Lily considers this. “How did you get it?”
“When I was five I pushed my sister, Meredith, into the coffee table and she split open her chin. It was mean and careless and a dumb thing for me to do. I don’t even remember why I did it, except I used to do a lot of things to Meredith because she was close to me in age, and often simply there. One time, I shoved a pink crayon up her nose and snapped it off. A doctor had to remove it with tiny forceps. Another time, I convinced her to rub an entire jar of Vaseline through her hair. She had to have a drastic haircut after that.”
“None of that explains really how you got the scar on your chin.”
I think about the point I am trying to make. “The best answer I can give you is that karma can be a bitch.”
“What’s karma?” Lily wants to know.
“Karma is the belief that a person’s actions in the present decide their fate in the future. A week after I pushed Meredith into the coffee table, I fell in the bathtub and split my own chin open. And that’s how I got this scar.”
Lily mulls this over before saying, “I have a sister named Meredith.”
“No,” I correct. “I have a sister named Meredith. You have sisters named Kelly and Rita.”
“And my mother’s name is Witchie-Poo!”
“That’s right.” I take the Witchie-Poo talisman out of my pocket and place it over our bed. Lily hops up on the mattress and sniffs it.
“I have a scar,” Lily says, turning around on the bed so that I can see the length of her back. She looks back at me with doleful eyes.
“Yes, you do. From surgery when you ruptured two discs in your back. You gave me quite a scare.” I often wonder how much she remembers the experience, or if she’s blocked most of it from her mind. I guess if she’s aware of the scar on her back, the events have left her scarred in other, less obvious places.
I take off my pants, fold them, and put them aside. I’ve been wearing the same underwear for three days without taking the time to wash them. “See these here?” I place my bare leg up on the bunk. “These scars in my leg are from my own surgery when a doctor opened my leg to pull out several veins.”
Lily makes a sour face. “Why did he do that?”
“Their valves had collapsed and they had no way to return blood to my heart. The doctor yanked them out like a bird pulling worms from the ground.”
Lily blinks and lowers her head. “What about this mark over my eye?”
I grab her snout and lower her head even more. “That? That’s nothing. A pleasure scar. You were chasing your red ball so diligently you ran headfirst into the stove.”
Lily laughs as if even she thinks that’s a dumb thing for her to have done. And then, as if by instinct, she scurries across the room and finds her red ball under the little table where we sometimes eat when we tire of looking at the sea. She hops up onto our bunk and drops the ball safely at her feet.
I hold out the index finger on my left hand as scotch laps against the sides of my glass like the ocean against our hull. There’s a mark just above the knuckle that joins the finger to the hand. “This here I got battling you.”
“Battling me?”
“That’s right. I was putting groceries away and you snatched a chorizo sausage right out of my hands, chomping down on my finger in the process.”
“I did?”
“You wanted that sausage so badly you wouldn’t let up on my finger.”
“What did you do?”
“I punched you in the snot locker and laid you among the bok choy. Just so I could have my finger back.”
Lily shrugs. “I’m a sausage dog.”
“I know you are.”
Lily twists again. “What about this thing poking out the side of me here?”
I press on the side of her abdomen and feel her floating rib. “Oh, that. When you were a puppy you fell down a flight of stairs. The doctor thinks you broke a rib. I didn’t know it at the time, but it must have healed funny. You scared me a lot when you were a puppy.” I raise my glass and toast. “I’ll drink to your floating rib.”
Lily hops off the bed and over to her water dish on the floor. “And I’ll drink to yours.” She laps thirstily at the water. I don’t bother explaining that I don’t have a floating rib. I get where she’s coming from.
Lily jumps back onto the bunk and asks, “Do you have any more scars?”
“Just on my heart. But only the figurative kind.”
Lily looks like she’s trying to figure that one out. Over the years, I’ve tried to explain about Jeffrey—about how he was there for six years and then suddenly he was not. How the yelling and the sadness and the quiet and the deceit were not how love was supposed to be. Even now, I’m not sure she entirely understands.
I sit down next to her on the bed and scratch behind her ears.
“Did the octopus come to me because of karma?” she asks.