Alternate Endings Read online

  They left the sheltered canyon, heading toward the steep, whiplashing, stacked switchbacks.

  “‘Grows up,’” she said into the furnace blast of sun. “How long do you plan to stay?”

  He exhaled audibly, and she heard his annoyance.

  “What?” she asked.

  He tugged on his orange vest, then said, “I don’t know what you expect. If you make her pay for her own nursing home, she’ll be using all the rent she’s getting from Florida.”

  “How else would it be paid for?”

  “That puts it all on me and Selene, to pay the rent at that place. But that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “These vests are stupid. I don’t know why you’re making me say this.”

  He was mad now. “With how sick she is with the baby, she’s not making enough to cover her share of the rent. You’re the one who made me rent that.”

  And his rage was growing. “No thanks to you, I’ve found someone to take it off my hands. You’ll be off the hook on your guarantee, too. You ought to thank me instead of criticizing.”

  Angry too, Calyce marched ahead of him onto switchbacks so exposed on the sheer vertical face that helicopters had to fly in cement when the Park Service restored them in the 1980s.

  Calyce didn’t turn to look back until she had reached the cerulean blue hundreds of searing feet above her. Far below, she could see Damion struggling as he pitched forward, gulping for air with his hands on his knees on a switchback that still wasn’t the last one. Her son could barely move the grade was so unrelenting and he was so badly out of shape, she realized. Her own legs were tired but not shaking this time. All the walking at home and at school at lunchtime had made her stronger.

  “You all right?” she yelled down to him.

  He waved her forward but she waited until he finally arrived, his chest ballooning and collapsing. Another hiker originally far behind them now passed her.

  Slowly, Damion and Calyce walked to a sign a thousand feet above the valley, on the cusp of a flaking, porous sandstone mound that blocked their view of the final, far-off, harrowing fin they had to climb, which neither of them had ever attempted.

  Since 2004 six people have died from falling.

  The 1.1 mile (1.8 km) round-trip route from Scout Lookout to Angels Landing is a strenuous climb on a narrow ridge over 1,400 feet above the canyon floor. This route is not recommended during high winds, storms, or if snow or ice is present.

  “Is that for real?” Damion asked her.

  They walked onward, to the sharp left edge of the lookout, where the plates of hard-sponge rock just simply ended in a red cliff with a sheer drop higher than a skyscraper under construction. She pointed way, way down to the sinuous road that looked like embroidery thread it was so far below them.

  “Right here is a thousand feet,” she said. “That’s the road we came in on.”

  He tried to lean over but she shot an arm across his chest as if he were five years old again.

  She said, “Someone died right here when they stood up. She had her feet dangling over the edge but when she got up she lost her footing and went backwards.”

  He craned to look down. From their left, to the north, a little white shuttle bus appeared with its kinked center, so small it looked like two Tic-Tacs connected.

  They drank again in the drying sun, preparing. He was exhausted She could see it. His disordered face showed the blazing heat and the extreme effort of climbing, which had been steadily uphill for longer than he had ever ascended. His puddled face dripped sweat from his hairline to his eyebrows, and his feet didn’t look planted. He moved them tentatively.

  She could see he was breathing hard too, still, but it wasn’t bringing much recovery. The water he was chugging didn’t help either.

  She wanted to ask him again if he could do it, but she dared not. Instead she chose to say, “I’m proud of you,” to encourage him.

  “Don’t be condescending,” he said.

  She reached for the empty water bottle in his hand and stowed it once more in the backpack, which she had insisted on taking from him.

  “This way.”

  She turned to the rising blush of rock and turned her back to the main canyon’s western rim.

  She wouldn’t have seen them anyway, even if she had been looking skyward, for they were still miles away. Hidden in the vast sky, far above and well west of the north-south cut where they were, mountainous storm clouds were assembling.

  One of the first support posts sunk into the porous rock had been pulled out by the force of climbers depending on it with their full body weight. The dangling post was still attached by its needle-eye to the thick metal links, though, so it swung limply and uselessly.

  Damion didn’t know what to do. “The chain stops,” he said, flummoxed.

  Calyce had never made it beyond that point before, but she said, “Let me get past you.”

  There was nowhere to put her hands. She had to climb up without touching anything, without anything but air between her and the far valley. She hunched forward as far as she could not to fall backward, and she stepped out nakedly onto the rock. She talked him up too, extending her downhill hand to help him.

  They continued along a narrow ledge weathered into a soft and uneven lip. Sometimes more chains assisted. Sometimes there were none over the pancake-stacked stone. Everywhere the path was so severely eroded that their right, outside, feet canted dangerously.

  They reached a spot where the chain itself had dug so far into the left wall of soft sandstone that the links had cut a groove created by the strain of hikers. Calyce stopped when she saw that it carved into a corner around which the walking ledge had disappeared. To get to the next foothold she had to hang on and swing and hope to land at a square that had been manually cut into the rock. Below her as she did it the void opened, but she made it. She swung and landed, then smoothed her vest and hitched her shoulders again as she turned back to Damion.

  On the far side, though, he held the chain and shook his head. He wouldn’t hop it. Down hundreds of feet was the cool path they had walked through Refrigerator Canyon.

  “You can do it,” she said to encourage him.

  He made a face, though. A teenage boy’s face embarrassed by his mother, but he swallowed hard and swung.

  His foot slipped the first time because the carved spot was so eroded, but he found purchase at last and straightened.

  Once they reached the more level saddle in the ridge, they slowed on the stacked boulders, ending at a protruding diving-board of layered stone. They stopped, struck mute with awe.

  The photographic view before them was the one in every photograph of Angels Landing: the thin back vertebrae of a long-necked dinosaur that started far below them and rolled up in a curve to somewhere they couldn’t yet see, an arched hump that extended into the very middle of Zion’s wide central canyon, on their right through chiseled sentinels of colored stone. To their left hemmed the close-in cliffs that changed from rust at their eye level to white-as-chalk above.

  Damion pointed up the dinosaur’s back as the sun beat down.

  He asked, “We still have to do all that?”

  But it wasn’t sun, she noticed, as much as glare from white clouds that were finding each other to form a solid plane above them. Far in front of them, off to the east, the sky was still blue, but overhead – she looked up – a flat ceiling of white was being painted.

  “How much farther?” he asked, spent.

  “I don’t know.”

  And then, “Do you want to turn back?”

  All his pretense had climbed out of him. Calyce saw his chest working as his eyes said he was regaining nothing. There was no energy recharging.

  He nodded. It was all he could do. “Maybe we should.”

  She agreed. “You go back,” she said. “Wait for me at Scout Lookout.”

  He blurted, “You
want me to go back alone?”

  And then, “No. Let’s keep going.”

  They were as high as the World Trade Center towers had been as they walked carefully forward and descended slightly to travel the left side of the vertebrae. This was the sheer side of the cliff with no chance of survival, without any trees or slope to soften it. It curved to their left, in a bowed curtain of dents and rusty streaks swept by a soft wisp of breeze.

  But then they saw it and stopped again. The thin fin had narrowed to only two feet.

  On either side, twelve hundred feet plunged so precipitously that a single wrong step would be fatal. On the left the river-ribbon far, far below was dull with silty run-off. On the right, Calyce couldn’t even see the bottom.

  Before them was a single step carved into the stone. A foot wide, the cut block could have been an altar, it was so solitary and exalted, held aloft in mid-air. And there was no choice. There was no other path possible around it.

  “The Step of Faith,” she said.

  “That’s got a name?”

  “It’s in all the pictures. I’ll go first. Be careful.”

  “You’re not really going to do that.”

  But she had already. She took a step, then believed in another. She found the chains again on the other side.

  To keep him distracted, she told him again how proud she was of him. In response, she was relieved to see again his sullen-teenager expression, which meant he was focusing on being annoyed rather than dying.

  “I’m not just proud of you about this,” she continued as he was crossing it, “but about the two-thirds. You’re offering to divide the bills at the house by the number of people, with you and me and Selene sharing equally. You’re being fair to me, and it shows you’re thinking of the two of you as a couple, because you’re claiming two-thirds of the costs.”

  Damion made it, but as they were breathing a group of three hikers neared them to pass them going down.

  “Excuse us,” the front man said, pointedly waiting for Calyce and Damion to move. She grabbed her son and inched him over, but Damion lost his balance and threw out a hand to his mother, who gripped him tightly until he regained his stability.

  When they continued, he made sure that she went in front, in order to guide him.

  “It’s not a headcount,” he said as he watched his unsure feet.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Space.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What’s the two-thirds then?”

  They had reached another narrowing. No carved step was there this time but only smooth, porous sandstone only as wide as four widths of a shoe.

  To her back, he said, “Two floors.”

  If Damion had been looking skyward instead of at his tattered sneakers, he would have seen that more clouds had been hiking in too. They were thickening as they tufted to gray where he and his mother were fully exposed on the narrowest bones of the dinosaur’s spine, open to the air now on gritty slabs without handholds.

  He said, “We need two bedrooms, and the kitchen. There’s no kitchen downstairs and we don’t want to wake you up at night with the baby. And once Grandma leaves Selene wants to make the guestroom upstairs into a nursery.”

  It took Calyce a long moment, long enough for the wind to blow in around them.

  But then she turned.

  “You want me to move downstairs? You want me down in your room?”

  His vest flapped suddenly and he pressed it flat again as he said, “You can use the kitchen of course. And once Selene figures out this work business, we can contribute to the mortgage, at least until I need it for tuition. If that’s what I do.”

  Calyce’s long hair blew in a gust. “You want me to move downstairs, but you want me to pay all the mortgage? You’re only offering to pay two-thirds of the utilities? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Until I go back to school, if I do. Then it might have to change.”

  She looked at him in wonderment, then said incredulously, “So if you go back to school, you still want to live there with Selene and the baby, but you want me to pay for everything?”

  And then, as the rain began, it dawned on her.

  She said, “You only want me there so I can babysit the baby. You want my free babysitting. In exchange, you’ll allow me to live in the basement of my own house. All while I pay for your entire family.”

  “We’re your family too, and you pay for family, like Grandma said.”

  The sky was pelting now. Damion cast his eyes upward.

  He motioned to her, rolling his hand. “Let’s go back down. Give me the backpack. I’ll carry it but you go first, so you’ll have to come around me.”

  But Calyce didn’t move.

  She said, “You came here to get me to give you my house. That’s why you came with me. So I’d agree, and I would agree to pay for it.”

  Lightning jolted, not too far off.

  “Give me that.” Damion began pulling at the backpack as the hardening rain wet their footing on the exposed ridge top.

  “No!” Calyce held onto the shoulder strap. “You played me. Just like you play everyone.”

  They were in a tug-of-war now, fighting over the backpack, though the loaded bag wasn’t their real battle.

  He got it from her at last as the rain rat-a-tatted around them, his orange vest wet now as he looked back where they had come, at the charcoal clouds that Calyce saw too.

  “It’s going to storm,” he said. “Come on.”

  But she wouldn’t budge. “You’re taking money from all of us, even your grandmother. And Selene. You cannot be like this. I won’t believe it.”

  He leaned toward her then, ignoring the sky.

  He shouted at her as the rain began blasting and sheeting.

  “Surprise, Mom. I am exactly like this.”

  He yelled, “This is me. This is who I am. You just don’t like it and want me to change, but you know what? I choose this. I choose to be exactly the way I am. I’m not even going to act anymore like I’m interested in whatever stupid dream you have for me.”

  The water was soaking them as the wind growled.

  “You keep trying to make me into what you want, Mom. You do this to everyone, and not me. Ask Simon. You know what he says? He says, ‘No wonder Dad left.’”

  “Damion!”

  “You know what they call you, Simon and Nina? The Dictator!”

  He brought the pack to his chest, then twisted around and hurled it with all his power, pitching it into the air.

  The sack launched airborne and away from them, arcing over the canyon. It flew, and curved, and then plummeted, leaden.

  But the toss was so violent and required so much strength that the centrifugal force turned Damion on a wheel. He couldn’t control it. He stumbled backward.

  He reached out to Calyce desperately. His arms were windmilling.

  She cried out and grabbed him.

  She flailed but he caught him.

  They bobbled. They had to shuffle their feet to stay upright.

  She held onto him despite his wobbling, wrapping both arms around him. They would both fall together if he lost his footing.

  Below them the bag hit somewhere with a crash, then hit again, then not again as it dropped to the bottom fourteen hundred feet below them.

  They recovered their balance as one, as a single unit, for she did not once let him go.

  But then he moved his arms to reject her. He shrugged her off him, then turned his back to her in the driving rain on top of the mountain.

  “I’ve got Selene,” he said. “I don’t need you.”

  He had turned to face down the trail. “Let’s go,” he said. “You in front of me.”

  He waited for her to inch around him and lead him home safely.

  Mine are not the only children in full rebellion.

  Damion listened but Calyce didn’t speak. Behind him, he didn’t hear
her moving.

  For the briefest moment, the sky inhaled. The wet retreated into the soot-gray and the storm lost its breath.

  Calyce spoke in a voice he had never heard before.

  “I’m going to the top of this without you.”

  Damion didn’t turn, for turning would be taking her seriously. He looked forward anxiously at the slick, wet rocks around him and down again at his treadless, dangerous tennis shoes. He looked ahead once more to the path, slippery now, where the glistening sandstone couldn’t drink the pouring water fast enough.

  He yelled back at her. He shouted to her without turning, frozen forward but hoping it got to her.

  “But what about me?”

  He couldn’t see it, but Calyce shrugged.

  She then returned his shouting in the renewed tempest.

  “It looks like you’re on your own.”

  Come, Aeolus said to her. Come to me my daughter.

  Once Effie arrived below them on the shuttle, having taken it north from the Lodge where she had quickly run out of things to do there, she had watched endless busloads come and go dispensing and swallowing their increasing cargo. Seated on a bench under the tall trees, she had watched group after group get out, collect themselves in a tight circle, then cross the street in upbeat anticipation, energy high, so high any youngster along would be skipping. The earlier trickle of serious hikers returning with arm pumps had become at mid-day platoons of day-trippers celebrating. She saw one pair of giddy girls high-fiving barefoot.

  Along with this stream came a trickle of can’t-do’s, those too old or too unfit or too scared who had tried but turned back far from the top, wherever that was. Their heads were lower and their body language defeated. Too hot, too dusty, no fun, ran out of water, damn sun, too steep, too far, goddamn impossible. By mid-morning Effie had heard it all many times over.

  “Only for the young,” she kept overhearing. “You can get killed up there.”

  But then the weather changed. The trees began rustling and their leaves started beating. She felt a slight drop of temperature and then a scatter of rain, not enough to darken the road but sufficient to palomino it. In the heat the first few drops that found her were soft and welcome.