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rear-view mirror
The first hard truth — or at least the first hard truth beyond the island, discounting things like ‘Velociraptors can open doors’ and ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex claws can shred electric fencing’ — is that the dinosaurs were only the first wave of carnivores. The first, and, Lex often thinks, the easiest to hide from.
Next come the journalists. They’re relentless, bloodhounds; Lex has memories of extinct lizards, and Lex has memories of full-grown men sticking cameras in her face and screaming questions at her: did you see Robert Muldoon die? did you see John Arnold die? did your grandfather force you onto the island? They wait outside the house, camp by the gates at night. Someone leaks the landline number and it rings until Lex’s father, with an exaggerated calm that frightens everyone, rips the cord out of the wall and reassures his (soon-to-be-ex-) wife that he’ll install a new one “when this shit-show dies down”. And then come the others. The house is suddenly plagued with visits from nosy relatives and well-meaning teachers and child welfare reps, lifeless smiles hiding their curiosity behind ‘I really must make sure Lex and Tim are doing alright, I have a duty of care—’
Then, swooping down like the hand of God, like Superman himself: InGen.
“The Murphy family will not be taking questions, and ask that you respect their privacy at this time of healing. Tim and Alexis have endured a great amount of trauma, but with the support of their family — and InGen’s extremely proficient team of psychiatrists — their family are optimistic for a full recovery both physically and psychologically. They thank you for your concern, and for your continued support.”
It’s called a Crisis Conference. Lex learns that it’s like a Press Conference but smaller, and their own is held outside the front gates of the prestigious school that they haven’t yet returned to. They're told not to speak. They're told not to smile.
InGen’s battalion of lawyers are the only wave of predators that Lex finds herself grateful for, a flock of Gennaros deflecting emails and preparing statements and pacing back and forth barking legal nonsense down chunky portable telephones, whipping NDAs out of their stiff leather attachés. Or, her favourite trick: every so often someone will approach her, a journalist or a member of the public, and one of InGen’s legal androids will appear out of nowhere with a toneless-but-firm ‘Miss Murphy has been through a lot, and has no comment.’ And Lex, who didn’t ever think she’d have No Comment on what happened on Isla Nublar, will smile like an American Girl doll and let Lawyer #7 steer her gently into the waiting Mulsanne.
Here is what Lex will remember about the first three months of her thirteenth year:
She isn’t allowed to use the telephone. Once InGen so generously provides them with a new one, one with a private number that Lex isn’t allowed to hand out to her friends or her school — one that she doesn’t even know the number for — it’s for her mother’s use only. She doesn’t see her school friends. She doesn’t see her teachers. She just sees Tim and her parents and a scattering of InGen employees. And she won’t realise until years later that this was all done not for her own safety, as she was led to believe, but so that a thirteen year old girl wasn’t underfoot whilst InGen wove a careful narrative of lies that denied everything that had happened to her.
Therapists. Half a dozen of them at least, slipping through the wall of NDAs and each wearing a smile as empty and clueless as the last. People with names like Theodore “call me Teddy!” and Melissa “call me Mel!”, people in starched suits and shiny loafers, people who brushed off her praise for Ellie and Alan and Ian with offhand comments that she was too clever to miss: “Well, sure, they’re nice people, but always remember that they’re just regular folks like you and me.” “Yes, lovely people, and InGen took care of them too!” “Don’t forget, Lex, you don’t have to worry about anything. InGen is looking out for you.”
Turning thirteen on a Wednesday. The barrage of floral arrangements delivered to the house, the gifts that desperate journalists tried to hand her through the barred gate. Feeling sick and overwhelmed. Sleeping well into the morning. Waking up to a small pile of presents from her mom (a Sega Genesis), her dad (a baseball cap, and tickets to see the Giants play 'when things die down'), and Tim (a tamagotchi, and a pin that says 'geek & proud'). Eating cake on her futon, cross-legged, filtering through the cards Tim has detached from her flowers and either tossing them in the trash or pinning them to the notice board above her vanity. Your friends at InGen, tossed. Have a lovely day from everyone at Oakmont Greeves Academy, tossed. She's never set foot in Oakmont Greeves Academy. Alexis, thinking of you on this special day, Dr. H. Wu, kept and pinned. She likes Dr. Wu.
Tim nodding his approval. “I bet his was the one with all the weird-looking, spiky plants.”
And one of the fondest memories: her chest flooding with warmth, tossing aside what's left of her pile at the sight of an achingly-familiar name. Letting it catch the strips of light filtering through her blinds. Lex, we hope you’re having an easy time of things, and that you enjoy your thirteenth birthday. Thinking of you always, call us sometime! I've attached my number. Ellie Sattler. And underneath it, a scrawl in blue biro: Happy birthday Lex, Alan. Lex will keep the note, along with a hilariously chaotic card from Dr. Malcolm, for years to come— even though it will take her a long, long time to understand why it means so much to her. All she knows is that noise from the living room TV bounds up through the floorboards and car horns sound off at the photographers loitering outside, and for the first time since they got back from the island she feels that she isn’t alone— that they aren’t alone.
Six months after the events on the island, Lex and Tim’s parents take them out to lunch, and Lex immediately knows that something is wrong.
It’s a narrow Italian restaurant, a dim yellowish glow illuminating terracotta floor tiles and potted olive plants and an overwhelming full-wall fresco of some pretty town in Sicily. The maitre d’ seats them a red-and-white-clothed table, and in the spirit of keeping things civil Lex’s father offers to call them a cab when they’re done so that his now-ex-wife can order a large glass of red wine. This in itself isn't unusual. She drinks a lot these days.
Lex recognises that something is about to be announced, because there’s little other reason for the four of them to be here. Her stomach remains clenched into an uncomfortable knot while they order, and while they wait for their food. Their father leans back in his chair with a kind of distracted smile, an affected calm that Lex sees right through; their mom takes microscopic sips from her wine and maintains a steady flow of mindless conversation with Tim, the waiter, the barman, other customers. Tim’s manicotti is drenched in sauce. Lex doesn’t touch her squash cannelloni.
“What’s going on?” she eventually asks, when it’s too much to keep in any longer.
Across the table, their parents exchange a look. Then their mom clutches her wine glass and sits back, chewing the inside of her cheek like she might cry, and their dad sets down his fork and pulls in a deep breath. Tim, oblivious, continues to eat.
“Well, honey, we uh— we’ve got another stop to make this afternoon, and we thought it might be nice to grab some lunch before we head over there. Over to uh— to InGen Tower.” Her father smiles apologetically.
Lex’s stomach does a nervous spin. “Why are we going to InGen Tower?”
“Are we going to see Grandpa?” Tim asks. He’s got red sauce smeared across his chin. Lex has a desperate urge to reach across and wipe it off, but she doesn’t.
“No, Timmy, Grandpa isn’t there today. We’ve been invited over there by— you remember mom’s cousin, Mr. Ludlow? English fella? He wants to talk to you about ah— well, about what happened on the island, and about how everyone moves forward.”
Their mom throws back the last of her wine and their dad pours her another.
“Is it something bad?” Tim asks, finally abandoning his food.
Their mom shakes her head. “No, baby. They’re going to ask you to pretend it never happened.”
Lex spends the first five minutes of their meeting trying to picture Peter Ludlow in anything — literally anything — other than the suit he currently occupies. Suit, which he pronounces, when Lex’s father idly compliments him on it, as ‘syoot’. He meets them in the atrium and escorts them to a massive glass elevator — Tim jabs an elbow into her ribcage and hisses something about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — that takes them, with an artful flick of Mr. Ludlow’s I.D tag, all the way to the forty-third floor. Standing with her back to the cool glass, Lex is struggling. Does he sleep in the syoot? No, surely not. But she imagines he owns a dull collection of silk pyjamas with his initials monogrammed on the cuffs. And one of those housecoats that isn’t really a housecoat.
She understands, now, why her mother insisted she didn’t wear jeans.
“Have you eaten?” Mr. Ludlow abruptly asks, eyes flicking between Lex’s parents. “I can have something sent up?”
Lex’s mother gives him a tight, polite smile. “We came from lunch, thankyou. If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer we get this over with.”
“Of course.”
They’re going to ask you to pretend it never happened.
Lex understands why, of course. She’s been waiting for this conversation for the past six months— well, the past two or three, anyway; since she figured out why InGen and Isla Nublar and her Grandpa had vanished from the newspapers and evening updates. She likes to consider herself a smart girl.
Mr. Ludlow — she can’t bring herself to think of him as Peter — leads them into a large conference room, open to a staggering view of San Diego through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows; the sight of which brings Tim inches closer to Lex. She remembers a time when he’d have dashed across the room and pressed his hands and face to it, dazzled by the extremity of their location, leaving a haze of breath smudged across the glass. She wonders if he’s thinking about the electric fence or the car in the tree. She wonders if Mr. Ludlow even heard about those particular stages of their ordeal.
“Take a seat, please,” he says, all smiles, gesturing. “I’ll make this as brief as I can and let you resume your day.” Resume. Res-yoom . The English accent is bizarre, Lex thinks, planting herself in the chair next to her father.
Once they’re all seated, Mr. Ludlow slips into the chair at the head of the table and clasps his hands on the polished wood. Then he looks Lex and Tim in the eyes for the first time, and fixes them with a glassy smile that leads Lex to believe that he doesn’t often address children.
“Alexis, Tim, I’d first like to thank you for coming to InGen Tower today.” he begins, and his voice takes on a patronising slowness. “The reason for this little visit, as I’m sure you both know, is to discuss how we all move forward with your reintegration into—”
“Peter,” their mom sighs.
Whatever cue she’s projecting, Mr. Ludlow picks it up. He clears his throat, flashes another hollow smile. “Your parents feel that you are ready to return to school,” he amends. “Which is, of course, highly appropriate, and entirely encouraged by InGen and myself and your grandfather and— everyone else who cares for you both. However.” And here he delicately pauses. Then: “To get right to the point and not keep you here longer than I should like, we at InGen have spent the last six months convincing the world that what took place on Isla Nublar did not take place. If the world knew that there were dinosaurs on that island, it would create rampant chaos. And your grandfather — my uncle — would suffer the ramifi— the ah, the problems this would cause, more than anyone else. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You want us to keep it a secret,” Tim says.
Mr. Ludlow smiles at him. “Prec-isely Tim. You might have noticed that the photographers and journalists have stopped camping outside your house, and stopped bothering you whilst you’re out and about? InGen has worked very hard to—” He carries on, but Lex stops listening. She wants to go home. The conference room smells like lysol, Mr. Ludlow smells like hair oil and aftershave; she thinks you’ve said all you need to say, we won’t get Grandpa in trouble.
After a short while he stops talking and tabs a button on the telephone ahead of him. “Marcia, if you wouldn’t mind?”
“Certainly, Mr. Ludlow.”
A moment later a woman enters the room, in a suit and tie as neatly tailored as everything else around here, to walk a handful of papers to Mr. Ludlow.
“NDAs? Is that really necessary?” Lex’s father asks.
Mr. Ludlow taps the papers on the tabletop until they’re in a neat stack, and flashes their dad a smile that barely even registers as apologetic. It reads, to Lex, as ‘I’m sorry you’re too stupid to understand all of this.’
“The company insists. But also—” and here he fixes the smile to something even more condescending and turns it on Lex— “I’ve always found that the more official things present, the easier it is for younger minds to take seriously. Now if you would like to read through them, you are of course more than welcome—”
“Just give us the gist,” Lex’s mom cuts in, abruptly angry. “They’re kids, Peter. What happens if they slip up? What does InGen plan on doing to my thirteen year old daughter, who suffered fucking trauma because of InGen incompetence, if she accidentally—”
“Laura, please,” Mr. Ludlow raises a calm hand. “It’s nothing like that. John is still in charge here, remember. If I’d even suggested a standard clause NDA — which I wouldn’t, of course — he’d have laughed me out of the room. This simply states that Alexis and Tim pledge to try their best not to discuss the events that took place on the island, and that they understand that should they do so, InGen will fervently deny everything. That is all.”
One good thing to come from all of this: the United Front of Anger that is Lex’s parents. She and Tim sign the papers and they all file out of the building and into the waiting car — Mr. Ludlow insisted they didn’t bother themselves with a cab — and all the while her mom and dad maintain a stream of furious back-and-forth that covers everything from the weather to retaining a lawyer to passive threats of arson. When they get home, Lex’s dad waits in the car as if to have the driver take him to his own house, and Laura leans back down at the door and tells him to ‘get the fuck out, Rob, I’ll make up the guest room’. Tim cracks a toothy smile for the first time in days.
And Lex wants to be happy, wants to think that this could be the beginning of some sort of familial reconciliation, but really she knows that her mom wants her dad around because she doesn’t know how to handle this alone. Because she doesn’t know what to do with a pair of children who had to fight for their lives on an island full of dinosaurs, and are now being told to pretend it never happened.
It's okay, Mom, Lex thinks, watching her dad snatch a bottle of wine from the kitchen and plonk it down in front of his ex-wife, I don’t know what to do with us either.
“Alexis.”
“Grandpa.” Lex says his name with the same reverence and love as she always has, although she hesitates to run at him these days. He always seems so fragile. Instead she lets her features slide into an easy grin and stops just short of a hug, resting her hands on his arm. “I missed you!”
John leans on his cane and nudges his forehead against hers. “I’ve missed you more, sweet thing. Come on, walk with me, give me the grand tour!”
He hasn’t seen the new house yet. Lex lets him hold onto the crook of her elbow and slowly paces a circuit of the ground floor, pointing out all the ridiculous Architectural Digest junk that their mom picked out, showing him the scuff marks where Tim’s razor scooter collides with the skirting. John listens with rapt attention, laughs where he should. He stops to admire a framed photograph of Lex and Tim with their father, outside the Giants Stadium last Spring, and politely inquires as to Robert’s wellbeing. Asks how school is going.
When they finally sit down in the den, and Lex has carefully placed a steaming mug of English Breakfast tea down in front of her grandpa, he fixes her with a sad smile.
“Alexis,” he says. “This is long overdue, but I owe you an apology. Well— I owe you significantly more than an apology, but I must— I want you to know that I will never forgive myself for the danger I put you and Tim in, on Isla Nublar.”
There are a thousand things Lex wants to say— and has wanted to say for months now, through the bombardment of media attention and then the stifling silence that followed InGen’s coverup. She’s imagined this conversation, gone over exactly how she’ll phrase everything, a hundred times. It was never your fault. You created something that you were so proud of, after a lifetime of work, and you wanted to share it with us. I’ll always be grateful for that, no matter what happened on the island.
But the front door opens before she can speak and Tim bounds into the house, rucksack launched to one side, hollering “Grandpa!!” and flinging his entire body over the back of the sofa. “When did you get here? You won’t believe what I’m doing in my History class, just wait ‘til you see my drawings of an Apatosaurus—”
Lex quietly sighs. When her grandpa glances up at her, Tim’s schoolbooks already thrust into his old hands, she can only hope that the smile she offers will convey at least half of what she wanted to say.
She’ll never be sure that it did.
A therapist — she can’t remember which one — once told her that she doesn’t have to deal with all of this alone. He’d intended, she’s sure, for this empty platitude to open the floodgates and give him notebooks full of juicy details he could report back to Father InGen, but it did make her think. She wasn’t alone on the island, after all.
When she turns sixteen and her mom obligingly fits a second landline, Lex tests the waters.
“Hello, this is Dr. Ellie Sattler?”
“Hi, Ellie? This is Lex.” Shuffling, high-wind. Static. Lex feels stupid for the briefest of moments, but when Ellie’s voice comes back — muffled, barely audible through the static — she sounds delighted.
“Lex! Honey, let me call you back in ten minutes, okay? We’ve just uncovered— well, I’ll call you in ten!”
It’s twenty minutes before she calls back, but the line is steady and clear. Ellie is out of breath. “How’ve you been? How’s Tim?”
“We’re— we’re okay, thanks. How are you and Dr. Grant?”
“Oh great sweetie, really good. Just at a dig site in Montana, it’s all very exciting—” In the background, a lower voice; Ellie pauses to listen and then snorts out a laugh— “Oh shut up. Alan says hi, Lex.” Shuffling, movement. Then, to Lex’s surprise and delight, Dr. Grant’s dulcet voice floats down the line.
“Hi Lex.”
“Hi, Dr. Grant!” She’s smiling, in spite of herself. “How’s the dig?”
“I’ve got sand in places I didn’t ever want sand in.”
A laugh, and the phone exchanges hands again. “He’s grouchy because we ran out of coffee two days ago,” Ellie explains. “You’d think he worked hard for a living…”
She’s not sure why it’s so nice. Maybe it’s because she's gone so long without talking about what happened that she’s started to wonder if she really did imagine it. Maybe it’s because Tim is struggling with his PTSD so badly that she’s begun to think she too should be waking up screaming, sweating. She pictures Ellie and Dr. Grant in their dusty trailer, sunburned and peeling, Ellie with the phone tucked between her shoulder and chin and Dr. Grant spooning Smuckers out of a glass jar. Digging tools and papers scattered across worktops, cowboy hats hanging from coat hooks. They’re okay. And if they’re okay, surely it’s alright that she’s okay?
“Ellie?” she asks, hesitant.
Mouth full, distracted: “Yeah?”
“Did InGen ask you to sign something? Saying that— that none of it happened?”
She expects a pause. Maybe a vague response, something polite-yet-firm about having to go and dust off some bones or turn off the stove. The click of a severed connection.
“Yeah, we signed the NDAs. Bastards. Sorry— I mean— did you? Surely they didn’t make you and Tim sign something?”
A smile works its way back onto Lex’s face. She doesn’t need more than this; she doesn’t need to get anybody in trouble. This is enough. “Yeah. It’s okay, though. Have you seen much of Dr. Malcolm?”
She calls him, too. Once again expecting polite disinterest, a scattering of excuses, “I’m sorry honey but I don’t have much time to talk right now, absolutely swamped at work.” Who wants to talk on the phone to a sixteen-year-old they barely know? Much less a sixteen-year-old connected to an event that almost killed them. But she finds Dr. Malcolm — “Lex, call me Ian for the love of God—” — not only happy to put her on speakerphone and chat for half an hour, but also, in his stop-and-start, fifty-mile-an-hour way of talking, unapologetically eager to throw slander on InGen and Ludlow and their, quote, “phalanx of bespoke morons”.
“Couldn't organize a bar fight in Boston. I mean, don’t get me wrong honey, I expected a few NDAs to make their way to me and Ellie and Alan, but to give them to kids? It’s just a prime example of how— no, Kelly, baby, don’t put sriracha on that, you’ll ruin the flavour.”
When they eventually hang up, Lex is inflated. She's calmed. And for a while, things seem to make sense.
And then, abruptly, they don't.
Here’s the thing: Lex adores her grandfather. She’s aware of his life accomplishments, of his intelligence and the achingly vast empire he built out of near-enough nothing — just as she’s aware of her own financial privilege, and that it can all be attributed to him — but he’s also been a soft old man for her entire life. To InGen and the world, he is a visionary genius (or madman, depending on who you ask). To Lex and Tim, he's just Grandpa. Leaning heavy on a cane, digging through his pockets for loose candy, a sweet old man. Even after the island. Lex isn’t sure how these things — these things being Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other such delights — are supposed to work, but she’s never been able to place a speck of blame on her grandfather for what happened. InGen? A little. Mother Nature, the Costa Rican climate, hurricanes in general? Sure. Gennaro, for leaving she and Tim alone at the foot of a T-Rex paddock? Maybe, but it's hard to hold a grudge on a dead man. But not her grandpa. All she can ever think is he didn’t know they’d escape. He hadn’t known that the weather would knock out the island’s power, he hadn’t known that any of it would happen. How could she blame him? She remembers the glint of joy in his eyes when he first showed her the picture of the baby T-Rex, the flush of pride in his cheeks: look at what I did! There’s no anger in her.
And then, suddenly, there is.
“It’s a hostile takeover.”
Her mom is drinking, slumped into the folds of a leather sofa at John’s home in San Diego. It’s almost one p.m. They started to arrive an hour ago. At the moment there are three of them, stiffly seated around the front entrance hall and talking amongst themselves. Lex recognises who they are by their sharp edges.
“What do you mean?” she asks her mother.
Laura is staring into the dregs of her wine. “Hostile takeover. They’re firing Grandpa.”
By the fireplace, Tim blanches. “Firing? How can they fire him, it’s his company?” He's a little louder than Lex would have liked. She thinks she sees one of the lawyers twitch an ear.
“He answers to a board, baby, and shareholders.”
Lex moves away from the door and sinks into her grandfather’s favourite armchair. “Why now?” she asks.
It takes their mother a long time to answer, which leads Lex to believe that she doesn’t really want to. But eventually she relents, under the persistent stares of her children, setting her glass down on a side table and sighing out through her nose. “They’ve been getting sued a lot, losing a lot of money. And the other day— some idiot family parked their stupid yacht on Isla Sorna, and I guess their kid was injured by some… I don’t know, by some little animals. Everybody’s up in arms over it, and Ludlow is using it as an excuse to strip Grandpa of his title as CEO.” She sniffs, and for a brief moment her features twist into something bitter and ugly. “I always told him they’d take it from him,” she murmurs, more to herself than anyone else. “It was never going to stay his flea circus, once they saw they could profit from it they were always—” She stops abruptly, clears her throat, and smiles. Dimly looks over at her daughter. “Why don’t you go take Grandpa a cup of tea, Lexie?”
As Lex heads toward the kitchen, she hears Tim: “What’s Isla Sorna?”
Lex finds her grandfather in his bed, propped against a wall of overstuffed pillows and gazing at nothing in particular. It alarms her, how small and still he is. Hands laid to rest on top of the sheets, bedside unit cluttered with old flowers and cards and sheets of pills. This isn’t John Hammond, she thinks, walking a cup of tea across the room. John Hammond is restless excitement and toothy grins, a man who would suggest a game of hide and seek in a house with three flights of stairs; a man who can’t even sit in an armchair without leaning half out of it, cane in hand should he feel the need to spring back up and chase Tim across the room. He seems…
Lost.
“Ahh, tea! The cure-all,” he smiles, and Lex finds it somehow even sadder. “Thank you, Lex.”
“It’s okay. How are you feeling?”
He brushes this off with a dismissive wave of one hand. “Right as rain, my dear, right as rain. What’s your mother up to? Has she polished off the Cabernet?”
“Second glass. I think she’s about half an hour from ringing my dad and complaining to him about the uh— about the people downstairs.” She smiles apologetically, and shifts to sit on the edge of the bed.
Her grandfather takes an unsteady sip of his drink and beams at her, even though she’s pretty sure she forgot to add sugar. “Perfect. Yes, well, your father is still her best friend, and she’s rather frustrated with all of this— even though I’ve told her not to worry herself about it all. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”
“What will happen now?” Lex asks him. It’s something she’s been wondering for a while now; with unfettered access to everything that her grandfather built, what will InGen do? Will they send people back to the island? Have they sent people already?
The ghost of a grimace passes across his face. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
She tries something else. “What’s Isla Sorna? I thought the island we went to was Isla Nublar.”
He looks at her. “Nothing for you to worry yourself about, sweet thing. It’s just another island that InGen owns. It’s nothing—” he falters, draws in an unsteady breath, and smiles at her again— “it’s nothing special.”
It’s November.
They’ve been staying at their grandpa’s house for some time now — with the exception of weekends, when Lex and Tim are driven to Palo Alto to stay with their dad — and things seem to be getting better. Tim’s stopped having nightmares. The therapist is slowly weaning him off his medication. Laura’s drinking only nosedives when Ludlow makes a house call; and even then Lex can’t really figure out who she’s mad at, because she and her cousin seem to be perfectly civil with one another. John is recovering from his illness — an unspecified, flu-like sickness — and slowly starting to seem like his former self. Lex is seventeen and looking at colleges. She thinks she’d like to do something with animals — small, herbivorous animals — or plants. She likes plants. Dr. Wu has actually created one of his own, a whole new species.
She hasn’t realised until now, but one of the unspoken mantras that has helped steer her through everything that happened after the incident on Isla Nublar, has been the reassurance that it wouldn’t happen again: a reassurance that she realises, after a long time, she never actually recieved from anyone but herself. At the age of twelve, thirteen, it had been an easy conclusion to reach. She didn’t need anybody to tell her, it was obvious! Grown ups don't make mistakes twice. Why would they continue to work with the dinosaurs, to put people around the dinosaurs, when so many people had died? She told herself that InGen — and her grandpa — would have obviously learned this lesson and shut the sites down, warned the Costa Rican government, dissuaded boats and planes from going anywhere near the island. She told herself, there’s islands out there that have never encountered modern technology, and the world’s governments have agreed to stay away from them. It’d be easy for InGen to do the same with Nublar. Somewhere down the line the this lie she told herself became warped in her memory, became something she thinks of as a promise made by her grandpa and InGen, maybe even Mr. Ludlow. They wouldn't go back. They won't send people back.
Dr. Malcolm is in her grandfather’s home.
“It’s so great to see you!” He’s all surprised smiles, a hug that crushes them both to his leather jacket. Lex is thrilled at the sight of him, and yet there's a growing warmth in her gut that tells her something is very wrong.
Tim, however, is ecstatic. “You came to see Grandpa?”
“Yeah, he called me— do you know what it’s about?” he asks, and then scoffs out a friendly laugh when they don’t immediately respond. “No, me neither. Is everything alright?”
“Well…” Lex wishes she could unload everything she's currently feeling, just to have him deny it. Just to feel the reassurance she felt when she called him after her sixteenth birthday. But she can already see them flocking down the staircase behind Ian; a cluster of lawyers in diamond formation, led by the imperial Mr. Ludlow. “Not really.”
They’re sending people back to the island. She understands that now.
Lex thinks it might not be so bad if they were sending the military, or the big game hunter she’s seen on the news recently— what’s his name? Roland something? It might not even be bad for someone like Mr. Ludlow to go, so that the people in charge of InGen can understand what they have worked so hard to lie to the world about. To make people like Lex and Tim suffer through alone. But they’re not sending people with big guns or big attitudes. She’s seen Sarah Harding, had lunch with her here at Grandpa’s house. She’s just like Ellie and Alan. She’s a nice lady, a scientist, just like them.
Tim’s nightmares start up again.
And Lex, after seeing Ian Malcolm move upstairs to visit John, and knowing that Sarah Harding was once his girlfriend, knowing why he’s been summoned to the family home, is finally angry with her grandfather.
It ends in disaster — she knew it would — and a family-funeral-come-press-conference to celebrate the ‘ambition and intellect’ of Peter Ludlow. Her grandpa is interviewed on the evening news. He talks about leaving the dinosaurs alone, about letting them live in peace in this wild habitat that he — and InGen — have gifted them, after ripping them from extinction and stuffing them into a world that doesn’t know how to deal with them. InGen forks out millions in damages. The truth of the island — the truth that Lex and Tim have been forced to swallow for almost five years — is finally aired.
Eventually, Tim’s nightmares will go away again. Lex will forgive her grandfather for sending Dr. Malcolm onto Isla Sorna. They’ll move on, and the incident on Nublar will become a strange anecdote that neither one of them will ever willingly bring up— although people will try, on occasion, to get them to tell “their side” of things, now that all the NDAs have been begrudgingly lifted. Tim will sometimes comment, but Lex declines. She finds that after suppressing it all for so long, she has nothing to say.
Six months after the T-Rex wreaked a Godzilla-style havoc over San Diego, the house phone rings.
“Lex!” Laura shouts, from somewhere downstairs. “It’s for you!”
It's four-thirty. Lex is finishing her homework, her mind on college applications and the Spring formal, and she reaches for her phone without pausing any of these lines of thought because if it's not one of her school friends then it's more than likely her dad. The Giants won to the Red Sox yesterday. “Hello?”
“Hi, Lex? Uh— okay so this is gonna sound weird, but this is Kelly Malcolm? I’m… Ian Malcolm is my dad?”
Lex blinks away her surprise, drops her pen into the spine of her textbook. “Oh, hi! How are you?” she asks, polite in the face of not knowing what else she should say.
“I’m uh— I’m okay, thanks. I was uh— ugh.” A beat. Someone on the other end of the line says something, and Kelly Malcolm huffs out a sigh. “Look, I know this is super lame, but I’ve been having kind of a weird time with stuff after nearly getting eaten by extinct animals, and my dad said I should maybe give you a call.”
Lex could laugh, both amused and delighted that Dr. Malcolm would suggest this, but she doesn’t want the girl to think she’s being mocked. “No, I totally get it,” she says. “I had a weird time, too. Are you in San Diego? Do you want to go get lunch sometime?”
There’s a brief scuffle, and Lex can only imagine that Dr. Malcolm has had his entire face crushed against the flat side of the phone up until this point because it sounds like he’s fighting his daughter for possession of it. After supposedly yanking it free of her grip, he replies on her behalf: “You know, Lex, she would absolutely love that. Are you free tomorrow? I have to run some errands, I can drop you both off at Seaport Village, pick you up a couple of hours later?”
This time she does laugh. “That’d be fine, Dr. Malcolm.”
In the background, she hears Kelly sigh out something that sounds like ‘think I’m a nutcase’.
“A nutcase? Baby, you think you had it bad?” Ian says, and for the briefest of panicked moments Lex thinks don’t do that, don’t devalue her feelings, and then she realises he’s teasing his daughter. “Princess, Lex and Tim got stuck in a meat freezer with two velociraptors. Huh? Yeah, just you wait— you can tell her all about how you—” a shuffle of movement— “kung-fu acrobat flipped your way outta that shed, and Lex is gonna tell you about how she tricked one of them into headbutting its own reflection. Plus, Seaport has a Ben & Jerry’s now. It’ll be fun, you’ll love it.”
It’s 2005. Lex lives in New York state. Grandpa is dead, and the last remnants of InGen are now a subsidiary of Masrani Global— about which Lex knows little and cares less, and hears about unwillingly through texts from Tim — THEYR OPENING A NEW PARK LOL — and annual Christmas cards from Dr. Wu.
There’s a growing sense of anxiety that comes with lack of knowledge, and Lex isn’t sure what to do with it. She can’t Google what Masrani is up to, it’s all a well-guarded secret, and the weight of her family name no longer opens the InGen-shaped doors it once did. Dr. Wu is politely taciturn in his cards. All she knows is that he’s working on something ‘exciting’, everything is exciting, your grandfather would be hugely excited about this.
She thinks this is where the anxiety spiral originates. When people put words and ideas into her grandfather’s post-mortem mouth, they’re usually doing something wildly stupid; something that he would not, in fact, be excited about.
The anxiety grows.
They’re opening a new park. She understands this now. People will be returning to Isla Sorna or Isla Nublar, whichever site Masrani has claimed for his playground, people will be going back to try and domesticate the dinosaurs. With little more to go on than this basic fact, Lex’s mind whirlwinds. She doesn’t sleep for a week.
She’s not sure who told Dr. Grant. It might have been Tim. All she knows is that she’s dosed with sleeping pills and when she wakes up, physically refreshed but no less anxious, Alan is in her living room.
“Lex!”
He hasn’t changed. Somehow both burned and tan, freckles on his forearms, dust in his hair; when he thrusts out a hand for Lex to shake it’s hard with callouses.
“Dr. Grant!” She shakes his hand and then hugs him. “What a nice surprise! Would you like a drink? Tea, coffee, juice?”
“No, no, I won’t trouble you. Just called in for a chat. I’m on my way to give a lecture at NYU, thought I’d call in and say hi.”
They sit in the sun, gazing out across the sweeping lawns of Poughkeepsie. Lex is soothed by his presence, and suspects he knows this, but the stress of what she wants to — needs to — ask him has her picking at the skin around her thumbnails— a habit she picked up when she was thirteen, and has never managed to drop.
“Lex,” Dr. Grant says, before she can summon the courage to speak, “has Simon Masrani been in contact with you?”
Lex blinks back her surprise. “No. Should I be expecting him to?”
“Possibly.” He rolls his shoulders, a kind of ‘it’s no big deal’ gesture. “They’re planning some big PR tour, they’ve called both Ellie and myself with invitations to some top secret event. Wouldn’t say what, but with the rumours in the news… doesn’t take much to put two and two together.” He huffs out a humourless laugh, gazes out at the distant lake.
Lex feels slightly sick. “Oh. He hasn’t, no.”
“Well, he might. Just be aware.” He looks at her, smile loose and friendly and — no mistaking it — apologetic. “Lex, you don’t even have to hear him out. You know that, right? You don’t have to even hear them out.”
“I just don’t understand how they can keep sending people back there,” Lex says quietly. Then, angrier: “And I don’t understand how people are idiotic enough to go.”
“I felt the same way for a long time,” Dr. Grant says, and in the warm glow of the morning sun he looks significantly calmer than Lex feels. “But then, once the ah— the trauma died down, I started to remember some of the earlier moments, before it all went to hell. Do you remember stepping off the helicopter and seeing the island in the grip of the sunrise? The Brachiosaurus, silhouetted like redwood trees? Lying with my head on the belly of the Triceratops. It’s all—” A beat. He seems to think for a long moment. “All that awe and wonder, it’s what people chase. It’s why they keep going back, it’s why they trick themselves into thinking that someone else has learned from the mistakes of the past. It’s what—” and here he slips sideways in his chair, so that he can lean an arm into the space between them and touch her hand— “it’s what your grandfather never lost. From the first park all the way back to the damn flea circus. People will do just about anything for that feeling.”
She knows. She understands. But what doesn’t understand is how so many people misinterpreted her grandfather. How many people who were close to him — Dr. Wu, for example — still think that he’d have been excited and proud of what InGen (and now Masrani) wanted to do with his work; how many people thought that his dream was to build Disneyland in Costa Rica.
“What do you think will happen?” she asks.
Dr. Grant toys with the brim of his hat. “He was— Masrani, I mean, he was full of all these reassurances. Wouldn’t tell me what the event was, but talked for a solid twenty minutes about security measures for guests.” He snorts, rolls his eyes.
“You think they’ve learned from InGen’s mistakes?”
Alan closes his eyes and shakes his head. “No, Lex. These people… learning from their mistakes means ‘try harder to make this work’, when it should mean ‘give up, it was never going to work’. That’s— that’s a concept, an understanding, that seems to have died with John.”
“Are you—” Lex begins, and then falters. “Are you or Ellie— or Dr. Malcolm— are you going? Have you accepted the invitation?”
It’s her biggest fear. That the people who helped get her through the trauma of her time on Isla Nublar would be the ones to go back. The ones who succumb to InGen — Masrani — idiocy. She knows Tim won’t go, or Kelly. But the others… she has no influence over them, she has no idea whether Masrani has managed to sweet talk them into believing that the place really is safe; that the past is immune to repeating itself.
To his credit, Dr. Grant doesn’t laugh in her face. But the smile he throws her way, whilst sitting up and fixing his hat back over dusty hair, seems to say ‘Lex. Come on now.’
“Lex, let me tell you something,” he says fondly. “These mistakes? That InGen and Masrani insist on making over and over again? They’re only made by people who’ve only seen the wonder of the islands: the sunrises, the herbivores moving through fields, the entirely-unbreachable fences around carnivore paddocks. Those of us who’ve experienced the truth of the place — the truth that, to paraphrase Dr. Malcolm, nature will always find a way to break through an electric fence — aren’t going back any time soon.” He pats her on the arm and rises to leave. “I can assure you, Lex, that no power on God’s green earth will get any of us back on that island.”
Lex breathes easy again.
It will end badly, it always does. Maybe this time they'll learn, and maybe they won't. The only thing she can tell herself is that the bigger this gets, the more money they throw at it, the more likely it is that someone with the power to shut it down will experience what she experienced; will finally understand what her grandfather tried so hard to show the world. That the dinosaurs aren't a fairground attraction. That if you let your child swim with sharks, you can't blame the sharks for the bloodbath.
And maybe, one day, InGen or Masrani or whoever, will learn from their mistakes and leave the place alone.