Alternate Endings Read online

  She had not left yet when her mother said groggily in the weak light, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” Calyce was whispering for no reason.

  “I told them to go.”

  “Who?”

  “Simon and Nina. They wanted to. I just gave them permission.”

  Rookie Amita sheepishly returned her completed questionnaire by the end of the very school day Calyce distributed it. She lingered too, to talk, even apologizing for not being able “to make the meeting. I had something last-minute.” She also answered eagerly Calyce’s small-talk question about what had been going on while Calyce had been out for Effie’s surgery. That was how Calyce learned that her cohorts had been streaming down to the lower and middle school campus across town, in upper Georgetown.

  “He’s so nice,” Amita said. “I had never really spoken to Javier before, but Dan wanted to go, and Ashley too.”

  Amita’s face darkened. “I heard the teachers there aren’t happy with how this questionnaire is worded. They’ve been exchanging emails. That’s what Dan said. They’ve been copying him. I thought you would want to know.”

  Calyce heard her mother calling as soon as she closed the front door. From the third floor Effie’s fragile voice was keening for “Da-mi-on!”

  Calyce rounded the corner of the kitchen and saw her son with his ear buds in, gazing mesmerized into the refrigerator.

  “Don’t you hear that?” Calyce said.

  “What?” He pulled one of them out to hear his mother, but Calyce had already left to run up the stairs.

  That night, long after Damion had departed for the bar, Selene found Calyce in her bedroom reading the flash fiction pieces her class had submitted. Selene knocked softly, then entered the third-floor room for the first time.

  “I was wondering if you were going to the grocery store tomorrow.”

  “Probably. Why?”

  Selene had a Vera Bradley cash wallet in her hand, the fabric white magnolias with yellow leaves on black. She flipped it open.

  “Could you get us some more of that red curry paste we like? And Nutella?”

  She pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to Calyce. “This should cover it, along with the gas.”

  “Flash fiction, huh?” Dan said as he handed her own piece back to her. “This is good, very good. You wrote a myth, but do you think the class will remember the underlying story?”

  Calyce speared a chunk of melon from her Tupperware. “They did the Odyssey in ninth grade, and that was only three years ago.”

  He bit his sandwich. “Your writing isn’t what I thought it would be. You’re so, um, definitive that I would have thought you’d be more Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Declarative, you mean.” But she smiled back.

  As they cleaned up later, he said, “I’ve enjoyed this. We should do it again.”

  “I’ve genuinely enjoyed it too.” She surprised herself.

  “Let me ask you,” he said quietly. “Why did you do that questionnaire?”

  “We’re the leaders, aren’t we, the teachers at the high school? The other campus is just a funnel.”

  Her mother had been post-discharge for six days. She professed to be “fine” but her mind wasn’t clear all the time. She thought her charter boat captain was still alive, and she sometimes thought Simon was still young and single despite his having been married for twenty years. But she was getting better.

  When Calyce got home that late afternoon, Effie was propped up in the living room on one of the loveseats with her bed pillow behind her back and her feet on one of the small ottomans. The little TV on the square corner table was on next to a glass half-filled with water but there was no food plate near her and none in the kitchen sink.

  “Where’s Damion?” Calyce asked her.

  “He went to the store but he hasn’t come back yet. I think the visiting nurse came but I couldn’t get downstairs fast enough. I tried, but she was gone when I finally got to the door.”

  “When did he leave?”

  Effie didn’t remember. Yes, he had given her her pills that morning, but no, she hadn’t taken her noontime set yet. He had said he would give them to her when he got back.

  Once Calyce had ministered to her mother, she went upstairs to her bathroom. She shook with rage, her fingers electrified and her heart tocking as she tried to think.

  She grabbed her leather satchel from her bed and returned to the bathroom, closed the door and locked it, then rummaged until she found her phone. She dialed his number, but he didn’t answer until the third ring.

  “Listen, Damion,” she said, still shaking. “I’m sorry but I have to work late. Something came up here at school. Are you at home?”

  He lied, and when he did it, she took in her breath. She sat on the closed toilet.

  She said, “You are? . . . Good. You’re not working tonight are you? I ask because a group of us are going to have dinner afterwards . . . Not until midnight, for sure. It’s a long meeting . . . Thanks for watching her. I really appreciate it.”

  She sat staring at her toes for a long time.

  At precisely 11:40 p.m., Damion and Selene came charging through the front door. Calyce heard them laughing as he unlocked his own door downstairs and they bumped inside.

  At 11:50 p.m., Damion climbed the stairs to the darkened living room where Calyce sat silently in the corner of the dining area, waiting. He didn’t see her as he walked into the kitchen and turned on the light. A moment later, he was moving through again, carrying a plate and a bottle of wine toward the landing.

  Calyce flipped on the wall switch and he turned to the sudden blast of light.

  She gave him a chance. She looked at him, but he said nothing. From his eyes she could see his mind whirring but he hadn’t gotten there yet when she said flatly, “You lied to me.”

  “We were downstairs,” he said quickly. “When did you get home?”

  She spoke with a voice he had never heard before.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re moving out. It’s more convenient for Mom to be down in your room. She won’t have to walk as far or negotiate the stairs to let in the nurse if no one’s home.”

  Catherine had plopped herself on a ledge of rock at Scout Lookout with her backpack still on, forlorn and hunkered in the cooking sun. She was not drinking water because she had none. Sweat poured down her back and under her breasts where her bra cups pooled the water against her skin. Her hands were trembling from the adrenaline.

  Over the next twenty minutes, until her school group giddily returned to her, she silently watched the two streams of hikers coming and going from the slope face she could not climb, and had given up on finally, and had retreated from. An old couple holding hands and a group of four middle-aged women with fanny packs could do it. She saw them start and not turn around. A laughing family clamored down and high-fived each other, followed by some sports team of young men all in matching red tank shirts. One of them was wearing flip-flops.

  And then the kids, the very young ones, hopping ahead of their clucking young parents. Billy goats, young lambs, small birds of reckless demeanor that spun and charged beyond her, children who did not notice even for a moment her sitting there.

  “They are all better, just simply better at it than I am,” she said out loud to no one.

  February

  Mike had come to sit with Catherine finally after a lonely hiatus when he had chosen for weeks to eat with his Science Department buddies. But she had caught his eye this time as he had entered. She told herself it was accidental, that she only happened to be looking at the clock above the doorway at the very moment he appeared, but her doing so meant that his moving around her this time would have been affirmatively rude. She was gazing now into his linen-gray irises and searching for things to say as he chewed his food with one forearm on the surface of the table.

  As he scanned the room beyond her, her mind offered up Alice’s
request the day before for a private meeting, which because of their schedules had to wait until after school dismissal that coming Thursday. Surely, she then told Mike, Alice wanted to confirm her endorsement to be new English Department Head. She told him she had been avoiding Alice for weeks (the same weeks he had not sat with her, but she didn’t say that) because the news wasn’t good. She couldn’t endorse her.

  “There are, uh, political issues.”

  She made herself stop. She made herself wait this time and not tumble on.

  There. He was interested. He turned his head to look at her. “What issues?”

  “Diversity,” she said, repeating Frank’s word.

  “But she’s black,” he said.

  “We already have a new black Vice Principal. Frank says we don’t need Alice too.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  She told him what Frank had said about electing Asian David.

  “That’s illegal,” he replied angrily. “It’s discrimination. Used to be that whites got screwed but now it’s every group that came before whatever’s next. Alice earned that position.”

  A vein thunder-cracked across his right temple. As he gulped air she felt the power of him. He was lightning in a jar all of a sudden about this and it excited her. She wanted more.

  She leaned forward. “Frank told me to lie to her.”

  “For real?”

  “He wants me to say there’s something wrong with her, something I’ve never told Alice in any performance review, but there isn’t. She’s great. I can’t do that.” So she had made up her mind.

  “What will you tell her?”

  He was close, looking into her eyes.

  “I don’t know. The one thing I can’t do is say that Frank’s involved. He told me not to.”

  “Damn weasel. He wouldn’t last a minute out where I’m from.”

  So there they were, touching forearms as her heart pounded.

  She realized she was mouth breathing. She looked at his arm in his plaid shirt du jour and felt the strength of the sinews she saw when he rolled up his sleeves every spring. Thankfully he had put his left hand on his leg under the table. The gold stripe had dipped out of view.

  “You know how to hike,” she said suddenly. “Can you teach me? I want to go back to Zion this year and I want to make it to the top this time. I need your help to learn how to do it.”

  When she finally met with Alice, it was an awful thirty minutes. There was not a single “why?” Catherine could freely answer. She had both to dodge the kind woman’s ensuing desperate wondering out loud about everything, including Frank, and simultaneously to avoid the thorny path to Frank’s hidden agenda.

  Eventually Alice demanded to know whether there was anything fatal in her performance, because no one had ever said so. To that at least she received a definitive no.

  Alice’s deep voice rose. “You know I’ll lose without your endorsement?”

  “Yes, but maybe it’s time to . . . I don’t know . . . do something different. Maybe pursue your hobbies. You like to paint, don’t you?”

  “You owe me. You promised.”

  “I didn’t promise you anything!” The next sentence blurted out. ‘’I’ve known you both for years, and it’s unseemly for me to endorse one of you over the other.”

  Shocked, Alice asked, “Both? Who else?”

  Damn. Catherine was cornered.

  She had to say, “David’s in the running too.”

  Roger was standing in the third-floor hallway, near the far end but facing her as he talked intently to a short boy whose back Calyce didn’t recognize. Roger didn’t see her as she left the stairwell, but he would when his eyes left the student’s face.

  She ducked back into the noisy central staircase and planted herself against the painted wall, which was all stars up that high, above the earth’s stratosphere that had shaded from palest to darkest blue. But she shook her head at her own ridiculousness and confirmed with herself that, indeed, the only way to the flat roof was through the set of doors just beyond Roger. She would have to either give up on lunch alone outside overlooking the slushy street, on what was the first warm-enough day in weeks, or march past Roger awkwardly, rictus plastered, barely speaking. But her coat was already on and her insulated gloves were already balled in her pockets.

  “So let’s go,” she said to herself and two girls on the staircase looked at her.

  As she approached, Roger and the boy finished and the teenager slipped into a classroom. Roger saw her. They made eye contact, but as she was readying her face he pulled his phone from his shirt pocket and checked it. When she passed him, he didn’t speak.

  Calyce installed her mother in front of the little TV on the main floor on both days of that next weekend. She made sure the remote and a day’s worth of food were nearby, and she left to drive to other middle-class Maryland suburbs. She made sure the apartments she saw were close to the tentacles of the D.C. underground metro, however.

  She explained to the landlords that her son had sent her. For everything suitable, she obtained rent amount, deposit requirements, lease term and application paperwork. By late Sunday night, when he came in the door long after Effie had gone to bed, Calyce had four solid one-bedroom, clean, rodent-free candidates.

  But Damion reacted volcanically, nearly shouting. “How dare you use my name to lie.”

  “You weren’t looking. Here, this one’s in Beltsville.”

  “I’m not living anywhere but in D.C.”

  “You can’t afford that. Look at these applications. They don’t want your tip income. All they want is your W-2. The only places you can afford on your official salary are out here, and even with your tips, you can’t afford an apartment in D.C.”

  “I’ll get a roommate.”

  “You hate people. This is the second weekend I’ve spent.” She smiled. “If you want to live in D.C. you need to get a real job.”

  Damion made himself scarce the next few days, so Calyce assumed he was staying at Selene’s despite his constant whining about her roommates. Apparently, they didn’t like his knocking in the middle of the night.

  She and her mother spent the evenings together. Effie said quietly very often how much she enjoyed the company, even if they didn’t speak while the old woman read and Calyce graded papers and tried to write fiction. Effie had become someone recovering successfully and no longer a post-operative invalid. Her wounds were “healing miraculously,” the pleased doctor had told them.

  One night, after that day’s follow-up doctor’s appointment, Calyce fixed a special dinner and over flank steak said happily to her mother, “We need to start thinking about your plane reservations home.”

  Calyce was checking flights that same night, trying to find a deal for her mother, when Damion came bounding up with flowers in his hands – irises, her favorite. He wanted to thank her, he said. He wanted to say again how sorry he was.

  What great news he had, he said. He’d found an apartment, a one-bedroom in D.C. and if she hadn’t pushed him, he never would have looked.

  “But it’s so much money,” she said when he told her the rent.

  “I’m getting a new job, remember? You were right. And you were right about the tips. They don’t count. So you have to co-sign. That’s what they all require, but we’ll meet at least once a month, I promise. You won’t have to chase me down anymore about my job search.”

  His eyes were lit with genuine glee. “That apartment shows me what I can do. I’ll be incentivized to get a good day job. Selene doesn’t want me working nights either.”

  It was such an onslaught of joy from her normally sullen son that she felt a shock experiencing it. She couldn’t tell him “incentivized” was not a word.

  “I have to co-sign? How long’s the lease?”

  “A year. What’s wrong?”

  She was doing the math. “That’s nearly thirty thousand dollars. I don’t have that kind of money.�
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  “I’ll pay. It’s just a formality.”

  “But I’m on the hook if you don’t.”

  He reared back.

  “But I will.”

  “Where are you going to get thirty thousand? And that’s not how it works. You get the job and then the apartment, not the other way around.”

  He was incredulous. “Are you telling me you won’t sign?”

  Another pause. A much longer one.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I won’t, and they don’t all require it. None of the ones I found out here in the suburbs do.”

  Calyce slammed out the school’s front doors without hearing the loud bang. She took in her breath immediately on the outside, then let it out and saw it freeze and fall as she stepped into it, pumping her arms already, heading up the sloped street, then right, then straight and along the block past National Cathedral and still farther, feeling her calves work and her lungs cut with knives of welcome chill air. Cold sliced her cheeks too and soon dried her lips but she kept on, warm in the knit cap she had pulled over her ears so only the curved ends of her dark hair feathered.

  She walked steadily for half an hour, on the first day back from two days off of school for snow, which had already begun to turn sooty on the far neighborhood streets she had never walked before. The lawns and houses, though, were still blurred with white and the trees still clad in stiff ice that wrapped every twig and stubborn withered leaf in a coat of shine, fattening and immobilizing them.

  It was beautiful and lonely, for the only people were huddled in their white-puffing cars bouncing over icy road bumps and negotiating traffic lights that were still out. No one risked the sidewalks, but she did, for she had just bought hiking mini-spikes on pull-on rubber fittings that gripped her thick boots, which were also new.

  She felt her body as she walked confidently. She had greater stamina now and more wind. The new diet and its early-evening time had made a difference. Her reflux would never be cured but it was better. The coughing was only sporadic, more burning but essentially the same as for regular people.