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The Hollanders’ regular lawyer, who did Shane's contracts and real estate stuff, referred them to a respectably expensive immigration lawyer in the same email in which she congratulated them on their marriage and cheekily noted their lack of a pre-nup. Deena Daniels, Esquire was a very small, very polite, very professional woman with a puff of hair and too-bright lipstick. After a very brief introduction, simultaneously chilly and friendly in the way Canadians could be, she began a devastatingly chipper spiel.
“Hello, gentleman, congratulations on your wedding. Okay. I'm gonna lay out the situation as I understand it, please let me know if I'm speaking too quickly or if you need me to explain anything.
“It's my understanding that you two are here so that Mr. Rozanov can apply for Canadian citizenship. Our first step is to apply for Permanent Residence, and, Mr. Hollander, I'm assuming you're sponsoring him. Okay. You should meet all the requirements to sponsor but I'll go over those with you later. Do you live together? Hm. Do you plan on living together? Okay, when? Okay, okay. You planning on visiting Russia anytime soon? Just checking! Good, don't. You have all your documentation here with you, right? Okay. Translations? Good. Criminal record? Hm. Okay.
“Alright. I'm going to send you an email with all of the forms you’ll need, they’re all online anyway but better safe than sorry, and I’ll shoot you a document checklist as well. They're going to want some sort of documented proof of your relationship, so make sure you guys are taking a lot of pictures from now on. And if you happen to have any photos from before the wedding, dig those up. If you don't have pictures, screenshots of text conversations and phone records. Anything indicating you were together.
“Listen. This is a stressful process, and it's unpleasant for anybody to put their relationship under scrutiny in this way. I understand your relationship was clandestine for a long time, which might make some of this proof more complicated. And, okay-- your notoriety isn't supposed to impact your application, but I can't imagine a person in Ottawa who doesn't know who you two are. And anyone who's aware of the situation would of course know that it would be ridiculous to think this is marriage fraud. So due diligence will be done, but nobody wants to deport our team's best Captain in twenty years.
“Good luck.”
--
Shane took charge on filling out the PR forms. Ilya let him, even though he was the one who actually had some experience filling out these kinds of forms (see: his rejected PR application from last year), because Shane was freaking out and would be an insufferable backseat driver about the whole thing.
They were over at David and Yuna's the weekend after the meeting with the lawyer. Ilya and David were on the couch, trying to chill, while Yuna and Shane bickered about the forms. Ilya was on his phone, switching between the news and Instagram, while David was reading one of his books.
Before getting to know the Hollanders, Ilya had kind of assumed they were all hockey robots, that Mr. and Mrs. Hollander were mad scientist Metro fans who had grown the perfect hockey boy in a lab and spent all of their time talking about hockey. He was partially right; they were very, very big hockey fans and had gotten Shane on skates as soon as he could walk. But they did in fact have other interests, and while Shane's bookshelf was 95% hockey-related, David and Yuna branched out a little further.
Yuna liked to read what she called “lady books” or “book club books”. She had once been in a book club with some other moms but had had a falling out with them years ago. Ilya was dying to know the details, but when it came up Shane went, “Oh my god, I cannot hear about Linda again.” He would find out one day.
David read a lot of nonfiction about the economy, and birds, and wilderness survival, and old boats, and fiction about wilderness survival and old boats, and biographies of important politicians. Ilya wasn't the most dedicated reader even in Russian, and even worse in English, but he'd read one of Yuna's “lady books” at the cottage last summer and found it pretty fun. David often said that their “library was open”, that he could borrow whatever he wanted.
David was reading something particularly gruesome this week, some huge book about Ontario public policy. Ilya didn't know how he could focus on that on a good day, let alone on a day like today, with Shane and Yuna getting increasingly agitated across the room.
“Mom, I don't think the government needs to know our entire sexual history. They just need to know we're married and we live together.”
“Honey, you need to be thorough. There's hardly any record of your early relationship, we need to be as thorough as possible.”
“That's not even relevant, mom! They don't need to know about every time we hooked up!”
Shane was definitely getting upset if he was admitting to his mother that he had sex. Ilya glanced up from Sveta's friend's super duper interesting Bali photodump and made eye contact with David.
“Ilya,” said David. “How about we get started on dinner.”
Ilya nodded and followed him to the kitchen.
“You wouldn't believe what they were like when Shane was a teenager,” he said, pulling some pots out. Ilya laughed.
The arguments in the Hollander household were nothing compared to what Ilya had grown up with. He thought he knew everything there was to know about arguing, he did it constantly. But David had introduced him to this whole other angle that wasn't avoidance or aggression: he diffused tension. It was totally novel to Ilya, and David was amazing at it.
“David,” said Ilya quietly. “You are like. . . Peace Corps. You could go out into warzones and make everybody eat a snack and calm down.”
David chuckled at that.
“Years of practice,” he said.
And just as David had planned, by the time Shane had his head in his hands and Yuna was shaking her head and saying, “Fine! Fine! I won't help!” David was there to say, “Shane, could you please set the table? Yuna, could you plate this up?”
They kept trying to snipe at each other while they got dinner ready and David would cut in and say, “Let's pause on the PR talk, for now, okay?” and make them listen to some story about his coworker getting sick on vacation. And then Yuna started talking about travel insurance and vaccinations and Shane chipped in with something about an old teammate who got West Nile Virus and Ilya said, “I've never been vaccinated. Russians do not need vaccines, we don't get sick,” which made Shane give him such a horrified look that the whole table laughed. Magic.
Ilya and Shane took on the dishes while David and Yuna took a walk, because David had astutely recognized that they needed some space.
“David tells me you used to start fights all the time when you were a teenager,” he said, purposefully exaggerating for the way Shane predictably said, “Not all the time.” Ilya smiled.
“Sometimes, though, yeah,” continued Shane, never slowing in his drying. “I was under a lot of pressure. You know. Most of it self-imposed, but. I kinda took it out at home sometimes.”
“Mmm. No big sexy Russian back then to make you feel better.”
“Shut up, oh my god,” he said, grinning.
“It's nice,” said Ilya after a few moments. “That you both care so much. About my application.”
“Of course we care,” said Shane. “We love you, we want you here.”
Ilya reached over and nudged Shane into a kiss. Shane said, “Gross, you’re damp,” but kissed him back anyway.
--
David guided Yuna out for a turn around the block -- just enough time for her to vent and cool down a little.
“I just want to kill those two sometimes! They’re so -- just, whatever about their own lives sometimes. You need to get on top of this stuff! I can’t believe Ilya fucked up his last application!”
“He didn’t ‘fuck it up’,” chided David. “His English scores just weren’t good enough. Those tests are tough, I probably couldn’t get a good score.”
“And he had that misdemeanor,” muttered Yuna, eyebrows up and lips pursed in her judgy face.
David sighed. Ilya had been so embarrassed when they found out about that, but David wasn’t really surprised that he’d gotten into trouble back in the day.
“Public disturbance, honey, he does that practically every day.”
That made Yuna snort and smile.
“Listen, the kids are probably stressed out. It’s been a crazy year, they’ve been under a lot of scrutiny, and now they’ve gotta lay everything out for the government. It’s a lot.”
Yuna sighed.
“I know, I know. I just, I worry about Ilya. I want this to be taken care of.”
“It’ll be okay. He’s made it this far.”
He wrapped his arm around her and rubbed her shoulder. She leaned her head against him for a moment.
“Imagine if we had to submit our relationship to the government?” he said, teasing. “The officer would be like, ‘Wow, you two move fast.’”
She slapped him and giggled a little.
“Let’s get back to the house. Think we should knock first?”
They did knock when they came in, half-precaution half-joke, and Shane shouted, “We’re not-- Jesus, it’s been like ten minutes,” and Ilya said something quietly that made Shane go, “Can you stop?”, all delighted and irritated. So Ilya had held up his end of the bargain.
Shane stepped into the front hall, dish towel still in his hands.
“I’m sorry I snapped, Mom,” he said, eyes pointed at Yuna’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry too, honey,” she said. “I just want things to go right for you guys.”
“I think it just-- it was kinda making me sad. That there’s no record of the early days of, like, us. Cause it was like, literally like eight phones ago, and obviously like, we were trying to keep it a secret, so it was on purpose that there isn’t any record. But it makes me sad. So yeah.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, and wrapped him up in a hug. David smiled at them, eyes a little teary at what Shane had said. These poor kids. He glanced at Ilya, who met his eyes and said, face very serious, “Nobel Peace Prize.”