States of Motion

by Laura Hulthen Thomas

  “You didn’t need the theatrics. Those stupid old bones.”

  For all her reserve, Emily never could stand silence between them. That much hadn’t changed. Dinah knew the Jell-O and the note would make her furious. Emily needed to be picked at like a stubborn scab. You had to carve chinks in her so real feelings could seep in.

  But she had thought Emily would like the bones. “The frog wasn’t for show.”

  “You put Kate in a terrible position.”

  “Kate?”

  “The young woman you used. Our postdoc.”

  “She approached me, Em. She offered to take it.” No need to point out how lax security could be, how easy it was to insinuate into any place. Dinah took another inventory. Emily looked happy, she’d bloomed. Her fragility had toughened, she had meat on her bones, she smiled now. She’d grinned all right when she caught sight of Dinah through the glass, grinned with joy until she swallowed her reaction, adopted the shock and caution she assumed Dinah would expect from her. The flash of brightness made Dinah wonder if she was no longer so angry, which would defeat the purpose of this visit.

  “Release them? Is that some kind of threat?”

  “That was the theatrical part.”

  “Some stunt. If you know where I work, you also know where I live. I’m in the damn phone book.”

  “This is a beautiful space.” Dinah set down her cup, looked over Emily’s shoulder at the glass lobby. The brittle winter sun reflected harshly on the directory kiosk and chrome waste cans. A crew was setting up tables for some sort of event. Emily flinched when a metal chair leg scraped the tile. The squeal shrieked into the atrium, lingered in the vast ceiling. “So much light and air. Is your lab also so open, so humane?”

  “Why wouldn’t you just call me, Dinah?”

  “Do you remember how gloomy your Worcester lab was? Those wicked basement cages. I remember thinking you could feel comfortable there, hidden away. But it was a stepping stone after all, or else things have changed a lot, your people are letting the light in now.”

  “Disrupting research isn’t exactly letting the light in.”

  “There is still something in you that doesn’t want to find an alternative to killing, Emily.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you in the building.” Emily glanced at the security guard standing at the building’s entrance. When she admitted Dinah into the lobby, the guard had swept them both with a practiced scrutiny as tactile as a pat-down.

  Dinah set aside the tea, it was too hot, too gingered, laced with a bitter aftertaste like the root’s bark had snuck in with the tea leaves. Behind Emily the crew was setting up a podium. A tech wrestled a microphone with a testy stand. The tripod splayed out no matter how he positioned it. “What’s the occasion?” Dinah nodded at the tables, now draped in flowing white skirts. The banquet crew was setting out water glasses, rims pressed to the cloth.

  “Did you appear out of thin air to ask me about the evening’s entertainment?”

  Furious, but curiosity lurked behind the exasperation. Emily would never kick her out until she found out the reason for dumping those bones on her. For Dinah, why was the least interesting part of any endeavor. Why got in the way of taking action. “I’m just asking, Emily, that’s all, it looks so fancy.”

  “It’s a hospital benefit for Alzheimer’s treatments our lab developed. Care to donate?”

  “You must be proud of that work.”

  “Cut the bullshit. What are you doing here?”

  “You know I am up to no good, Em. Why not alert the guard?”

  There it was, a chink. Emily almost smiled. “Would Nan have any reason to kick you out?”

  “Are you curious to find out?”

  Emily’s smile flattened. “Something wrong with your tea?”

  “Not a thing.” Dinah smiled. “It’s delicious.”

  Emily sat back, waited her out. Dinah kept the silence. Emily would be expecting her to ask about her life, a husband, children, her mother and father; but, too, would not be surprised to know that Dinah had learned of her divorce, the ages of her children, the dates her parents had passed, and exactly when she’d joined Abel after staying out of the field for years.

  The tech succeeded in propping the microphone on the portable stage and murmured, “Check.” He motioned to an elderly woman waiting at the riser, elegantly dressed in a black pantsuit with a maroon scarf knotted at her throat. A man in military dress uniform escorted her tenderly to the microphone. The tables gleamed with silverware and china. Dinah felt the heat rise under the coat she’d kept on to hide her weight gain from Em. She looked old and fat, felt old and fat. Emily hadn’t changed. Timid Emily, not tentative at all when it came to killing. It was like that, Dinah had found. Those committed to cruel acts preserved their zeal and devotion, while those out to stop them burned out. But the moral was never ascendant, this was natural law. Being moral must mean going against some instinct of self-preservation, she’d decided. Dinah arranged her expression, keep it neutral, keep it friendly. The heat of the day Emily had shot at that asshole came back. Who would think Em of all people would lug that old war trophy clear across town to take a wild shot at him? Then shoot that can clean off old Socks’s back as calmly as swiping a gnat?

  The elderly woman grasped the microphone’s round head. A shrill electronic screech grated and faded. The military man—her son?—removed her hand gently. She looked at him, her lack of recognition translating as utter fear. “What am I supposed to say?” Her amplified plea echoed through the atrium.

  “I’m going to speak, remember?” The soldier-son meant to soothe, but his low voice rumbled harshly through the speakers. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  The dress rehearsal wasn’t going very well, then. Emily was struggling to ignore the booming voices, her effort so familiar in her tensing shoulders, the way she had of shrinking into herself. Dinah felt the old urge to take her hand, pull her out into the open. “So Alzheimer’s is your life’s work now?”

  “Was.” Emily was watching the soldier-son pat his mother on the shoulder. “I’m studying the fear response now.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re researching PTSD treatments.”

  “But what am I supposed to say?” the woman cried into the microphone.

  “You’re doing great, just great.” The man nudged her away from the mic stand. The feedback whined, fell silent. Emily clenched her hands on the table.

  Dinah said, “Fear is suppressed anger, Em. You of all people know this.”

  Emily unclasped her hands. “It’s the other way around, actually. But there’s a bit more to it than glib psychology, Dinah.”

  Her voice was calm, Emily-prim, but she wasn’t even attempting to hide her fury, never could. But Dinah hadn’t sought her out to pick at the same old scabs. No more underground, no more useless symbolic rescues, no more bullshit.

  “You want another shot, Em?”

  “I don’t drink anymore.”

  Dinah laughed. “At him.”

  Emily froze, her expression blank, her old slipping away. That’s how she remained merciless, by this brief flight of her soul.

  After she left—fled—Dinah, Emily drove home to cower in her bathroom, retch into the toilet. When they returned home from school, Kristin and Kurt hovered outside the door, tentative. Their mother was never ill. When she emerged, they were fearful, unbearably clingy. She was helpless to fix dinner, tuck them into bed. She couldn’t even touch them, for God’s sake. Was some revulsion toward her children lurking deep in her that he could surface? She finally called Collin to take them for a few days, didn’t tell him why. The good-bye hugs felt like welts on her skin.

  He was the first thing she’d checked before moving back to Michigan from Worcester. He moved away years ago, her still-clueless father had told her. His house had been razed for a new subdivision.

  What happened to the bees? Her question popped out, as if the insects were what mattered.

 
Her father didn’t remember that his friend had kept bees.

  At the time, she’d convinced herself that his erasure was some justice, some safety. Now his return was an intent to finish with her. If he had returned, if this wasn’t another of Dinah’s games. Something catastrophic was turning inside of her, a compulsion to call Dinah’s bluff. Their friendship had always held a sadistic undertow that Emily both hated and craved. After two days battling sickness and a baffling feeling of shame, whatever impulse drove Emily to punch in the number Dinah had given her, it wasn’t trust in her motives.

  Dinah picked her up in a rusted silver Jetta. The engine growled on the idle like a complaint. They spent the brief drive in silence. When Dinah pulled up to the Asian grocery store in the slummy part of town, a cramped market where Emily often shopped, Emily stared at her. “Why did we come here?”

  “He lives here.” Dinah pointed to the second floor. Burred cedar shingles dangled from the battered siding. The landing of an old iron fire escape clung precariously to a cracked window. Traces of that morning’s frost still dusted the sill.

  “That’s not possible. There’s no apartment.” Ang’s shop was a cherished local secret, tucked away in this run-down residential neighborhood south of campus. The block building was a rude outcropping on a three-sided curb, as if tossed by accident onto a street of rented bungalows and subdivided Queen Annes. Before the recession, the shop was a tea house for the Russian and Eastern European immigrants seeking work with the university and a peaceful life on a quiet tree-lined street. Now the neighborhood housed Asian university students destined to take their education back home. Ang’s was the transient community’s bedrock. Emily bought star anise and the rice threads the kids loved here. She’d never even noticed the upper floor. If she had, she’d have assumed the space was storage for the shop.

  “Apartment is a loose term, but yes.”

  Emily studied the second floor window. No shades, no sign of life. The glass pane reflected the sun back to her, shimmering and fierce. “How long?”

  Dinah maneuvered to the curb between a rusty pickup and a Buick missing a wheel. Ang’s triangular lot didn’t have room for parking. Dinah pulled in too tight, rolled up on the curb. Emily felt the lurch as another wave of illness. “I didn’t ask.”

  “You’ve been … in there?”

  Dinah cut the engine. The winding street was deserted, a midday calm. Across from the Jetta, a power line sagged from the listing poles like a playground jump rope. How could Emily have failed to sense him? That she could have run into him anytime on this street made her shudder. More troubling was the thought that she had seen him and hadn’t recognized him. That he would no longer be a familiar, after she’d held such terror of him for so long, was unthinkable.

  “I befriended his sister, she leaves him in my care sometimes.”

  “He has a sister? How can he have a sister and—” And do what he did to me? But she couldn’t say it aloud. Was this woman a monster, had she belittled him, abused him, made him hate young girls? Or was it Emily who’d been different, nothing at all like the sister he loved?

  “He’s got a sister. He had a mom and dad. He got married and divorced. He moved to Indianapolis, became a teacher of industrial arts. He has lived an ordinary life.” Emily leaned against the passenger door. Dinah added gently, “Nothing about him has ever been extraordinary, Em.”

  “Except what he did to me.” Emily covered her mouth with her hand, swallowed hard against the nausea. “You wouldn’t call that extraordinary?”

  Dinah reached for her hand. “Yes, dear. I would.”

  They held on for a moment in the old way. Palms pressed tightly, fingers curled to form one fist. How many times had they clasped hands while running through fields or horsing around on the playground? Such easy contact then. This habit lasted into adulthood. As late as Worcester, just before the Jeffers raid when Dinah had appeared on her doorstep, she’d taken Dinah to the seaside thinking the ocean would help soothe her latest heartbreak. They held hands on the beach, shared whiskey straight from the bottle. Emily had wondered then why they weren’t lovers, and then chalked up her wonder to her usual confusion of affection with sex. He’d conditioned her to experience any touch as sexual. On the beach, with the waves caressing their ankles, their toes girlishly painted pink and tucked into the soft sand, Emily knew that if Dinah meant them to be lovers, they would be. Drunk on whiskey and the thin salty air, Emily didn’t trust herself to question what she wanted.

  But that day on the beach had proven to be the usual bullshit, Dinah’s broken heart a ruse to steal her lab ID. This sudden appearance out of thin air, too, must be a lie. He must be a ruse. Emily would always be an operation to Dinah, had been since the days Dinah had used her to earn her grades, fuck her favorite teacher, invade her lab, destroy her career.

  Emily yanked her hand away. “Why are you really here?”

  “The single time I hold pure motives, you think to ask this question?”

  “You’re a liar. He doesn’t even live here, he can’t.”

  A woman holding a plastic bag pushed open Ang’s door. Chopped spiky hair, a nose ring studded with steel beads the size of ball bearings, flowing leather coat. Green shoots poked from the top of the bag, scallions and chives. During the day, Ang’s attracted the alternative set. Emily shopped in the evening, when the Asian students stopped by the market to gather the evening meal.

  Dinah caught Emily’s brief stare at the nose ring. “You’re still so provincial, Em.”

  “Fuck you, Dinah. Take me home.”

  Dinah gave her that appraising look. Approval, affection, like Emily was rising to a dare. Emily still couldn’t read her. Under the bright scarf, her gray hair tumbled to her shoulders. A yellow undercoat shadowed her skin. Dark pouches rimmed her eyes. Age and fatigue only highlighted her loveliness but the old ferocity still made her beauty a deterrent.

  “I don’t mean that as an insult. You’re reliable, Em. Consistent. I must turn to you when I need someone. After all this time, I still have only you.”

  “When you need someone to fucking use. What is it this time?”

  “This time, it’s him. I owe you another shot.”

  “Got a gun?”

  That snide smugness. She’d think she was calling Dinah’s bluff. Dinah stared out the window at the nose-ring. Just the type of woman Emily would stare at, someone with the guts to display who she was. But poke Emily and she’d shake off her conventions, this Dinah could count on. After the Jeffers operation, she’d gone bonkers in that bar. Yelled at Dinah for fucking Bartley, as if the lab raid didn’t matter at all. I told him all about the frog, Emily had cried. I told him you were a cheat. This ridiculous outburst had summoned the fat bartender to throw them out. Dinah hushed him with a stiff tip. There’s no one even in here, she’d told the man. The tweed-and-elbow-patches scanning student papers over spectacles and a Bloody Mary looked up then. The two utility guys in blue canvas jumpsuits drained their ale, studied Emily curiously as they passed the women, break over, back on the job. Typical Yanks surrounded by Yank bar kitsch. The bar made from Babe Ruth’s bowling lane, polished, glowing in the gloom. Colonial blacksmith tools sharing the walls with cheap mirrored Samuel Adams ads. What did Emily see in these dark places, her labs and bars with their patriarchal bullshit? For a girl who mistrusted men, Emily sure barricaded herself with them.

  Emily could have turned Dinah in to the police after she stormed out of Moynagh’s, but she hadn’t. By keeping quiet, Emily ensured that the raid was Dinah’s first and best success, the one that had made Release a movement. Emily would think Dinah owed her for the break-in, but the real debt lay in her silence. In the bar that afternoon, Dinah could have revealed they’d only released the animals who couldn’t be saved, filmed the least-gruesome subjects vanishing into the tall grass and wildflowers for a recruitment video. The rest she’d delivered to animal care experts. When Emily had cried out released them to die, Dinah should have reassur
ed her that only a few met with that fate, but fuck it, Emily was the one who’d mutilated them. She didn’t deserve, did she, to know what was only for show?

  Seeing Emily now, shrinking against the passenger door, clenching her hands together, Dinah still didn’t regret the omission. Emily’s fear had always struck Dinah as artificial.

  The nose-ring walked to the rusted pickup parked in front of Dinah’s sedan. She glanced at Emily through the glass before stepping quickly up into the cab. In this temporary neighborhood of strangers, everyone earned a quick glance, a hurried avoidance. Unpunished crimes could languish here. Secrets could wither away into past lives. But forgetting was not forgiveness. “What if I did have a gun? Would you use it, or forgive him this time?”

  “Take me home.”

  “Get out, then. Call a fucking cab.”

  Emily didn’t answer. The pickup pulled away from the curb. When the motor faded, Dinah said, “What happened to you was meant to shape your genius and your compassion. You maim and kill animals for pleasure, for authority. You were meant to be better.”

  Emily said, “I hate you.” Childish, to believe those words would hurt.

  Because this belief would make Emily expect it, Dinah replied, “I hate you, too. I really always have.”

  Dinah opened the car door, slipped outside into the cold. She wrapped her scarf around her hair before heading around the back of Ang’s store. Emily caught up to her at the cheap plywood door behind a row of dented aluminum trash cans. She meant to have it out with Dinah, say everything she should have said in Moynagh’s. But Dinah slipped through the door into a cramped foyer, where a raised voice could bring anyone to witness. Later Emily would wonder whether she’d followed Dinah in silence because she needed to matter to him again, or maybe she was lonelier than she would admit.

  The foyer was freezing. Wind whistled through cracks in the doorjamb and siding. Black scuff marks slashed the cheap white tile. His name was written on a smudged paper scrap stuffed crookedly in a mailbox name-slot. Bill White. Ordinary, a name of no significance. A flyer from the local Kroger flapped in the mailbox’s lip. Someone had bothered to find this door, stick an ad in this solitary box. A phone book, still shrink-wrapped, lay on the floor below the box. He had no use for a community of names.