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The first call comes early, when Ilya is still skating along the edge of a dream. Shane is tucked in warm at his side, and his hair scratches at the underside of Ilya’s jaw, and the tender patch that always tickles just beneath his ear. He can hear the vibration against the wooden bedside table, the soft buzz buzz buzz incessant as a mosquito but he ignores it to go back in the warmth of his sleepy haze. The dream isn’t a nightmare, it isn’t really anything, just a wash of colours and feelings, but he’s pretty sure Shane is there so if he were asked, he’d say the dream was good.
Later, when the sun is fully up and Shane pulls from his warm and sweaty side, he checks his phone. It’s an unknown number, the region code is for Russia. He doesn’t call it back.
The second call comes when they’re sitting on the couch. Shane is on his back, Ilya is atop him, and outside there are birds calling in the freshly green-topped trees. A week ago, Shane told him that they’re Black-Capped Chickadees, and Ilya can’t believe that’s the real name of a real bird. Canada still feels so strange to him sometimes.
His lips press to the underside of Shane’s jaw, and Ilya likes the way he sighs into the soft, familiar pressure. They’re home from a short trip to Montreal, and in three days they’ll leave again for the first stop of their playoffs – Shane had been extra satisfied when the buzzer echoed around Centre Bell, and the Metros’ fans had gone home wanting. Their season is over, but Shane and Ilya’s is still alive. Maybe the risks they’ve taken were never really risks at all.
‘Ilya…’ Shane sighs, right when Ilya’s hand creeps down and slips beneath the hem of his shirt. This is what Ilya loves most, now they live together all the time. It’s the inconsequential things: cooking together, waking up side by side, and laying chest to chest on the couch while the sun is still shining, with hands wandering and nowhere else to be. His teeth graze slowly against the pulse on the side of Shane’s neck, and his mind is cycling through all the things he knows Shane loves him to do.
The call sends vibrations across the coffee table, and the spoon in his empty coffee mug rattles so suddenly that Ilya feels Shane jerk in surprise beneath him. Fingers slip into the sandy blonde of his tousled curls, and Ilya makes no move to pull away, because really how can he, when they’re laying together like this.
‘Do you need to get that?’ Shane asks, even as he tips his head back to give Ilya more room at the base of his throat.
‘No, is not important.’ Ilya murmurs against his skin.
‘You don’t know that, it could be.’ Shane tries.
‘Not as important as this.’ Ilya replies, and Shane doesn’t argue because Ilya’s hand has slipped under the elastic waistband of his boxers.
After, when Ilya rolls onto his back and Shane sits up to find the underwear they’d discarded somewhere across the floor, he picks up the phone and squints down at the screen. He needs to wear his glasses, when he gets in that close.
‘It’s someone from Russia.’ Shane notes, helpfully, and Ilya’s eyes are closed so he pretends he doesn’t know Shane is looking at him.
‘I will call back later.’ He lies, and Shane doesn’t push.
The third call doesn’t come for another few weeks – long enough later that Ilya thought he’d forgotten about them at all. They’d beaten New York, then Florida, but they’d fallen short against a young Carolina, and their season had ended with more of a fizzle than a bang. Ilya is disappointed, but not mad: Troy is injured, Wyatt sick, and they wouldn’t have made it much further without them. So, they come home and round off their season, then set out for the Cottage. Ilya eagerly puts dibs on driving, and Shane rolls his eyes and pretends he is annoyed about it, but Ilya knows he likes the way he can hold Ilya’s right hand with both of his, cradled in his lap. They both know the way by now, it’s not like Ilya needs his directions.
His phone rings somewhere in the space between city and wilderness, where the houses get fewer and further in between, but before they fell away completely in turn for the forest. It buzzes from the drinks tray, and Anya stirs on the back seat as Shane reaches down, like the phone is his own.
‘It’s from Russia.’ He says, and Ilya keeps his eyes trained on the road. He pulls Shane’s left hand – the one still held warm in his own – and presses his lips to the back of his palm, the edge of his wrist, that soft pad of muscle, right at the base of his thumb. He’s always liked Shane’s hands, so neat and soft and well taken care of.
‘Do you want me to answer it?’ Shane asks.
‘So confident in your Russian.’ Ilya jokes, and Shane squeezes his hand, not with affection, but rather to poke a hole in his determined pretence that the phone isn’t ringing.
‘It could be important, and you tell me all the time my Russian is getting good.’
‘Yes, Hollander, getting good, not good.’
‘Do you want me to answer it or not?’
‘No.’ The phone stops buzzing, right when he says it.
‘It could be important.’ Shane reminds him.
‘Is not.’ Ilya replies.
‘It could be your family.’
‘My family lives in Ottawa.’ Ilya says, firmer than he meant to.
It’s Shane’s turn this time to pull Ilya’s hand over and to his mouth. He doesn’t kiss it, not right away, he just brushes his lips feather light along the ridge of his knuckles. It’s something he does, sometimes, when he’s thinking.
‘You know what I mean.’
Ilya sighs, squeezes his hand back in three short pulses like a heartbeat thumping steady and true. I love you, it’s meant to mean. Once he’d tried squeezing it enough times to say it in Russian, and they’d both laughed because it never quite worked when the syllables went on too long.
‘The only people in Russia who have my phone number are Sveta and Alexei.’ He says, ‘Sveta wouldn’t be calling from an unknown number, she has many ways to contact me.’
‘And if it’s Alexei?’ Shane asks.
‘Then he wants money.’ Ilya replies, and he can see Shane nodding, out the corner of his eye. Ilya knows Shane won’t push if he makes it clear he doesn’t want him to, but even with the anxiety bubbling under his skin, he likes the way Shane always tries. Even in all these years, Shane has never spoken badly about Ilya’s family, no matter how many reasons he’s had to.
‘I love you.’ He says, now, with his fingers laced between Ilya’s and in a Russian that is accented but confident. Of course Shane’s right, he is good, and Ilya might’ve been jealous of his ability to learn the language if the taste of it on Shane’s tongue didn’t make him go so weak at the knees.
‘I love you, too.’ He says, ‘more than life.’ Shane smiles, and Ilya’s pretty sure he’s understood.
He misses the fourth call, it’s the first one he doesn’t necessarily mean to ignore. He wakes up early, they’ve already been at the cottage for close to a week, and he lounges lazily in bed once Shane has pulled from his side to potter his way through the familiar pattern of his routine. Ilya has it memorised, too, how Shane stands and dresses one item at a time. He always starts with his boxers, then his shirt and these days he always prefers it to be one of Ilya’s, he says he likes the way they fit on him (too big, hanging loose off his frame, the cotton soft and rich with the smell of yesterday’s cologne, shower gel, sweat and grime. Shane likes smelling like him, Ilya knows this to mean, and he can’t complain, because he likes Shane smelling like him, too.) When Shane is in the kitchen, Ilya rolls over and pulls his phone free from its charge, and he sees the call timestamped for a little after three. This time, it sets a pit of anxiety deep in his belly and he finds himself opening his browser, itching with a worry he’d not felt in years.
Alexei Rozanov, he googles, and scrolls through articles one at a time. He follows it with more searches: Alexei Rozanov Moscow, Alexei Rozanov Police and finally, when the feeling gets the better of him, Alexei Rozanov dead. The articles are nothing, though, his searching comes up empty, and he can’t help the way his chest floods with relief before descending back into frustration.
Weeks after he and Shane got married, Ilya had become a permanent resident of Canada. Now on the approach to their five year anniversary, he is nearing the ability to finally reach for citizenship. The last threads binding him to Russia are fraying, he is so close to the final snap.
In the kitchen the kettle whistles and Ilya tosses his phone onto the mussed covers to listen to the soft plodding of Shane’s footsteps as he sets about feeding Anya her breakfast. Last summer, he had presented Ilya with a stack of yellow post-it notes and leant over his shoulder as he asked him to write labels in Russian to stick to every surface. They were nouns, things like cupboard and kettle, counter and fridge and Ilya listens now to the sound of him repeating the words one by one, quietly and to himself. He argued it was the best way he could learn how to read, that Cyrillic was the hardest part, and Ilya had found new and fun ways of testing him. On the rare mornings he is up first, he switches them around until the dining table is a fork, and a light switch becomes their washing machine and it delights him how Shane figures it out every time, then gives him that long suffering look he does when he is feeling so wholly and completely in love.
‘I’ll never learn if you keep switching it all around.’ He complains, when Ilya folds him over the kitchen counter. It’s labelled as the couch.
‘No, my love.’ Ilya argues with his lips below his ear, ‘I think it will help you learn faster.’
On the fifth call Ilya finally picks up because he tells himself he’s had enough. It’s early, and Shane is doing his yoga on the living room floor, so Ilya has chosen to drink his coffee on the big rock by the edge of the lake with a cigarette loose between his lips. He thinks it might be his favourite place on the whole property, and he relishes in the soft sound of water lapping at the stones, the birds calling overhead. Across their little bay there’s a mating pair of swans, they come every spring and this year they’re surrounded by a gaggle of cygnets. Shane had told him that swans mate for life, and of course Ilya already knew that, but he let Shane explain anyway, because he’s so in love with the fact that he wants to.
His phone is in his hand when the vibrations start, and he takes a long slow drag as he stares at the screen. For a moment, he wonders if he even remembers how to answer, as though the simple act of sliding his thumb across the screen is insurmountable. But he does it, and he brings the phone up against his ear.
‘What?’ He says, in lieu of greeting.
The line crackles with static, maybe it’s from the distance, or the wind in the trees messing with his signal. For a long moment, Ilya just sits there with the phone against his ear, like it’s a can and string linking him across an ocean to a home he can’t ever quite shake.
‘Alexei?’ He tries, because he doesn’t know who else it might be.
‘No.’ The voice comes, and Ilya feels winded, like a punch has been landed to his gut. It’s the voice of a woman, no, a girl, and suddenly his head feels thick with clouds, his eyes misty, and he sounds like he’s drowning when he finally says: ‘Ekaterina?’
Ilya has never known his niece, not really, not like he wished he could. She was born when he’d been in Boston, and even with his regular summer trips home, he barely got time to bond with her. They would spend days together sometimes, but already by the next year, she would have mostly forgotten him and the hours they’d spend racing between play equipment, chasing each other through the garden. He existed in her life like a ghost, the only thing she could ever rely on him to be was absent.
‘Yes.’ She says, ‘Uncle Ilya.’
‘Where are you?’ He asks, and turns to look over his shoulder, back towards the house, as though she might be there waiting for him, ‘are you safe? Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’m safe, I’m okay.’ She says, and Ilya counts on his fingers, she must be close to seventeen by now, she must be so close to growing up, ‘I’m in the park, the one down by the river. I didn’t really expect you to answer.’ She laughs and it’s a shy little sound, and Ilya feels his chest swell. She’d adored him, when she’d been young, and he can still hear the soft chime of her childish laughter if he tries hard enough. But he’s not seen her in seven years, since the last time he left Russia when his father had died, and they’d all been so heavy under the weight of their grief that he’d hardly had the time to remind her how much he adored her still.
‘How did you get my number?’ He asks.
‘I found it in dad’s things. It was an old notebook or something, he’d written it down.’ She explains, although she sounds sheepish, like he’s caught her doing something she’s not supposed to.
‘So Alexei doesn’t know?’ Ilya says, ‘Will you be in trouble?’
‘No, he doesn’t know.’ She replies, but this time her sheepish tone gives way to something more like defiance, something Ilya thinks reminds him of himself, ‘You’re my uncle, I’m allowed to talk to you. I don’t like pretending you’re not real.’
‘I don’t know if my brother will see it that way.’ He reminds her and she makes a sound of exasperation.
‘I don’t care.’ She replies, and despite himself, Ilya smiles.
‘Then I won’t tell him, if you don’t.’ And it’s more than just a promise: it’s an open door.
‘Deal.’ She agrees. They talk for a little while: she tells Ilya about her schooling, her skating, her simple child-like dreams and he listens with nothing but an ocean of patience. She’s got so much anger towards her father, the way teenagers often do, but he won’t encourage her to hate him, he just lets her funnel it all out.
Eventually, she exhales long and slow, and the low horn of a boat sailing down the river punctuates their silence.
‘It’s late.’ Ilya reminds her, it’s closing in on mid-morning, and he keeps calculating the time on his hands.
‘Can I call you again?’ She asks, ‘the same time tomorrow?’
‘Of course, Katyusha. You can call me whenever you’d like.’ He replies.
When the line goes dead, Ilya presses the corner of his phone against his pouted lips. The sun is high in the sky, and across the bay the cygnets have strayed a little further from their parents. Their round, grey bodies are buffered by the wind, but they’re growing big and confident, before too long they’ll be losing their down and setting off on their own. He wonders if they’ll ever come back. He wonders if they’ll always call this place home.
‘Ilya?’ Shane’s voice pulls Ilya from his thoughts, and he turns to look back over his shoulder. Shane is walking down barefoot through the grass, a steaming mug held in his hands and his full lips spread into a warm, adoring smile, ‘I saw you were on the phone.’ He says. Ilya moves over, and Shane climbs up onto the rock beside him while Anya pokes her nose under the nearby bushes. She likes sitting inside with Shane while he does his stretches, and sometimes she’ll even join him, until he laughs and pulls her close.
‘Yes.’ He says, ‘but the call is finished now.’
‘You were speaking in Russian.’ Shane comments, and it isn’t a question.
‘Yes.’ Ilya says again, ‘you were right. It was important.’
For a moment, Shane just looks at him, then he reaches one hand up and sinks his fingers into the golden strands of Ilya’s summer-bright hair. At first he strokes them, then he pulls his head closer until he can press a kiss firmly to the pulse of his temple.
‘I’m glad you answered, then.’ He says.
‘Yes.’ Ilya agrees and rests his head down on the firm, strong muscle of Shane’s shoulder, ‘I am, too.’
Ekaterina is true to her word, and she calls again come morning. This time, Ilya is still in bed and he declines the call, then calls it right back.
‘I thought you changed your mind.’ She says when she answers, and he can’t help but laugh at her tone.
‘If I call you, I pay the international rates. Your dad is more likely to ask you questions if he is paying for you to call Canada all the time.’ It’s in his nature to feel protective of her.
‘Is that where you are right now?’ She asks, ‘Canada?’
‘You don’t know I live in Canada?’ He sounds surprised, and she’s impatient in return.
‘We still have internet here, Uncle Ilyusha.’ She huffs, ‘But I don’t know where you are all the time. You could be anywhere. America, Mexico, China, Vladivostok.’
‘I am in Canada.’ He replies with a roll of his eyes, ‘I am at my cottage. With Shane.’ It’s the first time he’s mentioned Shane, and he can’t help the swell of nerves that rupture from his centre. How funny, he thinks, that he feels all this fear of coming out again.
‘Shane.’ She says, ‘And Shane is what? Your best friend?’ She asks, right as the door to the bedroom opens, and he’s there in all his wood-cut Canadian glory. Shirtless and shoeless with eyes still dazed from sleep and the afterglow of where he’d let Ilya’s hands wander.
‘You tell me.’ Ilya replies, without taking his eyes off him, ‘with all that internet access, I’m sure you’ve searched me before.’ The thought of Shane being his best friend felt all wrong, reductive, like he was being forced into a box in which he doesn’t quite fit. No, Shane Hollander isn’t his best friend. Shane is his best everything. He has been Ilya’s best nights away from home, tangled in sheets and up too late, hoping to God the moment could linger. He has been the best notification coming in on his phone with a too-tame joke still enough to send Ilya reeling. For more than seventeen years Shane has been the best sight, the best sound, the best texture against his skin. The best conversation, the best phone call, the best face to see on his TV screen and on billboards, plastered across the back of a bus. The best parts of Ilya, the ones he likes most, are the parts that remind him of Shane, so Ilya figures Shane is the best parts of him, too. Like a rib, or a limb, or the marrow inside his bones. Shane isn’t his best friend. Shane is just his best.
‘He’s the best centre in the world.’ She says, like she’s avoiding the answer.
‘Yes.’ He says, ‘something like that. He’s here now, should I tell him you’re his biggest fan?’
‘No!’ Ekaterina cries, ‘I’m only a fan of Russian hockey players.’
‘That’s good because you can’t be his biggest fan. That’s me already.’ Ilya smiles and reaches out a hand towards his husband. Shane gives him a puzzled look, even as he smiles benignly and slips his fingers over the warmth of Ilya’s palm, and threads their digits together, ‘he speaks some Russian now, though, so really you should be a fan of him.’
‘Did he learn it for you?’ She asks.
‘Yes.’ Ilya replies, ‘and I think for you, in a way. He is your uncle, too.’ Shane presses one knee to the mattress, then the other and crawls up the length of him, until they’re curved together side by side. He presses his head against Ilya’s chest, right above his heart, and Ilya’s hands begin absently sliding through the black strands of his shower-soft hair.
‘And you love him?’ She asks, finally, ‘enough that you gave Russia away?’
‘I love him, yes.’ Ilya says, ‘but I gave up Russia because Russia forced me to choose.’
‘My dad hates you for that.’ She says, softly down the line.
‘I know.’ Ilya replies, ‘but do you?’
‘No.’ Ekaterina confirms, ‘no.’
The calls become regular, even when they head home to Ottawa. They slot into his routine as easily as running, eating, brushing his teeth. In the morning he wakes up, and while Shane does his yoga, Ilya goes outside and calls her. Sometimes they last ten minutes, sometimes they’re longer, and Ilya likes the familiarity that grows between them as he learns her friends by name, makes the patterns of their relationships in his head so he can understand the stories she tells him. There are girls she knows from figure skating, there are boys she’s met through school, and Ilya understands the way she rolls her eyes when her dad tells her she should be spending more time at the rink, because she doesn’t want to be an athlete like her uncle.
‘What would you study then?’ Ilya asks and he taps the end of his cigarette, watches the ash as it gets picked up by the wind.
‘Literature, I think.’ She says, ‘Art. I want to go to Paris when I finish school, study at the Sorbonne.’
‘Do you speak French?’ He asks her, and he smiles as he hears the tone in her voice that tells him she’s rolling her eyes.
‘Of course I can speak French.’
‘Shane can speak French, too.’ Ilya tells her. They haven’t spoken yet, but after every call Shane asks Ilya how she is like he has, and Ilya loves him for that. ‘He speaks French, he speaks English, some Japanese too, and now Russian. He’s so annoying.’
‘So I can talk to him about you in French and you won’t understand?’ She asks and Ilya smiles.
‘Yes. You and I can speak about him in Russian, he and I can speak about you in English. We can all be talking about each other behind our backs, very healthy family dynamic. It’s perfect.’ She laughs and he does too, and to Ilya it feels a lot like family, and a lot like homesickness.
‘Do you think one day I can come and visit?’ She asks, and Ilya sighs.
‘Of course you can.’ He says, too fast, ‘when you’re all grown up, living in Paris. I will buy you your plane ticket.’
‘I can’t wait to be free from here. I can’t wait to get out.’ She sighs.
‘But don’t hate your Papa. He loves you, he’s trying his best.’ Ilya reminds her.
‘You don’t even like him.’ She argues.
‘No.’ Ilya agrees, he sees no point in lying, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s not important that you do.’
They sit in silence for a moment. Ilya has finished his cigarette, and he drops the butt into the empty basin of his coffee cup.
‘Can I meet him tomorrow? Your Shane?’ Ekaterina asks.
‘Yes.’ Ilya sighs, like it’s a relief, ‘I want you to love him.’
After every call, Ilya thinks of his mother. He thinks of her a lot these days, because on his next birthday he’ll be older than she was when she died. Ekaterina had asked about her, early on when he’d still been at the cottage. She’d been at the park again, the one near her house, and Ilya told her, ‘your dad and I used to play there when we were small. Our Mama would sit on the bench with her cigarettes and watch us race around, or skate on the ice if it was cold enough.’
‘What was she like?’ She asked.
‘Your grandmother?’ Ilya clarified, even though he knew it’s who she meant.
‘Yes.’
‘She was wonderful. Her sense of humour was so sharp and dry and clever that she was so disarming. I remember being little and listening to all the adults downstairs laughing at her stories. But she was kind, too, she loved me and Alexei so much, just like she would have loved you.’ Ilya says.
‘My Papa says I look like her sometimes.’ Ekaterina sighs, ‘it doesn’t feel like he means it as a good thing.’
‘He said the same to me.’ Ilya replies. After his mother had died the photos of her were taken down in the house and hidden away in a cabinet, stuffed behind papers and old candles where the wax had drowned the wick. Sometimes, when Ilya had been home alone, he’d take them out and admire them, even if just to remind himself what she looked like. ‘She was beautiful.’ He assured his niece now, ‘to look like her is a good thing, Katyusha. It’s a good thing, I promise.’
Shane suggested they video call, the first time he meets Ekaterina, and Ilya feels nervous like it’s an interview. He texts her, and she easily agrees, so he changes his shirt three times before he finds one that feels just right. Shane wears one of Ilya’s old Olympic hoodies, РОССИЯ, it declares with pride, and it makes Ilya smile and kiss him over his face.
‘Too much?’ He asks, and Ilya can tell that he’s nervous, too. It makes sense, she is the first member of his family Shane will meet in the years they’d been falling in love.
‘No.’ Ilya smiles, ‘is perfect.’
She doesn’t answer the call until the final ring, and when she does Ilya can see Moscow behind her. She’s in the park, with its turning leaves, it looks the same as it always did. He and Shane are sitting on their couch with the phone propped up against a stack of empty cups like a makeshift tripod, squished side by side to fit in the frame with their thighs and hips touching, and Ilya’s arm across the back of the couch so that Shane can fit under it. Anya is there too, of course, curled up safely tucked in against Ilya’s other side.
‘Hello.’ Ekaterina says in a tone that betrays her nerves.
‘Hello, Ekaterina.’ Shane replies, in his best Russian, ‘it’s really nice to meet you. I’m Shane.’
‘Yes.’ She says, ‘I know. I have seen you play a lot, and I have heard a lot about you from Ilyusha, but please you can call me Katya.’
Ilya watches the way Shane’s eyes focus, and the muscles between his eyebrows twitch as he tries his best to understand, ‘She says you are good hockey player, and that you can call her Katya. Ekaterina is very formal, like business meeting or border control.’
‘Oh!’ Shane smiles. Sometimes Ilya thinks Shane looks no different to how he did the day they met, out back of the rink in Saskatchewan, but then he smiles and a series of fine lines appear high on his cheekbones, just beneath his eyes. For a while he’d been self conscious about them: they make me look so old he’d complained. But Ilya loves them, and he kisses them last every night. How lucky he is, he thinks, to love someone who’s lived long enough for his face to remember every smile.
Shane continues, ‘Well, Katya, it’s really very nice to meet you. I’m sorry my Russian isn’t very good.’ His words stutter, and he tries again in the language that doesn’t fill his mouth with the same ease it does Ilya’s or Katya’s, ‘I am trying to learn, but my- words can be limited.’
Ilya can’t help but smile, and he lifts his hand from where it’s resting on the back of the couch to smooth his palm over the back of Shane’s head. He’s going to cut it soon, and Ilya likes making the most of these weeks when it’s long and shaggy, because it’s like Shane is coming undone, ‘Speak to him in French.’ He says to Katya, who raises her eyebrows at him. Alexei had been right: she does look like their mother.
‘You don’t understand French.’ She says, and he shrugs.
‘Do not worry about me.’
Shane tentatively tries it, Ilya should have known he’d understood, and when Katya raises to the offer, Ilya lets himself fade out into a daze. He’s picked up words: living in Canada does that, but he can hardly string a sentence together. Learning English had been hard enough and he isn’t so sure he really wants to do all that again.
He still remembers how it felt, of course, when he’d been fresh in Boston and the few words he’d known had rattled around in his mind. Ilya had never been so studious, but growing up in Moscow in the 90’s and early 2000’s, he’d picked up enough English from the video tapes and cassettes making their way in bulk over the border. The post-Soviet tidal wave of foreign media had buffeted his childhood, but even though he’d thought his English was good, it had been hard for those first few years. There had been a lot he’d expected to find difficult about America, with its liminal malls and flashing lights, weak coffee and failed systems playing dress ups as democracy. What he hadn’t realised was that everything would be new: he didn’t recognise the brands on supermarket shelves, he didn’t know the rules on the road, how to get a doctor’s appointment, where he was supposed to shop for sheets and towels and bags to put in his bin. As a boy, puck in hand, he’d thought it’s all hockey, how different could it really be, until he was weighed down by the bone-dense sensation of his own foreignness.
It is much better now, nearing two decades after he’d been drafted ahead of Shane in a flashy hotel conference room, but he still struggled when he was tired, or sick, and the cogs of his brain stiffened and stopped. On those days he let the words buoy him along, like a channel marker bobbed by the tide and he didn’t mind so much because sometimes it was a privilege, to choose not to understand.
The only problems come when he is tired and they are fighting, and his tangled tongue leads to him say the wrong thing. He never means to make things worse, but in his reaching for the right word, he always seems to grasp the wrong one, and then he’s repeating ‘is not what I mean, is not what I mean,’ over and over again. Once they’d tried having an argument in their own languages, with google translate as their go between until they’d both become so furious at the app on their phones that their fight ended with them on a team together against it.
Language isn’t perfect, and neither are they, but things always work out in the end.
Now, his fingers brush through those long strands, at the nape of Shane’s neck. He’s laughing at something Katya has said, and Ilya hears his name, then he hears it again, and Shane turns to look at him so fondly that Ilya can’t help but smile.
‘Ah, you are saying nice things about me.’ He comments, and Shane rolls his eyes.
‘No.’ He says, and Ilya knows it’s a lie.
‘What are you saying, hm? Is it that I am so sexy and so funny, so smart and so handsome, and much better than you at hockey.’ Ilya teases him, then uses the hand in his hair to turn Shane’s head towards him so that he can press their mouths together. It’s short, chaste, the kind of kiss he hopes won’t make Katya uncomfortable.
‘No. None of that.’ Shane teases him back, when their mouths part.
On the call there is a flint click, and Ilya turns to watch as Katya smiles around the cigarette freshly lit between her lips. A flash of protectiveness washes over him.
‘Ah, absolutely not.’ He says, even going so far to wag his finger.
As if to make a point, she blows the lungful of smoke at the camera, ‘You started smoking younger than me. You also smoke on the phone with me all the time.’
‘Yes but I am older than you, I’m allowed to make all kinds of terrible mistakes so that I can teach you the ones you’re not allowed to.’ He argues, ‘put it out.’
Beside him, Shane says something in French and Katya laughs.
‘Maybe this was a mistake.’ Ilya huffs, even as his heart swells in his chest. He can’t imagine two people he’d want to have ganging up on him more.
Shane joins them sometimes, but most days he lets Ilya talk to Katya alone. The language barrier is hard, but Shane understands more Russian than he lets on, so he gives them privacy, he knows they’ll invite him when he’s wanted. The video calls become the standard, though, and Ilya likes getting the chance to see her. He realises he’d never really let himself imagine her, or their family, or anything about Russia. Maybe if he pretends it isn’t real, he can convince himself he doesn’t miss it so much.
‘He loves you a lot.’ Katya comments one day. She’s smoking, and Ilya’s given up on telling her not to. He and Shane are in Detroit and there’s snow in the parking lot he’s called her from, and in the park around her where she sits on a child’s swing.
‘Well yes, I hope so, we’ve been married for five years.’ Ilya snarks back. She’s lamented a lot these past weeks- she’d met a boy sometime in Spring, but they aren’t talking anymore. She’s sworn off love forever, and Ilya finds he doesn’t mind that notion. He can’t imagine a man on earth who’d ever come close to deserving her.
‘When did you know you loved him?’ She asks, and Ilya shrugs.
‘I figured it out a long time ago, but I think I loved him for a long time before that.’ In Boston, the first year Ilya had been chosen as captain, he’d filmed a promotional video for the new run of MHL playing cards. He’d never have admitted it, but he’d been giddy with excitement, at the thought of pulling out the little slip of foiled paper and finding a picture of him.
For the video he’d been paired with Cliff Marleau, and they’d each been given a single pack of ten cards to rip open and sort through on screen.
‘What if I get someone shit?’ Cliff asked their media manager, Natalia.
‘Yes, what if I get Marleau?’ Ilya countered and Natalia had laughed, so Ilya didn’t even register the glare he’d earned from his friend.
‘Just act excited no matter who you yet.’ She’d replied.
Ilya’s fingers dug into the foil and he ripped it open with a satisfying, crisp crunch. The cards were face down and he immediately glanced over to Cliff, ‘who have you got?’ He asked.
‘No cheating!’ Cliff said.
‘Cheat? Me? No, I would never do this!’ Ilya cried, and for a moment they jostled playfully to catch a look at one another’s deck.
‘Troy Barrett.’ Cliff said, when he finally flipped over the first card.
‘Not bad!’ Ilya said, then flipped over his own, ‘Ah, I have Juho Koskinen from Dallas.’
They took turns, one at a time cycling through names. Cliff pulled Scott Hunter, Ilya Connors, and by the end of their packs, the whole room was laughing along with them. When they had one card left each, Ilya wrinkled his nose and said, ‘this card is me, I am certain.’
‘No way!’ Cliff laughed, ‘they didn’t make any of you because nobody would want you.’
‘Ah no! They must make a lot, because I am best and everyone would want me!’ Ilya said and dramatically held up his final card to the camera, so the room would see it before he did. Eyes widened, and Natalia had to slap her hand over her mouth to stop from speaking, ‘what, who is it? Is someone bad?’ Ilya asked. When he turned the card over in his hand, he could have laughed out loud too. It would have been lucky to end up with a card of his own, but instead he looked down at silver foil, a uniform stitched from red and blue.
‘Shane Hollander?!’ he cried out, all drama and flair, ‘no this is rigged, this is set up.’ Beside him, Cliff doubled over with laughter, and Ilya knew it was the clip everyone had hoped for. The two greatest players the league had ever seen, the greatest rivalry of their age. The joke was that they hated one another, of course, the punchline was meant to be his anger.
Later, when the cameras were off and the lights packed away, after Ilya had changed from his jersey into the soft cotton of his hoodie and sweats, he pulled the card from where he’d tucked it safely away. The photo was ridiculous – so over saturated and staged that it hardly looked like Shane at all, not the Shane he knew. His freckles were hardly visible, nor was the rich brown of his eyes, the texture of his hair, or skin, or lips or hands. In a way it was sterile, it was a stranger, but Ilya still found he couldn’t take his eyes away from this Shane, the Shane the world loved.
‘How long ago was that?’ Katya asks and Ilya smiles because the card is in his wallet still, tucked between his driver’s licence and credit card and frayed at the edges. Shane hasn’t found it yet, Ilya wonders what he’ll say when he does.
‘The whole time, really.’ He says, ‘the whole fucking time.’
‘I wish we could send her something for Christmas. We already didn’t get her a birthday gift.’ Shane sighs. They’re in Ottawa for a short stint – just enough time to make their annual pilgrimage to the floor of Shane’s parent’s living room where they’d open presents and drink coffee when the sun was still down low and close to the horizon. The first year they’d spent the holiday together as a family, Shane had begged his parents not to encourage the four of them to wear matching Pyjamas. He’d argued that it was enough for them to stay the night when Ilya lived only a few kilometres down the road, but Ilya had embraced the tradition with excitement. He told Shane he liked the sleepover, the late night, the too much egg-nog, he even liked the red flannel set Shane’s mother had bought for him. He thought they looked like a Christmas card from the cheesy movies he watched growing up.
‘But we can call her, right?’ Shane continues. He’s folding their things into a carry bag – just enough to last them the night. Stacks of presents are already in the back of the car.
‘Is not Christmas in Russia until January 7th.’ Ilya reminds him as he sidles up to press his chest in against Shane’s back. His hands wander from his hips to beneath his sweater and fan out over the warmth of his skin, punctuated with a series of slow, open mouthed kisses to the nape of his neck.
‘I know, we can call her then, too.’ Shane leans into the touch, even if his hands don’t slow in their tender folding of Ilya’s clothes. Ilya likes how Shane touches his things: as though everything he owns is just as precious to him as Ilya’s skin and bones. ‘When does she finish school?’
‘Her exams will end in June.’ Ilya hums.
‘Then Paris?’
‘Then Paris.’ Ilya has no doubt she’ll get into her University of choice, and if he’s right, he expects she’ll leave Moscow in September, right when the trees start turning. She’ll be eighteen in November, too, the same age he’d been the first time he strayed from home.
‘I’ve been thinking.’ Shane says and moves his hands from the neatly folded clothes to rest atop Ilya’s and stop them wandering.
‘You’re always thinking.’
‘Yes, but listen to me, I’ve been thinking.’ Shane continues, impatient, ‘I looked at the school calendar for the Sorbonne, and, well, it’s the same as all the universities in Paris. She has two weeks off over Christmas, she should come and stay.’
‘With us?’ Ilya asks. ‘It will be mid season, we might be travelling.’
‘Then she can come with us. My parents speak French, they can come too, and we can sight see with her, wherever it is we go. Besides, we’ll have three days off over Christmas, and the schedule is light through New Years, it’s not like we won’t be able to see her at all.’ Shane turns around in Ilya’s arms to look at him head on, ‘I just don’t see why we have to wait until the following summer. She can come then, too.’
‘You’ve never met this girl.’ Ilya says, and it comes out more flippant than he means it. What he wants to say is: you’d do all that, just because you love me?
‘She’s my family, Ilya.’ Shane replies, ‘because she’s yours.’
And Ilya kisses him then, soft and tender. He doesn’t know if English has the words to express how much he loves Shane, and if it does he doesn’t know them.
‘Did you ever regret leaving?’ Katya asks in March, when the snow starts melting.
‘Russia?’ Ilya replies. They’re both smoking, and he can tell she’s anxious. She’s preparing for a whole host of exams: in Russian and in French. He knows that she’s smart enough to get into the Sorbonne five times over, but she’s too desperate, and desperation makes people scrappy.
‘Russia.’ She nods, ‘or Boston.’
‘No.’ Ilya says, but it’s too late because she’s already seen him hesitate.
‘Which is it?’ She asks.
‘I never regretted leaving Russia. I had nothing keeping me there, and a hundred reasons why it was best for me not to stay.’
She gives him a look that is playful and pointed, and he rolls his eyes and reminds her: ‘you did not exist yet.’
‘It was leaving Boston then. You regretted moving to Ottawa?’
‘No.’ Ilya says again, ‘I never regretted leaving for Ottawa. Not even when the team was terrible and Shane and me were fighting. It was worth it, just to be closer to him.’ She’s looking impatient, so he carries on, ‘but I love Boston. I loved living there. America isn’t perfect, it’s not a good place to be Russian, but I had friends who were good to me. There were things they didn’t know about me: I couldn’t have told them about Shane, or the men before him. But I missed them, even if I didn’t regret leaving them.’
‘Do you think I’ll miss Russia?’ Katya asks and Ilya smiles.
‘Of course you will. I miss it, even after all this time.’
‘What do you miss?’ She looks worried, and he wishes there was a way he could calm her, tell her it will be alright. He wishes he could say don’t worry Katyusha, it won’t be hard, and your heart won’t hurt, and you won’t stay awake at night wondering if you’ve chosen the wrong thing.
But Ilya isn’t a liar, so he opts for the truth: ‘People are obvious. You’ll miss your friends and your mother, the boys you know from school. You’ll probably miss your father, too. But it’s the little things that will be harder, the things you don’t expect.’
She looks confused, ‘what do you mean?’
Ilya takes a drag of his cigarette. It’s long and deep, and he tips his head up towards the barren leaves of the snow white trees. Water is dropping from the branches one crystal at a time, and soon the first leaves will push from their tips until the whole world is fuzzy with the velvet soft stubble of spring.
‘When I was a boy, on my way to school I took the metro. At the station nearest our home, there was a man who sold tickets from a little kiosk. He was there every single day, for my whole life, and every single day he smiled at me. He smiled at me when I was all bruised from training and from my dad losing his temper, he smiled at me when my mother died, he smiled at me when I had bags full of hockey gear and when there was homework I hadn’t done. We never spoke, I did not know his name or if he had a wife or children, what books he read, if he watched hockey, and he never did anything kinder for me than smile. I didn’t even think about him really, in all the years I saw him every day, but when I left Moscow, in the early days living alone I remembered him and I cried. The things you don’t think about are the things that you miss.’
‘Maybe there aren’t things like that for me.’
‘There will be a list as long as your arm of things you miss about Moscow and about Russia. But then you will find your kiosk man in Paris, and if you ever move flats or visit home, you’ll miss those too. Everywhere you go, there’ll be things that you miss because that’s what being alive is: loving things and losing things.’
‘Then how do you know if you’ve done the right thing?’ Ilya can’t blame her for being so scared. He can see it in her eyes, as she worries at her thumbnail with her teeth, the fear he had known when he’d been her age, desperate to fly and terrified of falling. He wished he’d had someone who knew it would all be okay.
Behind Ilya the sliding door out onto the patio opens and he turns and looks back. It’s Shane, of course, with a hat and scarf in his hands, ‘sorry to disturb you.’ He says, in English, and aims a wave at Katya over Ilya’s shoulder, ‘and I know you’re Russian and built different or whatever, but you’ll get cold if you stay out here.’
Ilya reaches out his arm and slides his hand across Shane’s shoulder blades, then down the length of his spine to drag him in and close against his side. He blows out a lungful of smoke, directed away from Shane, then presses his mouth against the side of his head.
When Ilya turns back to Katya, she’s watching them with her hands resting against her arms folded over the picnic table where she sat.
‘You find things that you can’t live without.’ Ilya says, as Shane settles his head into the hollow of his shoulder, ‘the things that you think you would miss so much it would kill you to be without them.’
‘But what if I don’t?’
‘You will.’ Ilya tells her, he’s warmed by the heat of Shane against his chest, a warmth he’d known since they’d been children, ‘I promise you that you will.’
Alexei figures it out over the summer, and the calls become fewer and far between until they stop entirely. Still, every morning, Ilya walks outside and sits on the rock by the lake, or on the patio of their sprawling Ottawa home, and waits just in case. He isn’t worried that she’s in danger, Alexei is a paper tiger, but he worries about the poison he may drip into her impressionable ear.
‘She’s been calling you a minimum of three times a week for over a year. I think it’s safe to say she likes talking to you.’ Shane reminds him, when he sees the far-off look in Ilya’s eyes and his brows creased with worry.
‘But what if she changes her mind?’ Ilya asks.
‘I don’t think there is a thing in this world that could stop someone from loving you.’
She calls again, come September, from her apartment in Paris, on the edge of the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Her bedroom overlooks the cemetery in Montparnasse, and the whole time she’s on the line, Ilya can’t stop smiling. The Sorbonne is perfect, she tells him, it’s everything she’s ever dreamt, and he stays up hours after Shane has fallen asleep to watch her traipse the streets she’s learning to love.
‘And what do you miss?’ He asks her, when he’s skating on the edge of sleep.
‘There’s a tree in the park where I used to call you.’ She says, ‘it’s big and really old, and it creaks in the wind.’
‘I know the one.’ Ilya smiles. He knows because he misses it, too: Katya really is just like him.
For her eighteenth birthday, they send her gifts right to her attic apartment – the one she pays for with the first trickles of Ilya’s trust. She flushes with excitement and shock at the new computer and phone and tablet, and even as she insists it’s too much, she rips off the plastic film eager to get inside. She’s cut her hair short, and Shane calls it Parisian, and she beams up into the camera, as though it’s the best thing she’s ever heard.
‘Venez nous voir pour Noële.’ He says and Ilya turns to look at him, those are words he understands, and Katya glances sideways from Shane to search him instead.
‘Really?’ She asks in Russian, ‘you want me to?’
Ilya drags Shane in close, and he nods, ‘we both do.’
Shane insisted on the sign, even though Ilya called it cheesy, but now he holds it tight in both his hands as he gazes at the indicator board, flicking times and airlines, beginnings and ends. Around them there are people holding balloons or flowers, or signs of their own as they wait at arrivals.
‘Here.’ Shane says and hand delivers Ilya a paper cup of black coffee. Ilya takes it from where it balances between two others in Shane’s hands. He looks sheepish and shrugs, ‘I didn’t know how she liked it, so I just got black for her, too.’
Ilya smiles and if his hands weren’t full, he’d pull Shane in close against him, even though there were more than a handful of people staring at them already.
‘I love you.’ He says, instead.
‘And I love you.’ Shane replies.
Behind them, the doors slide open and a plane-full of people emerge from customs. They rush the crowd and fold into the arms of their friends and families, exhausted from the travel but buoyed by the love they have around them. Ilya looks up, he lifts the sign that feels so ridiculous now. Екатерина Розанова it declares, as though she wouldn’t recognise them by face.
Eventually the crowd thins, and she’s the last one out, and she doesn’t stop before she presses herself into the warmth of Ilya’s chest, just like she used to when she’d been small. He drops the sign and wraps his arms around her, buries his face into the shining golden brown of her hair.
‘I missed you.’ She says.
‘I missed you, too.’ He replies.
Home is where the heart is, he thinks, or something like that.