Alternate Endings Read online

  “Mom, it’s Florida. He’s lucky you’re not dead.”

  Calyce drove into the darkness. “You mean you don’t go to the beach at all anymore? When was the last time?”

  “Today. With you.”

  Calyce looked over. In the half-light of the garage, Effie was smiling at her.

  Early the next Monday morning, which was Columbus Day, Effie approached her in the small kitchen where Calyce was putting water on to boil for instant coffee. Calyce was dressed already in her black skirt and pumps. Her mother wore a thin pink bathrobe and matching slippers, both of which were old but clean.

  “You didn’t sleep well,” Effie told her. “You were coughing.”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  Effie tilted her head. “Do you not realize it? You were coughing on and off all night. I could hear it through the wall. But not a regular cough. It was higher, like a bark.”

  Calyce swallowed. Her throat did hurt.

  Effie asked, “Hasn’t Damion said anything?”

  Calyce spent the rest of that morning shopping for her mother, who said she wouldn’t go to the store because she would only slow Calyce down. In truth Effie had dressed and already claimed her daily spot on the balcony. In the late morning, before the sun walked over the top of the building, her mother’s cheap white armchair and its matching low table still lay in refreshing shadow. On the little table were bulky new black binoculars, and under the chair a small aqua rug softened the rough cement.

  “But you always go,” Calyce said out the sliding door. “Do you not go to the store now, either?”

  “I go, just not all the time.”

  Effie had already turned toward the sea.

  “Mom, where did you get the binoculars?”

  “Simon brought them last time he was here.”

  Calyce was surprised. “When was that?”

  “Last month.”

  “And he didn’t notice that something was wrong with you?”

  At the Publix, when Simon didn’t answer his phone, Calyce bought as much as Effie’s kitchen could hold, focusing on staples that wouldn’t go bad and, because she knew her mother wanted them, Effie’s favorite hot sauce and bottled salsa, which she put on everything. Calyce bought more instant coffee and light bulbs, bar soap and toilet paper in single paper-wrapped rolls because a cellophaned dozen was too big to be stored. She had so much she had to use the stolen shopping cart the condo owners kept in a storage room in the garage to get it all upstairs.

  Her mother kept thanking her while Calyce unpacked and while Effie wrote a check to reimburse her daughter, which Calyce accepted.

  Calyce fixed lunch as Effie hovered, trying unsuccessfully to help. As they sat outside with their plates in their laps, Calyce asked about the young white woman down the hall who took Effie on errands once a week. Her mother answered that Stephanie (“Oh right, that’s her name,” Calyce muttered) had been focused on a divorce so she hadn’t been around much.

  “She’s a renter anyway,” Effie said, “and living here may be too pricy for her after the divorce.”

  “So you’re all alone trying to get places.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  But Calyce said she was worried, that her mother didn’t look well, that she needed to see a doctor about her fatigue. Effie was dramatically worse than the last time Calyce had seen her.

  “But that was ten months ago,” her mother said. “I’ve aged, that’s all.”

  “It’s been ten months?”

  “Christmas. I came to D.C.”

  But Calyce persisted. “You’ve always been active, but you don’t go anywhere now, and you seem exhausted all the time.”

  Effie put her fork down.

  “Alright,” she said. “I’ll go if you go. I called Damion while you were out and he says you cough all the time.”

  “You two were talking about me?”

  “Of course we talk. And sometimes we even talk about you. Hand me that Tabasco.”

  When Calyce left an hour later, she told her mother it wasn’t necessary to come down to the car. She should rest. Calyce would see herself out of the building. She didn’t tell Effie that her flight was actually six hours later.

  As Calyce made the right at the street, she was already dialing her brother and didn’t see Effie waving goodbye from her high balcony. The strong sun shone on Effie’s maple syrup skin and her flashing whitecap of hair. A sweet breeze had touched Effie’s cheek and she had lifted her chin toward the ocean to feel it.

  In the rental car, Calyce started in on her younger brother.

  “She says you told her to see a doctor, so you knew. You should have told me.”

  Calyce was passing houses and stores as low as the squashed-flat landscape. “All you did was dump those ridiculous binoculars and leave. Simon, she can’t breathe. You’ve left this up to me again. As always.”

  The next evening Calyce came down to do her weekly cleaning of Damion’s room, letting herself in with the spare key he had put back on top of the doorframe. From inside the interior door to the garage, she lifted off the cement an apple green plastic laundry basket filled with cleaning supplies and rolled out her spotless second vacuum. She used her thin rear end to prop open Damion’s door as she clattered sideways with a banging Swiffer also crammed under an arm.

  She saw immediately that his white rug was gone, replaced by a new one that was velvety slate gray. Two walking pairs of feet had already flattened the short pile to create tracks of powdery dove. One had been wearing socks. The other, smaller, was barefooted, with only the ball and toes showing, like she hadn’t fully touched down.

  Calyce switched on the arcing light and something else caught her eye. It was a picture frame. She stepped over to take the photo off the end table.

  It had been taken from above, maybe the open staircase to another level of the bar where Damion apparently worked, for he was standing behind a long shiny black counter against rows of bottles and ordered glasses on shelves back-lit by translucent panes. Little globe bulbs hung high and low on single lines like fringe and made a zigzag pattern above his head. Both of his slender hands, graceful as a woman’s, touched the bar top. He was smiling his honeyed smile.

  Sitting on one of the barstools with a high latticed back was Selene, her body turned toward Damion but her neck twisted over her shoulder toward the camera. Her long straight almost albino hair flowed down the back of her champagne dress, which contrasted with the close-fitting black T-shirt Damion wore. His toffee skin glowed in the V-neck, and the color poured up onto his high cheeks and over his ears.

  Her son really was the most gorgeous thing Calyce had ever seen. Selene’s extreme lean-in toward him, pressing her small breasts into the bar granite, told Calyce that she thought the same.

  Calyce flipped over the frame, which still had its back price tag. Home Goods. Not anywhere Damion shopped, so this was a gift from Selene. In the photo, Selene was attractive too, in a ghostly, never-been-outside sort of way. The young woman was nearly see-through, and she wore no mascara, ever, but Damion seemed to like it, for in the picture he was leaning toward her as well. What she had going for her, most of all, was youth.

  In Damion’s bathroom later, as Calyce was brushing the toilet bowl in her rubber gloves, she caught herself in the wall-wide mirror. It had been a long day. Her makeup had disappeared so her small, wide-set eyes had fallen into the deepening folds of her upper lids. Only liner in smoky crayon smudges could make them stand out. Her brows arched naturally high and well, so they never needed to be shaped. They were a good feature. She thought herself lucky not to have any forehead wrinkles yet. And no gray in the eyebrows, Calyce noticed as she leaned in to peer.

  Her mouth was what people remembered, with its movie star bottom lip. When she smiled the same double parentheses appeared for her as for Damion, but to Calyce the fates had also given an additional horizontal tuck just above each corner of her mouth
in the valleys below her round cheeks.

  She washed her hands and wiped her face with her forearm, dragging it up her forehead and over her stiff hair, which immediately betrayed her. She smoothed it with fat fingers in her yellow glove.

  In the artificial light, she saw that her hair was continuing to thin. Still jet black, though, from paying every three weeks to paint her rebellious roots a solid ebony.

  She had been beautiful too, but different from her mother.

  Calyce feathered the loud vacuum into the bedroom, where there was a new glint of glass from the top of Damion’s six-drawer dresser. A bottle, a tall bottle of liquor. She left the machine blaring to inspect it.

  The top was on it, a rounded cork stopper. Courvoisier, with an embossed medallion of Napoleon. She held it in her left hand, reading the label. “V.S.” Product of France. 40% alcohol.

  She had never found booze in her son’s room before. She certainly had never found a bottle of it already open.

  Belinda was laughing but Calyce was serious. Her friend‘s curls bounced with her bobbing head, which irritated Calyce as she tried to explain again why this mattered.

  “But Courvoisier!” Belinda said. “Like Ladies Man.”

  “You’re not listening. My son has alcohol in his room.”

  “He’s nearly thirty. He can drink if he wants.”

  “Not in my house. We don’t drink.”

  Other teachers had leaned toward them. Belinda noticed it so she said more quietly, “He does, and that’s the problem. He’s still living with you and he shouldn’t be.”

  Calyce lowered her voice too. “There’s no way he could afford the same apartment on his own, or his car, or that Courvoisier. Not to mention that girlfriend if he stays a bartender.”

  “I’m no expert,” Belinda said. “I don’t have kids, but I don’t see where it’s written that parents are required to provide their adult children the same standard of living they had as kids. It’s easy for me to say, I know, but how long will you be supporting him? When is it finally your turn?”

  When lunch was over they collected their things. They threw their garbage into the bin near the door but Calyce lingered, saying, “I put him here. He wasn’t up to it. The classes were too hard for him and he never found his place.”

  “I know,” Belinda told her kindly. “You’ve said that before.”

  Calyce was blocking traffic and didn’t realize it. “If I had left him in public school like he wanted, where he had friends, he would have succeeded, and he would have felt good about himself with his academics. He would have done well in college instead of barely graduating. I’m the reason he’s at that bar and he’s been there for four years.”

  Belinda shuffled Calyce out of the way as she continued, “I screwed him up, and it’s my job to unscrew him. There’s nobody else. Maybe if I were softer with him. You know, less me.”

  Early one morning she began the long climb up the school’s wide central staircase whose cinder-block walls had been painted by some long-ago senior into levels of the earth into the sky into outer space. Calyce started at the bottom, at the curved white core, and she had made it past the yellow outer core and the red mantle when she heard Dan call to her as he climbed behind her. She stopped where the teenage artist had painted a wide belt of brown crust and dinosaurs that ate banana trees and each other.

  Dan caught up with her at a rex with impossibly short arms. He was tall too, so she didn’t have to look down at him, but he was so thick in the torso that he blocked her view of what it was the tyrannosaurus was eating. The noise of jostling teenagers doubled as it bounced off the cement walls, so he gave up trying to speak until they were both out into the third-floor hallway.

  “Did you hear about Janice?” he asked. “She’s leaving too, with John, at the end of the year, but she’s stepping down as Vice Principal immediately, as soon as they find an Interim.”

  Calyce measured her steps and her breathing to keep them both even.

  “Yes, I know,” she lied. “John told me.”

  “I figured, but I wanted to ask you something.”

  They had stopped by the door to her empty classroom. A minute remained before the bell. “Don’t you think it would be great if it was Belinda?”

  “Were,” she said instinctively.

  He waited. She finally got it.

  “Yes,” she said. “She’s always wanted to be Vice Principal.”

  “Wouldn’t she be terrific? Can you think of – ”

  “No. She’s absolutely the right choice.”

  “Everybody respects her,” he said as two of her students slid by into the classroom.

  “And the children love her,” Calyce said. “She’s also why we’ve won It’s Academic the last two years.”

  As a girl excused herself to get by them he said, “So permanent? Not Interim?”

  “I agree completely. Why hire from the outside?”

  Their heads were close now, conspiratorial.

  “So who should talk to her?” he asked.

  “I will,” she said.

  The bell rang, but it wasn’t a bell but chimes that sang in a two-note lilt, repeated twice like the two-minute warning when the lights are dimmed at the end of a play’s intermission.

  “Um,” she said. “How is it that John told you? Were you meeting?”

  “No. I happened to be talking with Janice just now and she told me. She said they only decided last night. She asked me not to broadcast it but of course I figured you already knew.”

  She nodded, then turned toward her classroom.

  “But Calyce?” he said after her. “Is that when John told you? Last night? Because right now it’s only eight in the morning.”

  “Tell us another one,” a boy in her class demanded twenty minutes later.

  “Gray,” Calyce answered. “Why is it spelled two different ways? It’s the only color that’s spelled with an ‘a’ or an ‘e,’ but why do we have two ways to spell such a blah color?”

  She was angry so she kept going.

  “And Playtex. Do they think we’re stupid?”

  A girl said, “The gloves my grandma wears?”

  “You know where the name came from? They’re latex. Thick. They wanted women to think they’d have fun scrubbing the toilet if they wore them. So they called them Playtex instead of latex and made them happy yellow. It’s nothing but marketing. You have to watch what people tell you. And what they don’t, when they should.”

  Calyce said, “Mom, I can’t talk now. I have to talk to Damion but Selene has been here. She just left and it’s already late.”

  Calyce rolled her eyes dramatically to herself in her kitchen. “No, I haven’t called a doctor. Have you? You did? Really? When’s the appointment?”

  “Alright, alright, I’ll do it. Yes, we’ll tell each other at the same time what the doctors say. Now, how are you going to get there?”

  It was late that evening when she finally knocked decisively on Damion’s door with her laptop tucked under her armpit. He was half asleep, wiping his eyes with his fist like a little boy.

  “We’re meeting, remember?”

  She shouldered past him to set herself up in his living room, flipping open her computer on the coffee table and knocking her knees. She motioned for him to sit.

  Damion remained standing, scratching his stomach. “What are you doing?”

  She retrieved lines of text indented with bullets. She didn’t look up.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  She poised her fingers on her keyboard. “Tell me everything you’ve done this month so far.”

  “I just woke up.”

  “Did you check my list of job websites? You were going to tell me whether to add any.”

  “It’s ridiculous to do it on a spreadsheet we have to email back and forth. No one does that anymore.”

  He went into his bedroom, closed the door, and took ten
slow minutes to come out again, dressed and perfumed in a soft knit that hugged his torso.

  He seemed surprised to see her still there. “I have to go.”

  “No you don’t. You’re not working tonight. Here’s how it’s going to be. Once a month we’re going to meet. Tonight we’re going to formulate the ten things you’re going to do this month and as you do them, you’ll check these boxes. By the end of this month I want you to add the ten next things you plan to do in November and we’ll go over them. I’ll also have things to add to your list.”

  He was mad now. “Like what? That I have to check the newspaper?”

  She calmly consulted her screen. “You also promised to get me your revised resume, but you haven’t and my notes say that’s been pending now for two months.”

  He grabbed his car keys off the Lucite shelf under his giant TV.

  “I don’t have time for this,” he said as he departed.

  She was still there, on the same couch and in the same position when they came in together at 11 p.m.

  “Hello, Selene,” she said and startled them.

  The young woman saw Calyce’s face and politely excused herself to the bathroom, where she began to run the shower water.

  While Damion had been gone, Calyce had collected from upstairs that month’s bills and a black manual ledger book.

  “So, we’ve got water and gas and electric,” she said. “And groceries. All of those are more now because Selene’s here. I won’t charge you a share of the mortgage or property taxes or homeowner’s insurance. And I assume Comcast would be the same, so you don’t have to pay any part of that.”

  He stood staring. She was talking like he had flunked her class. “So my math says that in total you need to pay me six hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

  “That’s all I make!”

  “Is it?”

  “What about my student loans?”

  “You’re paying those too. No more advances from me. And it says here –” She turned the pages of the ledger they’d bought two years before. “That I’ve fronted you eleven payments. That’s four hundred and forty-four dollars and eighty-three cents, times eleven, is –”