Chapter 2: The Penalty Chair
The first violation happened on day three, and it was Shane's.
He didn't even notice. He was standing at the counter making his morning smoothie, spinach and frozen blueberries and a scoop of the protein powder Ilya called "the sand," and Ilya was sitting on the counter beside the blender in boxers and one sock eating Froot Loops out of the box, because he had brought a box of Froot Loops into Shane's house like a declaration of war. And Shane said, without thinking, "You should really be getting more protein in the off-season, your recovery numbers—"
He stopped.
Ilya stopped chewing.
"Recovery numbers," Ilya repeated slowly, "is a hockey word."
"It's a health word."
"Whose recovery numbers? From what? From the pickleball?" Ilya hopped down off the counter, dusting cereal off his hands onto Shane's clean floor, and went to the fridge, where the memorandum was now held up by a magnet shaped like a moose. He tapped clause five. "Penalty."
"That wasn't a real one."
"The referee says it was." Ilya looked around the kitchen like he was searching for a weapon. His eyes landed on the window, and the dock beyond it, and the bright, flat, early lake. "Two minutes. In the box."
"There's no box."
Ilya picked up one of the Adirondack chairs from the porch on his way past, carried it to the very end of the dock, and set it down facing the water with a flourish. Then he came back for Shane, took the smoothie out of his hand, and pointed.
So that was how Shane Hollander, two-time all-star, captain of the Montreal Metros, a man with his signature on an eight-year contract and his face on a billboard over the Décarie Expressway, ended up sitting in a wooden chair at the end of a dock at seven-forty in the morning while Ilya Rozanov stood over him with a phone, timing him with grave seriousness.
"This is stupid," Shane said.
"One minute forty. You are doing very well."
"People will see."
"Who?" Ilya turned in a slow circle. Across the bay there was exactly one other dock, and on it there was exactly one heron, which was ignoring them. "The bird? The bird does not follow hockey."
Shane looked at him. Ilya had his hair sticking up on one side and a crease from the pillow down his cheek, and he was squinting into the sun because he'd forgotten his stupid sunglasses for once, and the light was coming through the edges of his ears and making them pink. He looked about as far from the man who'd put Shane into the boards in the second period of game four as it was possible to look. He looked like a guy on a dock.
"Time," Ilya announced. "You may return to play."
Shane didn't get up right away. He wasn't sure he could explain why. Ilya waited, then sat down on the edge of the dock beside the chair with his feet in the water, and after a minute Shane slid down out of the chair and sat beside him, and they stayed there until the smoothie was warm.
By the end of the first week they had a system.
The penalty chair stayed at the end of the dock. It got used a lot. Ilya was charged for "the Metros are not very good at defending a lead" (obvious, unsportsmanlike), for doing a play-by-play of Shane trying to put up a hammock ("Hollander takes the rope, he looks for an opening, there is no opening"), and for using the word "Hollander," twice, both times so smugly that Shane gave him four minutes instead of two. Shane was charged for checking the scores of a golf tournament because Ilya argued, with total confidence and no evidence, that golf was "adjacent," and for a long and heartfelt sigh while walking past the TV, which Ilya ruled was "a sigh about hockey."
Shane swam in the lake every day. Ilya was right that it wasn't cold. Shane told him it was cold anyway, every time, through chattering teeth, mostly to watch Ilya's face when he said it.
They found other things to talk about, and the strangest part was how easy it was once the main thing was off the table. They talked about Shane's mother's pottery, which had escalated from bowls to an alarming series of ceramic frogs. They talked about Ilya's apartment in Boston, which had a view of the harbour and a fridge with nothing in it but vodka and ketchup, and his car, which he had named, and refused to tell Shane the name of. They talked about Moscow, a little, in pieces, at night. They talked about movies Ilya pretended to hate and Shane genuinely did. They played Scrabble on a rainy Thursday and Ilya tried to play the word "Хорошо" sideways in Cyrillic and argued for forty minutes that it should count for a hundred points, "because is harder."
Ilya cooked. That was a surprise. He made syrniki on the Saturday, little fried pancakes of farmer's cheese, and slid a plate of them in front of Shane with a dollop of sour cream on the side and an expression that dared him to say a single thing about macros.
Shane ate four. Ilya watched him eat every one of them, chin in his hand, with an expression that Shane couldn't look at for very long.
"My mother made them," Ilya said, when the plate was empty. Very casual. Looking at the window. "On Sundays."
Shane knew what Ilya's mother was to him. He knew in the way you knew the shape of furniture in a dark room: what was there, where not to put his weight. He'd never been told much, and he'd never asked.
"They were really good," he said, and Ilya looked at him, quick and almost startled, and then nodded once, and got up to do the dishes.
On Tuesday of the second week, Mrs. Dumont from three cottages down came by with a pie.
Shane saw her coming up the path from the window and his entire body went cold, the way it did in the half-second before a hit he hadn't seen. Ilya was on the porch in a lawn chair with his shirt off, reading a paperback mystery he'd found in the cottage that was so old the pages were brown.
"Get inside," Shane hissed through the screen.
Ilya turned a page. "Why?"
"Mrs. Dumont."
"Who is—"
"Hello, Shane!" Mrs. Dumont called, in the bright, carrying voice of a woman who had been watching the Metros on CBC since before he was born. She came up the porch steps with a rhubarb pie held out in front of her like an offering and stopped dead, because Ilya Rozanov had stood up out of the lawn chair, shirtless, all six-foot-something of him, with a paperback in one hand.
Shane watched her recognise him. He watched it happen in her face in slow stages. First the surprise of a stranger, then the nagging familiarity, then the moment she placed him, and her mouth opened a little.
"You're," she said.
"His cousin," Ilya said warmly, before Shane could say anything. He came forward and took the pie out of her hands with enormous courtesy. "From Moscow. Many people say I look like a hockey player. It is very annoying for me."
Mrs. Dumont looked at Shane. Shane looked at the porch railing. His face was so hot he was afraid it would actually smoke.
"Well," Mrs. Dumont said, after a moment, "it's nice that you two get on." And she looked at Ilya, and then back at Shane, with an expression he could not read at all and was going to think about at three in the morning for the rest of his life. "Bring the dish back when you're done, dear."
When she was gone, Shane went inside and sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the cupboards.
Ilya came in a minute later, set the pie on the counter, and lowered himself onto the floor across from him, long legs folding up, knees almost touching Shane's.
"I'm sorry," Shane said, to the floor.
"For what? I am a very good cousin."
"You shouldn't have to." Shane swallowed. "Be a cousin. Be anything."
Ilya didn't answer for a while. Shane could feel him looking. When he finally risked looking back, Ilya's face had gone quiet and serious in the way it almost never did, the jokes put away somewhere.
"That," Ilya said, "is the thing I am not allowed to talk about."
Shane's breath caught. "What?"
"You ask what it is. My thing. The hockey thing." Ilya rubbed his thumb across his own knee, back and forth, a nervous habit Shane had only seen on benches. "It is about that. About who I have to be. Where." He stopped himself. "No. I signed."
"Ilya."
"Four more weeks." The grin came back, but it was thin, like ice in October. He reached across and pushed Shane's hair back off his forehead, fingers lingering at his temple. "Eat the pie, cousin. It is very nice pie."
That night Shane couldn't sleep, so he went out to the dock at one in the morning, and sat in the penalty chair voluntarily, which felt right.
He heard Ilya's voice before he saw him. It came from the side of the cottage, around by the woodpile, low and fast, in Russian. Shane didn't speak Russian. He knew about thirty words, most of which Ilya had used to describe him across a faceoff circle and then, much later, in bed. He did not mean to listen. He just couldn't make himself stand up.
Then Ilya switched to English, the way he did when whoever he was talking to was in North America, and his voice carried clearly over the water.
"No. No, I said already. I don't care about the money." A pause. "Yes, I know what they are offering. Tell them I want Ottawa or I don't want anything." Another pause, longer. "Because I have reasons. Personal reasons. No. Nobody is to know. Not before September."
Shane sat absolutely still in the chair at the end of the dock, the lake black and silver all around him, and felt the word hit him like a shoulder into the boards.
Ottawa.
He knew the Ottawa Centaurs' cap situation. He knew their depth chart. He knew their schedule, which had them playing Montreal four times a season, and he knew how far Ottawa was from the lake he was sitting on, which was a ninety-minute drive, and from his parents' house, which was twenty.
He heard the side door open and close. He heard Ilya's bare feet on the porch, then the creak of their bedroom floor, then nothing.
Shane looked down at the contract in his head. Clause one. No talking about hockey.
He had written it. He had printed it twice because of a typo. He had made Ilya sign it, and Ilya had, laughing, and now there was something enormous standing just on the other side of it, close enough to touch, and the only thing keeping either of them from saying it was a piece of paper held to a fridge by a moose.
He got up out of the penalty chair. He walked back up the dock. He stopped at the kitchen door with his hand on the frame, looking at the fridge in the dark.
He could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. He could feel every single one of the four weeks that were left.
Shane went to the fridge, slid the memorandum out from under the moose, and stood holding it for a long time in the light from the little bulb over the stove, reading his own neat handwriting until the words came apart, trying to work out whether a contract could be broken if both people still wanted to keep it.