Dinosaurs on Other Planets

by Danielle McLaughlin

  There was a fountain in the middle of the square outside the station: three copper heads on a marble plinth. It hinted not at honor but at reprisal: decapitated heads left to bake in the sun, mouths slightly parted as if they’d cried out while the cast was being poured. Lily went over and sank her arms in the water, sluiced them back and forth, in and out around the bloated cigarette butts that floated on the surface like belly-up maggots. The water was cool, but in this position, bent over the basin, her hair fell forward onto her face and the sun scorched the back of her neck. Etta had come to stand in the doorway of the waiting room. She didn’t wave or call out or inquire about the fountain. She just leaned against the doorframe, watching. Nutmeg. Nobody had used that word to describe her hair before, but now that she thought about it, that’s exactly the color it was.

  A man arrived pushing a baby in a buggy. As he squeezed past Etta, a wheel glanced against her foot, knocking off her shoe, which snagged on the undercarriage of the buggy and got carried forward a short distance. Etta hopped on one foot as she went to retrieve it, a graceful, elegant hopping, the shoeless foot raised up behind her so that she looked for all the world like a flamingo. Lily turned back to the fountain, ran a hand again through the water. She was thirty-nine, battle-scarred, fraying around the edges. The last thing she needed was some undamaged twenty-five-year-old—anyone, for that matter, who might consider themselves entitled to beauty. She was too tired for all of that. The man with the buggy came out of the waiting room, accompanied by the mother and child, and as they went by the baby started up a loud wailing.

  Sandra and Julie would probably have a baby. Sandra had said as much when she’d called round last month with the renewal forms for the parking permit, which had always been in her name. She’d delivered the pronouncement in small, hesitant sentences, punctuated with long pauses, as if, already, before it was even conceived, the baby required delicate handling. Lily couldn’t give a damn about the baby and had told her so. The baby wasn’t the point. What a pity Sandra hadn’t shown such propriety in other things: who she slept with, for example. They could have half a dozen babies for all Lily cared; half a dozen mewling, puking, shitting babies one after the other. It was, in fact, what she wished for them, what they both deserved.

  A truck pulled into the parking lot, an open-backed truck with one side panel a darker green than the rest and the name of the hotel where Lily was staying emblazoned across the bonnet. The driver, a stocky man in his forties, jumped out. “Ciao, bella,” he shouted, at the same time waving across the square to Etta, beckoning her over. Etta didn’t budge, but she shifted position in the doorway, stood a little straighter.

  “It’s just me,” Lily said.

  “No,” the driver said. “Due.” He took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and read out first her name, then Sandra’s.

  “My friend wasn’t able to come,” Lily said. “She’s sick.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I am sorry to hear that. Very sorry.” He glanced in the direction of the waiting room. “And the young lady?”

  “She’s not with me.”

  He shrugged and seized her suitcase, threw it in the back of the truck as if it were an animal to be grappled with. He covered it with tarpaulin and tied it down with thick rope. Inside the cab, the seat was torn and speckled with cigarette burns. It was also tiny—how three of them might have fitted, Lily couldn’t imagine. As she fastened her seatbelt, she saw Etta crossing the square to the fountain, her holdall slung across her shoulder. The driver put the truck in gear, a process that seemed to involve much brushing against Lily’s leg, or was she imagining that? Etta settled herself on the edge of the fountain and drummed her heels against the marble. The cashier hadn’t returned, and the buildings on either side of the station had brought their shutters down. Lily wondered if she should inquire if Etta had heard from whoever was supposed to be collecting her. They could hardly just leave her here by herself, could they? But as she was trying to work out how to roll down the cab window, the driver swung the truck in a wide, sweeping arc and drove at speed out of the station.

  At the tollbooth outside town, his arm rested a moment on her knee as he rooted in the ashtray for coins. Back home, she was considered pale; here, her legs appeared startlingly white, as if her entire life up to now had been lived underground. The driver, whose name was Allesandro, said something to the tollbooth operator and the operator laughed, then glanced at her as if to see how she was taking it. They were driving into lush, verdant countryside, swaths of green meadowlands checkered with squares of blazing yellow saffron. They drove up into the mountains, through pastureland thick with wildflowers, rabbles of multicolored butterflies gusting across the windscreen. Every so often, there were warnings of deer: signs depicting Lilliputian animals, fairy-sized beasts, captured mid-leap. She’d left her sunglasses in her suitcase, and even when she shut her eyes a yellow haze persisted behind her lids.

  “Your friend,” Allesandro said. “Is she very sick or just a little sick?”

  “Very sick,” Lily said. “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” because she’d read an article about that on the plane on the way over and, anyway, Sandra deserved it.

  “Santa Madonna,” Allesandro said, and he shook his head. “I am sad for you, very sad.”

  They turned at a sign for Rifugio del Lupo, a timber chalet-style building of a kind Lily associated not with Italy, but with Switzerland, where she’d holidayed once with Sandra. The patch of rough gravel that served as a parking lot contained just three cars. On a small terrace to the front, parasols bearing the logo of an ice-cream company shaded red plastic tables and chairs. She followed Allesandro into a dimly lit bar with benches upholstered in faded velveteen. At a table in one corner a group of four—two men and two women—were sharing a bottle of wine, though there was no sign of anybody who might have served them. Giant pinecones painted with artificial snow hung from the ceiling, and on the shelves behind the counter were plastic reindeer, tinsel, a Nativity set, and other things out of season.

  —

  THOSE WHITE-FLOWERING, SMELLY BUSHES that grew along the railway line were not oleanders. Oleanders, it turned out, were a different creature entirely. For one thing, oleanders were biggish with dark green leaves that were long and leathery. Their five-petaled flowers stood distinctly on barky stalks. Nothing, in other words, like the messy, breathy balls of white that had graced the bushes she’d seen earlier. She knew this now because on the wall of the bedroom Allesandro showed her to there was a framed picture of flora and fauna of the region, an educational-style bilingual poster of the kind seen in interpretative centers. It had dozens of species of wildflowers and tiny field animals, hand-drawn in astonishing detail with close-ups of petals and stamen and seeds and, occasionally, as if the artist had tired of the concentrated gaze, a lake, a mountain, a rooftop panorama, dropped unceremoniously between plants and insects with no thought as to scale.

  “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?”

  “I was,” Lily said. “I am. In Ovindoli.”

  “Isn’t that very far away?”

  “Yes,” Lily said, “I suppose it is.”

  “What are you doing here?” Etta said.

  “I rang,” Lily said. “I tried to ring. I left a message.”

  “You rang the hotel?”

  “No, I rang you. I left a message. Two messages.”

  Etta frowned again. “But how did you get my number?” She picked up a phone from beside her on the table and shook her head. “No messages,” she said.

  The table was in the shade of an awning, but Lily was standing in the full glare of the sun. Out of vanity, she hadn’t worn a hat. She’d wanted to show off her hair—nutmeg—and now she could feel the top of her head beginning to burn. In an attempt to move things forward, she said: “I enjoyed the book very much.”

  “I thought you’d like it,” Etta said. “I found it a little old-fashioned, but my mother loved it. I thought you might like it, too.”

  “I see,” Lily said. The book had been bloody awful actually; she hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of it. She took it from her bag now and opened it to the title page. “Anyway,” she said, “that’s where I got your number. And I did leave a message but—”

  Etta was laughing. “Oh, that’s my mother’s number,” she said. “She does that with all her books. Don’t ask me why.” She paused. “But what are you doing here?”

  How to explain it, even to herself? Hope, she might have said, if she’d tried; the eternal triumph of hope over experience. That and the fact that, if she was honest, there was something about this young woman that reminded her of Sandra; she’d noticed it the minute Etta had settled into the seat opposite her on the train. Not a recent Sandra, an earlier version. She looked around to see if some plausible destination might pr
esent itself and saw an insurance office, a dry cleaners, a bank. “I came to see you,” she said.

  Even at this late stage, there was the possibility that something might have been saved. There could have been a visit to the stone arch where together they might have deciphered the inscription above the entrance; a coffee, perhaps, in the hotel bar. Life, after all, was mostly the art of salvage. But Etta, her expression shifting in sudden recognition, was too young yet, too undamaged, to have learned this. “Oh,” she said. “I understand.” And then, “I’m seeing somebody.”

  “Yes,” Lily said. “Of course.”

  Then Etta set her mouth in a tight line and bent her head to her notebook. A strand of blond hair swung forward over the page like a guillotine. Today she was wearing a halter-neck top and there, again, were the beautiful clavicles: so snappable and exposed that Lily wanted to reach out and tug at the fabric in an effort to cover them, to tell this young woman who knew nothing that anything that can be seen can be broken. She stood a moment by the table, and when Etta said no more, she turned and walked to the end of the street where she could see the taxi driver buying cigarettes at a kiosk. Less than five minutes had passed since he’d dropped her off.

  —

  A REWINDING THEN, THE morning unspooled, back through the crumbling arch, past the steam-blowing factories, the car dealerships, the fields of solar panels. Dust rose from scorched verges to fall in a fine mist upon the taxi windscreen. The road shimmered in the heat. In a field off the highway were the ruins of a third-century Roman settlement—she recalled her guidebook enthusing about the advanced and intricate nature of the drainage system. Plumbing, she thought, as they passed a field remarkable only for its scattered lumps of stone, a particularly historic piece of plumbing. “Stop here,” she said to the driver, on spotting a signpost for a hiking trail. They were within sight of the Rifugio now, and she had no wish to field Allesandro’s questions as to why she was back so early.