Chapter Text
From Vasilyev, by I. G. Rozanov
He answered every question I asked him for four days.
On the fifth I stopped asking, and we drove out to the arena where he learned to skate, which is a parking structure now. He stood in it for eleven minutes and did not say one word.
That is the only passage in this book he asked me to remove.
It is the only one I refused.
His mother arrived at nine forty on a Tuesday with a folder under her arm, which meant it was already decided.
Shane knew the folder. He'd been looking at versions of that folder his whole adult life. Folders meant Reebok, or a foundation gala, or a cereal company that wanted him holding a fucking bowl. Folders were never a conversation. Folders were always a schedule with a bow on it.
"There's coffee," he said, not turning around.
"I can see that there's coffee, Shaney."
He was at the counter with four containers open in front of him, portioning out chicken, broccoli and rice for the week, because it was Tuesday and Tuesday was when he did that. Sunday was linens. Thursday was the deep clean the cleaner had already done, which he did again. He was aware of how this looked. He had a therapist who was also aware of how this looked.
Yuna set the folder down on the island. She didn't open it. She poured herself a coffee, and stood on the other side of the counter watching him weigh out rice with an expression he had learned to be nervous about around the age of eleven.
"So," she said.
"Mm."
"How would you feel about a book."
Shane put the scale down.
"A what?"
"A book. About you." She said it pleasantly and as though it had already happened. "Penguin's been circling for two years and I've been putting them off because the timing was wrong. It isn't wrong anymore. You just won another Cup, you're going into the last year of your deal, and the foundation needs a fundraising engine that isn't another golf tournament where your father gets sunburned."
"I don't want a book."
"You don't even know what it's supposed to look like."
"I don't want to know."
"It's the origin story." She lifted the folder and put it down again, which was as close as Yuna Hollander ever came to a gesture. "Where you came from. The six a.m. drives, your grandmother's apartment, the draft. What it means for a kid in Scarborough to turn on the TV and see your face. The publisher's calling it inspirational, which means they'll put a photo of you at eleven on the cover and everyone will cry on a plane."
Shane went back to the rice, mostly so he had somewhere to put his hands.
"That's not a book, that's a commercial, Mom."
"It's a commercial that pays for twelve hundred kids to have equipment." She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. "All the proceeds. Every cent. Your name on the cover and not one dollar in your pocket, which is also, incidentally, extremely good for you in a contract year."
And there it was. He could feel the refusal he'd been assembling collapse quietly in his chest… piece by fucking piece.
Because what was he going to say? No, I don't want to fund the foundation. No, I'd rather not talk about Mom and Dad. No, I have a very specific reason I can't spend who knows how long with someone whose job is asking me the most personal questions, and I'm not going to tell you what it is, and also I've never told you what it is, and also I'm thirty in May.
"How long," he said.
"Six months. Through the season. They want it written from inside, so there'd be travel, home games, a few trips... the house in Scarborough, your junior town, wherever else it goes." She sipped her coffee. "Full access. That's the whole pitch. Otherwise it reads like a press release and nobody buys it."
"Full access?"
"Within reason. We'd have approval on the manuscript"
We. Shane didn't say anything about the we.
"I don't like interviews, mom," he said instead, which was completely true and also completely useless.
"Shaney." His mother's voice softened about four percent, which from her was an embrace. "You're extremely good at interviews. That's the issue. You've been doing them for eleven years and I've watched every single one and I still couldn't tell a stranger one thing about you."
She held on to her mug on the counter. "Which, incidentally, is exactly why they'll buy it. Eleven years of nothing. Everybody wants to know who's actually inside the jersey they're wearing. Whose poster is on their kid's wall. Whose face is on the overpriced protein powder they keep buying." She took a sip. "Nobody has ever got an authentic word out of you, Shaney. And now there's going to be three hundred pages with your name on the front."
He looked Up.
"Anyway," she said, "it doesn't matter, because they've already got a writer and he's the reason I said yes."
"You said yes."
"I said we'd talk. Which is different."
"It's really not."
"He's the best in the country," Yuna said. "Two books. The first one he wrote at twenty-four and it's still on syllabi, and the second one outsold everything on the list that year and got optioned. He does the deep ones... the books where you finish it and feel like you actually met the person. And I think the people deserve to meet you, Shaney." She turned the folder around and slid it across the counter with one finger.
"Ilya Rozanov."
"Yes," Shane said.
There was a small silence. It arrived about a half second after he'd spoken and then kept going.
Yuna's eyebrows moved. Only slightly. The same move she'd deployed when he was seven and didn't want to eat his greens, when he was sixteen and said he didn't want to go to the graduation party, and again at twenty-two when she asked whether he was seeing anyone and he said the word no in a voice way too high.
"Yes?" she said.
"I mean." Shane picked the scale back up. He put it down. "I mean, if he's... you said he's good. So. It's fine. Let's do it."
"You haven't read the proposal."
"You just told me the proposal."
"I told you the first page of the proposal."
"It's the foundation. It's twelve hundred kids." He was aware his ears had gone hot, which was the most fucking reliable traitor in his entire body. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I'm not looking at you like anything."
"You're doing the thing."
"I don't have a thing, Shaney."
She took another sip of her coffee, entirely unhurried, and did not stop looking at him.
She left at eleven with the folder still on the counter, because of course she did. And Shane spent the next forty minutes reorganising a cupboard that didn't need it. He knew what he'd done. He'd known before she got to the door.
He'd said yes to Ilya Rozanov in under a second, in front of the most observant woman in the world.
And then, standing in front of the open cupboard with a jar of something in each hand, he did the arithmetic properly for the first time.
Six months. Full access. His apartment, his parents' kitchen, hotels, planes, the locker room, the old rink, the town where he played junior. A man who is paid to notice things, who is famous for noticing things. In Shane's life. Twice a week. Until fucking April.
Shane put the jars down.
He shut the cupboard so hard the glass rattled.
Here is what nobody knew, because Shane had never said it to a living person:
He had been seventeen years old at the World Junior Championship in Ottawa and he had spent the entire tournament half-obsessed with a Russian centre he had never spoken to. Not in a... it wasn't like that. Or it was, and he was seventeen, and he had approximately the emotional vocabulary of a dial tone, so what it looked like from the inside was: that guy is unbelievable.
Because he was. Rozanov played like he'd never been told not to. He played like nobody had ever put a hand on his shoulder at twelve and said: be smart, be responsible.
He took shifts he had no business taking and he scored on them, and when he didn't score he laughed about it on the bench with his head thrown back. And he chirped in three languages, two of them badly, and he had this dirty-blond curly mess crammed under his helmet and he was - objectively - the best-looking person Shane had ever seen in his life. And seventeen years old Shane had already spent two years training himself not to notice things like that.
He had noticed all of it anyway. Every bit of it. And had filed it, at seventeen, under competitive interest, and then gone back to the hotel room he shared with a defenceman from Red Deer and lain in the dark thinking about it for a while. And then not thought about why he was thinking about it, because that was a door with a wall in front of it and that wall was massive.
They never spoke. Not once. Two captains, one round-robin game and one semifinal, ten days in the same building, and the sum total of their communication was Rozanov saying something to him at a faceoff in Russian that was almost certainly obscene, and Shane not reacting. Then the semifinal, second period, and a stick came up high and caught Rozanov across the face.
A Canadian stick. Shane's own defenceman. A kid from Brandon with good feet and no idea where his hands were, who cried in the locker room afterwards, later played nine NHL games and was out of hockey by twenty-four.
Shane was maybe fifteen feet away. He remembered the sound. He remembered the way Rozanov went down: not dramatically, not spinning, just down. One hand going to his face. And he remembered being the second person to reach him and not knowing what to do when he got there, so he just crouched next to him with his glove off, saying hey and okay and they're coming, and Rozanov said something in Russian through his teeth over and over, the same three words. Shane never found out what they were.
Then the trainers. Then the stretcher. Then the game restarted, because games always fucking restart.
Canada won. Shane was named tournament MVP. Somebody handed him a medal.
He went top overall in June. Rozanov went nowhere, because by then there had been two surgeries and a retina that didn't reattach the way anyone wanted, and with it the one thing a hockey player cannot lose: the ability to judge where a puck will be at full speed.
What got printed in the transactions column was withdrawn from draft eligibility, which is a very small sentence for what it actually is.
Shane didn't call him.
He didn't have a number, for one thing. And he was not about to ask anybody for it - not a coach, not a trainer, not the federation, not at seventeen, not about him. And anyway... there was no reason to call. They weren't friends. They'd never had a conversation. He was about to go first overall in June and to become the most photographed player of his generation and he had no idea what he would even say... hi, we've never spoken, I'm sorry about your eye, my teammate did it.
So he did nothing. And then a few months went by. And then it was too late to say anything. But he thought about Rozanov. Even though it never fully made sense.
Not constantly. Not in any way he'd have been able to explain if somebody had asked. Just... every so often, something would snag. A Russian kid coming up through the system with a similar stride. A highlight package from that tournament. Once, a guy in an airport with the same build and the same hair, from behind, and Shane's whole chest hammered for some reason, before the man turned around. He'd just wonder what happened to that guy. And then he'd wonder why the fuck he was wondering.
And then he'd stop, because that was another door with a wall in front of it.
He was nineteen when he stopped being able to not know.
There was no moment. This had always annoyed him about it afterwards. No scene, no person, nothing he could point at and blame. Just a Tuesday inFebruary, in a hotel room in Saskatoon, lying on top of the covers with the television on mute, when the sentence simply arrived in his head fully formed and would not leave again. He was nineteen and he was in the best physical condition of his life and he lay on that bed for about two hours without moving.
And then, because he was Shane, he did the only thing he knew how to do with a fact he could not use.
He filed it.
Neatly. Alphabetically. Practically. And then he went back through everything and re-labelled it, like you'd redo a whole spreadsheet after finding an error in row one: every locker room he'd been too careful in, every girlfriend he'd been extremely kind to and nothing else, every time he'd looked at something for a second too long and then looked at a wall. And somewhere in that filing, near the back, there was a Russian centre in Ottawa with his head thrown back on a bench, laughing at nothing.
Shane looked at that one for about four seconds.
Then he put the folder back and did not open it again for three years.
He was twenty-two when he found out what that had actually been.
Ottawa, of all places. Second intermission, a corridor full of cameras, a media scrum he'd done four hundred times.
He'd been giving the same answers he always gave - we've got to be better in the neutral zone, credit to their goalie, we'll take a look at the video - when a voice from the back said:
"Hollander. You scored twice tonight and both times you were looking at the net before the pass came. Both times. About half a second early." A pause. "Does it arrive as a picture, or do you just know?"
Shane looked up.
He was taller than the rest of them, which is why Shane saw him first. Media badge on a lanyard. A recorder in one hand and no notebook, because he wasn't writing anything down. Dirty-blond curls, longer now, pushed back off his face. And a scar... thin, pale, maybe four centimetres, running up from the outer corner of his left eye into the eyebrow.
And here was the thing Shane found out, at twenty-two, in a corridor in Ottawa, in front of a dozen cameras.
He had spent five years remembering that tournament as a thing about hockey. He'd had the explanation ready and he'd used it on himself for years:
the guy played like that, nobody could have looked away, it was professional interest, it was competitive, it was... normal.
And then Ilya Rozanov stood at the back of the scrum with a ruined eye and five years on him, and was still - even now, even in the very back, even with this scar - the most beautiful person Shane had ever seen in his life. And the explanation came apart in about a second and a half. Along with his ability to speak English.
Oh, he thought, standing there with a microphone in his face. Oh. Fuck. That's what that was.
"Uh," he said, on television. "Sorry. Say again?"
And Ilya Rozanov - who had not spoken to him in five years, and who had every reason to hate the entire Canadian roster from that tournament - looked at him in the same building where it had happened, and said it again, slower and with a smile on his face.
Shane answered it with absolutely nothing. We're trying to make the right play. Credit to their goalie.
He went back to the locker room, sat in his stall with his gear half off, and looked up the name on his phone with his hands not entirely steady.
Ilya Rozanov, Senior Writer, hockey. A bio photo. A column from that morning. And a paragraph at the bottom that said he had come to Canada at sixteen to play major junior in Rimouski, that his career had ended at the World Juniors, that he held degrees from Concordia and lived in Montreal.
Lived in Montreal.
Shane had been living in Montreal for four years.
Ilya's first book came out a year after that.
The Quiet Part... a hundred and ninety pages about the Russian junior pipeline, the boys who get shipped to Quebec at sixteen with forty words of French and none of English, and no idea when they'll see their mothers again, and what happens to the ones it doesn't work out for. Ilya was in it. Not the whole way through, and never as the main event - but the chapter about the surgeries was his, and the chapter about the year afterward was his, and the last four pages were about a nineteen-year-old in a rented room in Rimouski learning the word retina in three languages.
It was the most honest thing Shane had ever read about hockey, and it was not, in any way, about hockey.
He'd bought it in an airport. He'd read it twice.
He had never mentioned it to a single person.
There was also a page, about two-thirds of the way through, where Ilya mentioned a boyfriend he'd had in his second year at Concordia, in passing, in the middle of a paragraph about something else entirely... just how you'd mention a roommate or a car. No announcement. No chapter about it. Just the fact of it, set down in the middle of a sentence and left there.
Shane had read that page more times than he was willing to count. Sitting up in a hotel bed at one in the morning in a city he couldn't remember, with the reading light on and a preseason game the next day.
Like it's nothing, he'd thought. Like it costs him nothing at all.
That was six years ago.
In those six years, Ilya Rozanov had asked Shane Hollander somewhere north of four hundred questions, and Shane had answered every single one with nothing at all. It became a thing. Not a public thing - nobody outside the rink would have clocked it - but a thing between them, and Shane understood it completely and had never once acknowledged it.
Rozanov asked good questions. That was the first problem. He didn't ask what Shane thought about the power play; he asked whether Shane had noticed he only used his backhand in the third period, whether the new kid's shooting mechanics reminded him of anyone, whether it was strange to be the youngest guy in the room one year and the oldest the next. He asked things that would have been genuinely interesting to answer.
Shane never answered them. He gave him the neutral zone. He gave him credit to their goalie. Once, memorably, he gave him a nineteen-word response about compete level that Hayden had quoted back at him for a month.
And then, somewhere in about year two, the questions started doing something else as well.
Hollander. You played twenty-six minutes tonight and you look better than guys who played twelve. What's the secret? Some of us would like to know.
Hollander. That's four games in five nights. Are they letting you sleep, or is the stamina more of a spiritual matter?
Hollander. Your shootout move is the same one you used in juniors. Twelve years. Nobody's solved it. At what point do the rest of us just admit it isn't fair?
Always with a real question buried in it. Always perfectly printable. Always with about four extra degrees of warmth on it that nobody else in that corridor was getting, and that no recording would ever pick up. Every man in that scrum heard a charming Russian being charming, because that was what Ilya Rozanov was famous for. Shane heard something else, because Shane had read page one hundred and thirty-one.
He gave him nothing.
Every time.
He said we work hard and the guys have been great and I'll have to look at the tape, and he kept his face doing what his face had been doing since he was seventeen. And then he went home to an empty apartment and thought about it for half the night. Because he heard all of them. He heard every single one. He had, if he was honest - and he was honest approximately twice a year, usually around two in the morning - a fairly complete mental filing system of the best ones.
And Ilya Rozanov, as far as Shane could tell, had drawn the only reasonable conclusion available to him, which was that Shane Hollander was the most oblivious man in professional sport. He'd said something like that , once, on a podcast. Shane had listened to it in his dark car, alone.
"Look, he's the best player alive and I think he's a very nice man, but I have asked that man roughly four hundred questions and I have never once received a real answer. I'm not sure he's aware I exist. Honestly, at this point it's a personal project."
The host had laughed.
Shane had sat in the dark for a while.
The email came at 4:12 that afternoon, while Shane was on the stationary bike doing nothing useful.
From: I. Rozanov Subject: the book
Mr. Hollander,
Your mother tells me you've agreed, which I admit I did not expect, so let me say up front that I'm glad.
A few things you should know before we start. I'd rather tell you now than have you work it out in February, when we're four months in and it's too late for either of us to get out of it.
I don't write the version people want. Vasilyev was told exactly this before he signed, and he signed anyway, and he still isn't speaking to me - which I think is a reasonable outcome for a book that good.
I will ask you things you don't want to answer. You'll give me your media voice, which is excellent (genuinely, it's the best in the league, I've been studying it for six years) and I'll wait, and eventually you'll get bored of it before I do. That's the whole method. There isn't a trick.
I've attached the schedule. First session Thursday, your place, two hours. Bring nothing.
One more thing, and then I'll leave you alone until Thursday.
Ottawa. The semifinal. You crouched down next to me on the ice and told me they were coming.
I've wanted to thank you for twelve years and there has never once been a good moment, so I'm doing it in an email like a coward.
I. Rozanov
P.S.: I recognise this is the longest thing you and I have ever exchanged. Traditionally you'd reply with something about the neutral zone.
Shane read it four times.
Then he got off the bike, sat down on the floor of his own gym with his back against the wall and his phone in both hands, and understood exactly what he had agreed to that morning.
Six months.
Full access.
The only person who had ever asked him a real question. Here… in his house, on Thursday, with a recorder running.
A man who, considering page one hundred and thirty-one, was also not straight, and did not think that this fact was worth more than half a sentence.
He'll know, he thought. Within a fucking minute. He'll walk in here and look at me... at the private me... and he'll know.
And then, immediately underneath it, in a voice he did not recognise and did not want to hear again:
Good.
He typed: Looking forward to it.
He deleted it.
He typed: Thursday works.
He deleted that too.
He sat on the floor for eleven minutes, which he would not find out for another five months was a number that meant something, and then he typed the first completely unguarded thing he had said to anyone in a decade, and sent it before he could stop himself:
You remembered that?
The reply came back in under a minute.
I remember all of it, Hollander. That's why I am good at my job.
Thursday. 10am. I'll bring the coffee, bet yours is terrible, I've seen the ad.