again, i should have been working on something else but instead this happened. there are references to Irina's suicide in pretty much the same way as it's referenced in the show, and Yuna spends some time ruminating on the circumstances in more detail than the show touches on.

The thing is, Irina, Yuna thinks, and she thinks it so loudly that she repeats it, under her breath, as she yanks her hair back up into a tight knot, her fingers twisting automatically. “The thing is, Irina.” 

From the bedroom, David calls, “did you say something? I didn’t hear it.” 

“No, nothing,” Yuna calls back. Actually, yes, I was talking to our son’s boyfriend’s dead mother.  

She turns the faucet on; she washes her face. Everything is automatic – how she dries her skin, the serums and moisturizers she applies. She realizes that she’s glaring into the mirror, her own eyes hard and dark as she pulls upwards at the skin on her cheeks.  

She can still see Shane’s startled face. Hear his punched out little, what?   

Scott Hunter had gotten married – last week, extravagant, front-page news. The boys had both been there. Separately, of course. They took one picture together that Ilya sent to Yuna, but even in that photo they had been standing with a careful half foot between them, arms hovering over shoulders as though afraid any touch would be too revealing. They’d both looked very handsome, if not a little sad.  

Apparently, Scott had saved two seats in the front row for his parents, each with a proud, framed picture on the cushioned seat. Shane had thought it was sweet. At dinner tonight, over David’s grilled strip steak, Yuna had asked, “would you want to do something like that, Ilya?” 

They talk – occasionally, casually – about a wedding. It’s a hypothetical, but increasingly less so. It hadn’t felt like an overstep until Ilya had laughed. 

“Ah, no,” he had said.  

“Your dad’s not invited,” Shane had muttered, and Ilya had shot him an indulgent look.  

“This is not a wedding that mama would have agreed to attend,” Ilya had said, still smiling, and that’s when Shane had said it. What? He’d sat up straight, eyebrows pinched, and some long-suppressed part of Yuna had longed to reach across the table and smooth out that worried expression.  

Ilya does that sometimes – says things that ricochet through the room, taking damage. It always baffles him, their responses to what he apparently thinks are mundane facts to share. When he’s met with silence, dropped mouths, he goes uneasy.  

Ilya had looked around, and then he had taken Shane’s hand. “I think she would love you, yes, because I love you,” he said, eyes cutting to Yuna and back in the blink of a second, “you make me happy, my mother loves you. But two men, married? No, no.” 

Shane had been frozen, a prey animal hoping to escape notice. Yuna and David had followed his lead, still and waiting, until Ilya had finally said, very small, “I’m sorry, Shane.” 

And Shane had shivered and then smiled, tight, squeezed his hand, and said, “it’s okay, I – I get it. She can still come, if you want.” 

Now, though, Yuna fumes. You know that he’s happy, she silently lectures, hands on her hips. I understand that it’s a shock. I understand better than anyone! But that’s your son. And that’s my son!  

Yuna sighs, hard. As always, the greatest sin in her eyes: failing to love her Shane.  

But she’s not stupid. She knows Ilya can’t go home, and she knows why. And his mother, who Yuna never knew at all – a woman raised where she was, when she was. A religious woman? At least one who wore a cross every day. Why should Yuna be shocked that she might have struggled with her son’s sexuality? 

Often, Yuna wonders if even Ilya knows her particularly well. Knew her. He was so young: what child knows their mother as anything but their mother? He clearly idolizes her, idealizes her. He can hold these contradictory facts in his head: his mother would have hated him, in at least his choice of partner, but his mother would have loved him more. Because she had always loved him more.  

The thing is, Irina. I really think, if you knew him now. If you knew Shane! If you saw them together. I really think you would understand.  

Yuna reaches for her toothbrush and begins to scrub methodically at her teeth. She likes to picture them sometimes, Shane and Ilya, in their house, quietly domestic. Maybe Shane is reading on his side of the bed with his glasses on, while Ilya brushes his own teeth. Maybe they are calling to each other through the open doorway in half-exasperation like she and David so often do.  

She likes to think about it because for so long she wasn’t sure that Shane would ever have that easy intimacy. For many years, she had to picture him falling asleep on one side of a cold mattress in a darkened room, alone.  

Yuna sometimes forgets how adult Shane is now. A man. Because she feels exactly the same as the day that she had met him – the same love, the same fear – she sometimes expects him to still be small: her boy, her baby. Sometimes now she looks at him, the fine smile lines coming in around his eyes and his broad shoulders and his deep voice, and it’s hard to believe he had ever been small enough to fit in her arms, in her womb.  

Ilya would have been small still, when his mother died. Most boys don’t get tall that young. He still would have had fat cheeks and feet too big for his body. Just a little boy, really. Irina never got to know him as a man, either. Irina never got to see him fall in love.  

But he’s in love. He is loved. Yuna has to believe, she has to, that a mother as beloved as Irina was, still is, would have taken one look at Ilya’s soft eyes and noticed the way that Shane looks at him when he thinks nobody can see him and that she would have come around. Surely.  

Because you see, Irina? She says triumphantly in her head. Your son is happy! Our sons are happy. What else could possibly matter? 

... 

It’s not the first conversation that Yuna has had with a dead woman, in the comfortable privacy of her own mind. She has, in fact, made something of a habit of it, so much so that occasionally Ilya will do or say something that makes Yuna instinctively reach for her phone as though she could text Irina about it. Ilya said the funniest thing today!  

Obviously, Yuna cannot text her about it. But she does sometimes think it, anyway. She likes to imagine that she’s somehow heard.  

Irina is a fascinating, tragic figure. She occupies more space than she should in Yuna’s mind, but she occupies more space than she should in all of their lives: the giant black hole at the center of their family. As much as Yuna has grown to love Ilya, it is so obvious at moments that he is a boy who had wanted for some very serious mothering in his worst years. 

When Yuna had seen him the first several times, in fact – international tournaments, even the draft – she remembers thinking, somewhat disdainfully, and where is that boy’s mother??  

That boy’s mother was buried six feet underground on another continent. Not that she knew that at the time. She excuses her past self; what she can’t excuse is the way that her brain still skitters back there sometimes, unbidden, at the strangest moments. The same righteously angry feeling of witnessing an abandonment: when Ilya is feverish and sick on her couch, when he’s blissfully full of dessert and laughing on the deck, when he slips into one of his darker moods. Where is that boy’s mother? And because she knows, now, where she is, and how (if not why), her next slippery, guilty thought is often: how could you leave him alone like that? 

It’s the cruelest kind of thought that Yuna has. They were drip fed the story, in that first year of knowing Ilya. First, that his mother was dead. Tragic. Then, that she had killed herself. That was worse. That was the first night that Yuna had ever thought, Irina Foundation paperwork thrust aside and her name staring Yuna right in the face, how could she have done that? Yuna had been alone, in her office, the dregs of a bottle of wine in her glass and her head in her hands. Was an accident, Ilya had said, and then, as though to obfuscate the real meaning of it all, she accidentally swallowed a whole bottle of pills.  

And it had worked at first, too: Yuna had been nodding along, yes, yes, too many pills, and then her brain had lurched and caught up and she’d understood, met Shane’s eyes, seen the same thought, and something else, too, his own telepathic plea: don’t. Freak. Out.  

She hadn’t. And then later, she had.  

And then, much later, almost accidentally, it has slipped out that Ilya had found Irina’s corpse. And that was the worst. Really, that was the worst. That was the night that Yuna had first imagined Irina there with her, in her office, sitting tentatively in the armchair in the corner. Yuna has no idea what she had looked like, but her mind constructs the woman very easily: Ilya’s high cheekbones, his sandy hair, the bow of his top lip. She was probably beautiful. Certainly young. Maybe her eyes had carried her sadness. Perhaps she was tall – Ilya certainly is.  

What the fuck were you thinking, Yuna would have said to her, in that precise moment. She’d been forced to wonder if that was the plan. If that was how things always were – that Ilya came home first, that he would have been there before anyone else. Did Irina find comfort in that, somehow? Her beloved son, instead of her husband? Or perhaps it was an accident, really, perhaps Ilya had skipped practice or came home early from his friend’s house or played hooky from school.  

But Yuna had been furious, still. At a dead, and a long-dead, woman. She’d ranted and railed, silently, glaring across the room at an empty chair. She’d lectured about responsibility and childhood trauma and what did you think he was going to do without you, Irina? What did you think his father was going to do with him?  

And then, nauseous with guilt, she’d ricocheted back into tears. The despair of a woman she’d never met had seemed to possess her for a moment. It must have been despair, because she’d loved her sons: nothing else would have made her do it. And what had her final moments felt like? She must have been alone in the house. She must have been very alone in the world. Had she swallowed them one at a time, very near an accident, never realizing until it was too late how many were gone, or had she put them all in her fist together and steeled her nerves? Was there a moment of regret? Had she crawled to the bathroom and hoped she could throw them all up, or did it work too quickly for that? Was she scared, at the end, or did the crushing inevitability of it all make her numb? 

Was there a note? Had Ilya found that, too? 

The suicide, Yuna has in the intervening years, mostly forgiven. Ilya's face, when he said that he’d found her, is something she is still working to process through.  

Mostly, Yuna feels sorry for her. And sad, because Irina must have been so sad. So hopeless. So very close to saving. Yuna is probably twice her age now, much older than Irina was when she died, and though their children are only months apart from one another sometimes it makes Yuna feel strangely maternal about her, too. It helps, to picture Irina young. She was young. She was young, and beautiful, sad, and complicated, and probably a little bit selfish in the way that everybody is. Ilya loves her too much to allow her complexity, but Yuna does not.  

Ilya spent too long without a mother, but Irina had such a short time with him, too. None of it is fair. She’s missed so much of him. The things that Yuna takes for granted.  

Yuna has the luxury of pretending that Irina is in the corner of the room, when she’s reviewing contracts for the foundation that her son launched in her name, to prevent other young people from making the very same decision that his mother had. Yuna can say, sternly, lovingly, like a terrified parent would chastise: what an awful thing, Irina. What an awful, awful thing. 

... 

Ilya’s father is – was – awful. That’s the word that Shane uses. Yuna herself, through bits and pieces slipped loose over the years, understands that he probably more accurately was violent. Yuna doesn’t know if Shane knows this. Shane doesn’t always assemble the pieces of people in the same way, to get the full picture; this time, Yuna is grateful for it, and she thinks that Ilya is too.  

She remembers, quite vividly, the first time that she understood what Ilya’s father may actually have been like, because she had thought instantly of Irina: a woman in a violent home. A woman with children in a violent home. Yuna had been filled with the kind of deep, primeval fear that she thinks all women understand somewhere in their mitochondrial DNA, and always have, and always will. Maybe it was only because she knew Irina’s fate, that Yuna felt such dread, but she doesn’t think so.  

The boys had been over for dinner that night. Ilya had said it in his casual way – and now Yuna doesn’t even remember what he said, precisely, that made it so clear that he’d been slapped around as a child and moreover that he thought it was normal. He had said something like, mama always had the worst of it. Or maybe it was, mama always took the worst of it. Something like that. And Shane had grimaced and David had met Yuna’s eyes over the table, but she could see right away that they weren’t impacted by it. Not like Yuna was.  

She’d imagined Irina sitting at the table with them, too, at the end of it, next to Ilya. Maybe she would have reached out and pushed his hair back from his face in an instinctive way, the same way Yuna always touches Shane’s shoulder when they pass, an acknowledgement that her child is there, he’s hers, and he’s loved.  

Yuna had felt very sure that if Irina had been there, and if they had locked eyes in that moment, that they would have understood each other. She imagined reaching over and cupping her hand around Irina’s on the table, the fine bones of her knuckles and how she might have smiled sadly.  

Ilya’s father is dead now. Because he is dead, Ilya grieves him in a way that is kinder to his memory than Yuna thinks he probably deserves. But he’s dead, and he was sick before that, and Ilya bears some guilt around the whole thing, Yuna gathers, and so while Yuna continues to quietly detest the man, Ilya does not.  

Which is the way of grieving parents. Yuna has learned this from hard experience. Ilya idealizes his mother, he forgives his father. If Yuna cannot do either, that is her own cross to bear.  

... 

Ilya is funny. It's not easy to be funny in a second language, a second culture – how many dinners did Yuna spend with David on one side of her and her parents on the other, all smiling politely and nodding and saying nothing at all because nobody understood how to make each other laugh? But Ilya is funny. He’s silly. There’s something childlike about him still, in the way he wears his big emotions on his face and plays hard like an overgrown puppy and collapses so completely into Shane’s side when they’re near each other, his whole body given over to love.  

Yuna thinks of him as a child often, tries to picture his round little face and the way he must have clambered up his mother’s body after a long day to nuzzle close to her chest. Shane wasn’t particularly tactile as a child, but Yuna thinks that Ilya probably was. And Shane being so independent made everything more special, the last few times he climbed into her lap – seven and eight and nine – and crash landed into sleep with his cheek on her shoulder. 

She had loved watching Shane grow into himself, develop his own little personality. He had been so completely himself, and from so early on – Yuna remembers marveling at that, at how an infant could have such strong opinions and preferences and how his serious little face could be so singular, unchanged even to this day. And now that he’s grown, she looks back on those early years, and she feels that she’s known him, her Shane, a complete person, for so long that it makes her dizzy.  

She often wonders if Irina had loved it as much, watching Ilya become Ilya. Meeting him, and then learning him, and then knowing him. Yuna imagines him mischievous as a child. Sweet. Perhaps naughty, but never with malice.  

Shane was never naughty – even as a boy he was very quiet, attuned to rules, determined to do things right. At the time, Yuna had been so smug about it, because she had the best-behaved child of anyone she knew. People used to ask her what her secret was. There was no secret, just Shane, but people didn’t want to hear that because other harried mothers wanted to know that there was something they could do, some magic trick to perform, to make their six year old also sit quietly in the booth at the restaurant and color very carefully between the lines and ask the waiter very politely for water, please.  

But there was no trick. And now, in his adulthood, Yuna sometimes wishes that Shane had sometimes been naughty, or had at least felt that he was allowed to be.  

Irina probably would have been one of those harried mothers with a rambunctious child. Ilya represents her as the perfect mother, attentive and devoted and kind. She probably was all of these things. She probably also was exhausted, because Yuna had the most perfect son in the world and Yuna was also exhausted, and usually still is. She probably also, as Yuna did, lost her temper in the grocery store and snapped during bath time and gave into her wheedling sons when it was just simply too tiring to do otherwise. And Irina wasn’t Yuna. Irina was managing two children, a violent home, a tyrannical husband, and her own mind.  

Yuna pictures her most often at the rink – perhaps because she herself spent so much time there, when Shane was small, perhaps because she knows other hockey mothers so well. She pictures Irina in the stands, hands tucked away warm, coat pulled tight around her body. Perhaps Ilya is on the ice – the best on his team from such a young age – and his brother is sitting moodily beside Irina, upset at the early hour and complaining about breakfast. Or perhaps she left him at home and is sitting, worrying about him – will he get to school? Will he eat enough? Will his father be kind this morning? 

The brother, Yuna thinks, was older. Had he played hockey? Strange for him not to, if his younger brother did. So perhaps it’s his practice. He’s not the best on the team, but Irina would have watched him anyway. And Ilya, a toddler, is pulling at her coat, bored, but she cannot leave to entertain him or the brother – what is his name? – would probably be upset. You never watch my practices, mama. You always pay more attention to him.  

So she stays. But Ilya is cranky, and he wants attention, too, and so. And so, what? Irina takes him into her lap, tells him to be quiet and watch his brother play? Or perhaps she turns to him, perhaps she has brought a toy for him, and digging for it in the bag she misses her older son score, and he notices, of course, and on the way home from the rink the boys are both upset, and both because she was not watching closely enough. Irina is upset because they are, and because she feels awful, guilty, and so tired. Because there is only one of her to go around, only so much to give, and each day she has increasingly less.  

Yuna had always loved being at the rink, because she loves hockey almost as much as she loves Shane, and Shane had loved hockey over everything until Ilya. She had always been so smug about that, too, when the other hockey mothers had been sitting, balled up against the cold, hands tucked away, complaining about the hour and about the coffee and about how their sons had refused to get out of bed that morning. Not Yuna’s son – he was often up before her and dressed by the time she stumbled out of bed.  

Yuna imagines them at the same rink. Impossible, of course, but there must have been some time that it almost happened, across space: Irina in Moscow, and Yuna in Ottawa, both watching their own boys skate at the same time, in the same way, with the same sort of bursting pride-worry-joy in their hearts. How many times had Yuna glanced over and seen another mother, met her eyes, exchanged a tight smile of commiseration? 

One of them must have been Irina.  

... 

Irina probably would have been a smoker. Yuna is not a smoker, because she doesn’t do it regularly enough to be a smoker, but in college she used to bum cigarettes outside bars after a few drinks to keep warm, and now she keeps a packet tucked into the highest cabinet in the kitchen (now, Ilya slips her a new packet about twice a year, and though he spends plenty of time at their house alone he always does it when he’s there with Shane because Yuna and Ilya both know it’s more fun to get away with something) and maybe once a month, at the end of a particularly long day, Yuna takes the packet down and removes one cigarette and takes herself out to the deck with a glass of wine and savors it.  

Yuna imagines Irina joining her, on these nights. She imagines reaching out and offering her a cigarette, imagines that she would accept it with a smile and allow Yuna to light it for her.  

Ilya had been over tonight. Not with Shane, who is back in Montreal, but just on his own. They’d had dinner; he’d made them laugh. It had felt like spending time with her own child – that much familiarity, that much love. Yuna had always wanted more than one. 

“He turned out so well, Irina,” Yuna says softly, and she pronounces her name the same way that Ilya does instead of in the North American way. She takes in a lungful of smoke and closes her eyes as the nicotine surges through her, a headrush that sways her on her feet. “You would be so proud of him.” 

She imagines that Irina would smile – proudly? Self-consciously? That she would say something like, I always knew he would be a good man.   

“You should have been here,” Yuna continues, without any real bitterness, and she imagines Irina nodding along. “If things were fair, you would have been here.” 

... 

Shane wants to host Thanksgiving this year, but his schedule is more accommodating than Ilya’s and so actually they do it at Ilya’s place instead – the Ottawa house that Yuna thinks of, mostly, as theirs – and actually Ilya does most of the cooking and grumbles good naturedly about it to Yuna and David when he has to call David for the recipes because Shane has no idea what to make. David makes the pie; Yuna brings the wine.  

The house is just slightly different every time they go over, gradually filling with shared clothing and new artwork and becoming a family home and not a bachelor pad. Yuna is kicking off her shoes when she notices the framed photos up on the living room wall, a collage of memories in expertly hung rows. 

“Oh,” Yuna says, startled, “are these new?” 

David is already in the kitchen; she can hear him greeting Ilya, the homey clatter of pans on the stove and the familiar sound of their voices crossing over each other. 

“Oh, yeah,” Shane says. “We decided to put some pictures up.” 

Yuna scans the familiar framed photos – some of them she took, of Shane and Ilya together. There’s one of the four of them from last Christmas. One of her favorite photos of Shane as a child, curled on Yuna’s lap with a rare earnest smile splitting his face. She’s looking down at him, most of her face obscured by her hair.  

And next to it – “Oh,” she says again, a gasp of air. She feels... she feels. As though she has seen a photo of an old friend, one she hasn’t seen in many, many years, but a face she recognizes instantly, one that drops the thought straight into her head: it’s you.  

“Sveta unearthed some old family photos,” Shane says, oblivious to her breathless reaction. He hooks his thumbs into his pockets and smiles a little bashfully. “Isn’t he cute?” 

Yuna isn’t looking at the little boy. She knows that she will – that she will spend many hours, in her future, looking into that round, mischievous little face. But today, she looks into the face of the woman holding him. She’s very, very beautiful. She has her son’s cheekbones – more accurately, he has hers – and a mole near her right eye. Sandy hair, in big nineties curls.  

She looks very, very happy.  

Somehow, Yuna had always assumed that if she ever saw a photo of Irina, she would be able to read her fate in her face or her eyes. But the woman in this photo is smiling, and so is her kindergarten-aged son, and she is young and radiant and frozen in time, untouchable.  

“Irina,” Yuna says softly, reaching out to touch the edge of the frame. Shane has already wandered away, and Yuna can hear him laughing in the kitchen. They’re both laughing.  

Yuna looks at their faces side by side, framed on their sons’ wall: her own impossibly smooth cheek, Irina’s crinkling eyes. Their identical hands across their sons’ chests, and the way they both bend into their boys, helpless in love. They wouldn’t ever have been able to speak a word to each other.  

“It’s very nice to meet you,” Yuna says. 

I just think! Irina should have gotten to be more than a perfect dead mother.