Alternate Endings Read online

  He looked at her mouth and she watched him do it.

  She kissed him. She closed her eyes and reached him and pressed her lips against his.

  He kissed her back. Full on.

  She felt the softness of him and the parting of his mouth.

  He leaned his body hard against her as she leaned herself against the hard rock.

  Calyce was fully prepared for the first day of school after the seniors received their formal college decisions, as she was every year the first school day after April 1st.

  She made sure to tape a sheet of paper with the words “DO NOT DISTURB” in black Sharpie over the slit window in the classroom door, as she directed the shell-shocked young adults to pull their chairs into a tight circle so she could tell them in depth, at length, about her own failure. Those who had been accepted by their number-one-choice schools would be distracted, daydreaming about their rose-petal futures, but those who now had to re-adjust their plans might listen and be buoyed. At least, that’s what she hoped.

  She told these former children that she had tried to write. She had always dreamt of being a novelist. In high school, she said, she had written in the very early mornings and late at night when she wasn’t studying or tending to her two younger siblings for an entire year. When her mother had returned, though, Calyce had discovered that her voice had been buried by that day-to-day existence. Decades had passed and she was sure she would never regain it.

  “So hold onto yourselves,” she told them. “Some of you are hurting because you didn’t get into the schools you wanted. People will tell you it’ll all be fine, and it will be eventually, but I’m here to tell you that not getting what you want will deepen you. Don’t let where you go to college define you. That’s true even for those of you admitted to your first-choice school.”

  “And don’t be me. Don’t lose your voice. Don’t ever become . . . regular. All of you, every one of you is so much more than some ‘regular decision’.”

  It was everything Maria could do to get Jimmy to sit back down in front of the TV, where the Disney Channel had been primary coloring already for half an hour. The fidgeting boy was long past the end of his attention span.

  “So go,” Calyce said when her daughter returned to the kitchen. “It’s the chance of a lifetime. Jimmy’s so young still. It won’t affect his schooling.”

  Maria had climbed onto the countertop again, her neck to the wall cabinets above her, which Calyce remembered was how she had had every serious conversation since grade school. Maria swung her legs and banged the lower cabinets with her heels. “But I’ll miss you.”

  “This is what Greg’s been training for. This is what you wanted. I’ll be here when you get back. And I’ll come to visit.”

  “But Grandma . . .”

  Calyce snorted. “She’s strong as a horse.”

  Maria cocked her head to indicate the powder room around the corner. “So what’s with the new sign about turning off the water?”

  Jimmy called out, “Mo-om! I want to go home!”

  “She forgets sometimes. It’s nothing. I wish I could travel too but I’m stuck here.”

  Jimmy began pounding like a pile-driver on the corner table.

  “But Mom, where’s you?” Maria hopped off the counter to head out to him. “You take care of everyone else. When will you start taking care of you?”

  Five minutes later, Calyce watched her daughter scuttle behind Jimmy lugging a bagful of toys brought from home to keep him occupied. The boy strutted as he paraded down the stairs, trailing his servile mother. At the bottom, as Calyce watched from above, Jimmy announced that he wanted to stop for ice cream. He refused to step outside until she agreed, all while she held the front door from him.

  Even after Calyce heard the car pull away, she stood staring at what she had seen.

  Alone in her living room that evening, Calyce phoned Simon to very calmly raise with him for the first time the idea of putting their mother in a nursing home.

  But he refused to consider it.

  She said, “What happens if she forgets a pot on the stove? Or trips on the stairs while I’m at school? We’re alone here and I work all day.”

  She lowered the voice she had raised, and she kicked herself for not having called him from upstairs in her own room. She strained to listen and thought she heard movement on the floor below her.

  No, he said again. He wouldn’t agree to a nursing home.

  “You mean ‘assisted living,’ anyway,” he corrected. “She’s not sick enough for a nursing home.”

  He also wouldn’t help with the cost of it because he had no money to spare.

  “Plus Mom’s got her own assets,” he reminded her. “Dad left her everything. He left us zero when he died, remember?”

  All the rest of that week, Effie talked about the beautiful weather coming on Saturday. “A picture postcard day. That’s what they’re saying.”

  On Friday night she said, “Let’s go out tomorrow. That canal you like.”

  Early Saturday morning Effie gave Calyce no choice, calling up to her fully dressed already from the entryway.

  By 8 a.m. they were walking along the C&O Canal towpath with shafts of early light gilding the new leaves of the high, densing trees. Calyce was pleased to see for herself how much better her mother really was physically as they strode easily toward Georgetown. The sun followed them, touching the mossy green belt of water that was still as a pond.

  Effie even lengthened her strides to match her daughter’s.

  “I hate being cooped up,” Effie said. “See how well I’m doing? You don’t need to worry about me. I can walk miles now.”

  Belinda had texted Calyce: Meet me in the dance studio at 3:20.

  Calyce descended into the lowest bowels of the high school, down forty feet and four sets of wide stairs, with two landings, the first of which led to the weight room, the fitness-machine room and the top of the basketball court, where a full-sized track looped around the rim above the bleachers. Another set of stairs took her down to the small recording studio and the professional dance studio with its sprung floor and rows of birch ballet barres surrounded by three walls of mirrors. Calyce had only been inside once.

  Belinda was already there, alone, pacing over the shiny pine-plank floor under strong overhead lights that smudged two dark crescent shadows under her deep-set eyes.

  “You look tired,” Calyce said, but Belinda charged right in. She was furious.

  Javier had come to the high school to speak with Belinda personally earlier that afternoon. He had made a special appointment to tell Belinda that he had tried but he could not get beyond the way Calyce had treated him. The artificiality of her apology had haunted him, he had said, because it had demonstrated an even greater flaw in Calyce and more generally in the English Department at the high school, for the upper school had seemed to condone for years a perpetual disdain that now amounted to contempt for the contributions of the English teachers at the other campus.

  “What the hell, Calyce? What the hell?”

  Belinda’s hand gripped the barre. “What did you say to him this time?”

  “I apologized.”

  “Did you? Or did you do that wooden thing you do when you don’t agree with what you’re doing? I’ve known you a long time.”

  Calyce’s eyes narrowed, and when they narrowed they disappeared. “You made me. I didn’t want to.”

  Belinda spoke very, very slowly.

  “I don’t know who you think you are.”

  She started counting on her fingers. “You presume to be head of the department already. You’re so self-impressed you don’t even consider John, and you don’t ask for his endorsement until it’s too late. You dictate to teachers like they’re your servants. You condescend to Javier. There’s been a parade of people in my office since the first day I became Vice Principal, telling me about their problems with you. I’ve tried to tell you, but you won’t he
ar. And now you’ve made me so angry I’ve had to meet you down here so no one could possibly see me.”

  Belinda wasn’t willing to gift-wrap her words anymore.

  “Do you know that every single English teacher on both campuses has seen what you wrote about dictating the lower and middle school curricula? Hell, I think the whole school has seen it by now. Do you know how arrogant that was? They avoid you at lunch, Calyce. Have you noticed?”

  Stunned, Calyce said, “Of course I have.”

  “You’ve got to change how you interact with people. I’ve spent all these months defending you. I can’t anymore. I look ridiculous. From now on, this is all you. You’re hurting yourself and your department and even the school. If you don’t change how you deal with people Javier is going to pass you by. He’s beloved.”

  Simon called her the next day at school. He was oddly hesitant, searching for words.

  “Nina agrees with me about the nursing home, but she said you might have some . . . some need. Do you want me to chip in for a piece of whatever she’s adding to your costs? A couple hundred a month maybe, to help cover the light bill?”

  Calyce tersely said no, she didn’t need his help, thank you.

  But then he did something unexpected: Simon apologized. It took him a moment of fumbling, but he thanked her sincerely for taking such good care of their mother. He even said Effie wasn’t easy.

  Simon told her, “I’ve never been able to get used again to her telling me what to do. That was always you, that year you were our mother.”

  He laughed, awkwardly at first but then relieved. “You know Sandra can’t stand the way she chews? That smacking, it drives her crazy. Even my girls imitate it.”

  “Have you never been to Bryce?” Nina folded the paper map to the precise rectangle where they were driving.

  She had been navigating all afternoon, and they now approached Zion’s unassuming East Entrance on a two-lane road. Fat grass waved already in the April spring, contrasting with everything dry and barren Calyce had ever thought about Utah.

  “No,” Calyce said as she drove. “When do you leave for Chile?”

  “Next month. You ever heard of Punta Arenas? It’s the closest city to Torres del Paine.”

  “Don’t they have enough English-language teachers there already? You’re thirty years too old.”

  Nina turned to her. “I got this convertible for a reason. Why did you close the top?”

  Calyce kept her eyes on the pavement. “I don’t need my hair messed up. It doesn’t matter to you with all that up there, but I like to keep mine organized.”

  They passed the old wooden hanging park entrance sign and started subtly descending. Furred spring shoots gave way to hardened white sand dunes that grew until they thrust above them in layers first of rust red and chalk farther skyward. Around them soon, on both sides, pitted formations mounded like some filmmaker’s vision of the moon. Over the millennia the wind and ice and rare but brutal rain had carved striations in them. Even the road wasn’t asphalt any more but red-paved.

  Soon the land changed to outcroppings of peeling layers, then to a hardscape with undulating wrinkles that wrapped in pink-stacked coils.

  “My God,” Nina said, pointing left. “There it is.”

  Towering next to them was a soaring cone of white rock so cut horizontally that it looked like a million stacked dishes. Calyce slowed to find the top of it in the flag blue. Down the sides of it a thousand long lines were deeply carved too, running so distinctively parallel they looked chiseled by a conscious hand.

  “Checkerboard Mesa,” Nina said. “Holy shit. What caused that?”

  They arrived at the entrance hole to the tunnel, which was so tight it looked like the wire arch over a croquet ball. Calyce drove into the unlit cavern feeling tons of deadly mountain poised above their head. Inside, in the ink-dark, she saw to her right a flash of light, and seconds later two more together, followed by two more individually. The tunnel then opened completely on the right for a fleeting instant to a view of rugged cliffs bathed in daylight.

  She plunged into the tunnel again at the same instant she realized that the portal windows had been blasted into the mountainside intentionally, for the views.

  They exited to a canyon of stone in slabs higher than anything she had ever witnessed, extending as far ahead of them as they could see. The walls were copper and streaked in places as if they were crying. In one dented cliff stretched a vastly wide natural arch, still attached to the rock face behind it, still being etched by the carving power of erosion.

  Calyce pulled over without saying a word, steering to the lip of one of the looping switchbacks falling from the tunnel. She got out, gawking. Speechless too, Nina came next to her. They looked up, then far right and far left downward into the monumental canyon, following the forced perspective of the two soaring ridgelines. Hard earth rose a thousand feet all around them, with vertical lines and cuts that caught the blazing sun to cast charcoal shadows.

  Calyce listened but heard a silence unbroken even by wind.

  “I’ve never seen this,” she said quietly. “Last year we came in the other way.” Calyce leaned toward her sister the smallest bit. “Thank you for coming. I know it was a lot of effort.”

  “That’s okay.” Nina too was awe-struck. “Thank you. My God, this is amazing. Now I see why you wanted to come back.”

  They were touching shoulders as Calyce said, “But why did you offer? You’ve never done that before.”

  Standing on the looping curve, staring up at the endless chiseled cliffs, Nina turned to her sister.

  “It was the first time you ever said you wanted something just for you. I figured it had to be spectacular.”

  Nina insisted that they catch the very first shuttle the next morning, which departed north into the main canyon of Zion from the Visitor Center on the dot of 7 a.m. A jointed bus with an accordion middle, it pulled out from the collection curb with only the two middle-aged women in it.

  Nina dumped her fat daypack on the aisle seat of the row next to them. After the first stop she said suddenly over the pre-recorded voice talking, “Shit. We both look like dirt. If we get separated, we won’t be able to see each other. I didn’t wear anything bright.”

  They passed a band of mule deer startled by the shuttle. Their out-sized ears twitched on heads uplifted from grazing, the gaining light outlining just one set of antlers.

  Calyce pointed up out the window to the top of the eastern cliff-face. “These aren’t mountains. It’s flat behind there because it’s a shelf. That’s ground level up there, and we’re in the basement.”

  They alighted from the bus, which then gunned north without them. In the quiet morning they heard its engine far longer than they saw its square white tail. On the other side of the footbridge, spring trees canopied over a sinusoidal path. It meandered up and finally revealed after ten minutes a pinnacle of rough rock with a bow wedge higher than any ocean liner, so far above them that the morning sun kissed only the top third.

  They stopped.

  “That’s it?” Nina said with the back of her neck on her shoulders. “All the way up there?”

  Calyce nodded.

  “Then I have to pee and maybe poop. This’ll take a minute.”

  “Is that allowed?” Calyce called after her but Nina had already stepped off the trail. “There’s a bathroom back at the shuttle stop.”

  “Why?” Nina called to her. She had already disappeared downhill, away from an outcropping of rocks that hung above them.

  As Calyce waited she smelled a smell it took her a moment to locate. Something had died to her left and it was newly rotting.

  She saw a narrow way through the boulders and stepped off the path to follow it, balancing with her hands on the thick rocks to a secluded spot with branches and underbrush in a pile. Sticking out of it she saw two hooves, then legs and suddenly, two more little baby hooves spooned next to them and facin
g outward the same way.

  “Oh no.” She put a hand on her mouth.

  She knelt. There, under the twigs and leaves were two bodies of mule deer, a mother and a newborn fawn.

  But not newborn. Unborn. And partially eaten.

  She crouched, transfixed.

  “Calyce,” Nina said behind her, purposely calm.

  Calyce looked over a boulder between her and the path to where her sister stood facing her. Their eyes locked.

  “Don’t move,” her sister said. “Don’t turn your head.”

  Calyce saw Nina look up then at the rock ledge directly above Calyce.

  Nina looked back down at her sister.

  A growl started in a throat above her. It grew. A deep rumbling noise.

  The hairs on Calyce’s arms lifted.

  The motor-sound came again, louder now.

  It stopped.

  Calyce was between whatever it was and its kill.

  Below it, facing it, Nina stepped towards it. She stared at the thing eye-to-eye. She raised both arms and waved them up and down. She lifted on her tiptoes and made huge half-circles with them.

  She boomed at the cougar. “Get out! Calyce! Don’t you move!”

  She jumped up and down and continued flailing.

  The mountain lion screamed and she charged it. Nina came at a run, tearing across and onto the rocks toward it as she shrieked like she hadn’t since they were children.

  Nina was still holding Calyce five minutes later, both arms tight around her. Calyce was shaking and couldn’t stop.

  “I want to go now,” Calyce said. “I want to leave. I don’t want him coming back.”

  There was nothing Nina could do. Calyce galloped down the trail and into the trees and over the metal footbridge spanning the river. Nina tried to talk to her but she couldn’t, at least not so Calyce would listen as they waited at the shuttle stop.

  Calyce gripped the metal sign at the curb as she said, “How did you know what to do?”