Alternate Endings Read online

  If she stood fully upright she would stumble backward, the grade had steepened so suddenly out of the last turn. The dangerous pitch was obviously the reason for the new traction lines. She focused on her feet, sure she would lose her balance as her right side baked in the sun that had risen above the soaring opposite, eastern wall of the canyon. The backpack she had been told to buy balled a load that tilted her frighteningly off-center.

  She heard them before she saw them, two abreast with their arms swinging, a young couple thumping down the hill toward her in billed caps and special hiking belts that holstered their precious water.

  “Mojave, not diamondback,” the man was saying. “It was yellower.”

  “Sounded like a wind-up toy,” the woman told him.

  “You know it’s illegal to kill them here?”

  They nodded to her as she shuffled, inching out of their way. She got next to the wall and balanced herself by grabbing it, then slowly raised her head to look ahead, to where the mounting path turned again, left this time and out of sight.

  “Don’t worry!” the man called back to her, laughing. “I’m sure he’s gone by now.”

  October

  One bottle, purchased at the Zion Visitor Center only because the high school’s principal, who was leading the group, had told her to. Catherine had not understood the fuss. She had never run out of water before doing anything, so she had not seen the need for the insistence. She had bought one. Only one, which she had now finished.

  Where was the top of this thing? Breathless, she turned a corner and escaped from the sun into a narrow hanging slot canyon whose chinked red walls thrust upward on both sides of her. Suddenly in deep shadow, hungry pines poled tall and thin trees reached with broad leaves flat as coins to trap the merest sun. Below the tessellated canopy, a dry creek bed ran alongside on the left.

  She stopped, gulping the cool, and waited for her gamboling heart to slow to a clip-clop. As she did she began to feel the first physical euphoria of her long climb. She spread her feet, rotated her shoulders back and put her arms akimbo and, eventually, closed her eyes. She felt the slowing clunk of her chest, the cool on her wet neck, and the lump of her backpack. She heard no voices but the whispering trees and a bird’s song, two syllables with a high climbing swoop followed by a vibrating trill. It was answered from dense dark green far ahead, a cycling alto wah-wah.

  The week before, before the last days of frenzied shopping for expensive outdoor items she had never heard of in stores that overwhelmed her, she had told her son Ryan her latest ideas for his never-ending job search. He had agreed, as he always did, with the logic of her thinking and wondered out loud, as always, where she came up with these things. Ryan had written them on his to-do list, which he patterned on hers, and he had indeed followed up on every one, using even the words she had given him. But he had not once been asked to come in.

  “So what should I do now?” he had said as she was packing. “Can you think about it and call me tomorrow from out there?”

  Catherine stared up. Suddenly, rising straight up the high, sheer rock face in front of her was some kind of red construction of rough-hewn blocks. Mortared but crude, the chinked stones weren’t uniform but a thousand different sizes in a sort of brick wall that mounted hundreds of feet. Nothing but far-off sky cleared the top of it.

  Across its face, traversing on sloped paths she couldn’t see, a few hikers pin-balled back and forth. A couple moved left out of her sight, then reappeared lower a few seconds later, moving right. She did not know it yet but twenty-one very steep switchbacks had been engineered into the pink sandstone. To get to the top, which all the rest of her school group had already achieved, she would have to climb almost vertically 250 feet. She would have to scale the outside of what in a city would be a twenty-five-story building.

  Ryan met with her once a week to “report on my progress,” arriving punctually each time with a sharpened pencil in his mouth and his laptop and papers under his arm. It was unconscious, that pencil, a tic from his childhood. She had suggested it to eight year-old him as a way to stop biting his nails, but the ploy hadn’t worked. Nothing could overcome his need to suck on his hands, but the pencil-in-mouth had stayed.

  Each and every Sunday he climbed the stairs from his room to deliver a long-winded exegesis on his job search, which he rehearsed, showing her his notes, his call log, his emails sent, the scoured websites. That past Tuesday he had had a rare interview, but the man had asked odd questions for which she hadn’t prepared him. Her son hadn’t heard anything further.

  “What should I do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said with frustration. “What do you think? Why don’t you tell me?”

  But he just looked at her and waited.

  “Why can’t he be more like you?” Catherine said to her mother the next weekend. “You always know what you want. He’s a Bassett Hound staring at me. I love him so much, but why can’t he run his own life?”

  But her mother had fallen asleep. She was doing that more and more now.

  Catherine listened to make sure and waited before she whispered to the sleeping old woman, “You always were a total dictator.”

  She worked up the steep switchbacks that piled like ribbon licorice. As she went, downhill runners passed her. A climbing panting couple yelled after one, asking why he was running, and he shouted back that it was easier on his knees.

  She reached the top finally and the sky opened above her. The path became gritty sand and no longer roseate poured pavement. Exhausted beyond any exhausted she had ever been, she strained in a heating day that would ultimately reach 98 degrees. The leeching sun had found her, soft and parched and exposed as she stamped on, scrub trees dense on both sides.

  The stench of urine hit her. Acrid and piercing, an assault to the nose that squinted the eyes and made her cough. It was everywhere, an invisible cloud of it, an open sewer of pungency. She clenched her nose with a hand and scanned the north slope to her left, where thirty feet up in a clearing two industrial-strength outhouses shocked the hillside with their electric blue. The portable, execrable toilets ambushed the eyes as much as the nostrils.

  The smell staggered her. Burning, stale, awful urine poisoned the air and grabbed her, stopping her in the surprising sand.

  In the night, Calyce found herself. Overhead the old ceiling fan rushed, tapping the same metal part every two seconds. Next to the other side of the bed, whose throw pillows she had stacked as always on a small velveteen chair near her dresser, the clock glowed 4:20. As usual, the one outside door yawned open.

  Calyce lay on top of the bedclothes with her un-manicured feet tilted outward so the outsides felt the rough cotton of her IKEA duvet cover. Earlier she had lain herself carefully, resting her scarfed head gently on the satin pillowcase and pulling down her white nightgown with its eyelet hem ruffle until it spread evenly behind her without a wrinkle and smoothly over her knees. She felt the pleasant air brush her naked shins. The weather at last had sweetened.

  She listened for the silence that meant she would not be heard, then with her right hand lifted the nightdress just enough to reach herself. She felt the elastic at the top of her panties cling but she slid her hand past it and down to the cleft in her body, and parted herself, then laid a finger on either side and began rubbing quickly, purposely, between her knuckles. She settled in and closed her eyes and chose a dark man tonight who gleamed with ropey arms and a smile that blinded. He came to her, this full-grown man old enough to have grown children. He gazed at her and told her he loved her. She opened her legs wider to him, but no more than a hand’s breath, for that was all she needed.

  In her yearning mind, though, he lost his mouth in her, and she saw with her closed eyes the top of his close-cropped head between her legs. She lifted her free hand to caress his hair, holding that hand in the air above the mound of her, holding nothing.

  It was he and she in the darkness and her fingers d
oing lips’ work. She whispered that she loved him too and how grateful, deeply grateful she was for his attention.

  Quickly and soundlessly she came. She heard the meager slaps within her rise and fall away. There had been no moan, no hitch of breath, no mark at all but the tented nightdress.

  Calyce took her hand from her panties and smoothed the white cotton again over her flat belly and the long bones of her thighs. With the tips of her fingers she found the eyelet hem and smoothed it once more to lie evenly across her knees.

  She turned her head slowly and heard the slide of silk beside her ear. Through the open door, she searched for but could not find the slivered moon, which had fallen below the house beyond her backyard.

  On the far side of her, disregarded as it faced her across the vast deserted continent of her bed, the clock’s glowing red numerals changed to 4:23.

  The next morning she dressed. Standing damp in her robe at the sliding doors of her one small bedroom closet, she opened the right side first to examine exactly one-half of her carefully ordered work attire. She chose one of her three slightly different black skirts, then, modestly holding her robe closed, bent to retrieve one of her two pairs of identical black pumps. She closed the door with a practiced bare foot and slid the other, where each of her blouses faced left with precisely two inches of air between them. She lifted a white knit three-quarter-sleeve top and a boxy grey wool jacket with sleeves slightly too short for her long arms.

  Exactly eight minutes later she descended to her kitchen with her leather bag, which she thumped on the counter.

  “Keys.” She coughed once as she inventoried. “Glasses.”

  She took out her phone and checked it, then tucked it back in its designated inside pocket.

  She scanned the pristine counter and the empty sink gleaming from her nighttime scouring. She passed through to her living room to brush the corduroy sofa cushions against the nap so the old plush rose. She picked up the four coffee-striped throw pillows and slapped each between her palms, then returned them to their spots, each next to an arm, point down in a diamond.

  Leaving, she descended to her tiled entry and discovered what looked like water coming from Damion’s room and pooling a foot out from under his closed door. She could tell it was still coming.

  “Damion!”

  She knocked but no one answered. “Selene!”

  She tried the knob, but it was locked. She raised her arm to feel along the top of the doorframe, but the spare key was gone.

  “So, setting’s fine. You all did fine, particularly Matt with his description of New York, but now your story must be inhabited by your main character and not just stuck on like one of those Colorforms –”

  “Like what?” interrupted a boy with black-rimmed glasses.

  “Nevermind. You’ll be graded on how well your setting reveals character, and then, on how well your character’s interacting with that setting further reveals his nature.”

  “His?” a girl said. “Why ‘his’?”

  “And third. Are you writing this down? Third, I want to see at least one metonymical object.”

  She waited. “You know what that is? Anyone? Metonymy is relatedness through direct association. An example is when we say ‘the White House’ instead of the president’s administration. Or ‘the crown’ when we mean the Queen of England. We bring the whole concept through with just that one related reference.”

  “So you want metaphors?” asked the same girl.

  “No. A metaphor is an alternate way to describe something. She was a fish as she swam. But no part of her is actually a fish. A metonymical object is a small part of the bigger thing it’s replacing. If your character is a great swimmer, for example, showing us her trophies will take the place of all that establishing prose. Be efficacious, though. I want you to use just one. The best one. Got it?”

  As soon as class was over, she pulled out her phone.

  A text was there but she couldn’t read it, so she fumbled in her purse for her glasses.

  Looks like water heater, said her son. He had sent it half an hour before.

  “What about it?” she said to herself as she dialed his phone number. She paced but he didn’t answer.

  Into his voicemail, she had to say, “Damion, call a plumber. Get someone out there right away. It’s still early, and you don’t have to work until tonight. I have to stay for a meeting. Call me back once you’ve set that up.”

  She began to put the phone away but didn’t. She squinted at the tiny screen as she texted him too with a single finger.

  Call plumber. Stay to meet him. Let me know.

  “I had no idea what I was saying.” Calyce laughed for the first time that day. “I got that from your lesson plan from last year.”

  In the bullpen of the English Department faculty office, John DeGroot smiled back. They sat together in the tight space at his desk in the far corner, her chair rolled next to his from her own desk by the door. They flanked each other as they swiveled outward in unison toward the center of the room when the first two of the other English teachers sauntered in.

  Her smile wiped suddenly clean, she leaned in to whisper, “Thanks for doing this.”

  DeGroot's white, fibrous head nearly touched Calyce’s. “It made sense when you suggested it.”

  She watched Amita linger outside until Dan appeared, greeted her warmly, and guided her in.

  Calyce registered for the first time that the young woman was stunningly beautiful, her lustrous skin a radiant warm honey brown. Between her eyes and her eyebrows there was a model’s acreage, which she had made up perfectly with earth tones, deeper in the crease with highlights at the brow bone. But not too much.

  When the rest of the group was assembled, DeGroot brought them all up to speed, giving them details of his brother’s confinement and the indefinite prognosis that required his indefinite stay. DeGroot would have to continue to travel to California regularly, as he had been doing since school began. In fact, he had to leave for the next few days, starting tomorrow. He had realized that in his increasing absence and unfortunately increasing mental inattention, he had to seek the help of someone with nearly the same longevity as he, who knew the school and the department and the curricula.

  “So I decided on Calyce. She has all the institutional knowledge, and Hank agrees.”

  Around the cluttered room, all noise stopped and eyeballs stared. All but Dan looked surprised, but he was nodding. He caught her eye and smiled as he bobbed his head.

  DeGroot said, “I’ll let Calyce tell you some things she’s planned to make things run easier.”

  She rose to hand out some pages. On them she had outlined that all absences from now on had to go through her. With John out so much, they had to stretch their departmental substitute-teacher budget by covering for one another as often as possible. All absences except for illness (“and don’t be sick”) (“and don’t fake it”) had to be pre-approved a week in advance. Also, because of the need for all of them to be fungible, no deviations from the set curriculum for each class would be allowed. That way, anyone could teach anything if necessary.

  “So we can’t go farther in the lesson plans?” a teacher asked.

  “Further,” Calyce said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s ‘further.’ ‘Farther’ is used about a physical distance on a map. You can remember because it has “far” in it. And no, no changes to the lesson plans.”

  “Is this page posted?” another teacher asked. “Did you upload it?”

  “Why should I?” Calyce said. “You’ve got the paper in your hand.”

  Dan caught up with her as she motored down the deserted hallway. His freckled farm-boy face was pulled into a wide smile that accordioned his cheeks and sent ripples to his throat, so he appeared to have no jaw. His green eyes were sunk deep into the folds.

  He said, “Does that Ford commercial make you crazy too, like it does me?”
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br />   As she hurried, Calyce looked up from her phone.

  “‘Go Further,’” she said. “An entire ad campaign for millions of dollars and it’s grammatically incorrect. I see you and Amita are getting along.”

  She blew in late that same afternoon to find Damion’s door ajar and the chrome arc light in his living room pouring shine onto the pool of water still on her entryway tile, exactly where it had been early that morning.

  “Are you there?”

  She stepped over the small flood to look inside. A shallow river flowed between the TV and a small trapdoor behind it on the same wall, opposite the bathroom, which little door too was partly open. The water came from inside.

  “Damion?”

  No answer. No one was there. There were also no tools, no yellow plumber receipt, no towels anywhere, no mop and no bucket. When she swung her foot to put it on the white furry rug, the rug was soaked.

  His car was gone and he didn’t answer his phone calls or his texts or his voice messages or his emails from Calyce the rest of that night, even though she contacted him every few minutes.

  She had mopped and by 11 p.m., the emergency plumber had finally left after Calyce had paid him.

  “Damion,” she said in her final voice message. “It’s going to cost eighteen hundred to get a new water heater installed. I don’t have that kind of money so I couldn’t tell him to order it. You need to call me as soon as you can.”

  “John?” Calyce asked DeGroot the next morning. “Have you got a minute?”

  “You’re wet.”

  She wiped her damp neck with a flustered hand. “Uh, I used the weight room, so I decided to shower here.”