States of Motion

by Laura Hulthen Thomas

  Emily stored the sample in the sub-zero just inside the lab’s door, washed up, went to her desk in the last bay cut from the lab’s countertop. Out the window, the university’s unglamorous power-plant roof, a dense thicket of pipes and valves clustered around a chimney, blocked the view of the ivied graduate library and the heritage-brick dorms rimming the Ann Arbor campus. The Life Sciences Institute was a model of green efficiency, but when the power blinked off, the power plant kept the lights on as reliably as it had for a half-century. There had been talk recently of closing off parts of Life Sciences, mothballing whole corridors, abandoning the south wing. Fifteen years ago, the University of Michigan had driven deep stakes into biomedical research. Life Sciences coaxed top researchers to modern labs, encouraged risk, all but guaranteed reward. Now the Abel lab was a holdout in independent science’s losing war. Many labs had folded, the researchers absorbed into corporate labs. In hindsight, Life Sciences could be considered a reckless gamble with public funding, but who could have foreseen that an endless war on terror would divert the public’s fear of disease? The courage of conviction would soon be all that fed the Abel lab.

  Two bays down, Abel was speaking quietly into his phone. His daughter Amelia perched on a stool, coloring. Amelia, an epileptic, must have a medical appointment. Tom, one of the postdoc trainees, stood over Amelia, waited for Abel to end his phone conversation. Tom’s study of mesial-temporal-lobe epilepsy was personal to Abel, one he still insisted on funding out of the dwindling PTSD grant. Abel hoped to eradicate the need for lobectomy surgery on the worse cases so that Amelia would never be laid out in a white theater, swathed in blue surgical sheets, brain yawning to the theater’s chill.

  Temporal-lobe seizures were hard to detect. Until Amelia was three, Abel himself hadn’t spotted his daughter’s quiet recessions from motion and sensation, like being suspended in a wave’s backswing. Emily witnessed a seizure only once, when she picked Amelia up from daycare to help Abel out of a scheduling jam. She’d had Kurt and Kristin with her, so she decided to treat the kids to ice cream. She’d gone for more napkins to clean up the creamy rainbow streams the waffle cones wept in the heat. When she returned to the bench, her kids were ringing Amelia like a protective fence. Amelia was sitting stiff, expressionless, as if encased in a shell. Ice cream bubbled mildly from her lips. A lavender-and-pink slurry had pooled in her lap, soaking her sky-blue shorts.

  Did she turn into a doll, Mommy?

  Kristin had described Amelia’s transformation perfectly. The soul’s flight left behind waxen skin, stiff limbs, a doll’s lifeless eyes. When she’d come out of it, Amelia blinked and resumed lapping at the cone as if the moments had never been lost. She watched Emily mop the mess from her lap with a distant curiosity. After Emily’s shock calmed, she’d felt a jealousy at the easy erasure of time Amelia would never miss. Anything could be done to her during her release, and she’d have no memory of the damage, nothing at all to fear.

  Amelia offered Tom a blue crayon. Tom glanced impatiently at Abel. Back when Emily started her career at Worcester Polytech, before she had kids of her own and understood how impossible it was to staunch the bleed between work and family, she’d resented Cameron Jeffers’s domestic life spilling into the lab. A spat with his busy scientist wife over missed child responsibilities. The call from the kid himself, sick or stranded or otherwise marooned. Emily’s own family had bottled their emotions. She would never dream of calling her father at work. She’d never approach him with a problem at all, and her mother suffered from chronic sinusitis, the diagnosis her father preferred over suicidal drunk. But at her stage of life, divorced with two kids, midthirties, lodged between outgrown insecurity and middle-aged authority, Emily could easily join in Amelia’s drawing or wait out Abel, either course a natural one.

  Tom finally took the crayon and bent reluctantly over Amelia’s drawing. Kate, one of the undergraduate trainees, entered the lab carrying a parcel. Plain brown paper, twine gathered in a perfect square knot at the top. She slipped past Abel to hand the package to Emily. “This was delivered for you.”

  No shipping-company labels, no name on the package. Flat, a box the size of an egg skillet. For security reasons the lab didn’t accept unmarked packages. Not that the Abel lab drew the attention of extremists. Research on neuronal function and behavioral output was, for the mice’s welfare, uncontroversial compared to the oncology research she used to perform. The oncomice she’d made for the Jeffers lab were bred for tumor growth, engineered to be gruesome, perfect propaganda specimens for the animal-rights activists. The Abel lab’s transgenic mice were designed to lack behavioral genes, the animals more tool than subject. But Emily couldn’t ever again risk a breach. “You shouldn’t have accepted this. Who delivered it?”

  “I’m sorry. It was a woman.” Kate spoke as if women were a safe bet. “She was looking for a name on the building directory outside. On my way in, I asked if I could help her find someone. She said she was a friend of yours but didn’t want to disturb you. I thought it was OK to bring this up.”

  Abel snapped his phone shut, answered Tom’s question. Tom moved to the scope in the next bay. Abel looked over Amelia’s wave, look, Daddy, to rest a gaze on Emily. His long reliance on her to carry out his imagination’s practical applications had cultivated a shorthand sympathy between them. Emily had shared a version of this sympathy with Jeffers, but back then she’d been a promising researcher, still untested. Jeffers’s job was to test her, train her to move past her natural aptitude for discipline to invention’s messy play. She’d failed Jeffers’s test, all right. Abel had hired her not as a researcher with promise, but as a sidetracked career scientist who had chosen lab management for family reasons, or temperament. Not everyone was suited to the tedium of discovery or the funding chase. Abel respected what he assumed was her choice.

  When she proved her ability to anticipate the lab’s needs, their connection matured to signals. A glance caught her attention. A slight dip in her expression caught his. We’re better than married, he’d said last year after they’d managed a grant cancellation efficiently, as if bad news was merely another project launch. No layoffs, no interruption to the work, accomplished with no collateral tensions springing up between them, the managers of catastrophe.

  By the expression in Abel’s eyes now, Emily knew that the phone call had not concerned Amelia. She reassured Kate it was OK that she’d accepted the package and placed it on her desk. Kate moved to join Tom at the scope, took up the computer keyboard to record results. Abel stroked Amelia’s hair, great job honey, sit tight, pulled a stool to Emily’s side.

  “The DOD cancelled.” The next modest grant in their slim pipeline, the only grant in that pipeline after the current funding ran its course. “Tried to get through just now. They won’t even take my call.”

  “OK.” News she’d received so many times over that past year it was pointless to react.

  “How long?”

  He meant the budget, operations, staffing. She’d made all the cuts she could, and he knew it. “Operating as we are, a few weeks.”

  “We won’t hear from the CDC until January.”

  “I can’t tell you what you want to hear, Mike.”

  Abel tucked a finger into the palm of his other hand and made a fist around it, his nervous habit. She referred to it as holding his own hand. His black hair, speckled now with gray, curved at the temples. Narrowed blue eyes stared past her to the window, the billowing smokestack, the glittering cars on the road below, but he wasn’t seeing a thing at the moment. Emily waited. Behind Abel, Amelia crouched over her drawing. Six medication adjustments in two years. None had controlled Amelia’s seizures without also rendering her nearly catatonic.

  Abel was going to have to give up the temporal-lobe research. Emily thought through how much operational time this might buy, was startled to see Abel was again gazing at her as if he were the one waiting for Emily to finish brooding.

  Abel spoke before she could. �
��We’ll have to cut husbandry.”

  She’d faced last resorts before. The drastic never resulted in a long-term solution. “I’m not going to do that.”

  “We’ll have to trim anyway to make it through this round of results.”

  Cut. Trim. Euphemisms she couldn’t stomach even after years in the profession. “I’d rather explore alternatives.”

  “Like closing down?”

  “Like prioritizing what we get paid to do. Which at the moment is not epilepsy research, Mike.”

  Abel glanced back at Amelia. She was meticulously filling in her drawing’s blank spaces with a fiery-amber crayon. The picture could be a sunrise, or a ring of fire. He opened his fist, clamped it closed again. “If we euthanize half, how long can we hang on?”

  Managing death was her job, but for what ends mattered to Emily. Of course she’d made cuts before. For the Abel lab, when the downturn started, but that operation was small scale, one she could fulfill with the older mice who would die anyway within a week or two. For the Jeffers lab she’d had to perform large-scale euthanizing on rats, dogs, chimps that were too sick to offer for adoption. It was the one task she couldn’t view with the scientist’s detachment. She couldn’t help but feel she was betraying her subjects. The animals had given their bodies. She felt beholden to those bodies and the consciousness behind the eyes. What Abel was suggesting, and it would only be a suggestion for a few moments more, involved euthanizing the young. The choices of which subjects would live and which would die would have nothing to do with age or physical condition, everything to do with their queue in the research process.

  “Come on, Emily.” Abel met her gaze. She saw the determination she expected to see. She wished she could see regret.

  She also saw the results of the reduction as if the accounts were before her. “We could operate until January, yes.”

  “We’ve got a solid shot at the CDC funding.” Abel spoke as if he were confirming the plan’s success. He rose, walked back to his desk to help Amelia put on her coat. Amelia left her drawing to hug Emily, bye-bye Emmy. She returned the hug, drew in Amelia’s candied-apple aroma; missed, for a moment, her own daughter’s scent, an appalling strawberry-kiwi shampoo being the current stinky favorite. Amelia skipped away. Abel didn’t look at Emily as he swept Amelia up toward the door over her squeals that she was too big, Daddy. Abel’s avoidance was their rarest, and their most powerful, signal.

  The security latch on the lab door buzzed Abel into the hall. Emily stared blankly at the parcel she’d set out of the way. She took the package by the perfect knot, snipped the tweedy threads with scissors, tried to remember the last time she’d seen a package wrapped with twine.

  Inside an old Bering cigar box, wrapped in white tissue, was a glass vial capped with a rubber stopper filled to the rim with cherry-bright blood. Shaking, Emily set it aside carefully to unwrap the flat object nested underneath. She tore at the tissue, not careful now. A foam tray thudded on the desk. After all these years, the bones were still perfect. Bleached white, a meticulous design of scissoring limbs and curved rib cage. From the spiny feet’s angle, Emily saw that this frog wasn’t hers. She’d dissected Dinah’s, too. She’d arranged the legs differently so at a glance they could tell them apart. In eighth grade, Dinah was already squeamish about mutilating animals, no matter if they were long dead and reeking of formaldehyde and born, anyway, for the purpose of study.

  But for the first time in school, Emily felt drawn to explore. Running the scalpel down the belly, peeling back and pinning the skin, seeing that the organs were arranged exactly where she’d learned they would be, sparked a rush she’d later come to realize was joy. Dissection proved a death could be useful. Some harm in the world could make sense, was even for the good.

  Dinah, with her flair for deception, had received an A for that unit. Mr. Bartley had given Emily a B-plus although she’d prepared both frogs exactly the same.

  Emily flipped the tray over to confront Dinah’s handwriting, the offhand scrawl, the fat bellied a’s, the l’s loose loops, as if the lines existed only to corral the generous empty spaces.

  “What’s that?” Kate was leaning over her shoulder. Emily flipped the tray right side up.

  “Don’t you remember middle school biology?” Remarkable how she tamed the bobble in her voice. But the tray was shaking. Emily set it on the desk, folded her hands in her lap.

  “I never dissected a frog,” Kate said. “That’s cool.”

  “I had to bleach the bones.” Tears scarred her vision. “The teacher was very particular. It was a big part of the grade.” Of course Dinah wouldn’t record Bartley’s name. She never made a record of any man. She didn’t understand anything about Emily’s feelings for Bartley. The teacher was the first man she’d trusted after him. By then Dinah knew about him, although Emily had held back many details. She didn’t think Dinah would understand being trapped and doing what you were told without putting up a fight. Was she afraid that Dinah would say what she always said in answer to Emily’s surrenders? You’re so provincial, Em. Or maybe she’d been afraid Dinah would make an altogether different statement. You were raped. A confirmation of one thing, a denial of another, neither of which felt like the truth.

  “Well, you did a good job.” Something in Emily’s voice must have betrayed her. Kate’s tone was a tentative approval. “I didn’t dissect anything until high school. The fetal pig. So gross. But, some part of me must have liked it. Because here I am.”

  Emily wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “What did she look like?” She almost added, now.

  “Who?”

  “The woman who gave you this.”

  “About my height, long dark hair. Kind of heavy. Your age. But pretty. She had her head covered. One of those bright cashmere scarves with the paisley squiggles.”

  Your age. But pretty. “What did she say?”

  “Not much. Just asked me to put this in your hand. She said it like that. Put this in her hand. She had a funny way of speaking. Kind of formal. I asked if she wanted to see you. But she said no. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about security or anything.”

  “It’s OK.” But the thought of Dinah so close to the lab was terrifying. “Did you see where she went?”

  “No. God, is that blood?” Kate snatched up the vial, popped the stopper. The blood wobbled. A fake-cherry scent trickled into the air. Kate pressed a finger to the filmy surface. “Jell-O. Weird. Some sense of humor, right?”

  Emily didn’t answer. The last time she’d seen Dinah was in Moynagh’s, a bar near the Worcester campus, over whiskey shots. Several days had passed since Dinah had broken into the Jeffers lab with Emily’s ID. Emily was promptly fired, a consequence Dinah may not have yet known in the tumultuous wake of her organization’s so-called rescue operation. Emily was determined to be civil. The damage done, Emily simply wanted to know why Dinah had used her when she could have found another way. For resourceful Dinah, there was always another way. She must have wanted to send Emily a message, teach a lesson, pay her back. When Emily asked point-blank and Dinah started in about animal rights and liberation, it dawned on Emily that she and her goons had not taken the animals to a safe house, as she’d assumed, but had released them in a field on the outskirts of town.

  Freed them to die.

  She’d said it aloud, sick on whiskey and the thought of her hobbled subjects, some with advanced-stage tumors for God’s sake, abandoned to the wild. When Dinah looked at her with incredulity, you know you have killed them already, Emily’s old feelings about Bartley flooded back.

  How could you fuck him?

  Dinah had met her fury with disbelief. Then she’d laughed. When Bartley was transferred to teach advanced-placement biology their senior year of high school, Dinah had slept with him and made certain Emily knew. During their affair, Bartley’s passionate attention to Emily’s scientific aptitude blinked out. Dinah ruined her belief that men who could be trusted around girls did exist.

 
The man. Not the animals. This is what upsets you. Dinah approved of her outburst, as if putting the man first was—finally!—a show of gumption.

  Emily still felt stupid for blowing up over Bartley that day, who hadn’t mattered at all, or so Emily had trained herself to believe.

  Kate handed Emily the vial and returned to the scope. Emily wrapped the tray up carefully, pulled the cigar box toward her. Saw the note there, not folded, the loose handwriting plainly in sight. She wondered how she’d missed it.

  Release them.

  The words could be merely a reference to Dinah’s goons. “Release” was her organization’s name. But the note could be a warning. Emily stood up and quickly retraced her steps to the atrium walkway. Dinah couldn’t invade this lab, no way. In the years since the Jeffers stunt and similar high-profile incursions, security had become every lab’s top priority. But Emily had to view any word from Dinah as a threat. She took the elevator down to the basement, scouted the corridors around husbandry. Asked the techs she met if they’d spotted anyone unauthorized, felt an absurd impulse to laugh at the word. Then a conviction seized her, that at the moment she’d gazed at the traffic’s brilliant snarl while carrying the mouse brain, Dinah was huddled with the smokers, wrapped in her bright scarf, willing Emily to see her.

  Emily took the elevator up to the lobby, emerged into the great glass atrium feeling foolish and angry that Dinah would, as always, drag Emily out into the open. Of course she wouldn’t still be on the street. It was all a tease, the bones, the Jell-O, the words that were half-command, half-taunt. Release them. Had nothing changed in all this time?

  Nothing had. There Dinah stood on the other side of the glass, breath frosting from her bright scarf, loitering patiently in the cold as if Emily were only running a few minutes late.

  In the café at the north end of the atrium lobby Dinah sat silently across from Emily sipping a watery herbal tea. The young man behind the counter knew Emily, asked her if she wanted the usual, didn’t identify what the usual was. Emily had refused to order. Making the statement about not breaking bread with a traitor.