Ethan Chatagnier: Warnings from the Future

Do voices age? I don’t mean the thickening of puberty or the weak wind of old age, but within one phase of a man’s life—say, from thirtyfour to forty-three? I was asking myself this question as I quietly stepped down the hallway past the girls’ rooms, taking a call in the dark from a Tahoe area code, which meant someone from the past. In the bedroom, it was a voice whose familiarity could not be matched to memory. In the hallway I was fairly certain it belonged to my brother Rick, though the voice was babbling, and Rick was not one to babble. In the kitchen, turning on the little light under the microwave that usually only Denise used, that she sometimes forgot to turn off when we closed up the house for bed, I was sure—both because I’d heard enough that I could filter out what I thought was a little extra graveliness—a little more suggestion of beef or Skoal—to turn it into the voice I used to know, and because now he was saying, It’s Shasta , Bill . It’s Shasta . Shasta was my niece. Shasta was his daughter.

Through his hysterics I gathered she’d been stabbed in a bar and he was rushing her to Barton Memorial down in South Lake. As soon as he said this, it was like I was watching a live feed. I knew those roads so well I could see his truck weaving down them, his headlights making the trunks of the conifers real in the night. The lake just made an empty blackness at this hour, except where the lights of Reno glimmered off the far side of it like a smear of Impressionist paint. I knew exactly how fast you could take those turns without veering across the narrow shoulder and tumbling down the mountain into the lake, though this was more a memory of a knowledge than a knowledge in earnest. I could see his truck, the shade of matte grape blue that could only be produced by age, its brake lights flashing red when he felt he’d hit a turn too fast. He likely had a new truck by now, but what could I see other than what I knew? I saw my brother as he was nine years ago. Had he shaved his beard in the interim, or trimmed it, or done anything to demonstrate that he, rather than it, was in charge?

I’d seen Shasta six years earlier at her eighth-grade graduation. She was fourteen, and I still imagined her that way, which managed not to chafe my mental image of the ride too much, because her breasts and hips were already exploding at a rate any father of daughters could only describe as dangerous. My own girls were developing more patiently, and into more refined silhouettes, and I’ve never been able to rid myself of the silly notion that choices I’d made had influenced this: the mortgage, the life insurance, the college funds. But buttoned-up uncles have a special affection for their wild-hearted nieces, just as wild-hearted uncles have a soft spot for their honor-roll nieces. I’d felt I could talk to Shasta as an adult. She had the bearing of one; she spoke to me as if she were one, as if her education in all things, abbreviated though it might be, was completed. I had expected to hear about some boy with a skateboard or a guitar or hair in his eyes. Instead she told me that she wasn’t a mountain girl. She wouldn’t do what her dad had done, wouldn’t stay. She was a beach girl, she said, and she would be a beach woman once she had her diploma.

“You can stay with us in Sacramento,” I said. “Still a ways from the beach, but close enough to the Delta.”

She scoffed. “I’m talking Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara.”

“Santa something.”

“Exactly.”

She didn’t realize that in her choker, in her too-tight t-shirt and heavy eyeliner and sturdy shoes, she looked like the very picture of a mountain girl, and that by claiming to be destined for the beach, she was only cleaving tighter to norms of the girls who stayed. She’d spoken her intention so confidently I believed her in the moment, though driving back down into the valley, I knew better. If I had thought of her in the past few years, I would have been able to predict she’d spend her Saturday nights in one of those washout bars that served anyone over eighteen. But I would not have predicted any bloodshed.

“What happened?” I asked Rick.

“I’m applying pressure. What else should I do?”

“Is the knife still in the wound?”

“No.”

“Do you think it might have hit a major organ?”

“Can you listen, Bill? It’s four or five slices, high up on her thighs.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Where was he trying to stab her?”

He let silence be his answer, the first moment of quiet since I’d picked up the phone. For a moment I was back at the kitchen table, my eyes fixed to the microwave in a way I hadn’t realized, taking in the little circle of light, the oven’s control console, and the ceramic cooktop that bounced some extra light back up to the ceiling, where it nested, light blue, in the recesses of the kitchen’s main lights.

“How do I know if he got the femoral?”

“Is she still alive?” I asked. “Then he didn’t get the femoral.”

Talking down to him was the best way to ease his worry. I won’t say it didn’t also feel good, won’t say I didn’t want him to be thinking that his daughter would have been better off if it were me in the cab with her instead of him, that I had the skills to properly assess the wounds, that if I had concerns about her bleeding out on the drive I could have put in some emergency sutures with the fishing line in his tackle box and some sterile alcohol. In truth, so long as no major arteries were cut and they were doing a decent job applying pressure, I was more concerned about her going septic from whatever might have been on the blade, whatever might be on the towels or rags that were handy in Rick’s truck. Doubtless he knew without asking that my own daughters were sleeping soundly in their beds, that if they’d stayed up past ten at all it would be to read surreptitiously under the covers, that even when they reached Shasta’s age there was no way they’d spend their Saturday nights downing piss beer at bars populated by middle-aged men trying to drink enough to crack themselves open.

I heard Shasta moan, long and mournfully, and there they were again, my brother from nine years ago, my niece from six years ago, winding along the side of the mountains with white towels in her lap, a red penumbra spreading across them, the thighs of her jeans already saturated with blood, looking like something from a horror film. I saw her elbow thrown across her eyes like someone trying to nap on an airplane, less because of any physical wounds than to avoid interacting with her father. I saw the part of her face you see beneath a superhero’s mask, her jaw set with emotion, glazed with tears, white from the loss of blood.

“How’s her color?”

“Pale.”

“Gray at all? Blue?”

“Just pale.”

“That’s good.”

He was at least half an hour from the hospital. There was not much else I could tell him. The situation sounded as stable as it could be for an injured person riding through the dark in a dirty pickup. But he didn’t hang up, so neither did I.

Rick had taken a swing at me at a family barbecue over a matter of probate. When our father died, the whole of his estate was his cabin in Tahoe, which had been our vacation home before the divorce and his only home in the years after. Rick had wanted to take over the house, but of the hundred and fifty thousand he needed to buy me out, he had about five.

Our mother, who had lost the Sacramento house after a banker boyfriend talked her into a host of ill-considered investments, was working as a waitress in Truckee and getting older. She could move out of her apartment, and she and Rick could share the house. It would be good for the family. Good for the family mattered to me, but I still had my loans from physician’s assistant school, and Denise and I were still upside-down on our mortgage. We hadn’t even started our 529 plans for the girls. Gifting that kind of equity was untenable. I thought it a breach for him to even ask, so it was perhaps in an ungenerous tone that I suggested the two of them go in on an apartment together.