Archive of Our Own

The apartment felt colder than it ever had before.

Even with the heat turned up to the maximum Shane always preferred during winter months, the kind of aggressive warmth that used to make Ilya complain loudly while secretly loving how Shane fussed over the thermostat like a man personally offended by temperatures below seventy degrees, the chill settled deep into Ilya's bones now and would not leave. It had taken up residence somewhere beneath his sternum, behind his ribs, in the hollow space that used to feel full. He lay on Shane's side of the bed with his face pressed into the pillow that still held the faint, fading trace of Shane's shampoo. The one with the light citrus scent. Shane had been particular about it. He had once spent twenty minutes in a pharmacy comparing labels while Ilya leaned in the doorway eating a granola bar and making increasingly dramatic faces until Shane finally picked one and turned around with that flat unamused expression that meant he was actually enjoying himself.

Ilya pressed his nose harder into the pillow.

The scent was barely there now. A ghost of a thing. He had been afraid of this. From the first night alone he had been afraid of this exact erosion, the way time would quietly dismantle the last physical evidence that Shane had occupied this space, this bed, this life. He had forbidden Svetlana from touching the sheets. She had looked at him with the particular expression she reserved for situations where she knew better and said nothing, which was its own kind of mercy.

Svetlana moved around the apartment like she was afraid to make noise. Like the wrong sound would cause something to crack. She had taken over the kitchen on the second day, appearing from the airport with two heavy bags and a set expression on her face, and she had not asked for permission before filling the refrigerator with things Ilya might conceivably eat. He heard her now, out there, pots clanging softly. She was attempting to make their mother's borscht again. She had already tried twice and produced something that was technically borscht in the same way that Ilya was technically functional. He could hear her muttering in Russian about beets, about measurements, about how American grocery stores should not be allowed to call themselves grocery stores when they carried such inadequate root vegetables. Under different circumstances, in a different world, Ilya would have come to stand in the kitchen doorway and offered deeply unhelpful commentary in a tone designed to make her throw a dish towel at him. Shane would have been there too, leaning on the counter with that serene polite expression that he deployed around Svetlana's cooking, the one that hid the small private amusement in his eyes. He would have called it something with characteristic diplomatic absurdity. Authentic chaos. And Svetlana would have told him to shut up and served him the largest bowl.

Now there was no one to deploy expressions. No one to receive them.

Ilya stared at the ceiling. The same ceiling he and Shane had stared at together so many times, in the years of hiding and then in the strange extraordinary months of being allowed to be known, that Ilya had memorized its topography the way he had memorized Shane's freckles. There was a faint hairline crack near the left corner that Shane had noticed first and spent three days mildly worrying about before accepting that it was structural and not their problem. There was the slight discoloration near the window from that winter two years ago when the heat vent above it ran dry and left a pale watermark in the shape of something that looked vaguely like a skate blade if you were extremely willing to be convinced. Shane had been willing. He had pointed it out on a January morning with sleep still blurring his voice. That one looks like mine. The curve is all wrong for yours, your blade curve is wrong. Ilya, look. He had physically taken Ilya's face in both hands and aimed it at the ceiling. As if Ilya had not already been looking. As if Ilya had not already been thinking that the only thing he wanted to look at was Shane's face in the pale morning light with the lines pressed into his cheek by the pillow and his glasses on the nightstand making him squint.

Ilya turned his face away from the ceiling. He could not look at it right now without hearing Shane's voice.

He could not look at most things without hearing Shane's voice. That was the problem with loving someone for over a decade, with building a world out of another person so completely that every room in your shared life held the shape of them. Every corner of this apartment had a Shane memory threaded through it. The kitchen had the night Shane finally, definitively, conclusively proved that he could not caramelize onions without burning them while still being absolutely convinced that the problem was the pan and not the person. The living room held the November they had stayed up until three in the morning watching documentary footage of old Stanley Cup runs and arguing with increasing fervency about strategy and historical context until Shane fell asleep mid-sentence with his head on Ilya's shoulder. The bathroom held the morning routine arguments. Shane thought Ilya's entire concept of a morning routine was an affront to civilization. Ilya thought Shane's concept of an appropriate amount of time in a bathroom was something that should be studied by scientists. They had made a schedule. Shane had put it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a tiny hockey stick that he had bought at some tourist shop somewhere years ago and inexplicably kept.

The magnet was still on the refrigerator.

Ilya knew it was there. He had not been able to walk past it and not look at it, and he had not been able to look at it without the breath being knocked out of him like a check into the boards, so he had taken to angling his body away from the refrigerator whenever he had occasion to pass through the kitchen. Which was not often. He had not had much occasion to be in the kitchen since coming home from the hospital.

He thought about the hospital often. He was trying not to, but it arrived the way things you are trying not to think about always arrive: sudden and complete, like a door blown open by wind. The fluorescent lights. The particular cold of that waiting room that was nothing like the cold of the apartment and yet somehow left him with the same feeling, the sensation of being in a place the warmth had abandoned. Svetlana gripping his hand hard enough to leave marks. The doctor's face, which had been carefully, professionally arranged in an expression that told Ilya everything he needed to know before a single word was spoken.

He had known it was bad when it happened. He had known the instant he heard the sound, that specific sound, something falling that should not have fallen, coming from the kitchen when he was in the bedroom on the phone with his equipment manager about a stick preference. He had been in the middle of a sentence. He did not finish it. He dropped the phone and moved toward the kitchen with a certainty that arrived before any conscious thought, the way his body moved on ice sometimes before his mind had fully processed what was required.

Shane had been on the floor by the counter. He had been so still.

Ilya did not let himself follow the memory further than that. He knew where it went. He had followed it far enough in the weeks since to understand that following it served no purpose beyond destruction, that there was no version of replaying it in which anything changed or any knowledge was gained that was not already possessed at enormous cost. He knew the facts. He did not need to revisit them. What he needed was to locate some way to exist inside the facts, and he had not yet managed it, and he was not sure he would.

He pulled the pillow closer.

Outside the bedroom Svetlana dropped something, swore in Russian, and then resumed her muttering at the beets. Ilya closed his eyes and listened to her voice even though he could not make out the words from here. It was enough to have sound that was not the sound of his own thoughts.

He had slept in fragments since the hospital. Thirty minutes here. An hour there. Real sleep, the kind that knit things together and left you at least marginally more capable of bearing the morning than you had been the night before, had not arrived. When he closed his eyes there was often the ice. The ice as it was the first time he had seen Shane on it, at the World Juniors when they were both barely legal to be there, Shane in red and white moving across the ice with an efficiency that had genuinely made Ilya stop and pay attention, which was not something that happened easily. Shane had been so focused. Even as a teenager, even at eighteen with the hockey world already watching and the pressure already immense, he had moved with this quality of concentrated calm that read like stillness even in motion. Ilya had hated that it captivated him. He had been irritated by his own interest for years.

It had not been a short road from interested and irritated to lying in a cold apartment clutching the man's pillow like a drowning person clutching wreckage.

Memory arrived without asking, the way it did now constantly, like water through a crack that kept widening:

They had been in Montreal. Early in whatever year it was when they had finally, cautiously, with enormous and mutually characteristic levels of overthinking, begun to act like people who had something real rather than something logistically convenient. Ilya had come for a game. After the game, late, when the city had gone quiet in that particular Montreal winter way where the cold pressed everything flat and still, they had gone for a walk. This had been Shane's suggestion and Ilya had initially vetoed it because it was below zero and walking in below zero temperatures was something he did only under professional duress. Shane had stood in the hallway of his apartment building in his coat and scarf with that particular patient expression that meant he had already decided what was happening and was simply waiting for Ilya to catch up. Ilya had gotten his coat.

They walked along the river. Ice on the banks. Their breath visible in the air between them. They did not hold hands because this was early and public and the entire architecture of their lives was still built around not being seen, but they walked close enough that their arms brushed with every other step and Ilya was so aware of each contact that he might as well have been holding Shane's hand, the effect on his nervous system was identical.

Shane talked about the game. He had scored a goal that night that was genuinely good and he was dissecting it the way he always dissected good plays, not with ego, with the precision of someone who wanted to understand the mechanics so they could reproduce them. Ilya listened and argued with half his attention and spent the other half studying Shane's profile in the winter dark. The way his exhaled breath clouded in front of him. The way his eyes moved when he was thinking, that slight focus inward before a point was made. The freckles across his nose visible even in the low light from a distant street lamp.

You are staring, Shane said, without looking at him.

I am listening, Ilya said.

You are staring and also possibly listening.

Is this a problem.

Shane turned his head then. Not a question in his expression, more a consideration. The weighing of something. Then he said, quietly, with the deliberate care he put into most things he actually meant: No. It is not a problem.

They walked back in the same not-holding-hands way, arms brushing every other step. At the door to Shane's building Shane had stopped with his key card in his hand and looked at Ilya for a moment that lasted longer than a moment. Then he said come up and Ilya had and they had made it approximately six feet inside the door before any further conversation was tabled.

Later they lay in the dark and Shane traced the cross at Ilya's throat with one finger. He had done this before, this particular gentle inventory, like he was establishing that Ilya was real and present and had not relocated while Shane was not watching. You always wear this, Shane said.

My mother gave it to me, Ilya said. Before she died.

Shane's finger stilled. He was quiet for a moment. Then: I know. I'm sorry I never said that properly. About your mother.

You did not know her.

I know you.

Ilya had said nothing for a moment. Outside the Montreal cold pressed against the window. Inside Shane's body was warm along his side and his finger had resumed its gentle movement against the metal of the cross. She would have liked you, Ilya said finally. It was not something he had said to anyone.

Shane's arm tightened around him briefly. Then it relaxed again and they lay in the particular silence of two people who have said enough.

- -

The memory released him. He was on Shane's side of the bed. Cold pillow. Svetlana in the kitchen.

The present was always waiting to reassert itself.

He thought, not for the first time, about how many years he had spent in this arrangement where the present was something to get through in order to arrive at the next time he was in the same city as Shane. Years of schedules and flights and careful misdirections and the particular discipline of wanting something you could only have intermittently. He had complained about it, internally, in the way he complained about most things: loudly to himself and in fragments to Svetlana, who had understood more than she let on. He had found the gaps between too long. He had resented the other men and women Shane occasionally dated for appearances and had known exactly how unreasonable that resentment was and felt it anyway. He had counted the days of road trips where their teams' schedules aligned and their cities overlapped and the logistics permitted a few hours together in a hotel room with the curtains shut.

Now there were no gaps. No schedule. No next time, no city that would eventually produce Shane walking through a door. Just the present, continuous and undifferentiated, and the apartment, and the cold that the heat could not reach.

He heard Svetlana set down whatever she had been clanging and come down the hall. She stopped in the doorway. He could feel her looking at him even without turning over.

"Eat something," she said. Not unkindly. In Russian, because they were alone and the habit of Russian between them was old and deep. "You haven't had anything since yesterday."

"Not hungry."

"Ilya."

"Sveta." His voice came out rough. He had not spoken much in the past two days. He had forgotten, slightly, that speech was something that required practice.

She came in and set a bowl on the nightstand. Borscht. He could smell the beets even through the pillow. She sat on the edge of the bed and her hand came to rest on his shoulder, the way it had their entire lives, the specific weight of a person who has known you since before you developed any defenses against being known.

"He would hate this," she said. "Seeing you like this."

"I know." The words came out flat, scraped thin.

"He would say something annoying. Something reasonable. About taking care of yourself."

Ilya said nothing. He did know. Shane's particular form of care had been to express it practically, through action and instruction, through the specific language of someone who loved you enough to be honestly worried about you. Eat something, Rozanov. Sleep. You cannot play if you cannot skate and you cannot skate if you do not sleep. The practical framing had always been transparent, had always been a thin layer over what it actually was, which was: I need you to be okay. I need you to be here. I am asking you to take care of yourself because I cannot watch you not do it.

There was no one now who needed him to be okay.

The thought arrived with a physical sensation, a loosening somewhere, like a knot releasing in the wrong direction.

"He cannot see anything anymore," Ilya said.

Svetlana did not argue. She had the wisdom not to argue. She just sat there with her hand on his shoulder and her own grief present and visible in the way she was breathing, slightly too carefully, the controlled breath of someone keeping themselves in check. She had loved Shane too, in her own Svetlana way. She had initially regarded him with the skepticism she brought to most things Shane-related, which was simply displaced from her feelings about Ilya's years of performing indifference on the subject of Shane Hollander. But Shane had been patient with her in the same quiet way he was patient with most things. He had learned her humor. He had remembered details she mentioned once in passing. He had, on one occasion when Ilya was not present, apparently sat with her for two hours in their kitchen when she had been having a bad week and talked her through it with a steady gentleness that she had only told Ilya about much later, and even then briefly, because Svetlana was not inclined to narrate her own vulnerabilities.

"His parents called again," she said after a while.

Ilya closed his eyes.

Yuna and David Hollander had called every day since. He had not been able to speak to them yet. Yuna's voice on the voicemail had been the voice of a woman doing something enormously difficult and doing it anyway, which was so recognizably Shane's quality in her that it had made Ilya leave the room and sit on the bathroom floor for an indeterminate period of time. David had simply said Ilya, we love you, take whatever time you need, we are here. Which was simple and ordinary and had undone him completely.

"Tell them," he said. Stopped. Started again. "Tell them I will call. Soon."

"Okay."

She did not push the timeline. She was learning which things to push and which to leave. The borscht was a push. The Hollanders were a leave. She had some instinct for it, or she was watching him closely enough to calibrate.

He finally sat up when she had been sitting there long enough that he felt the obligation of being upright. The room made a brief slow revolution and then steadied. He reached for the bowl. It had gone cold. It tasted like nothing tasted like anything in particular. He ate some of it because Svetlana was watching and because Shane would have said eat something Rozanov and the echo of that was still enough, barely, to produce results.

"Hayden called," she said, when he had eaten enough to pass. "Jackie too. They want to bring the children tomorrow if you want. Said it might help. Noise. Life in the apartment."

Ilya turned the thought over. The girls. Emma and Ruby, who were at an age of perpetual catastrophic energy and who had, from their first meeting, treated Ilya with the same baffling complete trust they gave their father. They had given him this trust despite the fact that their father had initially, loudly, and at length made his feelings about Ilya very clear, which Ilya had found entertaining for years and now found something more complex than entertaining. They called Shane Uncle Shane with the same easy ownership with which they called Ilya Uncle Ilya. Past tense now. The verb tense problem was everywhere, was one of the small constant cuts of this.

"Yes," Ilya said. "Tell Hayden yes."

Svetlana nodded. She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had had since arriving, the one that contained her own grief and her worry for him in equal measure and was too much of both to fully suppress. "I am going to check on the borscht," she said finally. As if the borscht needed checking. As if the borscht had done anything since being placed in his hands except sit still and be borscht. She stood and hugged him before she left, sudden and tight and very Svetlana, the kind of hug that meant she could not find the words so she was doing this instead. He let her hold on because she needed him to.

When she left he sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. The bowl in his hands. The cold apartment.

Then he got up and walked to the window.

Outside the city moved. Cars. People. A woman pushing a stroller. A man on his phone gesturing at something invisible. The ordinary unpaused business of the world, completely indifferent to the fact that something essential had been removed from it. Ilya had known this about the world intellectually, had known for years from watching the people he had lost that the world did not stop for anyone's grief. His mother. His father, eventually, though that one had arrived with a complicated mixture of feelings too tangled to be called simple grief. But knowing this intellectually and standing at the window watching a man laugh into his phone were different things.

He put his hand flat against the cold glass.

He had called Shane from this window once. One of the early times Shane had been the one traveling, one of the seasons where Shane's team had a stretch of away games that kept him out of the city for two weeks. Ilya had stood at this window at eleven at night looking at the street below and called Shane on the phone like it was the most normal thing, and Shane had answered on the second ring because he always answered quickly when it was Ilya calling when Ilya did not usually call. Is something wrong, Shane had said. No, Ilya said. Then why— I just, Ilya said, and then could not finish the sentence for a moment. Below on the street a taxi moved through a pool of lamplight and disappeared around the corner. I just wanted to hear your voice, Ilya said. He had kept his tone neutral about it, which had not fooled Shane for a second.

Shane had been quiet for a moment. Then, very carefully, in a voice that contained something warm and soft and enormous that he was choosing to express in this small measured way: I wanted to hear yours too.

They had talked for two hours. About nothing. About the game Shane had played that night and the rookie who had started showing real promise and an argument Hayden had had with a referee that Shane had found genuinely alarming. Ilya had gone to sit on the couch and turned on the TV with no sound and watched images move without comprehension and talked to Shane until they were both falling asleep on the phone in different cities in different beds, which was exactly as miserable and exactly as good as it sounds.

Ilya took his hand off the glass.

Hayden brought the children the next afternoon. He arrived first, ahead of Jackie and the girls, and stood in the doorway for a moment when Ilya opened the door. He was holding a casserole dish. He had lost weight in the past weeks, or maybe Ilya was projecting. His face had the look of someone who had been doing a lot of not sleeping in a way he was not acknowledging.

For a moment neither of them said anything. There was a history between them that was long and had not been simple. Hayden had spent years thinking of Ilya as the enemy and had shifted, slowly and not without resistance, into something more complicated. Not friendship, exactly, or not the word he would have used for it, but a mutual acknowledgment built on Shane. On what Shane meant to both of them. On the specific shared experience of watching Shane skate for the first time at close range and understanding immediately that you were watching something that did not come along often.

"I made a casserole," Hayden said. He looked at the dish. "Jackie made a casserole. I drove it here."

"Come in," Ilya said.

Hayden came in. He set the casserole on the counter with the careful movements of someone managing himself deliberately. He turned around and leaned against the counter with his arms crossed, the way he stood when he was trying to look like he was not in the middle of something difficult.

"The girls wanted to come," he said. "They kept asking. I didn't know if it was a good idea but Jackie said— Jackie thought it might be better. For them too."

"Is fine," Ilya said. "I want them here."

Hayden nodded. He looked around the apartment briefly, taking in the bowl on the coffee table, the blanket on the couch, the general geography of a person who had been moving through rooms without much purpose. His jaw tightened fractionally and then released. "He talked about this place all the time, you know. When we were on the road. He'd just start describing something in the apartment. Some corner, some detail. Like he was so used to keeping it private that he couldn't do it in full sentences but had to let pieces out."

Ilya said nothing for a moment. Then: "What kind of pieces."

"The nursery." Hayden said it quietly, looking at his shoes. "He talked about the nursery a lot the last few months. The yellow. He said he'd spent a long time on the color, that he'd gotten like eight different yellows from the paint store and spent a whole Saturday comparing them in the light. Kept texting you pictures."

"He did," Ilya said. "I told him they all looked the same."

"He said you said that. He said you were wrong and that you'd understand when you saw the right one."

Ilya had seen it. Had stood in the doorway when Shane finally finished the room and had watched Shane's face more than the walls. Shane had been trying to pretend he was not holding his breath waiting. The yellow had been warm and soft and morning-colored and Ilya had said you were right and Shane had done the thing he always did when he was happy and trying not to be transparently happy, the small controlled smile that wanted to be larger. I usually am, he had said. About paint.

Jackie arrived with the girls fifteen minutes later, letting herself in with the key they had given her and Hayden at some point in the past year. The girls were ahead of her, Ruby running straight to Ilya with her arms already raised in the pre-hug configuration and Emma behind her moving more carefully, watching his face with her father's eyes in the way that always slightly startled Ilya, this quality of Hayden's assessment in a child's expression.

He crouched down. Ruby hit him at speed and wrapped her arms around his neck and he closed his eyes for a moment against the small fierce warmth of her. Uncle Ilya, we brought a drawing for the apartment, she said against his collar. Emma did the background and I did the people.

"Show me," he said.

She extracted herself from the hug and produced a folded piece of paper from her coat pocket with great ceremony. He unfolded it. Two figures in hockey jerseys, identifiable by the numbers rather than any features of the drawings themselves, which were vigorous if abstract. Number 81 and number 24. Ilya and Shane, side by side on ice that was represented by a jagged blue line. Above them Emma had done something careful and painstaking with a gold pen: a sky full of stars.

He looked at the drawing for a long time.

Emma came to stand next to him. She had been holding a stuffed hockey player doll, the one Shane had given her at Christmas, and she held it against her chest with both arms. "The stars are because," she started, and then recalibrated with the seriousness of a seven-year-old working out how to say something important, "because Daddy said Uncle Shane went to a star. So I put lots of them. So he has room."

Ilya's throat closed entirely.

He folded the drawing with great care and put it in his shirt pocket. Against his chest. He did not trust himself to speak immediately so he did not try to, and instead pressed a brief kiss to Emma's hair and then Ruby's and stood up. Hayden was watching from the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who was not going to make it through this afternoon without excusing himself to cry in the bathroom at some point.

Jackie squeezed Ilya's arm as she passed him. She did not say anything. She went to the kitchen and began doing things with the casserole and Svetlana appeared from wherever she had been, because Svetlana had excellent instincts about when extra people required management, and the two of them established a quiet competent rhythm that produced heat and plates and the smell of food being warmed.

The girls had claimed the living room floor and were arranging some kind of game involving the stuffed doll and several couch cushions and a rule system that they explained to each other in voices of intense conviction that they had entirely made up on the spot. Ilya sat on the couch and watched them. Hayden sat next to him with a careful distance between them that was slightly more than usual because they were both aware that if the distance was less they might accidentally have a real conversation.

"He would have been good at this," Hayden said after a while. The girls. The noise. The living room.

"He would have been the best at this," Ilya said. Flat. Factual. "He was already the best at it. Better with them than I am."

"You're good with them."

"I am entertaining to them. It is different."

Hayden seemed to think about this. "He used to practice," he said. "Did he tell you that? When the girls were little, before the twins could walk. He used to come over and help Jackie put them to bed sometimes when I was traveling. He'd call me afterward and describe what it was like. Like he was studying it."

Ilya had not known this. Or had known something of it, had understood that Shane's desire for children had roots that went down very far and into something genuine and not performative. But the image of Shane in Hayden's house, a young man in his mid-twenties putting other people's children to bed with the careful attention of someone preparing himself for something he wanted very much, was new and precise and hurt in a way that was also something else. Something close to love, the familiar impossible compound of loving someone and being unable to bear the distance between what they wanted and what was.

"He studied everything," Ilya said.

"Yeah," Hayden said. "He really did."

They sat with that. The girls' game evolved. Ruby had given the stuffed hockey player a name, which appeared to be Gerald, and Gerald was now apparently the third team in whatever sport they had invented. Jackie called them for food and they abandoned Gerald on a couch cushion and ran to the kitchen table, filling the apartment with the sound that Hayden had said it might help to have. It did help. It was also unbearable in the way that most helpful things had been since the hospital: genuinely useful and simultaneously a reminder of everything that should have been in this room and was not.

Ilya sat at the table. He ate something. He watched Jackie watch him eat the way adults watch someone they are worried about, with that careful peripheral attention. He watched Svetlana try to pretend she was not doing the same thing from the opposite side. He watched the girls eat with the efficient chaos of children who have places to be after this and food is simply fuel for getting there.

He thought, not for the first time, that he was surrounded by people doing their best. That he was the recipient of considerable care. That Shane would have wanted him to receive it. That receiving it did not make the cold in his chest retreat even slightly. That these things could all be simultaneously true and he could hold all of them at once and none of them could do anything about the other.

After they left, Ilya went to the nursery.

He had been avoiding it. He had stood in front of the door twice and both times turned away. But tonight something shifted or resolved or ran out of resistance, and he turned the handle.

The light from the hallway fell across the yellow walls in long rectangles. He reached in and found the lamp switch, the little lamp with the hockey stick base that Shane had bought at a craft fair from a local artist who made nursery furniture and had been so pleased about it that he had taken a photograph to send Ilya and then sent six follow-up photographs because the angle of the first one had not been right. Ilya had saved all six of them. He still had them. He would not delete them.

The lamp cast the room in warm amber. The yellow walls absorbed it and gave it back softer. Two cribs stood opposite each other, white, simple, the ones Shane had assembled himself over an entire Saturday with the door closed and no help accepted. He had sent Ilya photographs of his progress at intervals: the parts spread across the floor; one side completed; first crib done, second begun; both completed, standing side by side, with Shane's hand visible at the edge of the frame pointing at them with unmistakable satisfaction.

Ilya walked to the first crib and touched the rail. The wood was smooth under his fingers, real and solid, a thing that existed in the world. The mobile above it, small pucks and skates on silver threads, turned slightly in the air from his movement. The folded blanket in the corner of the crib, soft and pale yellow, the one Shane had chosen because he said it looked like sunshine even on gray days.

He picked up the blanket. He stood there with it in his hands. It was very soft. It smelled faintly of the laundry detergent Shane had switched to when they started getting the nursery ready, the unscented kind, because he had read that it was better for infant skin and had consequently replaced the laundry detergent in the entire apartment even though there were no infants yet, because the idea of accidentally using the wrong detergent was apparently not a risk he was prepared to take.

You have already replaced the laundry detergent, Ilya had said.

The other kind has fragrance, Shane said.

There is no baby.

There will be.

We have not even-

There will be, Shane said, with the particular quiet certainty he brought to the things he had decided. And then, because he was Shane: The detergent is fine for your skin too, by the way. Fragrance can be an irritant.

Ilya stood in the yellow room holding the blanket. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor between the two cribs, back against the wall. The mobile turned. The lamp glowed. From somewhere in the apartment he could hear Svetlana moving quietly, doing some small task, not coming to check on him this time, giving him the room.

He had sat here once before. This same floor. Different circumstances, or the same circumstances from a different angle, because it had always been this, even when he had not wanted to admit it: a man sitting in the middle of what he wanted most, unable to hold it.

He spoke to the room the way he sometimes found himself speaking when there was no one to hear. In Russian, because there were things he could not find in English and perhaps could not find in any language but at least in Russian they had the right shape.

He said: I do not know what to do without you.

The mobile turned. The lamp glowed warm against the yellow walls.

Outside the apartment the city moved and did not stop. It would not stop. It had not stopped once, and it would not, and Ilya would have to learn to be in it, to be a man in the city moving forward with the world, carrying the weight of a name that now belonged only to the past.

He stayed on the floor until the cold seeped through the blanket he had eventually wrapped around himself and the lamp cast long shadows against the yellow and somewhere outside a horn sounded and the city reminded him it was still there.

He did not move until dawn.