Alternate Endings Read online

“I’ve seen them before. They’re all over the Americas. You know they go for the neck? That’s what scared me. You were crouching with your back to him. You looked smaller, and you looked like you were eating his dinner. This is all my fault. We weren’t wearing anything neon that would have told him we weren’t prey.”

  “But you went towards him.”

  “The key is to make yourself look bigger. They back away if you’re lucky.”

  “Nina, you saved my life.”

  “We were just very lucky.”

  Calyce said she wouldn’t go back to Angels Landing, ever.

  “But you’ve come all this way,” Nina said on the shuttle bus. “I don’t get it. We scared him. He’s moved on.”

  “How do you know?”

  That warm spring night they ate at a hilariously bad Mexican restaurant on Springdale’s main street, and they had a blast. The food was all right but the margaritas, which were Nina’s goal, were mixed by such a blessedly generous bartender that Nina soon found the bumbling Keystone Kops routine from the clueless wait staff infinitely entertaining. The two women sat on bistro chairs at a round table on the front patio watching the four servers walk in and out the front doors in alternating confusion. They brought checks to tables that had just sat down. They parked appetizers in front of diners who hadn’t ordered them, while those who had gestured frantically. One group of diners they ignored for a full half-hour. Even Calyce finally relaxed and began laughing.

  Dry evening fell to a clear nighttime and stars threw themselves across the crystalline sky. Nina drank and both sisters saw the traffic diminish outside the restaurant’s front half-wall of stucco. Across the street dozens of tin whirligigs, some of them enormous, spun on poles and caught the floodlights in the front yard of a shop. Concentric circles turned and spoon wheels rolled.

  “It’s not the mall, Calyce,” Nina was saying. “It’s dangerous outside sometimes.”

  She licked the salted rim of her third margarita. “It’s like this thing you have about not drinking. You don’t want to lose control, but it’s just a defense mechanism. You need to relax. When was the last time you got laid?”

  “Excuse me?” Calyce darted her eyes to see if anyone was listening.

  Nina didn’t care. “Any luck with that white teacher?”

  “Are you done with this?” An errant waiter thrust his arm between them over the top of the table, reaching for Nina’s half-eaten plate.

  “No,” Nina said to him.

  “No,” Calyce said at the same time. “I’m not interested.”

  The young man left to bother another table.

  “You’re not attracted to white guys?”

  Calyce shook her head. She didn’t stop, so she looked like a bobblehead gone sideways. “No. No, I’m not. No.”

  The next morning Calyce was sitting on the balcony of their shared room. She sat in one of the two Adirondack chairs and held a steaming mug of hotel-room coffee she had made on the tiny plug-in machine in the bathroom while Nina still slept. Slid back into the wooden chair contentedly, Calyce had both her elbows on the flat arms and the ankle of her right leg posed on her left knee. On the building’s second floor riverside wing, she sat overlooking the shining ribbon of ebullient water winking through the cottonwood trees. Above them was a white glimpse of rock-littered mountain still in shadow, its back to the climbing sun. Massive and solid, the rough cliff faced west toward her. She felt its hard, forever certainty.

  There was nothing, finally, but the chiming of the creek and the gossiping rustle of the hemming trees, the painter’s light kindling the mountains, and the sensations of the mediocre but welcome coffee in her mouth, the heat of it in her hands, and the tender touch of the smallest breeze on her left shin below the pajama bottoms she had hiked up to her knees to feel it.

  A while later, the door opened and Nina stuck her head out. “You sure you don’t want to go back? We’ve got time before we have to be in Vegas.”

  Calyce said with sureness, “I’m too old now.”

  Nina stepped out and sat with her sister next to the brushing trees and the soft wind that ruffled them. Just like Calyce, Nina put her right ankle on her left knee, then waited silently, sensing her sister’s sadness.

  “I’m stuck with her you know,” Calyce said after a while. “Did she tell you she rented out the condo?”

  “Not until after she did it.”

  Calyce looked at the rock face at whose feet the little river giggled. “Sandra hates her, so Mom can’t stay with Simon, and you’re month-to-month in a one-bedroom.”

  Nina laid her hand on the wide arm of Calyce’s chair. “I’m sorry, but I need that job.”

  Calyce nodded. They hadn’t been so amicably in each other’s company in years.

  “Mom looks out for Mom,” Nina said. “That’s what she does. You were the one who looked out for us. Dad was flying all over the country that year. You put us first. Mom still doesn’t.”

  When Calyce turned to her, Calyce’s dark eyes were shining. “What do I do about Damion? He’s just like her.”

  Nina made her hand into a fist and pumped it on her sister’s chair arm. “You tell him to get his damn ass into gear. You don’t have to be stuck with him too. But why are you asking me? What do you want?”

  “I want him to succeed.”

  “You think he won’t? Because if you ask me that’s what you’re telling him with all this hovering.”

  “He had trouble in school. I was getting my degree then, and I was working and going through that divorce.”

  “You’ve been saying that for years, but that little boy is gone. He’s a grown man but you’re still treating him like he can’t do it without your help. It’s like what you said about Angel’s Landing. You’re not too old, but you think that, and your thinking it makes it true. It may be that all he’s doing is living up to the message you’re sending him. Or down, rather.”

  Nina watched Calyce regret leaving Zion. Her tall, slender, stunning elder sister kept looking up and looking back to the rims of the sunset-colored cliffs as Nina pulled out of their hotel at noon with the convertible’s top down, finally. Calyce moved her whole body and craned her neck seemingly to record everything forever, as if she were never returning. Nina saw it all and slowed, then stopped at a curb.

  “I have an idea,” Nina said. “Didn’t you say there was a northern road with a view of the park?”

  “Fourteen,” Calyce said. “But it’s way out of our way.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather do that than sit at the airport?”

  Nina exceeded the speed limit on the interstate while Calyce held her flapping hair with both hands. Nina took an exit toward Cedar City, which brought them along the lip of a high shelf as Calyce kept clutching her head.

  She yelled at Nina over the car wind, ”There’s a lava field around here with chunks of black rocks. Can you believe it?”

  Nina yelled back, “You look ridiculous. You won’t sleep with a white man but you wear white hair.”

  “Who says this is white hair?”

  Nina spotted two motorcycles parked on the roadside ahead. Four riders stood staring over the cement barrier that protected them from the deadly drop-off. She drove until she could make a U-turn that had Calyce protesting, “What are you doing?”

  Nina wouldn’t tell her as she drove past the motorcycles and turned left onto a dirt track that was barely a road. She turned off the engine.

  “Go,” Nina said as she pointed at the people. “See what they’re looking at. I’ll stay here with our stuff.”

  Calyce climbed out and walked carefully along the perched edge of the road. Ahead of her the riders mounted up and drove away east. The only sounds became the bumblebee of their engines on the old highway and the crunch of her hiking boots on the gravel shoulder. She was still wearing them and planned to wear them on the plane, though there was no need to.

  When she came upon it finally,
she stopped cold. Far away below her, down many discernible steps of descending earth and veins of trees were carved vertical gouges in the land. Huge sharp connected valleys twenty miles southeast with bottoms she couldn’t possibly see, but she could see the white sides of the canyons like curtains rippling and their stepped peaks flat like hatboxes in stacks on a closet floor. One rose taller than the rest, and it was pure white to its top, unadorned with fuzzy green. It was an altar, the Great White Throne of Zion, scratching the blue-jay sky higher than everything around it, shouldering above, resting unconcerned and unchanging for eons.

  Calyce lost track of time. She moved her feet apart and put her hands on her hips. She stared, unmoving, at the cathedral of stone.

  At last she spoke, but she didn’t realize it, so no one heard her, not even herself.

  “This,” she said to God’s handiwork. “I want this.”

  They made it to the airport just in time for Nina to run to her flight, but Calyce’s was long delayed. The outbound plane from Baltimore had had some equipment “thing,” the counter woman said unhelpfully as she paged through a bikini catalogue. Calyce had two extra hours to sit and think.

  Eventually she grimaced as she rehashed for the tenth time her awful meeting with Javier, realizing at last that she had done what she always did. She had bulldozed him and then she had given him a disingenuous apology.

  She walked the perimeter of the gate area, keeping her rolling bag in sight. Out the wall of window she saw her loading ramp still without a plane.

  It was after 9 p.m. in D.C., so she began by apologizing for phoning so late. Once she knew Javier had time to listen, though, and was willing to, she told him she was deeply and truly sorry for having treated him chronically with such disrespect. She was a bull and a tunnel-visioned person, and he had been far more gracious than she deserved.

  Javier remained silent as she went on for more than a minute.

  “I’m so very sorry,” she said sincerely. “It’ll never happen again.”

  At no point did she ask him to forgive her. There was no attempt at absolution, just guilt and genuine remorse. But he did forgive her, and he did it immediately, telling her he was stunned and struck by her humility. He assured her that yes, they were fine, they always had been, though he had indeed been angry. But he wasn’t any more. He was impressed, he said.

  They talked for a while about their families, and finally they circled back to what they both shared: DeGroot’s departure and the troubled brother who had necessitated it, the school-wide consolidation of the English Department, and the need for a new Head, who would be voted on the next month.

  Suddenly, and without her asking, Javier told her that he didn’t want the job, and that he never had wanted it.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Really.” As to the rumor, maybe the teachers at his campus had started it in an effort to draft him.

  Javier told her, “I’ve seen how hard it’s been on John all these years. I don’t need to have to handle the high school teachers. I’ve got enough thirteen year-olds as it is.”

  Effie stayed up with her, padding behind her around the main floor the night Calyce returned home, even standing next to Calyce as she opened the refrigerator door to search for a snack when her body refused to ramp down. Calyce was still on Zion time.

  Effie had been chattering without taking a breath since Calyce had come downstairs after her shower. She told her daughter every morsel about Damion and Selene, little Jimmy and his parents. As part of his upcoming placement, Greg had had to list all the foreign service posts on the planet in ascending order of his preference, Effie said, and more than half the names she had never heard of.

  “Like Oo-waga-somewhere. It’s in Africa.”

  Calyce moved things around inside the refrigerator. “I made all this and you didn’t eat any of it. And all the yogurts are still here, and the rotisserie chicken.”

  “You left too much.”

  “This casserole I made. The whole thing’s gone bad.”

  “It’s no fun if I don’t have anyone to eat with. When can you and I take a hike, just us two? Like you did with Nina. I’m fine now. I’m up to four miles a day.”

  May

  “You’ve been out of work for months,” Calyce said angrily to Damion, who was just as furious. “You keep talking but you haven’t done anything but fill in at bars.”

  “You know what I’ve done? I met a guy last night who says he maybe wants to sublet my apartment. That way I can come home and save some money while I go back to school.”

  “Yet another pipedream.”

  Effie stepped into the space between her daughter and her grandson, then turned to Calyce. “Be civil.”

  To Damion, Calyce enunciated every single word.

  “I will charge you rent if you dare move back here. You’re a grown man.”

  “You don’t charge her rent,” he said to the back of Effie’s white head, “and she’s not paying utilities either, like I did. She told me.”

  “Like Selene did, you mean to say. She paid your bills here.”

  “Quiet!” Effie said to Calyce.

  And then, “You don’t charge family. You pay for them.”

  “You’ve got her on your side now, too?” Calyce said. “Tell me, is Selene still paying towards the rent on your apartment?”

  He pressed forward then, against Effie, who had to move back in a chain reaction, her shoulders shoved now against Calyce’s chest.

  Damion said, “You’re a dinosaur, Mom. You know that? It’d be sexist if she didn’t contribute. She lives there.”

  Before school the next morning, Calyce was deep into her computer, fat chunks of moist blueberry muffin in her mouth as she typed a long email. She had arrived early, just as the sun summated the tops of the houses along the property line, when the day was already rapidly heating. She was so hunkered she didn’t notice Dan, not even when he thunked his backpack twice on his desk in order to get her attention. He had to call her name and say Good Morning before she finally looked up.

  “You look possessed,” he said, so she told him she was typing an entirely new proposed English curriculum for the lower and middle school. She had been up most of the night working on it.

  “I just took the bull by the horns, but I’ve integrated everything and there are no overlaps or holes. I want to get it out today.” She plopped in more muffin as punctuation.

  “Is this because Javier’s not running?”

  But she was gone again. She didn’t hear the next thing he said so he had to say her name again. “Calyce, do they know he’s not running?”

  “I don’t know. Why is that important?” she asked distractedly.

  “Because if they don’t know he’s not running, they’ll think you’re competing with him, and that won’t go over well. Has he told them? I found out through you. I haven’t gotten anything in writing from him.”

  “You’re right. I’ll tell them right here at the top.”

  “Wait! Stop.” He had had to raise his voice.

  She looked up again.

  Dan was trying to help her. “Don’t you want him to tell them?”

  She stood in front of her class an hour later in taupe pants stained umber where her lap had been soiled with muffin grease. She didn’t notice, though, nor did she register that she had placed her right foot on top of her left instep in the new flats she was wearing.

  She told her seniors that only two class periods remained before they departed on their senior Quests. Tonight she wanted them all to vote on their favorite pieces written by the class during the year. They would talk about the top ten winners once again during their last two meetings, moving backward, starting with number ten.

  “So if you want to know who the big winner is, you need to be here the last day. I’ll bring homemade cupcakes. But there’s no final, and nothing more you need to write. Congratulations, everyone, you’re done with me.” />
  On her way to the second floor, Calyce turned into the central stairwell and set her sights on the flying pterodactyl. The student artist had painted it with its mouth open, so its tearing teeth showed as it searched for prey. She didn’t see Belinda and Dan in a back niche of the bottom level where the maintenance staff stored folding chairs. She heard them first, then somehow knew to keep her head straight ahead and continue upward as if she hadn’t. But she strained her ears as she slowed her climb.

  Behind her Dan was talking in a low staccato stream so dense he wasn’t taking breaths. She thought she had seen Belinda nodding.

  Ten long seconds later she arrived at the straightaway under the shark. She gave it three steps, then looked down as she slid her hand along the railing casually.

  They were both gone.

  The next week Damion sang as he arrived in her kitchen.

  “I’ve got news,” he said happily. “I met this guy and he’s opening a four-star restaurant and he wants me to be the manager. He likes the way I look.” Damion gestured to himself, model-style, his long fingers sweeping down himself as he posed comically.

  She snagged a dishtowel and began drying her hands. “Where?”

  “Shaw. It’s going to be upscale.”

  “In Shaw? I doubt it.”

  “This is a real opportunity. I’d have a salary. I wouldn’t be unloading deliveries. They would all work for me.”

  “Starting when?”

  “He’s still trying to find space.”

  She made a face. “There ought to be a lot in Shaw.”

  “It might be somewhere else. I don’t know for sure.” He walked out to her living room and turned on her small TV.

  “What about your rent next month? Selene’s not paying all of it this time, is she?”

  From the next room, he yelled to her above the noise. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it covered.”

  But to himself, very quietly, he whispered, “Bitch.”

  It kept bothering Calyce and she couldn’t forget it. It kept niggling her in the middle of the night, and she couldn’t explain it sufficiently to herself, so the next Friday Calyce waited like a supplicant for Belinda outside the faculty lunchroom. She hugged a wall and folded herself and feigned that she was checking her cell phone. She was bad at it, though, like a howitzer trying to be origami.