We Are All Completely Fine

by Darryl Gregory

“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.

  But Stephen was the man who stayed. When she told him she’d lied about the car accident, he did not blink. When she told him some of the things the Scrimshander had done to her (no one knew the whole story), he did not run.

  For fifteen years, they were content. He stopped painting but discovered a talent for data analysis, making other kinds of pictures from vast streams of data. There was no financial need for her to work, though she did, taking a series of uninspiring jobs. Finally he said, Why d
on’t you just paint? He knew she needed it, just as he knew, and accepted, her need for privacy, for multiple locks on the door, for sleeping with the bathroom light on. He never asked her why she couldn’t say “I love you.” They made a life. Sometimes an entire day went by when she didn’t think of the Scrimshander.

  Then, in their late thirties, a surprise. Not an unwanted pregnancy, but an unwanted desire for a child that appeared without warning and took up residence in her body. She felt ridiculous, as if she were reneging on a contract she’d made with Stephen. But when she finally admitted it to him—“Stephen, I have some news”—he responded with an enthusiasm that frightened her. Had this desire for fatherhood always been in him, but hidden from her because of her craziness? Or was it possible that they could both be so unknown to themselves?

  They pursued pregnancy with scientific rigor and religious fervor. They read What to Expect When You’re Expecting until they were sick with fear. It was the worst kind of horror story, a child endangered on every page, but they absorbed the moral in every chapter.

  And it worked. The babies were born with a minimum of drugs and drama. The infants escaped SIDS and survived croup. The adults weathered sleep dep and stress. They were determined to become what Stephen called The World’s Greatest Parenting Team, Non-Asian Division.

  When the show ended and the pizza was consumed, Barbara and Stephen expertly separated and funneled the boys into phase 1 of the nighttime routine: homework, dishes, tomorrow’s lunches, the charging of devices. They did not have to speak. An hour and a half later, her husband was shooing the boys upstairs to showers and bed. He stopped at the turn of the stairs.

  “You’re going out?” he asked. He did not add, again? Good, polite Stephen.

  “I need to get some work done,” she said. “I’ll be back before breakfast, don’t worry.”

  He started to say something, then changed his mind. A long time ago he’d stopped asking what she was working on, whether it was a new piece or something she’d been painting for weeks. He’d stopped asking when she would show them to him.

  “Drive safe,” he said.

  Drive safe, dress safe, live safe. Retreat to the safest place of all.

  She opened the two locks on the apartment door, slipped inside, and immediately flipped the light switch. She stood there for a moment, breathing in the familiar tang of paint thinner, reassuring herself that she was alone.

  Every inch of the apartment was visible from this spot at the front door. The main room was just over fifteen feet square with a tiny kitchenette set into the corner. The bathroom was open to her left; she’d removed the door and set it across two metal filing cabinets, making a work table. There were only a few other pieces of furniture: a pair of floor lamps, a wooden easel, a metal folding chair, and a futon with its blue mattress opened flat. A long, wood-framed mirror leaned in the corner. Nothing was wide or high enough to hide an intruder.

  The pair of skinny windows at the end of the room were draped, but behind them were sturdy bars. She could feel that the windows had not been opened; the air was as warm and still as when she’d left. She twisted the locks shut behind her, then clacked home the deadbolt like a horizontal exclamation mark.

  Safe.

  A half-dozen canvases leaned against the walls, stretched and primed. They’d been waiting for months. On the easel was the work in progress, if one could say that an ongoing failure could progress. She walked past it without looking at it. She drew aside the drapes of one window, then pushed it up a few inches, allowing a feeble draft of cool air. She was on the second floor, so there was little chance someone could see through the window.

  The painting on the easel waited for her. She sat on the futon and looked up at it. As she’d done many times before, she’d painted a set of double doors, pale as her skin, and a seam between them glowing with golden light.

  I left you a message.

  She had not touched the canvas in weeks. There was nothing wrong with the painting, except that it was the wrong painting entirely. The doors should be open, revealing . . . something. A person, an object, a promised land. Or perhaps an abstract design, too difficult to translate into words. She would know it when she saw it, but she could not paint it until she saw it. Every time she’d attempted to force her way past those doors—and she’d tried a dozen times—she created a lie. An offense. The results were good only for burning.

  She stood and removed her jacket, then blouse and skirt and underwear, and set them on the bed. How scandalized would Dr. Sayer have been if she’d gone this far during the meeting? She might have stopped Stan’s heart.

  She went into the bathroom. The apartment’s open layout and clear sightlines were requirements, but what decided her on this place was the giant prewar bathtub. It was a cast-iron clawfoot tub, high-backed and swooping, that took up most of the narrow bathroom like a plump aristocrat. The porcelain interior shone like cold milk.

  She turned the taps (which were not the original hardware, but stubby, characterless replacements), and waited while the water warmed. She was and was not thinking about the mirror. Months ago she’d driven screws into the bathroom wall and strung long loops of hanging wire. She’d hung the big frame there, then, embarrassed, took it down, even though no one ever came into the apartment.

  After a long moment she went into the other room and brought back the mirror. It did not feel like a decision. It was something her body was doing, an action she was merely failing to veto. Perhaps, she thought—in the part of her brain that was noticing what was happening—this is the absence the recovering alcoholic feels as the glass fills. The blankness of the compulsive gambler as the next twenty slides into the slot machine.

  She attached the mirror to the wall. The top wire was much longer than the bottom, so that the mirror leaned out across the tub. She got into the water, concentrating to make her nerve-damaged limbs move correctly, and when she looked up it was at a second tub, a second Barbara, suspended from above. The woman’s skin gleamed, and the scars were like silver trails.

  The Scrimshander first made a filet of her limbs. He peeled back the skin of her arms to get at each humerus, keeping her half-sedated with strong alcohol as he worked. He moved carefully around the major arteries, preventing her from bleeding out. Over the course of a day and night he moved on to each femur, then finally the long crease at her sternum. He told her she had beautiful bones, and that he had made her even more beautiful.

  I left you a message.

  She never got to see what he had drawn. The police found her, unconscious, and by the time she awoke the doctors had stitched her closed.

  Greta was so lucky, Barbara thought. What had been done to her was right there, written where anyone could see.

  Chapter 3

  We were all surprised every time Stan made it to another meeting. If he wasn’t yet knocking at death’s door, he seemed to be rolling up the access ramp to it, huffing into his mask, hauling his collection of failing organs with him. After several months we were all deeply knowledgeable about his ailments and injuries, his medicines and their side effects, his ongoing battle with incompetent doctors and heartless nurses and corrupt insurance clerks. The medical industrial complex, he said, was a God damn mess, and it was a miracle he was still kicking.

  And yet, not only did he make it to the Elms every week, he arrived early.

  Stan bragged to the group how he’d lied to the van service, told them the meeting was a half hour earlier than it was. The same smart-ass kid picked him up every week. Knocked on the door, wouldn’t use the bell, walked right in if Stan didn’t get there fast enough. The kid would stand there making faces behind that God damn lumberjack beard, wrinkling his nose at the house that Stan had spent four decades in. “How the hell can a man with no hands be a hoarder?” the kid said once. He’d shove stuff out of the way, kicking Stan’s belongings like they were garbage, or worse, picking them up like he was appraising their value.

  “Why do you have a pi
stol?” the kid asked. It was a .357 police swing-out revolver, brand new and still in its case. Stan had found it on eBay.

  “None of your damn business,” Stan said. There was a lot more than the .357 in the house, but the kid didn’t need to know that.

  “How do you fire it?”

  “Shut up,” Stan said. “We’re late.”

  Somewhere in the house were his prosthetics. He’d gone through a dozen of them before giving up on them twenty years ago. They weren’t anything like the high-tech robot parts the soldiers had now; these were old-fashioned hooks and flesh-toned mannequin hands and strap-on shoes—original pirate material. Uncomfortable as hell.

  These days he rented hands, day nurses and Merry Maids and Meals-on-Wheels volunteers. The new ones always suggested he move into assisted living. They didn’t suggest it twice. I survived on scraps! he told them. For months! You think you can put me in a God damn prison?

  Oh, he could still crank up a good rant. The young ones quit the first time he reduced them to tears, and good riddance. He couldn’t stand wimps. He could instantly spot every variety of bad egg: the thief, the layabout, the cell phone watcher, the idiot. It usually didn’t take more than a phone call to get them transferred, and if that failed he could get them to quit soon enough. They thought he was old and helpless.

  He could see it in the eyes of the group, too. Well, most of their eyes. The youngest one, Martin, still wouldn’t take off the sunglasses. He decided to bring it up with Dr. Sayer before the meeting started.

  As the eldest member of the group, he thought it a good idea to confer with the doctor before the meetings and share thoughts about how therapy was going. Often she came downstairs right as the meeting was scheduled to start, leaving them no time to talk, but some weeks he could get a couple of minutes of one-on-one time with her.

  Today he was lucky. He’d commanded the driver to wait with him outside the conference room, and Dr. Sayer came down the stairs a few minutes before six.

  Her smile was bright and unforced. “Early again, Stan?”