“Oh, no.” His face changed in that moment; his affable self vanished and left behind a blinking husk who looked as if he had swallowed pure vinegar. “About the attack?”

I nodded. I wasn’t lying, exactly; I was having nightmares, but they didn’t explain the glass and blood my father had mentioned. “Teddy’s roughly the same age I was then. Perhaps that’s why.”

“I know you tire of me saying the past is past, but it really is, son,” he said. “You can’t go back. You can’t change it; you can’t fix it. All you can do is leave it behind.”

I assumed my father had regrets. No one who’d lived the life he had—affairs, divorces, shady business practices—could avoid them. But the way he talked, one could deposit those feelings in trash bags and bury them. For me, that was impossible. “I’ve tried.”

“Try harder. Put it in a lockbox in your brain and push it into a dark corner forever.” He sighed long and hard, an orchestra of parental helplessness. “Do you think the dreams started again for a reason?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the nightmare had never really stopped, that it had always lurked in the background. In it, a tiger loomed over me, pinning me down with its body as it swiped at my torso and arms. It wasn’t frantic about it; it was almost calm. The claws were dripping blood, but when I looked closely, they didn’t look like claws at all, but gleaming knives.

I’d stopped talking about it years ago because my father had sent me to a variety of behavioral therapists, all of whom tried to cordon off my brain from the trauma I’d suffered when I was three and a half.

“Teddy is always asking to go to the zoo,” I said cautiously.

“You don’t need to be fearful for Teddy. He’s not going to get into any animal’s cage these days.”

My father usually avoided talking about my accident; I jumped at the opportunity to discuss it more directly. “Do you remember exactly how it happened to me at the Berlin Zoo?”

“It was your mother’s fault,” he answered quickly. “I wasn’t even there that day. When I saw you, it was at the hospital. It was awful. I should never have let your mother take you to the zoo. She was deranged. She probably put you in there to bond with the tiger.”

I heard a terrible echo in my head at that moment. My father had said similar words about my mother many times. It was as if he didn’t realize that would make me wonder if I’d inherited some mental defect from her.

There was an uneasy silence between us. “I should go,” I said finally.