Alternate Endings Read online

  He smiled. “You’ve done some research of your own.”

  “But you could die on the table,” Simon said.

  Behind them the water gargled.

  “Is he right?” Effie asked the doctor.

  “Yes. It’s possible you wouldn’t survive surgery. There could also be complications afterward, both here in the hospital and after we discharge you. It’s a six-to-twelve-week recovery.”

  Effie turned to Calyce and away from Simon on the other side of her. She put her bird’s-foot hand on her daughter’s arm.

  She said, “I plan to live to be a hundred. We still have lots to do together, don’t we?”

  Then Effie looked at the doctor. “I’ve decided. It will be open-heart bypass.”

  Calyce and Simon sat outside on their mother’s small balcony, Calyce on the cheap white armchair and Simon on one of the kitchen’s dinette chairs, which he had dragged through the sliding door. The meeting at the doctor’s had been long and Effie had exhausted herself. She had made it to her bedroom but still wore her shoes as she lay curled on top of the bedspread like a baby. Calyce had checked on her once and debated removing them, but she had decided not to risk waking her up, so her swollen feet remained encased in her low, chunky heels and stacked neatly on top of each other.

  “We need to talk about how we’re going to do this,” Calyce said to Simon, who was checking his watch, which was big and bulky with multiple faces showing different time zones, in inexpensive metal.

  The afternoon was beautiful, with clear blue sky and powerboats buzzing the Intracoastal. At home, late autumn had leeched the green but here, Calyce saw again, the tropical lushness never changed. A deep-sea fishing boat headed to open water past palm trees that never lost their leaves.

  “God, I hate the ocean,” said her brother when he saw it.

  “We all do, because of Mom.”

  “I always hated it.”

  “No you didn’t. Remember how we used to slam the waves at Ocean City? I’d hold your hand and we’d run in. We just never went after Mom left, and then once we knew where she was.”

  Seagulls rose shrieking as Simon said quietly so his voice wouldn’t carry through the open door behind them, “I will never understand why he took her back.”

  But then, “My flight’s soon.”

  “You can’t leave until we figure this out,” Calyce told him. “It’s at least six weeks, assuming it all goes well. And she’s got doctor visits, and that woman told us she needs a support network. She can’t be alone.”

  “Do it next month,” he said as the red and orange trolley pulled up on the street below. “Don’t you get a long break in December? Come down and do it then.”

  “But what about after that? It’s at least two months of recovery.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe Nina will come.”

  “She’s in Patagonia.”

  “Isn’t she too old for that?”

  “So this is about Nina now? What about you?”

  In the open doorway, Effie appeared bleary-eyed with her short hair flattened completely on one side. Calyce and Simon fluttered when they saw her and Simon stood when Effie said to him, “Isn’t your flight at six? Or did they get another pilot?”

  “No,” Simon said. “I have to go.”

  Calyce said, “I’ll walk you downstairs.”

  “I heard you two,” Effie told them.

  “We’ll talk when I get back up.”

  “I’m not having it done next month,” Effie said. “It’s Christmas. I’m going to wait until January.”

  They protested, but she was immovable. She wanted Christmas with her family.

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Simon said too quickly. “I love you, but I have to get going.”

  Effie gazed adoringly at her only son. “I love you too. Give my love to Sandra and the girls.”

  Irate, Calyce in the building garage demanded that he explain how in hell they were going to do this in January, but he didn’t slow his stride to his rental car.

  “It’s what she wants,” he said. “I can maybe come down some weekends, but I have to work.”

  “What about Sandra?”

  “Clearwater’s a long way from Dallas.”

  Calyce raised her voice. “It’s a lot closer than D.C.”

  “Is it?”

  He thought. “I don’t think so, actually, not as the crow flies.”

  He opened his door. “You’ll figure this out. You always do. Isn’t that what you always tell us? You’re the big sister.”

  But before he pulled out he rolled down his window. She felt the blast of air-conditioning. “I know. Why don’t you do it in D.C.? Her insurance would cover it and you wouldn’t have to take much time off from school.”

  Calyce arrived home late that night tired and still angry. It was well after midnight when she clomped up the stairs to the main floor banging her rolling suitcase on every stair and cursing it.

  At the top, she switched on the light.

  She saw Damion on her couch under the window with his head between Selene’s naked legs.

  He didn’t stop.

  Selene moaning and holding the top of his head.

  But Selene had heard her. She turned to Calyce and looked straight at her.

  “Stop!”

  Damion looked up.

  He jumped, pulling back and up and off the couch. Moving quickly, fully dressed, he wiped his mouth as he stood, lost his balance and fell against the coffee table with a loud bang. He moved to the center of the room, where he stood barefoot with a stiff erection ridging his pants.

  Selene pulled down her black dress to cover herself.

  Surprisingly, though, she stretched her legs in the space Damion had fled and rolled, catlike, toward Calyce.

  Selene’s eyes were unlike anything she had ever seen.

  “Mom, um . . . ” Damion was saying.

  “Go downstairs and do that,” Calyce said. “This is my home. My living room. Go downstairs right now. Both of you.”

  Damion turned to the stairs immediately but realized Selene hadn’t yet moved. He waited, ashamed, not looking at his mother as the young woman sat up languidly, without hurrying, then stood and placidly smoothed her dress before slowly following him.

  It was strange that John DeGroot wanted to see her again. They had already talked early that morning, her first dragging day back from Florida, when they had happened to be alone in the department office. She had told him already with irritation about her mother, that she had refused to have surgery until January.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she had told DeGroot before the school day started.

  “Why is it solely your responsibility?”

  Much later he had ducked his head into her classroom and asked to see her at the end of the day. Now, he was closing the door of the department’s tiny conference room.

  “I know this isn’t the best time, but a couple of teachers have come to me during the course of the day today.”

  She was in no mood.

  “About what?”

  “I have to say I agree with them. I know this is a hard time for you, but you left us with no coverage.”

  “I called.”

  “From the airport, and you called me. We had to juggle at the last minute. You announced this strict substitute system, but you didn’t follow it for your own absence. You even missed your Advisory, and you’ve got some seniors in there who are dealing with college applications.”

  His tone was dead, flat. “And what was that email you sent about Belinda?”

  “She’d be a perfect Vice Principal.”

  “I agree, but what you did was dictate to the entire department that they had to lobby for her, and you told them to report back to you about the specific steps they take. Apparently, you didn’t clear it with her, either. I talked to her today. Belinda says she knew nothing about it.”

  Caly
ce was astonished. “She’s upset?”

  He sighed. “And the kids are coming to me. Who cares about the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay’?”

  She was making little head shakes. “It’s important.”

  “You remember at the middle school when you had your class count all the instances of ‘fig lang’? You wanted the teachers all to call it that, figurative language. We had this same discussion back then. You can’t quantify literature, Calyce. Grade them on the force of their words, not whether they split infinitives.”

  Not three minutes later, one of her seniors accosted her in the hallway and asked her to write a recommendation letter for him for colleges.

  “No,” she answered firmly.

  Open-mouthed, he asked, “Why not?”

  She chose her words carefully. “I don’t think I can do you justice.”

  “But I’m getting an A in your class!”

  She inhaled.

  “You’re disruptive. You challenge everything I say and think you know better. Your work is good. I can’t fault it, but you lack structure and proper mechanics. Your spelling is poor and you turn in your work late.”

  He made a face. “Is that all?”

  “I don’t like your tone, but it’s a good example of what I’m describing. It’s better that you get someone else.”

  “I am so sorry,” Calyce said to Belinda in the school’s parking lot that same afternoon. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. That was the farthest thing from my mind.”

  Her friend, at first wooden, softened immediately when Calyce conveyed her genuine remorse. She bear-hugged Calyce, pulling her in tight, breast-to-breast.

  They talked for an hour in the underground shadows as Calyce told her everything about Florida.

  “He’s right,” Belinda said. “Simon’s an asshole but he’s right. You have to do it up here.”

  Calyce also told her what happened on her couch.

  “Last night? Holy shit. What did they say?”

  “Nothing. Not this morning either, and I saw both of them. He’s not even embarrassed now.”

  “Why aren’t they in his room? It’s downstairs, right? They’re in your whole house like you’re not there. Did they know you were coming home last night?”

  Calyce nodded. “I even called him once I landed. He said they were still up.”

  Belinda laughed. “Were they ever!”

  That night Selene was out at class, so she confronted Damion in the kitchen. Calyce demanded to know what he was thinking, doing that in her living room where she lives. He knew she was coming home from the airport. He knew she was on her way.

  She said, “I eat dinner sometimes on that couch.”

  He was defensive, protesting that it was his house too, but Calyce knew him.

  “Was it her idea?” she asked her son.

  He hesitated, embarrassed, stumbling over the graphicness.

  “Yeah, uh . . . she wanted to, uh . . . do it there. I kept telling her ‘let’s go downstairs,’ but she wouldn’t.”

  That Saturday Calyce went to an appointment with her family’s old ENT. He was well past retirement age, so she hadn’t been sure he was still practicing, and he was out of her network, so the cost to her would be much higher, but she had had enough of young people.

  She hadn’t seen the gracious man in ten years, since Damion had last had an inner-ear infection, but he came into the examining room with his hand outstretched in a cloud of shaving cream smell and an authentic, recognizing grin that brought his shimmering eyes with it. She felt the dry folds of his papery fingers as he said Damion’s name and asked how “our boy” was doing.

  “Any more balance problems?”

  She chose not to mention the stair incident. “Not really.”

  “Married? Any grandchildren?”

  She shook her head.

  As she explained why she had come, he jotted notes in longhand. She had repeated the same story so many times she used a cadence.

  “Any heartburn?” He scribbled. “Chest pain?”

  “No.

  “Trouble swallowing?”

  “No, but sometimes it feels like I’ve got something in my throat.”

  “Nausea? Regurgitation?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “No asthma.”

  “No.”

  “Huh.” He thought. “Let’s numb up your nose and the back of your throat.”

  Soon, he had shoved a long, lighted, flexible white tube up one of her nostrils and down her esophagus. She felt odd pressure between her eyes and her natural gag reflex, though suppressed with spray, wanted to eject it. She concentrated on not throwing up as the doctor talked out loud, his eyes on a color monitor he had angled away from her.

  “Mucus in the throat, but not the nose. There’s no swelling, though, and your larynx looks fine. No esophagitis.”

  As he pulled it out she watched a long white plastic worm exit her body through her nose.

  “You don’t have gastroesophageal reflux. I thought maybe you had GERD, but you don’t. So maybe it’s allergies. I don’t know.”

  The next week, Indian summer hit and the temperature rose so the shy sun was warm at lunchtime and everyone, teachers and students, ventured outside as they hadn’t in weeks. Calyce, too, decided at the last minute that she had time at mid-day, and she left the cacophony of lunch plastic to walk for half an hour in the nearby neighborhood. She breathed in the surprisingly tepid air as she watched swirls of waltzing leaves that cleaved then spun from the peeling, showy birches that didn’t know they were supposed to just shut up and do their prescribed jobs of merely dotting the gridded streets at designated intervals.

  As she returned, passing parking meters along the curb, she saw Roger and Dan making their way back too, each with a brown Chipotle bag. When they saw her they waved and slowed.

  “We were just talking about you,” Dan said. “Roger was telling me about this thing you have for Zion. He says it occupies your every waking moment.”

  Roger said playfully, “She also thinks about me.”

  They were laughing and kind to her, so Calyce confirmed it. She mentioned her deep love for the place, its beauty and its eternal existence. “Until I went last year on the Quest trip, I had never seen anything like it.”

  Dan lowered his voice as students walked near them. “We’ve been talking about Belinda. I think the best way to get this done is to talk to people one-on-one rather than doing texts or emails.”

  Roger added, “Dan knows her really well.”

  Calyce said, “You do?”

  “She’s the one who was so welcoming when I first came, remember?” Dan said. “I wasn’t sure how I would go over. Do you mind if I talk to the rest of the English teachers, and maybe the people I’m closest to outside the department?”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” Calyce assured him.

  “I’m just keying off you.”

  As they reached the school’s front doors she said, “Don’t tell anyone you got it from me.”

  “Mom, I need to talk to you,” Damion said to her later that night. He had approached her at the dining table, where she was grading writing pieces in hard copy with her laptop open.

  She looked up and saw he was holding his own hands. She pointed and he sat. He exhaled but he didn’t start talking.

  She took off her glasses. “So what is it?”

  He shifted in his seat.

  “Uh, well, she doesn’t want you downstairs anymore. She says she’ll do the cleaning, and she wants to do her own laundry. She doesn’t want you to do it anymore. And she’ll put my dirty clothes outside the door.”

  Calyce put down her pen.

  Damion continued, “And she wants to leave the dirty dishes outside the door too, so you don’t have to come in and get them. I told her you don’t mind, that you like cleaning, but she wants to do it herself from now on.”

  “And y
ou agreed with this?”

  Damion shrugged. “It’s what she wants. It’s my room. Ours, now, and she wants our privacy.”

  That Tuesday was the first of two days of parent-teacher conferences. Scores of neurotically ambitious, narrow-eyed parents barreled down the hallways and sprinted up the stairs at an oddly child-less school, for on conference days, two in October and two in May, their overly indulged, overly scheduled and overly monitored children were banished to sleep in late happily at home.

  Calyce hated those days, for she was lousy at small talk. She also had little to say about any particular child. The good ones had parents who already knew it. The poor performers were constantly justified, explained, defended, and over the decades she had heard it all so often she had no more patience.

  Parents sat in chairs arrayed against the walls of the corridors outside the various classrooms, waiting for their fifteen-minute allotments in random order. First come, first served, so it was pot luck for the teachers, who didn’t know who they were shaking hands with until they read the nametags, at which point they had to re-arrange their faces, depending. Right then, Calyce was barely listening to an expensively blonded mother extol the supposedly misunderstood academic virtues of her (inattentive, hair-twirling) ninth-grade daughter, who Calyce watched at lunchtimes climb into her junior boyfriend’s Range Rover. There hadn’t yet been a question the child could answer in class discussion. Or rather, had bothered to. Her kohl-rimmed eyes gazed toward the window most of every hour. The girl had derided the entire first quarter, the written proof of which her intense, horse-faced mother now angrily brandished in her starving hand, for paper grade reports for the quarter had been distributed to the parents at a long table just inside the main entrance.

  The perched woman was behaving like her daughter, interrupting, sighing when Calyce was only three words into a sentence. This crow dressed all in black then looked up at the clock on the wall behind Calyce and hotly demanded to know why she spent so much time on grammar the kids could just Google. Calyce instead should be drilling “the children” (her princess) in advance on every review point to be covered on every coming test.