Lone Wolf A Novel (33 page)

“You owe me,” she says, lifting her chin.

Boyle looks around to see if anyone’s listening and then drags Cara into the Grange’s community kitchen. I follow them, clutching Jackson as he sleeps against my shoulder. “I
owe
you?” Boyle says, incredulous. “I ought to be putting you in jail.” He frowns, noticing me. “Who’s this?”

“My mom,” Cara says.

This makes Boyle tone down his attitude a little. After all, I’m a voter. “If I didn’t firmly believe that your whole scheme was a result of you being overwrought by your father’s condition, I would have indicted you myself. I don’t owe you anything; I’m cutting you a colossal break.”

“Well,” Cara replies, undaunted, “I need a lawyer.”

“I already told you I don’t try civil suits—”

“A temporary public guardian was appointed for my father. I don’t even know what that
is,
really. But there’s a court date on Thursday to pick a permanent guardian, and I have to let the judge know that I’m the only person who wants to keep my father alive.”

Watching Cara in action, I am impressed. She is a terrier with her teeth sunk into the mailman’s pants cuff. She may be the underdog in size and in scope, but she isn’t giving up without a fight.

Boyle looks from Cara to me. “Your kid,” he says, “is quite a piece of work.”

When he says that, I realize who Cara reminds me of at this moment.

Me, back when I was a reporter, and wouldn’t stop until I got the answer I wanted.

“Yes,” I say. “I couldn’t be more proud.”

Maybe Cara chose to live with Luke instead of Joe and me. Maybe she is willing to give up everything, now, to care for her father. Yet in spite of her infallible allegiance to Luke, it turns out she is very much her mother’s daughter.

Danny Boyle scribbles something on the back of one of his business cards. “This woman used to work for me. She practices law part-time now. I’ll call and tell her you’ll be in touch.” He hands the card to Cara. “And after that,” he says, “I never want to hear from you again.”

LUKE

There is a very real pecking order in a wolf pack, a fluid and constant test of dominance and respect. If a higher-ranking wolf comes toward me, I am supposed to move my weaponry—my teeth—from right to left, horizontally. If, on the other hand, I am passing by that wolf, I should not approach too quickly or I’ll find him stiffening and leaning forward, holding the position until I lower myself. Once he looks at me, making the eye contact to beckon me forward, I can inch closer—and even then, I have to pass on the side, avert my head and my teeth to greet him, proving that I am not a threat.

Needless to say, I didn’t know any of this at first. Instead, I was just my stupid human self with a true gift for getting in the way of wolves who ranked higher than me. The first time I tried to get too close to the beta without a formal invitation, he schooled me. We were in the clearing, and it had started to rain—a nasty, cold sleet. The beta had the good fortune to be positioned under the thickest cover of trees, and I thought there was plenty of room beside him. So the other young male wolf and I decided to share the space.

The beta’s eyes slitted and he growled, a low rumble, but I
didn’t get the message. When I was about twenty feet away, he showed his teeth. The young male immediately ducked sideways, but when I didn’t, the beta growled again, deeper in his throat.

I still didn’t see this as a warning. After all, he’d been the one to engage me first, to invite me to travel with the pack. So you can imagine how my heart rate skyrocketed when, in an instant, he closed the distance between us and snapped at me, his teeth clamping centimeters away from my face.

I was rooted to the spot with fear. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. The beta gripped me with his jaws, his teeth and breath sealing over my face. He roughly turned my head to the left and down, teaching me the correct response. Then he snapped at me, growled deeply, showed his teeth, and growled lightly, reversing the lesson.

Later that day I was sitting with my knees drawn up when the beta loped closer and suddenly lunged, grabbing my throat on the underside. I could feel his teeth sinking into my skin, and instinctively I rolled to my back, a position of utter subordination. He wanted to make sure I’d learned what he’d been trying to teach me earlier, I realized. He squeezed my neck harder, stealing my breath.
You know what I am capable of,
he was saying.
And yet this is all I’m going to do to you. This is why you can trust me.

The highest-ranking wolf in the pack isn’t the one that uses brute force. It’s the one who can, and chooses not to.

HELEN

It is telling, I suppose, that all of my work outfits are different shades of gray. Not just for the metaphorical value, but because it means that in the morning, I don’t have to agonize over whether I should wear the green blouse or the blue and if one is too showy for my job as a public guardian. The sad truth is that when it comes to making personal decisions, I find it difficult to commit, whereas when it comes to organizing the affairs of others, I am a natural.

The Office of Public Guardian in New Hampshire is a nonprofit that serves nearly a thousand people who are mentally ill or developmentally disabled, who have Alzheimer’s or who have suffered a traumatic brain injury. We are assigned to cases by judges who receive requests for temporary and permanent guardianship. Yesterday, my boss tossed another file onto my desk. It was not the first time I’d been appointed a temporary advocate for someone with a brain injury, but this case was different. Usually, our office is pressed into service when a hospital can’t find someone willing or able to make medical decisions for a ward. From what I’ve read, however, the problem here is that both of the man’s children are jockeying for that position, and things have spiraled out of control.

Apparently I am the only person in my office who has never heard
of the ward, Luke Warren. He is famous, or at least as famous as a naturalist can be. He had a television show on a cable network that showcased his work with wolf packs, but I only listen to the news and to PBS. It is La-a (pronounced Ladasha, which leads me to wonder if she’s as frustrated by her moniker as I am by my own) who drops the book off on my desk this morning. “Helen,” she says, “thought you might like this. Hank left it behind when he moved out, the pig.”

Who knew that Luke Warren was not only a television personality and wildlife conservationist but also an author? I run my hand over the raised foil lettering of the title of this autobiography.
LONE WOLF
, it reads.
ONE MAN’S JOURNEY INTO THE WILD.
“I’ll give it back when I’m done,” I promise.

La-a shrugs. “It’s Hank’s. Which means you can burn it as far as I’m concerned.” She touches the cover of the book, with its photo of Luke Warren being smothered in kisses by a presumably wild animal. “Sad though. That someone could go so fast from this”—she moves her hand to the dark case folder—“to this.”

Most of the wards I’ve worked with have not published autobiographies and do not have YouTube footage of themselves in their prime at work. In this, it is easier to get a sense of who Luke Warren was before his accident. I pick up the book and read the first paragraph:

What I get asked all the time is: How could you do it? How could you possibly walk away from civilization, from a family, and go live in the forests of Canada with a pack of wild wolves? How could you give up hot showers, coffee, human contact, conversation, two years of your children’s lives?

When I become someone’s guardian, even in a temporary position, I try to slip under that person’s skin, to find something within
myself that’s similar to him. You would think that a forty-eight-year-old single woman with a monochromatic wardrobe and a manner so quiet that librarians ask her to speak up might not be able to relate to a man like Luke Warren, but the connection I feel is immediate, and intense.

Luke Warren would have been deliriously happy to shed his human skin and become a bona fide wolf.

And like him, I’ve spent my whole life wishing I were someone I’m not.

My mother’s name on her birth certificate is Crystal Chandra Leer. She worked at the Cat’s Meow Gentlemen’s Club as their star attraction until, amid a night of tequila and moonlight, the bartender seduced her in the stockroom on top of boxes of Absolut and Jose Cuervo. He was long gone by the time I was born, and my mother raised me by herself, supporting us by hosting home parties to sell sex toys instead of Tupperware. Unlike other mothers, mine had hair bleached so white that it looked like moonlight. She wore high heels, even on Sundays. She didn’t own a piece of clothing that did not incorporate lace.

I stopped having friends over after my mother told them during a sleepover party that when I was a baby, I was so colicky the only thing that could calm me down was tucking a vibrator along the side of my baby car seat. From that day on I made it my mission to be the antithesis of my mother. I refused to wear makeup and dressed in shapeless, washed-out clothing. I studied incessantly, so that I had the highest GPA in my graduating class. I never dated. Teachers who met my mother at open school night would say, with amazement, that we didn’t seem related at all, which was exactly how I liked it.

Now, my mother lives in Scottsdale with her husband, a retired gynecologist who, for Christmas, bought her a powder-pink convertible with the vanity license plate 38
DD.
For my last birthday she sent me a Sephora gift card, which I regifted on Secretary’s Day.

I am sure that my mother didn’t mean to hurt me by putting my birth father’s last name on my birth certificate. I’m equally sure that she thought my name was a cute play on words and not a moniker fit for a drag queen.

Let’s just say this: whatever your response is when I introduce myself to you . . . I’ve heard it all before.

“I’m here to see Luke Warren,” I say to the ICU nurse manning the main desk.

“And you are?”

“Helen Bedd,” I reply, primly.

She smirks. “Well, good for you, sister.”

“I spoke to one of your colleagues yesterday? I’m from the Office of Public Guardian.” I wait while she finds me on a list.

“He’s 12B, on the left,” the nurse says. “I think his son might be in with him.”

That, of course, is what I’m counting on.

I am struck, when I first walk into the room, by the resemblance between father and son. You’d have to know Luke Warren from before his accident, of course, but this young man curled like a question mark in the corner looks exactly like the man on the cover of the book in my bag, albeit with a much more metrosexual haircut. “You must be Edward,” I say.

He looks me up and down with bloodshot, wary eyes. “If you’re with the hospital counsel, you can’t make me leave,” he says, immediately on the offensive.

“I’m not with the hospital,” I tell him. “My name’s Helen Bedd, and I’m the temporary guardian for your father.”

It is as if an entire opera plays across his features: the opening
salvo of surprise, a crescendo of mistrust, then an aria of realization—I am the one who will be presenting my findings to the judge on Thursday. He cautiously stands up. “Hi,” he says.

“I’m sorry to intrude on your private time with your father,” I tell him, and for the first time I really look at the man in the hospital bed. He is like every other ward I’ve worked with: a husk, an object at rest. My job isn’t to see him the way he is now, though. It’s to figure out who he used to be, and think the way he would have thought. “When you have a moment, though, I’d like to speak with you.”

Edward frowns. “Maybe I should call my lawyer.”

“I’m not going to talk to you about any of the criminal matters of the past few days,” I promise. “That’s not my concern, if that’s what’s worrying you. All I care about is what’s going to happen to your father.”

He looks over at the hospital bed. “It’s already happened,” he says quietly. Behind Luke Warren, something beeps, and a nurse comes through the door. She lifts a full bag of urine that’s been collecting on the side of the bed. Edward averts his eyes.

“You know,” I say, “I could use a cup of coffee.”

We sit at a table near the window in the hospital cafeteria. “I imagine this is incredibly hard for you. Not just because of what happened to your father, but because you’ve been away from home, too.”

Edward folds his hands around his coffee cup. “Well,” he admits, “it wasn’t the way I thought I’d come back here.”

“When did you leave?”

“When I was eighteen,” Edward says.

“So as soon as you could fly the coop, you did.”

“No. I mean, no one ever would have suspected that of me. I was
a straight-A kid, I’d applied to half a dozen colleges, and I pretty much just got up one morning and walked away from home.”

“That sounds like a radical decision,” I reply.

“I couldn’t live there anymore.” He hesitates. “My father and I . . . didn’t see eye to eye.”

“So you left because you didn’t get along?”

Edward laughs mirthlessly. “You could say that.”

“It must have been quite an argument, if it made you angry enough to leave your home.”

“I was angry long before that,” Edward admits. “He ruined my childhood. He left for two years to go live with a pack of wolves, for God’s sake. He used to say all the time that if he could have, he would have chosen to never interact with humans again.” Edward glances up at me. “When you’re a teenager and you hear your dad saying that to a television crew, believe me, it doesn’t exactly make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.”