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As long as she can remember, Dad has told her a different story every time she asked about his scars.
He is a patchwork man, pieces seamed together in odd places, and she had always just accepted that fact. Papa drinks wine, Dad likes to fish, and some dads just have parts of them missing. The Big One, the one they don’t talk about, twists its way down his cheek, curving into his upper lip on one side. She likes the way it makes him look like he’s always smiling, just a little. She remembers putting her hand on it when he tucked her in one night, in the pink room in the old house, tiny lights glittering on the walls, and how he’d gone so still, as though she’d found an off button.
“Does it hurt?” she had asked, sleepily. Marissa’s Daddy didn’t have a line like that, and neither did Papa, and for the first time in her life, she had started to notice that it looked an awful lot like a big cut.
His eyes had closed, his mouth pressed down, and for just a second, she thought maybe she was in trouble, but then he smiled crookedly. She felt it under her palm, the scratch of his cheek as it changed.
“Nah. Not really,” he’d said, taken her hand in his bigger one and kissed the palm. Then, with his thinking face, “Sometimes, but not in the way scraped knees hurt.”
She’d frowned. She didn’t really know what that meant, but it didn’t sound nice. It sounded how Papa sometimes did when it snowed outside. Like an echo of something.
“How did you get it?”
“Saving a princess,” he’d answered, something warm as cocoa in his voice, “From a dragon.”
He’d kissed her head, wished her goodnight. And in the way that little kids do, she’d believed him.
Again, though, the time they went swimming at the Lake, she’d noticed more of those lines, pink and white, some angry looking, some almost faded away, marking their way across his body. He threw her again and again in the shallows, and each time she paddled back to him, the yellow plastic water wings discarded on the shore, laughing and gasping, and occasionally swallowing some of the jewel-green water by accident.
“No more,” he’d begged, throwing himself backwards with a splash, and she’d giggled, knowing he was faking.
“One more,” she’d demanded, and he rolled his eyes back, ducked under, leaving only the floating top of his dark head and a stream of bubbles. She sucked a big breath in, pinched her nose shut, and followed.
Under the water, it was darker, calm. Little pieces of plants floated through, and something that glittered, tiny flecks of what she chose to believe was gold. And Daddy, with his eyes screwed shut, he looked green too, impossibly pale in the very quiet of the water. His hair floated up, hair that was the same color as hers, and on his shoulder, there was a little pucker of a scar. Almost like a kiss.
Her lungs burned at last, and she came splashing back to the surface. Back to the world. Daddy laughed as he came up and she splashed him just for fun, and scooped her out of the water, hoisted her up in his arms.
“Let’s go see what Papa has for dinner.”
For a moment she’d been tempted to resist. She wanted to continue their game and knew that if they ate, Papa would make them wait before they swam again. He was very clever, and knew that if they waited long enough, she would get sleepy, and they would put her to bed so they could sit on the porch of the cabin with their drinks, watch the sky turn colors, and talk about whatever it is grown-ups talk about when little girls go to bed.
Instead though, she rested her cheek against his shoulder, wrapped small arms around his neck. The familiar warmth and smell of him made her eyes feel heavy. But she could feel the scar beneath her face, and on his back, under her laced hands, she traced another.
“Daddy,” she’d murmured, in her best grown-up tone. She tried to sound like Papa when he used his No Arguments voice. “Where did you really get all your scars?”
This time, there was no pause, no sudden silence. He leaned down to scoop up the water wings, the towels, but he never let her slip out of his grip.
“Didn’t I tell you? They’re from back when I was a big game hunter.”
She’d raised her eyebrows at him the way she’d seen Papa do a thousand times, but realized he couldn’t see it, where she was pressed against the hollow of his neck.
“A hunter?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, and his voice was low like when he read her a bedtime story, “I hunted boars, wolves, lions,”
She pulled her face away from him, so he could see her disbelief, though in her belly she wasn’t all the way sure he was teasing.
“No, really,” he laughed, hoisting her higher on his hip, and gesturing to the curved, mean line across the bare skin of his stomach, “the lion gave me this one here.”
And in that, he had sounded completely serious, so she believed him.
Over the years, the stories changed, and gradually became more and more outrageous. Oh yeah, I used to be in a biker gang, or that’s what happens when you run away to join the circus. It’s almost a game, to see what he will come up with.
Once, on a very rainy day when Papa was Away as he sometimes went, she had asked again, comfortably wrapped in a blanket against his warm side, and he said in a very far-away voice, they’re from when I used to be a policeman, and I had to catch some Very Bad People. He sat in silence for the whole rest of the movie they were watching, and she felt fear prickle under her skin that she’d said something very wrong.
She doesn’t ask, for a long time after that.
Now, she knows that he has never tamed lions, nor dragons, for that matter; she is Big, and far past believing in such things. With time, she has decided that maybe there is a reason he is always so silly when she asks, and so she doesn’t mention them often any more. But on this night, when she wakes from a nightmare that she can barely grasp, that she’s too young to shake but too old to believe her dragon-slayer of a dad can chase away, she finds herself thinking of them again. The nightmare is the same, though she can only ever remember pieces. She knows red, everything red, and in some deep part of her she is afraid that the monster in her dream is familiar. She thinks of scars, and of empty cups, and it’s that which prompts her to slide out from beneath her covers, despite the fear that tries to paralyze, to get a drink of water.
Feet on the floorboards, she knows them by heart now. This house has at last become Home, has been filled with their scents and their smiles and the paintings she’s known her whole life. The hall is dark and eerie, washed of all color under the moonlight, strange, but Papa has always taught her that different doesn’t have to be scary, and she thinks of him now, fills her chest with bravery. She doesn’t think it is the house at night that he was talking about, but it helps, to recognize it’s the same, only in shadow. The stairs are harder, no windows here, but at last she pads across the carpet of the living room, thinking that maybe she will turn on the TV and sleep on the couch as Dad sometimes does, under the gentle flicker of its light.
But she stops before she gets to the kitchen. Her face feels hot, and there’s something uneasy in her chest. Dad and Papa are in there, and she feels very suddenly like she is seeing something she is not supposed to.
It’s not so much anything they’re doing; after all, they’re only talking. But something in the way they’re standing, very close to each other, Dad’s eyes soft on Papa, Papa’s cast down. The way their voices are pitched low, so she won’t overhear. The way they’re standing in slices of moonlight in the kitchen when they should, by testament of their routine, be sleeping in the locked bedroom at the far end of the hall. She has seen them talk about things she doesn’t understand, has heard bitterness lace their voices at times, casual needling over coffee or cold reprimands at dinner, but this is not that. Papa’s shoulders read of apology, Dad’s unsure hands of helplessness as they find their way to a waist that they should not look so uncomfortable resting on. Papa’s hand comes up, and she doesn’t want to see, but she has to, his fingers trace the line she’s asked about so many times, and the only thing that motion reads of is ownership. He presses the pad of his thumb to it, as though he could make it go away. When they kiss, it is more chaste than some she has caught them in, the barest brush of lips, but she has to turn away, because this is something more. This is something intimate.
She creeps back to bed before they can catch her, decides to leave them in that space where only they can go. And when she settles under her blankets, all thoughts of nightmares are gone. Instead she’s thinking of lions, and their claws. She thinks of dragons too, and days that belong to that line in the beginning of fairytales. And finally, sheets warmed again to her skin, eyes drifting closed, she supposes that if anyone can slay dragons and tame lions, it’s probably her dad.
Surely, he can be allowed a few stories.