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Of course, Ilya has to go home for the funeral.
He has PR now, which means he is allowed to leave Canada and re-enter, which is good. He has not yet surrendered his Russian passport, which means he does not need a visa to go to Russia, which is also good. The anti-gay law is problematic, of course, but Ilya’s notoriety has faded since he retired and his Russian passport has only one family name, and Svetlana has told him that from what she has heard, he will most likely make it back in one piece.
The main problem is that he does not want to go back to Russia.
“You don’t have to go,” Shane says, certain and solid. If Ilya could be convinced, it would be by that voice.
Ilya cannot be convinced. “I am the only man in the family now,” Ilya says. Of course this means nothing to Shane, who has a father who loves him by playing cards and cooking dinner, and a mother who loves him by negotiating brand deals with Rolex. “Lara needs me there.”
Larisa Rozanova is not a stupid woman, probably. Ilya met her rarely; a few times in the summers, when there were dinners in his father’s home, and then again at his father’s funeral. Certainly she doesn’t need him to deal with her husband’s affairs. The trust for her daughter was in her name alone, waiting for Ilya’s niece to turn eighteen, which meant Lara had little to do with it.
But the funeral itself—this, Lara would need him for. To talk to the clergy and the funeral director. To give the eulogy and the toast. Not because Ilya in particular was needed, but because a man was needed, and it would reflect poorly on Lara if the only remaining Rozanov could not be bothered to grieve with her for his own brother.
So, Ilya goes.
Almost immediately after he switches his SIM card to a Russian one, Ilya receives a Telegram message from Sasha. Come to the club, Saturday night. Svetlana will be there. Ilya knows the club, of course. Not an address either of them would ever send by text.
He thinks about it as he waits for a taxi. For his father’s funeral, the family had sent a private car. How quickly oligarchs fall in the twenty-first century.
Sasha’s little get-together will be the night of the funeral. Later in the night, of course, better described as early the following morning—Ilya will not be double booked. Yes, he replies. I will see you there. On Whatsapp, Shane has texted him, How was your flight? Ilya swipes away the notification.
Ilya considers the tempo of his new life as he settles into the guest room of his old apartment, half-lit by a lamp on the nightstand and the streetlights from outside. Alexei changed very little. He only had six years to do so, after all. Ilya had been happy enough to leave Russia behind when he was here for his father’s funeral. He’s not sure what to do with himself now that he’s back, so many years and yet not as many as he expected since the last time. He had thought Alexei might die in his sixties, at the earliest—long enough for Ilya to forget his family obligations completely, or for the spectre of his homeland to lose its terrible nostalgia.
Instead, he is here, six years after his father’s death, looking out of the window of a room he once did so much cocaine in that he convinced himself he could climb the walls like Spider-man. He told Sasha this—the American superhero, Sasha, from the Hollywood movie—and Sasha had told him to watch real films. You don’t need to do a cultural exchange to play in the MLH, Sasha had said. They will still let you into North America.
There are two new luxury condominiums blocking his view of the river. The smell is the same, though. Yes, even after six years. Ilya knows now that thirty, fifty years would not be enough to forget Moscow, not after a childhood and an adolescence and an adulthood here. He loves Moscow. He loves this city, loves the curves and secrets of it, the places he knows only because he grew up here, because he lived here, because he walked and fucked and cried and drank and smoked and sometimes wished so desperately to God to die here. That is what Moscow is, all the things he had once been, no matter that he is someone different now.
It has been four hours since he landed. Shane has sent him increasingly unhinged Whatsapp messages, including Yuna is going to disown you if you disappear and I’m not ready to be a single father to Anya, she barely knows what water is and can you at least tell me if you’re alive PLEASE.
Ilya calls him. It is almost ten in the evening in Moscow, which means it is almost two in the afternoon for Shane.
“Ilya—” and he hears Shane exhale, deliberately stop himself from lecturing Ilya about things like communication and I was worried, you asshole and even though I have an alarm set to feed Anya on schedule she still manages to get mad at me, what the fuck is your secret. Shane still hasn’t realized that dogs whine for food even if they’re already full.
Ilya smiles, looking at his city, listening to the tenor of Shane’s breathing. “Shane. You shouldn’t worry about me, you know. You will get a big headache, maybe ulcer.”
“Maybe I like worrying about you. You ever think about that?”
Ilya hears the whirring of a machine in the background. “Are you in the gym?”
“Yeah, just staying warm before the game. Hey, did I tell you about the crazy email I got from Speedo this morning?”
“No, tell me.”
“They want me on the runway for the Summer 2027 collection. The fucking runway, Ilya.” Shane huffs out a breath, and Ilya listens to him sweat. “I fully thought they were joking until they sent over the contract for review.”
Ilya laughs. He can really believe it, Shane opening his laptop, squinting and then staring bug-eyed at a contract to walk for a fashion show. “You should do it,” Ilya says, pulling out a cigarette. “First hockey player to advertise a swimwear line. Completely different sports. They might start thinking you top, too.”
“Shut up.”
Ilya lights his cigarette and listens, then, to his husband sweat and grunt through another minute, two minutes, three minutes on the treadmill. A different life. But not so different, of course. He’s been tainted by American exceptionalism. There are treadmills and fluorescent lights in Russia, too.
“So you are too busy for phone sex now?”
“Jesus, Ilya.” A few beeps, telling Ilya that he is reducing the speed on the treadmill so he can hold a conversation. Shane breathes, in and out. “I— well, shit, actually, yeah, I’ve been in here too long. I need to get ready for the game.”
Truth be told, Ilya hadn’t really been in the mood for it either, but it had seemed worse not to ask. “Let me see you, at least.”
He accepts the video request, and there he is, his Shane, sweating and red and gorgeous, a different species to the thing Ilya has become in the apartment that now belongs to Larisa Rozanova. He swallows.
“You’re smoking,” Shane says, disappointed, and Ilya stubs it out. The first thing Shane sees, looking at Ilya—disappointment.
“Not anymore,” Ilya says, tries for a grin, and Shane shakes his head ruefully. All the same, Ilya feels lighter. “Thank you for call, my swimsuit model.”
“Very funny.” Shane steps off the treadmill, wipes the sweat off his forehead with the bottom of his shirt. Ilya catches a glimpse of his stomach before Shane brings the phone back to his face. “No random Russian noun for me today?”
Ilya’s eyes catch on a cigarette burn on the nightstand he’d brought from home when he first moved in here. He’d forgotten. Kiri had chain smoked in his old bedroom for half an hour straight after her asshole boyfriend broke up with her and stole her car, while Ilya and Alexei planned in the living room how they would beat the shit out of him next time anyone saw him. He’d been fourteen then, Alexei a worldly eighteen. An adult, a man. And Kiri had come out of the room and said she had slipped and the cigarette butt had hit the nightstand and she was very sorry, and Alexei said you’d have to do worse than that to fuck this place up.
He hasn’t seen Kiri since before the draft, has no idea what happened to her. Maybe Svetlana would know, but they never liked each other, had that strange incomprehensible enmity between them that teenage girls did sometimes.
“Ilya? Hey, Ilya, you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” Ilya says, tearing his gaze back to Shane. “No nouns for you, handsome Shane.” And then, as if it is an admission of guilt, “I don’t think I want to teach you Russian from here.”
“Okay,” Shane says, softly. “I’ll talk to you later, yeah?”
“Yes, of course.” Ilya focuses on the screen, the light in front of him. His Shane. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” Shane says, with that smile of his, and the call ends.
He wanders Moscow the next day, calls Svetlana up for lunch. It is Friday. The funeral is tomorrow, the dinner immediately after, and then Sasha’s invitation. He will sleep all day on Sunday, and then, Monday morning, he will fly home.
“You look very handsome, you know,” Svetlana says, when he sits down with her in the cafe. “I’m so glad you didn’t wear Adidas today. I just want to put you in linen sometimes.”
Ilya rolls his eyes, gives her the obligatory compliment on her dress—Balenciaga, although he pretends not to know. He scans the menu. He’s never heard of this place before, but she likes it, says all her friends think it is comfortable and chic.
Svetlana has many friends. He knew this, of course—you cannot sell luxury cars without a gift for sociability—but he didn’t quite realize how many she still had in Moscow. The head chef sends a complimentary moelleux at the end of their meal.
Licking the chocolate off his spoon, Ilya looks out of the window, watches a little sunlight spear through the grey sky. “Do you remember Kiri?” he asks, surprising himself as he says it.
Svetlana looks at him. “I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
Ilya nods. This, he expected.
“I think she married… oh, what was his name. Pasha? Petr?”
Ilya has no idea who this man is. But, because he loves Svetlana and wants to tell her true things, he says, “I was just thinking about that time her boyfriend stole her car. We were young, then.”
Nineteen years ago. A whole lifetime, it seems. Two lifetimes.
Svetlana says, “Alexei was so convinced he was going to strike the fear of God into that boy.”
It’s the first time either of them have mentioned Ilya’s brother. For the first time since he got the call, he feels— he’s not sure. Something in the heart of him, some sadness he thought he’d cast aside a long time ago. The memory of a wound.
And Svetlana continues, “I miss him, you know. But I’ve missed Alexei for a long time.”
Ilya nods, and takes another bite of his cake. This, he can relate with.
After lunch, Svetlana takes his arm and makes him walk with her through all the prettiest shops in town, crystals and diamonds weeping over everything, and Ilya enjoys the ease of it, the way dressmakers assume Ilya is Svetlana’s longsuffering, bankrolling husband while the two of them know the truth. She forces him into a tailor shop so she can buy him something nice to take home, as if he is a little boy visiting his grandmother.
He stands in his underwear in the fitting room while they measure his thighs and his chest. “Such a good show, Ilya,” Svetlana says, and the tailor’s assistant laughs.
“This is what I am to you?” Ilya jokes, while Svetlana sips her coffee. “Just a little eye candy?” Meanwhile, the tailor is gentle with the tape measure around the awkward shape of his destroyed knee.
“So,” she says, “what is your life now that you are retired and old?”
So happy. This is what Ilya would say, but not in front of strangers who think Svetlana is his wife. So, so happy, so full of life, full of everything. He didn’t know it could be like this, sunlight at all hours. Even the cold is beautiful to him.
“I fear the rookies are untrainable,” he says instead, because this is also somewhat true. He reviews tape with Shane in the evenings and complains at their stupidity when Shane comes back from practice looking dogged and rough. Shane isn’t the captain anymore, not fast enough to justify it, but everyone looks up to him anyway. He’s the oldest on the Cens by four years, and fighting for his life to stay on the ice. All the sports broadcasters are already talking about him as if he’s past his prime. Sometimes Ilya jokes, privately and morbidly, in his own mind, that of the two of them, Shane’s the one who’s more likely to kill himself once he retires.
The rookies are not so bad, really. He saw worse plays when he was a rookie, and the things he notices now are things you can only notice from playing hockey at the highest possible level for twelve consecutive years. He just likes to see if he still has the eye that captains should have—and he does.
Svetlana ogles his ass blatantly when he turns around for pinning and draping, and Ilya grins at her in the mirror. She has chosen a very dark teal for him, almost black, in a fabric that hugs his body a little closer than most straight men might be comfortable with.
Then Ilya looks at himself. Three years off the ice has changed his body, made his thighs thicker and his stomach softer.
He looks like his brother.
Ilya sucks in a sharp breath, too fast, and gets poked. He waves off the apologies, readjusts so that they can compare swatches. In his own face he can see it. There is a great, gaping well of grief that has been waiting for him ever since he stepped off the ice, and he will do anything, anything, not to fall in.
Saturday dawns, too cold to be comfortable but not cold enough to feel clean. Lara has already made him breakfast, which makes him feel like a piece of shit.
One hour before the service, Ilya drives Lara and little Zhenya to the funeral home. He manages the funeral expenses and the menu for the dinner. Lara says very little and asks him for nothing. During a quiet stretch, he says, stiltedly, that he is sorry for her loss. She nods very serenely.
Ilya also manages the train of Alexei’s friends and business partners who come in as if Alexei’s death is just another party. Lara treats them all with the same bland kindness with which she has hosted Ilya, so all Ilya can really do is shake their hands and let her rest, for a moment. Let Ilya do the talking. He is, after all, very good at managing.
Everyone knows what has become of him, but no one is rude enough to refuse to shake his hand, at least. Probably for the sake of Lara, who is a perfect picture of dissociated stillness. Ilya realizes he doesn’t even know how old she is.
The funeral passes. Ilya says nothing, except for the prayer at the end. He helps to carry the coffin to the grave site.
Dinner is livelier than the funeral, much livelier than his own father’s wake. “Rozanov,” one of Alexei’s friends says—Nikolai, Ilya thinks. He slaps Ilya on the back hard enough to bruise. “Your brother was a wild man, ah? But a good one, very good one.”
Ilya laughs. “Yes, he was,” he lies, and pours another shot back. He looks around. Zhenya is staring at him.
“Little Zhenya,” Ilya says to her, crouching down to meet her height. “Last time I saw you, you were much smaller. Six years old, I think.” He grins, and she doesn’t smile back, but she doesn’t flinch, either, so Ilya thinks it is okay. “Now you are already twelve!”
Of course it means nothing that Zhenya’s father died when she was twelve. There is no family curse. It is a coincidence of years only; Ilya was twenty when Zhenya was born, which means Alexei must have been twenty-four. Now, twelve years later, of course Zhenya is twelve.
In the rigid, precise way of pre-teens, Zhenya says, “I’m thirteen.”
Ilya looks up at Lara helplessly. Lara says, softly, “Just last month was her birthday.”
“Ah,” Ilya says, and he pulls out the pearlescent button shaped like a squirrel that he got from the tailor shop. “I got this for you yesterday.”
Zhenya takes it, runs her thumb over it carefully, and Ilya has to turn away, so that he does not see himself thumbing over his mother’s crucifix.
She is thirteen, not twelve. There is no curse, or whatever story Ilya was imagining. But then, Ilya knows stories mean nothing—the truth will out. Accident, or no accident. Pills, or no pills.
Their family is well-connected enough in Russia and Ilya famous enough in North America that Larisa Rozanova had to put out a press statement about Alexei’s death. He died from a mugging gone wrong, tragic for the whole Rozanov family, left behind wife and daughter, etcetera. Of course, it was a hit. Ilya pities his brother who had everything—who had a wife, a child, had the easy acceptance of their father and the confidence of a man who could live with what he was—and still was not satisfied, still had to hide bricks of coke in his closet as if he didn’t know where it would lead him.
Ilya has to leave. He shakes Lara’s hand. “If you and your daughter ever want to visit me, please call,” he says. “I will be happy for you to come.” He does not need to say it to Larisa: Alexei is not here anymore to follow you.
Sasha greets him with a shot of vodka and a kiss on the cheek. Svetlana raises a glass to him from the bar, and Ilya settles.
The last time he was here… it was a long time ago. Maybe two or three years before even his father’s funeral. It amazes him that such a place still exists.
“No cocaine for our good boy Ilya?” At least Sasha doesn’t wait for an answer. He wraps an arm around him and steers him to Svetlana.
Ilya kisses her on the cheek, too, and leans against the bar next to her to scan the place. The same red lights, easy to hide under. The same single-stall bathrooms around the corner, the same music that is not so much loud as it is insistent, more felt than heard.
“What do you want to do tonight?” Svetlana asks him, mouth brushing his ear. Sasha pulls out a blunt and lights up, while Ilya gazes into the crowd.
Beautiful men are dancing with other beautiful men. And women, too, dance with each other and with the beautiful men. It is not exactly a gay club, more of a friendly sort of place. Certainly friendly enough to be illegal, if legal means what a police officer will allow.
“Dance, at least,” Sasha groans, and Ilya lets himself be led, dragging Svetlana along with them.
She puts a hand on his shoulder and he grins, releases the tension. He doesn’t have to hold it here. He moves, sweating for the first time since he landed in this almost-cold country, enjoying the eyes of the people around him. He looks good, he knows. Maybe he should send Shane a picture.
It still feels unusual for Ilya to be in a club with no desire to pick up, to even kiss anyone in the bathroom. He feels awkward, his body reaching for things that aren’t there. Still, he dances and enjoys the feel of it for its own sake, enjoys laughing at Sasha’s cheesy moves and wolf whistling at Svetlana when she sinks to the ground in a lithe squat.
A new DJ takes over and opens with a deeper, harder song, quiet in the melody, just bass and something a little more menacing. Ilya checks his watch. 4 in the morning. “Come to the bathroom with me,” Sasha says, high and comfortable in Ilya’s space, and Ilya has no reason to say no.
Ilya locks the door behind them while Sasha pisses, and then Ilya takes his turn. When he turns around, Sasha is lighting up again. “No cocaine,” Sasha says languidly, “but maybe weed?”
“No, no,” Ilya says, leaning against the filthy bathroom wall, content to watch Sasha smoke, to maybe get a little high from Sasha hotboxing this stall. The song outside has intensified, layers over layers. Nothing exists outside of this bathroom. Ilya has no idea where Svetlana is.
“Are you okay?” Sasha asks, and Ilya blinks. This is not the kind of relationship they have with each other.
But nighttime or alcohol or age has softened Ilya, and maybe it has done the same to Sasha. Ilya doesn’t know. He says, “Yes. Alexei was a dick.”
Sasha snorts. He knows that better than anyone, probably. Sasha was even more obvious than Ilya, was the kid Alexei pushed around before he figured out Ilya was an even more accessible victim.
“Your only brother, though,” Sasha says. “Now it’s just you left.” He looks at the joint in his hand. And he says, “You don’t plan to come back to Russia.”
Ah. Ilya hadn’t thought of it in those words, but… no. He doesn’t. “I don’t think so,” Ilya says carefully, and Sasha nods.
He says, “I told Svetlana I wouldn’t. But if you wanted… I wouldn’t tell.”
Ilya— he can’t believe it, for a moment. He honestly cannot comprehend what Sasha is saying to him. And then, when he realizes, he is stunned into speechlessness. That Sasha might think— that Sasha might really believe Ilya could do that, could fuck him in this bathroom—
“Don’t get offended,” Sasha laughs. “It was only an offer. A favor for the poor little orphan boy.”
Now Ilya remembers why he never visited Sasha in Paris. “Rude,” Ilya says. “I am leaving.”
Sasha catches his wrist, and Ilya looks down at it, feeling oddly detached even though it’s his wrist, his skin. Sasha’s hand doesn’t feel right, fingers aren’t the right shape. He wants to go home. He wants Shane so fucking bad.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Sasha murmurs, and the fuck of it is, he’s right. Of course he didn’t. It was a real and true favor, something generous, in Sasha’s mind.
Ilya hates himself for it because the very thought is so cheap, thinks so lowly of a man he’s been friends with since he was a teenager, but he pities him. Sasha does not know what love is. That is a horrible and condescending thought, but Ilya is a man transformed by sunlight. Ilya used to be the same as Sasha, the same kind of root-creature spearing through the soil in the darkness, and then he was brought above ground into the light of day, and survived it.
Jesus. That’s not— Ilya shakes off Sasha’s hand. Ilya doesn’t want to be a man who thinks he’s better than anyone else except when he’s earned it. He says, tightly, “Good night, Sasha.”
Outside of the bathroom, the heat and the bass hit him harder than before. He needs— a drink, maybe, and then to go home, hopefully quietly enough that he doesn’t wake up Zhenya or Lara. He checks his phone. No messages, so they are safe, at least.
Svetlana eyes him when he finds her at the bar. She waves off the two women who have been fighting for the right to light her cigarette. “Did you and Sasha…”
“No. No.” Ilya orders two fingers of vodka, takes a sip to clear his head.
Svetlana says, “You will go home soon?”
“You know me too well. Too old to party anymore.” But he leans his head on her shoulder when she offers it, and lets himself feel all the weight of it. His family is dead. There is not a person on this earth who knows what he looked like as an infant, who can tell him what his first word was or when he learned to read. He has forfeited all right to pictures and heirlooms.
Svetlana is all he has left. “I love you,” Ilya says quietly.
She kisses the top of his head. “Yes,” she says, just as quiet. “I love you, too.”
Sasha stumbles out of the bathroom eventually, and finds them with the ease of a man who knows how to make his way through a dance floor. “Should I sleep with the German couple in the red latex?” he asks, and Svetlana laughs. “I’m serious!”
“It will be so squeaky,” Svetlana says, and Sasha shakes his head.
Ilya finishes his drink. “Okay,” he says, wiping his hands on his thighs. “Good night, my friends.”
He looks at Sasha. Sasha offers him a handshake, very serious. Ilya takes it, and then kisses his cheek, in something like apology and goodbye.
He kisses Svetlana, too, and then after coat check and peeling the sticker off the camera of his phone, he is suddenly outside. It’s not permitted to linger outside the entrance, for security, so Ilya walks four blocks before calling a car.
I am only a little drunk, he texts Shane, before he can really think about it, and this is what makes him realize he is maybe more drunk than he thought. And the text is in Russian, good God.
Ilya switches to an English keyboard. miss you, little spitfire. He feels full of something—romance, maybe, or homesickness. For the rest of his life he will be homesick. He texts, i give up all of russia for you.
No reply. It is… he cannot calculate it in his head. He looks it up online. Current time in Ottawa: 8:42pm. Even his Shane should still be awake. But no, he remembers, Shane had told him before, Yuna had forced him to go to some kind of concert or something. His phone will be off because he is so responsible and polite.
you are so responsible and polite he sends. And then, in case that doesn’t come across as fondly as he wants, he adds, i like you like that.
His car arrives. He settles into the back seat, looking at the screen in front of him. this feels nostalgic. i go to club and wait for you to text me back. only look at screen, no women.
The city passes him by. He likes this, too, Moscow at street-level, little stores and houses, quiet in the pre-dawn.
He could run with Shane in the morning. If Shane were here, he would make him a smoothie. Shane would make fun of him for his hangover. They would run along the riverfront, and fight like boys to get into the train station first. He thinks Shane would like the mosaics. He thinks Shane would like the bakery three blocks from his father’s house. He thinks Shane would like to see his mother’s grave.
He texts Shane: wish i had you with me here
where i grew up
Sunday dawns, for Ilya, at one in the afternoon.
He blearily drinks some water, searches in his suitcase for painkillers, and showers the worst of it off. When he gets out of his room half an hour later, Zhenya and Lara are, of course, at church.
This leaves Ilya with an afternoon of no obligations. He looks at his phone. Shane has texted him: I love you. I would love to see where you grew up. Call me?
He considers it. An afternoon in his room, calling Shane in secret, too afraid to be seen video calling with a man in public—no, he thinks. Not for his last day.
So Ilya puts on his coat and takes the train, and then a bus, and then walks for ten minutes to the secluded cemetery where Irina Rozanova is buried.
It’s warm, this Sunday afternoon. Ilya passes through a quiet meadow, some small birds chirping in the trees above him.
His mother’s grave is well-maintained. White marble with an elegant engraving: Irina Rozanova, 1967-2002, beloved wife and mother.
Ilya swallows. He sits down on her grave, and cuts her a slice of the cake he brought with him, rests it at the base of her headstone with a bouquet of daisies he picked on his way.
“Hello, Mama,” he says, throat clicking.
The sun is very bright. His hands are almost warm, despite the temperature.
“My Shane says hello,” he murmurs, looking around the cemetery. As a hockey player, he never sat in fields like this, never appreciated the outdoors. Even now, nature is an excursion for him, a plan to be made with David, the hiker. Except for the cottage, of course. The cottage is an exception for everything, it seems.
Of course his mother does not reply. It’s up to Ilya to keep the conversation going.
“We buried Alexei yesterday,” he says. “I thought it might be me first, but it was him.” This strikes him as a horrible thing to tell his mother, actually. “I’m sorry, Mama. But maybe it will be nice for you to see him if he finds you. He would love to see you again.”
Another pause. The wind makes the grass into one rolling wave. A cloud passes over the sun, but only for a moment.
Ilya eats his cake. “I might not ever come back here,” he says. “Our country has become unfriendly to me. You wouldn’t blame me for this, would you?”
No, of course she wouldn’t.
Ilya blinks. He is crying, now, when he could not cry at all yesterday, not once during the funeral or the wake. Ilya lies down on his side, facing the headstone. He reaches out to press his fingertips to the shape of the letters. The marble is cold, colder than he expected.
“I’m so very happy, Mama,” he whispers. “But I am so very sad sometimes, too.”
Mama cannot reply.
“I miss you every day of my life,” Ilya says in one hot rush, “every hour, every minute. I wish you were not the first of us to leave. I wish you were still here. I wish you had not left Alexei when he was sixteen. He was so angry after that.”
He sobs, wretchedly. “I wish you could have seen all the things I did. I won the Cup for you, Mama. I wish you had met Shane.” And, hoarsely, breath catching on every inhale, he says, “I wish you had not left me with Father. I wish you’d been there to help me. I was alone for so long, Mama.”
Curling into himself, a little, voice cracking, “I wanted you to take care of me again, just for a day, Mama. Just for a day. I wish you could come back and take care of me.”
The earth takes his tears, and his snot, and his sweat. Eventually, Ilya pushes himself back upright. The whole side of him is covered in grass and dirt, but not mud, at least.
“I love you, Mama,” Ilya says. He looks at the headstone for so long his eyes burn. “Thank you for taking care of me when you could. You were the best mother ever.”
He sits there for a long time, listening to the birds, watching the sun dance on top of the grass and the trees, make shadows out of headstones. And then Ilya stands, and brushes the dirt off his clothes, and walks back to the bus stop.
In the train station, there is a painting of a worker, broad and muscular, hammer held over head, a forge fire lighting him from below. The sun through a skylight, precise like a missile, makes him beautiful and dramatic.
Ilya sees this, a painting he passed over dozens of times in his youth, and thinks of Shane, all the muscle, the labour of him. The teeth-gritting effort Shane puts into knowing him and loving him besides.
He takes a picture and sends it to Shane. Caption: hero of the proletariat is almost as sexy as you
Shane replies immediately. Call me, handsome.