Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

“Dorene,” her mother said, “this is my other daughter, Aileen.”

Dorene let go of her mother’s hand and took a pen from the pocket of her uniform. She wrote something on the chart clipped to the bottom of the bed. “Daughter?” she said, as she peeled back the blanket and sheets on one side. “Why, you could be sisters.”

Aileen felt offended, then immediately guilty, for was her mother not entitled to this at least, this small, transparent lie? She watched Dorene place a hand on her mother’s back and roll her onto her side, as her other hand pulled taut the undersheet. There was something supremely confident in the way Dorene, who couldn’t be more than thirty, moved her mother: easily, matter-of-factly, a careless squandering of touch as if this was something she did every day, which, of course, it was. Aileen suddenly felt very tired; tired and incompetent. If she could lift the baby out now she would. She would pass it, red and dripping, across the bed to Dorene. Dorene would know what to do with it. And Aileen knew then that she wouldn’t be able to tell her mother about the baby this evening; she wouldn’t be able to tell her anytime in this strange place that was half motel, half mortuary.

“I thought we might go for a drive tomorrow,” she said, as soon as Dorene had gone. “Just you and me. I thought we might go to the seaside.”

—

“I COULD ASK JANET to drive us,” her mother said the next morning, as they stood on the porch of the nursing home. As she spoke, she patted the outcrop of silver curls at the nape of her neck, a nervous habit she’d had since Aileen was a child, though the curls had been brown then, and thicker.

“I know how to drive, Mam.”

“It would be no trouble to Janet,” her mother said, staring at the car parked beside the curb. “She could be here in twenty minutes.” Aileen knew then that her mother had already asked Janet; that Aileen’s driving — the likely hazards of it — had been debated in apocalyptic fashion until all her mother’s troubles, even her illness, had paled beside the threat of a daughter home from London in a rented Fiat. Reminding herself that she mustn’t fight with her mother, Aileen said nothing, just linked her mother’s arm and walked her to the car.

They drove south along the coast with the sea on one side, and, on the other, ditches swollen with gorse and the lush, wanton grass of early summer. Last night, in a three-star hotel on the edge of the city, Aileen had taken out a map and decided they would go to Courtmacsherry, where her mother’s family came from and where her mother had holidayed each summer when she was a child. Her mother was a poor passenger, flattening herself back against the seat every time they rounded a corner. Her hand flew to her throat if they overtook a lorry. Not a driver herself, she wasn’t prepared to believe Aileen was one, either.

Janet texted to say she would meet them for coffee in Kinsale. Couldn’t she have allowed her this one day alone with their mother? Aileen thought. But there was no safe way of saying this to Janet, no way that mightn’t end in a row, so she’d said yes, of course, yes, please join us. Aileen and her mother were first to the café and sat at a table by the window. Aileen ordered coffee and a scone. Her mother ordered a pot of tea and a boiled egg, though boiled eggs weren’t on the menu, then went to use the bathroom. Aileen thumbed through a copy of a local newspaper. She’d noticed a shift these past few weeks, her gaze falling on things previously skipped over, and now it settled on an article about hatches in Germany where women could leave their babies. She imagined something like the clothes-recycling unit outside her office. Babies tipping over into warm, scented heaps of other babies, downy and milky and sleeping; babies plopping into warm darkness, the occasional soft cracking of skulls like eggs.

From behind the bathroom door she heard the muffled drone of the hand dryer, a drowsy, muted buzzing, like a bee trapped in a curtain fold. It stopped, started up again, stopped again. Her mother came out, wiping her hands on a paper tissue. “I don’t know why they bother with those things,” she said. She sounded more relaxed now, heartened perhaps by the fact that they had arrived unscathed. She took a plastic tub from her handbag and shook a blue cylindrical pill into her palm. Placing it on her tongue, she took a mouthful of tea and tipped back her head in a quick, jerky movement. She pressed a napkin to her lips, held it there a moment.

Janet’s car pulled up outside. The eldest child, Keith, the one who looked most like Janet’s husband, Richard, was in the passenger seat, the other three strapped into booster seats in the back. Janet took a while to parallel park, the minivan awkward and cumbersome, grazing the bumpers of the cars in front and behind. Then she swiveled round in the driver’s seat, presumably, Aileen thought, to shout at the children, because she seemed to shout at them a lot. Instead, she produced from somewhere on the floor of the car a multipack of crisps and proceeded to distribute them. She got out of the car, locked it, and hurried up the steps of the café. “I couldn’t get a babysitter,” she said. “But we won’t be long, will we?”

Now that Aileen saw her mother and sister together, there was a likeness — something in the nose, the chin — that she hadn’t noticed before. The four children stared in from the car, eyes fixed on their mother, aunt, and grandmother. The older ones expertly ferried crisps to their mouths with small hands while the baby pulled at the teat of a bottle. Janet appeared to be expanding at the same rate that their mother was shrinking. Her sweater, one that Aileen had given her the Christmas before last, was at least two sizes too small. Janet settled herself in the chair beside her mother, directly opposite Aileen. “How are things in London?” she said.

“Pregnant,” Aileen wanted to say. “Things in London are pregnant,” but she didn’t. She wondered how Janet would react when she, in turn, learned the news; pregnancy up to now had been Janet’s territory. But Janet wasn’t listening for her reply. She was looking out to the car where Keith was force-feeding crisps to the baby. “I’ll crucify him,” she said, and Aileen had an image of the boy nailed to the wall outside the café, blood dripping onto the flower boxes below. Janet jumped up and banged on the glass. “Stop it,” she shouted. Inside the café, conversation ground to a halt, but outside, the children carried on regardless. Janet ran outside, tugged at the locked car door. She felt her pockets for the keys she’d left on the café table. “Open the door,” she screamed.

Aileen’s mother looked on with the detached air of a spectator at a bullring who was waiting for the main event to start. “She’s got very fat,” she said. “She didn’t used to be that fat.”

It was then that Aileen noticed the window above their table was open. “She’d want to watch out,” her mother said, “or Richard will look elsewhere. I always wondered about her marrying a younger man. I worried about it.”

Aileen stood up and, too late, pulled the window shut. “He’s only three years younger,” she said.

Her mother seemed to take this as encouragement. “Well, yes, but three years is three years,” she said, “And he’s a man. Men are different.” Their food had arrived and she took her boiled egg, began to strike it with a spoon all around the shell in sharp, brisk movements. Outside, the children had unlocked the door and now Janet was half in and half out of the car, walloping the children in turn, all of them except for the baby; walloping them with a force that made Aileen’s hand go instinctively to her still-flat stomach.