Alternate Endings Read online

  “You can keep them, but you can’t have them out. Only paper. You remember paper.”

  Of her dozen Senior Creative Writing students, she saw that three were black and four were boys. All were privileged to attend the private high school in Upper Northwest D.C. whose college placements danced like sugarplums in the heads of their overweening parents. Room 2860 was on the top floor of the high, white-clad building. Two more floors, which included a full-sized basketball court, hid underground at the insistence of the plush homeowners in the surrounding neighborhood of 1920s Craftsman bungalows.

  Each day they would discuss two original pieces of student writing, Calyce told them, which meant that each week, over three classes per week, they would discuss a total of six pieces they would write. This in turn meant that each of the twelve students would be critiqued once every two weeks. The assignments would flow from well-known short stories she would give them.

  “So you’re responsible for always having a piece ready. No excuses. I want them distributed in hard copy by the end of the class before. And once we critique yours, immediately start the next one. I also expect you to know how to use proper grammar. You chose this course. It’s an elective, so I expect you to know how to write.”

  “Calyce, are you doing the assignments too?” a black girl with long twists asked her. “John DeGroot always does. That’s what my friend says.”

  “Yeah,” a gangly boy said, “John sure doesn’t care about grammar.”

  "Well, I do, and it's Cal-iss, like Alice with a hard C. Not Cal-lease. And be sure to spell it correctly, even though it sounds like that hard thing on the bottom of your foot."

  She didn't smile. No, there would be no poetry, and no non-fiction. “Use your imaginations, starting with today’s assignment.”

  She picked up some printed sheets to distribute. “Read The Monkey’s Paw and use it to write your own piece focusing on setting, which –”

  “Is that it?” A white girl cut her off. “You don’t want plot?”

  She waited, staring. A full beat. “We’ll get to plot.”

  “But setting alone isn’t impactful.”

  One of her veterans groaned as Calyce crossed her arms. “‘Impactful’ is not a word. It’s a trendy absurdity, like ‘incentivizing’ and ‘reach out.’ He reached out to me, instead of he wrote me an email. You may not use such words in your stories. They are what? Anyone?”

  The groaning veteran had to say it when Calyce finally pointed to her, but she rolled her eyes as she did so. “Index expurgatorius.”

  “And that’s not Harry Potter. Madison, tell us what that means at the beginning of next class and bring in a poster board so we can write words as they arise.”

  “Seriously?” rookie Madison said. “A poster board?”

  When they filed out at the end of class, a shy girl lingered, pretending to arrange things at the far bottom of her sausaged pack. Once Calyce knew they were alone, she quietly asked, “How’s your mother? Any better?”

  The child didn’t look up as she shook her head.

  “Do you want to talk about it? I’ve got a few minutes.”

  The girl nodded.

  As Calyce tried to make her way through the throng of rushing teenagers shouting and weaving, Roger, the freckled science teacher, came abreast of her in the hallway. They maneuvered shoulder-to-shoulder to create a wedge that diverted the flow.

  “I got that map for you,” he said loudly so she could hear him. “To show you the topography, remember? I’ll bring it in.”

  He was gone, having stepped ahead of her as the tide took him. All she could see was his red hair that curled like peaked whipped cream, and soon even that confection was swallowed.

  Twenty minutes later she was squeezed onto a chair at a small round table in a little room next to the English Department faculty office. The walk-in-closet-sized space served as storage unit, winter coat rack, book depository and conference room. If four people met, the table had to be pulled away from the wall, where the whiteboard was, whose ribbed metal bottom lip poked now into her left shoulder.

  She waited with her papers lined up neatly on the fake wood tabletop as she squinted through her reading glasses to text on her phone, holding it with her left hand and stabbing letters with her right index finger.

  John DeGroot, the head of the high school’s English Department, returned finally. “Everything okay?” he asked as he shoved a short stack of books on the floor with his foot to close the door.

  “It’s my sister.”

  Calyce clicked the phone off. “There’s something wrong with my mother but Nina thinks I’m crazy, at least that’s what I’m getting from these texts. Three words. Why doesn’t anyone talk anymore?”

  DeGroot had fine white hair in gauzy tufts and small, close-set eyes straddling the narrow bridge of a beaked nose above an edged jaw parallel to the noticeable ridges of his windpipe. “Why does she think you’re crazy?”

  “Mom didn’t come for Labor Day and she was supposed to stay for two weeks. I went to the airport but she didn’t show up. She says she just changed her mind.”

  “Has she done that before?”

  She nodded. “But you know that feeling when something’s not right?”

  “I do,” he said as he scrolled on his laptop.

  Calyce still had two more things to discuss. First was the new teacher, a young black woman who had already sent around a multitude of emails with her “thoughts” about the curriculum.

  “Who is this child?” Calyce said.

  “It’s Amita’s first teaching job.”

  “She doesn’t understand politics.”

  He smiled. “And you do? She reminds me of you all those years ago. I want you to be nice to her.”

  Last was the Senior Creative Writing class Calyce was teaching for the first time, and she told him she was nervous because she wasn’t a writer. DeGroot told her to relax. She didn’t have to use the same short story prompts he had used for years but should find pieces that spoke to her. And yes, he confirmed, he had done the assignments along with the kids, although he hadn’t always shared them.

  “It kept me attuned to the process of writing.”

  “I’m not a writer,” she said again. “Grammar I know but imagination eludes me.”

  “Life’s not as empirical as you make it.”

  He thanked her again for being willing to teach his class at the last minute and in addition to her English 9 for freshmen. He said it meant a great deal to him, that she would cover for him, particularly since he hadn’t given her a reason.

  “I figured it was Steven,” she said. “And you would have done the same for me.”

  He said she still deserved to know why he had asked her to do it. He hadn’t been able to say before, it was all in flux, but he had finalized things that morning with the school’s Head of Academics, so he could tell her.

  “I’m retiring.”

  Calyce blinked as he hurried to say, “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving until June, but I can’t do it any more, not with my brother institutionalized. What Steven did really threw us and he’s alone out there.”

  “But you promised.”

  “You’ve got Belinda.”

  “She’s a history teacher. Can’t you work part-time?”

  “He nearly died, Calyce.”

  She finally registered the reason for the closed door.

  DeGroot said, “I know we promised each other another five years, but I can’t do that now. I’m here all this year but with time off whenever I need it. You’ll be head of the department next year like you’ve always wanted, and I’m asking Hank’s approval to make you Interim Head immediately, so it’ll be a fait accompli. You’re younger than I am. You’ll have years to run all these pain-in-the-ass people we hired.”

  “Did he say what Janice is going to do?” Belinda asked as they walked into the noisy faculty lunchroom at first-period lunch that same day.r />
  “Only he’s retiring, not her. She’s staying on as Vice Principal.” Calyce lowered her voice as she talked about DeGroot and his wife. “He said they need her salary.”

  Not all the tables were occupied. At one, next to the double row of small windows that punched holes that looked like an ice tray in the school’s outside wall, three English teachers sat talking and eating. One of them was the young black woman, Amita, who had sent all the emails. She was flanked by a white woman in an olive sweater set and a broad-cheeked white man in his thirties. The other three chairs at the table for six were empty.

  “Is that the new teacher?” Belinda whispered.

  Calyce nodded but didn’t lead them over, choosing instead an empty table by the entrance, near short cabinets on which a microwave sat with its door open. She smelled the aroma of canned chicken noodle soup.

  “He likes her. I don’t,” Calyce said as she sat.

  “Who’s ‘he’?” Belinda scanned the other table. “Dan?”

  Calyce nodded. “Let him deal with her. I like your new ‘do.”

  Belinda pulled plastic containers from her neoprene lunch bag. “I had to stop paying all that money.”

  Calyce was doing the same, laying a place for herself with her fork on her napkin on the left and a knife and spoon on her right. “It’s shorter but I like it. The big earrings help.”

  Belinda jangled them, bouncing her gray spirals. “You know the best part? I can scratch my head.”

  The lunchroom’s ground-level portholes faced the school’s long entrance driveway, down which boisterous teenagers streamed like fire ants to the quick eateries they sought in their daily flight from the school cafeteria. Calyce saw a car trying to edge its way through the mass of young people.

  “All the girls have the same short shorts,” Calyce said. “Their backsides are falling out.”

  Four tables away, the three English teachers laughed as a math teacher joined them. The perky young man had curly hair and earnest brown eyes. Unlike the others, who dressed casually, he wore a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a red-striped tie.

  “That will wear off,” Calyce whispered to her friend.

  “Are you okay? You’re in a mood today.”

  “It’s Damion. What’s he doing bartending?”

  “That again?” Belinda took a bite. “Cut off his internet.”

  “What?”

  “Cut it off. You know, intermittently. Turn the Wi-Fi on and off when he’s home, secretly, so he doesn’t know. ‘Gosh, honey, I don’t know what’s wrong with it.’ That’ll make him get his own place.”

  “I don’t want him to get his own place. I just want him to get a career. He spends money like water.”

  Belinda waved goodbye at a woman leaving. “So show him how much it really costs to run a household, and show him he spends more than he earns. He was a business major. He’ll understand.”

  “May I join you?” said a deep voice above them.

  It was Roger, the redheaded science teacher, who looked and dressed like a Brawny commercial.

  Belinda made eyes playfully at Calyce, but the towering man didn’t see it.

  Shocked, Calyce didn’t speak, so her old friend said, “Sure.”

  But he didn’t sit down next to Belinda. Roger stepped over quickly to take the seat next to Calyce.

  Two Sundays later Calyce stood impatiently in her kitchen holding an armload of clean folded clothes and a ceramic mug of fast-cooling coffee. She had made brunch just an hour before, but her son already had his close-cropped fade deep inside her refrigerator.

  “You think if you stare long enough things will start dancing?” she asked Damion’s back. “Electricity costs money.”

  But he didn’t move. Finally, he opened the crisper to select a nectarine as big as his fist. He bit and sucked at the sudden spurt of juice as he walked from the kitchen through the small brown sitting room with his mother padding close behind him.

  “I’m glad we’re doing this,” she said. “Did you print out your bank statements and your credit card bills?”

  Damion suddenly stumbled. Catching one foot behind the other, he flung out his right hand to snatch at the stair railing, which sent the fruit flying. She heard it thud on a step and on the tile floor below.

  He was shaken but unhurt.

  She turned back to the kitchen. “I’ll get a paper towel.”

  Damion didn’t wait for her but headed down, his sullen feet thumping. “If I had a fridge in my room, I wouldn’t have to keep coming up for food all the time and this wouldn’t happen.”

  He had gone inside already when she arrived at his door and he had taken his key out of the knob, so she had to knock.

  Damion let her into his living room with its black leather corner sectional on her right, where a tall chrome floor lamp arced nearly to the spot lit ceiling. Under the lamp’s silver globe a black coffee table sat on a rug whose furry white pile matched the two fake-fur throw pillows, one at each end of the sectional’s arms. In the corner was a fake-chinchilla afghan she hadn’t seen before, whose long hairs riffed in the icebox breeze that fell from the ceiling vent.

  The side of the sectional along the long right wall of the house faced a flat-screen TV mounted on the room’s left wall shared with the garage. The TV was on and the remote was on the couch where Damion usually sat. A Fast and Furious movie cast the only colors in the monochromatic room. Even his clean clothes in her hands were all dove grays and blacks.

  Beyond the TV a short hall led to the full bath and dim bedroom, where Calyce at the door saw the unmade edge of his queen-sized bed. On the new bedroom carpet lay a balled up and surely wet white bath towel.

  “Let’s start with inflow and outgo,” she said as she sat. “I don’t want to have to pay your car insurance again like I had to last week.”

  “Careful of the mug.” Damion pointed, then went into his bathroom and closed the door.

  She waited, eyeing the towel but not moving.

  When he emerged minutes later, changed and patting his hair, she said, “It’s like ice in here. And dark. Do you still have the bedroom blinds closed?”

  He pinched the razor creases of his charcoal slacks as he sat.

  “Where are your papers?” she asked.

  “I don’t need them because I know what happened. It was that blue suit you had me buy for Jay Jay’s wedding. Plus that shirt and tie. And these shoes. Altogether, it cost me a thousand.”

  “A thousand dollars? That’s my mortgage.”

  One shoulder moved. “You said you wanted me to look good.”

  “I told you to shop at Macy’s. Where did you go?”

  “You said I looked ‘better than every other cousin there.’ Plus I need it all for interviewing.”

  “But a thousand dollars for a blue suit?”

  “You haven’t bought men’s clothes in twenty years. That’s what a good one costs. But that’s why I can’t pay my minimums, and by tomorrow there’ll be late fees.”

  She shook her head at him. “You can’t keep waiting until the last minute. What are the balances?”

  He lifted his right ankle onto his left knee, where she saw a matte black sock above a polished black dress shoe.

  “The minimums aren’t much,” he said. “A hundred each for the two of them.”

  He paused as she stared absently at his foot, then said, “I could always work a day shift.”

  “No. No. I want you –”

  “To have my days free for interviews, I know, but you can’t have it both ways. I can either be available during the days or be able to pay my credit cards.”

  He tilted his head at her, waiting.

  “I want you to focus on your job search, of course.”

  “Of course, but these bills distract me. I don’t need the whole thousand. I could ask for that. After all, you’re the one who wanted me to look good for the wedding. But just a couple hundred. Oh, a
nd maybe some cash too. So make it four. Five.”

  “But I don’t have five hundred dollars.”

  “Sure you do. Not in your checking but I went over all your bank accounts like you told me, to see how you manage your money.” He smiled. “See, I do do my homework, and you say I sleep all the time. You’ve got two thousand in savings. Take it from there, and it won’t affect your cash flow.”

  She frowned as she thought about it.

  “Or I could start working a day shift,” he said again.

  “No. So you’ll pay me back? This is just a loan?”

  “Like I always say, I’ll pay you back as soon as I get that big job you want me to find.”

  Calyce was on the phone as she drove to school early the next morning. It was Maryland, and the Beltway, and she was holding the phone to her ear, which was illegal, so she was looking for the police all while she was trying to breathe. A sudden coughing fit had stolen her wind.

  “I’ve got a job, Nina, an actual job. You’re the one who’s freelance.”

  She forced a cough and then another but her throat wouldn’t clear. “I can’t go see Mom until Columbus Day weekend. I’ll pay for you to go if you go this month. I don’t know how, but I’ll pay.”

  Driving sixty, she said, “I just talked to her.”

  And then, “No, going down there does not tell her we think she can’t live on her own anymore.”

  Coughing again, she took her foot off the gas and the van close behind her braked hard. It honked, and she turned on her flashers. She slowed to move right in the heavy traffic, and she couldn’t listen at the same time to what Nina was saying.

  She inched her Camry into the far lane and slid onto the narrow right shoulder. She hit the brake, still struggling to breathe as cars whizzed by a foot from her door.

  Panting, her chest straining in the dry hot sun, Catherine finally reached the cutout blasted into the rock. It was a trough that slashed along the side of the mountain and curved outward to create an overhang like a tunnel sliced vertically. At the same spot, the trail’s cement changed from bleached gray to rose flowerpot. Man-made ridges had been added too, running perpendicular to the canyon wall. At the path’s outer edge, square-cut blocks had been brick-laid to mark the rim but they didn’t barricade the lethal drop.