We Are All Completely Fine (7 page)

Over the next hour she guided him through a tour of her body, though she never let him come closer than a few feet to her. Her skin was both the map and the territory: She told him how and when she acquired each brand, and how much she loved the Sisters. “This one took weeks to heal,” she said. “It felt like the whole summer.”

She was talking about a jagged design near her navel. Looking at it made him queasy. “I know that symbol,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed.

“And that one, on your leg. And there was another on your back—two, I think. Related.”

“How?” she asked. “Where have you seen them?”

“The other side.”

“What does that
mean
?”

“That I was over there?” he asked.

“That they’re on
me
.”

“I don’t know yet.”

Harrison’s cell phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen—not many people had this number—and then picked it up. A few minutes later he hung up and told Greta that she would have to tell them about the Sisters. “The doctor and Martin, at least.”

“Might as well be the whole group,” Greta said.

“Yeah,” he said heavily. Then: “You can probably keep your clothes on, though.”

He said it jokingly, but suddenly she was embarrassed. She came out of the chair and started scooping up her clothes.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “Are you leaving?”

She wouldn’t answer him. He said, “What happened to the Sisters, Greta? Are they still out there?”

“They’re dead.” She pulled on one of her shoes. “All dead.
Whoosh.
”

She finished dressing, then stared at him, hands on hips.

“What?” he asked.

“I still need a ride,” she said.

At the next meeting we were all shocked by Martin’s appearance, in both senses of the word “appearance”: shocked at the bruises and bandages, and shocked that he had come to the group at all. He looked like a zombie from his video game: his face misshapen by the beating, still swollen in yellow and purple. One arm was in a cast from wrist to elbow, and the fingers themselves were wrapped, making it look like one of Stan’s stumps.

Jan had tried to tell him that he did not need to come to the meeting, and she’d understand if he wanted to drop out entirely. She would see him in solo therapy if that’s what he wanted. But no, Martin was determined to attend. He needed to see the others, and he needed to be seen.

“God
damn
, kid!” Stan said. “God
damn
!”

Martin put down his bulging backpack and took his seat next to Barbara. She touched his shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”

He didn’t know how to answer that question. He was upright, so was that holding up? His body ached. His bones felt as shaky as Tinkertoys. Even under this blanket of Vicodin—he was still taking four a day—spikes of pain would shoot up his spine with no warning. When he turned his head too fast, his vision swam.

Oh, and the world without frames. It was so strange to see without filters—to see this group without protection. The only advantage was that he could almost forget that Greta was a monster.

“I also need to find a new place to crash,” Martin said.

“Why’s that?” Harrison asked.

“I got kicked out,” Martin said, which was not a lie. He kept the explanation vague, making it seem like a problem about money and roommates. Only Jan knew the whole story.

Stan, though, was still outraged on Martin’s behalf. “You can’t kick a man out of his home!”

“Where are you going to live?” Barbara asked.

“I’ll think of something,” he said.

Harrison said, “If you need some help—”

“From
you
?” Martin said.

Harrison started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He glanced at Jan as if asking her permission to proceed. “Dr. Sayer told me that Martin was attacked right outside the bar where Greta and I were talking. We’d met there several times. After almost every meeting, actually.”

Stan raised his eyebrows.

“To talk,” Harrison said.

“Uh huh,” Stan said.

“I—
we
should have told the group. I apologize for that. If we’d been more open, then maybe—”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have stalked you,” Martin said.

“You really did that?” Barbara asked him.

“She left
wakes
,” Martin said. “Ripples in the air.”

“Really?” Stan said.

“Yup.”

Barbara said to Martin, “Do you want to talk about the attack?”

“No,” Martin said. He looked at Greta: straight on, from beneath eyelids puffy from the beating. “I want
her
to talk about it.”

“The cut was very small,” Greta said. “Maybe an inch long.”

Her voice was so quiet. Martin leaned forward, thinking, Finally.

“The razor was so sharp I didn’t feel it.”

Barbara made a noise, a tiny intake of breath, and Martin looked up. The woman’s eyes shone with unshed tears. What was going on with her? he wondered. In the first meetings Barbara had been so composed, knees together and voice calm, as polished as a Nordstrom’s saleslady.

Greta said, “All I remember was the ice cube the Sisters rubbed over my arm first. Then one of the other elders distracted me, making faces, and when I looked down they were placing a thin piece of gauze in the wound.”

“
In
the wound?” Barbara asked.

“You twist the gauze, like you’re rolling a joint, then you lay it in there. They have to keep open. The skin has to raise before scarring. You cut the skin of a child, you have to be careful or they’ll heal up without a trace.” She said this matter-of-factly. “Every successful brand comes from delayed healing.”

Greta described how the cuttings proceeded, from tiny incisions to longer, more intricate designs. They concentrated at first on her arms, then legs, so that she could see them. “The Sisters wanted me to love them as much as they did.”

“The sisters, the
sisters
,” Stan said. “What the hell kind of sister would do this?”

Martin almost laughed. Stan was the king of outrage.

“
The
Sisters,” Greta said, and then Stan heard it the way they did: a proper noun, capitalization required.

“I was related to only one of them,” she said. “My mother. It was kind of a commune.”

“In the what—the nineties? Who the hell still lives on a commune?”

“It was Oregon,” Greta said.

But Stan was steamrolling now. “Well where the hell were your teachers? Your neighbors? Didn’t anybody notice they were cutting up a little kid? You weren’t in God damn Africa.”

“I was homeschooled,” Greta said evenly. “All the daughters were. The Sisters were self-sufficient. Everything we needed was on the farm, and the only time I saw outsiders was when I helped set up our stand at the farmers’ market, or when the fuel-oil truck came.”

“That’s terrible,” Barbara said.

“No! I loved it there,” Greta said. “And the Sisters loved me. More than they did the other girls.”

Stan said, “You’re telling us this commune was all women?”

The old man’s voice had a strange tone to it. You old perv, Martin thought.

“She’s telling us that she was in a cult,” Harrison said.

“It’s more complicated than that,” Greta said.

“It always seems that way,” Martin said. “From the inside.”

Greta jerked in her seat. Martin saw the monster erupt in her, flashing white-orange like the mouth of a blast furnace. He grunted in pain. The light had brought tears to his eyes.

He didn’t understand what had happened. He wasn’t wearing the frames.

Greta said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Martin held up a hand. He was still seeing spots. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” When he looked up, Harrison was staring at him, his eyes narrowed as if measuring the space between them.

“You okay, Martin?” Harrison asked.

“I’m fine,” Martin said.

“So are you still in it?” Stan asked Greta. “This cult?”

Jan said, “I don’t think it’s helpful to keep using that word.”

“It’s over,” Greta said. “When I was sixteen, there was a fire. An old bus was parked too close the main house. The bus caught fire, and that spread . . .” She shook her head. “Everything fell apart after that. There were news stories. The survivors turned on each other. The whole community disbanded.” She grimaced. “I know the farm wasn’t perfect, but I still miss it.”

“Wasn’t
perfect
?” Stan said sarcastically. “They cut you!”

Jan said, “Greta, you said the Sisters loved you more than the other girls. How so?”

“All the daughters were marked on their seventh birthday. Then again every month, just tiny little cuts. We were all trying to get our first square. But I wanted more. I
asked
for more. The other girls dropped out one by one. But I kept going.”

The designs became more elaborate, the cuts deeper. By the time she was thirteen, she told the group, all the other girls had dropped out, and Greta was the sole object of the elders’ attention. The scars covered her arms and legs. She ached constantly. Her skin wept blood. Some mornings after a ritual she woke to find herself glued to the bed, skin and bandages and T-shirt and sheet transformed into one thing, cemented by blood. But still she wouldn’t stop.

She had her first period while laid out on a table, naked from the waist up. The elder women were carving the next ring of a spiraling symbol into her stomach, and they cried with joy when they saw the spots in her underwear. They stopped early that day, but the remaining sessions were longer. She was a woman now.

“I could take the pain,” she said. “I was the
queen
of pain. I got so I could breathe through any session, two hours, three. Sometimes I felt like I was floating above the table. I felt like I was opening myself to something greater.”

Greta paused, and Martin risked a glance at her. She was smiling shyly. She said, “They told me I would be worshiped.”

“And you
believed
them?” Stan asked.

“They were already worshiping me,” Greta said. “Every time they put the knife to my skin it was like . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“A prayer,” Barbara said.

“Yes,” Greta said. “Like that.”

The elders talked to her while they cut, telling her stories of the Hidden Ones. These were creatures in exile, cousins to angels, who wanted to reenter the world. Greta—little Greta!—was the key to opening that door. The symbols that she wore were like candles to their more fierce flames. Like to like, they said.

The sessions continued—once a month, twice at most, because the wounds needed time to ripen into high-ridged scars. The weeks of recovery were harder than the cut days. She constantly ran a low-grade fever. Antibiotics accompanied every meal. Some days she never left the cabin she shared with her mother.

Then Greta had to explain to the group that it was not really a cabin, but a rusting VW camper van, immobile for a decade, squatting in high grass. It was clean, though, and dry, and she and her mother were happy to have it. The Sisters had taken in Greta’s mother when she was running from her boyfriend, a dangerous man. This was not an unusual story at the farm. Many of the women were hiding from dangerous men: husbands, boyfriends, fathers. The founders of the farm, back in the ’70s, were three middle-eastern women who fled first their marriages, then mainstream Islam. They had decided upon a different course. They welcomed other women, of all races and religions, and slowly introduced them to the mysteries of the Hidden Ones.

One night the fever climbed, and she couldn’t sleep. She tore at the bedclothes, crying. Then suddenly a man was standing beside the bed. A man, but also a column of smokeless flame; both those things at once. He was beautiful. His eyes were half lidded, his lips slightly parted. The flame pulsed with his breath. He frightened her, and aroused her. She opened her legs to him, but he refused to come any closer. She thrashed and wailed. Still he wouldn’t move.

In the morning, when Greta told her mother what she’d seen, her mother burst into tears and ran to tell the elders. The news spread instantly. When Greta walked through the farm to the showers, the women and children stared at her.

“I felt like a rock star,” Greta told the group. “And then it got weird.”

“Ohhh,” Stan said. “
Then
it got weird.”

A few weeks after her sixteenth birthday, the mood at the farm changed. The elders whispered just out of earshot, and studied her with worried expressions. Then she overheard her mother pleading with one of the elders, saying, She’s not ready, she’s too young.

Greta was worried, but not scared. She’d been raised up in full knowledge of her uniqueness—she was
made
unique. Still, she didn’t demand that the elders tell her what was going on. She would not ask even her mother—at least in public.

“That night I confronted my mother,” Greta said. “I asked her, Is it happening? Is it finally happening? And my mother broke down. Started crying. She kept saying, They can’t make you, I’ll help you get away.”

Greta shook her head. “I think I laughed at her. I know I felt like laughing. Because why would I ever leave? This was my home. This was where I was loved. But my mother was so upset. She took my hands and said, ‘Aunty Siddra is dying. She’s coming here to perform the ceremony.’”

“Did I miss something?” Stan said. “Who the hell is Aunty Siddra? Was
what
finally happening?”

“My wedding day,” Greta said.

Silence crackled like a static charge.

Then Stan asked: “To who?”

“The human torch guy,” Martin said.

That only exasperated Stan more. “But what does that have to do with her scars?”

Greta started to answer, and Harrison said, “They were trying to make her look attractive to something from the other side.” He glanced at Greta and she held his gaze for a moment, then looked down.

“That’s what you were seeing before,” Harrison said to Martin. “She’s not a monster. She’s monster bait.”

The convoy (Greta told them, her voice soft but insistent) arrived in the afternoon, grinding and thumping through the potholes in the gravel road. First a boxy sedan with a cracked window, then a pickup truck with a blue tarp flapping over the bed, and last a school bus. Or rather, a former school bus; this one was hand-painted in reds and oranges, obliterating the yellow and black. The three vehicles drove up to the farmhouse and parked in a semicircle before it. The bus seemed somehow larger than the house, and instantly became the capital of their little community.