Danielle McLaughlin - Dinosaurs on Other Planets

Was it possible they could have been here all this time and not heard her calling? She was conscious of her torn tights, her bleeding leg, the incongruity of her tailored jacket and pencil skirt, here where everything was peaceful, where sunlight dappled her child’s blond head and weeds in flurries of blue and white bloomed along the riverbank. She crouched beside her son and hugged him. “Finn,” she said, “I was so worried about you.” He smiled but, shrugging away her arms, continued to read. Not knowing what to do, she settled herself next to him, tucking her legs underneath her to hide the bloodied knee. The preacher woman’s legs were bare, she noticed, bare and brown. She wondered if Finn had simply climbed out the window to the woman or if she, before luring him Pied Piper style across the fields, had climbed in. She pictured her going from room to room, sitting at the mahogany table under the ravaged chandelier, her green catlike eyes that, yes, were ridiculously like Angelina Jolie’s, taking in all the brokenness.

“We come down here sometimes when the weather is good,” the woman said. “Finn knows the names of everything — insects, birds, plants. He’s a walking encyclopedia.”

Stay away from my son, she wanted to say. Stay away from him with your beasts and your lakes of fire and your pestilence. Instead, she said: “Yes, he’s an exceptionally bright child.” And because in the silence that followed it seemed that something more was expected of her, she gestured to a cluster of purple flowers with yellow hearts that grew a few feet away. Possibly, they were violets; she had never been good with plants. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” she said.

The woman smiled. She picked up her Bible, opening it not to the place she had marked but to a different page, and began to read. “Consider the lilies of the field,” she said, “how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” There was a soft swishing sound, the sound of someone moving through long grass. Bill was making his way toward them across the wasteland, his jacket thrown over one shoulder, his gait relaxed, unhurried. “Dad!” Finn shouted, and he jumped up and ran to his father.

She kept her eyes on her husband until she knew he was near enough to have seen her, and when he didn’t wave or call out, she turned away. She lay back on the grass and looked up. A flock of small birds, starlings perhaps, were flying in an arrow formation above the trees. As she watched, they drew close together to form a dark, quivering orb. For a moment, they appeared freeze-framed as if someone had pressed Pause, and, just as she thought that they would surely fall, they scattered like gunshot across the evening sky.

From the fence behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees. “Colman!” she called, but he didn’t hear. She watched him swing the ax in a clean arc and thought, from this distance, he could be any age. Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he’d been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn’t known him then. He had already turned forty when they met.

It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter. Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes. “There’s nothing wrong,” she shouted when she was still some yards off. He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him. “Emer rang from London. She’s coming home.”

He put down the ax. “Home for a visit, or home for good?” He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls. The frame of the old awning lay on the grass, remnants of green canvas still wound around a metal pole. On the floor inside, if “floor” was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil.

“Just for a few days. A friend from college has an exhibition. I wasn’t given much detail. You know Emer.”

“Yes,” he said, and frowned. “When is she arriving?”

“Tomorrow evening, and she’s bringing Oisín.”

“Tomorrow? And she’s only after ringing now?”

“It’ll be good to have them stay. Oisín has started school since we last saw him.” She waited to see if he might mention the room, but he picked up the ax, as if impatient to get back to work.

“What will we do if the Forestry Service come round?” she said.

“They haven’t come round this past year. They don’t come round when we ring about the drinking or the fires.” He swung the ax at a timber beam supporting what was left of the roof. There was a loud splintering but the beam stood firm, and he drew back the ax, prepared to strike again.

She turned and walked back toward the house. The Dennehys, their nearest neighbors, had earlier that week sown maize, and a crow hung from a pole, strung up by a piece of twine. It lifted in the wind as she walked past, coming to rest again a few feet from the ground, above the height of foxes. When they first moved here, she hadn’t understood that the crows were real, shot specially for the purpose, and had asked Mrs. Dennehy what cloth she sewed them from, while the Dennehys’ two sons, then just young boys, sniggered behind their mother’s back.

After supper, she took the duvet cover with the blue teddy bears from the airing cupboard and spread it out on the kitchen table. The cat roused itself from the rug by the stove and went over to investigate. It bounded in one quick movement onto a chair and watched, its head to one side, as she smoothed out creases. There were matching pillowcases, and a yellow pajama holder in the shape of a rabbit. Colman was at the other side of the kitchen, making a mug of Bovril. “What do you think?” she said.

“Lovely.”

“You couldn’t possibly see from that distance,” she said.

“It’s the same one as before, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “But it’s a while since they visited. I’m wondering, is it a bit babyish?”

“You’re not going to find another between now and tomorrow,” he said, and she felt the flutter in her eyelid start up, the one that usually preceded a headache. She had hoped the sight of the duvet cover might have prompted an offer to move his stuff, or at least an offer to vacate the room so that she could move it. “It’ll be an improvement on that brown eiderdown, anyway,” she said. “John was still at school when we bought that,” but he just drank his Bovril and rinsed the mug, setting it upside down on the draining board. “Good night,” he said, and went upstairs. The cat jumped down from the chair and padded back across the kitchen to resume its position on the rug.

—

NEXT MORNING, SHE STARTED with his suits. She waited until he’d gone outside, then carried them from John’s old room to their bedroom across the landing. The wardrobe there had once held everything, but now when she pushed her coats and dresses along the rail they resisted, swung back at her, jostling and shouldering, as if they’d been breeding and fattening this past year. For an hour she went back and forth between the rooms with clothes, shoes, books. The winter before last, Colman had brought the lathe — a retirement gift from the staff at the co-op — in from the shed and had set it up in their son’s room. He would turn wood late into the night and often, when she put her head around the door in the morning, she would find him, still in his clothes, asleep on John’s old single bed. There began then the gradual migration of his belongings. He appeared to have lost interest in the lathe — he no longer presented her with lamps or bowls — but for the best part of a year, he had not slept in their bedroom at all.