“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.
That’s when he took his swing, and yes, it did connect.
After that, I sent my lawyer to talk to him and his. He never apologized. My mother considered my failure to give them half a house miserly, so I lost her in the deal, too. She was a type you see often enough in movies, a lifetime of stints as a diner waitress and bartender, interrupted only by marriages to more successful men. She was pretty in a blunt way that hadn’t aged well, turning her into one of those square-jawed old ladies that made me think of extras in spaghetti westerns.
Shasta’s graduation party had been at my mother’s apartment complex, hot dogs in the park-style grill boxes poking up around a pool whose unnatural turquoise color screamed of some kind of carcinogenic additive. A few families were in the pool, but no one from our group. We all stood dopily on the grass in the June heat. There was no mixing between the two populations of our party—Shasta’s friends and my mother’s. I’d come to see Shasta, knowing Rick was off in Goose Lake near the Oregon border seeing about a used boat. I didn’t want to see her tumble into a family rift she’d played no part in creating. My mother made a few crossings to offer the girls Ruffles from a melamine bowl, but she knew where her tribe was. I was stuck between the two. My mother didn’t come talk to me, and I didn’t go talk to her. Neither did I have any desire to hover around a group of six teenagers. Shasta finally resolved my dilemma by deserting her friends to talk with me awhile. She held her bottled Coke the way men held beer bottles at patio parties, with a thumb and three fingers, nonchalant, elbow bent to keep it at rib height, as if it were a microphone she might soon need to speak into. She was more practiced with the real thing, I suspected, from parties at which her grandmother wasn’t lurking. And the way she pulled up next to me, rather than facing me, so that we were looking out together at the kids half-submerged in the industrial-solventcolored pool, made me worry she might light up a cigarette.
“How’s Denise?” she asked.
The way she posed this simple question, as if asking were a dry joke, contained a fully formed critique of my wife: that she was too limited in her worldviews, that she was simple in her attempts to find balance and meaning through inspirational pictures and motivational quotes, that she did not know how to be a real person. Shasta, even in her elementary school years, had not bought into the pleasant and extremely mommish way Denise tried to lead her and the girls through activities. She perhaps thought there was something dishonest about that kind of acting, that it was concealing a void, that it was a sheet of wrapping paper over no gift. It was certainly not an act that Rick ever put on, and so must have seemed terribly insincere by comparison. I was of course familiar with the dirty or dark jokes Denise made after bedtime, and caught the jokes she lobbed over the girls’ heads, jokes neither they nor Shasta realized existed. Even disagreeing with Shasta’s critique, though, I caught the knowing wink of her question, the one hiding in every TV advertisement: you get it. Who doesn’t receive a thrill from a secret compliment?
“You know,” I said. “Doing lots of fun activities.”
My mother visited the girls again with a bowl of Chex Mix. She did not come to Shasta and me, but she did look at me passively, as if she might be trying to identify some realtor she’d seen on a shoppingcart ad. Shasta nodded at her and told me quietly, “Susan’s the type of lady who’s always thinking about poisoning people’s tea, muttering to herself she could do it if she wanted to, nobody would stop her.”
“That’s awfully judgmental,” I said, “but not necessarily inaccurate.”
I prepared myself for some unkind question about my daughters, but instead she started talking about herself. She was a beach girl, she said. Kids who stayed up here didn’t care about knowing anything. It was too easy to grow pot in the national forest lands, to teach summer people to jet ski and winter people to snowboard. Everyone said the drinking water up here was laced with something, and that was why even people who didn’t smoke seemed stoned all the time. To save your brain, she said, you have to escape.
How are your grades? That’s how I got out. There’s a question I didn’t ask. I remember thinking that kids have no idea how simple their trajectories really are, how easy they are to trace. A token resistance to the lifestyle up there was just part of the lifestyle up there. The ones who never talked about getting out were the only ones who got out. And this girl who was worrying about her brain had been a truant since fourth grade. I’m sure she used wadded-up worksheets beneath the kindling of her campfires. A little scholastic prodding from an uncle—how much could it do when her father didn’t even read her report cards?
I could have guessed that she’d stay, that she’d drink beer in the woods and fail classes at the community college. Going to bars at nineteen, getting stabbed in the crotch—well, that’s more than I anticipated.
“Who did this?” I asked Rick through the phone. “Was it a stranger, some crazy person?”
“Some white fuck who calls himself Indian Steve. The bartender called him her ex-boyfriend. Guy is almost my age.” I thought I could hear in his voice that he still had his beard, that his voice had to travel through it. “Crazy? I don’t know. Crazy if he doesn’t leave town or blow his fucking brains out.”
“Big guy?”
“Little guy, jumpy. Got a black mole right in the middle of his forehead I’m going to use as a target.”
“Wait, Steve Hillenbrand? He was my year.”
“Hope you’ve got a funeral suit, then.”
“No one liked him then, either. He had trouble getting people to take him seriously.”
Something like a snort came from the wet beard. “He tried to get everyone calling him Indian Steve,” Rick said. “Most just call him Asshole Steve.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Time I’m done they’ll call him Colostomy Steve.”
A long moan with a sort of honking quality came through the receiver, like a goose mourning. If she hadn’t lost too much blood, her heart would be supercharging to maintain blood pressure; the arteries of her neck would be rearing up like garden hoses, struggling against the choker she was almost certainly not wearing but that I couldn’t picture her without. I saw the usual sunny gleam of her tan wiped off the pale base beneath it.