We Are All Completely Fine (2 page)

Harrison looked at the man in sunglasses and thought, Really? You need to go in
order
?

Something must have shown on Harrison’s face because the man said, “My name is Martin.”

“Hello, Martin,” Barbara said. She held out her hand, and he took it hesitantly.

“Do you want me to talk about my history?” Martin asked Jan. “Why I’m here?”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with,” the doctor said. “You can—”

Martin jerked in his chair. He was looking over Jan’s shoulder with an expression of shock. The doctor turned.

The blonde girl stood in the doorway. She seemed to feel the group’s gaze like a harsh light. She endured it for a moment, then walked into the room, eyes down and face closed, and took the last seat, between Harrison and Dr. Sayer.

“Thank you for coming in,” the doctor said.

She lifted her eyes from the floor. “I’m Greta.”

Harrison, Barbara, and Stan responded in AA unison: “Hi, Greta.”

They went around the room, introducing themselves again. When it was Martin’s turn, he could barely speak. He seemed unwilling to look at the new girl.

Stan said, “Have
you
ever heard of the Weavers?”

Greta moved her head a fraction. Nope.

“Jesus Christ,” Stan said.

The next hour was filled with the polite conversation of people tiptoeing around each other. Martin had stopped talking, Greta had never started, and Stan wouldn’t stop. Harrison was entertaining fantasies about turning down his oxygen supply.

Jan said, “We’re almost out of time. I’m wondering if people want to share their impressions. How’s it going for you? What do you think of the others?”

The others? Harrison wasn’t about to touch that one. Jan had said that they were all trauma survivors, with similar experiences. If they’d gone through a fraction of the shit that Harrison had, that had to be Very Special Trauma indeed. It was pretty obvious why Stan was here; he was an old-school victim who’d never gotten tired of showing off his stumps. Barbara had said little about what had happened to her, only that she’d been attacked, and she’d been seeing Dr. Sayer since the ’90s. She seemed to have come to terms with it. She was calm, soothing, a natural nurse. Greta, however, was in no shape to help anyone. She was shell shocked, probably less than a year from whatever supernatural shit went down. And the black kid with the glasses—Martin—Harrison had no idea what to make of him.

And how about the good doctor? He’d only had two sessions with her, after she’d contacted him about joining the group. She’d said she believed his story, which made him think she was lying.
He
wouldn’t believe his story.

“I think it’s going about like I expected,” Harrison said. Meaning: nowhere.

Barbara said, “I was wondering about Martin. He never seems to look at Greta.”

“Who can tell?” Stan asked. “He’s wearing those damn shades.”

“You do seem to be hiding behind them,” Barbara said gently to the young man. “I’d like to know what you’re thinking, but I can’t tell.”

Harrison suddenly realized what was going on with the glasses. He leaned forward. “Hey. Martin.” The boy didn’t move.
“Martin.”

Martin hesitated, then swiveled his bug-eyed face in Harrison’s direction.

Harrison said, “Are you recording this?”

Martin sucked in his lip but did not turn away.

Harrison said, “You’re wearing some new kind of Google glasses.”

“It’s singular,” Martin said.

“What?”

“Google
Glass,
” Martin said. “And no, these aren’t them. They’re actually made by a startup company called—”

“Take them the fuck off.”

That
fuck
went off like a little bomb. They’d been so polite so far.

Martin didn’t move. No one spoke for a long moment, and then Stan said, “What is he talking about?
Who’s
recording this?”

“I’m not recording anything,” Martin said.

Harrison had put his hands on his knees, shifting his weight. Everyone in the circle tensed. Greta, next to Harrison, made a small sound too quiet for anyone but him to hear. Dr. Sayer watched him, but made no move to stop him.

Harrison was annoyed.
What?
Leaning forward was not an act of violence. It signified, if anything, the mere willingness to take action. Or perhaps the first move in a sequence: one, Harrison jumping to his feet; two, reaching for doughy, defenseless Martin; three, ripping the glasses from his fucking face.

Harrison leaned back, closed his eyes, and breathed deep. “I would
appreciate
it if you took off the glasses, Martin.”

No one spoke. Harrison finally opened his eyes.

Martin was gazing at the floor now. “Dr. Sayer said I could leave them on,” he said in a small voice.

Barbara frowned. “Is that true, Jan?”

“I said that he didn’t have to take them off to attend the group,” Jan said. “He promised me he would not make any recordings, or share what happens here—the same agreement I made with all of you.”

“I gave my word,” Martin said.

“And I took him at his word,” Jan said. “However, I did tell him that the group might want to discuss his wearing of them.”

“I don’t want a camera in here,” Stan said.

Martin made no move to remove the glasses.

Jan said, “Greta, do you have some thoughts on this?”

Harrison watched her without making it obvious that he was watching. She was not a
beautiful
girl—there was something slightly asymmetrical about her features—but she was striking.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said.

“Martin,” Jan said. “How are you feeling about this feedback?”

“I don’t appreciate the hostility,” Martin said. “What about Stan and his mask? Are you going to ask him to get rid of his wheelchair?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Stan said.

Barbara said, “Do you feel like you
need
the glasses?”

Stan made a derisive sound in the back of his throat.

“I don’t appreciate the bullying,” Martin said. “From him.”

“Me?” Harrison said.

Barbara smiled thinly at him. “You do seem a bit angry.”

“I’m not angry.” Everyone was looking at him, even Greta. “I’m not!” he said. What the fuck had happened? They were just talking about Martin’s glasses, and now they were turning on
him.
“Is this about the swearing? I apologize for that.”

“It’s not about the swearing,” Barbara said. “You seem annoyed that you’re in here. With us crazy people.”

“That’s not accurate,” Harrison said. “Jan says we’ve all experienced trauma. I’ll take her at her word.”

“You don’t have to take her word,” Stan said. “Not about me.”

“What’s yours, then?” Martin said to Harrison. “Your trauma. You haven’t said.”

“He’s Jameson Squared,” Greta said.

Shit, Harrison thought. A fan.

“Who?” Stan asked.

“Jameson Jameson,” she said. “From the kids’ books. The boy who kills monsters.”

Barbara looked surprised. She’d heard of him. Martin was more stunned. “I thought those were fiction,” he said.

“They are,” Harrison said.

Greta said, “Except they’re based on a real kid who survived Dunnsmouth. Harrison Harrison.”

They stared at him.

“Fiction,”
he said. “Completely made up.” Then: “Almost entirely.”

Greta was the first to flee the room when the time was up. Harrison followed her, but by the time he got outside she was gone, into the night. She couldn’t have gone far, he thought.

The transit van was waiting for Stan. The loading door hung open, and the young driver was working the controls to bring the lift down. The man glanced up as Harrison approached, and Harrison gave him the bro nod again. The driver turned back to the controls.

Harrison walked toward his car, then stopped and turned back. “Excuse me,” he said.

The driver looked over his shoulder.

“I gave you the bro nod,” Harrison said.

“The what?” The lift clunked down, and the driver stepped back from the lever.

“Twice now,” Harrison said. “You’re supposed to nod back.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” the kid asked.

“The rules,” Harrison said. “Cowboys tip their hats at each other. Detectives tap their fedoras. But since we’re hatless these days, all we’ve got is the nod, and returning it isn’t optional.”

“Are you—?”

“Say ‘crazy’ and I will beat you to death with Stan’s wheelchair.”

The kid blanched.

“I’m kidding.” Harrison showed his teeth. “You’ve got four inches and a hundred pounds on me, nobody’s that crazy. Now let’s practice. Ready?”

Harrison demonstrated. “Tilt the head back, keeping eye contact, but not in a challenging way. Then back level. See? Now you.”

The kid stared at him. Then his head tipped back, ever so slightly.

“We’ll work on it,” Harrison said. He clapped the driver on the shoulder, making him flinch. “But I think we’ve made excellent progress.”

He noticed Martin standing in the light by the house door. He’d been watching the whole exchange through his black glasses, perhaps even recording it, despite what he’d promised the doctor. Harrison threw him a bro nod, and Martin nodded back.

“See?” Harrison said. “Martin gets it.” He started for his car and turned again to the driver. “One more thing. Use the fucking access ramp. It’s right over there.”

He walked to his leased car—he still could not recall what color it was without concentrating—and had just put the key into the ignition when a face appeared at the window. He startled, then laughed to himself.

It was Greta.

He turned the key to get power, and pushed the button to lower the window.

“Were you really there in Dunnsmouth?”

“It was a long time ago,” he said.

“Ten years,” she said. “That’s not so long.” She looked to the side. She made no move to leave.

He didn’t know what to do with his hands. Starting the car would be rude. Sometimes with crazy people you just had to wait.

After a time she said, “Are you coming back? Next week?”

He hadn’t decided yet. The meeting had gone better than he thought it would. They’d already found out his not-so-secret identity, and here he was, still breathing. “I suppose so,” he said. “Yeah.”

She nodded. She seemed relieved.

He said, “Do you need a ride or something?”

She said, “Do you still kill monsters, Harrison Squared?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’ve read—”

“Yes or no?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t do that anymore.”

“Too bad.” She stepped back from the car, then turned and strode across the street. In a moment he lost her in the dark.

Yep, he thought. Definitely the craziest of us.

The rest of us were not so sure. By the time of the last meeting, five months later, we would still not be able to decide, even though there were fewer of us remaining to compete for the title.

We all returned for the second meeting. And the third.

Barbara was especially grateful that Greta kept coming back. The girl wore the same flesh-covering uniform for each meeting, black on black on black, her thumbs poking through holes in the cuffs of the long T-shirt like lynchpins to hold the armor in place. Barbara felt a twinge of sadness every time she saw the girl check to see if her wrists were exposed.

Greta rarely spoke—but hardly needed to. Stan dominated the discussion in those first meetings, turning each conversational point back to his own distress over being a freak, an outcast. Barbara suspected that the rest of the group was relieved to let the focus stay on him. Harrison didn’t have to be challenged on his anger, and Martin didn’t have to defend his continued use of the glasses; the young man still could not look in Greta’s direction.

Jan didn’t bring up any of these issues, and seemed to be willing to let Stan talk and talk. He was weaving his way backward through this story, starting from his current circumstances (terrible), though his life as famous victim (frightening, then tedious, then depressing), arriving after many digressions at the event that made him “the freak he was today.” Stan’s words. Stan was made of words.

“By then all my friends were dead,” Stan said. “Johnny, Davey, Alison, everyone dead except for me and Laura. Dragged off one by one to the smokehouse. A week later they’d be carried back into the barn, their bodies wrapped in burlap, bound by bailing wire. Like sausages. Like mummies. They hung them in the nets next to us.

“Laura was in bad shape. Feverish, hallucinating. I think she’d forgotten where she was. That was a good thing, yes? She didn’t know who was hung up beside her.”

Stan’s tears had started again. Barbara patted his arm. She knew the man was in pain. But who in the room wasn’t?

“It was the boy who kept us alive,” Stan said. “The youngest of the Weavers, seven, maybe eight years old. They called him Pest. He’d scamper up and down the nets easy as you please, half naked, just a pair of raggedy shorts, wiry as a monkey. He’d bring us water, push bits of food into our mouths. Hose down the ropes when we pissed or shit ourselves. He liked to climb up next to us and jabber in some kinda pidgin English.” Stan smiled and shook his head. “I could barely understand what he was saying. He would stroke Laura’s hair and coo to her. Most nights he would sleep with us, settle into the nets with his arms and legs in between the loops so he could hang there with us, his own vertical hammock. The older Weavers would beat on him sometimes, but I think they had a soft spot for him too. Or maybe they liked that he kept us alive. Maybe that was his job.

“He tried to help us on harvest days. That dinner bell would ring and the brothers would pull one of us down off the ropes and put us on the table. We’d be thrashing and screaming as they tied off above the cut. It wasn’t just Laura who cried and begged, I’m not afraid to admit it. But the Pest—the more we screamed the more he’d whisper and jabber in our ears, trying to soothe us. I remember one harvest—this was so sweet of him—he tried to cover my eyes as they took my left arm. I was so worked up I tried to bite him. I
did
bite him. Drew blood, too. Oh the Weavers laughed at that, made fun of Pest for getting careless. But he came back to me and pressed his palms over my eyes again. I felt so bad, losing control like that, but he didn’t hold it against me. Not one bit.”

Barbara looked around the room. Greta was staring at her hands. Martin was unreadable as ever behind his glasses. Harrison, however, was frowning at Jan.

The doctor was upset. She was sitting very still, but her eyes gleamed from unshed tears. Not for the first time Barbara wondered why any normal person would choose to listen to these stories day after day. Who would make this their job? And why was Harrison looking so disapproving over the doctor showing emotion?

“I only saw the boy cry once,” Stan said. “The day they came that last time for Laura. She was in a bad way—the infection was probably in her bloodstream by then, and there wasn’t much left of her. I knew what happened next, seen it with the others. Off to the smokehouse. To see
her
.”

Stan stopped talking. It was such a surprise that even Greta looked up.

Martin said, “Who?”

Harrison moved his head, a tiny gesture of disappointment. The message was clear: They’d almost gotten someone else to speak! Barbara suppressed a smile, and immediately she felt guilty.

But Stan, surprisingly, did not take the bait. He lifted the oxygen mask to his face and breathed deep. The group waited.

“I don’t know what happened to the boy,” Stan said finally. “When they rescued me, they killed the older Weavers—I saw two of the brothers die in front of me—and they killed the thing in the smokehouse. But nobody would talk about a child. They kept all mention of the kid out of the trial, probably to protect him. I used to think about him finding a foster home. Getting adopted. Growing up with real parents . . .”

Stan looked up. “I was glad that they never mentioned the child. Never said a name. Once you get branded a freak . . . that hangs on you.”

“Is that what you feel like?” Jan asked. She’d recovered her composure, and her voice was steady. “A freak?”

“Of course,” Stan said. “No one can look at me without recoiling.”

Jan asked, “Is there anyone in the room that you think is recoiling now?”

Stan glanced at Greta.

“You know, it’s not so uncommon to see amputees, since Iraq,” Martin said. “Plus you’re old.”

“What does that have to do with it?” Stan asked.

“I’m just saying. In the seventies or whatever, you were probably more shocking.” Martin shrugged. “Now you just look like a diabetic.”

“I was in the mall last week,” Stan said. “A child looked at me and screamed.”

“Really?” Harrison asked. “Screamed?”

Stan looked offended that he could be doubted. “The mother pulled him away from me. And everyone around us noticed what was going on, and then . . .”

And then and then and then. The words rolled out of him.

Barbara listened, but not patiently, as Stan detailed the other times he’d been humiliated or embarrassed in public. He seemed to have catalogued every frown of disgust, every averted gaze. And now no one in the circle would look at him, but not for the reasons he supposed.

When he paused to take a breath from his mask, Barbara said, “We all have scars, Stan.” Across the circle from her, Greta toyed with the hole in her sleeve. “Some aren’t as on display.”

“Amen to that,” Harrison said.

“None of you understand,” Stan said. “I spend every day in a chair waving
stumps
—”

Barbara stood and Stan abruptly shut up. She hadn’t planned on standing. When she realized what she was going to do next, she almost sank back into her seat. The group’s eyes were on her.

Greta’s eyes were on her.

Barbara took a breath, and then removed her black jacket. She folded it over the chair back and stood for a moment, looking at no one. She was wearing a linen long-sleeved shirt. She owned nothing but long-sleeved shirts.

“Does anyone know what scrimshaw is?” she asked.

“Fuck,” Harrison said.

She looked over at him and smiled shyly. She unbuttoned a cuff and began rolling back the sleeve.

“Etchings on whale bone,” Stan said. “Old timey sailor stuff.”

“A person who creates scrimshaw is called a scrimshander,” Barbara said. “But
the
Scrimshander . . . he doesn’t work on whale bones.”

She pushed the sleeve up to her bicep. A long, puckered scar ran from the inside of her elbow up past where the sleeve covered it.

“You’re from Dunnsmouth?” Harrison asked.

“I visited there,” she said. “Just once. I was nineteen.” But she wasn’t interested in telling her story right now. Stan had already exhausted them, and there’d be plenty of opportunities later. This was for Greta.

Barbara revealed a matching scar on her upper arm. Then she sat down and pulled up her skirt a few inches. Two other scars, starting at each knee. The Scrimshander had made five incisions in all, peeling back her skin to get at large bones. The largest scar was at her sternum, but she decided she’d made her point.

She looked around the room. “So.”

The group stared at her. The silence was unbearable.

Harrison grunted. The attention of the group swung to him. He stood up, tugged at his shirt, and lifted it to expose the ribs on his right side. An old, jagged scar puckered the skin. “The Scrimshander’s knife got me here,” he said. He unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt and pulled open the collar to show them three round welts, each as big as a half dollar, that looked like old burns. “These were from the suckers of a monster called the Abysmal. And then there’s my first one . . .”

He sat and tugged up his right pants leg. The plastic leg started a few inches below his knee. “See, Stan? You’re not the only one.”

Dr. Sayer put up a hand. “None of you should feel any pressure about sharing before you’re ready. This is not a competition.”

Stan had already lifted his arm to his mouth. He pulled off the sock with his teeth and let it drop to his lap. The end of the arm looked like a rotted peach. “You can still see the line where the bailing wire cut into the skin—right above the cut.”

Barbara watched Greta. Her face had gone pale, and her eyes were fixed on the middle distance. Mentally she’d already fled the room.

I’ve made a mistake, Barbara thought. Instead of helping the girl, she’d swung the spotlight toward her.

Greta pushed up her sleeve.

Barbara’s first impression was of twine: white string that had been wound around her pale arm, arranged into swirls and blocky mazes and jagged bolts. These were not the pale, old scars of Barbara’s skin, or Stan’s gnarly keloids. The scars were precise markings, intricate as circuit boards, dense as text. They clearly continued up her arm.

“Okay,” Stan said to Greta. “You win.”

After the meeting, the image of Greta’s scars would not leave Barbara’s mind. She drove home picturing them, imagining the unseen territory of her skin beneath those dark clothes, guessing at how much of it must be covered with those ridges and swirls. Greta didn’t say who had inscribed them on her, or for what purpose, or at what age it had started. Barbara was heartsick at the idea of the girl being subjected to branding. She knew from personal experience the risk of infection, the pain of healing.

But the shapes were so beautiful. And they’d been carved with such artistry.

Her husband’s car was already in the garage; they were home from soccer practice then. Usually she would have had supper on the table by now, but on group meeting nights that was impossible. She found Stephen and the boys not in the kitchen but in the living room, a pizza box open on the coffee table. The three were sitting side by side on the couch, eyes locked on whatever shiny loudness emanated from the TV. Ten-year-old Ryan, shirt off and already tan after a week of sun. Toby, two years younger, still wearing his shin guards and cleats.

“Hey hon,” Stephen said without looking up. The boys didn’t seem to notice her at all.

She’d known for some time that her husband and sons didn’t need her. Oh, perhaps they loved her, but
need?
They would miss the lunches she packed, the appointments she scheduled, the forms she signed. She kept the calendar and sent out the dry cleaning, tracked the boys’ ever-changing shoe sizes, cut up the carrots and refilled the water bottles, combed the denim-blue lint from the dryer trap. But these were maintenance activities, easily outsourced. For everything essential, the males of the house had each other. They were a unit, a wolf pack.

She was not sad about this; just the opposite. She’d spent the past few years engineering their independence. They leaned against each other now like three poles. A fourth could only destabilize them.

She made herself a salad and ate it at the breakfast nook. She did not eat alone; the dark outside and the bright kitchen lights made a three-sided mirror of the bay windows so that she was surrounded by Barbaras. She stared at the twin doors of the hall closet, and the seam of light between them from the closet light that one of the boys had left on. She thought about Greta pushing up her sleeve; Harrison, their angry young man, lifting his shirt. She wondered what they thought of
her
scars. Did they understand what they represented, what they hid?

Stephen came into the kitchen and refilled his glass from the Brita pitcher.

“Oh, you had your therapy thing today. How did it go?”

“It was good. Interesting.”

“Yeah?” His politeness was reflexive. Kindness was baked into Stephen on the cellular level. “Any breakthroughs?”

The boys burst into laughter at something on the TV. His head turned automatically.

“Go finish,” she said.

Once Stephen had been her rescuer. He’d seen the girl in the wheelchair parked at the end of the row—the lecture class, on art history, was held in an auditorium—and dared to flirt with her. They were fellow artists, yes? Kindred souls? When she graduated to a cane, he’d asked her to dance. When she threw away the cane, he asked her to marry him. She turned him down. She said, only half joking, that he would leave her if she didn’t progress beyond canes to decathlons.