Alternate Endings Page 27

  Calyce said, “Mom! Damion’s fallen. I saw his vest.”

  “Honey, I –”

  “The sirens, I heard them.”

  “ – just saw him. He’s fine. He’s right here, right behind me.”

  Effie turned but he wasn’t there.

  She told Calyce, “I don’t know where he is but he’s fine. I just talked to him.”

  Calyce bent over double. She fell to the sand-mud on her knees and started shaking. Her hardworking breath hitched and caught and finally hiccupped into tears. Her insides broke loose.

  Effie went down with her and held on, holding her.

  Calyce cried and tried to breathe, and then she said with her streaming face against her grateful mother, “Mom, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I don’t want you to live with me. I don’t want you there for the rest of my life. I have a life, Mom. I want my own, like you had yours. One that I choose.”

  Effie clutched her and patted her and thanked God she was alive.

  Calyce said, “Can you understand that? Can you forgive me?”

  Effie stroked her child as she hadn’t since before she had left her. Like a child, Calyce kept her head under her mother’s soft hand.

  “Of course I do,” Effie said. “Of course. I would never want you unhappy. Or to do anything you don’t want to do. All I care about is what’s best for you. And I’m so sorry.”

  The two women sat together, far away from the lethal cliff edge and shoulder-to-shoulder. Around them the thirsty sandstone was absorbing all the water and drying already into pink again.

  “I’ll think of something,” Effie said.

  Calyce leaned her head on Effie’s shoulder. She had to scrunch down to do it.

  Effie said, “I know. I’ll live with Simon.”

  Calyce laughed out loud. “You hate Sandra.”

  “No, she hates me. But they have room now that both the girls will be gone.”

  A moment later, Effie asked, “So what was all that jumping and arm-waving? That was scary. I thought you had lost your mind.”

  Calyce laughed at herself.

  “I thought you were a cougar.”

  Catherine made it too, finally, when she returned to Zion alone.

  Every foothold and hand grip she found herself, having learned how to take tiny steps and stand up straight, with arms out, and how to take micro-breaks by straightening each leg after each step so her skeleton could absorb her body’s weight.

  When she at last arrived at the top, she tiptoed carefully along its pitched roof to sit on the hot stone so high that birds flew below her. She hugged her knees. Spread beyond her was the deep, wide, green canyon floor bounded by rock candy chunks with sharp peaks in a widening V. They were washed with color in bands and cut with streaks of rust and they rose higher than any pyramids, pointing the way in the same arrow shape for hundreds of millions of years, an arrow that could only be seen from this height, an arrow that led northward to this place, to this church of God.

  Here, she had become someone who had climbed Angels Landing. She would do it again tomorrow or the next day when her aching muscles hurt less, and she would remain in Springdale so she could do it, unguided and easily, because she could. She knew how.

  She was someone who had done what others had died not doing. She had achieved. Within her now was a certainty, an abiding sureness in herself that no external assault could rob her of. It left a solidity she had never felt before, a confidence that, at last, she could attempt anything.

  “At least, that’s how it felt to me,” she tried to tell her mother when she visited the old woman three days later, the first Saturday after her return.

  “That’s nice, honey,” her mother said from her bed in the nursing home, where she had gone after complications from open-heart bypass surgery. They had known the operation was especially risky because of the diabetes, but her intransigent mother had insisted on it anyway.

  “How was the weather out there?” the frail woman said.

  “Mom it was really something to climb that. I started at the –”

  “Can you tell me next week? Read the paper to me now. It’s right there.”

  As always, she did exactly as her mother directed. Catherine had to cough, though, before she began. Something burned in her throat that wouldn’t go away.

  “It was amazing. You have to go and –”

  “Mom, the baby’s crying, and Elena’s at work, so I’ve got to take care of him. I tell you what. When you get home tonight, come on upstairs and we’ll talk. And could you bring home some carryout? I’ll sit up here in the kitchen while you tell me all about it. At least ‘til I fall asleep. Oh, and can you get some laundry detergent? I checked down in your room, and there wasn’t any left.

  A week before Catherine had boarded the plane alone to Las Vegas, she had led her last Senior Creative Writing class for the year. It was the Thursday before their Saturday graduation, and they were discussing the winners of the student writing pieces. They had arrived at last at the top of the list, at the very best work according to the kids, who were all leaving her.

  The number one, they said, they had voted on without her, secretly. The winner? Not a student work but a portion of her own first novel, which she had given them, about a black English teacher who tries to climb Angels Landing.

  “Write the whole thing,” they told her. “And keep the Greek stuff.”

  The next December, Calyce walked over the metal bridge again at the beginning of the trail from the bus stop. A sixty-ish man who was very tall and thin with long strides soon caught up with her. They were strangers, but because no one else was making the climb on that winter morning, they fell in step together.

  He was a professor from SUNY Binghamton who had seen Angels Landing on YouTube and had to try it. In answer to his question, she told him yes, she had climbed it before, many times, though this was her first December. Yes, she lived nearby. She had just moved to Hurricane to teach English at the private school there.

  As they mounted the steepening path, she told him she had sold her townhouse in the D.C. suburbs and moved lock, stock and barrel to Utah. Her kids were grown. Her daughter’s husband was in the Foreign Service so they lived in Africa with her grandson. Her son was recently married, and expecting a baby in a few days, and if it was a boy they planned to name him Cisco.

  “What does my son do?” Calyce repeated the man’s question. “Last I knew he was a bartender. His wife’s an electrician. Isn’t that something?”

  Later, as they traipsed Refrigerator Canyon, he asked if she had any family in Utah.

  “No, but my mother lives in Texas. I’m here alone, but it doesn’t feel that way. There’s something about this mountain.”

  To take the nice man’s mind off the extremity of the next, stacked, steep switchbacks, she asked him about his work at the university.

  He answered, then parried with, “So what do you do when you’re not teaching?”

  “I write. I’m working on my first novel.”

  They made their way panting to Scout Lookout. After a long moment staring down from the left lip-edge where the woman she was writing about sees a condor gliding, he said, “It’s sure different from back home, isn’t it?”

  But she shook her head.

  “This is home,” she told him, and then to pay him back for hearing her story, she guided him safely all the way up Angels Landing.

  Author’s Note

  I was fascinated by Calyce, who in Greek mythology is the daughter of Aeolus the god of winds and the mother of Endymion. He was so worthless and vain that he made a pact with Zeus to sleep for all eternity in exchange for Zeus granting him eternal youth. There’s a statue of him in the British Museum and a Keats poem called Endymion that starts – you’ve probably heard this – “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

  Before Endymion makes that deal, he fathers a child with Selene, the goddess of the moon, who visits him ni
ghtly after he falls asleep, so she can gaze upon him and adore him. You know who the child was, this boy child, Endymion’s son and the grandson of Calyce? Narcissus. Yes, that one, the one who stares at himself in the lake. This is a grandmother who will all her life blame herself for that happening.

  I also wanted to write a book about a mature woman who finally chooses herself. When given the impossible choice between her elderly mother’s needs and her adult son’s, she picks Door #3 – her own life, and she does it without being punished by death, poison, drowning, having to throw herself under a train, etc. Interestingly, as I described this decision to every woman I know, every single one of them refused even to contemplate such a story line. Every one said no, that wasn’t possible, a loving daughter/mother would never do that. She would serve her son and her mother and deny herself, of course. The visceral-ness of their reaction and its uniformity told me that we as women of a certain age have indeed been inculcated with an assumption of endless service. It is so successfully ingrained that any other hypothesis is expelled. That reaction also meant that if I retained the Calyce story line I had to include an equally plausible parallel one about a woman who concedes and does the expected. Hence Alternate Endings, with each protagonist the author of the other’s story.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, I am immensely grateful to everyone who graciously gave of their time and expertise to help make this story and my writing better. All factual mistakes are entirely my own.

  Mr. Perry Amati.

  Plateau District Ranger Andrew Fitzgerald, SAR Coordinator, Zion National Park.

  Michael B. Fowler, Washington D.C.-area realtor.

  Gene Gerstner, naturalist at the Zion Canyon Field Institute.

  J.J. Jefferson, Allstate insurance.

  Dr. Melissa Kerley.

  Ms. Sara Lofti.

  Ms. Camille Masse.

  Dr. James Metcalf, geologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

  Also helpful was Bryan A. Garner’s article, “A Bizspeak Blacklist,” Harvard Business Review, March 21, 2013.

  On my third attempt up Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park, I met an actual angel. Francois-Xavier Gagnon, founder of Alta Expedition, happened to come up behind me as I was struggling at the first gap in chains and gallantly spent the next two hours patiently getting me to the top and back down again, teaching me how to hike the deadly slope as he sacrificed an afternoon alone on the cliff with his girlfriend Lee. I am forever in their debt.