We Are All Completely Fine (9 page)

“Knowledge,” Barbara said. “We get to find out things that no one else knows. We get the gift of understanding.”

“Screw that,” Stan said. “I want my hands back.”

Harrison was the first to leave the building, but he stood for a while, scanning the sidewalks. Barbara caught him loitering. “Can’t fool me,” she said. “You still want to rescue the damsel.”

“But who’s going to rescue me?” he asked.

She laughed, and said goodnight. After a few steps she turned and said, “I always meant to ask you, did you see the portraits it carved?”

“The Scrimshander?”

“I’ve seen photographs of some of the bone carvings,” she said. “But I’ve never seen a piece in person.”

“I found its lair once,” Harrison said. “A cave set in a cliff. Half the time it was underwater, but we crawled in there once at low tide. He’d made driftwood shelves to hold them. It looked like a hobo art gallery.”

“What were they like?” she asked. “The scrimshaw.”

“Horrible,” he said. “And beautiful. Every bone came from someone he’d killed, but the portraits themselves . . . Somehow he made these people seem
more
than lifelike. They were just lines etched in the bone, some crosshatching, not even any color. But still. You know how they say an artist can capture someone?”

She tilted her head, thinking this over. “Take care of yourself, Harrison.”

Later, we would hear how Barbara spent her night. She had supper with husband and sons, and washed the dishes while the boys tussled in the yard. It stayed light so long in the summer. After a while she rounded up her sons and kissed them on the tops of their heads. Then she kissed her husband goodbye. “Don’t forget their soccer jerseys are in the dryer,” she said.

After that, details were sketchy. We know she arrived at her apartment and locked the door behind her. She filled the big clawfoot tub with hot water, and arranged the mirror over it. A chair was pushed close to the tub to act as a side table for her tools and supplies: the straight razor; the rolls of medical tape; the bottle of Vicodin. There were still plenty of pills left when they found her. She wasn’t trying to knock herself out, just dampen the pain enough to let her finish the job.

It was time to claim the gift. To finally know. She removed her clothes and climbed into the bath.

We.
Such a slippery little pronoun. Who is in and who is out? If we say, “we lost one of us,” the number included in the pronoun changes in midsentence. To Martin the word was like a variable in a computer program, a running counter that had a different value depending on when you looked at it. But the problem was more difficult than that; the definition depended on who was doing the counting.

Did Barbara consider herself one of us, those last few weeks, that last meeting? Perhaps she was already watching us from the outside, a soldier spending her last night in the trenches, or a terminal patient sitting through her final Thanksgiving meal. We who remained didn’t know what to think. How had we missed the signs? She seemed to be getting happier. Finally letting go of the damage the Scrimshander had done to her. Only in retrospect did we realize that it was the opposite. She was ready to embrace what he’d done to her.

Martin first understood this at the wake, when Harrison leaned in and said quietly, “Of course she was feeling better. She’d finally come to a decision.” They were in line to greet the family, and Martin was pushing Stan in his chair. It was a very long line. Nothing brought out the crowds like an untimely death.

Barbara’s husband and her two sons stood at the end of the line, greeting each visitor. The husband, a trim, balding man, seemed distracted. When someone was directly in front of him he would look baffled for a moment, and then automatically shake hands and try to say something. His attention, however, always flickered back to his son. The older boy stood beside him, the younger sat on a high wooden stool. They followed their father’s example and shook each hand dutifully.

Behind the family was the pearl gray casket. Martin thought, Thank God it’s closed.

After they made it through the line, Harrison started to say goodbye to them, and Stan said, “We’ll sit over there.” He pointed toward Dr. Sayer, who sat on a half-empty pew. Harrison exchanged a look with Martin, but followed them.

Martin parked Stan at the end of the pew. The doctor moved over to make room for them, and seemed grateful that they’d come. She clutched a clump of tissues and didn’t seem to be done crying. Martin was shocked at this, then ashamed by his shock. Why was he surprised that she was human? Somehow he’d placed her in another category, the way little kids put teachers and pastors in a special category.

Yet, he still didn’t know what to say. In desperation he said, “Is Greta coming?”

“I don’t know,” Jan said. “I tried to text her with the details, but . . .” She shrugged.

Martin looked at the doctor’s long-fingered hands, which didn’t seem to match her squat torso. She wore no wedding or engagement ring. It seemed that she’d come alone. There was so much he didn’t know about her. Was it hard to run a therapy group without being able to talk about yourself, or was it a relief?

Stan said something that Martin didn’t catch. “She shouldn’t have listened to the whispers,” Stan repeated. “You’re not supposed to listen.” He seemed to be offering this as advice to himself. Shit, Martin thought. Forty years and he’s still not over it. And now Barbara, giving in some twenty years after her attack. Martin had been hoping that someday he’d stop imagining what the Dog Man had done to his roommates. That he’d forget that there were creatures that
right now
were clinging outside these stained-glass windows.

He’d told the group that he was adjusting to life without the frames, and some days he actually believed that. Mostly he ached to have them back. Therapy was about facing reality, and with the frames he saw
more
reality, and that was exactly what was driving him crazy. Pretending to be normal made life so difficult. So far he had not given in and bought a new pair of frames (it helped that he was broke). But what if he could never adjust?

He was fucked, that’s what.

Greta appeared at the other end of the pew. She was dressed as always in black on black, but at least that was appropriate here. She sat down next to Harrison, and Martin thought, so that’s back on. Or maybe not: Greta stared straight ahead, not talking. Harrison glanced at her, then seemed to give up. Despite the expensive midnight blue suit, he looked like he hadn’t slept.

What a group. Sitting together at the funeral like a wing of the family. The psychiatric wing.

No,
I’m
not fucked, Martin thought. We
all
are.

Jan had decided not to follow the family out to the burial at the cemetery, and so had the rest of the group. They stood outside the funeral home making awkward small talk until Martin managed to load Stan into the transport. As they pulled away, Dr. Sayer said to Harrison, “I would like to ask a favor, but you must feel perfectly free to say no.”

Jan had debated with herself about the ethics of even asking Harrison for help. His primary issue—besides the sense of deep alienation from humanity that every member of the group shared—was his self-image as a doomed captain. He felt responsible for others’ lives, even as he was certain he’d fail them. Barbara’s death was one more damning piece of evidence.

Harrison, however, was an expert in his field. And she needed his advice.

“What is it?” he asked Jan. He frowned. “Is it about Barbara?”

He was so quick. Jan touched her shoulder bag, but didn’t open it. “I’ve gotten some pictures from the police. I’d like to have your opinion on them. Now, if that’s possible.”

Harrison glanced over his shoulder. Greta hovered twenty feet away. Waiting for him.

“Greta can come too,” Jan said. “But she may not want to see them.”

They walked a block to a small park and found a bench. Jan sat beside Harrison, while Greta stood by nervously, hands in pockets. “Barbara wasn’t found immediately,” Jan said. “The police think that by the time her husband got into the apartment, she’d been dead at least twenty-four hours.”

“You talked to the
police
?” Greta said.

Jan realized that what she meant was, You talked to the police about
us
?

“Before I met with them and told them anything, I got permission from Stephen, Barbara’s husband. Client confidentiality still holds for me, even after death.” Jan lifted her iPad from her handbag and turned it on. “I wouldn’t share these if I didn’t think it was vitally important.”

Greta moved behind Harrison’s shoulder. Jan watched their faces as Harrison flipped through the pictures.

“The detective told me he’d never seen anything like it,” Jan said. “She’d cut open each thigh without breaking a major artery. Then she’d had the strength to cut open her left arm along the bicep. She tried to cut the right arm too, but she couldn’t hold the razor with her arm damaged like that.”

They came to one of the worst pictures and Greta turned away. Harrison took a breath.

“The police just gave these to you?” he asked.

“The detective owed me a favor,” Jan said.

Harrison said, “I don’t see how I can help you with this. It looks like she cut along the scars she showed us. Re-creating what the Scrimshander did to her.”

“She’s not re-creating anything,” Jan said. “Keep going.”

After the crime scene pictures were the autopsy pictures. “I told them to take these pictures. They didn’t want to. They didn’t know her history, didn’t have her on file. I shouldn’t have been surprised—she was attacked so long ago, in a different state. I told them to google her maiden name. Then they understood.”

The first several pictures were too messy to make much sense of; it wasn’t clear which limb, which wound was being photographed. In each of them, though, white bone glinted from between the tissue.

“Fuck,” Harrison said. “She was trying to see them.”

“Yes.”

He stared at the screen. “That last meeting, she asked me if I’d seen the scrimshaw. I said it was beautiful.”

“Oh please,” Greta said to Harrison. “She had this planned for a long time. One comment didn’t send her over the edge.”

Jan said, “I didn’t bring you here just to see the wounds.” She took the tablet from him and flipped ahead. “I asked the police to take pictures of what the Scrimshander had carved into her. I wanted them to open all the scars, but they wouldn’t do that. The family would have a fit. So, we just have whatever Barbara got to. Here’s the first image, from her left humerus.”

The photo was at high zoom. The actual size of the etching was about an inch wide and four inches long, stretching down the bone. The picture was a bit hazy: the head and torso of a man, looking up and to his left. A crosshatch of curved lines radiated from him. The next picture was an even tighter close-up of the face.

“What the fuck?” Harrison said.

“That’s you,” Greta said, amazed.

It was Harrison. Not as a boy, but as he was now. He even seemed to be wearing a suit jacket, his uniform for the meetings.

“How is that possible?” Greta asked. “The Scrimshander drew this, what, twenty years ago?”

“Barbara was nineteen,” Jan said.

Harrison flipped to the next image, and the next, each one an alternate shot of his portrait. Then he reached the first photo of the next series, Barbara’s left femur.

Greta stepped back, her hand covering her mouth.

“I know, I know,” Jan said.

“I was a kid when he did this!” Greta said. “How could he—?”

There were two figures in the picture. One was of Greta, crouching, holding what looked like a thread in each hand. The other was of a young girl, who stood with her hand on Greta’s shoulder.

“That younger girl—is that you?” Harrison said.

“I thought it might be a before and after picture,” Jan said.

Greta shook her head. “No. That’s not me.”

“But look at her neck,” Harrison said. “She’s scarred like you.”

“I told you, that’s not me.”

Curved lines, similar to the background in Harrison’s portrait, radiated behind the two figures. The threads in Greta’s hands seemed to be the same width as the lines in the background, giving the impression that the hatchwork was not mere decoration, but something three-dimensional, like a net, or the rigging of a pirate ship.

“There’s more,” Jan said. “Martin is there, wearing the frames. And on her right arm, where Barbara stopped, there’s a part of a wheel visible. I think it’s Stan’s wheelchair.”

Harrison jumped up from the bench. “I hate this shit!”

“It’s prophecy,” Greta said.

Harrison wheeled about. “No! This is just . . . time shit. Time isn’t running parallel on the other side. The two universes bump up against each other. You get thin spots at random places. Space, time, it’s all different parts of the same bubble. Sometimes they look through and they see the future of our side. And sometimes we see the future of theirs.”

“That’s what prophecy is,” Greta said. “Seeing the future.”

“That doesn’t mean it
has
to happen,” Harrison said. “It’s not predestined.”

“You’re lying to yourself,” Greta said. “Listen to what you were just saying. The bubbles intersect. What they see has already happened. We just haven’t got there yet.”

“No, that’s not how it works,” he said. “There’s still free will and—”

“You can’t stop it!”

Jan stood up. “Greta, Harrison, please.”

Greta growled and threw up her hands.

“Please,” Jan said. “This may be important. We don’t know what the Scrimshander’s drawings mean, but Barbara thought he’d left her a message. She died to see it. That’s what I would like to figure out now.”

“Okay, we need all the pictures,” Harrison said. “We need to see everything the Scrimshander put on her.”

“We don’t have that,” Jan said. “The Scrimshander cut into Barbara in five locations. We have only three places Barbara was able to get to—three and a half perhaps, counting the glimpse of Stan. And we already know that x-rays and MRIs don’t work.”

“Then what do you want from me?” Harrison asked.

Greta started to say something, then shook her head.

Jan said, “I was hoping you could see something in these pictures that I didn’t. You’ve dealt with the Scrimshander. You’ve dealt with . . . lots of things that I haven’t.”

“Okay,” Harrison said after a moment. “Email them to me and I’ll take a look.”

Jan reached into her bag and fished out a small white thumb drive. “They’re all on here. High-res.”

Harrison took it from her. “And what if you don’t like the message?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s not good news.”

Greta said she knew nothing about computers, and seemed content to walk around Harrison’s apartment while he fiddled with his laptop. He paged through the pictures again and again, but kept coming back to the collection of portraits: of himself, Greta and the young girl, Martin, and Stan—or at least that wheel that suggested Stan. He had to assume that Barbara’s portrait was on her sternum, the only scar she had not opened. Would that have been the nineteen-yearold Barbara, or the forty-year-old woman they’d just buried?

He arranged the pictures according to their location on Barbara’s body. Harrison on the left arm; Greta and the mystery girl below him on the left thigh, clutching those threads; Martin on the right thigh. They were all facing inward or upward, as if gazing at the last scar on Barbara’s chest. There was not enough of Stan visible on the right arm to know where he was looking, but the orientation of the legs and wheel suggested he was looking at that blank spot in the middle of the table. Harrison wanted badly to know what was hidden there.