We Are All Completely Fine Read Online Free PDF Page B

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