Chapter 3: Second Line
"So the librarian's dead," Dougie Braun said, "but she's not the librarian. That's the thing. The real librarian's been in Portugal the whole time."
"Who's the dead one?" Shane said.
"That's what Galloway wants to know."
Dougie was thirty-six, from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, on the last year of a contract everybody including Dougie knew was the last one. He had played for seven teams and fought most of the men in the league at least once and been, according to everyone who'd ever shared a room with him, the nicest person on every one of those teams. On the road he read the Inspector Galloway books, a series about a detective in a Yorkshire market town who solved murders between hip operations. There were thirty-one of them. Dougie was on his third time through, and he told you the plot whether you asked or not, in instalments, on the bench, between shifts.
"Ben là," said Mathis, on Shane's other side, "it's the sister. It's always the sister."
"It's not always the sister."
"In those books it's always the sister, mon oncle."
"Book nine," said Dougie, with dignity, "it was the vicar."
On the ice the other line iced the puck, and the whistle went, and Kostiuk said, "Hollander," behind them, and the three of them went over the boards together.
That was the first thing Shane noticed, his first week on the second line: how easy it was to go over the boards. He had not had to think about it in twelve years and he'd had to think about it for a month, and now, all at once, he didn't. The draw was his. He took it. He won it back to the defenceman, clean, and swung up the middle where a centre goes, and the puck came back to him at the red line, and he could see the whole ice in front of him the way he always had: Dougie lumbering down the right wall like a delivery truck, Mathis cutting across the blue line with his stick on the ice, the Columbus defence a half-step too flat.
"Mathis," he said, and Mathis went where Shane had already put the puck.
It was the kid's first goal in the league. Top shelf, short side, off the post and in, a sound like somebody dropping a pan, and Mathis turned toward the glass and fell down on his knees and slid, the full ridiculous slide, twenty feet, into the corner, with his arms open.
Dougie got to him first and picked him up off the ice by the back of the jersey like a cat.
Shane fished the puck out of the net himself. You did that, for a first one. You made sure it didn't end up in the crowd or in a linesman's pocket. He skated it to the bench and handed it over the boards to Mick, who took it in both hands like an egg and wrote on a strip of white tape with a marker from his apron pocket, and Shane leaned over the boards to read it.
1ST GOAL / NOV 2 / FROM 24
"That's not how you do it," Shane said. "You put who scored it."
"Kid knows who scored it," said Mick, and stuck the tape on. "Go play, hey."
They won five in a row.
Columbus, then Nashville and Detroit at home, then Raleigh, then Philadelphia on a Saturday afternoon, in a building that booed Ilya every time he touched the puck, out of what seemed to be tradition. The second line had nine points in five games. Mathis had three goals and had learned to celebrate the next two standing up, mostly. Dougie had four assists and a fight, which he apologised for afterwards to the man he had fought.
Shane had seven points. It was the best stretch of hockey he'd played since the spring. He knew why, and he did not like to think about why, and he thought about it anyway, at night, on the bus, in the shower, in the half-minute before he fell asleep.
He was a centre again. That was all. Nobody in his way.
Ilya's line had two points in the five games, and one of them was an empty-netter.
Ilya joked about it. Ilya joked about it in the room and on the bus and to the horseshoe of reporters, who wrote it down: that his husband had dumped him for a twenty-year-old and a librarian, that he was going to file a complaint with the league, that he didn't need goals, he had a beautiful face. The reporters loved it. Ilya was good in front of a horseshoe. He was good the way a man is good at a party he doesn't want to be at.
On the bus out of Raleigh, at midnight, Mathis read a podcast transcript aloud from his phone, in an outraged voice, because a podcast had been rude about Ilya, and Mathis liked Ilya and liked being outraged.
"'Five straight since the split,'" he read. "'Hollander's got seven, his line's got nine. Rozanov's line's dead in the water. I'm not saying it, Benny, I'm just saying. Turns out the problem in Ottawa was the marriage.'" He looked up. "They can't say that. Can they say that?"
"Give me the phone," said Dougie.
"I'm just saying, it's—"
"Give me the phone, Mathis."
Mathis gave him the phone. Dougie put it in the inside pocket of his blazer and went back to book nineteen, and the bus went quiet in the way a bus goes quiet when everybody on it is pretending to be asleep.
Shane looked back. Two rows behind him, on the aisle, Ilya had his headphones on and his eyes closed and his hood up, and his face in the blue light from the emergency strip was completely still. Shane couldn't tell if he'd heard. He could usually tell. He could tell from the far end of a rink whether Ilya was going to go forehand or backhand by the angle of his left shoulder. He watched him the whole way to the airport and couldn't tell if he was asleep.
"Two sentences," Farah said. "That's all I'm asking."
Farah Jalali had been his agent since he was nineteen and had represented, in that time, three MVPs, two marriages, a divorce that wasn't his and one man who had tried to get a goat into a hotel in Edmonton. Not Shane. Shane was, she told him often, the easiest client she had ever had, which was how she said she was worried about him.
"No," he said.
He was sitting on the end of the hotel bed in Philadelphia with his shoes still on, looking at the painting over the desk, which was of a different, nicer hotel.
"You haven't even heard them."
"I don't need to hear them."
"'In April, I lost my footing. I've never thrown a game in my life and I never will.'" She said it in the voice she used for statements, flat, like a weather forecast. "That's it. We put it out on the Thursday before. Nobody can ask you about it in Montreal because you've already answered it. You walk into that building on Saturday with it handled."
"Then it's an excuse."
"It isn't an excuse if it's what happened."
"That's exactly when it is," said Shane, before he could stop himself, and heard it come out of him in his father's voice, in the lobby of the Nepean Sportsplex, beside the hot chocolate machine.
There was a pause on the line. He could hear her office. Someone else's phone ringing, a door, the lake out the window, which he'd seen once: a strip of grey Toronto water.
"Your father," Farah said, "is a lovely man, and one day I'm going to have him killed."
"He didn't say that about this."
"He didn't have to. I've met him." She sighed. "The Metros want to do a tribute video, first TV timeout. You stand up, you raise your stick, you sit down. You do not cry on the broadcast."
"I'm not going to cry."
"You cried at your own wedding."
"Everybody cried at my wedding."
"Ilya read a poem in Russian and then translated it himself, and the translation was mostly about your backside. It was a set-up, Shane. That's what poems are for." Her voice went softer. It didn't happen often enough that he'd learned what to do with it. "Honey. You don't have to say it to the public. But somebody has to hear you say it. That's all I'm going to say."
"You said two sentences."
"I'm your agent. I lie about numbers," Farah said, and hung up.
His mother was regrouting the kitchen backsplash.
She was doing it herself, on the Tuesday afternoon, in an old shirt of his father's with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. There was an iPad propped against the toaster playing a video of a man in Kansas who regrouted backsplashes. Every so often she paused him and looked at what he'd done and then at what she'd done and made a small sound of disagreement, and pressed play.
"You don't come on Tuesdays," she said, without turning round.
"I came on a Tuesday."
"I know. That's why I said it." She ran the rubber float across the tile at an angle. "Your father's curling. There's soup."
He got the soup out of the fridge himself. It was in a container with tape on it that said SHANE / TUES, and he stood there with it in his hand and felt, for a second, about eleven years old.
"Mom," he said. "How do you know what someone means when they say 'good'?"
She stopped the float.
She looked at him over her shoulder, and he saw her take in the whole of him at once, the way she had taken in his report cards: top to bottom, the comment section first. Yuna Hollander had read every contract Shane had ever signed, twice, before his agent saw it. She read people the same way, looking for the clause that didn't add up.
"Your father," she said, "says 'fine' when the furnace is out."
"I know."
"He says 'fine' and he goes down to the basement and he doesn't come up for two hours. That's how I know the furnace is out." She turned back to the tile. "Who said good?"
"Ilya."
"About what?"
"Coach split us up. Ilya told me. And I said good." He put the soup in the microwave and stood looking at it go round. "Because it was. I'm playing well. He's—his line's not. And he said good back."
His mother wiped the float on a rag. She did it thoroughly, both sides.
"Shane," she said. "What's the question he isn't asking you?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do."
"How would I know what—"
"Because it's the one you're hoping he won't." She said it lightly, as if it were about grout. "That's usually how you find it. It's the one you're standing in front of."
The microwave beeped. He didn't move.
It came to him the way a puck comes to you sometimes, out of a scramble, when you weren't looking for it and it's just there on your stick: the night in their kitchen, the phone face down on the granite, the shooter with his freckles drawn on. Ilya looking at the phone and deciding not to ask. Ilya counting in the dark. Ilya at the top of the stairs. He'd heard the stair, that second time; he hadn't turned round.
"He thinks I let him score," Shane said.
His mother didn't say anything.
"In April. He thinks I—" He couldn't finish it. It wasn't a sentence that finished. "He's my husband."
"I didn't say that's what he thinks," said Yuna. "I don't know what he thinks. You do." She tapped the float on the edge of the grout bucket. "Did you?"
He looked at her, appalled.
"No," she said, before he could speak. "I know you didn't. I watched it once, at full speed, with your father, on the couch. You fell. Your father said, 'Oh, he lost an edge,' and went to bed." She went back to the wall. "That's how many times a mother needs to watch something. Once. You take the boxes in the hall when you go. I'm not storing your childhood anymore. I'm making a craft room."
The boxes were in the garage now, stacked by the shelf with the pucks. Shane hadn't opened them. He knew what was in them. Report cards, trophies from tournaments in Kanata and Barrie and Sault Ste. Marie, a Lego set he'd never finished because the instructions had a misprint, and his Peewee goalie equipment, from the one season he had played goal, at eight, and hated every minute.
At twenty past twelve he was on his second bucket when the kitchen door opened behind him.
He knew it was Ilya before he turned. He knew by the way the floor sounded under bare feet and by the cold that came in with him, because Ilya never shut a door properly in his life. He turned round anyway, with the stick in his hands and something on his face he could feel himself putting there, very fast. It's nothing. Go back to bed.
Ilya was wearing his bathrobe, the heavy navy one with the hotel's name on the pocket that he'd stolen from a hotel in Las Vegas in 2014 and refused to admit he'd stolen. He had Shane's old goalie stick in one hand. On his head, perched on top of his curls like a very small hat, was Shane's goalie mask from Peewee, white, the paint on the chin worn off, with a sticker of a cartoon beaver on the side.
"Okay," Ilya said. "I'm in net."
"That doesn't fit you."
"It fits me as a hat." He walked past Shane to the garage door, turned round, and crouched in front of it in his bathrobe with the stick across his knees, and pulled the mask down over his face. It came about as far as his eyebrows. "Shoot."
"You're going to get hurt."
"Hollander. I've been shot at by you for twelve years. Shoot."
Shane shot. Forehand, because his body did it before he decided, and Ilya kicked it out with one bare foot and said, "Ow, fuck," and then, "See?"
"See what?"
"Your shoulders." Ilya stood up and pushed the mask up onto his forehead. "Every goalie in this league knows you. You come in alone, your shoulders are already square to the forehand. The goalie sees it, he says thank you very much, he goes there, and you beat him anyway because you're very fast and very good. Every time. That's twelve years. You never lie, sweetheart." He said it fondly, as if it were a great flaw in a horse. "That's your whole problem. Your shoulders tell the truth."
"So what do I—"
"Make them lie."
He showed him. It was a small thing. Shoulders open to the forehand, everything in the top half saying forehand: the head, the chest, the hands. And the blade, at the very last moment, coming back across underneath, cupping it, going the other way. "Like this. No. You're looking where you're going. Don't look where you're going."
"I have to look where I'm going."
"You've never had to look where you're going in your life. Look at me. Look at the goalie. Lie to him with your whole body and then do something else." Ilya crouched again and pulled the mask down. "Again."
Shane did it again.
It took a long time. It took most of the bucket, and the bucket after that. Ilya stopped some of them and let some go, and the ones he let go hit the door behind him and rang, and every time one rang he said "good," in English or "molodets" in Russian, or swore in both when one hit him on the ankle. The garage was very cold. The little bulb in the opener clicked off on its timer twice and Shane had to go and press the button to bring it back. At some point he started laughing and couldn't stop, at the bathrobe and the beaver and Ilya's bare white feet on the concrete, and Ilya pushed the mask up and looked at him laughing with an expression Shane didn't see often, and didn't have a name for, and liked.
Near the end of the third bucket, Shane came in from the side of the garage the way he would come in on a breakaway, shoulders square, everything saying forehand, and Ilya went down to his left, committed, the whole of his body going, and Shane pulled it back across underneath and put it into the top corner of the door where the bolt was, and the door rang like a bell that had finally decided to be one.
Ilya, flat on the concrete, looked up at the dent.
"Okay," he said, after a second. "That one. That one I believed."
Shane went over and held out his hand, and Ilya took it, and Shane pulled him up, and they stood there for a moment, close, in the cold, with their breath going up white between them. Ilya had concrete dust on the back of the bathrobe and the mask pushed up on his head, and he smelled of cold air and toothpaste and the nicotine gum, and Shane put his free hand flat on his chest, over the robe, over the bear, and felt his heart going under it, fast, from the work.
"Thank you," Shane said.
Ilya didn't say anything for a moment. He was looking at Shane's face the way Shane had watched him on the bus.
"In April," Ilya said.
Shane waited.
"When you fell." Ilya's voice was very quiet, and very careful, and he was speaking English the way he did when he was choosing every word off a shelf. "Did you fall?"
It was only three words. Shane heard all the rest of them anyway.
He took his hand away. He didn't mean to. It came away from Ilya's chest by itself, and he looked at it, and then at Ilya.
"You think I gave it to you," he said.
"I think—"
"You think I'd lie on the ice."
"I think," said Ilya, "that you love me very much. And I think you are the most stubborn man I have ever met. And I don't know which one is bigger." He took a breath. "I've watched it two hundred times, Shane. I don't know. I can't see it. I look and I look and I can't—"
Shane turned away from him.
There were pucks all over the garage floor, spread out in front of the door, under the cars, one up against the wheel of the dentist car and one, somehow, in the recycling. He went and picked them up. He did it slowly. He picked up every single one and put it in the bucket, one at a time, and he could feel Ilya standing behind him the whole while, in the bathrobe, not moving, and he didn't turn round.
The bulb in the opener clicked off again, on its timer.
Neither of them went to press the button.
He didn't answer. Answering would have meant there was a question.