We Are All Completely Fine (8 page)

Half a dozen women emerged from the pickup and car, smiling and stretching. They were dark-haired women in jeans and T-shirts, some in head scarves. Sisters came hurrying in from the fields, and the elders called out names, drew the visitors into hugs.

Greta watched from the periphery. The bus door did not open. A figure moved behind the wide windshield, another dark-haired woman who reached up and tugged the curtains closed. Greta realized the vehicle was a kind of RV. Most of the bus’s side windows had been filled in, and the rest were curtained. The roof was piled with luggage.

Her mother called Greta’s name, and the girl stepped nervously forward. The visitors exchanged looks, then one of the women approached Greta, holding out her hands. Greta didn’t know what to do, so she held out her own hands, and the woman laughed and took them in her own. “Little sister,” the woman said, and suddenly the rest of the visitors were surrounding her, touching her, laughing with her.

Finally they withdrew, and the elders moved off into the farmhouse. The bus remained sealed, its engine keeping up its watchdog rumble. Was Aunty too ill to leave? Greta’s mother had said she was dying. How old
was
the woman? Greta had heard stories about her since she was a child. Siddra was the only surviving member of the three original founders. She lived somewhere far away, and Greta had imagined a mansion, a fortress, a treehouse. Anything but this ramshackle bus.

All that afternoon Greta never strayed far from the vehicle, her eyes moving between the side door and that big curtained window. No one entered or exited.

Her mother came back to the cabin very late, and Greta pretended to be asleep. Her mother stood over her in the dark, breathing. Greta watched her silhouette through half-lidded eyes.

Then her mother knelt beside the mattress. Her clothes smelled of some strange spice. She touched Greta on her hip. “Oh,” her mother said quietly. “Oh my daughter.”

She was going to try to talk her out of it, Greta thought. She held her body still. If she waited long enough, her mother would give up.

Then her mother said, almost breathing it, “You are so lucky.”

The next morning, her mother set out a pretty, pale green dress that still had the JCPenney tags. Greta stood very still at the bathroom mirror as her mother combed her hair and—a first—applied mascara to her eyelashes. “Pout,” her mother said, and touched Greta’s lips with coral lipstick.

Together they walked to the center of the farm. Greta resisted the urge to take her mother’s hand. The fields around them were empty, but sisters stood on the porch of the main house, or in the doorways of their campers and cabins.

Greta and her mother stopped in front of the bus, looking up at the door. Nothing happened. Greta glanced at her mom, and then the door of the bus folded open. One of the dark-haired women from last night stood at the top of the stairs beside the driver’s seat, holding the metal handle of the lever with a cloth, as if it were an oven mitt. She smiled and gestured for her to come in.

Greta stepped up. The inside of the bus was twenty degrees hotter than outside. The dark-haired woman was sweating.

Greta realized her mother hadn’t stepped up after her. “You’re not coming?” Greta asked. She tried to keep her voice calm.

Her mother’s lips were pursed, her eyes gleaming. “I’ll wait for you here,” her mother said. “Go on.”

The bus door closed. The dark-haired woman touched Greta on the shoulder, then gestured for her to sit in a chair in the middle of the room. The woman walked past her to a wall made of faux wood paneling that did not quite meet the curve of the roof. A curtain covered a doorway, and the woman disappeared behind it.

Greta smoothed out her dress and controlled her breathing as if preparing for a new cut. Everything in the room seemed to be wrapped in layers; couches covered in colored sheets piled with blankets topped by pillows; scarves over purple lamp shades over tinted bulbs; rugs askew atop other rugs. Color upon color upon color. The air too was almost liquid with incense and wood smoke and the smell of strong coffee.

Too much. Too much.

She began to sweat. In front of her was a low cloth-draped table, perhaps a storage trunk, upon which were set nine or ten candles, burning in small glass cups of green and purple and yellow. The little flames seemed to fill up the room with heat. On the other side of the table was a huge armchair that Greta assumed belonged to Aunty Siddra. The arms of the chair had once been upholstered, but now they were bare wood, scorched black. The velour seat cushions, however, looked new.

The curtain moved, and it was as if an oven door had opened. Hot air swept over her and made her shrink in her chair.

Aunty Siddra appeared. She was a collection of spikes and angles, like a burnt tree still standing after a forest fire. And she was marked, too. Candlelight limned every ridge and scar.

Greta started to get to her feet and the old woman waved for her to sit down. She moved slowly, as if her limbs might snap under her own weight. She settled into her throne-like chair one bone at a time.

The woman wore a sleeveless shirt and a skirt that hung to her knees, so arms and hands and shin bones were visible. Every inch of visible skin mirrored Greta’s; the designs were the same. They were two copies of the same document, penned decades apart.

No, not copies. Not exactly. The woman’s forehead was branded, where Greta’s was unmarked. The top scars made a jagged line, as if a serrated knife had sawed away at her skull, and that line curved inward at each end.

Aunty Siddra smiled. “Candy?”

“Pardon?”

The woman held out a glass bowl full of what looked like dusty marbles. “Go on,” she said.

Greta did not want any candy, but she took a reddish brown lump. The surface felt crusty, like a sugar cube. She held it to her nose, then put it in her mouth. It tasted of some spice she didn’t recognize, like licorice but not.

Aunty smiled as if she’d trapped the girl. “I bet you don’t get much candy in this shit hole,” she said.

“Not much,” Greta agreed.

Aunty popped a candy into her mouth. “I didn’t expect a white girl. But I guess vanilla is the hot new flavor.”

Greta didn’t know what to say to that.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Aunty Siddra asked.

“I think so.”

“Hmm.” The woman leaned back. “Guess my age.” When Greta said nothing she said, “Go on. Don’t be shy. Sixty-five? Seventy?”

Greta shook her head.

“I’m fifty-two,” she said. “Fifty-
two
.” She looked at the ceiling.

Greta sat still for a minute, two. Suddenly Aunty Siddra looked at her. “There was supposed to be a revolution. We were supposed to form our own society. And the Hidden Ones would be our nuclear deterrent. You know what a nuclear deterrent is?”

Greta nodded, though she wasn’t quite sure.

“Yeah, well, the revolution’s always around the corner. We just wanted to have our weapon in place. And once we made our deal with foreign powers—well, you know, don’t you? One from our side, one from theirs.”

“‘A bridge and a bond,’” Greta quoted from her lessons.

“Right,” Aunty Siddra said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to do everything the other guy says.” She sat up straighter. “Listen to me, this is important. Don’t ever let go. Hold tight to the reins. You can do this, yes? Because we need a woman who won’t flinch, who can
take
it. Who can hold on to that son of a bitch, no matter how much it makes you hurt.” She gripped the sides of the chair. “Are you that woman?”

“Yes,” Greta said. “I am.”

“Thank God,” Aunty Siddra said. “I don’t think I can hold out much longer.”

A final step was required, Greta told the group. She was to come back in an hour after they prepared the bus for the surgery. Back in her cabin, she stared at her face in the bathroom mirror. She ran a finger across her smooth forehead, saying goodbye to it. Her mother pestered her with questions she didn’t know how to answer. What was Aunty Siddra like? Was she nice? Did she approve of Greta?

Greta shut the bathroom door on her mother and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She was sick to her stomach, and her skin felt clammy.

Before the hour was up, a neighbor came to their camper and banged on the door. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

A crowd had gathered around the bus. The door was open, and dark-haired women were hurrying in and out. Greta went in without asking for permission. Aunty Siddra lay on the couch. She was not moving. One of the women sat cross-legged on the floor, holding her hand.

“What’s the matter with her?” Greta asked.

“Cancer, child. It’s all through her.”

“But—but what about. . . ?”

“Sit.” She pointed to the huge chair Aunty Siddra had occupied less than an hour ago. Greta did as she was told. She put a hand down on the chair arm, then quickly lifted it; the arms were coated with black soot.

The dark-haired woman said, “Someone get the knives. Hurry!”

But it was too late. Aunty Siddra had taken her last breath.

“And then . . . .” Greta told us. “The fire.”

“I was the only one who made it out of the bus,” Greta said. “I crawled out, between the legs of the women. The fire seemed to jump from Sister to Sister. And then it spread to the farmhouse, the other outbuildings.”

“I don’t understand,” Barbara said. “Where did the fire come from?”

“It was the Hidden One,” Greta said. “Aunty Siddra had let go of the reins, and it was free.”

“They fucked it up,” Harrison said. “They didn’t complete the ritual. They were supposed to move the thing from the old lady to Greta—one bottle to another. But they didn’t get it done before the first bottle broke.”

“What are you talking about, bottles?” Martin asked.

“You know what they call ‘hidden one’ in Arabic?” Harrison said. “
Al-jinnī.
”

Martin thought for a moment, then got it. “Oh come on!”

“It’s just a word for something they don’t understand. It’s not Barbara Eden, or Robin fucking Williams.”

“We’re already out of time,” Jan said. “Next week we can—”

“Nobody move,”
Martin said.

Harrison and Barbara looked toward Jan.

“Please,” Martin said.

“What is it?” Jan asked him. “What do you have to say?”

Martin turned his broken face to Greta. “So. These Sisters. They thought you were special.”

Greta nodded.

“Special enough to kill for?”

“Oh,” Barbara said. And Stan said, “What?”

“The people who attacked me,” Martin said. “Some of them were women, I’m pretty sure. Maybe all of them. And they were protecting Greta.”

“There
are
no Sisters,” Greta said. “The fire killed everyone. Everyone but me.”

No one spoke. Martin saw that Harrison was staring at the floor, lost in thought.

Most of us were watching either Martin or Greta. Jan, however, was watching Harrison. He was staring into the middle distance with a thoughtful look on his face.

“End of story,” Greta said. She looked at Martin. “Happy now?”

He wasn’t happy. But he was satisfied.

We knew each other, at first, only by our words. We sat in a circle and spoke to each other, presenting some version of ourselves. We told our stories and tried out behaviors. Dr. Sayer said that the group was the place for “reality testing.” What would happen if we exposed ourselves and shared our true thoughts? What if we talked about what we most feared? What if we behaved according to rules that were not predicated on our worst suspicions?

Perhaps the world would not end.

For Stan, the group was his opportunity to test the assumption that every living person was repulsed by him. Decades of personal experience had convinced him of this. Understandably, he’d taken the position that the best defense was being offensive. He shouted at medical staff. He accused doctors of minimizing his problems before they could even hear his complaints. He stared at people on the street, daring them to look away.

Being a psychologically savvy person, he knew that the others might perceive his house as an expression of his inner defense mechanisms. He’d grown up in this house, and had returned to it after his experience with the Weavers. It was his castle, his fortress, and defended by palisades of junk. Every room was filled, with narrow paths winding through the piles of broken appliances, books, clothing, children’s toys, lawn equipment. Only the Medicaid-paid staff dared enter, and they didn’t stay long; home health workers were on the lowest rung of the medical economy and they didn’t collect hazard pay.

Dr. Sayer, had she known about his living conditions, would have been more likely to reach for the DSM-5 for a label; hoarding was a cousin to OCD and its victims sometimes responded to SSRIs. A steady dose of Paxil could do wonders in a small minority of patients.

Stan, however, knew that the house was not his problem, people were.

So it was that he’d surprised himself by inviting Martin to spend a night or two there, “just until he found a new place.” The invitation had been Barbara’s idea. She’d cornered him after the meeting in which Greta had told her story, just to “brainstorm.” She played upon his conscience, daring him to help someone in greater need than himself. “Mentor him,” she’d said. Of course, she’d never been to his house either.

Martin regretted accepting the invitation almost as much as Stan regretted offering it. There was something about Barbara, however, that made him want to be a better person. Perhaps it was because she seemed to think he was, despite very little evidence, already a good person. Both Martin and Stan didn’t want to disappoint her.

Stan’s driver, the bearded young man who seemed about the same age as Martin, said, “You’re
staying
with him?” He shook his head in disbelief, and when he unlocked the door to the house he chuckled in a low voice that reminded Martin of every cafeteria bully he’d known in middle school. “Enjoy your stay.”

Martin shut the door behind them. “What an ass-hole.” Then he looked up to see the condition of the room.

For a long moment he couldn’t think of anything to say.

Stan suddenly seemed angry. He gestured at the goat path through the mess and said, “Kitchen’s through there.”

“Got it,” Martin said, and began to push Stan’s
chair—slowly, and with many small corrections. His cast made it difficult. And still he couldn’t think what to say about the house. He was appalled but also fascinated. The way through the maze of the front room was like a series of D&D traps, set with hair triggers and hidden pressure plates. Move a broken microwave off a stack of
National Geographic
s and a boulder might burst through the wall and flatten them.

Martin thought about bugging out as soon as possible, but where else could he go? His checking account was down to gravel and his credit card had been scraped clean by the hospital and pharmacy. He needed to go back to work, to get looking for a new place to live, but the thought exhausted him. The beating had beaten something out of him. What had been lost, however, was a mystery; Stan would have called it gumption, or resilience. To Martin it felt like he’d sloughed off some other, tougher self, leaving behind a fragile pupa. All he wanted to do was sleep.

But that was looking to be impossible in Stan’s house. There was hardly any space to lie down, and nowhere to even sit safely. They passed a door that was ajar, but behind it was a wall of floor-to-ceiling crap like a dead end in a closed-environment game level. The kitchen was a wreck, full of non-foodrelated junk. Why was there a black safe sitting atop the stove?

Martin said, “I don’t know, Stan, maybe I should—”

“Try upstairs,” Stan said. He pointed at twin pillars of boxes. Between them was a narrow opening.

Martin slipped into the gap and discovered a set of stairs that led to a miracle: three bedrooms and a tiny bathroom, empty except for an appropriate amount of furniture. The rooms were dusty but not dirty; someone, at least in the past couple months, had cleaned them. This was higher ground, saved from the floodwaters of Stan’s compulsion by the lack of a ramp or chair lift.

Martin returned to the first floor, moving slowly so as not to aggravate his ribs. Stan looked at him expectantly.

Martin wanted to say, This is the first time I’ve been thankful for lack of handicap accessibility. Instead he said, “This is perfect. Thanks.”

“You’ll be safe here,” Stan said. “You wouldn’t believe how many guns I have.”

Greta didn’t show up for the next meeting. She’d sent Jan a text saying that she needed to work on something on her own. The tone, Jan told them, did not seem to rule out an eventual return; but when Jan texted her back, she got no further reply.

It was left to the group to deal with her departure. It was a rejection, a wound. We spent three weeks talking about it, assessing the damage, assigning blame. Martin thought Greta was a coward. Stan thought she was striking back at them for forcing her to talk. Harrison thought she just needed a break from the group and would be back when she needed them. Barbara, however, refused to take Greta’s exit as a sign of aggression
or
weakness. “Maybe she got what she needed,” Barbara said. “The group’s job is to patch us up so we’re strong enough to go do what we need to do. We’re not supposed to be here forever.”

What surprised us—the remaining members, that is, if not Dr. Sayer—was that we were
able
to talk about it so deeply and so well. Dr. Sayer seemed to do very little; she made comments that would nudge our little boat back into the stream and we would do the rowing ourselves. When we fell back into storytelling—and Stan was still our most frequent offender—one of us would nudge us back into the now. What mattered was what happened between us.

One week he was talking again about his time with the Weavers, the days he spent in that barn, in the nest of ropes that stretched between the rafters and the poles. He seemed to remember every kindness that the Pest, the smallest Weaver, had done for him, even as he watched his friends die, one by one. “Their mistake was killing the cop. If Bertram Weaver hadn’t had done that, they would never have found me. I would have made my last visit to the smokehouse. But the cops burst in, and Bertram tried to rush them—”

“Stan, you’ve told this story before,” Barbara said. “When you go on and on like that, it’s like you’re demanding that I tune you out. The more you talk, the less I can hear you.”

Stan lifted the oxygen mask, inhaled deeply. We’d seen this delaying tactic before. Often it ended any meaningful interaction with the old man. But this time he lowered the mask and said, “Then you’ve trapped me. If I talk you don’t listen, and if I don’t talk . . . what am I supposed to do?”

“Tell us something you’ve never told before,” Barbara said. “Something real. How do you feel, right now?”

“I feel sorry,” Stan said. “I don’t mean to bore you. I don’t know why I do that. I just . . . fill the room.”

“I’m more concerned about what you’re not saying,” Barbara said.

“Are there things you’re not telling us?” Martin asked.

“Of course there are,” Harrison said. “We all have secrets left.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Harrison,” Barbara said.

Harrison laughed. “I’ll let you know.”

Despite Greta’s absence, a lightness seemed to have entered the meetings. The gloom around Barbara (which only Jan and Greta had noticed) had lifted. Martin seemed to be healing. He was still living with Stan, but he’d gone back to work, thanks to a phone call and earnest letter from Dr. Sayer. He told the group he was adjusting to life without the frames. He knew the dwellers were lurking just out of sight, and he never forgot that, but he could function
as if
there were no dwellers. “I just tell myself to act like they’re not there,” Martin said one week. “And sometimes I can fool even myself.”

“Amen,” Harrison said. “That’s my primary maintenance strategy.”

“How so?” Jan asked.

“You know. Act normal. Pretend we don’t know what we know. But it’s so . . . tiring. I start to hate people for their ignorance. Their complacency. Sometimes I see a couple people sitting around laughing and I think, What the fuck do you think is so funny?”

The rest of us were nodding. Even Jan.

“I want to be like them. But I can’t. We’re not safe. There are things on the other side that want in—the dwellers, the Hidden Ones. And scarier shit.”

“They whisper,” Martin said.

“Yes,” Harrison said. “Always trying to get someone to open the door.”

“Like Aunty Siddra,” Barbara said.

“And the Weavers,” Stan said.

“Well, the Weavers were just psychos, right?” Harrison said. “Nothing like the thing that burned down Greta’s farm.”

Stan said, “I do
not
agree with that.”

“I’m not saying they weren’t scary,” Harrison said. “But they didn’t bring over monsters.”

“They wanted to become the monsters,” Jan said. She sounded almost angry.

Harrison looked at the others, seeing if they’d noticed her tone.

“And they got halfway there,” Jan said. She looked up. “Stan, tell them about the Spidermother.”

Stan flinched as if he’d been slapped. Tears filled his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

“It’s okay, dear,” Barbara said. “What is it?”

But Stan was staring at Dr. Sayer. “How do you know about that?”

“It was in the police reports.”

“Back up,” Martin said. “
Spider
mother?”

“That’s what her boys called her.” Stan rubbed at his eyes with his sleeve. “Mrs. Weaver. That’s who they were feeding.”

“Fuck,” Harrison said.

“They kept her in the smokehouse,” Stan said. “They were afraid of her, but they loved her too. She looked . . . pregnant. Or like those starving kids in Africa, with the big distended bellies? The rest of her, her arms and legs, were like sticks. And filthy. But the worst part was her eyes. There was something wrong with her eyes. She had too many of them.”

Martin bent forward in his chair. “What?!”

“Inside her sockets. She had two in each socket. Small, shiny black . . . spider eyes.”

“Another fucking hybrid,” Harrison said. The rest of us looked at him. “If something’s made it across, it can taint people. And their children. You get things that shouldn’t exist.”

“The Scrimshander,” Barbara said. “Half dweller, half human.”

“Yeah, him,” Harrison said. “And others.”

“But you killed it, right?” Martin asked.

Harrison shrugged. “Probably. Other people thought they killed it too. It’s hundreds of years old. It may not
be
killable.”

“What are you saying?” Stan said. He was frantic. “The Spidermother may still be alive? They burned her out. The whole place went down. I heard her
scream
. You can’t tell me that she’s still out there.”

“I’m sure she’s not,” Harrison said.

“Don’t coddle me!” Stan said.

“I’m sorry,” Harrison said. He surprised himself by sounding as sincere as he felt, or perhaps the reverse. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just . . . I don’t know if any of these things obey the same rules we do.”

“But that’s what you’re here for,” Martin said. “You’re the official dragon slayer.”

“I’m here, in this group, because I
used
to think that was my job.”

“Maybe it’s all of your jobs,” Jan said. “Each of you is on the hero’s journey.”

“Oh no,” Harrison said. “Leave Joseph Campbell out of it.”

“The Mormon guy?” Stan asked.

“Joseph
Campbell
,” Martin said. “The monomyth?
Star Wars
? Damn it, Stan, read a book.”

“It’s a pattern you see in many myths,” Jan said. “A hero leaves the everyday world, and crosses over into the world of the supernatural. He gains magical helpers, faces great trials, fights strange forces, and wins a great battle. Then he comes back to the normal world with a boon—a gift. A reward.”

“That’s not my story,” Harrison said.

“Well
I
crossed over,” Stan said. “And what reward did I get?”