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Cliff Marleau wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked.
He didn’t let on, much, but that wasn’t entirely intentional. He had a slow mouth, he just did. And he knew the way he looked-- deep-set eyes, heavy brow and jaw-- made people think things. It was sort of inevitable. He mostly didn’t mind. Honestly it made things easier. His slow mouth meant he put his foot in it often enough, but if people just thought he was dumb they tended to hold it against him less.
Ilya Rozanov was also a lot smarter than he seemed. Now, that one was easy-- he only had a slow mouth because of the language barrier, and nobody with an ounce of sense could fail to notice the sharpness in his gaze. If you let the accent make you think he wasn’t smart, then you were pretty fucking stupid, and really, you deserved what was coming to you. Rozy could get his own back, and did.
Rozy wasn’t bad to Cliff. Cliff had been a rookie in Rozy’s sophomore season, and by then Roz had already been pretty well-established on the team. He’d taken Cliff under his wing and had stood up for him a little in the locker room. And maybe he also underestimated Cliff’s intelligence a little bit, now and then, but mostly Cliff was used to that, and at least from Rozy there was never a mean edge to it. Sometimes Rozy assumed something had gone over Cliff’s head and didn’t bother backtracking to explain, but very often, he would make the effort to clue Cliff in. Which was kinder than most were.
Rozy was nice to everyone, was the thing. He showboated a lot, and made himself obnoxious, but he was never unkind. Not even to his hookups-- Cliff had come up in a pretty toxic hookup culture and it had really opened his eyes, cruising with Rozy and watching the way he managed to simultaneously be respectful and genuinely courteous to women while still getting insanely laid. Like-- insanely laid, Rozanov had not only a keen eye but a startling success rate. And he was extremely good at managing to wingman at the same time he himself was pulling. Somehow he knew-- he’d tell Cliff within minutes which girl he should focus his efforts on, and he was almost always right. But the most important thing he taught Cliff was that even while just looking for a quick fuck, you had to appreciate the humanity of the person you were trying to put your dick into. Even if she got off a little on being degraded you had to make sure she knew it was a role you were playing and that deep down you did respect her.
The hard part was that you had to actually respect her, which was a bit harder for Cliff to pick up. Fortunately he had been raised by a strong mother and he did actually deep down understand that women were people. It was a little bit of a mental shift to consider the puck bunnies that way, but he got there.
He also worked his way up to the first line on the Raiders defense, which was no small achievement.
After a few seasons he looked around and drew the weird conclusion that he was maybe Rozy’s best friend. They hung out a lot. They talked a lot. They shared a lot. They played together a lot. They roomed together on roadies a lot, until Ilya got the C and started rotating who he roomed with to keep a better eye on things.
Rozy never told Cliff anything important. Not really. Cliff had a bunch of non-hockey friends he was pretty tight with, and got a lot of his socialization needs met that way, but he was also close with several of his teammates. Rozanov was friendly enough, even warm sometimes, even affectionate, but he never told Cliff anything really important. When Cliff had a falling-out with his Dad Rozy was right there for him, helping him talk through stuff and figure out what to do, but it was like pulling teeth to get Rozy to admit more than the fact that yes he had a father. Cliff managed to get the picture that Roz’s dad had been pretty strict and kind of cold, which wasn’t unfamiliar and didn’t seem like a lot to admit, but even that much seemed to take a lot out of Roz.
So Cliff never pushed.
But he observed.
When Cliff’s dad died, right after another falling-out, or maybe just an extension of all the others, that they’d never had a chance to make up, it completely devastated Cliff, in ways he hadn’t at all seen coming. And it was Rozy who picked him up and kept him moving, gently pushed him along through the world while the world kept moving around him, and kept everybody off Cliff’s back. It was ostensibly practical-- he had to get Cliff back up to speed, because it was during the season-- but the pressure was incredibly helpful, gave Cliff something to hold onto and something to do that wasn’t just drowning in all his unresolved everything. None of his other friends knew what to do, but Rozy did, and just kept him moving.
“Dads are difficult,” Rozy said at one point. “Mine is sick, Marly, and he doesn’t remember that I’m here. He calls me sometimes because he thinks I’m nearby. Thinks I’m just not coming over even though he needs me.”
“That sucks,” Cliff said, because he could understand that it did.
“My brother is caring for him and does a shitty job,” Rozy said. “And I make sure they have everything money can buy but really thing they need is me there, and I can’t go.”
“No, you can’t,” Cliff said. “How many hours’ flight is it?”
“At least ten,” Rozy said. “And you can’t get direct flights always, so. Longer.” He shrugged. “And my visa-- I can’t just go, and come back, and go.” He sighed. “But my point is. He’s not dead yet, but I will never have a chance to make him understand me. But I could not have ever made him understand me.”
“So you know why I’m so upset, even if I don’t know how to say it,” Cliff said. “Even if I don’t even totally know I feel it.”
“Yes,” Rozy said.
“You’re good at knowing things, Rozy,” Cliff said. He was stone cold sober but was still holding a bottle of whiskey, rolling it in his hands. It didn’t help, and he’d tried, and he’d given up, but everybody expected him to keep drinking, so he kept the booze around and sometimes just sort of pretended.
“Some things,” Rozy said. “What I don’t know is how to make it better for you, Marly. Because I don’t know how to make it better for me. Except to do more hockey. Because I know how to do hockey.”
“Me too,” Cliff said.
“This will only work for so long,” he said. “Eventually we can’t do it anymore. You know? I don’t know what to do then.”
“Me neither,” Cliff said.
Rozanov took a deep breath, held it, let it out again. “Well,” he said.
“We gotta stay friends, Rozy,” Cliff said. “So whenever we retire we can keep each other from blowing our brains out.”
Rozy laughed. “Deal,” he said. Cliff put down the whiskey bottle and held out his hand for a fist-bump to seal it, and Rozy leaned over to press their knuckles together.
March 2017
Cliff had been waiting to tease Rozy about his afternoon hookup, which had clearly left him in such a good mood-- it was transparent: if Rozy had gotten laid he always always played with this edge of almost incandescent cockiness-- but they had been back in the locker room for less than a minute celebrating their victory when Rozanov’s phone buzzed. He’d been ignoring it-- Cliff had heard it go off several times in the pregame prep, and Rozy had annoyedly declined the call each time-- but this time he picked it up.
Cliff knew the calls had been from Rozy’s brother. He couldn’t read Cyrillic, exactly, but it wasn’t that different, and he could recognize the shapes. He’d downloaded a PDF of the Russian alphabet once, and it was on his phone and he looked at it sometimes, and he knew these shapes were Ilya’s brother’s name. Alexei, who Ilya only ever rolled his eyes about and looked grim.
Rozanov spat a terse string of Russian, and then went silent. After a moment he sat down suddenly. He didn’t say anything. There was no sound through the phone. It was loud in the room but Cliff had heard the voice at first, tinny and faint, shouting something. Now there was nothing.
Finally Rozanov said something, maybe two syllables. His face was completely blank, unreadable.
The rest of the room was still loud, jostling each other; people were addressing things to Rozanov and not paying attention to his lack of response. But Cliff just stood there watching. Something really bad had happened. Rozanov wasn’t mad, he wasn’t upset, he was just-- gone.
Without another word, Rozanov disconnected the call and then sat with the phone in his lap, not moving. “Hey,” Cliff said quietly. No response.
Chancey came over, one of the ones who’d been joking with Rozanov a moment ago, confused and annoyed at the lack of response, but Cliff held out a hand, stopped him from grabbing Rozanov’s shoulder.
“Give him a minute,” he said. “I think he just got some bad news.”
“Rozy?” Chancey said, alarmed, his joking annoyance gone.
Roz blinked, looked down at his phone, took a sharp breath. “Chort,” he said softly, which Cliff had heard before and thought was probably a curse word.
Cliff crouched down to get into his eyeline, carefully putting a hand on Rozanov’s knee. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”
Roz took another sharp breath. It was like he was badly injured, the way he held himself-- like he’d taken a stick to the ribs or worse. “I have to,” he said faintly, “I have to-- go.”
“Hey okay,” Cliff said. “Let’s get your skates off.” He dropped to his knees and started unlacing Rozanov’s skates. “It’s okay, man.”
Roz stared at him, maybe not actually seeing him. “Yeah,” he said, “okay. I have to-- I have to.” He breathed.
“Tell me what you need,” Cliff said. The room had gone quiet.
Roz put his hands over the lower part of his face, awkwardly because he was still holding his phone. He breathed. “I have to tell coach,” he said.
“Okay,” Cliff said. “He’ll be in here in a minute, probably. Want one of us to go get him?”
“I,” Roz said. “I have to-- moy otetz-- my father is dead.”
“Fuck,” Cliff said quietly.
Roz sat silently, breathing through his hands.
“Okay,” Cliff said. “So.” He looked over Roz’s shoulder, where Chancey was still hovering; from his grimace, he’d heard what Rozy said. “You go find somebody administrative, let them know he’s gonna need personal leave.”
Chancey nodded, and left, still in his skates.
Cliff looked back at Roz, who was still staring blankly. He looked over Roz’s shoulder again, where Chancey had been replaced by a fretful Neep. “Neep,” he said, “maybe you should go get Max.” Max was one of the sports medicine staff, who was fluent in Russian. Mostly Roz didn’t need that nowadays but this was a special circumstance.
“Max?” Neep said, confused. He was a rookie, maybe he didn’t know the deal with Max, but next to him Very had stepped in and put a hand on his shoulder, and pulled him away with a murmur.
Cliff looked back up at Roz, who had put his hands down and was breathing more evenly, more deliberately. “Okay,” Roz said. “Okay.”
“Lift your foot,” Cliff said. Roz obeyed, and Cliff pulled off one skate, then the other, and set them aside. He grabbed Roz’s socks and peeled them off too, because they were disgusting and he wasn’t going to want them on. “Lemme get your shoulder pads. You need those off.”
He stood up. “Coach’ll be here in a minute,” he said. “What else? I bet admin can help you get a flight. You gotta get home, right?”
Rozanov nodded.
“Don’t think too hard right now,” Cliff said. “It’s just gonna be a big hole blown through your chest and you can only breathe. So only breathe, ok? That’s what you gotta do.”
Roz pressed the hand with his phone against the middle of his chest, took a breath, and then obediently raised his arms for Cliff to pull his shoulder pads off. “I got you,” Cliff said. “Okay, shirt now,” and stripped off the undershirt.
“No,” the coach said at the door. “Hey, we’ll send someone out for press in a sec, I gotta talk to the guys alone. No, no, we’re happy, I just--”
Roz lifted his head and looked slightly blank. “Oh,” he said. “Fuck. Press. I--”
“No,” Cliff said, and made eye contact with the coach, shaking his head.
“Morrison,” the coach said, naming one of the alternate captains, who’d scored a goal. “I need you to do press. Talk about your goal, our cycling, line depth, whatever. Don’t talk about anything personal. Got it?”
Morrison started up, flustered. “Uh,” he said, “give me like. One minute.” He yanked his skates off, then shoved his feet in his shower shoes and came over. “Hey,” he said to Roz, “I got you, okay?”
Roz looked up blankly, saw Morrison’s outstretched fist, fist-bumped it. Morrison nodded grimly and shot out the door past the coach.
Coach came over and stood over Roz, looking down. “Chancey says you got some bad news.”
“My father,” Roz said. “Died.”
Coach nodded. “So you gotta go home and deal with that,” he said. “I’m real sorry. You take whatever time you need.”
“I-- I won’t-- it won’t be long,” Roz said. He was still blank.
“Don’t think too hard right now,” Cliff said. “Don’t try to do the math. It’s okay. You can do it later.” He looked up at the coach. “I’m gonna try to get him through the shower, get him changed, get him home, and I figure we can work out details later, yeah?”
Coach nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds good. I’m gonna go help Morrison, he wasn’t really prepped for this and I don’t want him alone with the wolves.”
“It’ll be easy,” Cliff said. “We won.” He patted Rozanov’s shoulder. “Let’s get you outta the rest of this, okay? Not gonna help anything if you let the sweat dry.”
Rozanov was shivering with shock by the time Cliff got him into the shower. Cliff figured there was nothing for it; he pulled the guy into the spray, wet him down, soaped his hair, tried not to be weird about soaping the rest of him. Roz came to himself enough to give a few desultory swipes to the bits of him Cliff wasn’t going to presume to touch even after their years of intimacy, but mostly was passive and let Cliff do for him. Cliff held his hand against Roz’s forehead to keep the shampoo from washing down into his eyes, like you would for a little kid. Steered him out of the shower, wrapped him in a couple of towels, back out into the locker room.
Everybody else cleared out around them quietly. Some of the guys came over and touched Rozanov’s shoulder now and then, with quiet murmurs, or wordlessly. Roz may or may not have known they were there.
Max turned up, and said something quietly in Russian to Rozanov, who opened his mouth, closed it, shook his head. Max looked at Cliff.
“He’s not really talking in any language,” Cliff said. “But he doesn’t have to. I just figured we might, you know. Need you, if he had a hard time.”
“Thank you,” Roz said, and to Max he said “Spasibo,” which was one Cliff knew from the little list he’d looked up. It meant the same thing.
Rozanov managed to get himself dressed, which was good because even as tight as they were Cliff would have felt uncomfortable putting underpants on him. It also gave Cliff time to get his own clothes on. “Listen,” Cliff said, “I’m gonna drive you home, okay? Leave me your keys and I’ll get your car back to your house while you’re away, don’t worry about it.”
Roz nodded. He was sitting motionless on his bench. Cliff found his shoes and put them in front of him. One of the admins was standing in the door with a clipboard clutched to her chest, looking nervous. Cliff made eye contact, glanced at Max who was still standing there, then crouched down to get Rozanov’s shoes on. “Hey,” he said, looking up into Rozy’s blank face. “Do you wanna talk to admin tonight? What do you think they need to know?” That was too much. “I can talk to them for you. I’ll find out what’s gotta happen. Which airport do you need?” He didn’t know much but he did know Moscow had more than one airport, Rozanov had bitched once about having to fly into the wrong one for some stupid airline reason.
“Oh,” Max said, “I know that one, we’ve talked about it.”
“Great,” Cliff said. “So you help with that, okay?” He looked at the admin girl, who shuffled a little closer, nervously.
“PR can put together a statement,” she said quietly, “with whatever details, we can send it--”
“No,” Roz said. “No, I don’t want--”
Cliff nodded. “We don’t have to say anything either,” he said.
“People will ask,” the admin said nervously.
Cliff shrugged. “They can ask but we don’t really have to say anything,” he said.
“I make so many jokes,” Roz said hollowly. “Someone will make joke. I can’t. Not this.” He looked so fragile Cliff considered hugging him. But he just kept tying his shoes instead, because that seemed more useful.
And it was true, there would be jokes. Roz ruthlessly chirped his opponents about all kinds of things. He was never mean, though. He never picked on anybody about this kind of thing. But other people weren’t as unsettlingly good at chirping as Rozy was. And Cliff himself knew fine well about that. A Calgary forward had made a shitty joke about Cliff’s daddy issues the week after his father’s funeral, and Roz had jumped in and beaten the shit out of the guy.
Which had gotten Roz in some trouble for the rest of the game, once his penalty was served, but Cliff had protected the shit out of him and nobody’d managed to hurt him. Cliff was still pretty proud of that one.
Roz was still moving like somebody who’d been shot. “Then we don’t say shit,” Cliff said. He looked at the admin. “Okay? We don’t say shit. Let it be a God-damned mystery for once.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said. Cliff wasn’t usually a guy who made decisions or expressed strong opinions; he was a backup guy and he knew it, he knew his place. Usually he was Rozy’s sidekick. But Rozy had done all this for him when he’d needed it, so it was his turn, and he knew what to do. Rozy had taught him: you keep moving, until you can’t. And he could still keep moving, so he was going to.
Cliff stood up, and looked in Roz’s stall for where his coat was hanging up. There was a sweater there too, so he pulled both out, and offered the sweater first. Roz put it on, and stood up. “I think that’s all we gotta do here, right?” Cliff said.
“I don’t know,” Rozy said. Cliff held his arms out for a moment, and Roz looked blankly at him, but then stepped closer, so Cliff put his arms around and pulled him in.
“I got you,” he said. “I got you. We’re gonna take you home, and they’re gonna book you a flight, and I’ll get you to the airport. Should we find somebody who can go along with you?”
“No,” Roz said into his shoulder. “No, I can do it.” But he wasn’t pulling away, and he pressed his face against Cliff’s shoulder and shivered again. He wasn’t crying, he was completely dry-eyed, but he was freezing cold. Shock. Cliff really didn’t want to put him on a ten-hour flight or whatever all by himself. But it wasn’t like Cliff could miss the next two or three or four games or whatever, they were flying to Nashville tomorrow at seven a.m.
“I know you can,” Cliff said. “But somebody could help you. I wish I could help you, man. I’d do it. You know I would.”
“I know,” Roz said, a bare whisper. “I know you would, Cliff.”
Cliff caught Max’s eye. “Ah,” he said. “Let’s give Max your brother’s phone number, and then he can tell him your travel details once we have them. Yeah?”
“Okay,” Roz said, and let go of Cliff to turn to Max with his phone in his hand. Cliff put his coat over his shoulders, and he wriggled into it one arm at a time. Max copied down the details into his own phone. Then Cliff gave Max his own phone number, and said he’d be with Roz all night so they could call him to confirm details.
Roz said nothing the entire way to his house, but stared unseeing out the window. He looked like a statue. It was like he was two different people, Cliff thought. Sometimes he was so animated, his face changing shape with every new thought. And sometimes he was like this-- cold, pale, still. And at those moments he really fucking looked like a statue, like something one of the old masters of whatever would have carved into marble or granite or whatever the fuck they carved to make those statues.
He had amazing bones, really. Or whatever it was that made somebody beautiful, Rozy had it. And you wouldn’t notice, most of the time, because whatever animated him was so bright and so loud. It was only obvious when he was still like this.
At Rozy’s house, Cliff had to come around and gently pull the passenger door open before Rozy started to move. He held out a hand. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get inside.”
Rozanov drifted into the house like a ghost. Cliff noticed that the slides Rozy usually wore around the house were by the door. He caught Rozy’s arm gently, pointed at the slides, helped get Rozy’s coat off. Rozy yanked his shoes off on autopilot and stepped into the slides, but then stood there motionless for a few moments. Cliff gently steered him into the kitchen, sat him down at one of the stools at the counter.
“You gotta eat,” he said. Rozy’d had something like thirty minutes of ice time in that game, he had to be ravenous. Cliff knew his routine on the road, but he wasn’t sure at home. He looked in the fridge. There were some containers in there, maybe that was food.
“No,” Rozy said. “No, I’m-- I don’t think so.”
“Drink, then,” Cliff said. He looked in the fridge. Rozy had a shitton of ginger ale for some reason. “You like this stuff?” He pulled out one of the cans. Rozy blinked at it, and his face creased oddly.
“No,” he said. Cliff liked it once in a while, so he set out a can for himself. It wasn’t like he was going to crack a beer at a time like this.
“Coke? Beer?”
“No,” Rozy said, and Cliff remembered how he’d been shivering.
“Oh,” he said, and looked. There was an electric kettle. “Tea?”
“Yes,” Rozy said. “Tea.” He got up. “I will make it.”
He seemed decisive, so Cliff let him do it. “Yeah, sure, make me one of whatever you’re having,” he said, when Rozy asked.
Yeah, the guy was like a statue. And as Cliff thought about it more, he thought how even the animated side of Rozy was all… like, what he wanted you to see. He sometimes got mad, but often the anger was controlled, tactical. He was almost never visibly sad. Sometimes he was sort of wistful but mostly he just displayed irritation, or something else. Like he was deflecting you from what he was really upset about.
Years now, Cliff had been tight with Rozy. He’d expressed himself as well as he ever did, to Roz, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought he never really had known much about what Roz was actually feeling at any particular point. There was a distance, there; Roz kept everybody fended off. Even when he was fucking (they were tight enough that Cliff had directly witnessed this), Roz had a kind of-- like almost like a mask, on. He was there to have a good time. He was there to revel in sensation. He was there to get off. He was present, all right, but it wasn’t-- it wasn’t ever anything really deep, or vulnerable, or genuine.
This was Roz with the mask off, maybe, but it was unsettling because there just wasn’t anything there. He was shut down, like on autopilot or something. There was nothing for the mask to cover.
Maybe he was just the mask, now.
The kettle rumbled, and Rozy moved around, opening a cabinet. He made no sound. Even shuffling in his plastic slides on the tile floor, he made no sound, opening the cabinets soundlessly, gently closing them so there was no click. Cliff had noticed that before, sometimes. Rozy could take up a lot of space when he wanted, could be loud, but when he wasn’t dong it on purpose he was eerily silent. It seemed to be his natural state.
It was like sharing a kitchen with a ghost. Cliff wasn’t a superstitious guy, any more than anybody in his peer group. He was vaguely Catholic, in the kind of way where he had a St. Christopher medallion in his car and a crucifix on the dresser in the guest room so his mom would see it when she came over, and he like, knew how to act in a church mostly. He hadn’t gone to Confession since they made him do it for Confirmation, but at least he’d gone then. So he knew ghosts weren’t supposed to be real but he also knew there were things you lit candles to.
Rozanov shook a little jar. “Sakhar?” he said.
Didn’t take a genius. “Sure,” Cliff said. He thought about saying da but surmised this would sound like wiseassery, from him, which was the opposite of the effect he wanted to achieve. He watched Rozy pour the water, stir a spoon full of, sure enough, white sugar, into each of the cups, and set a little egg timer.
“I have to pack,” Rozy said, rubbing his face. “I have to--” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Flight.”
“Max is helping admin figure it out,” Cliff said. “They’ve got like your passport and stuff on file, I’m sure they can figure it out.”
“I have to pay for flight,” Roz said.
“They’ll figure that out too,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll let you know if they need something.”
The timer went off, and Roz fiddled with the teacups-- some elaborate thing with tea strainers of some kind, Cliff had seen him do it before-- then brought them over, and sat down next to Cliff. He rubbed his face. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“You really should eat,” Cliff said. “And maybe stretch. We didn’t really do a cooldown.”
“You eat,” Roz said. “Stuff in fridge. Anything that looks good.”
“If I make myself something,” Cliff said, because he did, he needed to eat, he’d played almost half an hour too-- defensemen tended to get longer shifts than forwards, and they were a little less strenuous but not by much-- but Roz was the one who’d done hero shit out there, a fucking hat trick on Montreal of all teams. “You gotta try to eat a little.”
Roz shook his head, but got up and went to the fridge. He got out a container, put a frying pan on the range, turned on the burner. They were premade meals, Cliff got them too-- the team had a service that did them, and you could sign up. Just, easy premade shit prepped fresh and delivered on a schedule, that you could just reheat and eat and it would have some kind of reasonable nutritional profile. In a minute the pan was hot and he just dumped the entire contents in, then turned the heat down. He was still moving silently, still a little halting like he’d been injured.
“Come on,” Cliff said, “come sit down, I can stir that. Not even I can fuck that up.”
“Tea is too hot,” Rozy said.
Rozanov’s phone, sitting on the counter, started buzzing. Cliff looked at it. “Ah,” he said, “I think it’s your brother.”
Rozy looked dully at it, then turned back to the pan. “Let it go,” he said.
“I can just tell him you’ll call him back,” Cliff said. “Or-- Max was going to call him once he had the arrangements made.”
“I don’t think his English is good,” Rozy said. “But sure.”
Cliff picked up Rozy’s phone and swiped. “Hey,” he said. “Somebody from the organization is going to call you once the arrangements are made.”
“Vot,” someone said, a cartoonish accent. Rozy didn’t sound like that anymore. After a moment, haltingly, “Who is-- this.”
“This is Marly,” Cliff said, “I’m Rozanov’s teammate.” He made himself talk slower but not insultingly so. “We have somebody making arrangements to get him home. We’ll call you once we sort it out. That okay?”
“He cannot talk himself?” the voice demanded.
“No,” Marly said, “he can’t. So we’ll call you.” He hung up. “What a fuckass bitch.” This call had been reasonable but Marly had some years of patterns to go off, to come up with this.
Rozanov laughed suddenly, a bitter sound. “Fuckass bitch,” he said. “Yes. This is correct.”
“I figured he had to be, or you wouldn’t decline his calls all the time,” Cliff said.
“I pay him,” Rozanov said, “to stay home and care for Papa, all he does is complain that I do not come and do it.” He gestured. “How does he think I earn the money to pay him this? Does Raiders pay me to sit in living room in Moscow?”
“Naw, that’s shitty,” Cliff said.
“I would have go home if I could,” Rozanov said. He sounded like he had back in the early years, when his English wasn’t good yet.
“C’mon and drink your tea,” Cliff said, getting up and brushing lightly past him to stir the pan of food. “G’wan. Sit.”
Rozanov drifted over toward the stool, rubbing his face. “I did not take his call, before,” he said. “I could maybe have seen one more time before my father die but he already not remember me. What good would this do?”
“It was yesterday he started calling you and you were ignoring him, yeah?” Cliff said. “I noticed you declining the call. If it was that recent you wouldn’t have made it in time.”
Rozanov stood, nodding to himself, staring blankly. He looked-- small. He wasn’t a small man. He was smaller than Cliff, sure, but almost everybody was. He was shivering again.
“Hey,” Cliff said. “Drink your tea, Rozy, you’re making me cold.” He shook the frying pan, jostling the food, then poked it with the spatula. He couldn’t really cook anything but omelets or maybe sandwiches, but he was pretty good at reheating stuff.
Rozanov blinked, went back over to his stool, and sat, wrapping his hands around the mug. Cliff’s phone rang, a local number, and he picked it up and held it between his shoulder and his ear. “Yello,” he said.
“We emailed Rozanov the flight itinerary and check-in info,” the admin lady said. “There wasn’t a direct flight until tomorrow night, so we got him one in the morning with a layover in London, but it’s only like an hour and a half. The flight leaves pretty early but we figured he’d want that. We could still switch it. Do you think you can ask him? Is he doing okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll ask him,” Cliff said. “I’m gonna be rude and not put you on mute though, because my hands are full.” He turned. “Rozy, they got you a flight early tomorrow with a layover in London, that okay?”
“Ah,” Rozy said, “I have miles.”
“He’s got miles?” Cliff said. He didn’t really know what that meant; most of his flying was with the team, not on an airline.
“I don’t think we’re set up to deal with that,” the woman said uncertainly.
“It does not matter,” Rozy said, “I was not thinking.”
“He says never mind,” Cliff said. “So they emailed it to you, Rozy. You can look for yourself or gimme a minute and I’ll check it out.”
“I can look,” Rozy said. He rubbed his face. “Tell them thank you.”
“He says thanks,” Cliff said.
“Is he doing okay?” the woman asked anxiously.
“You know,” Cliff said, “I don’t think so, but like, what can you expect? I’m gonna try to get some food in us both. Thank you for taking care of that, it’s not a skill set I’ve got at all.”
“I shouldn’t expect so, Mr. Marleau. But I think you’re being a very good friend to your teammate,” the admin said.
“I can only try,” he said. “Okay, we’ll call if we need anything else, but like, I mean. It’s pretty late, isn’t it.”
“I will be fine from here,” Rozy said quietly. “If I need to change, I will change. I am not broken.”
“He says it’s good,” Cliff said. He ended the call and dropped his phone back into his pocket, turned off the frying pan, and poked around in the cabinets to find plates. The first one he opened was drinking glasses, so he flipped it shut it again and noticed that Rozy flinched at the sound it made.
They’d been silent, when Rozy closed them, and it wasn’t because they were well-cushioned or had soft-close hinges. No, Rozy just shut them silently somehow. Cliff was more careful with the next one, which held plates and bowls. He got down two plates and kept his grip on the door until it was entirely closed so it made no noise, which took more attention than he’d expected. All right, drawers for silverware. He opened one that was cooking utensils, shut it again very carefully, tried another. Bingo. Silverware. He got out two forks, then shut the drawer quietly, quietly.
He split the food in the pan between two plates and brought them over to the counter.
“No,” Rozy said, “for you, eat. I can’t eat.”
“You gotta, man,” Cliff said. “Please try.” He dumped half of the portion from one plate to the other and gave Rozy the smaller plate. “Just like. Something. So your body doesn’t eat itself.” He set it down. Rozanov stared grimly at it. It was a kind of pasta with pesto thing, full of shredded chicken and vegetables cut up pretty small, and the garlic wafting off it was absolutely mouth-watering.
Cliff was fucking starving, so he set about demolishing his three-quarter portion. He’d brought a water bottle from the rink and had downed most of it by now, so he opened the can of ginger ale. Rozy was still holding the mug of tea. But after a long moment he picked up his fork and started eating too. Cliff didn’t comment, because it seemed indelicate.
When he was finished, he brought his plate over to the sink rather than looking at Rozy. Probably if the guy was leaving it’d be smart to clean up the kitchen. Well, he’d wait.
Rozy had pulled out his phone and was scrolling with one finger while he ate, slowly, with the other hand. “Itinerary is fine,” he said finally.
“Good,” Cliff said. He laughed. “You know I’ve only ever flown commercial a couple times, I was thinking I got no idea how to manage that shit.”
“You could figure it out,” Rozy said. He was chewing, slowly. He hadn’t made a lot of progress but food had gone into him and that was better than food not going into him. “You are smarter than you act, Cliff Marleau.”
“Aw man,” Cliff said. “You’re onto me.”
Rozy looked up over the edge of his phone. “I know it all along,” he said. And there he was-- a little glint of himself, there, behind the statue face.
March 2018
“I know we don’t talk about… lot of things,” Rozanov said, peeling the label of his beer bottle. Cliff looked over in some surprise.
“We can if we gotta,” he said. “Something eating you, man?”
Rozy shook his head. “No, but…” He sighed. “Free agent, end of this season, yes?”
“You are?” Cliff shook his head. “They’d be stupid to let you go.” He grinned. “You gonna hold ‘em over the coals?”
“After season I have had?”
Rozy had been on IR for something like forty games by now. It wasn’t great. “Well,” Cliff said. “We shouldn’t’ve let you get hurt.”
“Wasn’t your fault,” Rozy said, not for the first time.
“They’re still not gonna let you go,” Cliff said.
Rozy tilted his head. Cliff leaned in closer. “You don’t think,” he said, trailing off in sudden doubt.
Rozy shrugged. “All I’m saying,” he said. “Is, if I go somewhere else, is not because of you, Marly.”
“Don’t leave me,” Cliff said, horrified.
“Marly,” Roz said.
“Fuck,” Cliff said. “Okay well. I guess I’m skipping to acceptance.” He’d read up on the stages of grief or whatever but he couldn’t remember them all. “But I don’t wanna. I just think the other ones aren’t gonna help my case here.” Denial, anger, bargaining-- he couldn’t remember the others.
“No,” Roz said, “they aren’t.”
“They’d be so stupid to let you go,” Cliff said. “So stupid to--”
“I might have reasons to go,” Roz said, looking at his bottle. He sighed.
“Nobody on the team--” Cliff said, thinking hard.
“No,” Roz said. “No, Cliff. Nobody on the team has done or said anything to make me want to leave. You all are wonderful and I will miss you so much if I go. I don’t want to leave team. But Raiders organization, maybe, not so much.”
A couple of things connected then, for Cliff, and he mulled that over. “The Scott Hunter thing,” he said. “You worked really hard with us on that, and you got us all to agree, but then…”
“Mm,” Roz said. “That stung.”
“It sucked,” Cliff said. “That all the players on the team could be united-- and it wasn’t easy for us, to all agree on something like that, that took a ton of work.”
“Not just by me,” Roz said. “You guys all worked hard on yourselves and each other.”
“Yeah,” Cliff said. “There was a lot to think about.” He considered it a little longer. “I guess that must’ve sucked personally for you too.”
Roz glanced up from his beer bottle, something sharp in his gaze. He didn’t say anything. Cliff hadn’t thought he would.
“I won’t say it like that to anyone else,” he said, looking down. It wasn’t like he didn’t know Roz was sometimes into dudes. They’d traded handjobs on the road a time or two, when early curfew and tight supervision meant there was no chance to find anyone. They’d shared girls, made sandwiches where the bread touched sometimes, and Cliff wasn’t like, the hugest fan of other bread but there was no point denying that a friendly hand, a thigh, a body to press against was kinda nice, that sometimes kissing a mouth and getting stubble burn was kinda hot on its own. He knew a lot about how Rozy fucked, and knew damn well that what Rozy really liked most wasn’t something that you needed to be either a man or a woman for. He liked people, he liked connection, and you could find that with anybody you had a spark with. He’d never seen Rozy specifically, like, pick up a dude, but he figured it was pretty obvious that Rozy would.
“You can care about human rights without--”
“Being a human?” Cliff interrupted. “That’s all I’m saying, Rozy. If they won’t stand up for that, I don’t blame you for feeling like they wouldn’t stand up for anything.”
Rozy considered him. “That is the… middle of it. Center of it?”
“Heart of it,” Cliff said. “Or core of it, I guess, but heart is like. Poetic.”
“That’s what I was thinking of,” Rozy said.
Cliff nodded. “Are other teams any better, though?” he asked.
Rozy shrugged, shook his head. “That is what I try to find out,” he said.
“Don’t go, man,” Cliff said, very quietly. “Man, don’t go.”
“Marly,” Roz said, also very quietly.
“I know,” Cliff said. “I said I was skipping to acceptance.” He rubbed his face. It actually literally hurt, which shouldn’t have been surprising. “Christ.”
“It’s not anything simple,” Roz said. “It’s not just that. I also.” He sucked his teeth. “I want Canadian passport.”
“What’s wrong with the one you got?” Cliff asked.
Roz just looked at him for a long moment, eyebrows eloquent, but his eyebrow language was one of the many languages Cliff couldn’t quite parse. “It’s Russian,” he said finally.
Cliff had not studied politics, to put it mildly. He had managed to read a few articles about Russia over the years. Never enough that he’d understand Rozy at all, but a few things, here and there. “It’s not like it’s great here,” he admitted. Not that he’d say that loudly. Most of his family was a big fan of how things were going. Because most of his family were as stupid as Cliff looked like he was.
“Exactly,” Rozy said, very very quietly. “I want Canadian passport.”
“You wouldn’t,” Cliff said suddenly in horror. “Montreal. Tell me you wouldn’t--”
“They could not afford me,” Rozy said. “Not me and Hollander. And Hollander has another year on contract.”
Of course he knew that. Rozy knew everything about Hollander. He had Hollander’s stats memorized up to the minute. He could probably tell you what time of day Hollander took a shit. If the guy ever did; he was sort of superhuman, after all.
“I guess anything else would be okay, then,” Cliff said. “But. I’ll be real sad if you wind up out West.”
“I do not want this either,” Rozy said.
“It would suck even more to get back to Russia,” Cliff said. “Like, the travel.”
“Oh,” Rozy said, “this is not a concern. There is no one there for me now.” He rolled the beer bottle between both hands. “But I don’t want to go to West. I want to stay close to here.”
“Not a lot of teams to pick from,” Cliff said. He sighed. “Admirals maybe.”
“Also can’t afford me, but. Also would not get me Canadian passport,” Rozanov said.
“I think your fastest way to that is marrying a Canadian chick,” Cliff said. “I know you could find one.”
“I don’t want to do that,” Rozy said, not looking at him.
Cliff took a breath, and said, carefully, “What about that Jane?”
Rozanov glanced up again, eyes sharp again. Cliff considered his options. She clearly lived in Montreal. But if she were just some chick, Rozanov would absolutely have brought her around. Oh okay. Jane was not-- well, she wasn’t a single woman, at least. Maybe not a woman at all. Why else would Roz be so touchy about this?
He’d half-thought this through before, and had kind of decided to just. Not think too hard about it. Because Rozy didn’t want him to. But maybe he should. He’d always been touchy about Jane, and so Marly had cooperatively looked away, only teased lightly. But there was clearly something there.
“Even if I married some Canadian chick,” and he said it in Cliff’s accent, which was always hilarious, “I have to live in Canada with her to get passport. So even if I did this I would not be able to stay with Boston.”
“Yeah, no, I get it,” Cliff said. “I’m not trying to talk you into staying. I told you, I moved on to acceptance already.” He sighed. “But I’d be happier to lose you if it meant you were, like, moving toward something you wanted, you know?” He fidgeted. “Instead of. Away from something that sucked.”
“Marly,” Roz said, moved. He leaned over and pressed his shoulder against Cliff’s, not looking at him. Cliff pressed back. “I am,” Rozy said finally.
“Good,” Cliff said, very quietly, almost a sigh. “Okay.” And he sat up, pulling away from Rozy’s warm shoulder. “Okay.”