Lone Wolf A Novel (11 page)

LUKE

In the wolf world, it’s in everyone’s best interests to fill a pack vacancy. For the family that’s lost one of its members—one that’s been killed or has gone missing—the ranks are suddenly depleted. A rival pack trying to overtake their territory will become an even bigger threat, and the defensive howl sung by the family will change to an inquiry instead: a higher-pitched question, an invitation to lone wolves in the area to join the pack and battle the rival together.

So what would make a lone wolf answer?

Imagine being all alone in the wild. You are another animal’s potential prey, a rival pack’s enemy. You know that most packs will be prowling between dusk and dawn, so instead you move around during the daytime—but that makes you vulnerable and more easily seen. You walk a precarious tightrope, urinating in streams to disguise your scent, so that you cannot be tracked and challenged. Every turn you make, every animal you meet, is a danger. The best chance of survival you have is to belong to a group.

There is safety in numbers, and security. You put your trust in another member of your family. You say: if you do what you can to keep me alive, I’ll do the same for you.

EDWARD

So my sister hates me because I ruined her childhood. If she understood the irony of that very statement, God, we’d have quite the laugh. Maybe one day, when we’re old and gray, we actually
can
laugh about it.

As if.

It’s always amazed me how, when you don’t offer an explanation, other people manage to read something between the lines. The note I left my mother, pinned to my pillow so that she’d find it after I split in the middle of the night, told her I loved her, that this wasn’t her fault. It said that I just couldn’t look my father in the eye anymore.

All of this was the truth.

“Thirsty?” a woman says, and I jump back when I realize that the soda fountain I’m standing in front of in the hospital cafeteria is spilling Coke all over my sneakers.

“God,” I mutter, releasing the lever. I glance around to find something to sop up the mess. But the napkins are rationed by the cashiers, some sort of ecofriendly initiative. I look over at the cashier, who narrows her eyes at me and shakes her head. “Luellen?” she yells out over her shoulder. “Call the custodian.”

“Here.” The woman beside me removes a packet of Kleenex from her purse and starts patting my soaked shirt, my pants. I try to take the ball of damp tissues from her, and we wind up bumping heads.

“Oh!”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m a little bit of a wreck.”

“I can see that.” She smiles; she’s got dimples. She’s probably about my age. She’s wearing a hospital ID tag, but no medical coat or scrubs. “Tell you what, the Coke’s on me.” Refilling another cup, she moves my banana and yogurt from my tray onto hers. I follow her into the seating area after she swipes her ID card to pay.

“Thanks.” I rub my hand across my forehead. “I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep lately. This is really nice of you.”

“This is really nice of you,
Susan,
” she says.

“I’m Edward—”

“Nice to meet you, Edward. I was just correcting you, so you’d know my name for later.”

“Later?”

“When you call me . . . ?”

This conversation is moving in crazy circles I can’t follow.

Immediately, Susan cringes. “Shoot. I should have known better. I swear my gut instinct is permanently disabled. This is creepy, right? Trying to hit on someone in a hospital cafeteria? For all I know you’re a patient or your wife’s upstairs having a baby but you looked so helpless and my parents met at a funeral so I always figure it’s worth taking the chance if you see someone you want to get to know better—”

“Wait—you were trying to
hit
on me?”

“Damn straight.”

For the first time during this conversation, I smile. “The thing is, I’m not.” Now it is her turn to look confused. “Straight, I mean. I bat for the other team,” I say.

Susan bursts out laughing. “Correction: my gut instinct isn’t just
disabled, it’s irrevocably damaged. This might be a new single-girl career low for me.”

“I’m still flattered,” I say.

“And you got a free meal out of it. Might as well enjoy it while you’re here.” She gestures to the seat across from her. “So what brings you to Beresford Memorial?”

I hesitate, thinking about my father, still and silent, in the ICU. About my sister, who hates my guts, and who’s swathed like a fallen soldier from neck to waist in bandages.

“Relax. I’m not going to violate HIPAA with you. I just thought it might be nice to have a conversation partner for a few minutes. Unless there’s somewhere you need to be?”

I should be at my father’s bedside. This is the first time I’ve left it in twelve hours, and I only came to the cafeteria to get enough food to keep me going for another twelve. But instead, I sit down across from Susan. Five minutes, I promise myself. “No,” I tell her, the first in a series of lies. “I’m good.”

When I walk back into my father’s room, two policemen are waiting for me. I’m not even surprised. It’s just one more item on a long list of things I never expected. “Mr. Warren?” the first policeman asks.

It’s strange to be called that. In Thailand I was called Ajarn Warren—
Head Teacher Warren
—and even that felt uncomfortable, like an oversize shirt that didn’t fit. I’ve never actually known at what point a person becomes a grown-up and starts answering to titles like that, but I am pretty sure I’m not there yet.

“I’m Officer Whigby; this is Officer Dumont,” the cop says. “We’re sorry for your—” He catches himself, before he speaks the word
loss
out loud. “For what’s happened.”

Officer Dumont steps forward, holding a paper bag. “We recovered your father’s personal effects at the scene of the accident, and thought you might like them,” he says.

I reach out and take the bag. It’s lighter than I think it’s going to be.

They say their good-byes and head out of the room. At the threshold, Whigby turns around. “I watched every single one of his Animal Planet episodes,” he says. “You know the one with the wolf that almost gets poisoned to death? I cried like a baby, swear to God.”

He’s talking about Wazoli, a young female who’d been brought to my father at Redmond’s after being abused at a zoo. He built an enclosure for her and moved two brothers into it, forming a new pack. One day an animal-rights activist broke into Redmond’s after hours and swapped meat that had been delivered from the abattoir for meat laced with strychnine. Since Wazoli was the alpha of the group, she ate first—and collapsed, unconscious, in the pond. The camera crews covered my father fishing her out of the water, carrying her to his trailer, wrapping her in his own blankets to warm her up until she began to respond again.

This policeman isn’t just telling me he’s a fan of wolves. He’s saying,
I remember your dad back when.
He’s saying,
That body in the hospital bed, that’s not the real Luke Warren.

When they’re gone, I sit down beside my father and look through the bag. There’s a pair of aviator sunglasses, a receipt from Jiffy Lube, spare change. A baseball cap whose bill has been chewed. A cell phone. A wallet.

I set the bag down, turning the wallet over in my hands. It’s hardly worn, but then, my father often forgot to carry one. He’d leave it in the console of the truck, because if he went into a wolf enclosure he was likely to have it snatched out of his back pocket by a curious animal. By the age of twelve I had learned to carry
cash when I went out with my dad, to prevent the embarrassment of being stuck in a grocery line without the means to pay.

With clinical detachment, I open the wallet. Inside are forty-three dollars, a Visa card, and a business card from a large-animal vet in Lincoln. There’s a feed-and-grain store customer-rewards punch card that says “HAY?” on the back in my father’s handwriting, and has a phone number scrawled beneath it. There’s a wallet-size photo of Cara, with the cheesy blue background that school pictures always have. There’s no indication that he even knew me, at all.

I will give all of this to Cara, I guess.

His driver’s license is inside a laminated pocket. The photo on it doesn’t even look like my father; he’s got his hair pulled back and he’s staring at the camera as if he’s just been insulted.

In the bottom right-hand corner is a small red heart.

I remember filling out the paperwork for my own license when I was sixteen. “Do I want to be an organ donor?” I had yelled to my mother in the kitchen.

“I don’t know,” she’d said. “
Do
you?”

“How am I supposed to make that decision right now?”

She had shrugged. “If you can’t make it right now, then you shouldn’t check the box.”

At that point my father had walked into the kitchen to grab a snack on his way back out to Redmond’s. I remember thinking that I hadn’t even known he was in the house that morning; my father would come and go with that sort of fluid frequency; we were not his home, we were a place to shower and change and eat a meal occasionally. “Are you an organ donor?” I had asked him.

“What?”

“On your license. You know. I think it would freak me out.” I’d grimaced. “My corneas in someone else’s eyes. My liver in someone else’s body.”

He had sat down at the table across from me, peeling his banana. “Well, if it came to that,” he’d said, shrugging, “I don’t think you’d be physically capable of feeling freaked out.”

In the end, I hadn’t checked off the box. Mostly because, if my father endorsed something, I was dead set on supporting its opposite.

But my father, apparently, had felt differently.

There is a soft knock on the open door, and Trina, the social worker, comes in. She’s already introduced herself to me; she works with Dr. Saint-Clare. She was the one who’d been pushing Cara’s wheelchair the first time my sister was brought in to see my father in his hospital bed. “Hi, Edward,” she says. “Mind if I come in?”

I shake my head, and she pulls up a chair beside mine. “How are you doing?” Trina asks.

It seems like a strange question from someone who does this for a living. Is
anyone
she meets inclined to say “Fantastic!” Would she even be skulking around near me if she thought I was handling this well?

At first I hadn’t understood why my father, unconscious, had a social worker assigned to him. Then I’d realized Trina was there for me and for Cara. My previous definition of social worker involved foster care—so I wasn’t quite sure what help she could offer me—but she’s been an excellent resource. If I want to talk to Dr. Saint-Clare, she finds him. If I forget the name of the chief resident, she tells it to me.

“I hear you talked to Dr. Saint-Clare today,” Trina says.

I look at my father’s profile. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever seen someone get better? Someone who’s . . . as bad off as him?”

I can’t look at the hospital bed when I say this. I stare down at a
spot on the floor instead. “There’s a wide range of recoveries from brain injury,” Trina says. “But from what Dr. Saint-Clare has told me, your father’s injury is catastrophic, and his chances of recovery are minimal at best.”

Heat floods my cheeks. I press my hands against them. “So who decides?” I say softly.

She understands what I’m asking.

“If your father had been conscious when he was brought into the hospital,” Trina says gently, “he would have been asked if he’d like to complete an advance directive—a statement explaining who is his health-care proxy. Who has the right to speak on his behalf for all medical decisions.”

“I think he wanted to donate his organs.”

Trina nods. “According to the Anatomical Gift Act, there’s a protocol for which family members are approached, and in what order, to give a directive for organ donation for someone who’s medically incapacitated and unable to speak for himself.”

“But his license has an organ donor symbol.”

“Well, that makes it a little simpler. That symbol means that he’s a registered donor, and that he’s legally consented to donation.” She hesitates. “But, Edward, there’s another decision that needs to be made before you even start to consider organ donation. And in this state, there’s no legal hierarchy to follow when it comes to turning off someone’s life support. The next of kin of a patient with injuries like your dad’s has to make the decision for withdrawal of treatment before anyone even starts talking about organ donation.”

“I haven’t talked to my father in six years,” I admit. “I don’t know what he eats for breakfast, much less what he would want me to do in this situation.”

“Then,” Trina says, “I think you need to talk to your sister.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“Are you sure about that?” the social worker says. “Or is it that
you
don’t want to talk to
her
?”

When she leaves a few minutes later, I tip back my head and let out a sigh. What Trina’s said is a hundred percent true—the reason I’m hiding in this room with my father is because he’s unconscious—he can’t get mad at me for walking out six years ago. On the other hand, my sister can and will. First, for leaving without a word. And second, for coming back, and being thrust into a position that naturally belongs to her: the person who knows my father best. The person my father would probably want sitting next to him, now, if given the choice.

I realize that I am still holding my father’s wallet. I take out the license, rub my finger over the little heart, the symbol for an organ donor. But when I go to slip it back into the laminated sleeve, I see there’s something else in there.

It’s a photo, cut down to fit the small pocket in the wallet. It’s from 1992, Halloween. I had on a baseball cap, covered with fur, with two sharp ears sticking up. My face was painted to give me a muzzle. I was four years old, and I had wanted a wolf costume.

I wonder if I knew, even back then, that he loved those animals more than he loved me.