Chapter 2: In Russian
"Two hundred and twelve," Ilya said.
Galina Molchalina did not write it down. She never wrote anything down while he was in the room, which he had found sinister in November and now found restful, the way he found most things about her restful once he had stopped trying to make her laugh.
"Pucks," she said.
"Pucks. Tuesday. Wednesday he was tired, only ninety. Last night two hundred and twelve."
"And you count them."
"I'm lying there. What else am I going to do? Pray?"
They spoke Russian in this room. That had been the point of her, at the beginning: a woman in Ottawa with a degree from Saint Petersburg and an office above a pho restaurant on Somerset Street, where on Thursdays the stairwell smelled of star anise and the whole building hummed with the extractor fan. In Russian, Ilya could say things at the speed he thought them. He had not understood, until he sat in this chair, how much of his life in English he had spent translating himself down.
Galina was somewhere past sixty, small, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a bowl of Mishka candies on the table between them, the ones in the blue wrappers with the bears on an ice floe. She had not offered him one in eleven months. He had not asked. It was, he suspected, a test, and he was not going to fail it over a chocolate bear.
"You could go down," she said.
"I could."
"Why don't you?"
"Because he would stop."
She waited. That was her other trick. She could wait longer than anyone he had ever met, longer than referees, longer than customs officers, longer than his father, who had once made him stand in the hallway for an hour because Ilya had laughed at the television during the news.
"I have a joke for this," Ilya said.
"I'm sure."
"It's a good joke."
"One joke," she said, "and then the answer."
That was the rule. He had agreed to it in January, mostly to see if she would hold to it, and she always did. He considered the joke, which was about Canadians and garages, and decided it wasn't good enough to spend.
"He goes down there," Ilya said, "because there is something wrong and he doesn't want to tell me what. If I go down, he will stop and say, it's nothing, go back to sleep. He will be very nice about it. And then he will go and do it at the rink instead, where I can't count."
"So you let him have the garage."
"I let him have the garage."
"And you lie upstairs counting."
"Two hundred and twelve," he agreed, and looked at the bears on the wrappers, who were having a better time than him.
"Tell me about the room," Galina said, later.
So he told her about the room.
After Calgary, when they had lost 4–2 and played like two men carrying the same couch through different doors, Shane had stood up in the dressing room. He hadn't meant to. Ilya had watched it happen. Shane had stood up to get his shin pads off, the way he'd stood up after games in Montreal for six years with the C on his chest, and when he straightened, everyone was looking at him, because that is what a room does when a man like that stands. So Shane said what he must have said a hundred times in the other room.
"Okay. We were slow on the walls tonight. That's on the forwards, that's on me. We clean it up Thursday."
And the young guys nodded. Ilya had seen it, all down the bench, the way you'd see wind go over a field. Mathis nodded. Ferris nodded, and Ferris was a defenceman and had nothing to do with the walls. Even Troy, who knew better, sort of nodded, out of politeness.
Then they all looked at Ilya.
Ilya had been going to say what he always said after a loss, which was, "Okay, boys, shit game, beer." It was a good speech. It had worked in Boston for years, and it had worked here last season, when the team was bad and needed to be told that a bad game was only a bad game. But now it was coming after Shane's speech, and after Shane's speech it sounded like a man with no plan.
So he said, "What he said," and laughed, and everyone laughed, and they took their gear off.
"And then?" said Galina.
"And then it is every day." He held up a hand and counted on it. "He fixes the penalty kill. He draws it on paper at the kitchen table, and he laminates it, and he puts it in the young guys' stalls. Laminates, Galina. He has his own machine. It came with him from Montreal, in a box marked FRAGILE, with the trophies."
He folded down a second finger.
"He moves the stretching. He thinks we stretch too late before the game. He's right. Nobody asks him. Now we stretch earlier."
A third finger.
"Tuesday, at practice, he tells Ferris where to stand on the kill, and Ferris says, yes, Cap." Ilya let that sit for a second. "Not to me. To him. By accident. Ferris went red like a stop sign. Everyone heard. Shane didn't even notice, I think. He just said good and skated away."
"And what did you do?"
"I laughed. Very loud. Everybody laughed. It's my job."
"Is it?"
He looked at her. She looked back over the beaded chain.
"You know how many times," he said, "I have been told I got the letter because of the marketing? Because I am Rozanov, I am loud, I sell jerseys? I've heard it since last year. On the radio. In the papers. My own team's radio. I'm captain of a team that was terrible, and then it was a little less terrible, and nobody thinks that's me. And now the best captain in the league lives in my house and eats my food and fixes my penalty kill, and he's very nice about it, and he doesn't even want the letter. He would be horrified if you gave him the letter. He just can't help it. He is like a dog that herds sheep. Put him in a room with sheep."
"Are you the sheep?"
"Fuck off," Ilya said, in English, and she smiled, which she did not do often.
"And the other thing," Galina said, when there were ten minutes left.
He had known she would. He had told her about the other thing in September, the week before camp, on a hot day with the window open and the pho fan going. He had told her once and then refused to talk about it again for two months, and she had let him, the way you let a horse stand at the edge of the water.
"I watched it again," he said.
"How many times?"
"I don't count that one."
That was a lie, and she knew it. He had it saved on his phone in a folder with nothing else in it. Forty-one seconds of broadcast footage from the last game of the series in April: the faceoff in the Ottawa end, the puck going around the boards, Ilya picking it off the half-wall. Shane coming across to take away the middle, because Shane always took away the middle. And Shane's left foot going out from under him. Shane on the ice. Ilya past him and in alone, and the goalie going down early, and the backhand-forehand, and the net moving, and the building coming apart.
He had watched it frame by frame. He could have told you the frame where Shane's foot went. He did not know what he was looking for in it. Something in the knee. A decision. Something that looked like a man choosing.
"You understand," he said, "it is the best goal of my life."
"I know."
"Game Six. Eliminate Montreal. In front of my building. I go around him and I score. I have been trying to beat that man since I was seventeen years old." He stopped. "And I don't know if I did."
"Have you asked him?"
"How?"
"In words," said Galina. "That's usually how."
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the chair arm, where the vinyl was cracked and somebody had mended it with clear tape.
"In English," he said, "it's a question. Did you fall, or did you let me. In Russian, it's an accusation. I only have him in English." He laughed, not very well. "You know, the one time I told him everything? Everything, Galina, the whole truth, every true thing? It was in Moscow, on the phone, after my father. I said it all in Russian so he wouldn't understand. And he didn't. He listened to all of it. And then he said, okay, and I said, okay. That's the most honest I have ever been with him. In a language he doesn't speak."
Galina took her glasses off and let them hang on the chain.
"So say it in English," she said, in English, which she did sometimes, when she wanted him to hear something the way other people heard it.
"In English," Ilya said, "it sounds like a child. Did you let me win."
"Yes," she said. "It does."
At the door she held the bowl out to him, without comment, and he looked at it for a while before he took one.
Against Tampa, on the Saturday, they were still on the same line, and it was still not working, and at 11:42 of the second period it went on television.
There was a faceoff coming in their end, left of the goalie. They'd just had a long shift, and Kostiuk had sent them out again anyway, because there was a TV timeout coming and he wanted his best centre on the draw. Ilya had his hands on his knees. Shane coasted over and leaned in, and Ilya could feel what was coming before it came, the way you feel a hit coming through the boards.
"Their guy cheats to his backhand on the draw," Shane said, low, quick, very helpful. "Tie him up. I'll come in behind and take it."
Ilya had taken somewhere around twelve thousand faceoffs in his professional life. He had won a lot of them against the man now explaining faceoffs to him.
"Я знаю," he said. And then, in English, because he could see Shane didn't know what that meant and was about to ask: "I know, Hollander. I'm wearing the letter."
He said it louder than he meant to. He also said it, he would find out later, directly into the bench camera, which was eight feet away on a little arm over the glass and which he had known about for nine years and forgotten about in exactly the moment it mattered.
Then he went and lined up for the draw, and tied the Tampa centre up, and Shane came in behind him and took the puck and cleared it. It was exactly right. It was the right call and the right play and they got off the ice clean.
That was worse.
The clip was everywhere by the end of the game.
Harris, who ran the team's social media and was Troy's boyfriend, and whom Ilya liked a great deal against his will, texted him in the third period, when Ilya's phone was in his stall and couldn't be read, so he read it after.
Harris: please never do that again
Harris: also it's at 3.1 million
Harris: also you said "I know" to him in russian like han solo and the entire internet has decided it's romantic. i'm not going to correct them. you're welcome
By midnight there was a version in slow motion with a sad piano song under it. There was a version from a lip-reader in Halifax who had got the English part right and the Russian part wildly wrong. There was one called "mom and dad fighting in front of the kids (the kids are the ottawa centaurs)" that Ilya, against his own interests, watched four times. On the intermission panel on the national broadcast, a former player with a bad tie had said "trouble in paradise" with real satisfaction, as if he had been waiting his whole career for a chance to say it.
They won anyway. Troy scored in overtime, off a broken play that had nothing to do with either of them, and the building was very happy, and in the room Shane did not stand up.
Ilya noticed that. He noticed Shane sit very carefully, already half-undressed, and stay sitting until Ilya had said, "Okay, boys, good game, beer," and everyone had laughed and started to move.
In the kitchen, after, Shane said, "I shouldn't have said it on the bench."
He was at the island with a ginger ale he wasn't drinking. He had changed into the soft grey T-shirt he slept in. He had the look he got, very occasionally, after a referee made a call he couldn't understand: polite and badly lost.
"You shouldn't have said it," Ilya agreed. "The bench is fine. Everyone fights on the bench."
"Then what's—"
"Nothing." Ilya put his hand on the back of Shane's head, on the short soft hair at the nape, which was the place his hand went when he didn't know what else to do with it. Shane leaned into it, a little, the way he did. "Nothing. It's okay. I'm tired. Your mother's spicy one is very spicy, and I need to go and lie down and think about my mistakes."
"Which mistakes?"
"Eating all of it."
Shane almost laughed. Ilya kissed the top of his head and went up.
At twelve-forty, the first puck hit the garage door.
Ilya was on his back in the dark, looking at the ceiling, where a smoke detector blinked green every forty seconds. He'd timed it once. He counted the pucks the way he'd counted sheep as a boy, in Russian, because counting was the one thing he never did in English. Odin, dva, tri. The bang, and the door ringing after it. A gap while Shane collected them. Then the next.
At ninety-something, he got up.
He went as far as the top of the stairs. From there, if the kitchen door was open, you could see a slice of the garage through the mudroom: a stripe of concrete, the white door, and Shane's back in the old Metros hoodie, his weight low, the stick moving. He was working on something. Ilya could see that much. Not just hitting the door. Drawing the puck in, going one way with his hands, the other with the blade. Doing it again. Doing it wrong, and doing it again.
Ilya stood on the top step in his boxers with his hand on the banister, and the cold coming up the stairs from the mudroom, and thought about going down.
He thought about Shane turning round. The way his face would close up, very fast and very politely, like a shop at five o'clock. It's nothing. Go back to bed.
He went back to bed.
One hundred and forty-seven, that night.
Kostiuk's office was the size of a penalty box and decorated like a man's basement in Dauphin, Manitoba, which Ilya assumed was where most of the decorations had come from. There was a framed photo of grandchildren in snowsuits. There was a curling broom on the wall, signed by somebody. There was the coffee mug with the seeds in it, and a second mug, identical, for the shells.
"I'm splitting you," Kostiuk said.
He said it the way he said everything, like he was reading it off the back of a cereal box. He was sitting on the edge of his desk with one foot on his chair.
"Okay," said Ilya.
"Hollander centres the second line. Cormier and Braun. You keep Barrett and I'll give you Lindgren, see if he wakes you up." He dug in the mug. "You two are the best two players I have ever coached. I mean that. I've been doing this since the Mulroney government. And together you play like a guy trying to carry two pizzas through a revolving door."
Ilya laughed, and it was a real laugh, which surprised him.
"It's not a punishment," Kostiuk said. "It's not about the thing on the bench, either, before you ask. That was nothing. I've seen guys fight on the bench who'd been married to their wives for thirty years. It's just not working, and I don't have time to wait for it to work. We'll come back to it." He cracked a seed. "Maybe."
"We'll see," said Ilya.
Kostiuk pointed at him, approving, with the hand that had the seed in it.
"I'm telling you first," he said. "You wear the letter. You tell him, or I tell him. Your call."
"I'll tell him."
"Good," said Kostiuk. "Captain's call." And he went back to his laptop, which was how you knew a meeting with him was over.
He told him at home, because he didn't want to do it at the rink, in front of people, where Shane would take it the way Shane took everything at the rink: well.
Shane was at the kitchen table with his reading glasses on and his laptop open to a real estate listing. A duplex in the Glebe with a sagging porch and good bones, according to the agent's description, which Shane had been reading aloud to him in pieces for three days with the pleasure other men took in sports highlights. Ilya called him Mr. Real Estate when he did this. He called him Mr. Real Estate now, from the doorway, and Shane looked up over the glasses and smiled, the slow full smile he only did at home.
"It has a coal chute," Shane said. "The original coal chute."
"Wonderful. We'll keep coal in it." Ilya sat down across from him. He had practised this in the car, in English, three different ways. He used none of them. "Coach is splitting us. You centre the second line. Cormier and Braun."
Shane took his glasses off.
Ilya watched his face. He had been reading that face since they were seventeen, across faceoff circles, through two cages, in every building in the league. He had read it asleep and furious and laughing so hard he couldn't breathe, and crying once, at the cottage, at the end of the dock. He knew it better than he knew his own. And he watched, now, something in it come loose. A small thing. The muscles at the corner of Shane's jaw letting go, the way they did at the end of a long shift when he finally sat down on the bench. The look of a man who has been told he can put the box down.
"Okay," Shane said. "Good."
He said it gently, as if it were good news for both of them. As if he'd been carrying it too, and was sorry Ilya had had to be the one to bring it.
"Good," Ilya agreed.
He went out the back door into the yard to not smoke.
It was very cold now, the end of October, and the grass was crisp under his socks. He'd forgotten shoes. The neighbour's motion light came on at him, as it always did, and lit up the whole yard flat and white like a crime scene: the fence, the bare maple, the little brass hooks Shane had screwed into every fence post in June so the string lights would hang at the right height for the wedding. Shane had measured. Ilya remembered him out here with the tape measure in his teeth.
He took the gum out of his pocket and chewed it until it had no taste left, and then for a while after that, until the motion light gave up on him and went out, and he was standing in the dark.
When he came back in, Shane had put his glasses back on and gone back to the duplex in the Glebe, and was making a small, careful note on it in pencil.