Chapter 1: The Card
Mick Gorman held the card by its corner, the way you'd hold something the dog brought in.
"Laminated," he said.
"So it doesn't get wet." Shane had thought that was obvious. It was an equipment room. Everything in it was wet or about to be: the towel bins, the floor drain gurgling under the sharpening machine, a rack of gloves drying with their fingers spread like they were giving up.
"Half-inch hollow," Mick read. "Both blades. Check the edges with the gauge every day, including off days." He turned it over. The back was blank. Shane had thought about putting something on the back and decided against it, and was now glad. "You do this in Montreal?"
"Gilles had one. Same card. I made him a new one every couple of seasons, when it got scratched."
"Did ya." Mick was sixty or so, with a moustache that had been grey a long time and the forearms of a man who had carried hockey bags up bus steps for twenty-two years, which he had. He was from somewhere up the Valley, Eganville or Cobden, Shane had been told twice and still couldn't say which, and he ended sentences with a small upward "hey" that wasn't a question. "Well. I'll put it up, hey."
He pinned it to the corkboard over the grinder, next to a photo of a beagle in a Centaurs bandana and the sign-up sheet for the Christmas party. The pushpin went straight through the laminate, through the bottom corner of the half.
"That's the—" Shane started.
"Sheila," Mick said, nodding at the beagle. "She's got a thing on her liver. They're watching it."
"I'm sorry."
"She doesn't know. Eats like a horse." Mick picked Shane's left skate off the bench, turned it blade-up under the lamp and ran his thumbnail down the steel, which Shane had watched Gilles do maybe four thousand times and which still made the back of his neck go tight. "What's wrong with them?"
"Nothing's wrong with them."
"You brought me a card."
"I bring everyone a card." It came out more defensive than he wanted. He tried again. "They're fine. They just don't feel like mine."
Mick looked at him over the skate. He had very pale eyes and no hurry in them.
"Since when?"
Since April, Shane didn't say. Since a minute and a half from the end of the last game of the series, when he'd cut hard to his left to take away the middle and the inside edge of his left skate had let go of the ice like it had changed its mind about him, and the ice had come up, and Ilya had gone past with the puck close enough that Shane could have grabbed his ankle, and scored.
He'd felt it go. He'd known exactly what happened before his shoulder hit the ice. He had never said so to anyone. Not to the trainers, not to Coach Theriault, not to the forty people in front of the podium or the guys who stopped looking at him in the room afterwards, not to Ilya. Because when Shane was nine and had come off the ice at the Nepean Sportsplex saying his laces had been too loose, his father had crouched down in the lobby, beside the hot chocolate machine that was always out of hot chocolate, and told him kindly that an excuse was still an excuse, bud, even when it was true.
"A while," he said.
"Hm," said Mick, and set the skate down, and didn't write anything.
Coach Kostiuk ran a morning skate the way some men run a hardware store: he knew where everything was and he did not want your help finding it. He was from Dauphin, Manitoba. He kept his sunflower seeds in a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST GRANDPA, and in the month Shane had known him he had said "we'll see" perhaps forty times, each time meaning something different.
"Rozanov, Hollander, Barrett," he said at the whiteboard, and wrote them on the top line. Then, because Shane was watching, he drew a small arrow from the H out to the left. "Hollander, you're on the wing."
Shane had played centre since he was six. He opened his mouth.
"We'll see," said Kostiuk, and spat a shell into his palm.
Ilya was beside him on the bench, chewing nicotine gum with the concentration of a man doing it instead of something else. He had his helmet on and the cage pushed up, and he looked, as he had looked for most of the month, completely delighted with the arrangement.
"Left wing," he said. "Very nice. Very supportive position. Like a wife."
"I'm not your wife."
"You are on my wing." Ilya pulled his gloves on. "Is the same."
On the first line rush Ilya won the draw back to the defence, Shane swung wide the way a winger is supposed to, took the pass at the blue line, cut inside, and had the puck taken off his stick by his own husband.
It was a beautiful lift. Shane had been on the wrong end of that exact lift maybe three hundred times since 2009: the stick coming from underneath, the hitch of the wrist, the puck just no longer his. Ilya was ten feet past him before either of them understood what had happened.
Someone on the boards laughed. Troy Barrett, it turned out, who said sorry and kept laughing.
"Sorry," Ilya called over his shoulder, not sounding it. "Muscle memory."
"We're on the same team."
"My muscles are very slow learners. Like you."
On the second rush Shane kept the puck on his far side, which is the correct thing to do against a backchecker and meant he was now protecting it from the man who was supposed to be getting open for it. Ilya, getting open, saw this and looked so personally insulted that the rookie, Mathis Cormier, had to skate off to the far corner and bend over with his hands on his knees.
Mathis was twenty, from Caraquet, New Brunswick, and had worn number 24 for exactly one preseason before Shane signed. On the day of the press release he had turned up at their front door with the jersey folded into a square inside a Sobeys bag, very red, and tried to hand it to Shane on the step, saying in two languages that it would be an honour. Shane had said no. Ilya had said, from the hall behind him, that the kid would be insulted by a no, and that the tradition was that you paid for a number: a watch, a car, a trip somewhere hot. So Shane had opened Mathis an account and put a sensible amount in a low-fee index fund that tracked the TSX.
Mathis told everyone. He had told the trainers, the bus driver and, during a preseason game in Toronto, a linesman. He seemed to think it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him, and Shane was fairly sure he also checked it every morning.
"Again," said Kostiuk, from the bench, through seeds.
They lost to Calgary 4–2.
It wasn't the worst game Shane had ever played. He had a list, if anyone wanted it, and this wasn't on it. But it was the first game since he was a teenager in which he spent most of his shifts thinking about where someone on his own team was, and the thinking made him slow, and being slow made him think harder.
Twice they were offside on the same rush because Shane, out of habit, went to the middle to support the puck, and Ilya, out of a different habit, went to the middle to have it. Early in the second they came down two-on-one, nobody back but a Calgary defenceman with his weight on the wrong foot and a goalie who'd been hung out to dry all week, and Ilya slid it across, and Shane, who had been certain Ilya would shoot because Ilya always shot, had already gone hard to the net for the rebound. The pass went through the space where he'd been a second before. Ilya, who had expected him to be there because Shane was always there, pulled up and stared at the empty ice as if it had let him down personally.
The puck went into the corner. Calgary went the other way and scored.
On the bench, Ilya leaned over and said, conversationally, "You were not there."
"You always shoot."
"I passed."
"I know you passed. I'm saying you always shoot."
"So it was a very nice surprise," Ilya said. "For the goalie. Also for you, apparently."
Shane looked at the clock over centre ice and drank half a bottle of water without tasting it. Two rows behind the glass, a man in a Centaurs jersey with ROZANOV on the back was holding up a sign that said MARRIED AND BURIED, which didn't mean anything, Shane thought. That was just two words that rhymed.
The reporters came into the room at the usual time and stood in the usual horseshoe, and Shane gave them what he'd been giving reporters since he was eighteen.
Yes, it was an adjustment. No, he didn't think it had anything to do with off the ice. They'd watch the tape and get better. It's a long season. Calgary's a good team. Nobody wins anything in October.
He knew exactly how boring it was. He had been boring on purpose for twelve years, professionally, the way some men are funny professionally, and had made a lot of money and three Cups out of it. Halfway round the horseshoe a young guy from a website at the back, lanyard and hopeful face, said, "Shane, December fourth. Have you thought about going back?"
"I think about the next game."
"Have you heard what the fans are saying about April?"
"I think about the next game," Shane said again, nicely, and the young guy wrote something down, and Shane could see him deciding it was a better quote than it was.
Across the room Ilya had his own horseshoe, bigger and louder and laughing. He was telling them that Shane was a slow learner but a very hard worker, like a good dog, and they loved it, and Shane loved him for it, distantly, the way you love someone who has stepped out into traffic to direct it.
The drive home was twenty-four minutes on the Queensway, twenty-six if the merge at Moodie was bad.
Ilya hated the car. He'd hated it in Montreal, where it lived under Shane's building, and he hated it more here, where it lived in his own garage beside the one sports car he'd kept from Boston, a low red thing that couldn't survive a speed bump, never mind an Ottawa February. He called Shane's car the dentist car. He had called it the dentist car for so long that Shane had started thinking of it that way himself, which was how most things went with Ilya.
"Your car smells like a library," Ilya said, from the passenger seat, knees up by the glove box, because he never put the seat back, out of what Shane believed was principle.
"It doesn't smell like anything."
"Yes. Like a library." He found the protein bar in the door pocket, the one Shane had put there for himself, read the label with great seriousness, and ate it in three bites. "Tonight I steal from you four times."
"Three. The fourth was a bad pass."
"It was a very good pass. For me." He brushed the crumbs off his coat onto the floor mat, which he knew Shane would vacuum, which was presumably why he did it. "Twelve years, Hollander. Every time I see you with the puck, my body says: there is a puck, it is near Hollander, this is wrong, fix it."
"So tell your body we're married."
"I tell it every day. It doesn't speak English." He let his head fall back against the headrest and shut his eyes, and in the orange lights going past, his face looked tired in a way he didn't let it look in the room. "Coach will move you."
"He just moved me."
"He'll move you again," Ilya said, eyes still closed. "That's what 'we'll see' means."
His mother had been in the house.
Shane knew it before he turned on the kitchen light, because the dish rack had been emptied and the tea towels had been folded in thirds instead of in half. Once the light was on he knew it for certain, because the fridge was full.
Yuna Hollander had cooked for her son on game days for most of his life, and moving him back to within fifteen minutes of her house had, Shane suspected, felt to her less like a career decision and more like a correction. The containers were stacked by day. Every lid had a strip of masking tape on it, and every strip had her handwriting, in the same blue Sharpie she'd used on his lunches in 1999.
SHANE / TUES / CHICKEN, RICE, NO SAUCE (I KNOW)
SHANE / WED / SALMON
ILYA / SPICY / NOT FOR SHANE
ILYA / ALSO SPICY
Ilya read over his shoulder and made a noise of pure joy. "Also spicy," he said. "She loves me."
"She loves everybody."
"She does not love everybody. She loves me also spicy." He took both of his and a fork and sat up on the counter, which Shane had asked him not to do in both their previous kitchens and which, in this kitchen, Ilya's kitchen first, Shane hadn't worked out whether he had the standing to ask about. Ilya ate it cold. He always ate cold after a loss, as though heating something up would be admitting he cared.
The schedule was on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a loon. The whole season on one sheet, October to April, in a font so small Shane had needed his reading glasses the first time he checked it. He didn't need them now. Someone had taken a red pen to one Saturday in December and gone round it twice.
SAT DEC 4 @ MTL
"She did that," Ilya said, mouth full. "Not me. I want this on the record."
"I didn't think it was you."
"Your mother circles like a person who is threatening someone."
Shane looked at the red circle, and at the second red circle on top of it. He thought about the building in Montreal, which he knew the way you know the house you grew up in: which stairwell was quicker, which tunnel the Zamboni came out of, the panel behind the Metros' bench where the glass was older and you could hear what people in the first row were saying about you. He had sat on that bench for twelve years. He had never once sat on the other one, thirty feet away, and looked at the building from there.
His phone buzzed on the counter.
Hayden. A photo first, no words. A chalkboard on an easel outside a bar, the kind on Saint-Denis with a terrace in summer and heat lamps in October. Someone had a good hand with chalk. SPÉCIAL DU MOIS, it said, and under that, in pink, LE HOLLANDER, and under that a little stick man in a Metros jersey falling over with his skates in the air, and the line: On trébuche, on boit.
You trip, you drink.
Then the messages.
Hayden: they named a shooter after you
Hayden: its blue. its so bad. JJ had 3
Hayden: jackie says hi and that shes making the lasagna on the 4th whether u come or not so u better come
Shane read them twice. He zoomed in on the stick man. Somebody had taken the trouble to give it little dots of freckles across the nose.
"What," Ilya said.
"Nothing. Hayden." He turned the phone face down. "Jackie's making lasagna."
Ilya looked at the phone, face down on the granite, and then at Shane, and Shane watched him decide not to ask. It was a very small decision. It took about as long as a faceoff. Shane had spent eleven years learning to read that face from two hundred feet away, through a cage, in buildings full of people screaming, and he could read it perfectly well. The trouble was that it never told him what to say back.
"Good," Ilya said. "I love lasagna. I'm going to bed."
At ten past one, Shane gave up.
He was quiet about it. He was good at quiet; he had spent most of his twenties leaving hotel rooms at three in the morning. Ilya was asleep on his front with one arm off the side of the bed and his face in Shane's pillow, which was where he always ended up, as though his own were a decoy. Shane found sweatpants and the old Metros hoodie with the cuffs worn through at the thumbs, and went down through the dark kitchen, past the circled Saturday, into the garage.
It was cold. Not outside cold. Garage cold: concrete, gasoline, the plastic smell of the recycling bins. He didn't turn on the overhead light. The little bulb in the door opener was enough, and he knew where everything was because he had put it there. The red car sulking on one side. The dentist car on the other. On the wall between them the hooks for Ilya's summer things, a croquet set nobody had ever used, and a bin of string lights from the wedding that neither of them had managed to throw out.
He took the bucket of pucks off the shelf and his old stick off the rack, the one with the blade too chewed up for games, and tipped forty pucks onto the floor in front of the garage door.
Then he stood there for a while.
He had a good wrist shot. Everyone agreed. A quick release and a heavy one, and he could pick a corner from the top of the circle with his eyes on the goalie's face instead of the net. A very good forehand, a very good slapper, he could tip anything. A guy on a sports channel had once said on air that Shane had the best shot of anyone born in 1991, as though that were a category.
His backhand was weak.
Everyone in the league knew. Goalies knew; they cheated to his forehand when he came in alone, and he'd built most of a career on beating them anyway. Ilya knew best. He'd said so that first summer at the cottage, lying on the dock with his feet in the lake, in the same breath as the freckles and the slow feet, in a voice that made it sound like a love poem. He said it now in the room, to reporters, as a joke, as a way of saying I know this man. Weak backhand, Hollander. Fix it.
Shane pulled the first puck onto his backhand, felt the blade cup it, and shot it at the door.
It hit low and left with a flat, ugly bang, and the door took it like an insult and kept it: a round dent at shin height in the white aluminum. The noise went up through the house. He waited. Nothing.
He shot the second one. Lower.
By the tenth he had stopped waiting to see if the sound woke anybody and started listening to it instead, because the sound told him things. A puck that came off the blade wobbling landed with a slap. A puck that came off clean hit with something closer to a knock, a short hard note, and the door rang behind it for a second, a bell that didn't want to be one.
He picked a spot. The rusty bolt-head at the top left of the second panel, about where a goalie's blocker would be if the goalie were cheating. He shot at the bolt-head until his forearms burned and the pucks were spread over the concrete like spilled change, and he collected them, and tipped them out, and did it again.
The fortieth puck of the third bucket rang.
He stood looking at the new dent, the closest one yet to the bolt, and breathed out into the cold and watched it go white in the little light.
Above him, where the bedroom was, a floorboard creaked once. The loose one on Ilya's side, by the window.
Shane stood very still with the stick in his hands. It didn't creak again.