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TOR@MTL: Post Game Media Ops | FULL PRESS CONFERENCES
[00:00:08] Outside VOYAGEURS locker room. Camera pans over a crowd of personnel and press crews waiting for statements. Non-descript music can be heard from auditorium speakers.
︳. . .
︳. . .
[00:01:35] Indistinct chatter throughout the hallway. A man appears in the doorway.
[00:01:42] VOYAGEURS PR: Hollander is just finishing up and will be out soon. We apologize for the wait.
[00:01:56] The man leaves. Indistinct murmuring amongst press.
︳. . .
︳. . .
[00:03:07] THERIAULT pushes through to the locker room, refusing comment, and disappears inside. He appears upset. Camera flashes follow.
︳. . .
︳. . .
[00:04:13] HOLLANDER enters the hallway alone, gripping the frame and appearing pale. He pauses for a moment. Cameras continue to flash.
[00:04:18] HOLLANDER attempts to take a step forward, stumbles and collapses just outside of VOYAGEURS locker room.
[00:04:25] The sound lowers for a moment before rising again. THERIAULT appears to the side. Other VOYAGEURS players can be seen in the room behind them. Medics are called. PIKE pushes into the hallway and kneels beside HOLLANDER.
[00:04:36] PIKE: Get back! Get the fuck out of the way! I told you he shouldn’t be going out there when he’s — [INDISTINCT]
[00:04:43] Camera shakes and abruptly swings down. Non-descript pants and a pair of shoes as well as camera equipment can be seen upside down in-shot. In the background, a loud voice urges crowds away from the exits. There is shuffling and the squeaking of shoes.
[00:04:57] PIKE and BOIZIAU can be heard attempting to clear the area. HOLLANDER seemingly remains unconscious.
[00:05:16] Camera suddenly pans up to the ceiling, then attempts to refocus on VOYAGEURS room over the top of the crowd. Medical personnel can be seen coming from the opposite end of the hallway in the far side of the frame.
[00:05:30] HOLLANDER is lifted onto a medical gurney and is checked over by medical personnel before being wheeled toward the exit. PIKE is yelling indistinctly. He follows them.
[00:05:45] Live view cuts out abruptly. Video ends.
2020
J U N E
Shane wakes up under water.
He isn’t scared. That’s what waking up has been like mostly, these last few months. Gradual enough that he hadn’t really noticed it at first, but when he compares the now to the then, he can’t believe he ever missed it.
Waking up early used to be one of his most favorite things. That block of time where the world was only just his, just quiet and still, when he could think without having to take into account a million other thoughts or opinions, had been sacred. The key to a successful day.
Waking up now means slugging through sand at the bottom of a lazy river, weight on his chest as he kicks his way to the top, and then when he finally breaks the surface, the fog in the air is so thick that he can’t see but several feet in front of him. Can’t gasp for breath without coughing it up again.
The single reprieve, sometimes, is the silence. Shane’s brain has always hit the ground running from the moment of consciousness to when he finally fell into sleep at night. Replaying conversations, rehearsing ones he hasn’t yet had, some of them so completely hypothetical that he gets frustrated with himself in the middle of it, and yet still can’t stop. Statistics and routines, the next thing on his calendar and the ten other things he has to do that precede that. With the water, with the kicking, with the fog, for the first time in his life, sometimes there’s just—nothing.
But the beeping is there. It’s always the fucking beeping. The alarms, the ticking clocks, the reminders.
The thud of his pulse coming from the oximeter, cool where it clamps down on the end of his finger on top of a rough, bleach-smelling sheet.
His other hand, though, is warm. A pressure on his palm, a trace along the hills and valleys of his knuckles that makes the pinch of the IV in the back of it feel a little easier to swallow.
When he’s awake enough that keeping his eyes closed starts to make him lightheaded, he opens them, stares at the spot where the eggshell blue of the wall meets the gray panels of the ceiling. He presses his fingers into warm skin, once, twice.
From the chair beside the bed, Ilya squeezes back. “Do you want me to…?”
“Not yet,” Shane rasps. It’s been months of this. He can wait another few minutes before he has to hear sorry, we can’t help you again.
Ilya bends to press his mouth to the back of his fingers and tells him, “Okay.”
+
If waking up is wading through stillwater, what comes after is a flood.
There’s a lot of information and not nearly enough time to parse it all, especially when he’s being wheeled down all sorts of different hallways and corridors that all bleed into one another, scanned with beeping machines, stuck with sticky patches on his chest and radiographically photographed, sat in a stiff chair while they take another round of labs through his IV.
In the room, at least, he has Ilya, but he can’t leave it except for carefully orchestrated bathroom trips. It’s a private room on a less occupied floor of the hospital, but with the clip from the live video already circulating online, they can’t be too safe. With no updates on Shane for the last several hours while he slept, his mother had channeled all of her nervous energy into managing Ilya instead. Shane is fairly certain he’d heard the word NDA thrown around once or twice in regards to the nursing staff.
It takes two hours to complete the testing they’ve ordered for him before he can go back. He eats lunch in the interim while he waits to hear results, Ilya beside the bed and his parents on the sofa in the corner, the dull rattle of a laugh track coming from the sitcom on the sun-bleached television on the wall.
Getting to shut the noise off is probably the only good thing about the doctor coming back.
There’s something that happens, the longer he feels bad, the more specialists he sees that either refuse to treat him or treat him for something that ends up not making a difference—he stops wanting to hear the answers.
They don’t ask him about that, though.
“We completed some testing. A dynamic MRI, a digital motion X-ray, a CT scan. We also completed two physical exams with you, the ligament stability and stress tests,” she lists. “Based on those results, I do believe we can give you some answers. But it’s important to remember that this still may not be the full picture, and things may change or fluctuate as we continue to learn more.”
He looks at his lap and tries not to grind his teeth together. “What did the tests say?”
“The dynamic and motion scans were able to show us more than some of your previous testing you completed with other specialists. According to neurology, we’re looking at craniocervical instability.” Where she’d been purely clinical before, the doctor’s voice gentles just a little, and that almost makes Shane flinch more. “I’m sure you’re aware that the concern with CCI in professional athletes is that it puts you at a significantly elevated risk for CTE.”
His mother makes a noise from the sofa, and Shane squeezes his eyes shut. Ilya tightens the grip on his hand.
“While I don’t believe that’s an imminent concern at the moment, I’d like to reach out to a diagnostic specialist and have you evaluated for a few other genetic conditions that typically go hand-in-hand with other structural and neurological imbalances like these.”
“Like what?” Shane asks.
“It isn’t my specialty, so I can’t say anything for certain,” she prefaces, “but the tests I would specifically be inquiring about would probably include POTS, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and other connective tissue disorders, and MCAS, to begin with, based on your reported symptoms. I can get you in contact with the specialist I’m referring you to if you have further questions about the testing.”
More doctors, then. More tests. Another dead end. He’s spent a lot of time oddly detached from how he’s feeling—survival, maybe—but here, now, it hits him in the center of his chest, makes his eyes burn and his throat threaten to close. His vision of the future, the things he’d wanted, starts to tunnel.
He doesn’t realize he’s stopped listening until Ilya’s voice cuts clean through his mother’s questioning.
“Enough,” he tells the room, kind but firm. He’s standing up beside Shane’s bed now. “No more questions right now.”
The doctor nods, standing from her rolling chair to leave. She gives him a small wince of a smile. “I can come back later if you think of anything, Shane. But I’ll give you some time to rest and process.”
His mother has a more difficult time holding back her other questions, her eyes still wet and cheeks blotchy as she follows the doctor out the door. Shane knows that she gets like this; it’s where he gets it from. The incessant need to keep pushing through instead of standing still, to dig until rock bottom.
He wishes she could look at him though. At least once.
His father clears his throat. “Shane,” he says, standing from the sofa.
“Give us a minute,” Ilya tells him, more gently than before.
David hesitates a moment but nods, patting him twice on the ankle as he passes by on his way out. The door clicks shut behind him, and then it’s just him and Ilya again, the quiet calm and suffocating. He slides his hands into his hair, palms fit into the hollows of his eyes.
“Fuck,” Shane mutters.
“Moy lyubimyy,” Ilya says.
“Don’t fucking tell me it’s okay, Ilya,” he snaps. “It’s not okay. It’s not—”
Ilya does not tell him it’s okay. His arms fold around Shane’s shoulders, careful of the wires and monitors, and the impenetrable wall of his chest feels like relief. Like no matter how hard Shane throws himself against it, Ilya won’t let him chip away.
What bothers him the most is how vague it all is. Instead of being a central, controlled thing, the pain is everywhere, all the time, sometimes better but never gone. He’s so used to it now that he has to rely on other tells just to know when it’s worse, like headaches from grinding his teeth, tension in his shoulders or his fists, his hips and legs giving out halfway through a workout, muscles half asleep, unable to hold him up anymore.
His symptoms are all scattered. Difficult to identify, even harder to assign to any particular diagnosis. Sometimes he insists they’re brand new. Other times he gets snapshots of memories from years ago, some of them back to childhood, and he thinks did the timer start then?
The unknown had been infuriating before. The questions and hypotheticals. But now, staring down the barrel of things like craniocervical instability, things that mean one wrong move could not only potentially take away his career but his mobility, his memory, his life, is something different altogether.
“I’m not going to be able to play anymore,” he muffles into Ilya’s shoulder. It settles like a rock in water.
“Shane.”
“You know that’s what she meant.”
“She did not say that.”
“She didn’t have to,” he insists, putting enough distance between them to see his face. “You know what it means. She mentioned CTE, Ilya. And I fucking love hockey, I—God. But. What good am I to it if I can’t fucking—if I’m not able to—?”
He’s never had to ask himself the question before: does he love it even if he isn’t the best at it? Could he? And, if not, what is he without it?
Is he brave enough to find out?
More than that, would it be worth burning himself out on the ice? Would he be willing to risk the life he’s only just started planning with Ilya for it? Now that he knows, for the first time ever, maybe, there’s something waiting for him on the other side?
“I would quit with you, if—” Ilya starts.
“Don’t,” Shane interrupts before he can finish. “Don’t fucking say that to me, Ilya.”
Ilya takes in a breath, fingers spread wide over the ache between Shane’s shoulder blades, lips warm against his forehead.
“Okay,” he agrees. “Okay, Shane.”
The words Ilya said a handful of weeks ago keep echoing in his head. I will always love hockey. For many reasons. But my favorite one is because it gave me you. He doesn’t think the wording had been intentional, but the core of it’s there anyway: it and you being two separate things. It’d been one of the first times Shane had heard it phrased that way, where there was no inextricable link where Shane existed without hockey.
He clings to it—and to Ilya—like a lifeline now, when everything else is unclear. Even if, Shane tells himself, even if the accolades and accomplishments are stripped away, there is still at least one person who thinks there is someone worthy underneath.
Shane would like to include himself in that group one of these days too, but. One thing at a time, he supposes.
+
They end up keeping him another day, because it turns out he metabolizes nutrients a lot quicker when he’s being pumped full of them and hydrated through the IV, and he’s apparently very low in some of them despite his meticulous diet and exercise routine.
“This is not because you have had to take breaks,” Ilya murmurs to him when Shane glares at the vitamin panel on his workup, lit up with red deficiencies. He’s angry with the doctors, angry with the team nutritionist, angry with Ilya for knowing what he’s thinking without having to say it.
Most of all, he’s angry with himself.
The hospital suite is private enough that Shane almost manages to forget about the outside world for the forty-eight hours he’s there. His mother is handling most of the fallout from the video with his agent—without much help, since she still doesn’t seem capable of being in a room alone with him right now—and Ilya and his father seem to have made some sort of silent pact not to bring up anything remotely related to it.
J.J. and Hayden come by on the second morning though, and things start to come rushing back in.
It’s the first time Ilya leaves since they’ve been here, stepping out in a jacket with a cap and sunglasses to go and grab food with his dad to give Shane a chance to talk with his friends alone. It’s only after he’s already gone that Shane remembers, with striking clarity, fumbling his phone into Hayden’s hands and telling him to call Lily.
He fucking hopes he’d said Lily, at least. It’s still a little blurry.
He hasn’t watched the video but apparently it’s bad. Farah had even been hesitant in her initial email before his mother took over communications, and Shane had been too tired to argue any stance on any of it. It explains why his friends look like they’re stepping around landmines when they wander into the hospital room, feet light and sitting on the edge of the furniture as if Shane might drop to the floor again any minute.
He’d like to remind them that he’s the same person they’ve been on the ice with for years, the one that’s taken countless hits and gotten back up again. But he guesses that might be an easier point to argue when he isn’t strung up in a hospital bed with bags under his eyes and bruises on his hand and inner arms, swollen with tears and saline. Too exhausted to make it look like anything other than what it is.
They came in separate cars. J.J. stays for three quarters of an hour before he makes a casual exit, wishing Shane the best and promising to update the rest of the guys later that afternoon. Hayden, in the chair that still has Ilya’s imprint in it, stays.
It’s quiet for long enough that Shane eventually leans his head back on the pillow, letting the beep of the monitor carry the silence between them. He’s not used to this, he realizes. To the times when Hayden doesn’t fill it for him.
“Are we gonna talk about it?”
Easing in a deep breath, Shane pulls his eyes open and turns his head in Hayden’s general direction.
“If you want.”
“If I want?” Tongue worrying against the back of his lower teeth, Hayden huffs. “What do you want, Shane? Do you even want me here? Should I go?”
Shane’s eyes lift to his face. He sits up in the bed a little more. “What? Of course I do. I thanked you for coming.”
Hayden shakes his head, glancing off toward the door, and Shane gets that feeling again; like he’s missed a step somewhere, like he’s broken a rule but no one will tell him what it is.
“It’s not even the fucking Rozanov thing,” he mutters, voice lowered as if Ilya might pop out from the corner at the sound of his name. “I get why you’d have to keep it quiet. And I’m not mad about it, even if I can’t really understand it.” He falters for a moment, bringing a hand up to shove through his hair. “Mostly it’s just the fact that, I mean—fuck, dude. I tried, you know?”
“Tried what?”
“To be your friend,” Hayden says.
It ricochets through him like a check to the boards. He feels himself withdraw a little more, the smokescreen thickening.
With as much conviction as he can manage, Shane maintains, “We are friends.”
“Yeah, I thought so,” Hayden agrees. “I thought we were best friends. I—I tell you everything, man. When something happens to me, you’re the person I wanna tell right after Jackie. And I know you’ve always been a private person but you didn’t—” he cuts himself off with a laugh, and his eyes are wet when he blinks. “You didn’t even tell me you were gay until it was with everybody else. Which isn’t—you’re entitled to the timing and who knows, of course, that’s not what I’m—” he cuts himself off.
Shane wilts further with each sentence. The problem is that Hayden isn’t wrong. Shane has known that the scale has always been a little… unbalanced, and he’s only been pushing it further lately. He knows that he doesn’t need or at least has never experienced the same kind of friendships that the people around him have. Relationships mean effort, and for a long time, Shane only wanted to put that effort into playing hockey. And then there was Ilya, and he hadn’t realized how much he was pouring into that until it stopped when he was with Rose. And Rose had been—something else entirely. Then, when all of the health issues started, he was back to having no energy except for the crucial things while the others fell down the rungs, out of reach again.
But he knows enough to have found out that this is not something he can say to people. Sorry, it takes too much effort to be around you. It’s not you, it’s me.
The worst part is that he means it. Hayden, on paper, is a wonderful friend. He goes out of his way to include Shane even when the offers aren’t returned. He’s supportive, mostly. Shane knows he could’ve probably come out to him before the team and it would have been fine. But that too had been his own issue, taking the way out that felt easiest. Least confrontational. That ripped the bandaid off the quickest, all at once.
People have always had to muscle their way through to get him to open up, like Rose’s steady stream of inquisitory texts that he isn’t obligated to answer but always makes her thrilled when he does. Like the way Ilya had pursued him relentlessly until it was impossible not to crave the rush of the first real, intimate thing he’d ever really had.
But, realistically, not everyone is willing to strong arm him into friendship. Shane knows this. He just hadn’t necessarily thought that it was this heavy for Hayden. That it was weighing on him so much.
It doesn’t feel good. And the more he tells himself be here, listen, speak, open up, the more he feels like shutting down altogether.
“I guess I just kind of feel like an idiot,” Hayden says eventually, elbows on his knees in the chair.
Shane glances at him. “Why?”
“Because I’ve been thinking that I know you this whole time. Better than most people. Things I just thought were facts,” he says. “The time you arrive early for practice. Your pre-game rituals. The food you like when you come over. The ginger ale over beer if it’s an option. The fact that you hate Rozanov with a burning fucking passion—except for the fact that you don’t and maybe never have,” he lists, losing momentum. “I’ve been out here feeling like I was one of the closest people in your life but maybe—maybe I’m not. Maybe I don’t know you. Not really.”
“You do,” Shane insists. “I don’t—it’s just been a lot lately. And you know I hate lying, so it was easier to just… not be in a position where I would have to do that, I guess.”
“I still came to see you when I was out on that knee injury last year, though,” he presses. “You were in my wedding. We had you over lots of times when Jackie was pregnant, when we had the kids. I was knee deep in diapers and baby shit and I still thought of you. And it’s not a fucking competition, but. I have to beg you half the time just to come to dinner anymore,” Hayden continues, voice breaking on the last syllable.
Because it hurts to fucking move, Shane thinks desperately. It materializes in his head, crisp, clear, as he tries not to bite through his tongue. Because I don’t want you to see how much effort it takes me just to get out of bed and get dressed. Because by the time I actually do the things I have to do in a day I’m exhausted. Because I want the image of me from years ago—strong, fit, healthy, capable—to be the one that sticks.
“I—” Shane starts. Clears his throat. “I’m sorry.”
He can feel Hayden staring at him while his eyes are on his lap. He wipes slick palms off on the sheet. When he chances a look over at him, Hayden seems cross between expectant and resigned.
“Is that…it?”
“What do you mean?” Shane asks.
It’s Hayden that looks down this time. He sniffs, reaches up to knuckle at one eye, and then stands, slipping back into his jacket and lingering by the bed. Shane watches his mouth open and close around words that he can’t seem to find.
“I love you, man. I tell you all the fucking time. I wanna be there for you,” he says. “But I can’t be there for someone who has an entire other life I don’t know about, because then I’m—I’m showing up in all the wrong ways. I’m thinking that I’m helping you when in reality I could be making things worse.”
Before Shane can refute it, he continues, hands shoved into his pockets.
“I also don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to want a friend that… you know. That shows up. That makes the same effort I do.”
Shane feels the last part of himself trying to stick to the script wither and close off. He stares just past his own feet in the bed.
“What are you saying.”
Hayden sighs, scrubbing a hand down his face. “I don’t fucking know. I’m… obviously you have a lot going on right now. You don’t need me here. I get it. I guess, maybe when you get all of this stuff figured out and you’re back to normal, we can—I don’t know. We can try again. If you want,” he offers. “But until then, I think I need to just—recharge. Or, shit, just, like—wrap my head around things a little more.”
Shane swallows bile. Keeps his face carefully neutral.
“Okay.”
Hayden still looks like he’s half expecting more, but Shane is tired of failing things today. He keeps staring ahead, and Hayden drops his chin.
“Okay,” he echoes, and turns for the door. “Feel better soon, Shane.”
Hayden leaves, sans promise of homemade food or to call if he needs anything this time, and Shane sits there stiff in the aftermath of it until the afternoon nurse comes by to check on him again.
Feel better soon. Maybe when you’re back to normal.
It’s a lose-fucking-lose. If he stays quiet, Hayden will think he doesn’t want to fix things and he’ll fade into nothing more than a teammate, years of memories blotted out like tears on a page. If he tells the truth, it’ll be like he’s asking if Hayden wants a deadweight tied to his ankle, doomed to a relationship that will inherently be either less than what Hayden expects, or more than what Shane can give. No, Shane isn’t going to feel better soon. Not if this really is chronic. No, he can’t just be ‘normal’ again, not when he never really was in the first place. Not in the way Hayden needs him to be.
He gets checked out just before evening, his dad walking with him as he’s wheeled to a private exit, his mom sitting idle in the front of an SUV with tinted windows, Ilya waiting for him at home.
Shane sits in the back in a t-shirt and sweatpants, his mother’s eyes on the road, inner elbow stinging, and tries not to press on the bruise.
J U L Y
He’s granted LTIR, finally. In July. He wishes he didn’t have to collapse in front of thousands of people on the internet to have earned it, but it’s at least a small relief. His agent tells him to stay offline regardless.
What isn’t as relieving is the fact that he apparently can’t tolerate heat as well anymore, and Montreal is having a particularly warm summer this year. Typically he would love the sun, stay out in the water, on the trails, but he takes about ten steps outside now, or sits inside of his hot car while it’s cooling down, and he feels weaker than he’s used to feeling even after a workout. He sweats through his clothes, has to bring a change everywhere now. And if he doesn’t get somewhere cool, suddenly his heart rate’s beeping on his watch, he’s dizzy, and if he really doesn’t listen, that’s when the blackness starts to crackle in around the edges.
His body’s calling the shots. Which used to mean something Ilya related, usually. Or the on-ice instincts he’s always getting accolades for. Both of which are significantly more exciting than having to drop his ass to the ground and sit until the world starts to feel real around him again.
But despite that, it’s the summer, and Ilya’s here, and the cottage somehow doesn’t feel quite like everywhere else does. Like the rug’s always pulled out from underneath his feet. He’s steadier here, at least more than he is anywhere else right now.
The less-sex thing is still sort of weird when nearly a decade of their relationship was built around it, but it’s not so bad like this. When it’s warm out and it’s easier to sit still than it is to move, even the brush of fingertips against his back in passing is exciting. A kiss to the temple instead of being shoved up against a wall. The easing into a slow hug, arms wrapped around him from behind and lips at his shoulder instead of an—equally as loving, to be fair—grope and slap to his ass.
If anything, it’s like learning another language. Not necessarily like the Russian books in Shane’s nightstand he’s been practicing in his recent downtime, but like they’ve always done; listening and adapting. Reading the play.
Summer also means more time together, which is a silver lining in the least. The more Ilya spends time here, his clothes in Shane’s closet, his toothbrush by the bathroom sink, shoes at the door and food in the fridge, the more Shane wonders what it might be like to have that all the time.
Days like today, when Ilya being here is probably the one thing able to distract him enough from the limbo between thinking he’ll never play hockey again versus knowing to keep him from going insane.
The sound of his own breathing is driving him crazy. He can hear himself, the way he keeps huffing and sighing, the way he can’t sit in one position for more than a few minutes without something falling asleep or starting to ache. He wants to go for a run, wants to go to the gym, wishes he could lunge across the sofa and tackle Ilya to the floor, wrestle around with each other the way they used to until they’re sweaty and breathless and spent.
He must get lost staring at the carpet, novel open and forgotten against the bend of his knees, because Ilya squeezes the ankle resting by his hip to get his attention again. When Shane finally drags his eyes up, Ilya’s already watching, a small smile tilting his lips.
“What are you thinking about?”
“My vision’s getting worse, I think,” which isn’t actually what Shane was thinking about, but is an adjacent concern. Ilya frowns.
“You did not bring your glasses?”
“I left them in the bedroom. And the stairs are…” Shane trails off, his own expression souring.
Ilya pats his leg before he lifts it to duck underneath it, standing from the couch. “Stay. I will go and get.”
He presses his lips to Shane’s forehead as he goes, then disappears over his shoulder toward the bedroom. His vision and the brain fog have been seemingly competing with each other, so he’s wearing his glasses near constantly now, and also forgetting them more than he ever has before. It’s the sort of thing he thinks might be nice to joke with his dad about, if his chest didn’t still ache a little about it all.
He takes the time to stretch out his legs on the now empty cushions, rubbing absently at the spots that are sore. He’s too distracted wondering if one of his ankles is slightly swollen to notice Ilya until his face is being grabbed and tilted backward, his glasses slid onto his nose and Ilya’s mouth against his upside down.
“Thank you,” Shane tells him, cheeks pink as he watches Ilya cross back to the other side of the couch and reclaim his spot. “I don’t want you to have to get up every time I need something.”
“I don’t mind,” Ilya says.
“I know. But I don’t like it.”
With a contemplative hum, he maneuvers back against the opposite arm rest and crosses his bent legs, pulling Shane’s ankles into his lap and covering the spot he’d been studying with rubbing hands. “Okay. Then we will make a cart.”
“A cart?”
“Yes. A cart with little wheels. We can put all of your ‘essentials’ in it and when you are feeling bad you can go and get one thing instead of many. It’s practical.”
Shane’s eyes narrow. “You sound like you’ve thought about this.”
“I have seen them on Pinterest.”
“Who showed you Pinterest?”
Ilya tosses him an unimpressed glance. “I am a cultured man, Hollander. Do not overestimate me.”
“Understimate,” Shane amends automatically.
“Whatever,” he dismisses, pressing his thumbs against the arches of Shane’s feet. “The cart is more important. I have decided.”
Unbidden, Shane’s mouth twitches. “Oh, you have?”
“Yes. I will build it.”
“Ilya,” he splutters, now battling a full grin splitting his lips. “Have you ever built something from scratch before in your life?”
He lifts a shoulder. “No scratching necessary. I will watch a tutorial and I will build it,” Ilya says confidently. Suddenly very interested in Shane’s foot, he adds, “And I will maybe build it at your parents so that your dad can make sure it does not have extra legs or something.”
His chest feels warm at the thought of Ilya bent over the old work bench in the garage, his dad giving him pointers the same way he’d tried to with Shane before hockey became the focus instead.
What else might Shane be interested in now if not for that? What other things could he have been good at?
Is it too late to find out now?
“I love you,” he tells Ilya, clearing the grit from his throat before it becomes to obvious. He wiggles his foot in Ilya’s grip. “You know?”
“I do know,” Ilya grins. “I love you back. And more.”
“So competitive.”
“Says Mr. Stubborn.”
“I think you mean steadfast,” Shane says dryly. “Persistent, maybe.”
“Annoying,” Ilya mutters.
Shane scoffs. “Asshole.”
Ilya sticks out his tongue.
“That wasn’t even a word!” Shane complains.
This, of course, is said without considering the fact that Ilya still has his feet in his possession. Shane makes a noise when the rubbing starts turning ticklish, trying to twist away. But he’s not actually trying that hard, so he doesn’t really end up going anywhere at all.
But he laughs so hard his stomach aches, a bit of sweat clinging to his upper lip and the back of his neck from the warmth in the windows and the blanket tangled between them, the fixation on his soreness momentarily redirected toward the ticklish pinpricks of Ilya’s fingers dancing along his feet and ankles.
It ends minutes later with Ilya flat against his chest, torso caught between his thighs, both of them breathing hard. It isn’t wrestling on the hardwood, but somehow it still feels like a release.
Outside, the world looms. The final decision with the league. The impending test results. His parents. The press. The day Ilya will go back and Shane will have to watch him go alone and try not to let it break him.
But this—this is its own kind of medicine, too.
A U G U S T
The room doesn’t have an examination table inside of it, a fact which Shane doesn’t know if he should be relieved or worried about. It’s just an office, a neat looking desk and organized file holders, a comfortable looking chair on the opposite side.
Amanda Castillo had not been easy to find. If not for the extensive research he’d done, he’s not sure he would have known about diagnostic specialists at all. Someone to take all of the piles of seemingly monotonous, unhelpful data from his labs, appointments, and symptom lists and match them into some sort of cohesive answer.
Answers, Shane is pretty certain. Plural.
He’s alone at the appointment, despite Ilya’s offer to ditch an off-season cookout with his team and a very awkward, stiffly worded message from his dad in the family group chat telling him they’re there if he needs anything and to let them know how it goes. Shane hadn’t told them he was even coming today, so he assumes Ilya’s been in touch. He wants to be irritated but if he’s honest, he’s only relieved that it didn’t have to be him doing the communicating. Not just yet.
Dr. Castillo is punctual and no nonsense, which Shane can appreciate. He’d rather go through a bullet list and information packets than to be asked how any of this makes him feel. One thing at a time.
“I’d like to keep a very close eye on the POTS,” she tells him as they begin going over the paperwork, black and white reports spread out in front of him as she points. “Male athletes with a history like yours is not typically a demographic that we tend to see it pop up in a lot, but just because the symptoms you’re experiencing from the CCI are very similar to what we see with POTS, I’m not ruling it out. There are more imminent parts of your treatment that we can focus on first though, before digging into that too much further.”
Shane clears his throat. His palms are sticky in his lap. “Sounds good.”
“One thing I want to prepare you for as we get into your results is that it’s highly common for people who develop one autoimmune or genetic condition to also have others within the same umbrella of diagnoses. Some people call these ‘clusters’.”
She waits for Shane to nod before continuing.
“The first one we typically see diagnosed alongside things like POTS and CCI is something called small fiber neuropathy. This is the one we ruled out for you already based on your nerve testing so you don’t have to worry about it now, but I’d be happy to answer questions if you have them, and we can absolutely reevaluate if you feel the need to at any point.” She moves another paper to the forefront, pointing with the tip of her pen. “There is one here I’d like to monitor, MCAS or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, but with your current testing I don’t believe there’s enough unique markers for it to diagnose you at this time. We’ll table it and come back to it in six months to a year and proceed from there.”
He tries not to get ahead of himself, focusing on the black and white metrics laid out in front of him depicting his results instead of the informative pamphlets already laid out to one side. He’s pretty sure she catches his eyes wandering over to them anyway.
“Are there others in that… cluster?”
“There are. Those would be ME/CFS and Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome,” she confirms. “As of your current results, I feel very comfortable giving you an official diagnosis for these, and I’d like to keep them in mind as we form a treatment plan moving forward.”
Drawing in a breath, Shane wipes his hands on his jeans. “What’s the, um. The M-E-C…?”
“ME/CFS is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I believe it’s the reason behind many of the sleep and energy related symptoms you reported. It’s a disorder of the neurological and immune systems that can cause severe fatigue, as well as brain fog, lack of energy or lethargy following physical activity—what we refer to sometimes as post-exertional malaise—as well as other disturbances of daily life.”
“And—and the other one?” Shane asks.
“H-EDS is a subtype of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It’s a connective tissue disorder. Most patients I see all have varying symptoms depending on age and management, but generally this would be the root of most of the pain that you’re feeling, since your joints aren’t holding themselves together properly.”
Connective tissues. Joints. Things he’s been using, pushing past his limits for decades without a thought.
“Did I report symptoms of that?”
“You did, yes,” Dr. Castillo says. “Patients with h-EDS often experience a level of pain that might not be immediately noticeable to them at the time of diagnosis because they’ve been living in it for so long. But there are a few tells,” she informs him. “Are you frequently told that you’re flexible? Do your joints feel too loose and simultaneously too tight?”
“Yes,” Shane answers.
“Are you able to touch your thumb to the underside of your wrist?”
He doesn’t know the answer to that one, so he looks down at his hands in his lap and tries it. They both watch as his thumb, with only minimal assistance from his other hand, bends down and stretches toward his wrist, the curved tip of it making contact with the pale inner side of his arm. He stares at it for a moment, and when he looks up again, she’s offering him a reserved smile.
“Skin can also be a large tell. If it’s naturally smoother and less prone to breakouts or things like acne,” she says. “As well as the elasticity. When you pinch the skin on the back of your hand and pull up, does it stretch?”
Shane does it. The skin stretches. He puts his hands back down in his lap and resists the urge to shove them underneath his thighs.
“But how is that possible?” he asks. “You said it’s genetic? Like, lifelong? It hasn’t caused me any issues before now and I don’t know of any family members that have it. Wouldn’t I have known about it? Especially with the hockey?”
Dr. Castillo leans back in her chair, adjusting the dark frames of her glasses on her nose. “It is a genetic disorder, yes, so it would have theoretically been present throughout your life. But unfortunately this isn’t something entirely uncommon among gifted athletes. The extra flexibility and lowered risk of serious breaks or fractures due to subluxations often lends young athletes to pursuing sports from an early age, assuming that these things are simply a natural advantage or skill.”
“But it was hurting me the whole time,” Shane murmurs, staring hard at the wood of her desk.
It would have been one thing if this was some sudden, unexpected thing that happened to him. He’d have understood, even, if it’d been from the cumulative injuries he’s had over the years he’s played finally demanding vengeance. He knows what he signed up for. He’s weighed the risks and made his decision. Knows that he’s been actually very lucky to have come this far and avoided so much.
But this is not something new and sudden, and it’s not purely the consequences of his actions. At least not entirely.
This has been there since before all of that. From the moment he first stepped on the ice, even. It was there for Ilya, from the first time to the most recent. It was there when he was drafted and signed. It was there for every practice and every game. It was there each time he visited the physical therapists with advice that never quite seemed to work, and every time he’d bitten his tongue and pushed through it anyway. Every time he insisted he was fine because, in the bigger picture, what was a little bit of discomfort in the short term?
It was there whether he wanted it to be or not. It’s better and simultaneously worse—that he’d had no control over it. It wasn’t his fault, sure. But he can’t do anything to stop it or reverse it now either.
It’s only ever through. Pushing, shoving, treading, crawling on his hands and knees through. He’s never felt this fucking tired.
“I’m not going to tell you that you’ve built an incredible career at the cost of your wellbeing,” she prefaces more gently, pulling his focus back, “because I can’t say for certain that that’s the case. Like I said, many athletes experience symptoms of their condition when they’re younger and only find out there’s anything to be concerned about once they do begin showing symptoms, which is often in or around their twenties or thirties,” she explains. “In such a high stakes environment, and with so much pressure, it’s not unreasonable to assume that you believed the pain that you were feeling was normal for an athlete performing at your level.”
Something else he’s misread. He can hear Hayden’s voice even now, urging him to open up. Giving him opportunities to talk about himself. If he had, maybe he’d have realized what wasn’t normal earlier on.
Maybe Hayden would still be talking to him now.
He nearly chokes around, “So I have to stop,” and reminds himself that he’d known this would likely be the outcome of it all.
Dr. Castillo, a middle aged woman with dark, silvering hair, glasses similar to his, and lightly wrinkled eyes that are kind if Shane could look at them more than a few seconds at a time, thinks for a minute in her chair. Shane wonders if she has children. Hates the way that the maternal, sympathetic wrinkle in her brow makes his eyes burn instead of his fists clench.
He’s never been one to seek out pity. Acknowledgement though, from the right people, would be nice.
“If I may, Shane…?” Dr. Castillo interjects before he can follow the train of thought. “It seems to me that you’ve been asking a lot of your body for a very long time now. Physically, yes, but you’re also incredibly perceptive. You’re in tune with your environment in a way that not many people are. That takes a toll. It takes effort, practice, restraint, everything that your profession also demands from you. And for most of your life, your body has agreed to these terms.”
She leans forward in her chair, arms crossed, white-coated elbows gently covering up the papers on her desk Shane had been staring at seconds before.
“This is your body demanding something back for the first time in a long time. Maybe for the first time ever.”
“I just don’t know how it got so bad so fast,” Shane admits, feeling guilty. “I get that in some ways it’s always been there, but one minute I was fine, and then I wasn’t, and I just—haven’t been since.” He sniffs, glancing at his lap. “I don’t want to stop, but I don’t want to get any worse.”
I don’t know what to do goes unsaid, unsure of how to fit his mouth around the syllables. He looks at his knees and thinks do I even have a choice?
“You do the same thing you do on the ice,” she says. “You adapt. When you implement a new technique in your game, it probably feels daunting. It might even have the potential to determine the outcome. But the more you practice and work at the parts that aren’t clicking, the more confident you get that you’ll be able to handle it, on the less demanding days just as much as the really high stakes, challenging ones. We just need to get you and your body playing for the same team again.”
Her smile wanes a bit as she pauses, her professional mask slipping just a bit for the first time.
“Did that make any sense? I’m sorry. I’m not much of a hockey fan.”
The brittle chuckle that makes it past his lips eases some of the burning in his throat. “Yeah. I get it, I think.” Shane chews at his lip. “It just. Wasn’t what I wanted to hear, I guess.”
“It’s a lot,” she agrees, gathering up the papers into a neat stack and setting them to the side. “If it helps, Shane, no one else can determine if you stop playing except for you. I’m not trying to take that choice away from you. I’m just giving you the the facts so you can make an informed decision.”
When everything else feels like it’s all slipping out of his control, that at least feels like it puts a little bit of power back in his hands. No it would be better if-’s or you should really consider this-’s. Just information. It’s easier, when he thinks about it like that.
He leaves her office with a stack of pamphlets thick enough to earn him a complimentary branded tote bag to carry them home in, but he has answers. Some of them, at least. It’s a start.
In the car, Shane blasts the AC and reaches into his pocket for his phone. He scrolls to Ilya’s text thread first to tell him he’s finished with the appointment. He’s got an email from his agent sitting in the notification log and a cluster of news headlines he swipes away, a message from Rose he can’t summon the energy to respond to just yet, several photographs from his dad this morning of the new birdfeeder he installed in the backyard.
He locks the phone and sets it in the cupholder. Exiting the medical park across from his car, a woman holding hands with a small child squats down in the middle of the sidewalk. Her son, presumably. Face twisted up, cheeks flushed and wet in the glint of afternoon sun, a bandaid peeking out from underneath his shirt sleeve.
He can’t even remember being that small. Doesn’t feel like he’s ever been.
Her bended knee puts them face to face with each other. The boy turns his chin down and knuckles at his eye, trying and failing to square trembling shoulders. She’s saying something, mouth moving while the boy listens, hiccuping still every few seconds as his breathing regulates.
Other people walk around them on the sidewalk, a businessman talking loudly on his phone and another passerby who gives them an annoyed look at the sound of crying. Neither of them move, her palm between the son’s shoulder blades, his feet stuck stubbornly to the concrete.
When he’s caught his breath, Shane watches her mouth curve upward into a soft smile, watches her bend to meet it halfway when the boy lifts his arm so she can press her lips to the outside of the bandaid.
The AC in the car sounds like a wind tunnel. Shane’s mind conjures up a memory, fragments that’d been lost to a bigger picture.
The first time he’d dislocated his shoulder on the ice, sometime around U15, before the excited chirping from his teammates for earning his first real injury and the heavy eyes of a coach waiting to see how he’d react and adapt. When it was just Shane and his mother and the doctor there on the side of the rink, arm held out between them.
He can’t remember what he said, but he remembers, strikingly clearly when he thinks about it, his mother’s face. Lip caught and turned white beneath her teeth, voice somehow both shaking and firm as she questioned the doctor. He remembers her eyes on him, wide and wet, her hand clammy where it’d clutched his as he sat on the bench and waited to be fixed.
He remembers the fear in her face when they’d insisted on putting it back into place right there, but he’d been strangely distant from it even then, tired from practice and already eager to get back to his waiting team.
Most of all, he remembers her relief after it was over. How tightly she’d pulled him to her chest, how much she’d praised him for being so brave, for not crying, the way she’d spent the whole evening with him afterward, back when they had time for things like aimless car rides and ice cream after dinner. He remembers that feeling following him afterward, at home, in appointments, when he’d had other injuries—how badly he’d wanted to recreate it without realizing.
Suddenly, it’s an onslaught.
The cheers and catcalls after admitting to not having once slept a full night on a roadie, his exhaustion swept underneath the comforting rug of approval from his teammates, even if under false pretenses. Physical therapists, yoga instructors endlessly impressed with his abilities. The way he’s always flinched when most people touch him even if he knows it’s coming, like his body’s a hornet’s nest strung together with determination alone. Ilya from years ago, bathed in a halo of dim hotel lighting and wearing the smirk that Shane’s kissed a million times over, murmuring did you even know you were this flexible? into his ear.
Fumbling for the handle, Shane tosses open the door, narrowly avoiding scraping up the car next to him as he bends to dry heave onto the pavement.
When he looks up again, the mother and child are gone. He wants to call his mother, perhaps more overwhelmingly than he ever has before—as if the stack of papers in his passenger seat are the needle prick and her comfort is the balm; is the click of a bone back into place; is the press of lips to a child’s arm, is a breath of relief after holding it for ages.
Shane leaves his phone in the cup holder. There is nothing he could give her to be relieved about.
N O V E M B E R
“Do you ever think of… talking to someone?” Ilya asks. “About everything?”
The question is more tentative than Shane expects it to be. Ilya’s face is slightly pixelated on his phone screen, the background dark and still, not as clear as Shane would prefer to be able to read what he’s thinking.
“Everything is kind of vague,” Shane answers from his own bed in Montreal.
He doesn’t roll his eyes, and he doesn’t point out that Shane knows already precisely what he’s talking about.
“Like a therapist,” he clarifies anyway.
Shane sits up a little straighter in the bed. “Uh, I guess. Maybe. Sometimes,” he admits. “Do you?”
Ilya glances off to the side with an absent look in his eye, and the skin underneath his lashes appears slightly bruised even though Shane knows he hasn’t taken any hits on the ice recently. He doesn’t say anything for a while, and Shane listens to his breathing; slow, deep, even. The new season has taken a toll on them both in different ways.
“I am seeing one,” Ilya tells him eventually. “For a few weeks now. I didn’t say at first in case it was not something I wanted to keep doing, but—I do. Some of it is hard, but. I think it will be good.”
Out of the two of them, Ilya’s always the one trying to catch Shane’s eye, get him to hold his gaze a little longer before he looks away. Tonight, thousands of miles away in a dark, silent hotel room, it’s like he struggles to look at him at all.
“It is not because of you,” Ilya adds. “Or—not completely. Mostly because I worry about genetics and also because moving was… a big change, I think. But also yes, because of you, because I want to be… good.”
“Ilya,” Shane says. “You are good.”
“No, like—you take so much care of yourself. Always, from when we met. You are so careful with your body, your health. And I know the doctors, all of this is not something you have chosen, but.” He lifts a shoulder on the screen. “You are trying to get better at understanding and it makes me want to be better also. For you and also for me.”
Leave it to Ilya, Shane supposes, to dig out the silver linings. He smiles softly at the camera.
“Thank you for telling me. I’m glad you have someone to talk to about everything. I know it’s probably helpful to have, like. A neutral third party.” He sobers a little, looking at the hollows of Ilya’s cheeks again. “Hey. Can I—can I ask you something?”
Now lying down flat in the bed, Ilya hums his affirmative.
“Is this just something you wanted to try? Or was it… was there a specific reason that made you do it now? Other than the move, I mean.”
The pause draws on for longer than Shane is comfortable with.
“I don’t know if you will like the answer,” Ilya says.
“I just want you to be honest,” Shane insists, blazing past the crack of his voice and the pit in his stomach. “Please.”
Ilya clears his throat. “When we were talking about curses,” he recalls, hesitating. “I—it is harder for me to shake off than I thought.”
“How so?”
“Mama was sick for a long time,” he admits quietly. Shane can hear the clink of the cross necklace against Ilya’s brass ring in the dark. “She would have always been that way, I think. I know this now. But when you grow up with someone telling you that you are the reason for it, it is hard to… stop thinking this way.”
Shane’s teeth grind. “Your father?”
Ilya sniffs, nodding. “Then my brother tells me he would not need to turn to drugs if he did not have to worry about money so much, which is also my fault,” he goes on with a heavy breath. “And then my father, he—toward the end, he would have these moments where he would think clearly again. The sickness made him different. Nicer. Quieter. But when he would come back to himself, he could still be so… mean.”
His knuckles bump the screen, aching to touch them to Ilya’s face despite the distance. He aches with it, the intricacies he wouldn’t have caught if he hadn’t already unraveled some of the story—the way his brother knows he can bleed Ilya dry if he exploits the drugs because of the fear leftover from their mother; how jarring it must be to be forced to prefer the equivalent of a stranger over a father because the unknown was the less cruel alternative.
Shane swallows, throat thick, and wishes he had better words.
“I’m sorry,” he offers, though Ilya’s eyes are still glazed, lost in a memory.
“He told me once that the disease was a blessing to him because he would not have to remember—” he loses his breath halfway through and shudders in another. The rest comes out in a rasp. “Remember having a son that was such a disappointment.”
“Jesus, Ilya,” Shane breathes.
“Was not the worst thing he ever said,” Ilya dismisses, blinking his way back to himself. “But I was not expecting it when he said it. I thought he was… gone, mostly, by then.”
“I don’t think any child ever wants to learn to expect hearing that sort of thing from a parent.”
“I was not a child, though.”
“You were still his son.”
Ilya smiles the way he does when he’s charmed by Shane’s optimism, when he likes to pretend he isn’t an optimist himself. Shane lets him have it this time, mourns it when it deflates again a few seconds later.
“I did not realize how much I still thought of these things until recently.”
“Until I got sick,” Shane paraphrases.
“Yes,” Ilya says honestly. “And I want things to be different now. I am trying to be more ‘present’ so that I do not spend even the good moments waiting for the bad ones to happen again. Worrying that I am the reason for them.” He readjusts the phone, props his chin in his hand. “Some of it is… genetic. I know. I am not trying to escape the sadness. And the forgetting is… something I will take care of eventually if I have to, maybe—”
“We,” Shane amends. “We will take care of you.”
“We,” Ilya concedes with a soft glance. “But. I have these thoughts, like we said. They do not make sense. I know they are not real. But sometimes I cannot turn them off.”
The silence is less scary this time, with everything laid out the table. He wants to ask Ilya about the thoughts, the topics, the frequency, wants to fix. But if there’s anything the last several months have taught him, it’s that the fixing is never as simple and straightforward as he thinks it should be.
“The therapy,” he circles back, chewing at his lip. “It’s helping with the thoughts?”
“I think so, yes.” Ilya turns his face, the line of his jaw no less lethal than the twitch of his mouth when he says, “You help, too.”
“Good,” Shane tells him. “I want to keep helping. If there’s anything I can do…”
“Sweetheart,” he calls Shane in Russian.
“I’m serious, Ilya. I know I’m trying to better myself too, but it feels like that’s all I’ve been doing for months,” he admits, and doesn’t add how he feels about his progress so far. “I want to help you the way you’ve helped me. Just—to give me a break from myself for a minute, if nothing else.”
The suggestive lilt of Ilya’s mouth steadies back into something soft again, and Shane imagines pressing his lips into Ilya’s bruised, half-shut eyelids. “Okay. I will tell you if there’s anything. I promise.”
He thinks about it long after they’ve said goodnight and hung up the phone, the irony of it all. Ilya says Shane inspired him to do this, to go to therapy, to dig into the parts of himself he’s previously been adamant about avoiding just so that the future, the one they’re planning together, might be better for it. Shane doesn’t feel very inspiring these days.
If anything, it’s the opposite; Ilya asking for help despite how difficult Shane knows he finds it, the move inviting as many fears as it does thrills, teammates he’s becoming friends with and a captaincy he’s still settling into, things on the horizon. It’s the sort of thing Shane thrives on, a schedule so he can’t slow down, a to-do list so he doesn’t have to sit with himself in the in betweens because he never learned how.
Ilya makes him want to, though. The scale is tipping, their roles reversed. And if Ilya is capable of stepping this far outside of his comfort zone—well, he and Shane have always been evenly matched, haven’t they?
He falls asleep halfway through the skeleton of a plan. Step one: what, step two: how.
+
Shane is fairly certain that he’s walking into a setup, but he can’t bring himself to stop it.
December is creeping up on them, closing in on the longest amount of time he and his mother have gone without speaking more than a few words to each other in passing. At first it was just the argument they’d had over the phone. They’re both stubborn, more prone to folding away incidents in mental filing cabinets rather than absolving them. It isn’t the first time they’ve disagreed on something and used distance as the solution until the tension lessened.
But it’s been nearly six months now, and somewhere along the way, after the hospital, the distance began seeming less stubborn and intentional and more like she simply didn’t know how to bridge it.
It’s bothered him more than he’d like to admit. He’s been through the stages—denial, convincing himself it was just in his head. Then he’d skipped over to anger for a while, insistent that despite being an adult and despite her being his mother, Shane shouldn’t have to coach her on how to interact with him. She could ask him, if she wanted to. The phone goes both ways.
This, of course, backslid into sadness when he couldn’t ignore it any longer, trapped in a lonely house with his distractions stripped away and too much time on his hands to not spiral. He considers therapy for a bit, asks Ilya about how he first went about it, tries a couple of one-off sessions over the internet with therapists that aren’t bad but don’t fit just right either, but none of it seems to settle him the way it has so far for Ilya.
Bargaining is the only thing barring him from acceptance at this point, so Shane assumes that’s what this is supposed to be.
The garage is open when Shane pulls up the driveway to his parents house, misplaced nerves buzzing underneath his skin. There are different flowers in the garden now, the chipped rock that sits along the front steps fixed since the last time he’s been here despite being broken for a year and a half before this.
It seems Shane isn’t the only one that’s been searching for distractions.
He kills the engine and sits idle in the car for a minute before he goes in. Ilya’s been spending time here on his off days building the aforementioned cart, and Shane is supposed to come and pick it up. The problem is that Shane can see the cart from here, sitting not at all like it was only just finished beside his dad’s woodworking table, most likely ready two days ago when Ilya was last here. His dad’s car is also gone, just his mother’s smaller SUV parked alongside him in the drive. They must have planned it together, commiserating over lumber and stubborn partners.
With a sigh, Shane steps out of the car and walks up to the open garage. He stops at the cart, allows himself a smile as he runs his fingertips across a couple of uneven edges before he gathers the courage to go inside.
The door from the garage into the house is unlocked as usual, the laundry running when Shane walks through the mud room to get to the hallway. He toes off his shoes in the threshold, trying not to feel so much like a different person as he walks past walls of memorabilia and framed photographs of achievements that no longer feel like his own.
“Mom?”
The sound of running water echoes as he walks through the stillness of the living room, his mother’s voice calling back from the kitchen.
“In here.”
The overhead lights are off, the large window on the far wall open enough to color the terracotta tile a plain, cloudless gray. Shane steps past the threshold and pauses for a moment, listening to the familiar clink of plates and cutlery as his mother washes them at the sink.
“Need a hand?” he asks.
“Sure.”
He pushes his already rolled up sleeves a little further up to his elbows and moves to stand at her left, taking the plate that she hands him to finish scrubbing it. She shifts to the side, putting the already rinsed dishes into the washer.
Having a task to complete helps, makes him not feel quite so lost even in the house he’d grown up in. Gives him a blueprint for how to occupy the space. A little of the tension in his shoulders eases as he picks up another pan and scrubs it, methodically eating away the mess with the soapy sponge.
“I talked to Ilya,” his mom says eventually.
Shane’s gaze flicks to her and back to the pan. “You did?”
“Or, well,” she laughs softly, “Ilya talked to me, rather.”
“Oh.” He keeps scrubbing. Once the pan he’s working on is more than squeaky clean, Shane sets it on the wash cloth between them on the counter and pulls his hand away before their fingers can touch as she reaches for it.
“He told me a little bit more about what’s going on. How you’re feeling.” The words settle around them, lackluster for reasons that Shane can’t name. The pan slots into the bottom of the dishwasher. “What do you need from me?”
“I don’t know,” Shane tells her, more sharply than he intends to. “I just… want you to know, I guess.”
“Well, I thought I knew and I got it wrong,” she returns. “I thought you needed space.”
He glances up at her over his shoulder. “Why?”
“You were pretty clear in your phone call, Shane,” she says. The tone makes him grit his teeth.
“Clear how?”
“That you felt I was making too many choices for you. I was—I don’t know. Backing you into a corner. Putting too much pressure on you.”
“But I didn’t actually say that.”
“It was clearly what you meant,” she maintains. “I think I know you pretty well.”
“But it wasn’t,” Shane insists, the plate he’s holding clinking against the inside of the sink as he sets it down. “I asked that we stop talking about that one subject in particular because I don’t know how to talk about it with you without somehow hurting your feelings, and I can’t manage that on top of everything else right now.”
Everything is very quiet for a moment.
“My feelings?”
“There isn’t a right answer. If I say that I’m okay, you’re off the hook, but I’m still struggling. If I say I’m not okay, suddenly I’m a problem that needs fixing and if for some reason you can’t then you just—” he gestures with the sponge, nerves fizzling, “...disappear.”
Really, it’s the fact that his entire life he’s been told he’s exceptional and special because of the skills he possesses, the things he accomplishes. But when it comes to the things that he struggles with, pain or stress or the things in his head that don’t always make sense, suddenly he’s yanked back down to earth again, reminded that everyone has their cross to bear; that whatever he’s feeling isn’t something that requires extra time, attention, or help to deal with. Or worse, that the struggles he has are to be expected. As if they’re something else Shane should have seen coming and prepared for ahead of time.
It’s all he does. Even when he doesn’t want to be, he’s aware of everything. Every noise in a room, every scent in the air, every minute shift that happens that could throw off his equilibrium. Is it a byproduct of a fundamentally unsteady body? Or is it simply how he’d been raised? To pick up on everyone’s feelings but his own?
There aren’t any more dishes left when Shane reaches for the next one. So he bends to grab the detergent from the cabinet underneath the sink instead, tipping the nozzle to fill the machine with washing fluid before he closes the lid and starts the cycle.
“You’re right,” his mother admits as Shane dries off his hands, leaning against the countertop behind her. Something is stripped from her voice now, uncharacteristically soft. “I hate this for you. I hate that you’re in pain. I hate—” she stops, shakes her head. Stares through the archway into the dining room for a moment as she gathers herself again and then to her feet. “I hate that there isn’t anything I can do to make it better. It makes me feel like I’m failing you, and I—I took the easier way out.”
He’d thought that that would feel satisfying.
“But why not ask questions?” he says. “I was talking to dad. Apparently Ilya’s been updating you. Why not just reach out to me and talk about it yourself?”
“I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to.”
“Allowed,” Shane echoes, perplexed.
Reaching for her own hand towel, his mother eases in a breath. “You—you’re a very private person, Shane. You’ve always kept things close to your chest. And sometimes, when your father and I would press, you would… shut down. Talk to us less, or get upset if we asked questions,” she explains. “I didn’t ask about this because I figured you would come to me when you were ready. This is—it’s a big thing, everything that you’re handling right now. The decisions you’re having to make because of it. And I thought if I pushed you too hard about this, specifically, then I would risk losing you for good.”
It sits in Shane’s chest like a rock. Sometimes, when your father and I would press, you would… shut down. He wants to lie down on the floor and not move for several hours. He wants to sink his fingers into his hair and yank at the root until the pain becomes localized, specific, something intentional this time.
He wants to find some way to express the fact that this is all one big loop, or a mirror, or something; that he’d learned to shut down because it was easier than being a problem, than becoming a checklist, than trying to find the right words to explain what was bothering him when they were always doomed to come out wrong somehow regardless. He wants to find a way to say shutting down is too similar to disappearing for his liking.
That he loves his mother, and he wouldn’t be where he is without her, and also that this is the first time in his life he’s slowed down enough to think about these things and he’d like to be angry about them for a little while before they’re pried back out of his fists again.
And, in fact, how many of those times when he was angry or withdrawn were because of this? Because of a pain he couldn’t escape from, couldn’t name, and hadn’t even known was there? He’s never felt this simultaneously justified and heartbroken.
“I’m not going to be able to function at the level I was before,” he says instead, his only recourse left to be honest. A truth it’s taken him all the months they haven’t spoken to even begin to come to terms with.
She folds the towel and sets it aside again, shoulders straightening. “Okay.”
“I’m not saying I’m a different person entirely, I just…” he shakes his head. “There are things that I am going to have to ask for help with.”
She nods. “Absolutely. I can work with that.”
“There are also times when you can’t help,” he interjects. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I’m not saying I don’t. I know that I would never have had half the opportunities I’ve gotten without you advocating for me,” he tells her, and he means it. “But I’m not just hockey, and I never have been. I don’t need a manager right now. I need to know that we can still be around each other if neither of us needs fixing.”
Her brow pinches into something solemn, her mouth opening and closing. In a similar tone, she says, “Of course we can, if it’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want,” Shane confirms. He doesn’t want to leave room for misinterpretation this time.
The dishwasher hums to life between them, water swishing inside the machine in predictable intervals. For now, at least, he’s said what he wanted to say.
They move into lunch easily once Shane agrees to stay for it, just the two of them since his dad is still running errands in town. He fetches the ingredients for sandwiches while his mother pulls the chilling pasta salad out of the fridge, taking two clean plates down from the cabinet.
“Ilya can be pretty intimidating when he wants to be, by the way,” she tells him while she stirs.
Shane snorts lightly, slicing up the turkey breast. “Really?”
“He cares about you very much.”
The humor fades, something warmer and lighter in its place. Shane smiles. “I know.”
“I’m glad he’s been able to be there for you.”
His head snaps up at the sound of her voice breaking, and for a moment, sheer panic floods his veins. Barring a few memorable exceptions throughout the years, he isn’t used to seeing her cry.
“Mom,” he says, his own voice thick.
“Sorry,” she tells him, laughing thinly through it even as her face twists up further. She waves a hand, using the other to cover her eyes.
Setting a hand on her shoulder, Shane turns her enough to meet in the middle, his fingers clutching at her shirt while her palm settles in the center of his back, too heavy, featherlight, just enough.
They stay like that for a couple of minutes, the colon nestled between the time on the microwave blinking as the seconds pass and the food sits unfinished on the counter, until the sunlight has turned sharp and bright on the tile and Shane’s ankles have begun to ache from standing for so long.
He parts from her slowly, still unsure of quite where to step in what he hopes—and is nervous for, in equal measure—will be new territory for them. His mother’s eyes darken with weariness Shane recognizes instinctually, a grief separate but not wholly unlike his own. A tear makes its way down her cheek, but Shane’s stay put, stubborn and cradled in his lashline, not yet ready to concede to new terms.
“Just—I just have to ask,” she says. Her voice lowers to a whisper, that ever-steady corner of her mouth wavering as her palm envelopes his cheek. “How long have you been hurting?”
He thinks of the rink, gloved hands. A pinch in his shoulder that came before relief, short lived and never permanent. The boy on the curb, the bandaid, the empty space.
My whole life, probably, Shane thinks. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know.
He speaks to her as he always has, the words he needs to hear most himself: “You couldn’t have stopped it.”
“But I didn’t notice,” she laments.
“Neither did I.”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m your mother. I should have known. I should have asked more questions, or taken you to better doctors, or—”
“Mom,” he interrupts, taking a breath. “Can we just… start from today? Both of us?”
“Yes,” she agrees. “Yes, let’s—let’s do that.”
They both take a minute to collect themselves, his mother reaching for a dish towel to dab at her face while Shane freshens up in the bathroom in the hallway. Lunch is ready when he returns, both of them bringing their plates to a freshly set table.
His dad returns just after they finish, eager to herd Shane into the garage again to show him the cart properly. He takes what Shane is positive are several of the most unflattering pictures of him standing next to it to send to Ilya, which is bound to be meme fodder in the group chat with the four of them later. It’ll just be nice to revive it again, Shane figures. Even if it’s at his own expense.
He stays for a bit longer and then loads it into the back of his car, straps and all for the precious cargo. His parents walk him out, stalling as they continue talking by the driver’s side until Shane has sit down again.
The sun is beginning to set by the time he leaves. He finds himself pulled in for another hug before he goes, his mom’s hand squeezing his. “Thank you,” she whispers as she lets go.
He’s halfway through the drive home when Ilya’s text notification sounds from his phone. Shane waits until he pulls into the driveway to read it, clicking over to their private thread when he realizes it wasn’t sent in the group chat.
Did you see writing on the side? he says.
Shane frowns. No.
Go look.
Unbuckling his seatbelt, Shane gets out and rounds to the trunk of the car again. The cart is sitting there strapped in where he left it, with its crooked shelf and the questionable paint job, with the little hook for his glasses and the spot for his books. He smiles to himself as he unbuckles it and pulls it toward him.
Sure enough, there are words on the opposite side that he hadn’t seen in the garage, but surely must have been the cause for his father’s hardly controlled glee as he urged Shane to take it home. They’re drawn on with more care than the rest of the cart, one per each level of neat edges and curving lines, the Cyrillic eye catching amongst the backdrop of painted wood. Shane traces a fingertip over each one, then pulls his phone back out again.
What does it mean? he sends. He could look it up, but he wants it from Ilya.
The text bubble pulsates. Live laugh love.
With a roll of his eyes he starts to type fuck off, then pauses. Ilya had said he’d been on Pinterest. He texts back Really? instead.
In a way.
You said I was a blessing but I could not come up with just one thing for you. So I picked three.
Жизнь моя. Радость моя. Моя любовь, Ilya switches to Russian to send back. Shane waits for the translation to pop up as he presumably switches back again. He’s learned a good amount of Russian from hearing Ilya speak it to him intermittently, but he still struggles with the actual letters. He vows to himself to start practicing again.
My life. My joy. My love.
His breath catches in the middle of the driveway, eyes blurring as the words register. They’re not all that different from the sort of things Ilya says to him in person, but today specifically they hit harder, when he already feels tired and a little bit lonely and still achingly raw.
I love you, Shane types. Then I miss you, and thank you.
Ilya sends a tacky barrage of exploding and sparkling hearts, and then adds, There was another I wanted to add to it but I think I will save it. Gives away too much.
Save it for what? Shane asks.
Someone has a birthday coming up…
In like six months ??
Patience. ))))))
This time he does roll his eyes, turning around to lean on the trunk as he types. Just tell me what you were going to say now and I won’t translate it.
Promise?
I swear.
It takes him a minute to answer. Shane carefully lifts the cart, locks up the car, and carries it inside with him, leaving his shoes by the door as he considers where he’s going to put it. The living room had been the intended use so he goes there first, fetching his glasses and a couple of other things like his book and a phone charger for the places where Ilya had built in specific uses.
He’s finally sat down when the phone vibrates again, and he pulls it back out of his pocket to read Ilya’s response.
Ты — мой дом
Shane has no idea what it means or what sort of clue it’s supposed to be, and true to his word, he doesn’t look it up. It doesn’t follow the same format as the other phrases Ilya sent, but his curiosity stays at bay the more he thinks about how happy Ilya will be that he waited.
It looks beautiful, he types, because it does, and because he’s certain it is, if it’s coming from Ilya.
Ilya says, it will be.
Not knowing things usually drives him crazy. But tonight it feels like a tentative lighthouse in the distance as he floats, knowing there’s something on the horizon to look forward to. It flickers and beckons to him the same way Ilya does, the shine reflecting off of him ven when he’s alone.
The phone vibrates again, a video call this time just as Ilya gets out of practice in his time zone. Shane smiles, lifts his sore ankles up onto a pillow as he lays back on the couch, and picks up, the cart an ample prop for the shape of Ilya’s face through the screen.
