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It's still fairly early in the morning when Shane slips out of the house, but the air is warm on his skin already. The grass is soft under his feet, green and springy as he makes his way slowly down to the pier, careful not to spill his mug of tea. There are two Adirondack chairs sitting at the end, tilted just barely toward each other, mostly facing out to the water. He stops to stand behind one of them, Ilya's chair, as he had started calling it after finding him out here napping one too many time.
This has always been his favorite time at the cottage - early enough in the morning that the world isn't quite awake yet, the universe serene and still at the end of the pier. He sets his mug on the flat top of a dock piling, and hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his shorts, breathing the morning air in deeply through his nose.
God, he misses Ilya. He never knew it was possible to miss someone like this, like a limb severed from his body. He hasn't been gone all that long, really. They've been apart for much longer before, in the grand scheme of their relationship.
The water of the lake is calm under the pier, reflecting endless blue of the summer sky. He'd always found it grounding before, the consistent ebb and flow beneath his feet, with nothing around but the trees and the birds.
For the very first time, Shane finds it decidedly lonely. He stands there in the quiet, letting time pass him by nebulously, until he can't take it anymore.
"I miss you every day. I wake up in the morning and forget that you're gone, until I roll over and the bed is empty." Shane pauses. He feels a little silly, saying it out loud, but no one is around to hear his words except for Ilya. "I know I've spent time here without you, but it's hard to think about it now. Everywhere I look, I just remember you being there, and now… You're not. I never considered that I would need to get used to this being my space again. I couldn't even tell you when I started thinking of it as ours. I'm sure I'll see you soon enough, but that doesn't really make me feel better now."
As he speaks, Shane thinks that he can hear the door from the cottage slide open and shut again. He doesn't bother looking back, he knows there's only a couple people it could be. At some point, his hands had left his pockets to grasp the slats of the back of Ilya's chair, and he finds himself leaning into it. Footsteps on the weathered wood stop a few feet behind Shane.
"I thought I said I didn't want you walking all the way out here alone, anymore." Shane can't help but smile at the sound of the voice, and looks over his shoulder. His sweet eldest daughter, Irina. Lately it hurts to look at her, with how much she looks like Ilya. "Who were you talking to?"
"You know how your Papa used to come out here when it was quiet to talk to his mother? Your бaбa." Her namesake. Shane hangs his head, looking down at the faded pattern of the cushion in the chair in front of him. "If it worked for him, and helped him feel better, I thought maybe…"
He hears a soft, oh, dad, before she places a steady hand on his shoulder. He blows a long, shaky breath from his pursed lips, trying to blink the tears back from his eyes. Irina didn't need to see him like this. She tugs on his shoulder, and the touch is so gentle, but it's all he needs to convince him to turn around, directly into his daughter's arms. He can feel her sniffle against his shoulder, and he can't help but to squeeze her so tightly he's a little afraid she's going to break, if not for the fact that she's holding him just as tightly. He's not sure how long they stand there, swaying a little on the pier in the sunshine, crying into each others shirts. They don't need to be strong here — that's never what the cottage has been for.
Eventually, mostly at Irina's insistence, they sit; Shane in Ilya's chair, tracing the long-faded scorch mark from a secret cigarette, Irina in Shane's, hunching forward a little to wipe the tears from her eyes with the hem of her sleep shirt. She's still in her pajamas, and Shane feels bad for disrupting her morning. He tells her so, and she brushes it off.
"You wouldn't say it was disrupting your morning if you found me out here, would you?" He asks, and he can't argue with that.
"This is my first summer here without him in…" He has to pause, do the math in his head. "30 years, I think. Not since you were a teenager. I expect to see him everywhere."
"I've never had a summer here without Papa." She fiddles with the string on her pajama pants, suddenly looking so much younger than her 47 years. "The kids haven't either."
He's been gone two months now. They're supposed to be spreading his ashes today, out in the water.
The lonesome call of a loon bounces across the lake, and nothing responds.