Page 105

I came to him last.

He stood at the end of the Ravens’ line, in his red-and-black jersey, with his helmet under one arm and his face carved out of stone. He looked ten years older. He looked, I thought, like a man at a graveside.

I held out my hand.

He took it.

His grip was cold and shaking. He held on a second longer than the rules allowed. I looked into his eyes and saw something rising there, huge and dark and terribly gentle, like a tide coming in.

“Good game, Pendleton,” he said, aloud, in a dry, formal voice.

Then he leaned in, as if to say something more, and murmured, so low that not even the microphones could catch it, a string of Russian syllables I didn’t know.

“ Ya lyublyu tebya. Doveryay mne. Zhdi. “

I stared at him.

“What does that mean?”

But he had let go of my hand. He turned, and walked away across the ice, toward the tunnel, toward the locker room, toward the bus, the plane, the rest of his long life.

I stood alone at center ice, with the crowd cheering the Ravens and the lights beating down and a strange, cold feeling spreading through my chest.

Jason found me a minute later. “Dude, are you okay?”

“What’s ‘zhdi’?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” I took out my phone and typed it in with clumsy thumbs, letter by letter, right there on the ice, in front of the Frost Cup.

“Ya lyublyu tebya” — I love you.

“Doveryay mne” — Trust me.

“Zhdi” — Wait.

I read it four times.

Then I put the phone away and walked off the ice, and I did not know that it would be the last thing Maksim Volkov said to me for four days.

Chapter 25

LEX

Four Days of Silence

My sister hit me at sixty miles an hour.

She came off the front steps of the Pendleton house before my father’s driver had put the car in park, a small blur in a yellow sweater, arms wide, braids flying, and I had exactly enough time to say “Jen, careful, my shoulder—” before she landed. I caught her. I always do. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist like a koala and squeezed until the ice pack fell out of my jacket.

“You lost, “ she said, into my collar.

“Thanks.”

“You lost and you got hit and I watched it on TV and Mom cried.”

“I did not cry,” called my mother, from the doorway. “I had a cold.”