When we reached his bedroom, I had to help him take off his shirt and lie down, holding him by the shoulders while he braced his neck and head. I saw the six-inch scar on his chest that I’d sometimes seen as a child, after he’d come out of the shower with a towel around his waist. Since he never told us anything about what he’d done in the war, we made up stories about how he’d been shot through the chest, or stabbed by the husband of one of his mistresses. The scar was a vivid bolt of red lightning in my memory, angled between his sternum and his heart, but in the dim light of his bedroom, it
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