States of Motion

by Laura Hulthen Thomas

Down the hallway a light burned. Her mother’s bedroom door was closed. Emily rapped lightly. “Mom.” Cracked the door to see a mound of blankets burying her on that bright warm day. The sunglasses stood rickety on uneven earpieces as if she’d bent them on her way to her room. A bottle of pills to treat her sinuses lay empty on its side near the lamp. One of her hard stuff bottles stood next to the pillbox, the cap screwed on neatly. Beer was all her father ever drank. He left the hard stuff to my lovely wife, he always said. Emily could never tell whether he was joking or not. Her mother kept her bottles in her nightstand, some in her sewing cabinet, never in the kitchen. Emily wondered if her dad knew how often her mother replaced those bottles.

  Her mother must have gone to sleep to escape the news of her daughter’s defilement, a word Emily had read in a tale. A heaviness in the air, the sour scent of resting up before facing the truth, but whom would she confront upon awakening, him or her daughter?

  Anyway her mother wasn’t going to be a hero.

  The first order of business was to fill the water dispenser and carry the rabbit to the garage. No animals in the house. After the hamster died that became the new rule. She slid the cage on a low shelf tucked in dust and gloom. When her father pulled into the garage, his fender would graze the bars, hide the animal from view.

  Then back to the ants to await her mother’s awakening.

  Not only did her mother survive his visit that day, he never even confessed; but the blistering memory of her mother’s deep sleep made hard and fast truth out of childish supposition. Such news would make any mother want to kill herself, Emily reasoned. Sometimes heroes did that, absolved the family dishonor by taking their own life. It was how Emily forgave her mother for not shooting him dead. The real truth was that her mother had already swallowed those pills when he came to the door. He’d interrupted her long slumber, not caused it.

  For years, Emily thought her father’s desperate attempts to awaken her mother when he found her that evening, his frantic call for an ambulance, her mother’s confinement to her bed for weeks after she came home, proved he’d told. When her father yelled at her, why didn’t you call for help? Emily thought immediately of how hard and sudden he had grabbed her in the furnace room. I couldn’t, she tried to explain, which made her father furious. She understood his rage, shared it, even. Couldn’t she have gotten away somehow before he knocked her to the concrete floor and it was too late? But her father was forgetting that no one had been home, so what difference would her struggle have made? At the time it didn’t occur to her that her father meant, help your mother. Emily assumed that by then her mother had told her father about the defilement, that they were all dancing around the same unspeakable thing.

  As the weeks dragged on and her parents never mentioned him, Emily never dreamed of bringing him up. It was about that time that she approached Officer Friendly in school when he was warning the class about drug danger. Officer Friendly called his talk D.A.R.E., which to Emily sounded more like an invitation than deterrence. She didn’t make herself at all clear. She mixed up the telling of him with how he’d then tried to kill her mother. When the officer looked concerned, Emily’s teacher stepped forward. Suicide attempt. Everyone in the class could hear her stage whisper. Officer Friendly patted Emily’s shoulder kindly, embarrassed for her. Not that Officer Friendly’s reaction mattered, not really. What worried her wasn’t justice, just keeping him away.

  One last faith, that if she fed the bunny exactly as he’d instructed, the rabbit’s health would ward him off. During her mother’s hospital stay, when Emily was left alone in the house for him to come for her any time he pleased, she loaded the cage with all of the vegetables she hated. Limp salads pickled in vinegar, mushy cooked carrots, slippery canned green beans. She fed it sweets, too, bits of fudge and cookies. The rabbit’s belly bulged. It forged guarded, knowing black eyes and a sly way of moving as if anxious for the day it would outgrow the cage and return to the wild. Emily never knew if it was male or female. Did she know how to check at her age? Of course she knew. She must have refused to learn the sex, and she’d forgotten he had called it her.

  Why didn’t she release the monster in the yard before her father discovered it? When Emily came out to feed it one evening, her father had set the cage on the station wagon’s hood. By then the enormous belly pressed through the bars. The rabbit’s eyes were narrow and short-sighted from the chronic gloom. The orange light from the dusty garage window startled it. It shied from the sun, pressed its flab tight into the cage’s corner. “Where did it come from, Emily?”

  Emily told. Waited for his reaction at being reminded of all the trouble. Did Dad blame him or Emily for her mother’s condition? Well, now the rabbit was the charm to find out.

  “How thoughtful of him.” Her dad smiled, the first pleasure she’d seen in weeks, months really. Not since her mother had pointed the Mauser at him and he’d laughed. “I didn’t know he’d been by. Too bad we’ve been out of touch. A pet will be a nice plaything for you, won’t it?”

  She nodded. Except how was a rabbit supposed to play? But she didn’t say this out loud.

  Her father gave her the uneasy look he’d been casting at her lately, like he wished he didn’t have to talk to her at all. “Your mother’s illness is hard, isn’t it, sweetheart.” He said this like a fact, not a question she was expected to answer.

  She did anyway. She allowed as how it wasn’t all that hard because her mother slept so much.

  Her father disapproved of her attitude. She could tell because he petted the bunny’s floppy belly through the bars instead of petting her. She wanted to scream, don’t give me away, because what else could his pleasure mean at his gift?

  “I hope you said thank you.”

  She curled her fists at her hips. At least she didn’t have to lie about that.

  “I’ll build your bunny a cage out back, honey. Animals need light, a roomy place to live. You shouldn’t have put it in the garage. They’re like us, Em, OK? Animals need what we need. The basics, anyway. Understand?”

  She did understand.

  Her father scratched the rabbit on the silken crown, rubbed a finger between its dim crafty eyes. “After your mother is all better we’ll give a call, invite him over to dinner. Thank him properly for thinking of you.”

  That was how a timeline was established for his return.

  The magical notion that keeping the bunny fat was her warding charm vanished with her father’s pledge. Emily stopped feeding the rabbit. The animal’s slimming took longer than she imagined. After a week it was still huge. It drank greedily when Emily filled the water dispenser. It butted its crown against her palm, licked at the sweat and dirt between her fingers. The longer the bunny kept its fat, the more affection Emily came to feel for it. Because it didn’t change appearance, it couldn’t be in pain, she reasoned. Its refusal to suffer was a show of loyalty.

  Or a sign that her fear of him would never show.

  Her father’s pledge to invite him back meant her parents had decided to restore her honor by giving her away, like a village girl to the bandit who’d defiled her. Would they braid her hair with flowers, dress her in white, parade her through town as if the arrangement were a wedding, not a sacrifice? Her mother’s suicide attempt was a necessary response to the field of battle. No one would blame Emily directly for her mother’s enduring despair. But giving her to him was an atonement that made sense.

  That these assumptions were fantastical and irrational, that such cruelty contradicted her parents’ competent, if sadly distant, treatment of her, never crossed Emily’s mind. The imagination she possessed. The fear she carried. The tale she spun of the village girl and the bandit, handsome to all the world, his villainy shown only to her, was a way to cope with impulses she didn’t understand. Crushing the ants. Starving the bunny. Her missing appetite for food, for friendships, for the normal passions other girls her age were pursuing with clumsy single-minded quests for affection. A hero was her last hop
e, but no way would he show up in time.

  One sweltering day, it must have been late June, Emily climbed the attic stairs to rummage through some boxes. What had she been looking for? She couldn’t recall anything being worth enough to her that summer to leak sweat, dizzy and disoriented, in the dismal heat. She must have gone after some long-forgotten obsession, a little-girl doll she suddenly wanted to play with again, a book she wanted to reread. She found instead a box marked Eagle’s Nest. Inside was a photograph of her grandfather sipping wine on a marble terrace, a lead-gray sky blending with the mountains behind a caramel-brick chalet. Grandpa had bright-blue eyes, but the black-and-white photo erased their color, made everything in the photo look like stone. He was squinting at the camera the way he used to squint at Emily before he died. Angry and scared, warding her off as if she’d caused his stroke. Her mother explained Grandpa didn’t mean to look that way, he didn’t even recognize Emily anymore. The wine glass in the photo was still full. She flipped it over. Damn fool Hitler’s damn fool wine 1945 was scrawled on the back.

  From a wad of yellowed tissue paper Emily pulled a red marble chunk, dull as old blood. Folded neatly underneath the marble were two satin dresses dimpled with stains. The hems rustled on the pine floor when Emily held them up to her shoulders. In the pale light of the bulb dangling from the ceiling, the crimson and lavender silk shone like wildflowers.

  She set the dresses aside and pulled out a thick handkerchief. Wrapped inside she found five cigar-sized torpedoes capped with steel. Maybe they were toys, since real torpedoes were enormous. The close, dusty air was getting to her. Her sweat dripped onto the crimson dress draped over her bare toes. She wiped her neck with the bodice and took out another tissue-wrapped packet. More photos, but the paper was sturdier than photographic paper and the pictures on the cards were larger than Grandpa’s snapshots. One showed Hitler with his head squished between a naked woman’s fat, round breasts. In another, Hitler’s stern salute collided with the mud-brown saucers ringing a woman’s nipples. The women’s arms were draped around Hitler’s neck. Their wide-mouthed hungry grins leered down on his greasy, tousled hair. Why was Hitler dressed in uniform when the women were naked? But he hadn’t undressed either, with Emily. He’d torn off her sweatpants and unders, scrunched her shirt around her neck to choke her. All he’d done to his own clothes was tear open his belt and unzip his jeans.

  More cards, decorated with foreign words. One cartoon was split into two panels. In the left panel a tired soldier hunched behind barbed wire. The bodies of fallen soldiers hung limply from the tented wire fence. In the right panel a naked woman in a fancy room brandished a champagne glass and snuggled on a man’s lap. Outside the window behind her nude shoulder, the Eiffel Tower’s black skeleton shone starkly on the white paper. On the table next to the armchair was a photo of the tired soldier in ordinary clothes kissing the woman. The man she was snuggling with now wore ordinary clothes. He’d wedged his hand between the woman’s spread legs. The woman’s lips curved around the champagne glass as if she were enjoying her drink and that hand didn’t hurt a bit, but Emily thought she saw pain in the woman’s flat inked eyes.

  Emily thumbed through the drawings. Soldiers with naked women flung over their shoulders like sacks. Soldiers bumping into naked women from behind, the women bent double to the ground. Black soldiers squeezing fat white breasts. Foreign words unfurled like triumphant banners over the scenes, showy script, fancy exclamation points. Warnings or celebrations? Impossible to tell.

  The last card showed a pretty village girl framed by plump blond braids. She was lying on her belly, elbows propped under her chin, dainty slippers crossed at the ankles, a daisy stem tucked in her smiling lips. Behind her stretched a field thick with wildflowers and grass. Above her unfolded a clear, empty sky. The girl’s expression was peaceful, happy in that daydreamy way, maybe because she was the only girl in the bunch with her clothes still on. But what was she dreaming about? The empty sky offered no clue. Emily rubbed at a smudge above the girl’s head. Held the drawing up to the bare light bulb to inspect the dirt. Smack dab in the blank empty sky the ferocious snarl of a soldier grinding on top of the girl jumped out at Emily. His hairy, muscle-roped hands choked the girl’s white neck. Her pretty dress was torn to shreds. The plump braids flopped into her gaping mouth. Her legs wrenched like broken toothpicks under the soldier’s thrusting. The daisy she’d been chewing on lay crushed beneath her arm.

  Emily cried out and dropped the card. The soldier and the suffering girl winked out of sight. The village girl was alone again with her happy dreams and the wide empty sky. Her defilement lurked above her, hiding in wait for the next ray of light.

  Emily fought back tears. Why did Grandpa have these wicked, dirty cartoons? Had he fought the Germans to rescue these poor women?

  She laid the cards next to the toy torpedoes. The steel tips gleamed in the dim light. The rafters creaked in the heat. A moldy smell like her mother’s breath seeped from the satin dresses. He’d done some of these things to her, things she thought had never been done to any girl. But if what they’d done could be drawn, they must be common things, nothing special, like that village girl with the daisy.

  She picked up a torpedo. Why would Grandpa have toys in this box, toys he’d never given to her?

  She glanced back at the cards, picked out one with a grinning soldier ramming into a woman’s behind. His gun was slung over his shoulder. It looked like Grandpa’s Mauser.

  She pressed the torpedo’s sharp tip, studied the deep impression it dimpled in her finger. Too small to be real torpedoes, but were they just the right size to be bullets for a big gun?

  The field of battle stretched before her as if a magic carpet had flown straight to her feet to take her there. If she dragged a chair to the mantel, she could easily reach the Mauser. Her sleeping mother wouldn’t hear a thing. The fat muumuued neighbor lady wasn’t out today on the back deck sipping Tab, settling her hawk’s eye on Emily, poor thing, playing all by herself while that sicko mother neglected her. Their overgrown lawn bounded a stand of oak trees, and the trails through the woods led to abandoned cornfields. She could easily spirit the gun away.

  She knew where he lived and could walk there.

  Emily piled Grandpa’s treasures back into Eagle’s Nest. Except the dirty photos. Those she tucked in her sundress pocket.

  Lugging the gun proved the real chore. Emily could barely lift it over the hooks. A peg caught the trigger guard, almost sent her tumbling to the carpet. She was awkward, bony-weak, as if hammered to life on a worn-out anvil. The gun was almost as long as she was. But Emily managed to get it out of the house and drag it across the yard to the protected path without being discovered. She didn’t dare think about how she would heft the gun once she had him in her sights.

  She was tromping through the cornfield, the Mauser bumping along at her heels, when she burst upon a girl smoking in a clearing. The new girl, Dinah, the one who’d pulled the wings off the monarch butterfly. Dinah’s bare toes were buried in the furrows. The cigarette dangled from her hand, ashing on a mound of dried husks.

  She shared none of the surprise Emily felt stumbling onto her. Her gaze rested on the barrel poking from Emily’s fist. “That’s not the way you carry it.”

  The same calm assurance she’d shown over the butterfly’s torture. At her feet, a filament of smoke unwound from the husks.

  “It’s heavy.” Emily drew the gun to her chest.

  “Are you shooting with the boys?”

  Dinah’s hard curiosity raised a wrinkle of feeling Emily would come to realize was attraction. She thought Dinah had said at the boys until a shot rang out, followed by a metallic plinking on tin. Whoops drifted through the cornrow’s slats. She shook her head.

  “Can I watch you shoot?”

  “There’s nothing to watch.”

  Dinah appraised her skinny arms, her flat, plain body. Sizing up whether Emily was capable of doing anything interesting. She must hav
e liked what she discovered. She pulled on the cigarette, held the cloud in her lungs, an abrasion Emily could almost feel. She dropped the butt, ground the husks with her bare heel. The smoke curl winked out. “No reason I can’t tag along, then.”

  She might need help loading the gun, was Emily’s thinking. She allowed Dinah to trail her, said nothing when Dinah lifted the Mauser’s stock as if they were village girls hauling the water bucket home. When Emily wound her way toward the boys, toward the wrong way out, Dinah nudged her east, the rifle her rudder.

  His house was isolated on the outskirts of town, a cobblestone plunked down in stark presuburban Southeast Michigan fields not yet thought of as real estate. The girls crossed a dirt road to wade through a grassy field scorched from the heat. A flatbed farm truck sped by. Gravelly dust skittered along the road in front of a white concrete apron. A short road divided the opposite field, ended for no good reason in the middle of the corn. She would learn later that the unfinished street was the beginning of a new subdivision, but on that day the nowhere road seemed like an abandoned mistake.

  When the truck rattled past, Dinah lowered her end of the rifle to bury the weapon from sight, but out there, back then, no one would question the sight of a gun in a field filled with pheasant, not even if girls were carrying it. Their rustling traipse through the long grass should have raised a bird. By now a flash of green and gold, a glorious pinwheel against the broad white sky, should be casting a shadow on the girls. But the sky stretched empty and clean like a yawn’s void. His house and a clump of oak trees behind, leafy branches woven like an emerald tapestry, were lonely bumps on the horizon.

  He was unlikely to be home, Emily realized, too late. In her girlish view of summer’s unmoored routines, she hadn’t thought that he’d be at work. Like her father. She’d hauled the Mauser all this way for nothing. Sweat streaked her back and heels. Salt burned her eyes. She’d have to face Dinah now. Admit to poor planning and the narrow vision of the imagination where deeds are foolish descendants of impulse.