Chapter Text
The sock is green.
Not a real problem. Not a problem anyone over the age of three would recognize as a problem. But Max is two, and Max wants the blue sock with the rocket ships, and the blue sock is in the washing machine because he wore it for two days straight and even I — who once wore the same practice jersey for an entire playoff run — even I have limits. Max does not care about my limits. Max is on the nursery floor in his diaper, flat on his back, screaming. His face is so red he looks sunburnt. His fists are going. His whole body is stiff with rage, this tiny furious person, and I love him so much it makes my teeth hurt but right now I am standing over him holding a green sock and losing.
"Max. Максимка. Look. Green. Is nice color. Frogs are green."
He screams louder. He kicks. One foot catches my shin and I let out a breath because this kid has legs. Shane says he'll be a forward. I say he'll be a goalie — he already has the temperament.
Across the room, Lena is in her crib. She's been awake for a while — I saw her on the monitor, lying there with her eyes open, doing nothing. Shane does the same thing. Lies still in the morning, brain already running, before the body catches up. I don't know if Lena's brain is running. She is two. She might just be looking at the ceiling because it's there.
"Morning, зайка."
She stands up. Holds the rail. "Papa." Arms up.
I pick her up with my free hand because the other hand is still holding this sock and I have forgotten it is there. She settles on my hip and her fingers find my collar. She's been doing this since she was tiny — grabs the collar of whatever I'm wearing and holds on. The pediatrician said it's a comfort thing. Shane said it's a control thing. I think she just likes collars. She's two. Not everything means something.
"PAPA! BLUE! BLUE SOCK!"
"Blue sock is wet, Max."
"BLUUUUUE!"
Max rolls onto his stomach and bangs his forehead against the carpet, which is padded, which is why we bought this carpet, because Max bangs his head on things when he's angry and Shane researched impact-absorbing carpet for two weeks and made a spreadsheet comparing density ratings and I said Shane, he is a baby, just get the thick one and Shane got the thick one but only after confirming the thick one also had the best density rating.
I crouch down with Lena on my hip. I put the green sock next to Max's face. He turns away from it. I put it on the other side. He turns again. We are doing this dance. We do this dance most mornings.
"Max. Green sock or no sock. Those are the choices."
He screams.
"Okay. No sock."
I leave the green sock on the floor. I carry Lena out. Max will follow in about ninety seconds because Max cannot stand being alone in a room more than he cannot stand a green sock. I know this. He knows this. The negotiation is a formality.
From downstairs — the coffee machine. That Italian thing Shane bought that I have never successfully operated. Not once. Shane has tried to teach me. He drew a diagram. The diagram is taped to the cabinet above the machine and it has arrows and labels and I still do it wrong every time and he still drinks what I make and says nothing because somewhere around year six he decided this was not a battle worth fighting.
Shane is downstairs. He has been up since five-thirty because he is Shane Hollander and five-thirty is practically sleeping in. I can hear him in the kitchen — the sound of a mug on the counter, the fridge opening, the small organized sounds of a man who moves through a kitchen the way he moves through everything: quietly, precisely, with a plan. The schedule is on the fridge. I can picture it from here. Monday. Color-coded blocks. His meeting at nine, my equipment meeting at eleven, practice at ten. Twins to Rachel at eight. Everything organized, everything planned, everything running on the structure he builds every week so that I can fill it with noise and children and whatever else I contribute to this household.
It works. He builds. I fill. We figured this out early.
Lena's fingers tighten on my collar as I carry her down the stairs. Her head is against my shoulder. She's warm and heavy and she smells like baby shampoo and the particular smell of a child who has been sleeping — a warm, close, bread-like smell that I could breathe forever. I press my mouth against her hair. She tolerates this.
"Shane, your son is having a political crisis about —"
The sound.
I stop. Third stair from the bottom.
Not the mug. Not glass breaking — that comes after, smaller, secondary. The first sound is something else. A thud. Heavy but soft. Like weight hitting the floor. A sound I have heard before, on the ice, when someone goes down wrong, when the legs just go and the body follows and the sound is different from a check — it's the sound of a person who did not choose to fall.
"Shane?"
Nothing from the kitchen.
Lena's fingers dig into my collar. She doesn't know what happened. She felt my body change — the muscles, the breathing, something — and she responded. Children feel you before they understand you.
"Shane."
I put Lena down. On the stair. I take her fingers off my collar and I put her down and she makes a noise — not a word, just a sound, a protest — and I say "Stay here, зайка, stay" and I go down.
The kitchen.
Shane is on the floor. On his side, next to the island. The mug — Yuna's blue mug, the one from Japan, the one he uses every morning — is in pieces around him and the coffee is spreading across the tile. His right arm is under him but wrong. Not broken. Something worse. It's just there. Like it stopped being part of him. And his face —
His face is wrong. The right side has dropped. The mouth, the eye, the cheek — everything on the right side has slid, like the muscles holding it in place have let go. The left side is still Shane. The right side is someone I don't recognize.
His eyes are open. He's conscious. He's looking at me and his eyes are — this is the thing I will not be able to forget, this is the thing that will follow me into the dark for years — his eyes are clear. Terrified and clear. He knows what is happening to him. He is fully present inside a body that has just stopped working and he is looking at me and he knows.
"Shane. I'm here. I'm right here."
I'm on the floor. I don't remember going down. My knees are in the coffee and there's a piece of ceramic under my kneecap and I don't feel it. I have his head in my hands. The tile is cold under him and I should put something under his head but I don't want to leave him for a second, not for one second, not with his eyes looking at me like that.
His mouth moves. The left side. The right side doesn't. A sound comes out — not a word. Air. Just air shaped wrong.
"Don't try to talk. Don't try. I'm going to call an ambulance. You're going to be okay." I don't know that. I don't know anything. But the words come out because words come out, because I have always filled silences, because the alternative is the sound of his breathing which is wrong, which is too fast, which is scared.
My phone. My phone is — upstairs. In the nursery. On the changing table where I put it when I picked up Max. Shane's phone. The counter. I can see it, plugged in by the toaster, three feet away. I reach for it without letting go of his head and I can't reach it. I have to let go.
"I'm going to get the phone. Two seconds. I'm right here."
I let go. I stand. My knees are wet with coffee. I grab his phone and the screen is locked and I hold it in front of his face — it unlocks, the face recognition works even with the drooping, which means the phone still knows him even if his face doesn't look like his face — and I dial.
"Nine-one-one, what's your emergency."
"My husband. He collapsed. His face — one side of his face is drooping, he can't talk, his right arm isn't moving. I think —" The word. The word I don't want to say. "I think he's having a stroke."
"What's your address, sir?"
I give the address. I give it in English and the numbers come out right because numbers are the same in every language and in a crisis my brain goes to the thing that's most efficient.
"How old is your husband?"
"Thirty-eight."
"Is he conscious?"
"Yes. He's conscious. He's looking at me. He can't talk."
"Okay, sir. Paramedics are on the way. Stay with him. Don't move him. Can you tell me when the symptoms started?"
"I don't — I was upstairs. I heard him fall. Maybe two minutes ago. Maybe three."
"Okay. That's good. That's helpful. Keep him still. Keep talking to him. Help is coming." I put the phone on the floor, on speaker. I get back down. I put my hand on his cheek — the left side, the side that's still his.
"They're coming. Шейн, they're coming. You're going to be fine."
His left hand moves. Reaches for me. The grip is strong — the left side works, the left hand works — and his fingers close around mine and hold on with a force that has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with fear.
His eyes.
I cannot look away from his eyes.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
From upstairs — Max. Crying. Not the sock-crisis crying, the real crying, the scared crying. He can hear something wrong. Children hear it in the walls. And Lena — silence from Lena, which is worse, because Lena goes silent when she's scared, she goes still and holds whatever she can reach and waits.
I can't go to them. I can't leave Shane on the floor.
Shane's eyes move. Toward the stairs. Toward the sound of Max. His face — the working side — tightens. I can read this. Twenty years of reading this face. He's thinking about the children. He's on the floor with half his body not working and he's thinking about whether the children are okay.
"They're fine. They're upstairs. Max is being Max. I'll get them in a minute." His hand squeezes mine. Twice. Our thing. Two squeezes — I'm here, I love you, I've got you. We've been doing this since we were twenty-six. Under tables at events. On airplanes. In bed, in the dark, when we didn't have words or didn't need them. Squeeze squeeze. The whole language of us in two pulses.
I squeeze back. Twice.
The paramedics take eleven minutes. It feels like four hours. I stay on the floor with him. I hold his hand. I talk because talking is what I do — I tell him the paramedics are coming, I tell him he's going to be fine, I tell him Max is going to be okay, I tell him Lena is sitting on the stair holding her playing with her toys she leaves all over the stairs for apparently occasions like this. I tell him the coffee is going to stain the grout and he's going to be mad about it when he gets home. I tell him I love him. In English first, then Russian, because when it matters everything is in Russian.
"Ya tebya lyublyu. Slyshu?"
His eyes. Just his eyes. Holding mine. The hand gripping.
Max is screaming upstairs. Lena is silent. Shane is on the floor with a shattered mug and a broken face and my knees are in the coffee and I'm talking and the ambulance isn't here yet. The paramedics are calm. This is their job. They come in through the door I left unlocked and they assess him — penlight in the eyes, blood pressure cuff, questions I answer for him because he can't answer. They say stroke protocol and time of onset and which hospital and the words go through me like objects, heavy and specific.
"We need to transport him now. Time matters. Can you ride with us?"
The twins. The twins are upstairs. I can hear Max — his crying has changed, it's the confused crying now, the where-is-everyone crying. Lena hasn't made a sound.
"I have — my children are upstairs. They're two. I can't —"
"Is there anyone who can come?"
Rachel. Our nanny. Rachel is twenty minutes away and today is a workday and she was supposed to be here at eight, which is — I look at the clock on the stove — forty minutes from now.
"I'll call someone. I'll follow. Tell me which hospital."
They tell me. They lift Shane onto the stretcher and his left hand reaches for me as they lift him. I take it. I walk beside the stretcher through the kitchen, through the hallway, past the mug, past the coffee, past the fridge where the schedule says Monday in Shane's handwriting. At the front door they have to take him outside and there's a step and I have to let go.
"I'll be right behind you. Shane. I'm right behind you."
His hand lets go. His eyes stay on me as long as they can, over the shoulder of the paramedic, as they carry him down the front steps and toward the ambulance in the driveway. The neighbors are out. Someone is watching from across the street. I don't look at them. I watch the stretcher go into the ambulance and the doors close and the ambulance is in the driveway with its lights going and I am standing in the doorway of my house with coffee on my pants and my children are upstairs and my husband is being driven away.
I close the door. I go upstairs.
Lena is on the stair where I left her. She has not moved. Her hand is holding the hem of her own shirt, twisting it, because she couldn't reach my collar and she needed to hold something. Her face is — she's not crying. She's waiting. She's two years old and she's sitting on a stair waiting for someone to come back.
I pick her up. She grabs my collar immediately and her grip is tighter than usual and her face goes into my neck. I hold her. I carry her to the nursery. Max is on the floor — still on the floor, same position, but the crying has stopped and he's just lying there looking at the ceiling with his face blotchy and his chest heaving in the aftermath.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. Papa's here. Everything is fine."
Everything is not fine. But they are two and they need me to be a person right now, not the thing I am underneath, which is terror in a shape that has not finished forming. I change Max. I change Lena. I put clothes on both of them — whatever is closest, whatever I grab first, which means Max ends up in Lena's leggings because I'm not looking and Lena ends up in a shirt that's too big because it's Max's. I don't fix it. I carry them both downstairs, one on each hip, my arms full of children, and I put them in the playpen in the living room and I call Rachel.
"Rachel, I need you here now."
"I'm leaving in twenty min —"
"Now. Please. Shane is — Shane had to go to the hospital. I need to go."
"I'm coming." No more questions. I can hear her moving — keys, a door. "Ten minutes."
I hang up. I call my mother-in-law.
Yuna's phone rings three times. She picks up with the voice she always answers with — warm, practical, a voice that has been answering phones and solving problems for sixty-five years.
"Good morning, Ilya."
"Yuna. Shane collapsed. His face — he couldn't talk. The paramedics said stroke. They're taking him to the hospital."
Silence. Two seconds. I hear her breathing shift. Then: "Which hospital?"
“Queensway”
"We're coming."
"Yuna —"
"Ilya. We are coming." And then, quieter, the voice underneath: "Is he conscious?"
"He was when they took him. He knew me. He squeezed my hand."
A sound. Small. The sound of a person absorbing a thing they are not ready to absorb.
"We'll be there. David is —" She turns away from the phone. I hear her voice, muffled, saying David's name. Then back: "We're leaving now."
"Okay."
"Ilya."
"Yes."
"He is strong."
"I know."
"So are you."
Yuna hangs and before I even realize I call Pike.
"What's up, Rozanov."
"Shane had a stroke."
The silence is different from Yuna's. Yuna's was two seconds of processing. Pike's is three seconds of the world stopping.
"Where."
"Home. This morning. They're taking him to Queensway."
"I’m leaving now. I should be there in, I don’t know, four hours." Then, quieter: "Is he conscious?"
"He was."
"Okay. I'm coming. Don't — just stay with him. I'm coming."
He hangs up. Pike, who lives in Montreal, who has four children of his own, who is supposed to be at practice in three hours, is getting in his car. I did not ask him to. I didn't have to. Rachel arrives in eight minutes. She comes through the door already in motion — coat halfon, keys still in her hand, face set with the particular competence of a woman who has been taking care of other people's children for fifteen years and knows what an emergency looks like.
"Go," she says. "I've got them."
"Max is in Lena's pants."
"I see that. Go."
I look at the twins. Max is stacking blocks in the playpen, happy, moved on, the morning's drama already behind him. Lena is sitting against the mesh wall holding a board book. I kneel down. I put my hand on her head. "Papa has to go. Rachel is here. I'll be back." She looks at me. She puts her hand up and waves at me.
"Bye-bye, зайка."
I stand up. I grab my keys. I grab Shane's wallet from the bowl by the door because they'll need his health card. I go to the garage. I get in the car.
I sit there for thirty seconds. My hands are on the steering wheel and they are shaking. Not the fine tremor of nerves — shaking, visibly, the way they shake after a fight on the ice, adrenaline making the muscles fire without permission. I look at my hands and I think: these held his head twenty minutes ago. These held his head on the kitchen floor while his face was wrong and his eyes were scared and I told him he would be fine. I don’t know if he will be fine.
I start the car. I back out of the driveway. The ambulance is gone. The street is normal. The neighbor across the street has gone back inside. The world is continuing to be the world, which is wrong, because my husband is in an ambulance and I am not with him in that ambulance and the world should be different but it isn't.
I drive. I do not speed because a car accident will not help Shane. I drive the way I skate. I drive past the school and the park and the grocery store where Shane and I go on Sunday mornings, him with his list, me adding things not on the list, the argument we have every
week that is not an argument. It is how we end up with sweets he says he will not eat but if I look at him and say his name the right way he always treats himself.
Seventeen minutes. The hospital. The parking garage. The elevator. The ER desk.
"My husband was brought in. Shane Hollander."
“One moment.” She says with a sense of calm that just should never exist in an ER. The woman at the desk types. Looks at her screen. Picks up a phone. Someone comes. A nurse. She walks me down a hallway that smells like hand sanitizer.
"Your husband is being assessed. The stroke team is with him. Dr. Osei will come speak with you as soon as she can."
"Can I see him?"
"Not yet. They need to work."
"I need to see him."
"I understand. As soon as they're done, I'll bring you in."
She puts me in a room. A waiting room. Small. Four chairs, a table, a window that looks out on a parking lot. She brings me water.
I sit.
The room is quiet. The hallway outside is not — there are sounds, footsteps, voices, the particular hum of a building full of people doing urgent things. But in this room it is quiet and I am alone and my hands are still shaking and there is coffee drying on my knees. I look at my phone. 7:52 AM.
At 7:10 this morning I was standing in the nursery holding a green sock arguing with a twoyear-old about footwear. At 7:15 I was carrying Lena downstairs. At 7:16, I heard the sound of my husband's body hitting the kitchen floor.
I want to smoke. The thought arrives without warning, the way it always does, the way it has for years. I quit when the twins were born. Two years clean. But my body wants the inhale and the pause and the thirty seconds of nothing and I want it so badly my fingers ache. I press my palms flat against my thighs. I breathe.
Under my shirt, the gold cross. My mother's. The chain is warm against my skin.
Dr. Osei is tall and calm and sits down before she starts talking. People who sit down first are about to say something you should be sitting for.
"Mr. Rozanov. I'm Dr. Osei. I'm the neurologist overseeing your husband's care."
"How is he?"
"He's stable. I want to explain what's happened and what we're doing."
She explains. She is clear and specific and I catch pieces — a clot, a blood vessel, the left side of his brain. She says a name for the area that was affected and I don't retain it. She says they've given him a clot-dissolving medication — tPA, she says, and the abbreviation sticks because abbreviations are easier than full words in a crisis. She says it was given within the window, which is good. She says they're monitoring for bleeding. She says the medication is working.
"The right-sided weakness and the speech loss are consistent with the location of the stroke. We won't know the full extent of the damage until the swelling goes down and we can do a complete assessment."
"When."
"Days. Possibly longer."
"Is he going to be —" I don't finish. I don't know how to finish. Okay is too vague. Normal is too hopeful. Shane is what I mean. Is he going to be Shane.
"The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical. We're moving him to the ICU for monitoring. He's been intubated —"
"What does that mean?"
"A breathing tube. It's a precaution. The stroke affected an area near the brain stem and we want to ensure his airway is protected. He's being sedated to keep him comfortable while the medication works."
"He can't breathe on his own?"
"He can. The intubation is precautionary. We want his body to focus on recovery, not on working to breathe."
I nod. I don't understand. I understand every word she's saying and I don't understand any of it because the words are about Shane and Shane is a person who runs five miles before practice and does box jumps and holds his breath underwater for fun to annoy me and the word intubation does not belong anywhere near him.
"Can I see him?"
"Yes. I'll take you up."
She walks me to the ICU. Through doors that require cards to open, past stations where nurses look at screens, down a hallway that is quieter than the ER, more controlled. She stops outside a room. Glass wall. Curtain half-drawn.
"Take as long as you need."
I go in.
I stop. In the doorway. My body stops because my brain can’t understand the image in front of me. Shane is in bed. There is a tube in his mouth and down his throat. My husband has a machine breathing for him. The tube goes into his mouth and the machine beside the bed rises and falls — hiss-click, hiss-click — and Shane's chest moves with it. Up, down. Up, down. Not because Shane is breathing. Because the machine is breathing and Shane's lungs are following.
His eyes are closed. They have sedated him. The nurse explains — monitoring, watching for complications, keeping him still while the medication works. I catch maybe half of it. The half I catch is: he is asleep and they are keeping him asleep and he cannot squeeze my hand or talk me off the ledge I am on. I am always the one to talk him off ledges and yet all I want him to do is talk me off one.
I sit in the chair. The plastic chair next to the bed. I take his left hand — the one that worked, the one that gripped mine on the kitchen floor. It is warm. His hand is warm. This fact is important. This fact is the thing I hold.
"Hi," I say. To a sedated man. To my husband who cannot hear me.
I look at his face. The tube distorts it — his mouth forced open around the plastic, his jaw at an angle that isn't natural. But I can see the drooping. The right side, still wrong, still slid. Even with the tube, even with the tape, the two halves of his face are different and the difference is the damage.
"The kids are fine. Max is with Rachel. He's wearing Lena's pants because I couldn't — I wasn't paying attention. You would have noticed. You always notice."
The ventilator breathes. The monitors beep. I hold his hand.
"I called your mom. She's coming. Your dad. Pike's driving from Montreal." I pause. "I don't know what else to do. I'm sitting in this chair and I'm holding your hand and I don't know what else to do, Shane."
Nothing. The machine breathes. The numbers on the monitor hold steady. I have no idea what the numbers mean but they are steady and steady feels like something.
I lean forward. I put my forehead against his hand. I close my eyes.
The morning is still in my body. The sock, the stairs, the sound, the floor, the mug, the ambulance, the driveway, the drive. It's all in my body and there is nowhere for it to go. The body holds the things the mind can't process yet and the body is full and I am sitting in a
plastic chair with my forehead on my husband's hand and the machine breathes for him and I am here and he is here and that is all I know.
Yuna and David arrive at 10:14.
I know the time because I have been watching the clock the way I used to watch the clock on the scoreboard in the third period when we were down — every minute noted, every second accounted for, the numbers the only structure in a situation with no structure. Yuna comes in first. Coat still on. Purse over one shoulder. She looks at Shane — the tube, the monitors, the face — and her hand goes to her mouth. One second. She presses her fingers against her lips hard enough to leave marks. Then the hand comes down and she crosses the room and bends over the bed and kisses Shane's forehead, carefully, above the tape, and her lips stay there for a long time.
When she straightens up she pulls the other chair to the opposite side of the bed and sits and takes Shane's right hand — the one that doesn't work — and holds it. She holds the hand that can't hold her back and she doesn't comment on this. She just holds it.
David comes in a minute later. He stands in the doorway. He looks at his son and his face does something private and fast and then he is across the room, his hand on Shane's leg, over the blanket, near the knee. He doesn't speak. He stands there with his hand on his son's leg and his other hand gripping the bed rail and he breathes. Once. Twice. Then he steps back.
"What did the doctor say?" Yuna asks. Her voice is steady. Her eyes are not. I tell them what Dr. Osei told me. The clot. The tPA. The location. The intubation. I say the words like a report because that is the only way I can say them — flat, factual, the information organized into blocks the way Shane organizes information, the way I have learned to organize information from twenty years of watching him do it.
"When will they try to take the tube out?" David asks. He has sat down. He is sitting on the windowsill because there are only two chairs and he has given both of them to Yuna and me. David does things like this. Gives up the chair. Stands when others sit. Finds the least comfortable place in a room and claims it without comment.
"She said they'll reassess tomorrow. See how he responds overnight."
David nods. He looks at Shane. He looks at the monitors. He looks at the ventilator.
"He's strong," David says. Quiet. To the room.
Yuna's hand tightens on Shane's. "Yes."
We sit. The three of us, around the bed, with the machine breathing. Outside the glass wall, nurses pass. Someone laughs somewhere down the hallway and the sound is obscene. Yuna asks about the twins. I tell her — Rachel has them, they're fine, Max was upset but he moves on fast, Lena was quiet. Yuna nods at each piece of information like she is filing it.
"I'll go to the house tonight," she says. "The twins need someone they know. Not that Rachel isn't wonderful, but they need family."
"You don't have to —"
"Ilya." She looks at me. The look is gentle and absolute. "I am going to your house. I am going to be with my grandchildren. David will stay here with you. You will stay here with Shane. This is the plan."
I nod. Because you don't argue with Yuna Hollander. You accept the plan. The plan is always correct.
"There's food in the fridge. Shane made — he did a meal prep yesterday." The words catch. Shane made food yesterday. Shane was in the kitchen yesterday chopping vegetables and labeling containers and complaining that I used the wrong Tupperware lids and now Shane is in a bed with a tube in his mouth. "The containers are labeled."
"I'll find everything," Yuna says.
Pike arrives just after noon. He comes into the ICU room smelling like Tim Hortons and road and he is carrying four coffees and a bag because Hayden Pike has never entered a crisis without food. He looks at Shane — the tube, the monitors, the face — and something moves across his expression. He catches it. Puts it away. Puts the coffees down. Looks at me. He doesn't say anything. He opens his arms. I walk into them because I am too tired to perform the thing where I pretend I don't need this, and he holds me, four seconds, solid, the grip of a man who has been my best friend's best friend for twenty years and who has slowly, without either of us planning it, become mine.
I step back. "Thank you."
"Jackie's packing. She'll come up with the kids in a few days. She says to tell you the Pike army is mobilizing."
"I don't need —"
"Shut up. Yes you do." He hands me a coffee. "Drink this. Have you eaten?"
"I'm not hungry."
"I didn't ask if you were hungry. Have you eaten?"
"No."
He opens the bag. A muffin. He puts it on the arm of my chair like it's not a thing. Like food appearing is just something that happens near Hayden Pike, which it is, which it has been for the entire time I have known him.
Pike sits in the hallway because the ICU only allows two visitors. He sits there for three hours. When I come out to use the bathroom he is on his phone — talking to Jackie, texting
someone, doing things. Logistical things. Pike in a crisis is a person who does things. He brings food. He makes calls. He sits in hallways. He doesn't ask how you're feeling because the answer is obvious and the question is pointless and instead he finds out where the good coffee is.
I come back from the bathroom and he's standing at the nurses' station, leaning on the counter, talking to a nurse about visiting hours and overnight policies and where the cafeteria is. He has his phone out. He is making notes.
"The cafeteria is on two," he says when I approach. "Coffee's bad. There's a place across the street that's better. Also, they have decaf after two PM in the cafeteria, which is useful if you want to sleep at any point."
"Pike."
"The parking validation is at the front desk, not the lot. I already did yours."
"Pike."
He looks at me. His face is — he's been crying. In the bathroom or the stairwell or wherever he went while I was with Shane. His eyes are red and his jaw is set and he is standing here telling me about parking validation because that is what Pike can do and he is going to do everything he can do.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't thank me. Just eat the muffin."
The afternoon moves slowly. David and I sit with Shane. Yuna went to the house at three to relieve Rachel and be there when the twins wake from their nap. Pike goes between the hallway and the cafeteria and at one point disappears for forty-five minutes and comes back with a blanket — not a hospital blanket, a real blanket, the kind you buy at a store — and puts it on the chair and says nothing about where it came from.
David reads a newspaper he found somewhere. He does the crossword. He sits by the window and exists in the room the way David exists in all rooms — quietly, usefully, taking up less space than he should. I have known this man for eleven years. He has never once raised his voice in my presence. He has never made me feel like anything other than his son's partner, his grandchildren's father, a member of his family. When Shane and I got married, David shook my hand and said welcome to the family and his eyes were wet and his handshake lasted too long and that was it. That was everything.
Now he sits by the window and reads the crossword and every few minutes he looks at Shane. Just looks. Checking. Making sure the chest is still moving, the numbers are still steady, the machine is still breathing. Then back to the crossword. The looking and the crossword and the looking. The rhythm of a parent who is watching his child be kept alive by a machine and who is doing the crossword because the alternative is the thing that would happen if he stopped doing the crossword.
At five, David says: "You should go home."
"No."
"Ilya. The twins. They need to see you tonight. Rachel's been there all day and my wife is a force of nature but those children want their father."
"I can't leave him."
"I'm here. I'll be here all night." He folds the newspaper. Puts it on the windowsill. "Go home. See the kids. Sleep. Come back in the morning."
"I don't want to sleep."
"I know." He stands. Stretches his back. The sound of his spine cracking is loud in the quiet room. "But you have two children and a hockey season and you can't do either of those things if you don't sleep."
He's right. I know he's right. I know it the way I know every practical thing that I don't want to know right now — the way I know that the twins need dinner and baths and bedtime and that none of those things will happen without me and that Shane is sedated and won't know I'm gone.
I lean over the bed. I put my mouth next to Shane's ear, close to the tube, close to the tape.
"Ya tebya lyublyu. Ya vernus'."
I love you. I'm coming back.
I squeeze his hand. Twice.
Nothing comes back. Just the hand, warm, still.
I leave. In the elevator, alone, I put my back against the wall and I close my eyes and I breathe. The fluorescent light hums. The elevator smells like metal and disinfectant. I have been in this hospital for nine hours and my husband is upstairs with a tube in his mouth and a machine breathing for him and I am going home to my children because someone has to and that someone is me.
The car is where I left it. The parking garage is cold. I sit behind the wheel and I don't start the engine for two minutes because my hands are shaking again and I need them to stop before I drive.
They stop. I drive.
The house is lit up. I can see it from the street — every window, every room. Yuna. She has turned on every light in the house because she knows what I know, which is that a dark house when you're coming home from the hospital is a thing you cannot walk into. So she lit the house. Every room. The porch light. The hallway. The kitchen.
I park. I sit in the car for one more minute. I can see through the living room window — Yuna, moving. The blue glow of the TV. A small shape in the playpen. Normal things. Life happening.
The front door opens before I reach it. Yuna. She's changed — not her travel clothes anymore, something comfortable, something that looks like it came from Shane's closet. An old Ottawa sweatshirt. She probably found it in the laundry and put it on without thinking about it or while thinking very hard about it.
"They just had dinner. Max ate everything. Lena ate most of it."
I nod. I walk in. The house smells like food — Yuna has been cooking. Not the meal prep Shane left. Something new. Something that fills the house with the particular warmth of a kitchen that's been in use. Yuna cooks when she's scared. Shane organizes. I eat. Pike brings food. David reads the crossword. We are a family of people who do things because the things are better than the nothing.
"PAPA!" Max, from the playpen. Standing, arms up, face split with a grin. He has no idea. He has absolutely no idea that anything is wrong. His world is: I was here, now Papa is here, this is good.
I pick him up. He wraps around me — arms, legs, all of it. His head against my neck. His hair smells like the baby shampoo Yuna must have already given him a bath. He's in the right clothes now. Someone fixed it.
"Hi, buddy."
"Papa home!"
"Papa's home."
Lena. She's on the floor by the playpen. She's been out of it, apparently — Yuna must have let her out. She's sitting with her legs in a V, holding a block. She sees me and she stands up, wobbles, walks. Her walk is still new — ten months of walking and it's still the wide-based, arms-out walk of a person who doesn't entirely trust the floor. She comes to me and grabs my pants at the knee and looks up and says nothing.
I crouch. Max still attached to my neck. I look at Lena.
"Hi, зайка."
"Papa."
She holds her arms up. I scoop her. Two kids. Both hips. Max talking into my ear about something — truck, juice, dog, a stream of words that are half-real and half-toddler and entirely unrelated to each other. Lena holding my collar. Not talking. Just holding. Yuna watches from the kitchen doorway. Her arms are crossed and her face is doing the thing that Yuna's face does when she is feeling something very large and managing it — the slight
tightness around the eyes, the jaw set, the control. Shane has this face. Shane got this face from her.
"There's food," she says. "When you're ready."
I'm not ready. But the kids need routine. So I put them down and we eat — at the table, the four of us, Yuna and me and the twins, in the chairs where Shane and I usually sit and the chairs that are usually empty because we don't have guests most nights. Max throws pasta on the floor. Lena eats carefully, one noodle at a time, holding each one and looking at it before it goes in her mouth. This is normal. This is how they eat. This is not different from yesterday or the day before or any day.
"Dada?" Max says. Out of nowhere, through a mouthful.
I look at Yuna.
"Dada is at the doctor," Yuna says. Calm. Simple. The two-year-old answer. "He'll be home soon."
Max accepts this. He goes back to the pasta. Lena does not say anything. She puts a noodle in her mouth and chews and does not ask.
Bath. I do this. Me. I run the water and I test it with my elbow the way Shane taught me because my hands apparently can't feel temperature properly — he said this once, in our first month of having the babies, and I argued and he showed me the data on thermal sensitivity in athletes' hands and I said Shane, I am not reading a paper about hand nerves at three in the morning and he said then trust me about the elbow. I trust him about the elbow.
Max splashes. Water goes everywhere. He has a cup and he is pouring water on his own head and laughing and the bathroom floor is a lake and I don't care. Lena sits at the other end of the tub, calmer. She has a rubber duck. She holds it under the water and lets it go and watches it pop up. Does it again. And again. The same action, the same result, repeated. I don't know if she finds this interesting or comforting or if she's just doing it because the duck is there. I wash them. I dry them. I put pajamas on — the right pajamas, Lena's on Lena, Max's on Max, I am paying attention this time. I carry them to the nursery.
Goodnight Moon. I read it because Shane reads it every night and the routine is the routine and the routine is what they need. I sit in the rocking chair with one twin on each side of my lap — Max against my left arm, Lena against my right — and I open the book. I don't do the voices. Shane does voices. Shane does a different voice for every part — the old lady, the moon, the cow jumping, the quiet hush. I've heard him do this a hundred times through the baby monitor, sitting downstairs, listening to my husband read to our children in voices that make them laugh and settle and fall asleep. I don't do voices. My voice is my voice. It's Russian-accented and too low and it doesn't change for characters because I am not that person.
I read it flat. Just the words. The great green room and the telephone and the red balloon. Max's eyes are closing by page three. He is always out fast. His body runs at full speed all day and then it stops and when it stops it stops completely, no negotiation, no transition. Lena is awake. She's looking at the pictures. Her hand is on my shirt, holding the fabric near the third button. Not the collar — she can't reach it from this position. The fabric. Close enough.
I read it again. The whole thing. For Lena. Same voice, same flat delivery. Somewhere around the quiet old lady whispering hush, Lena's eyes close. Her grip on my shirt loosens. She's heavy against my arm.
I sit there.
Both of them asleep. The nursery is dark except for the nightlight — the one Shane picked, a small moon that projects stars onto the ceiling. The stars move slowly. Shane showed me how to set the rotation speed and I set it too fast and the stars were spinning and Max screamed and Lena stared and Shane looked at me and said Ilya, it's a nightlight, not a rave and I fixed it and now the stars move slowly, the way they're supposed to.
I sit in the rocking chair with my children asleep on my body and I don't move. I don't move because if I move I'll have to put them down and if I put them down I'll have to leave the room and if I leave the room I'll be in the hallway and in the hallway there is no one, nothing, just the house and the quiet and the absence of Shane and I am not ready for that yet. Five minutes. Ten. The clock on the shelf — Shane's clock, the one that shows the time and the temperature and the humidity because Shane monitors the nursery humidity — says 8:14 PM. Twelve hours. Twelve hours since the kitchen floor. Twelve hours since the mug and the coffee and the thud and the eyes looking at me with everything in them and nothing coming out.
I put them down. Max first. He doesn't stir. Lena shifts when I lower her to the crib — her hand reaches, grasps at air, doesn't find my shirt. She settles. I pull the blanket up. I stand between the two cribs and I look at my children and I want to tell them something but there is nothing to tell them that they would understand and nothing I can say that would make any of this different.
I leave the door open. I stand in the hallway.
The hallway is long. The house is quiet. Yuna is downstairs — I can hear her, the sound of the kitchen, running water, the dishwasher. The sounds of a house being maintained by someone who is not Shane but who is keeping it running in his place.
I lean against the wall. I slide down. I sit on the floor.
The floor is hardwood. Cold. My back against the wall, my knees up, my hands in my lap. I sit here and I let the thing happen that I have been not-letting-happen all day. The shaking starts again — not my hands this time, my whole body, a tremor that starts in my chest and moves outward, and my breathing goes wrong, fast and shallow and uncontrolled, and my
eyes fill and my face does the thing and I put my hands over my mouth because the children are asleep twenty feet away and they cannot hear this.
Thirty seconds. I told myself thirty seconds. It goes past that. A minute. Two. The sounds that come out of me are not sounds I recognize. They are animal sounds, guttural, the sounds of a body processing a thing the mind hasn't caught up to yet. My husband is in a hospital with a machine breathing for him. My husband who ran five miles yesterday and held my hand in bed last night and made fun of my coffee this morning and planned our week on the fridge and kissed me goodbye at 5:45 AM the way he does every morning — quickly, his lips on my cheek, half-asleep, the kiss that means I'm up, I love you, go back to sleep — that person is in a bed and his face is wrong and his brain is damaged and I'm sitting on the floor of my own hallway making sounds that aren't words.
I stop. Not because I'm done. Because the body runs out. The crying stops the way it started — without my permission, on its own schedule, the biology doing what it does. I breathe. I wipe my face with my shirt. I stand up.
Yuna is at the bottom of the stairs. She doesn't come up. She stands there, looking up at me, and her face says: I heard. I know. It's okay.
"Tea?" she says.
"Okay."
I go downstairs. She makes tea. We sit at the kitchen table — the table where Shane and I eat breakfast, the table where the twins smear food on the surface and I wipe it up and Shane wipes it up again because I miss spots. The table is clean. Yuna has cleaned it. I drink tea. Yuna drinks tea. She doesn't ask me how I'm feeling. She doesn't say it's going to be okay or he's strong or any of the phrases that people say. She sits and she drinks tea and she's here. She's Shane's mother and she's here and her son is in a hospital and she is sitting at his kitchen table drinking tea because there is nothing else to do and doing it together is better than doing it alone.
"David texted," she says. "Stable. No changes. He's sleeping in the chair."
"I should be there."
"You should be here. David is there. Tomorrow you'll be there and David will be here. We take turns. This is how it works."
"I don't know how this works, Yuna."
"Nobody does. We figure it out." She puts her mug down. "Tomorrow I'm going to make a schedule."
I almost smile. Almost. The ghost of something, not quite there.
"Of course you are."
"Don't take that tone. Schedules are important."
"I'm not taking a tone."
"You're taking a tone. Shane takes the same tone. Where do you think he learned it?" There it is. His name. In the kitchen. In a sentence about a normal thing — his tone, his habits, the small inherited behaviors that make him his mother's son. Not Shane-in-thehospital. Not Shane-with-the-tube. Shane who takes a tone about schedules. Shane who is still here in every corner of this house, in the coffee machine and the labels on the containers and the schedule on the fridge and the nightlight and the elbow and the humidity monitor and the thick carpet with the best density rating.
"I'm going to go back," I say. "Tonight. After you're settled. I'll sleep in the chair."
"David is in the chair."
"There are two chairs."
Yuna looks at me. She knows I won't sleep. She knows I'll sit in the chair next to David and I'll watch the monitors and I'll hold Shane's hand and I'll wait for the morning when the doctors come and tell us something. She knows this because she knows me and because she would do the same thing.
"Go," she says. "I'll be here."
I stand. I rinse my mug. I put it in the sink the way Shane puts it in the sink — rinsed, upside down, on the left side. I've been putting mugs in the sink his way for eleven years. I didn't decide to. It just happened. You live with someone long enough and their habits become your habits and you don't notice until you're standing at the sink at 9 PM on the worst night of your life rinsing a mug upside down on the left side and realizing you do this because he does this because this is what twenty years looks like.
I drive back to the hospital. The streets are dark. The city is doing what cities do at night — lights, movement, people in restaurants and bars and living rooms living their lives, unaware and unbothered and normal. I drive through it.
The hospital is quieter at night. The ICU has a different quality — dimmer, slower, the machines more audible in the reduced noise. I badge in. I walk to his room. David is in the chair. Awake. Reading a different newspaper — where he finds these newspapers I have no idea. He looks up when I come in.
"Yuna said you were coming back."
"She tried to stop me."
"She tried to redirect you. There's a difference. It's how she manages all of us." He stands. Stretches. "He's been stable all night. No changes. The nurse came at eight and at nine."
I sit in the chair. I take Shane's hand.
"You should go to the house," I tell David. "Yuna's there but the twins wake early and she'll need help."
David shakes his head. "Not yet. I'll go in the morning." He sits back down. On the windowsill. His spot.
We sit. The ventilator breathes. The monitors hold their numbers. Shane's hand is warm in mine. David reads his newspaper and I hold Shane's hand and somewhere outside this room the world is turning and somewhere inside this room my husband's brain is fighting and we are here, in the chairs, in the dark, doing the only thing anyone can do.
Waiting.
I lean back. I close my eyes. I don't sleep but I close my eyes and I listen to the machine breathe for Shane and I hold his hand and the hand is warm and the warmth is the evidence and the evidence is enough.
He's alive. He's here. I'm here.
Tomorrow the doctors will come. Tomorrow there will be information and plans and words with too many syllables and decisions I'm not qualified to make. Tomorrow Yuna will make a schedule and Pike will bring coffee and David will do the crossword and Rachel will watch the twins and the machine will breathe and the monitors will beep and the world will continue to be the world, indifferent and relentless and moving.
But tonight is tonight. Tonight is the chair and the hand and the ventilator and David by the window and my husband in the bed.
I squeeze his hand. Twice.
Nothing comes back. But the hand is warm. The hand is warm and I'm holding it and I'm not letting go and tomorrow is tomorrow and tonight I'm here