Alternate Endings Page 24

  Calyce shook her head. “These things aren’t mine to decide any longer. Dan said no, so it’s no. He’s the one in charge now. I only work here.”

  Simon’s daughter graduated from high school that next Saturday, on the same day that Calyce had to attend the graduation ceremony for her own high school, which mandated that all faculty and staff sit compulsorily through a ceremony unchanged for twenty years, but for the identity of the new Headmaster. The former square-chinned Episcopalian perpetually in buckled flats had finally been nearly forcibly retired. She had been replaced by a well-intentioned late-forties man whose one child attended the middle school. He better fit the school’s demographic but had an odd habit of gesturing for emphasis with his right pinkie in the air. Calyce in her stiff seat played an internal parlor game of Count The Number Of Times during the man’s platitudinous speech, which flowed over them like warm and soothing bath water. His predecessor had been the same way, an occupational requirement in a world of over-educated, easily outraged, and combative professional parents who keep constant score.

  That evening, they all called Simon’s daughter to congratulate her. She in turn thanked Calyce for the Amazon gift certificate.

  “Are you excited about Tulane?” Calyce asked her.

  Calyce congratulated Simon too, when he got on the phone.

  “The last one,” she told him. “But the house does feel empty, at least until they move back in.”

  Because Effie was paying for everything, they could afford to take a private minivan cab to National Airport.

  Calyce was ready a full half an hour before she had scheduled it to arrive. She had stuffed her new backpack with everything she needed for the climb, times two, since Damion had insisted he wanted to accompany her to the top of Angels Landing. He was perfectly capable of it, he had told her. He said the hike couldn’t be nearly as tough as she had described.

  She wore cargo shorts and the same stiff high-top hiking boots she had worn when she had gone with Nina. They felt like old friends, and she enjoyed the renewed hug of wool socks against her ankles. On her head she wore a rust-colored billed cap with sequins, which Nina had bought for her at the airport in Las Vegas. It flattened her hair, the fit was so tight. Her curls flipped like dolphins at her shoulders.

  “You look absurd,” Damion told her at the front door, which she had propped open with her rolling bag to see the street.

  She scanned her meticulously groomed son’s black knit shirt and charcoal knife-pleated slacks. “You can’t hike in that.”

  “It’s Vegas.”

  “We’re only in Vegas one night.”

  “I forgot how much I love hanging out with you.” But he was smiling, and it was real, and it traveled between them unfiltered.

  “You two look like you’re having fun,” Effie said as she descended in her pristine new white tennis shoes and broad-rimmed cloth hat with a neck flap that made her look like she was on safari.

  “I forgot the mail,” Calyce said. “I’ll just be a second.”

  In the box was a small padded brown envelope addressed in a hand she didn’t recognize. The minivan had come, so she threw it in her satchel purse and didn’t give it another thought until they were waiting idly at the gate. She told them she had to use the airport bathroom, then found a stall and tore the package open to find a one-line note and one last carved stone star. This one was Carrara marble, milky white with veins of dove gray. She turned it in her grateful fingers, where it was cool to the touch and smooth to her thumb. She flipped it, the points familiar as all the others had become over the six months since Roger had given her the stars at Christmas.

  She read the note.

  I’m sorry I’m the wrong color. If I could change that, I would.

  It took Catherine several more weeks of public humiliation, but she finally stormed into Mike’s classroom after yet another ostracizing lunch. She had walked by the door’s slit window twice to make sure he was alone.

  She did not knock but simply entered.

  As she came across the carpet, he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “You ignore me. Can’t we talk about this?”

  He was instantly angry.

  “I’m married. Happily, in case you didn’t know that before you threw yourself at me. Get a life, will you? You’re like a puppy waiting for me every day.”

  “I am not!”

  “You’re a sad woman who spends all her time inside her head. That damn poncho with all those trinkets. You look like a bag lady.”

  “Then why did you eat with me?”

  “I felt sorry for you.”

  “But all those months?’

  “You had no one else to eat with. Not once.”

  “But you kissed me!”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You kissed me back!”

  “That’s just another story you tell yourself inside your head.”

  They headed north out of Las Vegas the next morning with Damion driving. He insisted even though Calyce alone knew the way. Effie of course got the convertible’s front seat next to her grandson. It took them five minutes to open the top, which Calyce thought was a great idea.

  As they left the eerie early morning neon and reached the flat pre-heating desert, Calyce’s knees in the miniature backseat were shoved to her chin. Crammed next to her was her backpack piled on top of her mother’s cloth rolling bag, its four small hard wheels punching her side. Damion’s one suitcase had claimed the tiny trunk.

  “The air’s so dry!” Effie yelled back toward Calyce.

  Damion yelled too, as the wind whipped. “Never had heat without humidity before.”

  Calyce leaned forward to shout to her son as they passed a motor speedway fifteen minutes later. “Did you put on sunscreen?”

  After an hour, and they approached what looked like a weather front of barren grey mountains. There was no visible entrance for the highway, yet they dove inexorably toward it. At the last moment they curved into a hidden passage and began to rise northward on two narrow lanes of asphalt with hard cement moveable barriers separating them from the southbound cars, semi’s, SUVs hauling jet skis, and boxlike rigid RVs, some of which seemed as long as the tractor-trailers but all of which matched the grays and browns of the dirt and the naked cliffs that thrust next to the highway. Above them as Damion took the sharp turns, ships of rock with striped layers rose 500 feet and slanted as sharply as sinking Titanics.

  Calyce watched her son glance up, then stare up at the five-hundred-million-year-old hardscape like nothing he had ever seen.

  “Virgin River Gorge,” she yelled to him. “You know how much this highway cost? A hundred dollars an inch! Ten million a mile, and that was back in the seventies.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Effie asked that late evening in Springdale as they walked northward toward the touristy restaurants and shops. Cars and RVs choked the road and they had to negotiate their way through a stream of pedestrians.

  Calyce answered with a smile, “A Mexican place I know.”

  “I love Mexican food!” Effie exclaimed.

  Damion said, “I hate it. Makes me fart.”

  Effie said, “Let’s take a walk after dinner. How far is the entrance to the park?”

  Damion had changed clothes. His slacks were gray now and his new polo was purple. “They’re all white,” he said about the other tourists they were passing.

  Calyce looked to the cloudless sky and saw the canyon walls, not because she could actually see them in the dark but because the bright stardust ended in utter blackness on both sides much higher than it would if there had been a flat horizon. Directly overhead a million holes were punched by straight pins through black construction paper held in front of a spotlight.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?” she asked them.

  Damion pulled the front of his shirt from his chest, flapping it. “I’m still sweating. It must be ninety.”

 
; Calyce turned into a stucco courtyard that faced the street. On a wall, Mexican Village was painted in turquoise. “This place is fun, you’ll see.”

  “But I told you. I hate Mexican,” Damion said, but Calyce had already turned in, followed by her happy mother.

  At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, the Utah sky was inky still, for creeping dawn would not begin for another thirty minutes. By 6:30 the sun would rise, but it wouldn’t reach the top of Zion’s western rim until Calyce and Damion had already climbed to Scout Lookout, if her time estimate was correct. They would take advantage of the early light at the cool of the day to hike that first 1,000 vertical feet.

  But now, as Effie readied herself in the bathroom, humming, Calyce stepped onto the Lincoln-log balcony of their hotel at the south end of town, on an exposed hillock on the west side of the main road. Arranged in long two-story buildings, every double-queen room had a rustic décor and a matching balcony that faced the psychedelic canyon.

  Outside, the birds that would welcome the dawn had not yet awakened. There were no sounds but the infrequent swish of a passing car breezing through as it moved south toward Hurricane.

  Calyce put both elbows on the rough-hewn top log of the balustrade and gazed west to where the sky was still velvet. Just above the negative space that was blacker even than the tuxedo sky, she saw a falling full moon that had journeyed for hours. She blinked as her eyes fixed on it, for it was so sharply focused it surprised her. A perfect ring circled it so closely there were no stars between the ring and the paillette disk.

  She turned and called through the open door. “Mom, are you ready?”

  The three of them parked in the huge dirt parking lot at the Visitor Center and walked the short distance to the display boards on posts near the entrance, across from the bathrooms and the outdoor water faucets. As her son and her mother waited in the warming morning, Calyce filled the three, liter-sized water bottles from the outside tap.

  “Is one for me?” Effie asked.

  Calyce shook her head. “You’ll be at the Lodge. They have water there. Did you bring money?”

  Calyce pointed to Damion’s feet. He was wearing ratty, stained, half-tattered old running shoes whose pitted foam bottoms were detaching. “Are you sure you won’t trip?”

  “I don’t need all that water,” Damion answered, stiff in jeans so new she had never seen them. “This isn’t the first time I’ve taken a hike, you know.”

  Calyce said, “We need to check the board inside for flood conditions.”

  “Why?” he said. “We’re going up.”

  As Effie looked up reflexively at the clear sky, Calyce said, “Flash floods can happen, and when they do, they have to close the Narrows to rescue people. I don’t know what it does up there on Angels Landing.”

  At the shuttle bus stop, there was already a line of early hikers, all men and one woman, confirmed as serious by their sturdy shorts, no-nonsense hats and boots and, for two of them, including the one woman, thick coils of rope looped over their muscled shoulders. Damion was their age, but Calyce was thirty years older. Effie beat them by more than fifty years, yet the old woman charmed them all, chatting amiably.

  “So here’s your stop,” Calyce said to Effie as the motoring shuttle approached Zion Lodge and its wide front lawn planted with a huge, ancient cottonwood. A little boy and a little girl were playing under it already.

  “But I’m going with you,” Effie said as the bus pulled in. “I can make it.”

  “No you’re not,” Damion told her firmly. “It’s too hard.”

  Effie said to him, “But I walk more than you do.”

  “Mom, I only bought vests for two,” Calyce said. “And you’re not going up there without some bright color on.”

  At the Lodge, Effie still refused to climb down. Damion shook his head and made a face, both with far more irritation than there should have been.

  Calyce talked to Effie like she was chiding a child, as the shuttle headed north again.

  “The bus will let Damion and me off at the next stop, then turn around eventually. It’ll loop back to the Lodge, so get off there. No arguing. There’s food, and you can sit in the lobby. It’s nicer than waiting for us up there. There’s nothing but bathrooms and benches at the bus stop, and we’ll be gone for hours.”

  “I can’t even come partway?” Effie said. “I can do it. I want to show you.”

  “No,” Damion said decisively.

  “But I –”

  “No!” he said. “You’ll stay at the Lodge.”

  Effie said, “All right. All right. I’ll go back there and wait.”

  The instant they stepped off the shuttle and the doors closed, leaving Effie inside, Calyce said to Damion angrily, “You told her, didn’t you? You told her I’m looking at nursing homes. That’s why she wants to show me she can do this.”

  But he was crossing the street already, striding toward the metal footbridge crossing the winking river.

  “When do we get to Angels Landing?” he asked over his shoulder. “This is easy.”

  A mere fifteen minutes later he was so out of breath he had to lean on a boulder in a litter of rock-fall ten stories above the canyon floor. As he sank back against the stone, Calyce saw that under the neon orange plastic road-construction vest she had brought and made him put on, his taupe shirt had armpit stains already.

  Calyce unhitched her backpack and fished out one of the three water bottles for him to carry, but he wouldn’t. He took four long swigs as he bellows-breathed, then gave it back to her to lug for him.

  They stopped every five minutes to regain their wind. Under the open vest front, his shirt soon became wet in a pyramid, and the half-moons under his armpits grew to meet it.

  “Are you really going to put Grandma in a home?”

  She nodded. “More water?”

  Ten minutes later, “Mom, you watch Jimmy sometimes. Would you do that for us too, with the baby?”

  “Of course. I’d be happy to.”

  “Because,” he said between gulping breaths, “Selene is thinking she may want to make extra money by being on-call at night in addition to her day job, and I’m thinking about going back to school.”

  “Are you serious this time?”

  “Really? Is that what you say to me?”

  She saw that, even exhausted, his insolence was unaffected.

  At the Lodge, Effie visited the lobby restroom, then climbed the stairs to the Red Rock Grill. It was too noisy and crowded, though, with breakfasting families of very loud small children. She found the snack bar instead near the gift shop downstairs and bought a cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee. She sat at an outside table until all the other tables were quickly filled and a family with a bumptious seven year-old asked if they could “join” her.

  “It’s great you’ll have more time now,” Damion said when they stopped at a tight loop in the trail, which had turned rose-colored as it cut under an outcropping and tilted up in an endlessly long run like the initial climb of a rollercoaster.

  He looked at it and asked, “How much farther?”

  She adjusted her backpack. “Still far. We’re not even at Scout Lookout, up there above that cut-out. This is the easy part. Do you want a protein bar?”

  She fished it out, feeling past the hard side of her cell phone.

  He took his time chewing, chewing and breathing.

  Across from them now, hundreds of feet above the riverside trees below them, the laser sun had risen over the eastern rim of the canyon. Its heat reached the top of her head. As they rested she stretched her arm above her hat to feel it. “It’s going to be very hot soon.”

  Damion said, “You know, she’s not working as much now because she’s been so sick with the baby. She’s had to cut her hours. And she’s had those doctor bills, and she’s got this high deductible.”

  He paused, but Calyce didn’t say anything.

  He said, “And at the moment, I
’m not working full-time either.”

  As he handed her the empty wrapper, she realized suddenly that she had bought the bar, she had carefully packed it, she had lugged it all the way from D.C., and she had hauled it for him up the mountain. She was now expected, apparently, to carry the foil all the way down for him.

  She said, “You know I don’t have any extra money. You know as well as I do that I didn’t get that raise when I wasn’t elected.”

  But he surprised her then. He reached out and said, “It’s my turn to carry that backpack.”

  He circled around to the subject again fifteen minutes later as they arrived in refreshingly cool Refrigerator Canyon. She thought they had resolved it, but they hadn’t, apparently.

  The level grade helped him regain his lost breath as they walked between walls soaring hundreds of feet above them. The sun streamed overhead but didn’t reach them and never would, the little canyon was so pocketed. The heat would blast again, though, the instant they left it.

  “The thing is,” Damion said. “She may have to run out quickly to a call at night, and I might be working.”

  He let it hang, walking alongside until she got it.

  Calyce stopped and turned to him. “You’re kidding. You want to move back in, don’t you? And you want to bring Selene and the baby.”

  “Just until we get enough money to get a place. And she’s already found someone to sublet my apartment in D.C. It’s a guy she did some work for.”

  “So you want to move back in right away? Immediately?”

  He nodded. “And until you can get rid of Grandma, we thought she could move up to the guestroom again. She’s fine now. She can do the stairs. Selene and I will pay our share of the bills, and two-thirds of them, for sure, once Grandma moves out. And you’ll be able to see your grandson all the time once he’s born.”

  “Grandson? You know it’s a boy?”

  He smiled.

  He said, “And think of all the gas you’ll be saving not having to come down to the D.C. apartment. Don’t you want to be near him as he grows up?”