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Yuna Nakamura, age 19, mails a reassuring letter to her mother, promising that she loves Montreal, that McGill is everything she dreamed, that even in calculus, her least favourite subject, her grades are still top of the class. She tells her mom she's going to the hockey game that night, McGill vs Queens, although she doesn't mention that David, who usually sits two rows behind her in calculus, is on the team. She's supposed to be waiting until she has her degree to date. But, well. If there's anyone else from California in her year she hasn't met them yet and it's cold, it feels like it's been cold for years already and they're not even halfway through winter. And David smiles warmly every time she catches him staring at her. And she does love hockey. Something fun to concentrate on while she tries not to worry about how much it will cost to fly back home for New Year's.
David finally asks her out in January. He gets tickets to a Metros game. Either he’s paid attention closely or he just really likes hockey – either way, Yuna’s happy. If this is going to be an anniversary that matters, she’s glad it’s one that will make a good story.
Eventually, she makes more friends – girls from her political science class who want to talk about feminism and career planning, a few Chinese-Canadian students from Vancouver who try to include her. They join a French class together in the evenings, safety in numbers. The others mostly speak Mandarin at home, and while French is very different the ability to jump between languages is there. Yuna never manages to pick up much – she’s only ever spoken English. David speaks English and mediocre Anglo-Canadian French that his Québécois teammates chirp him about. It doesn’t mean anything. The hockey players, unlike Yuna’s political science study group, are entirely uninterested in the question of secession and the place of French as a political statement. They probably don’t know anything about the history of Japanese internment if it comes to that. Yuna finds them relaxing, with their consistent patterns of communication and willingness to let any conversation be derailed into hockey statistics.
David asks Yuna to marry him right after Montreal wins the Stanley Cup, after they've yelled and kissed and cheered on his dingy sofa. David has a job lined up with the federal government. Yuna’s still interviewing, but she already knew she wanted to end up in Ottawa, and has drafts of visa paperwork sorted neatly into folders on her desk. When she calls her mom the next day, twisting the phone cord and watching the clock tick down the money in her bank account, she’s not surprised at the hesitation in her mother’s voice – Yuna was supposed to move back to California, to support her mother and grandmother as they age. But Yuna’s fallen in love with pleasant-faced Canadian who smiles reflexively when she walks in the room and cooks her dinner and makes her help him with crosswords because he likes writing the answers in but she’s the one who knows them.
“Don’t have children until your career is established,” Yuna’s mother tells her as she fixes her veil, fussing over Yuna’s wedding dress. “You never know what might happen.” Yuna doesn’t tell her mother they haven’t even decided if they want any children yet. She can’t imagine considering it with anyone but David and as her mother says – anything can happen. She, after all, was supposed to grow up with five or six siblings in a sun-filled single family home, not alone in her grandmother's apartment.
“Don’t worry, mom,” Yuna says, hugging her close. “I got my first bonus last quarter and I’ve locked down three deals this quarter already.” She likes working in Sales. Every conversation is a game she can win.
Shane isn't an accident, but sometimes Yuna feels like it was as her body grows and stretches without her permission. She hates maternity leave, somehow even more than she’d expected. She wishes, desperately, that she could give the time to David, who escapes his job at 5pm every day to take their tiny squalling scrap of humanity away from her to cuddle and bathe and feed and coo at. She would feel guilty about making him do so much childcare, except that he looks so happy burbling right back at Shane. David, without even thinking about it, speaks that incomprehensible baby language in a way Yuna could never imagine. She gratefully leaves them to it, taking the evenings and weekends to go shopping, balance their bank books, hire someone to fix the broken gutter, neatly prep meals for the week.
They put Shane in hockey when he's three years old, because they both like hockey and because it’s what you do with Canadian toddlers during the long winters. Yuna takes him mostly, Saturday mornings, so David gets a chance to sleep in – he still spends every hour he’s not working attending with deep interest to Shane’s disjointed sentences and playing over and over mindless toddler games that make Yuna want to scream. So hockey is nice, something she can do with Shane. And Shane loves it. Yuna’s never heard him laugh more than that first year of skating when he falls over constantly. “Ice is better, Mum. It's always the same.” Yuna likes it too, watching Shane getting better by the hour, by the minute almost. The other parents are mostly men so she can pretend that the only way she stands out is by being a woman. And like David’s hockey friends, both at McGill and the ones he still plays pickup games with in the park sometimes, hockey dads are easy to talk to. They all watch the professional games and want to dissect Gretzky's play with her and love watching their sons bobble around the rink.
Yuna researches schools with an intensity that David watches with mild bafflement. She chooses a French immersion school for Shane, hoping it will help him fit it – in Ottawa, in hockey, in whatever he ends up doing when he grows up. More languages can only help. Shane holds back on the playground in ways she worries about. School doesn’t help; the only other kids he ever talks about are from hockey and even then she’s never one hundred percent sure they actually talk to him at school. Shane does his homework dutifully, because he’s the best son any mother could hope for, but he only really lights up for hockey practice. He does learn French, though.
Shane is a teenager when Yuna quits her job. She never intended to be a stay-at-home parent, but with Shane’s schedule, she feel like she’s almost never at home. She is, of course; Shane still has school to complete. But a lot of the time she’s at the rink, or driving to the rink, or driving from the rink to the gym, or driving back to the rink. They don’t get back to visit Shane’s grandmother as much as they’re supposed to, because Shane always has practice, and equipment is almost as expensive as plane tickets. Besides, Yuna isn’t sure she’ll be able to fully explain to her mother that Shane might, possibly, have a future as a professional athlete. It seems crazy to think about, not the kind of thing that anyone she knew would ever have considered, but Shane is so good. She can see it in how he skates, but also how he cares, how he wants to practice all the time. And how he pushes himself to learn how to fit in with his teammates. The endless rides in the car have their benefits – Shane can ask her questions about social interactions without having to try to meet her eyes and she equally has an excuse to keep her eyes on the road so he can’t see how upset she is that he’s upset. He would never bring her his problems again if he knew they scared her too. Instead, in the comforting obfuscation of Ottawa rush hour, they can replay conversations from the locker room and Yuna can explain some of the jokes and help Shane figure out what he can say in return. When she was Shane’s age, Yuna didn’t find the language of friendship intuitive either so she’s desperately grateful that this is something she can do for him, helping him understand the words people say that don’t mean what they sound like they mean. After all, hockey players are fairly straightforward if you’re not shy about swearing.
Yuna doesn’t remember when she started calculating Shane’s income in time. By the time he signs with Reebok, she knows they have enough saved that he can take two years off to heal and readjust before starting going back to school and still be able to afford a good four year university. If he gets a career ending injury, that is. The Rolex deal extends that to five years. She wonders whether he would want to go to university, if it became necessary. It’s almost impossible to imagine Shane not at the rink all hours but well. Anything can happen. Maybe if he went to university, he would have the time and space to meet someone. Maybe someone with the warmest smile in the world would sit two rows behind him and his life would be irrevocably changed. If that eventually comes to pass, Yuna will make sure he’s not worrying about the financial costs of it when he calls to tell her about it.
By the time Shane sits down across the kitchen table with Ilya Rozanov, eating lunch that David made them both like he belongs there, Yuna helplessly wonders if she ever spoke the same language as Shane at all. But Ilya clearly does, his touch and reassurance being enough to calm Shane’s anxiety when it spirals out of control. Yuna looks across the table at the boy her son has lost his heart to and mentally adds Russian to the list of languages she should, but cannot, speak.