Alternate Endings Read online

  As they made salads and waited for the grilled chicken they could smell in the oven baking with olive oil and dried herbs from an Italian Seasonings bottle, Selene was talking about the moon. She had just said that it had always fascinated her.

  “Did you know a man from NASA is actually buried there? And Buzz Aldrin –”

  “How do you know about Buzz Aldrin?”

  “He radioed back about the shadows. Because there’s no atmosphere everything throws shadows that are pitch black, and sometimes they have these silvery halos because of the opposition effect. He saw them first. Did you know that people sleep worse during full moons?”

  There was a familiarity between them, as well as a shared bond with Damion, so it was no work for Calyce to transition the conversation to her son’s job search, which Selene confirmed had indeed been more words than action and below her wish, too. Any day job was an improvement, she told Calyce, particularly now that he had quit the bar.

  “So I’m still your ally,” Selene said as they ate. “He’s working random shifts in places but I’m paying most of his bills. I’ve been doing that for months. Thank God I’ve got a job now.”

  “You what? I thought all you paid for was that car repair.”

  “I was paying all the bills you gave him here at the house too. He said he finally told you.”

  Calyce chewed, trying to cover.

  She asked casually, “For how long?”

  “Since you first gave them to him. He didn’t tell you? But he’ll pay me back half eventually. We keep a tally book like the one you have. It was his idea. I figured it was the least I could do, what with him paying you rent to live down there and me staying over all the time. But he said you wouldn’t take it if you knew it was coming from me, so we said it was his tips.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “Nearly all of it came from me. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, but he said he wanted to handle it with you directly.”

  A thousand thoughts fired and fought inside Calyce’s mind.

  As she pretended to chew, she asked as calmly as she could, “How much rent did he say he was paying me so he could live here?”

  “Twelve hundred, which was a big part of your mortgage.”

  Selene was chomping. She was utterly oblivious. “That’s why he was so concerned about moving out. He wanted to. I’m sorry. But he was worried about how you’d pay your mortgage without him.”

  Selene swallowed and speared another bite as Calyce made herself take a sip of her drink.

  Selene said, “But now that he’s quit the bar, I just hope he doesn’t do that restaurant thing, not if it means he’s not home nights. But until that takes off he’s having trouble with the rent, which was already a lot higher, so I gave him a check again today. That ought to tide him over.”

  She leaned toward Calyce. “I’m moving in with him officially next month so I only have to pay one rent. I can’t keep paying for two places.”

  Calyce rapped on the downstairs door the moment Selene departed.

  Effie was awake with the light on, reading, waiting soundlessly for her daughter’s report. What she hadn’t expected was Calyce’s enraged story about how her grandson had been taking Selene’s money.

  “Maybe he needs it,” Effie said.

  “He lied to her! He’s never paid any of my mortgage. He told her that so she would pay his bills here. It wasn’t his tips he paid me. It was her money.”

  But Effie kept defending him. “Maybe she misunderstood him. Your mortgage isn’t really twelve hundred.”

  “No, but –”

  “Then she got it wrong. That has to be the answer. She’s just got it all wrong.”

  The next Saturday morning Effie bustled in and out in a hurry. Calyce heard the sand sound of her slippers on the tiled entryway and the clasp of the closing front door. Two minutes later it opened again, but when her mother mounted the stairs still in her bathrobe, she didn’t mention it. Calyce had to ask and watch her shock that she’d been heard. But she was happy to tell.

  She had just caught the postman, who always came so early, didn’t he? She had handed him the return, postage-paid envelope she had received yesterday. They had sent her two identical originals and she had signed both of them, like the directions told her, and she had mailed back one of them just now. It was legal. She had planned to tell Calyce tonight over dinner, but –

  Effie clapped her hands. “I’ve rented the condo! You know Stephanie. She’s always liked my place, and I gave her a deal on the rent so she’s saving money. I’ve rented it to her for the next year, and she’s already moved in. There was cash in the package for what she called the pro rata.”

  Effie was blissful as she looked at Calyce, who was dumbstruck.

  “And since I don’t have a mortgage anymore,” Effie said, “That’s all free money, so I can contribute here. Won’t you please let me pay you?”

  Calyce took a swallow of her coffee, which tasted suddenly bitter. “How long has this been in the works?”

  “A couple of weeks.” Effie was still smiling.

  “You’ve signed papers? It’s official? You can’t get out of it?”

  “I mailed them back to her just now. But what a great solution, don’t you think? I can help you financially and I can stay here. I get so lonely in Florida.”

  The instant Calyce hit the street she started moving, pumping her arms and pistoning her legs to get away from Effie, from Calyce’s cage-like, rabbit-warren townhouse, from her encroaching existence. She truly saw the other houses for the first time as she strode with her phone in her hand. They were all identical human storage compartments, decorated with plywood matchstick siding punched by small, cheap windows all the same size up the narrow street. Too-small, non-working shutters had been nailed on by the builder here, and colonial lanterns planted in front “yards” there to make the development seem wealthier than it was and provide some false sense of uniqueness, but they were all the same in every way but the last iota. People, hundreds of faceless people, were stacked next to and on top of each other, over garages and driveways lined with cookie-cutter wheels too, all about the same number of many years old. As she blew up the street she saw that her old Camry and her non-descript house were standard-issue.

  Only the corner houses had extra windows. Not different, just an extra two.

  She dialed her phone, tossing her head to look at the sky, which whipped mashed potatoes above the gray roofs.

  When the voice-message beeped, she said, “Roger, it’s Calyce. If you promise to keep your hands in your pockets, I’d like to take you up on your offer to teach me how to hike. Take me somewhere challenging, though. Don’t hold back.”

  Effie’s cardiologist pronounced her a “one-in-a-million patient.” The deep scar was healing, her mind was “a steel trap,” and her lifelong stamina had returned. He said he had never seen such a fast recovery from an elderly woman.

  “You’re from Florida, I know,” he said to Effie in his examining room as Calyce stood in a corner with their two purses. “I know you’re anxious to get home.”

  But Effie shook her head. She looked from him to Calyce, imploring.

  “But I am home. My home’s here now. This is where I live.”

  Mather Gorge is a crack in the bedrock where the Piedmont plateau sloping east from the Appalachians slams into the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Over that crack gravity has pushed the churning Potomac River for hundreds of millions of years, but the hard bottom bedrock won’t erode. Sharp cliffs jut and crumble up both narrow sides, topped by a boulder streusel hikers must hop to climb.

  On the Maryland side of the river, a trail falls precipitously to the water’s edge downstream from Class Five killer rapids that claim experienced kayakers every year. Even on the deceivingly placid shore a hiker can put her tired feet in the shallows and be swept away by currents that trap the unsuspecting under drowned, spiked rocks that mirror the dented ridge tops
against the sky.

  Section A of the Billy Goat Trail requires a commitment, for once begun there are few points of escape, and once a climber begins one particular nearly vertical climb up the jagged cliff face that commands, from the bottom, all the pictures ever snapped, there is no choice but to continue. Even when it begins to mist, even when that sudden mist permeates the fleece layer that he, as a science teacher and avid climber, knows to put on before meeting a woman he likes for their first weekend hike.

  In the fifty-degree weather Calyce was behind him as he had directed, watching and following his careful footsteps that squeezed themselves between the littered rocks, for there was no path or grass, no dirt to walk on in this segment, where they had to jump from stone tooth to stone tooth. But then it had started spitting, which he hadn’t planned for, and the white flat sky had turned ghostly pearl.

  On a slick incline Roger suddenly slipped back, sliding. He had been in mid-stride up the boulder with his hands in his pockets, but it was too wet. He started skidding. His arms went out and spun. He was flailing, struggling to stay upright as he skateboarded in reverse.

  She reached out to him as he flew down toward her. He slammed into her on the hard rock. He hit her front with his back and knocked her sideways. Both their shoulders hit a higher wall as a single unit, and they both yelled “OW!” though hers wasn’t merely the granite. It was the weight of him too, though he quickly moved off her and turned to grab her with both hands.

  “Are you all right?” he asked two inches from her.

  She panted. She felt his grip as he said, “Seriously, are you all right?”

  Here were the pores of his nose, and the tiny wet dots on his upper lip. The freckles of his face weren’t uniform but darker and lighter, and he was handsome close up and big in a way she had never expected.

  She put her right hand on his pumping chest and felt the mass of him. No soft flab cushioned her fingers. She looked at him, eye-to-eye at her own level. He was examining her too, she saw, running his dime-colored eyes over her skin.

  She pushed him away. She did it firmly, deliberately, as a decision, then stepped into a chink in the rock just large enough for her booted feet.

  “I’m fine. Just winded.”

  She turned away from him. “Let’s go before we’re inundated.”

  She began to walk as fast as she could in the rain without stumbling, and she didn’t speak. Even when they had reached the towpath and its welcome flat dirt she powered ahead of him, stretching the gap so far Roger had to raise his voice at her to slow down, but she didn’t.

  “What’s going on?” he called from behind her as they emerged at the parking lot, but she didn’t answer.

  Finally, ten steps from her car he caught up. He reached to grasp her arm and the sudden forced stop nearly toppled her. She turned.

  He was mad with smalled eyes. “Listen.”

  His words knocked into each other. “I’ll never do that again. I can see you don’t want anything to do with me. I get it. Okay? I finally get it. But you’re acting like I’m some kind of freak.”

  “What do I need duct tape for?” Calyce asked Nina on the phone as Calyce wrote a list of what to bring to Utah.

  She was sitting on the floor of her bedroom as Effie stood above her, waiting. Effie waved a hand into Calyce’s face but her daughter refused to look up.

  “What’s a bivvy?” Calyce said to Nina.

  Effie bent over even more, waving from ten inches away.

  “Hold on Nina. Yes? Is there something you need?”

  Her mother said, “I’m going to bed.”

  “Well then goodnight.”

  Then back to the phone and the piece of paper. “Yes, I got the room reservation.”

  That next weekend she could not get them off the couch. Damion and Greg had fallen into the college basketball game, one of many that day. Jimmy emulated the men so exactly, yelling at the TV, that Calyce laughed at the same time she strained to hear over the noise to listen to her daughter.

  Maria was parked on one of the small ottomans, which she had shoved against a wall to flip through the magazines she had brought for Effie. Effie herself had given up long before and gone down to her room.

  At the next commercial, Calyce stood in front of the screen, blocking it.

  “Let’s take a walk,” she said to them. “We can all go to Wheaton Park and Jimmy can play on the playground.”

  But Damion announced he was going to sit there all day. “Aren’t we, Jimmy?”

  Calyce told him he was setting a bad example but Damion disagreed.

  “Leave us alone,” he said. “Where else is Jimmy going to see so many of us at one time on the screen, with so many people cheering?”

  That night, alone, she found herself again, but the man who came to her was white.

  “Why aren’t you seeing anyone?” Catherine’s elderly mother demanded. “You’re still comparatively young. You just won’t make the effort. You keep asking me what’s wrong with my grandson. He doesn’t have fire in the belly you say, but what about you? You’re just like him.”

  Catherine searched the second-floor science hall. She had looked for Mike in the faculty office, ducking her head in for the briefest instant, but he had not been there. She had not asked the other teachers in his department what class he had where or when, despite their having all raised their heads in unison from their computer screens.

  She found him at last in the chemistry lab setting up for a class experiment. Startled, Mike had to pull off his clear plastic goggles at the flame he had been adjusting. He looked at her without greeting and without speaking, but he was not unfriendly, so she said she had been hoping to maybe schedule a day and time soon that worked for him, so they could go somewhere and he could show her how to hike properly.

  “Maybe the Billy Goat Trail?” she suggested. “One Saturday? Bring Marlene if you want. That would be fun.”

  When she had found his wife’s name in the school’s online directory, which included the faculty’s spouses and children, she had tried not to visualize what the woman might look like. He had never brought her to any school function in all the years he had worked there.

  “Marlene’s not much of a hiker.”

  Catherine didn’t know what to say.

  But he was positive. “Let’s wait for the weather to clear. Next month? April’s better.”

  She suppressed a grin. “Sure. April sounds great.”

  “The Billy Goat shouldn’t take long. Only a couple of hours.”

  Once she agreed with him, he wicked up the flame again and put on his goggles.

  April

  He had met a girl, Catherine’s son Ryan said proudly.

  “And she’s pretty. She works at Target too. Her name’s Elena. It means sun. Mom, I want to ask her out but I’m not good at that sort of thing. Can you help me figure out how to say it?”

  Catherine and Mike met at the old white tavern building at the beginning of the walk to the scrambling trail. She had come early that spectacular Saturday morning, so she was waiting, and that made her able to see him as he approached her from the distant parking lot. He was tall compared to her average height, with the broad shoulders and flat belly of a man devoted to a life outside, which she could also see in his walk that swung confidently in his heavy shoes. He wore a sweatshirt she had never seen, silver gray with purple letters. As he got closer, she saw it said WILLIAMS.

  He greeted her from four feet away, and they began. She tried to make it social, but he started the lesson as soon as they reached the first large pile of rocks.

  She reached out to him, to help her climb, but he declined. Every foothold and handgrip, he said, she had to find alone.

  “But maybe you’d like to come?” she said half an hour later to Mike, the man who for months had kept her awake at night and pawing herself with her eyes closed. “You and Marlene? Have you been to Zion?”

  The narr
ow path became choppier and they had to boulder. He told her to take tiny steps and stand up straight with arms out when she could.

  “Relax,” he said. “Enjoy it.”

  He showed her how to keep three points of contact on troublesome spots, and on the steep incline that photographers loved, he taught her how to breathe, for cramped panicked gulping and a hunched body tore through energy and would make it impossible to achieve the top, particularly on a cliff as high as Angels Landing.

  At one point they stopped to look out over the rushing, forceful river that spat and played. The day was beautiful, and the hiking elated her. With him near her, guiding her, Catherine felt she could do anything.

  An hour later, nearing the end of the trail, they laughed down a path littered with rocks and boulders tossed by some angry god who had made huge piles Mike and Catherine had to climb over with tired feet. At one narrow seam, where there was no choice but to balance down it, he directed her to go first.

  She was careful exactly to do as he had taught her, balancing and softening her knees. She made it down the steep face without banging into the stones at the bottom.

  But he wasn’t so lucky. As he came, his feet slid. He lost his balance and stiffened his knees in reaction, and he came skidding at her. He was slick on the ten feet of slanted hard rock.

  He crashed into her, hard, slamming her back against a chunk that cut into her.

  “Oof!” he said as he landed against her, pinning her.

  It took him a moment but he finally asked, “You all right?”

  Catherine wasn’t talking. Mike was on her, pressing against her front. She felt the breadth of his chest and how it flattened her breasts against him.

  She looked at him, closer than she had ever been to him. Her mouth opened.

  He had been drawing away from her but he stopped.