Lone Wolf A Novel (15 page)

“You know what?” I say. “I don’t even care why you left.”

This isn’t a lie, actually. I don’t care why Edward left. All I really want to know is why I wasn’t enough to make him stay.

I’m dangerously near tears right now, something I attribute to the fact that you can’t get any goddamned sleep in a hospital, since someone’s always waking you up to take your blood pressure or your temperature. I won’t let myself believe it’s because Edward has gotten underneath my skin. I’ve worked too hard building a brick wall around my feelings to admit that he might have chiseled his way inside so fast. “Did you find Jesus or Buddha or something in Thailand?” I say. “Guess what, Edward. I don’t forgive you. So there.”

I sound like a spoiled brat. He’s reduced me to that. I hate him even more for making me into someone I’m not than I do for the fact that he’s been sitting upstairs with my dad, making
himself
into someone
he’s
not.

But Edward doesn’t even flinch; it’s as if he’s reading the text
of me with some magic internal Rosetta stone that makes him understand what I say is not what I mean at all. “Right now, this isn’t about you and me,” he says patiently. Calmly. “We have all the time in the world to figure things out between us again. But Dad doesn’t.”

The fact that he’s finally asking for my input about my father makes me dizzy. For a moment, I feel ridiculously happy—the way I used to when Edward picked me up from elementary school in his old beater, and all my friends had to go home instead with their moms in decidedly less cool vehicles. He let me name his car, actually.
Chase. Viper. Lucifer,
he had suggested.
Something badass.
Instead, I called it Henrietta.

“Cara, he can’t stay hooked up to life support forever.”

Maybe it’s the pain medication in my system; maybe it’s just plain shock. But it takes me a few seconds to connect the dots. To realize that my brother, who’d left after a fight with my father, had grown that hatred like a spider plant until, years later, its offshoots threaten to fill every inch of him. “You hate him so much that you’d kill him?”

Edward’s eyes grow darker. Mine do that, too, when I’m angry. It’s strange to see it mirrored in someone else’s face. “You have to be ready to make some hard choices.”

That’s when I lose it. Who is my brother to tell me about choices—my brother, who gave up on this family six years ago? He has no idea what it’s like to hear your mother crying at night through the walls, to have a strange woman come up during your dad’s daily wolf talk at Redmond’s and slip you a piece of paper with her phone number on it. He has no idea what it is like to attend your own mother’s second wedding, and then come home to find your father drinking himself under the table, asking what the ceremony was like. He has no idea how it feels to be responsible for buying groceries so
the family doesn’t starve, for forging signatures on report cards and making excuses when your father forgets a teacher conference. He has no idea what it’s like to visit his mother and see her with the twins and feel obsolete. He has no idea.

The reason I’ve made the choices I have is because I wanted to save my family, just as much as Edward was hell-bent on destroying it. Because when you get down to it, the only person you can trust is the one you’d lay down your own life for. And I’m going to do that for my father now, no matter what Edward thinks.

I cannot look at him, so I stare over his shoulder. The contestant on
Wheel of Fortune
loses her turn.

“I know you’re hurting,” Edward says after a moment. “This time, you don’t have to go through it alone.”

“It?”

He glances away. “Losing someone you care about.”

He’s wrong, though. Even with him standing three feet in front of me, I have never felt so isolated. So I do what any wolf would, if cornered. “You’re right. Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure Dad gets better.”

Edward’s mouth tightens. “If you want to be taken seriously, then act like an adult,” he replies. “You heard the doctors. He’s not coming back, Cara.”

I stare at him. “
You
did.”

He tries to argue, but I pick up the remote control and turn on the sound on the television. There is a ringing as a contestant gets twelve hundred dollars for choosing a
W.
I push the buttons, so that the applause drowns out Edward’s voice.

I am behaving like a two-year-old. But maybe that’s okay, because, by definition, toddlers need their parents.

I stare at the Wheel of Fortune until Edward gives up and leaves the room. Under my breath, I solve the puzzle:
Blood is thicker than water.

The next contestant guesses a
P;
the buzzer sounds.

People can be so stupid sometimes.

The first time I came face-to-face with a wolf, I was eleven years old. My father had just opened up the first enclosure at Redmond’s. He waited until after hours and then took me past the first safety fence, and up to the second one. Inside were Wazoli, Sikwla, and Kladen, the first captive wolves he’d brought to the park. He made me crouch down, with the chain-link safely separating me from the wolves, and hold up my fists so that the knuckles just grazed the wire. This way, the wolves would get used to my scent.

Wazoli, the alpha female, immediately darted to the far end of the enclosure. “She’s more afraid of you than you are of her,” my father said quietly.

Sikwla was the tester, and Kladen the enforcer wolf. Big, with strong black markings down his back and tail, as if someone had taken a Sharpie marker to him, he came right up to the fence and stared at me with his wide eyes. Instinctively, I backed away into my father, who was standing behind me. “They can smell your fear,” he told me. “So don’t give an inch.”

In a low, calm voice, he told me what was going to happen: he would open the outside gate that led into the enclosure, and then we would step into the little wire double gate and lock it behind us. Then he’d open the inside gate, and I would go in. I had to stay down low, and not move. The wolves might ignore me, or run away, but if I waited, they might also come closer.

“They can tell if your heart rate goes up,” my father whispered. “So don’t let them know you’re afraid.”

My mother did not want me inside the wolf enclosure, and with good reason—who would willingly put a child right smack in the middle of danger? But I had watched my father insinuate himself into this pack now for months. I might never take my position at a carcass and rip away the meat with my teeth, like he did, while two wolves snapped on either side of him—but he was hoping Wazoli would have pups, and I wanted to help raise them.

I wasn’t afraid of Wazoli. As the alpha, she would never come near me—she had all the knowledge of the pack and she would stay as far away from an unknown entity as possible. Kladen was big, 130 pounds of muscle, but he didn’t scare me as much as Sikwla, who just a month ago had sent a park employee to the hospital after biting down on his finger all the way to the bone. The guy was a groundskeeper who had reached through the chain-link to pat Sikwla, thinking he was rubbing up against the fence for a scratch, and before he knew it the wolf had turned and bitten him. Screaming, he tried to pull away, which only made Sikwla bite down harder. Had he just stayed perfectly still, Sikwla would have probably let go.

Every time I saw the groundskeeper walking around Redmond’s with his bandaged hand, I shuddered.

My father said that with himself in the enclosure, too, Sikwla would most likely leave me alone.

“Are you ready?” my father asked, and I nodded.

He opened the second gate, and we both went inside. I crouched down where my father had told me to crouch and waited as Kladen walked past me. I held my breath, but he just continued to lope toward the copse of trees in the back of the enclosure. Then Sikwla approached. “Steady,” my father whispered, and all of a sudden Kladen came barreling at him, knocking him onto the ground in greeting.

Because of that, because my attention flickered, Sikwla seized his moment and went for my throat.

I could feel the pierce of his incisors, feel the wet heat of his breath. His fur was wiry and coarse and damp. “Don’t move,” my father grunted, unable to free himself fast enough to rescue me.

Sikwla was a tester wolf; this was his job in the family. I was a threat until proven otherwise; just because I’d come into the enclosure with my father, whom they accepted, didn’t mean they wanted me around. Sikwla set the standards for this pack; this was his way of making sure I measured up.

At the time, though, I didn’t think of any of this. I thought:
I am going to die.

I didn’t breathe. I didn’t swallow. I tried not to let my pulse show what I felt. Sikwla’s teeth pressed into the flesh of my neck. I wanted to shove at him with all my strength. Instead, I closed my eyes.

Sikwla let go.

By then my father had wrestled Kladen away and grabbed me into his arms. I didn’t start to cry until I saw that he had tears in his eyes.

This is what I am thinking of when, just after three in the morning, I crawl out of bed. It is not easy, with a single hand, and I am certain I am going to wake up my mother, who is sleeping on a pullout chair beside me. But she only rolls over and starts snoring lightly, and I slip into the hallway.

The nurses’ station is to the right, but the elevators are to the left, which means I don’t have to pass by them and be interrogated about why I’m out of bed at this hour of the night. Keeping to the shadows, I shuffle down the corridor, careful to hold my bandaged arm tight against my stomach to keep my shoulder from being jostled.

I already know my brother won’t be in my father’s room. My
mom told me she gave him the key to our house—something that makes me feel uneasy. Most likely Edward won’t be poking around in my room—and it’s not like I have anything to hide—but still. I don’t like the thought of being here, while he is there.

The skeleton staff in the ICU doesn’t notice the girl in the robe with the bandaged arm and shoulder who gets off the elevator. This is a blessing, since I really didn’t know how to explain my migration from the orthopedic ward to this one.

My father is bathed in a blue light; the glow from the monitors surrounds him. He does not look any different to me than he did yesterday—surely this is a good thing? If he were, as Edward said, not coming back, wouldn’t he be getting worse?

There is just enough space for me to sit on the bed, to lie down on my good side. It makes my bad shoulder ache like hell. I realize I can’t hug him, because of the bandage, and he can’t hug me, either. So instead I just lie next to him, my face pressed against the scratchy cotton of his hospital gown. I stare at the computer screen that shows that steady, solid beat of his heart.

The night after I went into the wolf enclosure for the first time I woke up to find my father sitting on the edge of my bed, watching me. His face was outlined with moonlight. “When I was in the wild, I was chased by a bear. I was sure I was going to die. I didn’t think there could be anything more terrifying,” he said. “I was wrong.” He reached out one hand and tucked my hair behind my ear. “The scariest thing in the world is thinking that someone you love is going to die.”

Now, I feel tears coming, a feather at the back of my throat. With a steady breath, I blink them away.

They can smell your fear,
he taught me.
Don’t give an inch.

LUKE

Two weeks went by without any sign or sound of the wolf that had come so close to me when I was sick. And then one morning, when I was drinking from a stream, I suddenly saw an image rise in the reflection beside my own. The wolf was big and gray, with strong stripes of black on the top of his head and his ears. My heart started hammering, but I didn’t turn around. Instead, I met his yellow eyes in the mirror of the water and waited to see what he would do next.

He left.

Any doubts I’d had about what I was doing vanished. This was what I had hoped for. If the big animal that had approached me at the stream was truly wild, he may have been just as curious about me as I was about him. And if that was the case, I might be able to get close enough to understand their behavior from within, instead of observing from outside.

I wanted nothing more than to see that wolf again, but I wasn’t sure how to make that happen. Leaving food around the area would attract not just the wolf but also bears. If I called to the wolf, he might respond—even if he was a lone wolf, having a partner is safer than being alone—but that calling
would also reveal my position to other predators. And honestly, although I hadn’t seen proof of any other wolves since I’d come into the wild, I couldn’t be sure that this wolf was the only one in the area.

I realized that if I was going to take the next step, it meant moving out of my comfort zone. Hell, it meant leaping blindfolded off the cliff of my comfort zone.

I adjusted my schedule so that I was sleeping during the day, and waking at dusk. I would have to travel in the darkness, even though my eyes and my body were not suited to it. This was much more threatening than any night I’d spent at the zoo in the captive pack’s enclosure; for one thing, I was walking nearly ten miles in pitch darkness in a single night; for another, I didn’t have to worry about other animals when I was in the wolf enclosure at the zoo. Here, if I tripped over an exposed tree root or splashed in a puddle or even stepped loudly on a branch, I was sending up a flare alerting every other creature in the wild to my location. Even when I was trying to be quiet, I was at a disadvantage; other animals were better at seeing and hearing in the dark and were watching every move I made. If I fell down, I was as good as dead.

What I remember about that first night was that I was sweating like mad, even though it was near freezing. I would take a step, and then hesitate to make sure I didn’t hear anything coming toward me. Although there were only a scattered handful of stars that night, and the moon had a veil draped over its face, my vision adjusted enough to register shadows. I didn’t need to see clearly. I needed to see movement, or a flash of eyes.