Alternate Endings Read online

  She knocked. “Damion?”

  “He’s not here,” Selene called from within. “He won’t be back until after closing.”

  “I’ll leave these things here,” Calyce said to the door. “And I’ve got some mail for him.”

  She retrieved a handful of bills from under the clean laundry and slid them beneath the door along with a note she had written.

  Calyce, Belinda’s email said, I’m sorry but you can’t leave notes on my chair anymore.

  They might get lost. I’m also sorry that I’m so busy when you’ve come by, but I have a crazy tight schedule now. My first 15 minutes free is next Tuesday at 9:15. Let me know if that works.

  Belinda, Calyce wrote back, let’s do dinner instead. You’ve never seen my house. Friday the 12th ?

  Calyce entered the lunchroom and stood, her insulated fabric lunchbox in her hand. The room was noisy and banging with movement and color, the crash of voices, the screech of chairs, and the clinking, popping, scratching of plastic containers, elbows, and opening soda cans. She also heard the crinkling of potato chip bags and the ringing of some real silverware somewhere above the scraping sound of plastic knives and forks. She smelled microwaved, cheesy food.

  The room was full, which meant to Calyce not that every chair was taken but that every table had at least one occupant, and no one, not a single person, had raised their chins in greeting or flapped their hands to invite her over.

  She registered a set of five English teachers with just one empty chair at their table. They were all looking at her mid-bite in that first moment of recognition before politesse kicks in.

  Calyce turned and took herself and her lunch out of the room, passing Dan coming in from the hallway. He invited her to sit with them, pointing to that same table, but she declined. He did it again, saying “Seriously,” but once more she said no, this time adding that she had decided to take a walk, the weather was so nice.

  “It’s forty degrees outside.”

  “But better than yesterday. I’ve been getting a lot of exercise lately, and now I want to do it during the school day too.”

  He said to her back, “I had no idea you were such an avid walker.”

  “What the hell is this?” Damion demanded as he waved the note she had written.

  Selene spotted the fat grocery bags Calyce had just parked on the counter. “What did you get?”

  Calyce said to Damion, “You never called him.”

  “You think I need a note from Mommy slipped under my door to remind me?”

  Selene slid behind Calyce to inspect the bags.

  “Don’t you embarrass me like that again,” Damion told her.

  Calyce hesitated because of Selene, but then said, “You embarrassed me. John was only trying to do you a favor. You promised me repeatedly and you didn’t do it.”

  They had all left him, his angry sons and daughters, circling and spinning around him and away. He was alone now, abandoned on the pointed mountaintop with its ice-blue sky above and no air, no breeze, no kissing of his face anymore by his loving children. Aeolus, immortal, the keeper of the Four Winds, had no usefulness now that they had swirled themselves out beyond his realm, his grasp and embrace. If they returned, if they ever did, they would no longer be controlled.

  Love to! Belinda texted as Calyce was writing. But promise, no work discussion. Purely social.

  “And here’s the money for the bills. You don’t have to slip those under my door, either.”

  Damion had stomped up loudly an hour later, past an astonished Effie in the living room with Selene right behind him, trailing so close it looked like he was hauling a trailer.

  Furious, he flung the cash at Calyce where she sat at the dining table, all small bills, ones and fives, a flock of them taking flight as he jerked his hand, all shooting into the air between them, then fluttering to the polished tabletop. They reflected as multiples in the sheen.

  “Fuck her!” Calyce heard Damion say to Selene as he slammed the door to his room.

  Calyce sat with the cash littered around her and on her, for ones had landed even in her lap and on her arm. A five had swung as it descended, alighting on her keyboard. She stared, stunned, at the money.

  She plucked bills from her arm, from her lap and her computer, laying them beside her. She replaced her fingers reflexively on the home row of her keyboard ready for the next staccato in her story about Aeolus, but nothing came. She stared at the screen but didn’t see it, and she didn’t hear her mother glide toward her.

  Effie bent and began picking up the money with her talon fingers. She piled the bills neatly in her palm as she bobbed quietly around the table, making as little noise as she could, then went into the kitchen to put the stack somewhere Calyce wouldn’t see it.

  She returned and stood near her daughter but didn’t touch her. When Calyce didn’t move, Effie went to the other side of the table and pulled out a chair, then sat and waited.

  After a long moment she finally spoke, her voice soft and loving.

  “I’m proud of you.”

  Calyce didn’t answer.

  “I had no idea,” Effie said. “Does he do that a lot?”

  Calyce nodded.

  Effie tried to make a joke of it. “At least he’s got the money.”

  But then, “He’s always nice to me. Do you think it’s her?”

  Calyce looked up then, suddenly dependent on every word. “It’s not me? I’m not the cause of this?”

  Effie laid her arm on the table, stretching it across but not quite reaching Calyce, then said kindly, so kindly, “Sometimes our children get mad at us and they don’t give a reason. Sometimes they even hate us and won’t say why.”

  One of the mothers had offered her mullioned home for the meeting, and three other parents had brought food, so by the time Lee stood to speak at the top of the inexact circle of chairs arranged against the walls of the red-lacquered Georgetown dining room, the picked-clean Crate & Barrel platters bore nothing but large ornate service forks, which, Calyce noticed, were sterling silver and a hundred years old. The meal had been good, that usual private-school combination of some light protein with out-of-season fresh vegetables sprinkled with herbs and two different salads of leafy greens followed by chocolate chip cookies for the teenagers, who eyed each other as they each sat tethered to their assigned parent(s) and tried to act as though mom/dad hadn’t come.

  One of the girls was in Calyce’s writing class, and they smiled fleetingly at each other. The girl’s father even made small talk at Calyce across the expanse of room, as Calyce sat tightly between two other families, all of them balancing their plates on their laps with their elbows pinned.

  Lee spoke at length about the logistics and paperwork involved in the upcoming senior Quest trip to Zion and Bryce she led every year in May. An avid outdoorswoman, she was in her mid-thirties, fit and taut in a menswear-tailored white dress shirt she had tucked into her black trousers. Beautiful in a sun-kissed California way, Lee had tamed her long, thick blonde hair into a low ponytail. As the evening wore on, though, and she played with it near her ears as she always did, wisps escaped and the horsetail loosened.

  Lee began to describe the long, difficult climb up Angel’s Landing, a very high rocky promontory connected by the thinnest edge to the west side of a narrowing canyon formed by the often-flash-flooded Virgin River. The exposed precipitous scramble to the top risked death, for a fall would be straight down 1,500 feet.

  “People die,” Lee said. “One woman was an experienced hiker there with her family and she just stumbled and fell. You don’t fall and live unless you happen to fall into a chink, but that’s just luck, and even then, you’d have to be rescued, probably by helicopter. That’s why the school requires each family to sign a complete release in order to do this. We can’t be liable.”

  “The woman who died, how old was she?” a father asked. His son had his arms crossed and was sunk down so low in a fol
ding chair that his toes couldn’t be seen under the dining table.

  “Mid-fifties, I think,” Lee told him.

  “That’s too old,” he said. “You’re not fit anymore and you can’t recover if you lose your balance.”

  Lee turned to Calyce. “Do you think it’s too hard?”

  Cornered, Calyce answered quietly. “I didn’t make it. I tried, but I couldn’t get up that first hill. I think there’s some magic to it, but the kids didn’t have any trouble.”

  The same father turned to his sprawling son. “See? What did I tell you? Twenty years younger and she would have made it, no problem.”

  Calyce walked with Lee to Lee’s car. It didn’t snow much in the city because of the dense population, which threw off heat, and because of its location on a tidal plain, but D.C. could be knife-cold. It was one of those frozen nights.

  “So I have to get someone else to go,” Lee was saying to Calyce. “I wish you’d said something earlier than a few days ago. If you’d told me over Break I could have had your replacement lined up to come tonight instead of you.”

  For this mid-term, three short stories follow: The Wind and a Boy by Bessie Head, The Wind by Ray Bradbury, and The Wind Blows by Katherine Mansfield. 1) Write a short essay about what each of these stories reveals about its writer, so that none could have been written by either of the others; and 2) write a piece of original flash fiction, totaling no more than 300 words, about the wind, without using the wind as that tired metaphor for change.

  Effie was watching the big TV upstairs in Calyce’s room when Damion came into the kitchen alone searching for his mother, who stood chopping at the counter with her back to him. She recognized his footstep of course but didn’t turn, so what he saw was her profile, a willowy, handsome woman with a long neck curved over green peppers. Her hair was still perfectly in place even at the end of the workday, and she still wore her black skirt and purple silky long-sleeved top, but her large feet for the first time stood bare on the linoleum. The nails had no polish, and the toes were knuckled and bent like bare roots.

  “Your feet aren’t cold?” he said. “It’s January.”

  She didn’t respond to him.

  He said, “I’m sorry about the other night. I’m just so worried about this job stuff. I’ve been out of school so long with nothing to show for it. This interview today with DeGroot’s guy didn’t go well and I think it was my fault. I didn’t have enough on my resume and the guy was an asshole, frankly. I’m sorry, but he was. He gave me five minutes then told me to leave.”

  Calyce took that next Friday off to ferry her mother to and from Georgetown Hospital. The surgeon had ordered blood tests and a chest x-ray, as well as cardiac catheterization, which frightened Calyce, who was suddenly sharply aware of the imminence of everything. A tube threaded up Effie’s artery to her heart from her leg seemed monumental to Calyce, and yet it was termed a “routine” pre-op procedure. The idea of cutting into a heart was impossible to entertain.

  The appointment that day with the surgeon had driven it home, for he had mentioned the need for Effie’s end-of-life wishes, in writing, so if anything happened, though it was statistically very unlikely, the “care team” would have her instructions.

  “Let me go,” her mother told them. “Just let me go. Give my organs to whoever needs them.”

  Belinda came for dinner right on time, bringing a bottle of white wine to accompany the baked flounder Calyce had already told her they were having.

  “You know I don’t drink,” Calyce said when she saw the bottle.

  “But I do.” Belinda smiled. “I thought you hated seafood.”

  “My mother loves it, but I don’t know if she’ll eat. She’s nearly asleep.”

  Damion’s door opened and Selene came out on her way to class. She nodded courteously when Calyce introduced her.

  “She’s pretty,” Belinda said when she was gone. “Is that Damion’s room?”

  “Do you want to see it?”

  Calyce felt for the extra key above the doorframe.

  As soon as they entered, Belinda said, “You always say room. I thought it was a kid’s room but this is an entire apartment except a kitchen. He’s even got a fridge.”

  In his bedroom she looked out his sliding glass door. “Is that a gas grill with that table and chairs?”

  Calyce flipped on the outside light. She had never seen any of the setup before, and it was expensive. “He must have just bought all that.”

  At dinner Calyce couldn’t avoid the topic of the English Department’s school-wide consolidation. She couldn’t help herself. Yes, Belinda admitted reluctantly, she had known it was happening, and yes, she had known before John DeGroot.

  Calyce asked casually then for Belinda’s endorsement, assuming it was a given. Her friend, though, repositioned the orb of the wine glass between her fingers. She cupped it and swirled. The conversation became still.

  “I can’t do it,” Belinda said.

  “Why not? A black woman in management who endorses me will help.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. It’ll look like collusion, and politically it’s a bad idea, especially as my first official act. And I can’t play favorites.”

  Calyce put her fork down. “He’s at the middle school. He has nothing to do with your being the high school Vice Principal.”

  “But I can’t cause friction between the campuses.”

  “I campaigned for you!”

  “It was Dan who went all over the school. He talked to everyone.”

  “I told him to.”

  “But he’s the one who did it. He’s campaigning for you too. Do you know that?”

  The rest of the meal was so uncomfortable that neither woman could find a topic on which to light. Belinda was at Calyce’s front door less than an hour later, when she asked suddenly, “Have you been to the middle and lower school campus to talk to the English teachers there?”

  “It would look like begging,” Calyce said stiffly.

  “Well, you need to do something. You know there are more of them there than at the high school?”

  The next Monday morning Calyce was coughing again. The sharp bite in her throat had returned. She fought it, blast-coughing repeatedly as she walked to her classroom but even the air she inhaled seemed to have an acrid taste.

  “Calyce!” Roger called after her.

  She had to turn, hand to mouth.

  “What?” she said weakly.

  “Lee has talked to me about doing Zion. Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine . . . You’re the right choice . . . It should have been you all along.”

  She turned but he persisted. “How’s your mom?”

  She whirled around angrily. “She’s fine, now may I please go teach my class?”

  To: **All** English teachers HS MS LS

  From: Calyce Tate, Interim Head H.S.

  I thought it would be helpful if we all met to discuss where the department is as a whole, what challenges it faces, and how best to work as one to create an experience for our students that moves seamlessly from the necessary rudiments of the lower and middle schools to the advanced curriculum of the high school. I am particularly concerned that we eliminate overlap. I’ve arranged for us all to use the second-floor conference room at the high school next Friday afternoon, starting at 4 p.m. Come with ideas! Your presence is expected, so no need to RSVP.

  She looked for Roger at lunch so she could apologize, but he wasn’t in the faculty lunch room.

  She began a systematic search that eventually led her to a far stairwell that mounted one whole wall of the tall building. Through the punched windows that rose diagonally with the stairs, she located him at the far end of the playing field, walking alone and bundled up, so she retrieved her coat to head outside.

  She approached him with her cold hands deep in her pockets. He had seen her coming across the plastic turf and he had stopped, but he hadn’t take
n a step toward her.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “Why do you care?”

  This was going to be an honest conversation.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I was so rude.”

  He said nothing.

  “You were just being kind,” she said. “I can be so difficult sometimes. I know that.”

  “And obtuse,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do you know how long I’ve been interested in you?”

  “Me?”

  He snorted and his breath leapt in white puffs. “I thought I was obvious. Everyone else saw it but you. Will you go out to dinner with me?”

  She looked at him. He was well-built and kind and smart, with astonishing dove gray eyes and a natural glow that was for that minute because of her.

  “No,” she said softly. “I won’t.”

  “Your mother? Too soon? Too much on your mind?”

  Yes, this was to be an honest conversation.

  “No, it’s not my mom.”

  But though she tried, that was all she could bring herself to say to him.

  Later that day, Calyce and DeGroot sat at their respective desks in the faculty office, alone together in a rare suspension of the flux of English-teacher traffic. She had been speaking to him about Damion’s interview and he had swung toward her on his swivel chair as she had asked uncomfortably whether he had any more leads.

  “Maybe something less . . . advanced,” she said. “More entry-level.”

  DeGroot crossed one leg over the other. He scanned the doorway and the corridor beyond. Knowing him, Calyce tensed.

  He said, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but it sounds like you don’t know what happened. Bill says your son showed up an hour late and had nothing to say. He hadn’t done any research, so he had no idea what the company did or what Bill’s job was. He also came right out and said he didn’t know what position he was interviewing for, even though the job was posted on the website. Bill had to get him a job description, but even then, Damion couldn’t match any of it to his resume, so Bill had to do it line by line. He wasn’t prepared and it seemed to Bill that he had no interest, which meant that Bill was wasting his time. It didn’t last long. Bill ended it.”