Alternate Endings Page 15

  Her chest was pounding so hard the rush reached her voice and her hands, a clashing of drums that made her fingers shake so much she had to clasp them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a quavering vibrato. “John, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  That Friday at 4 p.m., the high school’s second-floor conference room was deserted except for herself and DeGroot and Dan, who all sat at the same table and waited with Calyce as she faced the doorway, ready to greet everyone else who entered as she had greeted the two men, welcoming them as if she had invited them into her home.

  But by 4:15 no one else had walked in.

  At 4:30, DeGroot said he had to leave.

  “Maybe it’s the weekend,” Dan said compassionately as the two men packed up. “Maybe you should reschedule your meeting for an afternoon that’s not a Friday.”

  Simon had finally come two days later, late the Sunday night before Effie’s surgery on Monday. Still in his airline jacket with sleeve stripes like he was in the Navy, he had blown through the door into his mother’s arms without saying a word first to Calyce. Trim, large-handed Simon also hugged his nephew, who held him while they exchanged the man-thumping and seal-barking of males who adore each other but interact only occasionally.

  “The bed’s made downstairs,” Damion told him. “I’m sleeping at Selene’s.”

  Calyce said, “But you’re still coming to the hospital in the morning, aren’t you?”

  Simon and Damion exchanged a look, then Simon smirked as he said, “You can’t stop yourself, can you? We’re both fully capable of being where we need to be when we need to be there. Aren’t we, Damion?”

  “Yes,” Damion said. “We sure are.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Effie said to her granddaughter Maria on the phone. “You’ve got a long day tomorrow too. You need to take care of your mother.”

  “I’m fine!” Calyce called from the kitchen so Maria would overhear her. “Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow at the hospital.”

  Late that night Effie had a long, private conversation with Simon that didn’t include Calyce. She knew because when Simon helped their mother up the stairs, he closed the guestroom door firmly behind them.

  When they were all finally tucked in, lights out and dishes put away, the house was silent. Two stories above Simon, who was sleeping downstairs in Damion’s room, Calyce stood facing herself in her bathroom mirror. Still fully dressed, she spoke softly to her own image.

  “I am scared, Maria. I’m scared she won’t wake up.”

  Effie, Calyce, Simon, Damion, and Maria all waited very early the next morning in a spare hospital room. In just a few minutes an orderly would come in to wheel Effie in the truncated bed down the hall into surgery in the adjacent wing through double steel doors that opened on a breathless piston. Calyce could hear them working loudly from her post at the foot of her mother’s pulled-taut linens.

  They were all making ridiculous small talk as Simon ignored his buzzing phone and Damion failed to resist his, which he checked six times in two minutes. The texts were from Selene, who was training at her new job and couldn’t get away.

  Around them, nurses hummed with unexplained but meaningful activity. One thing Calyce recognized, because the surgeon had warned them, was the monitoring of Effie’s blood sugar.

  The nurses’ tolerant “ma’am’s” had elongated with their frustration at Calyce’s relentless questioning. A single word at 7 a.m., “ma’am” had become a two-syllable diphthong by 7:20.

  But then it was time. One of the family’s repetitious topics of conversation had been Nina’s imminent arrival, but she still wasn’t there despite having texted Simon that her taxi was nearing. The orderly had just stuck his head in to say he’d be “right back” to roll Effie away. They gathered around her, both men with their hands clasped as both women nosed their hands around the perimeter of the old woman uselessly, nervously shoving in her covers. Effie assured them all, joining eyes with each one in turn, that she was excellent. Positive and hopeful. This was the right thing to do.

  Nina burst in, breathless and trailing a gauze scarf she had wrapped over the top of her head and x’d in front of her throat to throw over the back of her shoulders. She was tall like Calyce but alive with a vital energy that spun in her wake and startled Damion and Maria, who hadn’t seen her in years and didn’t remember her adrenalined impact. She was a diva who didn’t know it, a Hollywood star who had never spoken to a camera, whose presence commanded all the air in a room without being aware of it.

  She elbowed her way to the bedside. No one minded; they simply moved over. She kissed her mother and held her hands, but like Calyce, she maintained a certain distance from Effie, a reserve unshattered even by the circumstances, though Nina was warm enough. Effie was overwhelmed at seeing her “girl,” and at them all being there with her in that room in that moment, whatever the reason.

  The orderly returned and began packing Effie up. Calyce stepped to the bed too, but to direct him, demanding that he be gentle.

  Nina said to her, “Let the man do his job.”

  He strained to turn the bed toward the doorway, making one of the wheels squeak.

  Effie looked at Calyce and said, “I want you to promise –”

  The bed banged around the narrow corner as the orderly swung it like a line of shopping cars.

  “What Mom?”

  “ – that if I die you’ll stop relaxing your hair. That stuff will give you cancer.”

  Calyce followed them out and saw the top of Effie’s head and her veined hand waving goodbye above it as she was wheeled away from them.

  “But I like my hair!” Calyce called after her.

  Damion had to leave immediately for something, he said, so he peeled off, saying that he and Selene would see them later at home when it was over. Calyce was to text him if anything happened.

  Simon, Nina, Calyce and Maria settled in for the long wait, which the surgeon had warned would be at least five hours. The surgical waiting room for families was a very large perfect square with chairs arranged as in a church, in rows all facing the same direction with a wide aisle running between them from the entrance to an unadorned wall bathed in a yellow spotlight illuminating nothing. The stackable chairs had shiny chrome legs and curved seats with thin fabric cushions in an odd ochre color that looked to Calyce like old vomit. They also had no arms, so for the next many hours, they could all either sit or stand, but there would be no leaning.

  Two other families were also there that morning, but the room was so cavernous they sat far away and could barely be heard despite their many generations and large numbers. Only Calyce’s group had merely four.

  When Calyce led her daughter and her siblings in and chosen all their seats, she retained for herself a sightline to the nurses’ station, angling a chair so she could watch it head-on. She put her things at her feet and smoothed her skirt as Nina kept talking about the most recent long trip she had taken.

  The two nurses wore bleached mint and they had similarly bobbed hair, curled under, stiff as helmets under the pin lights of the low ceiling.

  While Nina told her story, Calyce opened her laptop and opened her document.

  They had all left him, his angry sons and daughters, circling in their rage and spinning away from him. He was alone, abandoned with his empty sack on his lush pinnacle with no air, no breeze, no kissing of his face anymore by his sweeping progeny. Aeolus, immortal, the keeper of the Four Winds, had no usefulness now that they had swirled themselves beyond his realm and grasp and embrace. If they returned, but they wouldn’t, but if they ever did, they would no longer be controlled.

  What does a man do when he has just one definition, and he no longer keeps, and he has chased away the flock for which he was shepherd? He was nothing now but husband, but she too had left him for a man from the sea who drank her on a far shore.

  Aeolus reached to the mossy stone and took the empty leather in his hug
e hands. He opened it and bent his sumptuously curled head to stare deep into the dark inside but heard nothing, not the moan of the slightest wind.

  Because of his own disregard, he had simply given them away without ever once inquiring of them what their wishes were. Docile children, they had done what he had directed, but as they had twisted in that fetid space they had grown into adult gales fueled by his betrayal, so their return had been only to taunt him before they hurricaned away, taking all the water in the sky along with them.

  And so it was that, because of him, the deserts of the Southwest came and the hot sun unshielded baked the green from the rocks and the spongy grass from the earth and left a father forever on a high gritty stone so dry it couldn’t cry either.

  “Will you stop bothering them?” Nina said to Calyce two hours later when she returned yet again from pressing the nurses. “They’ll let us know when they hear.”

  Simon was once again idling on his phone. Maria was paging through a magazine. Calyce got up and grabbed her own coat. “I’ve seen everything there is to see in here. I’ll be right outside, through those doors there.”

  Nina said, “I’ll go with you. Simon, come get us if there’s news.”

  They exited near the ambulance bay in front of the emergency entrance. Heavy snow had begun to fall in floating dish flakes, the kind that announce they won’t be sticking. In the cold the two sisters stood under the ER’s overhang. It was the first time they had been alone in ten years. Calyce had seen the gray threading in her sister’s coiled braid, mercury silver at the base but dark at the ends. She knew Nina, who noticed everything too, had seen the bootblack uniformity of her own.

  They heard an ambulance blaring its approach.

  Nina said, her shoulders hunched and freezing near her earlobes, “A lot different from Angel’s Landing, I bet.”

  Calyce turned. “We can talk about it now? In there you told me you’d had enough of Zion.”

  “I’m just trying to make conversation.”

  “Why couldn’t you have taken care of Mom in Florida so she didn’t have to come up here for this?”

  “Oh come on. You like it this way. You get to be in charge.”

  Flashing red, the ambulance pulled in. The back doors opened to a shiver of activity the two sisters watched silently.

  Nina said after a minute, “You need to go earlier in the year. May’s too hot already.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  They watched the gurney being rolled by two paramedics toward the entrance. “No, it’s just obvious. It’s the desert.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Calyce said. “I’m too old now anyway. I’d never get up.”

  A pause, a beat. The falling snow crinkled like cellophane on the sidewalk beyond the overhang as they watched the automatic ER doors close again.

  Calyce said, “One of the teachers asked me out last week, but I said no.”

  Nina turned to her.

  “Why?”

  Calyce took a deep breath.

  “He’s white.”

  Just then Maria hurried out the same side door they had used. She had left her coat inside and her bare fingers were wedged into her armpits.

  Maria said the nurses had called Simon over to say the operating room had called to report that surgery was “progressing.”

  “That’s all?” Nina asked.

  Maria refused to return inside to the warm. Calyce put an arm around her as another ambulance arrived with its klaxon blasting. The boxy truck with its red minivan chassis pulled up behind the still-open rear doors of the ambulance in front of it.

  Maria said as she bounced, trying to keep herself from freezing, “I hate those things. Remember Dad? He was never the same after that fall off that ladder. I don’t know why he didn’t hire someone. It doesn’t cost that much to have someone clean your gutters.”

  Maria turned to Nina. “You didn’t see him again after the divorce, but Dad never fully recovered. His balance was so bad he had to sit down to take off his shoes.”

  Inside again, Calyce sent an email to the high school English teachers only.

  I’m sorry that most of you could not attend the recent departmental meeting, but I have prepared a paper questionnaire soliciting your views on how you think the Lower/Middle School could work more seamlessly and successfully with us. In order to maintain confidentiality, I will distribute the questionnaire to each of you by hand later this week. So this process is as effective as possible, please be entirely candid. Return them directly to me, please, by no later than Monday.

  They had been told to wait there, at the nurses’ station. The surgeon wanted to speak to them.

  When he appeared he had removed his mask, which hung around his corded neck, but his small cadet blue beanie remained.

  “She was more frail bone-wise than we’d hoped, so we had to use sternal plates to pull the breastbone together.”

  He explained that they weren’t plates despite the name but X shapes like bicycle chain sunk into the bone on either side of the sternum after surgery, to pull the sides of the breastbone and the ribs together. Usually wire was used, and that is what they had planned, but once they had gotten in there, he said, put her on bypass, and performed what became an unexpectedly protracted coronary graft surgery and valve replacement, they had opted to take every possible precaution to minimize the chance of post-op infection of the long wound. They had had to consider her age, too, and her recently diagnosed diabetes.

  “Unfortunately, and as you and I discussed,” he told Calyce, “she may also have some fuzziness mentally, and that could last several months. It happens with the elderly. But I want you to get her moving as soon as I authorize it. Get her back walking, especially once she gets home.”

  Maria called her husband and Calyce phoned Damion but had to leave a message. Simon punched the number for his wife. He was still on with Sandra when Calyce finished, so Calyce heard him confirm that he was indeed departing from Dulles at 10 a.m. the next morning for Denver, where his next flight assignment would begin.

  “You’re leaving Mom in less than twenty-four hours?” Calyce interrupted, but Simon ignored her until he had said goodbye lovingly and hung up.

  “I was talking,” he said.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “So’s Nina,” Maria said. “She just told me.”

  “You are?” Calyce said to Nina.

  “We’re driving to the airport together,” Nina said. “I’m leaving from Dulles too, so he’s taking me.”

  When Nina walked into Calyce’s kitchen that night, she saw that Calyce was alone. Simon sat in the living room with Damion and Selene, all three of them with glasses of red wine. Damion was regaling his uncle as Selene sat tucked contentedly under his muscled arm.

  “There’s white wine too if you want it,” Calyce said with her head down, working. She had rolled up her long sleeves rather than changing, to save time.

  “Does Damion ever help you?”

  Calyce didn’t respond.

  “You’re not taking care of yourself,” Nina said. “Your hands are ashy.”

  “No time.” Calyce kept moving. “But at least I’m walking. I did three miles on Saturday. And my throat’s better.”

  Nina poured herself a glass, then leaned against the counter. “So this is it. This is your life now. How’s the job?”

  Calyce shrugged. Nina lowered her voice. “Anyone besides this white guy?”

  “No. Can you get the roaster pan out of the oven?”

  A minute later Nina leaned out to confirm that the rest of the family was still happily planted in the living room as her older sister once again, as always, made them all dinner.

  Nina took another swallow. She thought, then paused, and thought some more, then to Calyce finally said, “I think we ought to do Angel’s Landing together. I can get you to the top. I’ve had years of hiking.”

  Calyce’s hands stopped. She fixed
grateful eyes on her sister.

  Nina said, “Don’t you get a spring vacation in April?”

  Calyce didn’t want her released but after ten days “astounding patient” Effie met every one of the discharge criteria, including having climbed a full flight of stairs.

  “She’s chomping at the bit to get outside. And I’m confident she has excellent at-home support,” the cardiologist said as he patted Calyce on the shoulder the next Thursday. “The plating should allow her to heal more quickly and with less pain. She’s already breathing more easily. The mental cotton should pass once she’s home and into a routine. Stay with her as much as possible so she regains her mental acuity. Try not to leave her alone.”

  Calyce slipped out of bed and into the short hall and over to her mother’s door, which was mostly closed, but not entirely. A diffuse, bluish glow outlined its edges. Calyce had asked Maria to bring one of the nightlights they used for Jimmy, and Calyce had made sure it was reassuringly burning.

  She felt the soft carpet under her bare toes as she pushed the door open, then sneaked in to see Effie sleeping and stood silently to listen. She heard the hiccupping snoring of her childhood and breathed in the sharp smell of medicaments. She said without realizing it a prayer of thanksgiving, which she sent to heaven with each of her mother’s shallow exhalations.

  Calyce stepped to the bed and carefully brought up the covers, moving Effie’s feet inside the sheets with a mother’s practiced hand. She waited once more, to see if she had awakened her, but satisfied soon moved to the doorway.