Alternate Endings Read online

  But Frank balked. He then deflected, after which he finally had to tell her outright when she did not get the message, which annoyed him, for he operated in a thin-aired world of microscopic eyebrow twitches. He began with a general observation that “we need more diversity,” to which she naively responded with a paean to Alice’s blackness. He had to then refer explicitly to the new black Vice Principal, whom the faculty had driven upward nearly in a coup, but still she did not understand. He said “diversity” again, and a third time before she finally eyed him.

  “So who do you want?” she said, confused.

  “Whom. It’s whom.”

  He waited until she understood that she had to re-say the sentence, and he waited until she did it, after which he finally mentioned David. Frank rebuffed her subsequent protest, explaining that the young teacher was impressive. He knew this because David had been “popping in for chats.”

  “Chats?”

  David was the future, Frank said. Knowledgeable, published, and he made a real contribution, which was “sorely needed in your department. Didn’t he just recommend a novel to you that you’ve already decided to use next year?”

  Just as important, Frank said, David clearly met a demographic that was growing at the school, yet was underrepresented. Several wealthy Asian parents had told him plainly at the last parent meet-and-greet that they were disappointed not to see any Asians in management.

  “We’ve got everything else,” he said. “Blacks and gays and trans but no Asians. How could we have missed that?”

  She asked, “But what do I tell Alice?”

  Frank shrugged. “Tell her she doesn’t fit the bill.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “She’s not entitled to the job. We never promised her.”

  “But I’ve never criticized her in any performance review and neither have you.”

  “So it’s subtle. Make it something vague that impacts her leadership style. I don’t care, but make it her. If it’s her, she can’t fight you.”

  “But without my endorsement she’ll lose. You know how this works.”

  “And don’t ever tell her we’ve talked. This has to come from you, so it’s strictly internal within your department.”

  Calyce said to her students, “But first I want to redefine this class. I think I’ve been doing it wrong. Creative writing is subjective, though I think we can all identify what’s good. What I want to do this hour is create a rubric I’ll use for grading for the rest of the year. I want us to formulate this together because I’m throwing out the way I’ve been doing it.”

  That first Saturday of the month, Calyce took the large fake-pine wreath off its high hook on the pegboard nailed to the far inside wall of her garage, the wall shared with Damion’s room. That was where she hung through all the years every bit of the old seasonal paraphernalia of a family of growing children: the wooden painted hanging Valentine hearts connected with red ribbon, the two Easter baskets with their crystalline green cellophane, the Halloween black bat with slippery wings and plastic skin so soft it felt feral, and the two plastic orange buckets with jack-o-lantern eyes that Damion and Maria had used as toddlers. Through the pegboard holes two bouquets of glittered balls on thin stalks massed in firework bunches of fuchsia and royal blue. These she would poke into the two small planters by her front door the morning after Christmas to herald the week-long run-up to New Year’s.

  The children had made the tacky wreath so long before that she had still been married. Alone together one weekend when the kids had been in elementary school, she and they had trooped to the craft store to buy the circle of plastic bottlebrush pine with silvered tips but no pinecones, no ribbon, and none of that red cheap stiff velveteen. They had clamored and she had allowed them to buy whatever small trinkets they wished from the fifty-cent bin, and in this way the artificial store-bought thing became a joy festooned with sienna chili peppers and feathered Styrofoam white birds and branches tucked with gold balls, from which a sequined star dangled and swung whenever they opened the front door. It was a Christmas wreath to dazzle Las Vegas and so unlike her, yet she cherished the garish relic of childhood.

  Every January before, when the holidays had ended, she had climbed the six-foot ladder again to display her trophy exactly in its spot, centered above where her car stopped when it pulled into the garage. As she took the wreath down, she wondered if Damion noticed it when he drove inside.

  Calyce spent the solitary rest of that Saturday afternoon researching the specifics of open-heart bypass, including surgeons in the D.C. area, Medicare coverage, and referral requirements. She made a handwritten list of what they had to do once Winter Break started and Simon brought their mother up from Florida.

  “What are those?” Selene asked her that same evening.

  “Advent candles,” Calyce said.

  “They could start a fire if you forget them. I’ll get you those electric ones like restaurants have. They’re safer.”

  Selene dumped the grocery bags on the counter and unloaded leeks, a box of chicken broth, a five-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes, and a pint of half-and-half. “Do we still have butter? I saw it this morning.”

  “You’re making a cold soup in December?”

  Damion walked in and hugged Selene, wrapping his arms from back to front around her. He was smiling, deeply contented, and Calyce felt the second-hand warmth.

  “Mom, I’ve got something for you.” He dug in a back pocket to tug out a folded square.

  She opened it to see that it was a check repaying everything he owed her for the month, and he was paying it early.

  He said, “It’s not just Christmas that pays well. Tips are good the whole month of December.”

  Calyce frowned. “Were they this good last year?”

  “You just don’t remember.”

  He asked Selene, “What are you making?”

  Calyce said, “Vichyssoise.”

  “No,” Selene corrected. “Potage parmentier. It’s a warm leek and potato soup. And I got bread too. The rosemary kind you like.”

  She looked at Calyce. “I’m sorry, but I only bought enough for two.”

  At dinner Damion and Selene sat touching on one side of the dining room table. Calyce sat opposite and picked at a small plate of red seedless grapes. Selene had set the table with only two placemats, so Calyce had had to fish her own out of the drawer in the sideboard.

  “I’m sorry,” Selene said. “I didn’t think you were eating.”

  A few minutes later, Calyce said to Damion, “When your grandmother comes later this month, you’re going to have to move up to the guestroom.”

  The two lovers lifted their heads in unison as their right hands rhythmically worked their spoons.

  Calyce said, “From your room down there it’s only one flight up and down to this main floor. To get to the guestroom from the front door it’s two, and that’s more than she’ll be able to do while she recovers.”

  “How long will that take?” Damion asked.

  “It could be as long as three months, depending. I’ve already told you this. Twice.”

  He flopped back in his chair. “I have to be in the guestroom for three months? You’re kidding. You know what she did?” he said to Selene. “She left them, the whole family, and she didn’t come back for a year.”

  “This isn’t the time for that story,” Calyce said.

  “She ran off with some boat guy,” he continued. “She made my mom take care of the whole family. What were you then? Fifteen?”

  “Damion.”

  “My aunt and uncle were little and my granddad travelled all the time, so my mom had to do it.”

  Selene asked Calyce, “Where did she go?”

  “Florida,” Damion answered. “So she could be with this guy. Right, Mom? A sailor?”

  They both looked at Calyce as though they were watching TV, slurping soup and waiting for her answer. />
  “Fishing boat captain,” Calyce finally said to be done with it. “One of those charters that goes out to deep sea.”

  That night a text hit her phone but Calyce couldn’t read it until she found her glasses.

  Not coming Xmas. Still in Chile. Mom says to come just for Jan surgery.

  Calyce punched buttons.

  What about surgeons? I emailed you several possibilities. I can’t do this alone.

  Two hours later, words snapped back to her from the far Southern Hemisphere.

  You’ll do your usual fine job organizing. Really don’t have service here.

  “So what do you have to do?” Calyce asked a junior girl in her Advisory. She wanted to know what Abby, the girl’s chemistry teacher, had told her.

  “She says I have to take the test on Tuesday, in the morning, right before I leave for the hospital. They’re rebuilding my ankle.”

  “She wants you to take a test the morning of surgery? When?”

  “Eight.”

  “When’s surgery?”

  “One, but they want me there at ten.”

  “And you can’t eat anything the night before. No water even?”

  The child shook her head.

  “And you can’t take your ADHD meds.”

  “I can’t have any drugs at all in my system. But she said she has to have the grade next week, that having me take the test after Winter Break would give me an unfair advantage.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Are you in town the first week of Break? Could you take it then?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be home recovering.”

  Calyce patted her. “You go to class now. Let me see about this.”

  As she walked the corridor a moment later, Calyce began coughing and couldn’t stop. It started as a searing high in her throat, just below where she swallowed. She wheeze-coughed and coughed again, and then it suddenly became a gag reflex and she had to pray she didn’t bring her lunch up and out onto the carpet.

  She knocked on the doorframe and entered the laboratory classroom that was empty except for a thirty-something teacher writing on the whiteboard with a dark red marker.

  “Abby?” Calyce said hoarsely. “Have you got a minute?”

  “I simply don’t understand why you won’t yield on this,” Calyce said five minutes later. “The child needs surgery. She won’t be able to focus Tuesday morning. It’s unfair.”

  Abby crossed her arms, the marker tip now pointed out like a weapon. Her furious eyes were the only things alive on her shut-tight face. “It’s not going to matter. She’s not one of the brightest anyway.”

  “How would you like it if a teacher required you to take a test an hour before you had surgery?”

  Abby said stubbornly, “Her surgery’s not until the afternoon.”

  Just as stubbornly, Calyce told her, “You’re insensitive and heartless. You know that.”

  Alone in the house again, Calyce sat at her dining table that night talking to Simon, who had just informed her that he was not in fact travelling from Dallas to Florida the next weekend to retrieve their mother and bring her to D.C. as planned, for what everyone understood could be her last Christmas. Instead, he and Sandra and their two teenage daughters would be staying home. Simon’s elder girl, a high school senior, had finals right after the first of the year, he said, and the family had decided that studying was the top priority.

  He would, however, be arriving the night before Effie’s surgery in January, once it was scheduled. He planned to stay in a hotel for two nights “to make sure she’s all right.” He had discussed it with his wife. He wouldn’t leave to return home until early the morning of the second day after the bypass.

  “You’re leaving before she’s discharged?” Calyce was incredulous.

  Yes, because he had a job and routes to fly and pilots were only wage-slaves nowadays. “That two days is already going to be tough, what with my taking Christmas. Not to mention, what message does it send her if we all flock to D.C.? We’re telling her she won’t have another one.”

  “But who’s going to bring her?”

  He was done. “You’re on Christmas break soon. Why don’t you get her? Don’t you get two weeks?”

  An hour later Selene and Damion pulled in to find Calyce in the garage, on the stepladder, digging passionately in one of her CHRISTMAS-marked wall cabinets, her head so far inside she didn’t notice Damion’s car inching alongside her.

  Selene said a moment later to the legs on the ladder, “I bought you lights for the lamppost out front. I thought it could use some.”

  “I don’t put lights on that,” Calyce answered from inside the cabinet. “It’s a candy cane if I can find the ribbon in here somewhere.”

  She was moving things, brushing against the bottom.

  “Then maybe on the door wreath.”

  “Nowhere to plug them in. Damion can you take this?”

  Calyce pulled out a box without a lid.

  “The crèche?” he said. “You don’t put that out.”

  “I am this year. And everything else Simon doesn’t like. Time to put Jesus back in Christmas. It’s his wife, your Aunt Sandra. They’re not coming.”

  Calyce walked toward the department office the next morning with her mind on everything but school, so she didn’t see Roger hurrying to catch up. He didn’t call to her so she didn’t slow, and when he spoke it surprised her.

  “Are you going to the faculty Christmas party this Sunday?”

  “Winter party,” she corrected as she motored. “No Christianity. School policy.”

  “So are you going?”

  Ten minutes later she was staring at John DeGroot before the weekly departmental meeting started.

  “You’re not serious,” she whispered.

  “They’re complaining that you’re constantly monitoring them. You keep track. But I want you to announce it, not me. You tell them you’re moving your desk. Put Amita there and make points with the young ones.”

  “But I’ve had my desk by the door for eighteen years. I like it there.”

  “It’s time for things to change.”

  “But I don’t want to sit there,” Amita told Calyce quietly as soon as the meeting ended. “With all the traffic in and out, I won’t be able to concentrate.”

  “It’ll be good for you. You’ll see. I always liked it there.”

  “But then why are you moving?”

  Calyce had to think of something.

  “I’m Interim Head now. If I sit there, I look like the receptionist.”

  That night Calyce was checking flights roundtrip to Clearwater when Damion climbed the stairs to the dining room. She waited but didn’t hear the softer footfalls of his diaphanous girlfriend and caught herself wondering if Selene ever touched down.

  Calyce reminded him again that he had to move upstairs by that coming Friday.

  “Already?”

  “Do you know how much these tickets cost? It’s a fortune to go down and back the same weekend.”

  “Isn’t Simon paying?”

  “Why should he?”

  “At least the difference. He’s the one who bailed at the last minute.”

  The teenager was alone and crying in the classroom when Calyce opened the door and flipped on the lights, which set the girl to wiping her face sloppily. She was a senior with long blonde hair and eyes that looked like a summer day. Calyce had taught the girl the prior year, and she knew her to be devoted and studious, with good parents.

  Through sniffles, the girl described the previous afternoon’s email from Yale, in which the school had rejected her outright. Early admission decisions had been issued the day before, and Yale hadn’t bothered to defer or even waitlist this straight-A student, who knew already that three other classmates had been accepted. Good students, but not all great, none obvious future leaders of the civilized world, and none better than this child sobbing alone in a remote classroom.


  “Yale was all I ever wanted since I was little,” she said with her face streaking. “My mom and I were Rory and Lorelei from Gilmore Girls.”

  Calyce sat next to her. “You used to say that.”

  “What do I do now?”

  Calyce thought for a long moment.

  “You feel as bad as you want for as long as you want, but you don’t let it stop your applying over Break to everywhere else.”

  “But I don’t care about the others.”

  “You don’t right now. Just get on mechanically to the next schools on your list. Call me if you want over Break, and let me know if you need a recommendation letter. I’d be happy to do one. And Zoë?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yale made a colossal mistake. You and I both know that. Wherever you go, you’ll be phi beta kappa.”

  They were alone in the department office at the end of the next day, she and Dan, for the first time she could remember. The room was always bustling when he arrived in the mornings just minutes before classes began, and he ate with all the other eager young teachers in the lunchroom every day. Dan was a crowder, she had seen, and not a loner. He came and went with noise and electricity.

  To Calyce, at her new desk in the middle of the bullpen, he said, “Did you hear about the consolidation? Of course you did. What do you think?”

  She froze for an instant but quickly recovered. “You tell me. I want to hear your reaction first.”

  “I think it’s good,” he said. “It makes it seamless from Pre-K to the high school if we all have one unified department. That way we know it all fits together.”

  She nodded, then said, “I need to spend some time here on my lesson plan. Do you know when John’s getting in?”

  When DeGroot didn’t appear, she went to search for him. When she didn’t find him in the school, she hugged her blazer to herself and went outside into the icy wind to look for him in the underground garage. She was heading down the ramp, ducking under the white semaphore gate arm, when she finally spotted him striding up. He too was clutching his jacket.