldn't remember when he'd last seen it — before the hit or after. His head. Mama had put it on him back in Moscow and said, "Don't take it off. It keeps away everything bad." And he never had — not on the ice, not in the shower, not with anyone.
Nonsense, he told himself. He didn't even go to church. And still he kept catching himself feeling for it — there, on his chest, where now there was nothing. The way your tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be.
But in the dream, the light was soft.
He dreamed of the kitchen every other night now, then almost every night. The light lay on the windowsill, on the oilcloth, on Mama's hands — honey-colored, late-afternoon. That exact hour when Mama came home from work and the kids were still shouting in the courtyard. Ilya could look straight at the window. For as long as he wanted. Nothing hurt.
One day he noticed that the light never changed.
They'd had breakfast — syrniki. Then Mama made soup, and he sat on the stool and watched her chop dill. Then they had tea with jam. And the light behind the tulle stayed exactly the same: golden, slanting, late-afternoon. The clock on the wall — round, its glass cracked — was ticking, but the hands stood at ten past five.
Always at ten past five.
Ilya looked at those hands and waited to be afraid.
He wasn't.
Awake, time was the only medicine he'd been prescribed. It crawled like a heavy, sick animal, and every day weighed as much as a week. Here, time had simply stopped. Here, you didn't have to wait for it to pass.
Here, it already had.
"More tea?" Mama asked.
"Yes," said Ilya. "Yes. More."
Word for Word
Mama told stories.
About the time he was four and got lost in Detsky Mir, the big children's store. How she ran from floor to floor, how the security guard made an announcement over the loudspeaker, how they found him in the toy department: sitting on the counter, swinging his legs, gnawing on a sushka, a little ring of dry bread the saleswoman had given him.
"And you know what you said to me?" Mama would lean forward and make big scary eyes. "'I wasn't lost. You were lost.'"
And she'd laugh. And tuck behind her ear the strand of hair that had slipped loose from the pencil.
Ilya laughed too. He didn't remember any of it himself. He liked that someone else remembered it for him.
A few dreams later she told it again. Detsky Mir, the guard, the sushka. "And you know what you said to me?" Leaning forward. Scary eyes. The laugh. The strand of hair behind the ear.
Word for word. The same pause before "you know what." The same little laugh on "lost." Like a tape someone had rewound.
Ilya looked at her and felt something inside him go cold — somewhere deep, deep down, as if someone had opened a window in a faraway room.
And then Mama said:
"Did your Shane come by in the night again? Good boy. Only he's so thin. You should feed him."
Ilya had never told her about Shane. He couldn't have told her about Shane. When she died, Ilya was still a boy, and Shane was just a kid in another country he'd never even heard of.
He opened his mouth to ask: how do you know that?
Mama slid the jar of jam and a spoon toward him.
And he didn't ask. If you ask, you have to hear the answer. And he wanted so badly to sit here a little longer — here, where nothing had to be explained. Not to the doctors, not to the coach, not to his agent, not to Shane. Not to himself. Where nothing had to be proven and nothing had to be endured. Where all you had to do was stay.
Awake, he slept fourteen hours a day now. He went to bed at seven in the evening. He didn't answer messages — no longer because he couldn't read them, but because he didn't want to. Shane left containers in the fridge, labeled in marker: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. In his neat, even handwriting.
The containers sat untouched.
Ilya no longer woke up with a wet face. He woke up with a single thought: how much longer until evening.
Doors
Shane found the containers on Friday.
At first he didn't say anything. From the bedroom, Ilya heard the fridge open. Heard how long — too long — it stood open. Heard something drop, muffled, into the trash. Then Shane came in and sat on the edge of the bed. In the dark he was barely visible: just a silhouette and the smell of outside — snow, gasoline, gas-station coffee.
"You're not eating anything," Shane said.
"I eat."
"Ilya."
Ilya turned to face the wall.
"I made you an appointment," Shane said. "Not the neurologist. Galina. Just to talk. Tuesday."
"I'm not going."
"You talk in your sleep." Shane's voice was very even. Ilya knew that voice: it was how Shane talked before shootouts, when he was scared enough to throw up. "In Russian. I barely understand any of it, but I know one word. Mama. You call for her. Every night I'm here. Every single one."
Ilya lay still. Inside him it was quiet and empty, like an apartment after the movers have taken all the furniture.
"Leave her out of this," he said.
"I'm not touching her. I just want to understand where you are. Because you're not here. Even when you're here — you're not."
And Ilya said it. Later he tried many times to remember whether he'd wanted to — and every time, the answer was that he had. Not to hurt. Just to tell the truth, because the truth came easier than anything else.
"Maybe I don't want to be here."
Shane breathed in. And didn't breathe out for a long time.
Then he stood up and said, very quietly:
"Okay."
And left. He didn't close the door all the way — between the door and the frame there was a strip of hallway light, thin as a blade. It cut into his eyes. Ilya pulled the pillow over his head and waited for sleep the way you wait for a train.
In the dream, Mama asked:
"Ilyusha, did you wash your hands?"
So he went to wash his hands. He opened the bathroom door.
Behind the door was the stairwell.
Their old building. Walls painted halfway up in green oil paint. Mailboxes with bent little doors. A light bulb in a wire cage. The smell of cats, damp, and somebody's fried potatoes. Everything was right, down to the last marker scrawl on the wall. Only one thing was wrong: the stairwell couldn't be here. This was where the bathroom was.
And from below, from the stairs, someone was crying.
Quietly. The way people cry when they don't want to be heard: through clenched teeth, into a sleeve. Ilya stood in the doorway and listened. It was the first thing in all these dreams that hurt. Really hurt — somewhere under his ribs, where, awake, he hadn't felt anything in a long time.
He knew that crying. He couldn't remember where from.
Mama's hand came to rest on his shoulder.
"Draft," Mama said, and closed the door. "Don't pay any attention."
"Who's crying out there?"
"No one, sunshine. It's the neighbors." She crouched down in front of him — he was small again, and hadn't noticed when it happened — and buttoned him into a coat that hadn't been there a second ago. Red, with a hood. "Let's go for a walk instead. It's gotten noisy in here."
Ilya looked back at the closed door.
Behind it, someone was still crying. Very quietly.
"Come on," said Mama.
And he went.