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When Zhenya is twelve, her Aunt Sveta takes her out to lunch and gives her three gifts and an apology.
She knows, without quite knowing why, that something is wrong, because Papa never lets Sveta take her out alone anymore, and they haven’t visited this café since Zhenya was quite small. Perhaps that’s why she allows Sveta to order her a cocoa, like she used to have here as a child, though she’s preferred ginger tea for years now.
They sit by a window, and Zhenya cups her warm mug in her hands, watching the spattering snowfall land and melt into brown slush on the streets, trampled by shoes and tires.
“You know your father and your uncle have fought,” Sveta says. It is not a question; it would have been impossible for Zhenya not to know this. She nods.
Sveta’s nails, glossy and red, tap a nervous rhythm against the wooden tabletop. She sighs. “Ilyusha will probably not come home for the summer again.”
It shouldn’t catch her by surprise the way it does. She’d guessed as much, before now. For years, her uncle’s summer visits had been getting shorter and shorter, his flights into Moscow coming later, leaving earlier. And each year, the fighting had been worse; her and her mother have practiced pretending to hear nothing and see nothing as the sounds of him and her father screaming had echoed through the house. The last time her uncle had left, he’d knelt in front of her and folded her tightly into his arms, pressing a brief, hard kiss against her temple, and then another against her forehead.
She had known, then, that she might not see him again; she is surprised to find herself still on the verge of tears, when she hears it out loud.
She swallows tightly, takes a sharp breath. She does not allow her tears to fall. She does not allow her mouth to move. Sveta, who sees everything and knows everything and has since Zhenya was a baby, of course notices. She reaches across the table and gently pries one of Zhenya’s hands from her mug, clasping it between her own.
“Oh, Zhenechka,” she murmurs, her thumb rubbing soothing circles on the back of Zhenya’s hand. “I’m so sorry. Things are… complicated, with him.”
“Why?” Zhenya asks, before she can stop herself. She hates how whiny, how petulant it sounds to her own ears.
Sveta squeezes her hand. “It’s hard to explain. Things have been difficult since your grandfather died. Your father will not see your uncle, and your uncle will not return to Moscow now. But Zhenya, he loves you, you know this? He loves you very much, it’s important that you know this.”
She nods stiffly, feels her face burn hot with shame as the first wave of tears rolls down her cheeks. She doesn’t understand, not really, but when she thinks of her uncle, quiet and pale and sad and more so every year – she wonders if it was Moscow that made him that way. She knows that he loves her, because he’s told her a thousand times in a thousand ways. She hates that she’s not enough for him to come back.
Sveta squeezes again, a little tighter. When Zhenya forces herself to look up at her face, she’s leaning forward, her expression intense, solemn. Zhenya finds herself sitting up straighter, pulling her hand away to scrub at the tacky tear tracks on her cheeks, because she can’t make sense of the look on Sveta’s face, but she knows quite abruptly that it is the reason that Sveta took her out alone.
Sveta watches her collect herself. Nods once, firmly. “You’re a smart girl, Zhenechka. You understand there are things we don’t talk to your father about.”
Zhenya nods. Yes, there are a thousand things she and her mother and Sveta do not discuss with or around her father. They move around him like a sleeping bear, terrified of each misstep.
Sveta reaches into her purse, and places two things on the table between them. One is a small, unmarked white box. The other is a book.
Sveta slides the box towards her. Carefully, Zhenya pries the lid off, and looks inside.
A mobile phone, plain and unassuming. Not an expensive model, not half as fancy as Zhenya’s own phone, her most recent birthday gift from her father.
“It has a prepaid SIM card,” Sveta tells her, quick and businesslike. “International plan. We’ll keep it loaded.” We, Zhenya assumes, means Sveta and her uncle. “His number is already in the phone. Mine as well. Neither of us will call this phone without asking you first. But if you call us, either of us, we will always answer. You understand?”
Zhenya nods again, feels something sharp and dangerous waking up in her chest. She lifts the phone from the box gingerly, as though afraid it might explode. It’s small, light, slim. So completely innocuous. It is the most dangerous thing she’s ever held.
She slips it into her school bag, between the pages of her notebook. Sveta does not need to tell her to be careful; she knows how delicately she will need to handle this, to keep it from her father’s eyes.
“And the book?” she asks, pulling it towards herself, turning it to face her. Anna Karenina, a very old copy, the spine bent and flaked beyond legibility and the cover faded and brittle. Zhenya hasn’t read it, though she thinks she’s seen a copy on the shelves of her grandfather’s old study.
“Your grandmother’s copy,” Sveta tells her. “He wanted you to have something of hers.”
Zhenya cradles the book carefully in her hands, her thumb tracing the painted face of the woman on the cover. Her grandmother died a decade before she was born, but she has seen photographs. She was beautiful, Zhenya thinks. And sad. Her father had never spoken of her, and Zhenya had known better than to ask him twice.
All she knows about her grandmother, she has learned from her uncle. The woman in Ilyusha’s stories is funny, kind, clever, strong. She read to him at night, held him when he had nightmares, dressed him up warmly to take him to play in the snow. Cheered him on at practice, held his stick steady as he taped it himself for the first time. Zhenya and her uncle, they both look like Irina. He wears her cross. And now, Zhenya has her book. One more thing, to tie the three of them together.
An apology, and two gifts. The phone and the book.
She finds the third later that night, with her bedroom door locked and her breath held, listening for the sound of footsteps in the hallway.
The pages of the book are yellowed and soft, almost spongy to the touch. On the inside cover, there is old writing, in a short, elegant script she doesn’t recognize.
For Irochka,
My love, my heart.
Always yours,
Grisha
Below the note, ticked in the crease of the spine, is a small white card. The writing is in a different alphabet, but she knows enough to understand.
(514) – 932 – 2582
Call if you need us.
Shane
She traces the letters with her fingertip, feeling the divot where the pen has carved into the paper. She remembers Shane Hollander, from the awful week after her grandfather’s death. Ilyusha’s friend, the man on the phone who had introduced himself in terrible Russian, who had made her uncle laugh. She remembers him, but she knows nothing about him. She can’t imagine he knows much about her. She doesn’t know what he’s trying to offer her, and has no idea how to accept it.
She commits the number to memory, and burns the card over a tealight.
It’s four months later, the first time she calls.
She doesn’t know why she does it. It would make more sense for her to call Ilyusha or Sveta, both of them in Boston for the rest of the year. She calls her uncle most weeks anyways, a secret she allows herself as she walks back from school, a stolen half-hour of his time, his voice, his attention, that she painstakingly deletes from her call history each time before she returns home.
Curled under her covers, hand over her mouth, she listens to the sound of her father’s voice, moving below as he storms through the living room below. Her mother’s voice interjects at points, faint but furious.
She turns on the phone, and blinks through her tears until the keypad is no longer blurry.
Eight. Wait for the tone. Ten.
She does not call her uncle.
“Hello?”
His voice sounds the same as she remembers, low and even and warm. She opens her mouth, but fails to speak for long enough that, somewhere on the other side of the world, Shane Hollander tries again.
“Hello? Anyone there? Uh… Privet?”
She can’t stop the sharp, wet gasp that escapes her throat. She bites her knuckle, trying to stifle another sob.
In her ear, quiet and careful, Shane Hollander says, “Zhenya? Is that you?”
In a blind panic, she ends the call. For a long, awful moment, she waits with her breath held for the screen to light up, cutting into the darkness with an incoming call. When, after ten minutes, he has not called her back, she erases the call history, powers off the phone, and slips it back into her pillowcase.
The next time, she is thirteen, sitting at a bus stop. She doesn’t want to go home today. She doesn’t want to go home ever.
Eight. Wait for the tone.
She has money. She could take the bus to a train station, go north to Saint Petersberg, or maybe down to Krasnodar. Disappear into the crowd, throw her phone into the ocean. Figure it out. Her family is good at that. Surviving.
Ten.
If she called her uncle right now, would he help her? Perhaps. He wants to, she thinks, but it would be complicated. The fantasy of simply getting on a plane and showing up at his doorstep is constant, but impossible.
Five-one-four—
He picks up on the second ring.
“Hi.” It’s less urgent, less confused, than he had been before. Perhaps he knows this number, now. He doesn’t speak again, just waits, silent, on the other end of the line.
Eventually, she says, “Shane Hollander.” It comes out more stiffly than she means it to, his name awkward and unfamiliar in her mouth. She doesn’t know why she called him. Silly girl, this man does not know you—
“Evgenia Rozanova,” he returns immediately, and from the lilt of his voice, she thinks he’s meaning to tease her. A moment later, he continues, “Zhenya. It’s good to hear from you.”
Is it? She can’t think why it would be.
“Is it—What time is it for you?” she asks. She hadn’t ever thought to check the time difference in Montreal, has no idea if he’s even in Montreal.
“Nearly six in the morning,” he replies. “We’re about eight hours behind you.”
The same as Boston, then. He must be in the east as well, she supposes. “I’m sorry,” she says, a little mortified.
“Don’t be,” he dismisses, before she can try to excuse herself. “I’ve been up for a while anyways, you didn’t wake me.” On the other end, she hears a soft huff, like he’s laughing to himself. “Wow, he wasn’t kidding. Your English is great, now. I’m pretty sure you’re better than I am in Russian.”
She ducks her head at the praise, though he can’t see her. “I just pay attention in school,” she protests faintly. Feels something strange and pleased at the thought that her uncle has been telling Shane Hollander about her. Idly, she swings her leg out in front of her, watching the toe of her school shoe scrape against the pavement, scuffing the toe. Her mother will be upset, she supposes. She’d polished them just a few days ago.
“Where are you?” she finds herself asking. “I can hear water.” It’s faint, through the phone speaker, but she’s sure that’s what it must be, the dull rushing sound, punctuated by distant, unfamiliar birdcalls.
“Ottawa,” Hollander tells her. “I have a cottage by a lake where I spend the off-season. I like to come sit on the dock to watch the sunrise.”
Years ago, Zhenya spent a week of her summer holiday at a cabin near Lake Baikal, owned by her Aunt Sveta’s father. Zhenya’s father and grandfather had stayed in Moscow for business, so it had just been her, her mother, Sveta, and Ilyusha spending long afternoons in the sun-warm water, her uncle hefting her high on his shoulders and throwing her into the lake as she squealed. It had been one of the best weeks of her life. She’d almost forgotten.
“That sounds nice,” she whispers, her throat tight. “Is—is my uncle there?”
“Yeah,” Hollander confirms, which shocks her just a little. She isn’t sure why she thought to ask, hadn’t expected the answer to be yes. “He spends the summers up here with me. He’s inside, though, still sleeping. Want me to get him?”
“No,” Zhenya says quickly, and hates herself for it.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to her uncle. She wants to talk to him very, very much. But she does not want to go home today. And she’s afraid that if she speaks to him, she’ll ask him to come and get her, and he might agree.
“Okay. That’s fine,” Hollander says.
She shakes her head, though she knows he can’t see it. “It’s not—it’s stupid. Don’t tell him I called.”
There’s a long, heavy silence. She hears him take a breath. “Zhenya,” he says, and he’s got this gentle, apologetic tone that makes her stomach twist into knots. “Me and him, we don’t keep secrets from each other. This would be a big one, for me. I won’t tell him anything we talk about, that’s between you and me, but I’m gonna let him know that I heard from you, okay?”
“Okay,” she whispers. The street in front of her swims and blurs, and she squeezes her eyes shut, willing away the tears. She’s scared, yes, but—something else too, something electric and dangerous. It is one of the things they do not speak about around her father, around anyone, even Sveta dances around it carefully when they talk alone, but she knows that there is a reason her uncle is staying at a cottage in Ottawa with Shane Hollander, a reason Hollander knows he is still asleep somewhere inside, a reason there are no secrets between them. A reason her uncle does not return to Moscow anymore.
“He won’t be mad,” Hollander says, perhaps taking her silence as fear. Not entirely incorrectly. “He’ll be glad you called, we gave you my number for a reason.”
She knows this, she thinks, because her uncle has never truly been angry with her. Still. “It’s stupid. I just needed…” Her voice fails her, her throat closing up as she chokes on a breath. Can’t think of the right words in English anyways, isn’t sure she’d know them in Russian either.
“It’s okay,” Hollander says again. “Sometimes you just need to talk to someone. I get it.”
“You do not know me,” she says wetly, a little petulant. She’s not sure how she means it. Maybe, how can you claim to know what I need? Maybe, a little more, why should you even care?
“Not very well,” Hollander agrees. She imagines that he might be shrugging. “But I’d like to, someday. You’re Ilya’s family, so.” She waits, but he does not continue. Just… so. As though that explains it entirely. She wonders if, to him, it does.
Far down the street, a bus turns the corner and begins its slow, rumbling approach. She finds herself glancing around, abruptly self-conscious. She knows, rationally, that nobody passing by knows her or cares to know her, that it is not unusual to hear English in passing on the streets of Moscow, that nobody has any reason to wonder who she is talking to, or why. Nevertheless, she feels suddenly exposed, unsafe.
“I should go,” she murmurs. She’s surprised by how reluctant she finds herself.
Hollander hums softly. “Sure. You okay?”
“Better, now,” she admits.
“Good. Call if you need anything, okay?” She can still hear the sounds of the lake, the birds, faint and crackling with static. She wonders what the sunrise looks like on the water.
“Goodbye, Shane Hollander.”
“Bye, Zhenya.”
She is fifteen years old, climbing indelicately out of Katya’s bedroom window and hauling herself up onto the roof the way they had done when they were younger to look at the stars. Her shoe scrabbles against the slippery bricks for a dangerous moment, and she curses when she feels the fabric of her tights catch against something, but she makes it up in one piece. She does not allow herself to think about the number she is dialing.
As soon as she hears the call connect, she announces, “I kissed a boy.”
There is a brief, significant pause.
“O-kay?” Shane Hollander says, voice high and uncertain, and quite blatantly trying not to laugh. “And is that, uh, a good thing, or a bad thing?”
Zhenya throws her free hand up in exasperation, for the benefit of nobody but herself. “Ugh, I don’t know!” she groans. “Is just thing. His name is Maks, I go to school with him. He’s nice? Quiet.” She waves her hand in vague frustration, trying to grasp the words she needs from the air and scowling when they fail to materialize. Briefly, she resorts back to Russian to say, “He has kind of an ugly face and a weird laugh, but I think I like it.”
Shane laughs, abrupt and delighted. “Wow, you are just like him,” he murmurs, as though only to himself. Zhenya allows herself a small moment to preen; so often, any likeness to her uncle is a black mark upon her soul, a defect she must overcome. It is… nice, to be permitted to be proud of it, for a moment.
“Okay,” Shane begins, still clearly amused, but a little more steady. “Let’s start with this. Did you want to kiss him?” She’s not sure what time it is for him; it’s past midnight in Moscow, so it should be afternoon for him if he’s in Montreal, but she knows he and Ilyusha are both travelling often for matches at this time of year.
She shrugs sharply. “Yes, I think. I’m at a party, we were dancing. He asked if he could, I said yes. It was—I don’t know, it was okay.” She barely remembers it now. Inside, it had been warm and sweaty and so loud she could barely hear herself think; she had been so focused on his hand on her arm, on Isa and Tasha watching them from across the room, on how close he was standing to her. Now, in the sharp clarity of the night chill, all she can remember is how much wetter it had been than she’d expected. She shivers, wishes she’d thought to grab a blanket from Katya’s bed.
“It’s a little gross, right?” Shane asks, and she knows he’s teasing, but somehow also that he’s not, not entirely.
She giggles against the back of her hand, and allows herself to admit, “Yeah. It was weird.” All at once, a truly mortifying thought occurs to her. “Please, don’t tell Ilyusha I’m kissing boys at parties.”
She likes Shane Hollander’s laugh, she thinks. It’s soft and warm and earnest in her ear, and it makes her somehow gratified, proud, to have earned it from him. “I won’t,” he promises. “Anyways, it’s not like he tells me about all the boy’s he’s kissing at parties.”
Zhenya snorts, not bothering to keep the grin off of her face. “He kisses boys at parties?”
“Just the one, I hope,” Shane replies.
She hasn’t spoken about it with Ilyusha, not directly. He has never asked her about her calls with Shane. She has never asked him why he now lives in Ottawa. It bleeds through, though. Colours their conversations, in the details he tells her about his life. Complaints about strange food he buys to appease Shane’s strange diet, offhand mentions of our house, the constant presence of him in the stories he tells her. He has, in his way, told her everything.
Abruptly, Shane says, “Hey, can I give you some unsolicited advice?”
She frowns, turning over the words in her head. A little sheepishly, she asks, “What is unsolicited?”
“Oh,” Shane says. “Sorry. Like, unwanted, I guess? Advice you didn’t ask me for.”
Zhenya pulls her knee into her chest, picking at the rip in her tights with a fingernail. “Not unsolicited then,” she says, pronouncing the word carefully. “I would like advice from you.”
“Oh, cool,” Shane murmurs. After a moment, he seems to remember himself, and says, “Just… be safe, alright? I’m not the boss of you, I can’t tell you not to go to parties, but just watch out for yourself. Don’t take any pills or let anyone talk you into trying anything. And if you do drink—” There is a stiff hesitation to his voice that tells her he is barely restraining himself from trying to forbid this as well. “—Just don’t put down your cup. Make sure you’ve always got eyes on it, okay?”
She feels herself smiling, wobbly and a little wet, the cold stinging her cheeks and lips. She doesn’t know what to do with the feeling in her chest. He’s so fucking normal. He’s just nice. She doesn’t know where he is, what he’s doing, if he’s busy or tired or angry, only that she is sitting on her friend’s roof in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from him, and he wants her to be careful.
“I will,” she promises him. “I won’t do anything stupid.”
“You’re a kid,” Shane argues lightly. “You’re supposed to do stupid stuff. You’ve just gotta be careful about what kind of stupid. Me and Ilya chose the kind of stupid where we get paid to get concussions, but I’m pretty sure you’re smarter than us.”
“I don’t feel smart right now,” she mumbles. It’s too cold for her to stay out here much longer, she can feel her fingertips and her nose going numb, and her sweater’s too thin to be of any use against the wind. “What if he wants to kiss me again?”
“Well, if you want to kiss him, go for it,” Shane says. Then, incredibly mildly: “If you don’t, and he tries anyways, kick him in the balls.”
She laughs, loud and ugly and inelegant, too quickly for her to stifle into her fist. On the other end, she can hear him laughing with her. Biting her lip against her grin, she says, “Okay. I’m going back inside. I will maybe kick him in the balls.”
“Good luck. Let me or Ilya know when you get back home safe?”
“I will. Goodbye, Shane.”
“Goodnight, Zhenya.”
She kisses Maks again that night, and then, because it was nice and he asked if he could, she does it again on Monday at school, and a few more times for good measure, and keeps doing it for a few more months until she spots him kissing Sasha Popova behind the old school library where everyone always sneaks off to smoke.
Then, she kicks him in the balls. That feels pretty good.
She skips class, which is stupid of her, but she knows she’s too much of a mess to sit and pay attention to anything, and the thought of everyone staring at her, whispering behind her back, makes her skin crawl.
She wanders towards a park, empty at this time of morning and a little too rusted and rundown for any good parent to let their child play in anyways, and throws herself onto one of the swings, which creaks perilously under her weight. She can’t go home and tell her parents. That would involve actually telling her father that she’d had a boyfriend, which simply did not bear thinking about. Ilyusha would want to kill him. Sveta might actually try to.
So she calls Shane Hollander.
It takes a long while for him to answer, and when he does, his voice is thick and groggy. “H’llo? Zhenya?”
It is, she realizes, terribly late at night for him. She takes a ragged, wet breath and makes to apologize, let him go back to sleep, end the call. Instead, what she stupidly says is: “I wish I was in Ottawa.”
Shane, nearly immediately, murmurs, “I know. Just a few more years. We’re waiting for you.”
She closes her eyes, grips the freezing chain of the swing set.
Years ago, she’d forced herself to discard her old dream about simply getting on the first plane out of Moscow the day she turned eighteen, and arriving on Ilyusha’s doorstep. Childish, improbable, impractical, presumptuous. Cruel to her mother, leaving her. Ungrateful to her father. She is unable to grapple with the suggestion that Shane and her uncle might have wanted that too. Might have been preparing for it.
She hears movement on the other end of the line, a faint material rustling. Faintly, Shane says to someone, “It’s okay. I’ll talk to her. I’ll be right back.” Low and indistinct, she hears her uncle’s voice say something in response. After a moment, she thinks she hears the click of a door closing, and Shane’s voice reappears, closer to the microphone than it had been. “Zhenya, what’s happening? What’s wrong?”
Well, she feels silly now. A fucking boy isn’t worth waking up Shane and her uncle for, not worth whining about, not worth begging to leave the country over. Abruptly embarrassed, frustrated with herself, she kicks petulantly at the sparse grass, pushing herself into a lazy swing. She feels too ridiculous to try and articulate it in English; in Russian, she grumbles, “Maks is a fucking asshole.”
“The boy from the party?” Shane asks, responding in kind, to her faint surprise. “Did he do something?”
Zhenya huffs a humorless laugh. “Yeah. Fuck him. I’m done with him.”
“Fuck him,” He agrees easily, and despite herself, her foul mood, the knot in her chest, she can’t keep the smile from sneaking onto her face. His accent is still funny, a little hard to understand at points, but not nearly as terrible as she remembers it being. He must speak a lot with Ilyusha, she thinks. They sound a lot like each other.
She sniffles, clears her throat, and says in English, “Your Russian is very good now.”
He laughs softly. “Oh, thanks. I’m, uh, taking a class for it. Still not great, but getting better.”
“I am too,” she says, then scowls, because that sounds utterly stupid. “For English, I mean.” Which sounds stupid as well, because it’s a mandatory class in school, obviously she’s taking it. She doesn’t know how to make it sound less dumb though, and she really doesn’t want to talk about Maks, so.
Shane makes a small, enthusiastic sound. “Oh, yeah, I heard you’re pretty advanced now? Svetlana was bragging.”
Zhenya ducks her head, decides to blame the sudden burning in her cheeks and the tips of her ears on the cold. “I’m okay,” she dismisses. She’s better than okay. She’s fluent and she’s fast and she’s good. But it’s not the kind of thing she’s supposed to talk about.
“Heard your teachers were pretty impressed,” Shane counters. “Said you might be able to submit to some kind of competition?”
She shrugs again, pointlessly. “Maybe. It was just a poem.” She’d translated it as part of an assignment. The printed sheet her teacher had given her is still sitting at the bottom of her bag, damning and dangerous, an armed bomb. It’s a youth competition, with a prize for the best translation of contemporary Russian literature into English. The award is given in London.
“You should look into it,” Shane urges. She wouldn’t have guessed from his voice that he’d only woken up a few minutes ago. “It might be a great option for you, if you decide to pursue it. There’s always work for translators—god knows we need more interpreters in the NHL. And it would probably give you a lot of opportunities to travel.”
She takes a careful breath, holds it. She hadn’t allowed herself to think that far ahead, not really, as though just saying it out loud would curse her, somehow. But it all sounds so simple, when he lays it out like that.
“I’m sorry,” Shane says suddenly, all in a rush. “I don’t mean to be your manager, I’m sure you get enough of this from everyone else. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want—"
“Are you really waiting for me?” she cuts in, too loudly, too bluntly.
“Ilya asked about your favourite colour last week so we’d know how to paint your bedroom.”
It can’t be that simple. She wants it to be. She wants it so badly she thinks she might die.
“I want purple,” she sniffs, scrubbing the heel of her hand across her cheeks and swiping under her nose.
“We know,” Shane replies. She can hear his smile. There’s some faint noise, and she hears him say, “What? I don’t know.” Then: “Ilya wants to know if you’re supposed to be in school right now.”
“Ah, I cannot hear you, I think I am going through a tunnel—”
“Zhenya.”
“Goodbye, Shanya, give my love to Ilyusha—”
“Zhenya!”
“Goodbye!”
She is seventeen, and she has a system.
She closes her bedroom door gently behind her and pulls off her heels, balancing precariously against her desk as she tries to massage some feeling back into the soles of her feet. She shrugs off her cardigan, then rucks up her dress to peel off her tights. Piece by piece, she shucks her armor, the way Sveta had always taught her, and feels her shoulders, her jaw, relaxing by minute degrees as she leaves the night behind in a crumpled pile on her bedroom floor.
She wants very badly to just collapse into bed, but she has the smell of perfume and cigar smoke caught up her nose, clinging to her skin and hair, and she knows she will regret it deeply if she doesn’t shower and scrub the makeup from her eyes and lips.
It was a good night, all things considered. Nobody had fought, the food had been good, the music had been nice, and she had been able to spend a good deal of time speaking with Aunt Sveta and Grandpa Seryozha. Everyone had been kind. Her mother had boasted about her high marks in school, and she’d been showered in gifts and praise.
She’d hated every second of it. Her cheeks hurt from the porcelain smile she’s been holding for most of the night, and her tongue hurts from biting it every time her father opened his mouth.
In the shower, she washes the product from her hair and the sweat from her skin, and feels the last of her tension swirl down the drain with it, leaving only bone-weary exhaustion in its place. She doesn’t bother drying her hair properly, just scrubs it lazily with a towel and allows it to drip damp patches onto her t-shirt and pillow. Her hair curls wildly when she allows it to dry naturally, which her father does not particularly care for, and she takes a private thrill in.
In her bed, with her duvet pulled up over her head, she powers on the phone, and plugs in a pair of headphones.
As promised, there is one new message waiting for her, the first and only text Shane has ever sent her. It’s a video file; in the blurry thumbnail, she sees a brightly-lit locker room of men in hockey gear. She presses play, and the recording starts mid-sentence, an immediate cacophony of sound.
“—ppy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you—”
If she didn’t already know that this was supposed to be a song, she doubts she would have guessed that they were actually trying to sing. She has never heard so many people sing so many different notes without even accidentally getting a single one correct. It’s like a pack of howling dogs.
“Happy Birthday, dear Zhenya—”
Her name is dragged out to the point of absurdity, and she grins as she sees her uncle throw his head back, his voice impossibly rising above the rest in its enthusiasm.
“Happy birthday to you!”
To the limited extent that the room had been together, it entirely falls apart into discordant whooping and clapping, a beautiful disaster. Her uncle stands on one of the benches, claps once, and the noise of the room fades just enough for him to cup his hands over his mouth and shout over it.
“Alright, listen the fuck up!” he barks, and Zhenya finds herself biting her knuckle to keep from laughing. He is, at once, entirely different, and somehow just as she remembers him.
“It is my baby niece’s birthday today, so I expect perfect present, yes? For her, we will fucking break Calgary. We send them home weeping, okay? For my niece, we do this. Now fucking move!”
Another wolf pack howl of sound, so loud that the microphone barely seems to be able to process it, before the video devolves into an incomprehensible blur of movement. After a brief, dizzying swing, the camera flips and refocuses on Shane Hollander’s face. He grins, winks, and waves with one hand to the camera, before the video ends.
The message had been sent hours ago; she googles the Ottawa-Calgary match, grinning when she sees a 5-1 victory. Before she can think better of it, she takes a screenshot of the score, and texts it to Shane.
My favorite present this year, she types, watching the message flip quickly from Sent to Read.
Almost immediately, he replies, Happy birthday, we love you. One more year!
Maybe that’s what makes her brave enough to be a little bit stupid.
Carefully, methodically, she erases the phone’s search history, deletes the score screenshot and then clears the photo gallery backup, and pulls up the text conversation with Shane.
She saves the video to a locked folder, wipes the text history, and powers off the phone.
One more year.
She’s eighteen, and her thumb is hovering over the call button as she steps out into the arrivals gate.
She doesn’t need to bother; they’re waiting.
She’s in Ilyusha’s arms in an instant, and would be more embarrassed about how quickly she starts crying if she couldn’t hear him sniffling wetly into her hair. She’s grown, since she last saw him, a little taller than her mother now. It is an immense relief to find out he still feels the same to her, larger than life and indestructible.
He releases her only long enough to hold her at arm’s length, looking her up and down with bright, damp eyes. “Did you sleep on the plane?” he asks. “Have you eaten? How was the flight?”
“I’m fine,” she murmurs, scrubbing at her eyes and cheeks, grinning as she collects herself. “I slept a little bit.” They’re not the only ones speaking Russian at the gate, given where she flew in from, but she’s conscious of their conversation attracting some attention, the faint recognition and surprise crossing the faces of the people around them. Ilyusha seems entirely oblivious to it, his attention never wavering from her, as though she’s worried if he stops looking at her, she’ll disappear.
She is, in truth, a little afraid of that as well; as though if she doesn’t cling onto this moment, onto him, in front of her, holding her, she’ll wake up alone in Moscow.
Shane nudges Ilyusha gently to get his attention, easing him back with a hand on his elbow. “Let’s get downstairs to get her bags,” he urges softly. “Do you know where baggage claim is?”
“Mh, yes,” he agrees faintly, as though barely hearing the words. He seems to focus himself on his new task though, craning his head to read the airport signage around them.
Shane takes the opportunity to step into the space her uncle vacated, placing a tentative hand on her shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
She moves without thinking, doesn’t even really register that she’s doing it until she’s already thrown herself into his chest. He’s of a size with her uncle, so he barely stumbles under the sudden onslaught before his arms are around her, one hand coming up to cup the back of her head.
Muffled into his chest, where she’s most likely leaving a terrible, snotty damp patch on his nice jacket, she says, “I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for eighteen years.” She doesn’t know how to explain it. Doesn’t know how to tell him that it feels like she’s been swimming for a shore she can’t see, that every phone call to him, to Ilyusha, to Sveta, has been a tiny breath of air, a faint hint of sunlight below the waves, a reason to believe that she might not be drowning.
Maybe she doesn’t need to tell him, not yet. His grip on her tightens, and he tucks her against his shoulder, pressing a brief, hard kiss to her temple, then her forehead.
“I know,” he murmurs. “But we’ve got you now. You can breathe. Let’s go home.”