Chapter 4: The Visitors' Room

"Fifteen two, fifteen four," Dougie said, "and a pair is six, and his nobs is seven."

"That's not his nobs," said Kostiuk. "That's a jack of hearts. The starter's a club."

"Then it's six."

They were playing crib across the little table at the front of the bus, the board balanced between them on a rolled-up towel, the way they had played it on every road trip since September, and Kostiuk was winning, the way he had won every game since September. Out the window the 417 went by in the dark, flat and white, the snow fences along the fields, the gas station at the Quebec border lit up like an aquarium. A sign said MONTRÉAL 70. Somebody at the back groaned at it, out of habit.

Ilya was on the aisle, four rows back. Across from him, also on the aisle, Shane was reading.

Shane read on buses the way he did everything, properly. He had a hardback about the history of the St. Lawrence Seaway, borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library, with a bookmark that was a real bookmark, and his reading glasses on, and every few minutes he turned a page with the very end of one finger, so as not to crease it. He had not looked at Ilya since Kanata.

That was not quite true. He had looked at him, and said please, and thank you.

For nine days he had been saying please and thank you to Ilya. Please could Ilya move his bag off the stairs. Thank you for the coffee. Thank you, he'd said on Monday, when Ilya passed him the salt, and Ilya had sat at his own table with the salt hand still out and felt it go through him, very thin and cold, like a draft under a door. Married people should not say thank you for salt. You said thank you for salt at a dinner party, to a person you were never going to see again.

They slept in the same bed. Shane slept well. Ilya knew because he didn't.

The garage had been quiet for nine nights. Ilya had not known that quiet could have a number on it. He lay on his back under the green light of the smoke detector and listened to the house not making any sound at all, and counted that instead.

"Ilya," said Mathis.

The kid had been sitting next to him since Ottawa. He'd done it at every chance for a week, with the loyal, sideways air of a dog that has decided someone is sad. He had one earbud in. In his other hand his phone was playing French sports radio, a call-in show, a man with a very old voice and a great deal to say.

"Gaston from Laval," Mathis reported, "says Hollander should give back the Conn Smythe."

"From 2020?"

"He says, out of respect."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Gaston says it makes a lot of sense." Mathis listened. "Now he's talking about his hip."

Ilya laughed, and Mathis looked pleased, and for a while they listened to Gaston's hip. Then Mathis turned the radio down. He didn't take the earbud out. He turned it over in his fingers instead, and Ilya could see him working up to something, the way you see a young player working up to a hit, a long way off.

"Is it true?" Mathis said. "What they say? That he did it for you?"

He didn't say it loudly. But it was the kind of bus where everyone was half asleep and half listening, and the crib game at the front stopped, a peg halfway into its hole. Dougie's head turned. Three rows up, somebody took his headphones off.

"No," Ilya said.

It came out of him before he'd decided anything. It came the way the lift came, in practice, on the first day, when his stick had gone in under Shane's before Ilya had known it was moving. His body had known. It said no, loud enough for the whole bus, and flat, like a door closing, and then it was said.

Mathis nodded, very seriously, and put the earbud back in.

Up front, Kostiuk said, "Your crib," and Dougie said, "Right," and the peg went in.

Ilya looked across the aisle.

Shane had not looked up from the Seaway. His glasses were on and his face was turned to the page. But he had not turned the page, and he did not turn it again for the rest of the way to Montreal, past the lights of Vaudreuil and the long bridge onto the island. He just held the book open on his knees, very still, as if somebody had told him not to move.

Montreal had hated Ilya for twelve years and he had loved every minute.

He had loved being booed in this city. He had been booed in thirty buildings and none of them did it like Montreal, which booed in two languages, from the gut, with a sort of joy, like a choir. He had loved the man in the red seats behind the visitors' bench who had shouted the same thing at him in French for most of a decade, and whom he had eventually paid a teammate to translate (it was about his teeth, and then, from 2016, oddly, about his hair). He had loved coming out of the building into the cold at eleven o'clock with the crowd going home around him, recognising him, shouting, and getting into a cab, and going three blocks, and getting out, and walking into a lobby, and going up in an elevator, and Shane opening the door.

Now he stood at the window of the hotel room on the nineteenth floor and looked down at the city, and couldn't love any of it, because they hated somebody else now.

Shane was in the shower. Ilya could hear it. He took his coat off the chair and put it on again and went down the hall.

Kostiuk's room was the same as everyone's room, except that he'd already taken the cushions off the armchair and stacked them on the floor, for reasons nobody had ever learned, and the coffee mug with the seeds was on the desk. He travelled with the mug. He had wrapped it in a towel in his carry-on, and on one flight out of Calgary he'd held it on his knee for the whole of the landing.

"Rozanov," he said, at the door, in his socks.

"Tomorrow," Ilya said. "Put us together."

Kostiuk looked at him for a while, then stood aside, and Ilya came in, and didn't sit down, because the armchair had no cushions.

"Why?"

"Everyone in that building knows how he plays," Ilya said. He had practised this one, and this time he used it. "Twelve years. Their goalie has stopped him in practice every morning since 2014. Their coach drew up half their systems around him. Their defence knows which way he turns when he's tired and which way when he's scared. They know him better than anyone in the league. Better than me, maybe, on the ice." He stopped. "They don't know how we play."

"Nobody knows how you play," said Kostiuk. "Including you two."

"Yes," said Ilya. "That's the point."

Kostiuk took a seed out of the mug and looked at it, as if it might have an opinion.

"Third period," he said, at last. "If it's close. And if it isn't close, you never asked me this, and I'm going to tell people you came in here to complain about the cushions."

At half past ten he went for a walk, because Shane had come out of the shower and got into bed and said, very politely, goodnight, and turned off his lamp, and Ilya had found that he could not lie down next to that.

The building was six blocks away. He didn't decide to go there. His feet went, the way they'd gone there for twelve years, and the security man at the loading dock, an enormous Haitian guy called Réginald who'd been on that door since Ilya was a rookie, looked at him and at his coat and at the time, and said, "Rozanov. You're early," and let him in.

The visitors' room was at the end of a concrete corridor that smelled of rubber matting and the cold, damp, chemical smell of a rink at night. The lights were half on. The stalls were set up already, all down both walls: the jerseys hung, the names over them, the gloves laid out on the shelves in pairs, the way Mick laid them out in every room in every city, as if somebody important were coming. Ilya found his own stall. 81. ROZANOV. And four down, on the same wall, 24. HOLLANDER, in a building where that name had been over a different stall, in a different room, for twelve years.

He heard the grinder before he found it. Down the hall, past the visitors' room, in a narrow back room that belonged to the Metros. Mick was at the machine with his apron on and his glasses pushed up on his head, running a blade, and next to him on a stool, holding two Tim Hortons cups and talking, was a small old man in a Metros polo and a cardigan.

"There he is," said Mick. "Couldn't sleep, hey?"

The old man turned round.

He was well past sixty, bald, with very bushy white eyebrows and a face like a walnut, and Ilya knew him at once, because Ilya had been glared at by that face from the far end of this building for twelve years. Gilles Thibodeau. The Metros' equipment manager since before either of them had been born, nearly. He had a pair of reading glasses on a cord, like Galina's, and the tips of his fingers were grey, all ten, worn grey with steel dust.

"Rozanov," said Gilles. "You broke the glass on my bench door in 2013. I had to explain to the league."

"It was already broken."

"It was not already broken. It was perfect." Gilles held out one of the coffees, not to Ilya, to Mick, who took it. "Bon. Sit, sit. Michel is telling me about his beagle."

"Sheila," said Mick.

"Sheila. She has a thing on her liver."

"They're watching it," said Ilya, and sat down on an upturned towel bin, and Mick looked at him with something close to respect.

They talked about Sheila. Then, because they were equipment managers and that was what equipment managers talked about when nobody was listening, about a goalie in Winnipeg who had his pads re-stitched every month and wouldn't say why, and a defenceman in Dallas who wanted his sticks heated with a hair dryer before every game, and a man, now retired, who had once asked for his skates to be sharpened by the light of a full moon.

"And you," Gilles said to Mick, "you have my little one now."

"Got your little one," Mick said. "Gave me a card."

Gilles stopped with the coffee halfway to his mouth.

"No."

"Laminated."

"No," said Gilles, delighted. "No. He still has the card?"

"Half-inch hollow," Mick said, "both blades, check the edges with the gauge every day, including off days. I've been doing it to the letter since September. He hates them." He shook his head. "I've done twenty-two years and I've never had a guy hate his skates so polite."

Gilles started to laugh.

It was a big laugh for such a small man, and it went on for a long time. He had to put the coffee down on the bench. He took his glasses off and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his cardigan, and said something in French that Ilya didn't catch, and then, in English, still laughing, "Half-inch. Half-inch! Ah, mon Dieu. He's two hundred pounds. On a half-inch, he digs. He ploughs like a tractor."

"So what did you—" Mick said.

"Five-eighths," said Gilles. "Since 2012. Every day. I never told him."

There was a short silence in the little room, except for the grinder winding down.

"For nine years?" Ilya said.

"Ten, nearly. In 2012 he comes to me, he says, Gilles, they don't feel right. I look at him skate. He skates on his heels. Not always. When he's worried. When something is wrong, the season, the contract, a girl—" Gilles waved a hand. "Something. He sits back on his heels, and on half-inch, on the heels, he catches, he stutters. On five-eighths he glides. So I give him five-eighths. And he says, Gilles, that's perfect, that's exactly half-inch, exactly like the card. And he makes me a new card. Every two years, a new card." Gilles put his glasses back on. "He was worried for ten years, that boy."

Ilya realised he had his hand over his mouth.

He took it away. He found he was laughing too, in a way that hurt, bent over on the towel bin with his elbows on his knees. Ten years. Ten years of cards. Ten years of Shane Hollander, who checked the oil in the dentist car every second Sunday and knew how many minutes the Queensway took and had a laminating machine, standing in this building in front of this old man, being lied to every morning, kindly, about his own feet. And being happy.

"Jaysus, hey," said Mick, softly, to the grinder.

Gilles went quiet after that. He sat on his stool with the coffee and looked at Ilya, a long, flat look, the look of a man deciding something about a skate.

"Ottawa," he said. "April."

Ilya stopped laughing.

"Game Six. I was in Ottawa. I do the room, after. Everybody is—" He made a gesture, a sort of collapse, with both hands. "Nobody looks at him. He takes off his skates and throws them in the bag and doesn't look. So I look." He got up off the stool, slowly, with a hand on the bench, and went out through a door at the back of the room, and Ilya heard a drawer open somewhere and close again.

When he came back he had something wrapped in a grey rag.

He unwrapped it on the bench, under the lamp, the way you'd unwrap a fish. It was a runner. A skate blade, just the steel, out of its holder: about a foot long, narrow, curved at the toe. There was a strip of white tape around the heel end, and on the tape, in black marker, 24 / AVRIL.

"Here," said Gilles, and put a grey fingertip on the inside edge, about a third of the way back from the toe.

Ilya leaned in. At first he didn't see it. Then he did: a nick in the edge, a little bite out of the steel, no bigger than a fingernail clipping. Small enough to miss. Big enough that there was nothing there to stand on.

"A rut, maybe," said Gilles. "Or a puck. Or the post, earlier, he hits the post in the second, I remember. He steps on that with all his weight, cutting left." He opened his hand, a small explosion. "Pouf. No edge."

"Did you tell anybody?"

"Who?" said Gilles. "Thirty-one years, nobody asks me anything except where is the bathroom." He folded his arms over the cardigan. "And he didn't ask me. And he is the one who should ask. So."

Ilya picked it up.

It was heavier than he expected, the way they always were. He held it under the lamp and turned it and looked at the bite out of the edge, and the thing he felt first was not what he'd have guessed.

He wanted to run with it. He wanted to walk into the room tomorrow at the morning skate with this over his head, like a sword in a film. He wanted to put it on the podium in front of the forty people with their phones out, and on the screen in the building, and on Harris's account, and on the chalkboard on Saint-Denis, over the stick man with his freckles drawn on. He wanted to make every one of those people look at it. He wanted it so badly that his hand shook, a little, holding it, and he saw Mick notice and look away.

And then the second thing came, slower, behind the first, the way the second wave comes in at the cottage after a boat goes by.

He'd needed it. That was the thing. He had lain awake for nine nights next to his husband and had needed a piece of steel in a drawer in Montreal to know what he should have known in the garage. In the garage, in April, in 2010, in every room they'd ever been in.

He put it down on the rag.

"It's his," he said.

"He won't ask for it," said Gilles.

"No."

"So." Gilles wrapped it up again, carefully, the corners of the rag folded in, and put it into Ilya's hands, and kept his own hands over Ilya's for a second, grey fingertips and all. "You keep it for him. Until he asks. I'm retiring in June. I'm not keeping it in my drawer anymore. It makes me sad every time I look for an Allen key."

At the door of the little room Ilya turned round.

"Mick," he said. "Tomorrow. Five-eighths."

Mick looked at him over his glasses for a long moment, the way he had looked at Shane over the skate.

"Don't tell him," said Ilya.

"Wasn't going to tell him, hey," said Mick. "He'd make a new card."

Shane was awake.

Ilya knew before he'd got the door closed, from the line of light under the bathroom door and the shape of him in the bed, sitting up against the headboard with the lamp off and his knees drawn up. He didn't say anything when Ilya came in. He didn't ask where he'd been.

Ilya took his coat off and hung it on the chair. The rag was in the inside pocket. He could feel it pull the coat down on one side, and he left it there.

He sat on the edge of the bed, on Shane's side, in the dark.

"Galina says," he said, and stopped, and started again. "Galina says I should say what I'm afraid of. Out loud. She says it's very healthy. In English it sounds like a card from the pharmacy, so I'm going to say it in Russian first. It's practice. You don't have to understand."

"Okay," said Shane, from the dark.

So he said it in Russian. He said all of it, and it took a while, and his voice did things he didn't let it do in English, and Shane sat very still and listened to every word without understanding any of them, the way he had listened once on the phone from Moscow, the night after Ilya's father was buried.

When it was done Ilya breathed out, and rubbed his face with both hands.

"Okay," he said. "In English. Short version."

"Okay."

"I'm afraid I'm only good against you." He made himself keep going. "That on your side I'm just a guy. A nice guy with a good wrist shot. Lindgren. And in April I scored the best goal of my whole life, and I was afraid you gave it to me. Because if you gave it to me, it isn't mine, and then I don't know what is." He laughed a little, at himself, in the dark. "This is a very stupid thing to be afraid of. I know. I'm a stupid man. You married me in a backyard."

Shane didn't say anything.

"And I don't need you to answer," Ilya said. "That's the other thing. That's the main thing. I'm sorry I asked you. I didn't need to ask."

It was very quiet in the room. Somewhere down on the street a snowplough went by, scraping, with its orange light going round on the ceiling, and then it was gone.

"I lost an edge," Shane said.

He said it to his knees. Plainly, like a man telling you the time.

"Left skate, inside edge. I cut left to take the middle, and it went, and I knew. I knew before my shoulder hit." He was quiet for a second. "I've never said that to anyone."

"Why not?"

"Because it's an excuse."

"It's not an excuse," said Ilya. "It's a skate."

"Dad says an excuse is an excuse even when it's—"

"Your father," Ilya said, "is the nicest man in Ontario, and I'm going to drive him up to the cottage and put him in the lake."

Shane made a sound. It took Ilya a second to understand that it was a laugh, a wet, cracked one, and then Shane's hand came out of the dark and found his wrist and held it, hard, the way you hold a rope.

"You'd have scored it anyway," Shane said. "It was a good goal."

"No. You'd have taken away the middle. You always take away the middle."

"Yes."

"So it's half yours."

"It's your goal."

"Half," said Ilya.

They sat there. Shane's thumb was moving on the inside of his wrist, back and forth, over the place where you'd find a pulse, as if he were checking.

"Also," Ilya said. "I should have known in the garage."

"Known what?"

"You can't even lie with your shoulders, Hollander." He turned his hand over under Shane's and held on. "How are you going to lie with your whole body?"

Shane laughed properly then. He laughed with his forehead down on his knees, and then he lifted it, and Ilya could see his face in the little light from the bathroom door, wet and tired and his, and Shane leaned across and kissed him, and the bathroom light went on shining under its door, and neither of them got up to turn it off, and that was the end of the talking for a while.

Later, Shane slept.

Ilya didn't, not for a long time. He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling of the hotel room, which had no smoke detector he could see and no green light, and nothing to count. The coat hung on the chair, pulled down on one side by the weight in the pocket. The only piece of evidence in the city of Montreal, he thought, and nobody needed it.

"Coach," Shane said, into the pillow, much later, from very nearly asleep. "He said yes?"

Ilya had told him, somewhere in between. He didn't remember when.

"Third period," he said. "If it's close."

"It'll be close," said Shane, and he said it so certainly, half asleep, the way he said the drive was twenty-four minutes, that Ilya lay there in the dark and believed him.