Work Text:
David Hollander raises a son. He loses another. And then, without planning it, he raises another.
*
I. The Store
Mrs. Nguyen had run the corner shop on Laurier for thirty-one years. She knew what Yuna liked. The thin rice noodles, not the flat ones. She hated chilli oil with the sediment. She knew David drank a specific brand of Vodka and that Shane, when he was small, used to press his face against the freezer glass and fog it up with his breathing, tracing kanji his mother had taught him.
She was eighty-one now. Her memory had thinned in places, the way old fabric thins. She still knew David and Yuna by sight because she saw them every week. But Shane had left for junior hockey at sixteen and had not been in the shop since he was a boy. Mrs. Nguyen remembered the boy. She did not remember what the boy looked like grown.
She knew they had a son who played hockey. She did not follow hockey. She followed the Hollanders.
David walked in on a Tuesday in November with Ilya Rozanov beside him, and Mrs. Nguyen looked up from the till and her whole face opened.
"David! You brought your boy!"
David's hand stopped on the door.
"I keep telling Yuna, bring your son, bring your son. And finally." She came around the counter. She was barely five feet tall. She looked up at Ilya the way you look up at a building. "So tall. My God. And the eyes!" She turned to David. "Same blue. Exact same. Like you poured it in."
"And the hair," she said. "Yuna always said the boy looked like her, but I see you in there. I see you. The jaw. The way he stands."
She patted Ilya's arm. She went to get the chilli oil. She called over her shoulder: "Tell Yuna I have the good miso paste. The one she likes."
The shop smelt of dried shrimp and cardboard and something sweet, like overripe persimmons. David picked up a basket. Ginger. Scallions. The vinegar.
Ilya followed. Silent for three aisles. Then:
"You didn't correct her."
David shook his head.
"Why?"
David put the vinegar in the basket. Mrs. Nguyen had not seen Shane in over a decade. Her memory filled in the gaps with what made sense. A tall blonde boy beside a tall blonde father. The picture worked.
When Shane stood beside David, the picture never worked. Nobody's memory could fill that gap.
"Because it felt good," David said. Quietly. Almost to himself.
*
He had stood outside this shop twenty-four years ago, holding a three-year-old Shane against his hip, and a woman he had never met had grabbed his arm.
Not gently. Grabbed.
"Whose child is that?"
Shane had been eating a rice cracker. His dark hair sticking up. His eyes, Yuna's eyes, bottomless and black-brown, his face sweet, fixed on the woman without blinking. Shane at three already had the Yuna stare.
"Mine," David said.
"He doesn't look like yours."
"He's mine."
She did not let go. Pearl earrings. Juicy couture jacket. She asked for identification.
David looked at her hand on his arm. He looked at Shane, who had stopped chewing. Three years old and already reading the room. Already looking at his father for the signal. Are we safe?
"Take your hand off me."
She called the police.
They came. Two officers. Young. Embarrassed, once they understood. David stood on the kerb outside Mrs. Nguyen's shop with his son on his hip and his licence in his hand and proved that the child he had made was his.
Shane had not cried. He put his small hand on David's cheek and said, "Daddy."
Just that. The whole word.
David drove home. Put Shane in his little bed. Sat on the kitchen floor and pressed his fists into his eyes until the shaking stopped.
He did not tell Yuna.
It happened again four months later. A different woman. Same question. Same eyes doing the same ugly calculations. No police this time. Just the look.
A third time, at a park. A man. Followed David to his car. Wrote down his licence plate.
Three times in one year. David strapped Shane into his car seat after the third time and drove home with a scream behind his teeth that he swallowed and kept swallowed and never let out.
*
In the car, Ilya was turning a persimmon in his hands. Mrs. Nguyen had pressed it on him at the till. For the hockey boy. Too skinny.
"This is fucked up," Ilya said.
David glanced at him.
"I am sorry."
"Don't be. Eat your persimmon."
Ilya ate his persimmon. Juice ran down his wrist. He wiped it on his jeans.
David kept his eyes on the road.
*
II. The Restaurant
The restaurant had been a breakfast place called Young's. Formica tables. Burnt coffee. Now it was Maison Theriault - owned by Coach Theriault's 3rd daughter. Filament bulbs. A wine list with eye watering prices.
David ordered for both of them because Ilya's French was barely functional. Ilya let him. He sat with his shoulders rounded and his head tipped forward.
He's tired, David thought.
He ordered the duck for Ilya. The fish for himself. Water, no ice, because Ilya didn't drink cold water. David had learnt this without being told.
The food came. Ilya was sawing at his duck. The knife at the wrong angle. The meat shredding.
David reached across. Took his plate. Cut the duck into even pieces. Slid it back.
Ilya looked at the plate. Looked at David.
"Shane does that," Ilya said.
David nodded.
"No. I mean. Shane, when he is tired. He lets me cut his food. Puts his head down and lets me do things. Only time he lets anyone do anything."
David was thinking about Shane at nineteen. This same corner. The booth that was now polished wood but had been vinyl. Shane sliding in after a game, too tired to hold his head up. David ordering eggs and toast and pushing Shane's hair off his forehead and kissing him there, above the eyebrow.
A woman at the next table had said, loudly: Look at that. Another white guy with his little Asian sugar baby. Disgusting.
Shane had lifted his head. Had said, "Dad." The quiet voice. The one that meant I am here.
David had turned to the woman and said: "This is my son. He looks like his beautiful mother, which is fortunate."
David had let the bile lie in the back of his throat with visceral disgust.
They had finished their eggs in silence. In the car, Shane put his hand on David's forearm. Left it there all the way home, a big hockey player cuddling his papa.
*
Today, the server came back and said, "Can I get anything else for you and your son?" David said, "Two coffees, please." Ilya opened his mouth. David gave him a look. Ilya closed it.
Every time. Every single time David sat next to Ilya, someone saw it immediately. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Father and son.
Twenty-eight years with Shane. Not once.
David drank his coffee. He did not say this out loud.
Ilya seemed pleased. In a way.
David was happy if Ilya (and Shane) were happy.
*
III. The House
They were clearing out the storage room on a Sunday. Yuna had left a list and gone to her mother's.
Ilya had come because Shane asked him to. David labelled. Ilya stacked. They found Shane's old gear. Skates from bantam. A stick signed by the 2007 Voyageurs. A box of trophies packed in tissue paper.
Ilya held one up. Peewee. Shane Hollander, Most Valuable Player, 2003.
"He was twelve," David said.
"Same age as me," Ilya said. "When my mother died."
He said it the way you say a thing you have said many times.
David set down the box he was holding.
"She was not what people think. People hear Rozanov, they think cold Russian family. My father was like this. Police. Almost fifty when I was born. But my mother was sweet. Funny. She made up songs about the neighbours. She wanted to be actress." He put the trophy back. "She was soft. A soft person in a hard place, and the hard place won."
David listened.
"She was young. Twenties. Married to a man of fifty for money and security. In a country that did not care if she was sad. Nobody asked." He paused. "She took pills. Whole bottle. I found her. I was twelve."
David said nothing. There was nothing the right size. Shane had told him this story one day, crying and heartbroken for his Ilya.
"My father was not sad. He was angry. He made me tell people it was accident. Accident with pills. Oops."
They wallowed. David felt the bile rise again.
"This is third time in few months" Ilya said. "That someone thinks I am your son. Movers on Tuesday. Man at hardware store. The lady at the convenience store." He looked at David. "You never correct them."
"No."
Ilya sat down on a box of Shane's old jerseys. His knees came up high. He looked, suddenly, very young.
"Your eyes," he said. "When Shane first brought me to dinner. I looked at your eyes and I could not breathe."
David waited.
"My father's eyes were the same. Not just blue. The same blue. Pale. Almost not a colour. Like ice that has been in the sun too long." He touched his own face, below the eye. "There are many shades of blue. But this pale one, almost hazel, with the light behind it. My father had this. And then I walk into your kitchen and there it is."
David's throat closed.
He was thinking about Ilya. And the baby.
Not Shane. The other one. The one who came a year after Shane and stayed for nineteen days. A boy. Light hair, so fair it was almost white. David's eyes. David's brow. A face that was unmistakably, undeniably Hollander.
They had named him. They had held him. They had brought him home from the hospital and put him in the crib next to Shane's and for nineteen days David had had two sons, one dark and one light, one with Yuna's face and one with his, and the world had made sense in a way it had never made sense before and has never made sense since.
The baby died in his sleep. Nineteen days old.
They buried him in a cemetery in Ottawa on a Tuesday morning in March. Yuna wore a black coat. David carried the box. It weighed almost nothing. That was the worst part. How light it was.
They never told Shane. Shane was too young to remember, and by the time he was old enough to understand, the grief had calcified into something private, something David and Yuna carried between them without words. A locked room. A name they did not say.
David did not think about the baby often. He had trained himself not to. But sometimes, in unguarded moments, the thought came: I had a child with my face. Not instead of Shane. Never instead of Shane. Shane was everything. But for nineteen days David had known what it felt like to hold a child and see himself reflected back. To walk down a street with a baby on his hip and have nobody question it.
It was not about loving Shane less. It was about the world being so simple that hair colour was the whole test, and for nineteen days David had passed.
"Shane did not get your eyes," Ilya was saying. "He did not get your hair or your height. He got Yuna in everything you can see. So what did he get from you?"
David came back. He was in the storage room. Ilya was looking at him. The peewee trophy was on the box between them.
"The boring parts," David said.
Ilya laughed. It broke the room open.
"Yes. Shane says this. He says he got his mother's face and his father's personality, which means he is beautiful and boring."
David almost smiled.
"You are also not boring. You are extraordinarily boring. Which is different."
They sat across from each other.
"I like that you don't correct them," Ilya said. Quieter. "I know it is complicated. But for me. It is the first time since my mother died that someone's face made me feel like I belong somewhere."
David reached out and put his hand on Ilya's knee. Brief. Enough.
*
Later, Ilya fell asleep on the sofa. They had been watching hockey. Ottawa versus Montreal. Ilya had tipped sideways in stages, the way large men sleep.
His neck was at an angle that would hurt in the morning.
David put a hand on his shoulder. Gentle.
Ilya did not wake. He murmured something in Russian. David caught one word. Odeialtse. Shane had translated this once, laughing. Blankie.
David found the throw from the armchair. He laid it over Ilya, who was twenty seven years old and six foot and asking for his blankie in his sleep, in a language his mother had spoken to him in a house he could never go back to.
Ilya's hand came up, unconscious, and gripped the hem. Tight.
David tucked the edges in. Turned off the TV. Stood in the dark.
He was thinking: this is what it would have been like.
Not two boys. Three. Shane, dark-haired and watchful. The baby who stayed for nineteen days. And now Ilya, who had walked into their lives with blonde hair and pale eyes and a dead mother's sweetness, and who had, without anyone planning it, filled a space that had been empty for twenty-seven years.
He went upstairs. Got into bed.
"He's asleep on the sofa," he said.
"I heard him ask for something in Russian," Yuna said.
"He asked for his blankie."
Yuna put down her book. Looked at him over her glasses.
David looked back. She knew what he was thinking. She always knew. Twenty-seven years and a locked room and a name they did not say and she always, always knew.
She said nothing. She reached across and put her hand on his chest.
He put his hand over hers.
*
IV. The Game
The invitation came in October. McGill, class of 1990. Reunion. Alumni hockey game.
David held the card in the kitchen.
He had been good. Centre for the team. The kind of good that made people go quiet. The reads. The angles. A weight shift at speed that changed everything by degrees too small to measure and too large to ignore. A scout from the Voyageurs had called his coach.
David had said I know, and meant it, and chosen Yuna.
They had married young. Had Shane young. Yuna was the only woman David had met who loved hockey the way he did. Who could recite Voyageurs line combinations from memory. Who yelled at the television in two languages.
Finding her was the luckiest thing. Luckier than the talent.
His body still remembered. His wrists ached in the cold. His weight still shifted when he rounded corners.
Yuna said, "Go."
His teammates said, "Bring Shane."
Shane said: "I don't think I can make it, Dad."
David called Ilya separately. Because they did that now.
"Is nice," Ilya said. "I would come but I am also busy."
"I didn't ask you to come."
"I know. Am just saying."
*
He arrived at McGill on a Saturday morning. The locker room smelt the way locker rooms always smell. Old rubber. Sweat. Time.
David changed quietly. Taped his stick. Two wraps at the top. Three at the blade.
The door opened.
Shane walked in.
Everyone stopped.
Shane Hollander. Captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. His face on billboards. Standing in the doorway in a McGill hoodie. Every man in the room remembered, at the same time, that David Hollander had once been something.
"Hey, Dad."
"Hey, bud."
The hug was the real one. The long one.
"I brought someone," Shane said.
Ilya. Hockey bag over one shoulder. Grinning in a way David had never seen in public.
David raised an eyebrow at Shane.
"We're running the Irina Foundation camp at McGill this summer. Ilya wanted to see the rink."
David looked at Shane. Shane looked back. I know, David's look said. I have known for a long time. It's all right.
"You said you were busy," David said to Ilya.
"I lied. Shane told me to lie."
*
On the ice, David's body remembered.
The knees went. The lungs burnt. But the edges held. The hands were soft. He took the puck at centre. Moved into the neutral zone. The rink shrank to the size of his heartbeat.
He deked. The old one. The weight shift. The defender bit. David went around him and shot. Top corner. Clean. That thwack you feel in the roof of your mouth. His old defender Kowalski screamed.
David felt thirty six years dissolve.
Then Shane and Ilya played together. Same line. Same jersey. Moving as a single thing. Shane read and Ilya reacted. No signals. Shane looked left, Ilya was already there. A hangover from their All Stars game for the public, deeply entwined lovers in private.
And then Shane carried the puck through centre. He shifted his weight. Changed angle. David's shift. David's angle. The one he had perfected at seventeen. Shane did it without thinking. It was in his knees. In his bones.
Kowalski, beside him on the bench, said quietly: "Jesus, Dave. He skates just like you."
Nobody had said that before. Not once in years. Because they always saw the face. The dark hair. The dark eyes. They stopped at the surface.
Nobody looked at the wrists. Nobody watched the angle of the blade.
David said nothing. He just watched his son skate.
*
V. The Dinner
They went to a Japanese place Shane liked. Small. Quiet. The owner knew Yuna and brought a very specific miso soup without being asked.
Yuna was telling a story about a sponsor who mispronounced Hollander as Hollinder for an entire meeting. Shane was laughing. Really laughing. The rare sound.
The food came. Small plates. Chopsticks.
Ilya picked his up. Held them like a pair of pliers. Attempted a piece of sashimi. Lost it. Attempted again. Lost it. Stared at it on the table.
Yuna reached across without breaking her sentence. Picked up the sashimi. Placed it on his rice so he could eat it with a spoon.
David placed a piece of tempura on Ilya's plate with his own chopsticks.
Ilya looked at it. Looked at David. Said nothing. Ate it.
"You know what's funny," Shane said. "Hollanders have a type."
David tilted his head.
"Mum married you. I chose Ilya. Tall. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Centre."
"I am not blonde," Ilya said. "I am curly dark blonde."
"You're blonde."
"Is different shade. There are categories."
"You're blonde, Ilya."
Yuna smiled. The wide one. "He's right, Shane. Hollanders have a type. Tall, handsome, blue-eyed hockey centres. We like them boring."
"I am not boring," Ilya said.
"Not you, sweetheart. David."
"Ilya. Just take the compliment."
"Which part was compliment?"
"All of it."
They were laughing. All four of them.
David sat in it. The noise. The warmth. The plates. The chopstick failures. This was the family. Not the one he had planned. This one.
*
Outside. Cold. November.
Shane was leaning against David. His head on David's shoulder. The way he had done since he was small. Shane at twenty-seven still did this.
David put his arm around him. Shane's dark hair against his coat. Shane's eyes closed.
Ilya stood apart. Watching from a slight distance. The way he did.
David looked at him. Lifted his other arm.
Ilya hesitated. One second. Two.
He stepped in.
David's arm went around him. Ilya was taller by an inch, so his head leant against David's temple. Blonde hair against grey-blonde hair.
David stood on a cold pavement with his son on one side and his son's person on the other. One dark head. One light. The son who stayed. The son who arrived late, from a different country, by a different road.
And somewhere between them, in the space between David's ribs where the locked room was, the baby who had stayed for nineteen days and left behind a shape that nothing had filled until now.
Yuna took out her phone.
"Don't move," she said.
She took the photograph.
David's dark coat. Shane's dark hair on his left shoulder. Ilya's blonde head tilted into his right. Their breath making clouds in the air. Three men who did not match, who had never matched, standing together as though they had been made to fit.
Yuna sent it to the family group chat that night. No caption.
David saved it. Set it as his lock screen.
Every time he picked up his phone for the rest of his life, the first thing he saw was his boys. The one who looked like Yuna and moved like David. The one who looked like David and carried a dead woman's sweetness in his chest like a flame that would not go out.
The photograph lingered.
David's memory did too.