Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

“It’s good, yes?” Allesandro said, setting down her suitcase and sweeping an arm wide to encompass the room.

She didn’t know what to say, because actually, if she was truthful, it wasn’t. It was narrow and painted a dull mustard color, a rushed careless job because all around the edges someone — Allesandro, she guessed — had allowed the mustard to leak into the white of the ceiling. There was a bed, a wardrobe, and a sink set into a square of cracked tiles. Vintage Sandra. She looked about for a door that might lead to a bathroom, but there wasn’t any. “It’s lovely,” she said. It wasn’t a downright lie, because the view from the window was spectacular: the shadows crossing the mountainside, the colors of the sky as it slid toward evening, lights in the valley arranging themselves dot by dot into tiny villages.

After Allesandro left her to unpack, she studied the poster to see if she could establish the true identity of the pretender plants, the ones that were not oleanders, but they were nowhere to be seen. The real oleanders stared out at her reproachfully. The poster reminded her of one from boarding school, only that one had been solely in English and had featured birds instead of plants. Categories and subcategories of finches and sparrows and hawks; a grotesque side panel of mummified birds, macabre depictions of a kind no longer allowed in schools, that had flown into a poisonous lake in Tanzania mistaking it for sky. She took some wipes from her suitcase and scrubbed the sink where she’d noticed a rim of scum. She wiped the windowsill, too, and dusted the top of the bedside locker, rubbing and cursing, all the time wishing that Sandra was there. “Now,” she’d say to her if she was, “now look what you’ve done.”

—

IN THE DINING ROOM the next morning she found the walls hung with snow scenes, mostly of the Rifugio shot from various angles, the trees all about it dripping snow and snow heavy on its roof. She was reminded of Victorian Christmas cards, or a montage from the inside of a snow globe. “It must be magnificent in wintertime,” she said to Allesandro, who arrived bearing syrupy coffee and a basket of bread. “Yes,” he said, “very white, very beautiful.” His gaze dropped to her legs and he winked. As he moved between tables, tending to his other guests, she caught him sneaking glances. Was it possible that she was more attractive in this country than in her own? That desire was shaped, in part at least, by the vagaries of geography?

She’d gone to bed early the evening before but had slept badly, waking at three A.M. to visions of Etta, still not collected, waiting alone at the train station. She’d gotten out of bed and gone to stand by the window, which was a mistake, because immediately upon parting the curtains she’d seen to the west a thick plume of yellowy white smoke billowing from the direction of Rocosalto. She pictured Etta perched on the fountain, frowning as the smell of burning reached her. If Sandra were here, she’d say that this was a whole new level of foolishness. It was arrogant in the extreme — she recalled how Sandra had called her that once, arrogant — to interpret every vibration of the universe as relatable to her life, her needs, her acts and omissions. It’s not about you, Sandra would say, which Lily had always thought particularly unfair because she never did think it was about her — it had been such a long time since anything was. Then she’d realized that she was looking east, not west, and Rocosalto was in the other direction entirely, and she had climbed back into bed and slept fitfully until dawn.

After breakfast she fetched the book Etta had given her on the train and decided she would go outside to read. It was a slim volume, barely a hundred pages, and Etta had said she thought she would like it. Stepping onto the terrace was like stepping into an oven, but the air was sweet, the scent of pine needles mingling with the smell of wildflowers, the green of the meadows gloriously ruptured with bursts of purples and yellows and blues. It was when she walked around the back of the hotel, searching for a place to sit, that she got the other smell, the fermented, sour smell from the day before. She tracked it to a copse of squat, bushy-headed trees. Figs. Not any kind of flower then, but unharvested figs left to rot where they fell. She pulled one from a branch and bit it. It was foul, bitter, and she spat it out immediately onto the ground. Beyond the fig trees, a flight of concrete steps led to a stilled ski lift, its chain of linked metal chairs disappearing up the mountainside. She climbed into one and sat facing the summit, her back to the Rifugio. She swung her legs back and forth, creating a pleasant breeze, and opened the book.

And there it was, on the title page: Ulrike Etta Dorn and a telephone number. She brought the book closer, examined the handwriting. It was scrawled, slightly jittery, as if it had been written in a hurry, and she remembered now that there had been a moment when she’d left her seat to ask the ticket checker a question. The insistence with which Etta had pressed the book upon her — please, you must have it, you must keep it — returned, as did her own shilly-shallying in the station waiting room, the rudeness of her departure. She took out her phone and dialed the number. Etta answered, eventually, in German. She sounded different in that language. “Hello,” Lily said, then realized it was Etta’s voicemail and hung up. She should have realized that might happen. She should have thought about what to say and written it down — hadn’t she learned that the hard way with Sandra? — but she didn’t have a pen. “Hello,” she said next time on the beep. “I’m sorry I drove off. I hope you’re all right.” She began to recite her own number, but faltered, lost her place, and, unable to find her way back into the sequence, hung up again.

—

TWICE THE TAXI DRIVER asked her to repeat the name of the town, as if sure that he must have misheard. It was situated in what her guidebook described as a zone of light industry, down in the flat of the plain, and for “plain” read “ugly,” because there were no pretty farmsteads here, no quaint goatherd huts. There were fields of solar panels, car dealerships, factories of various kinds blowing out steam. And it was much farther away than she’d thought, over an hour’s drive. She speed-read the book on the way, skipping every second page. Since the likelihood was that Etta was still alive, she’d also googled “geothermal” and had memorized a few phrases. Context would be tricky, of course, she’d have to watch context, and she’d better not get things mixed up, or it would be oleanders all over again.

At the entrance to Gariano there was a crumbling stone arch that must once have formed part of the town walls, though almost nothing else of the walls remained, apart from a few freestanding banks of stone leaning toward rubble. Etta hadn’t mentioned the name of her hotel, but as it turned out, there was only one, a hideous affair of modern construction halfway along the town’s main street. And just as Lily finished paying the taxi driver, before he had even driven off, she saw her — Etta — at a table on the pavement. Not only was she not dead, she looked entirely well — better than well, in fact. She looked beautiful. She looked different, too, though it was difficult to say in precisely what way. More composed, perhaps, less helpless. Or had Lily just imagined the helplessness? She was writing in the same notebook as the day before, but today even the movement of her wrist seemed stronger, more assured. “Oh, hello,” she said, glancing up, and she frowned, an entirely different sort of frown to the one Lily remembered from the train. “I thought you were staying in the mountains?”