Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

She found a track that led back out to the meadow, but at a different point to where she’d entered earlier. There was a breeze and the grass rippled in a sea of dark greens, light greens, and silvers. She could see, a little distance away, the Rifugio and someone — Allesandro, she presumed — doing something with a ladder on the terrace. Farther uphill, half a dozen horses were grazing. The last film she and Sandra had seen together was set in medieval France, where horses kitted out for war — huge, apocalyptic horses in the king’s colors — had galloped in a regal charge through cobbled streets, sweat glistening on their flanks. These horses were nothing like that. Most were not horses at all, but shaggy ponies. Possibly, one or two were donkeys.

Seemingly as one, they raised their heads from the grass and stared. The intent with which they regarded her was touching, as was the graveness with which they stood at attention, as if they had been waiting, as if her emergence from the woods had summoned them to a different, nobler, calling. She returned their gaze, keeping still, very still, even the in and out of her breathing as quiet as possible. Then she realized they were not looking at her, but past her. A figure was making his way up the hillside, a bucket in his hand. He came a little way up before halting and putting down the bucket. He cupped his hands around his mouth and began to call. The horses broke into a trot, then a canter. Then they were barreling downhill, their unkempt manes flying, their tails streaming out behind them. The slope brought its own momentum, and they were galloping now, neighing and snorting and whinnying. They thundered past, trampling on daisies, forget-me-nots, buttercups. And as they went by, she stepped back into the trees, to shelter from the clouds of yellow dust flung up by the chaos of their hooves.

Her mother’s room was on the second floor with a view of the river and the Coca-Cola bottling factory on the opposite bank, neat rows of red-and-white trucks resembling from this distance a child’s toy collection. Aileen had planned to deliver her news on Friday evening; that way, if things didn’t go well, her mother would have time to come round before Aileen had to leave again on Sunday. But fog at Heathrow delayed her flight and then there was a queue at the rental car desk in Cork and a problem with a form, so it was almost eight P.M. before she arrived at the nursing home.

“Aileen,” her mother said, “you’re late.” Her mother was propped up in bed, her slight frame barely denting the pillows. Settled by her bedside, in the room’s only chair, was Eily, one of the other residents. Eily was tall as well as broad, her white curls adding several inches to her height, and when she leaned forward in the chair, she eclipsed Aileen’s mother almost entirely.

“Sorry,” Aileen said, “my flight was delayed.” But her mother and Eily had already resumed their conversation. It was something about the new podiatrist and his tendency to be rough with the pumice stone. Her mother’s problems, being terminal, were far beyond the reach of podiatry, but, still, she debated the subject of calluses with an intensity that was unsettling. Aileen went to stand by the window while she waited for them to finish. Their conversation had a curious dynamic — a decorous yet vaguely malicious chipping away at each other, the way a child might pick slyly at a scab. It occurred to her, fleetingly, that were she to deliver her news now, Eily’s presence might possibly temper her mother’s response. It wasn’t that her mother had anything against grandchildren; but Aileen’s sister, Janet, had already provided four, and the circumstances of Aileen’s pregnancy — forty-three, unplanned, married work colleague — were not what her mother would have hoped for.

The nursing home had once been a convent, and it retained a cloistered feel. Cell-like rooms branched like pods off narrow stalks of corridors, and in the wall behind her mother’s bed, there was a curious rectangular indent where it looked like a door had been papered over. Usually when she was home from London, she stayed in her mother’s house in Ballyphehane, empty these days apart from a cat the neighbors had been entrusted with feeding. But Janet had rung earlier in the week to say that this time Aileen should book a hotel. There was now a tenant in their mother’s house, because, as Janet had rather bluntly put it, it wasn’t as if their mother would be moving back in. Aileen imagined a stranger, a girl — because for some reason she was sure the new tenant was a girl — working her way through the house, opening first one drawer, then another. “I guess this is what it feels like to be burgled,” she’d said to Janet.

Janet had sighed. “It’s nothing like being burgled,” she said. “Why does everything have to be such a drama with you? I was only saying that to Mam the other night.”

“So Mam knows?”

“About the house? Gracious, no! We were talking about something else.”

“But what about my things?” Aileen had said. She’d pictured the girl — in clearer relief now: fair-haired and fine boned and dressed like a cat burglar — finding diaries from Aileen’s teenage years, items of graying underwear forgotten in the airing cupboard.

“You haven’t lived in that house in twenty years,” Janet said. “What things could you possibly have there? If it makes you feel any better, I moved a lava lamp and a box of ornaments up to the attic.”

—

IT WAS LATE MAY, and the evening was still bright. Outside on the grounds, neatly pruned shrubberies descended into briars and mounds of fermented grass cuttings as they approached the river. Since Aileen’s visit the previous month, floods had taken away part of the boundary fence, and someone had bridged the gap with a length of blue rope, tied between posts like a finish line. It was tempting fate, Aileen thought; it was downright irresponsible in a place like this. She imagined her mother and Eily, shuffling and elbowing, as they tumbled downhill to land head over calloused heels in the black mud of the riverbed.

Eventually, Eily stood up, gathering her dressing gown around her, and shuffled toward the door. She paused to raise a hand, hip height, in half salute, though her expression was so vexed the gesture could just as easily have been interpreted as a threat. When Aileen sat in the vacated chair, it still held traces of Eily’s warmth, and she took off her coat and folded it underneath her to serve as a cushion.

“I knew all the Reardons from Liscarroll,” her mother said, “and there was never any of them a dentist.” A filigree of bruises from the hospital drip was visible on the inside of one arm. “There was a Reardon a vet, all right,” she said. “A vet of sorts, but never a dentist.” This was her mother’s latest pastime: scrutinizing Eily’s ancestry. Each new fragment was committed to memory to be dissected in Eily’s absence, inconsistencies hunted down with a doggedness usually reserved for war criminals. Her mother’s hand crept across the blankets and beat up and down at the edge of the bed. “Janet brought me a book the other night,” she said. “You might as well take it away.” The book, a copy of The Road —a curious choice for the terminally ill, Aileen thought — had fallen to the floor, and Aileen picked it up, put it back on the locker. “Take it with you when you’re going,” her mother repeated. “Things only go missing here,” and she rolled her eyes in the direction of Eily’s room.

From the corridor came the squeak of rubber-soled shoes and a trundling of wheels. A young woman in a blue aide’s uniform parked a cart in the doorway. “How are we this evening?” she said, squeaking her way across the floor. She lifted Aileen’s mother’s hand and placed a finger on the underside of her wrist. The finger was plump and fat. Aileen’s mother’s skin was almost transparent, veins winding in blue rivers beneath the surface.