Lone Wolf A Novel (41 page)

My mother’s jaw looks like it is made of glass. As if turning her head, even incrementally, might make her shatter. “Then why did you leave?”

“He begged me not to say anything to you. He said it was a onetime thing, a mistake.” I look into my lap. “I didn’t want you or Cara to get hurt. After all, you waited two years for him, like Penelope and Odysseus. And Cara—well, she always saw him as a hero, and I didn’t want to be the one to rip off the rose-colored glasses. But I knew I couldn’t lie for him. Eventually I’d slip up, and it would break apart our whole family.” I bury my face in my hands. “So instead of risking that, I left.”

“I knew,” my mother murmurs.

I suck in my breath. “What?”

“I couldn’t have told you which girl it was, but I
assumed.
” She squeezes my hand. “Things deteriorated between us, after your father came back from Canada. He moved out, staying in the trailer or with his wolves. And then he started hiring these young girls, zoology grad students, who treated him as if he was Jesus Christ. Your father, he never said anything specific, but he didn’t have to. After a while, these girls stopped looking me in the eye if I happened to show up at Redmond’s. I’d sit in the trailer to wait for
Luke, and I’d find an extra toothbrush. A pink sweatshirt.” My mother looks up at me. “If I’d known that was the reason you went away, I would have swum to Thailand to get you myself,” she confesses. “I should have been the one protecting you, Edward. Not the other way around. I’m so sorry.”

There is a soft knock on the door, and Joe enters. When my mother sees him, she flies into his arms. “It’s okay, baby,” he says, stroking her back, her hair.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says against his shoulder. “It was forever ago.”

She isn’t crying, but I figure that’s only a matter of time. Scars are just a treasure map for pain you’ve buried too deep to remember.

My mother and Joe have a lovers’ shorthand, an economy of gestures that comes when you are close enough to someone to speak their language. I wonder if my mother and father ever had that, or if my mother was always just trying to decipher him.

“He never deserved you,” I tell my mother. “He never deserved any of us.”

She turns to me, still holding Joe’s hand. “Do you want him to die, Edward,” she asks, “or do you want him dead?”

There’s a difference, I realize. I can tell myself I’m here to disprove the theory of the prodigal son; I can say
I want to carry out my father’s wishes
until I am blue in the face. But you can call a horse a duck, yet it won’t sprout feathers and grow a bill. You can tell yourself your family is the picture of happiness, but that’s because loneliness and dissatisfaction don’t always show up on camera.

It turns out there’s a very fine line between mercy and revenge.

So fine, in fact, that I may have lost sight of it.

LUKE

The anchor I had to the human world—my family—was different. My little girl, the one who had still been afraid of the dark when I left, was now wearing braces and hugging me around the neck and showing me her new goldfish, her favorite chapter book, a picture of herself at a swim meet. She acted as if two minutes had passed, instead of two years. My wife was more reserved. She would follow me around, certain if she took her eyes off me I might disappear again. Her mouth was always pressed tightly shut, because of all the things I knew she wanted to say to me but was afraid to let loose. After our first encounter at the police station in Canada, she had been afraid to come too close, physically. Instead, she smothered me with creature comfort: the softest sweatpants in my new, reduced size; simple home-cooked foods that my stomach had to relearn; a down comforter to keep me warm. I couldn’t turn around without Georgie trying to do something for me.

My son, on the other hand, was outwardly unmoved by my return. He greeted me with a handshake and few words, and sometimes I’d find him warily watching me from a doorway or
a window. He was cautious and tentative and unwilling to place his trust too quickly.

He had grown up, it seemed, to be much like me.

You would think that the creature comforts would have sent me diving headlong into the human world again, but it wasn’t that easy. At night, I was wide awake, and I’d roam through the house on patrol. Every noise became a threat: the first time I heard the coffeemaker spitting at the end of its cycle, I ran downstairs in my undershorts and flew into the kitchen with my teeth bared and my back arched defensively. I preferred to sit in the dark instead of beneath artificial light. The mattress was too soft beneath me; instead, I lay down on the floor beside the bed. Once, when Georgie noticed me shivering in my sleep and tried to cover me, I was up like a rocket before she even finished draping the quilt over my body, my hands wrapped around her wrists and her body rolled and pinned to the ground so that I had the physical advantage. “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered out, but I was so caught up in instinct that I couldn’t even find the words to tell her,
No, I am.

There’s an honesty to the wolf world that is liberating. There’s no diplomacy, no decorum. You tell your enemy you hate him; you show your admiration by confessing the truth. That directness doesn’t work with humans, who are masters of subterfuge. Does this dress make me look fat? Do you really love me? Did you miss me? When a person asks this, she doesn’t want to know the real answer. She wants you to lie to her. After two years of living with wolves, I had forgotten how many lies it takes to build a relationship. I would think of the big beta in Quebec, which I knew would fight to the death to protect me. I trusted him implicitly because he trusted me. But here, among humans, there were so many half-truths and white lies that it was too hard to remember what was real and
what wasn’t. It seemed that every time I spoke the truth, Georgie burst into tears; since I no longer knew what I was supposed to say, I stopped speaking entirely.

I couldn’t stand being inside, because I felt caged. Television hurt my eyes; dinner table conversation was a foreign language. Even just walking into the bathroom in the house and smelling the combined confection of shampoo and soap and deodorant made me so dizzy I had to lean against the wall. I had been in a world where there were four or five basic smells. I had reached a sensory awareness where, when the alpha began to stir in her den, thirty yards away, I knew it, simply because her stretch sent a small puff of clay earth from the underground den through its narrow opening, and that smell was like a red flag among the others of urine, pine, snow, wolf.

I couldn’t go outside, either, because when I walked down the street other people’s dogs began to bark in their houses or, if they were in the yard, run to confront me. I remember passing a woman riding a horse, which shied and whinnied when it spotted me. Even though I was clean-shaven now and had scrubbed two years of dirt off my skin, I still exuded something raw and natural and predatory. (To this day, I have to walk a twenty-five-yard detour around a horse before it will pass.) You can take the man out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the man.

So it made sense that the only place I really felt at home was at Redmond’s, in the wolf enclosures. I asked Georgie to drive me over there—I still wasn’t really ready to drive. The animal caretakers there treated me as if I were the Second Coming, but they weren’t the ones I wanted to see. Instead, with a relief that came close to a total breakdown, I let myself into the pen with Wazoli, Sikwla, and Kladen.

Kladen, the beta, came at me first. When I instinctively
ducked and turned my head away from him—acknowledging his dominance—he greeted me by licking all around my face. I realized how easily this nonverbal conversation came to me—so much easier, in fact, than the stilted one I’d had with Georgie on the way over here, about whether or not I’d thought about the future and what I was going to do next. I also realized how much more fluent I’d gotten in the language of the wolf. Things that I had once had to think about while in enclosures with wolves now were a natural response. When Sikwla, the tester wolf, nipped at me, a throaty growl rumbled out of me. When finally, the wary Wazoli—the alpha—approached, I lay down and rolled to offer her my throat and my trust. Best of all, mucking about in the dirt like this, I started to smell like me again, instead of like Head & Shoulders and Dove soap. My hair tie got lost in our play, and my hair, which I’d cut to my shoulders, fanned over my back and became matted with mud.

These wolves were softer around the edges than my brothers and sisters in Quebec. They were still wild animals, and they still had wild animal instincts, but simply by definition a captive wolf’s life is not as violent as a wild wolf’s life. This would again require an adjustment for me, as I remembered that my role here was not just as a pack member but as a teacher: offering these wolves an enrichment program to make them learn what they were missing by being contained in this wire fencing.

And now that I’d lived it, who better?

I had asked one of the caretakers to bring a half of a calf from the abattoir—a celebratory meal. He did, doing only a cursory double take when he saw me crouched between Kladen and Wazoli. I wanted this food because it was a pack food, one that would remind these guys that I belonged to the family. As
soon as the calf was dragged into the enclosure and the caretaker had left, the wolves descended. Wazoli went for the organ meat, Kladen the movement meat, and Sikwla the stomach contents and spine. I wedged myself in between Kladen and Sikwla, baring my teeth and curling my tongue to protect the food that was rightfully mine. I lowered my face to the carcass and began to rip off strips of raw flesh, bloodying my face and my hair and snapping at Sikwla when he came too close to my portion.

I am sure, when I came up for air, I was quite a sight: dirty and bloody, sated, delirious in the companionship of a group of animals that understood me and that I understood. I loped away from the carcass, following Sikwla to the rock where he sometimes dozed.

Until then I’d forgotten about Georgie. She was standing on the far side of the fence, staring at me with horror. Although I’d done nothing she hadn’t seen before, I don’t think she was reacting to my interaction with the wolves, or my meal with them. I think she just knew, at that moment, she’d lost me for good.

GEORGIE

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

That’s what the wizard says, in
The Wizard of Oz.
Keep the dog and pony show going so that the eye is drawn to the spectacle, and not to the reality. Of all the questions I get asked about Luke, the most common one is, “What was it like to be married to someone like him?” I suppose people think, based on his television persona, that he is an animal in bed or that he eats his steak raw. The truth would have disappointed them: when Luke was with us, he was perfectly normal. He’d watch ESPN; he’d eat Fritos. He changed lightbulbs and took out the trash. He was ordinary, rather than extraordinary.

The thing is, when celebrities are born, they aren’t supposed to wallow in the mundane. They are supposed to always be dressed to the nines, step out of limousines, or in Luke’s case, live in the wild. Which meant that, after he returned from Quebec, Luke couldn’t be the husband I needed him to be. That would have detracted from the man everyone else expected him to be.

But even those who are larger than life have people close to them—people who know that they leave the toilet seat up when they pee, or that they hate peanut butter, or that they crack their knuckles. And those of us who are close know that when the television cameras stop rolling,
those legendary figures deflate into people who are simply life-size, people with zits and wrinkles, people with flaws.

I suppose that when Luke started hiring young girls to be wolf caretakers, it crossed my mind he might be sleeping with them. He wasn’t, after all, sleeping with me. But what I really thought was that he needed an entourage. He needed girls who were so enamored with the man he was on camera and in the news that they believed exactly what they saw. Then, Luke could start to believe it himself.

So to all those people who want to know what it was like to be married to someone like Luke?

It was like trying to embrace a shadow.

It was coming in second place, every time.

It doesn’t surprise me to find Cara stalking back and forth in front of the window of a conference room. “It’s a lie,” she says, the minute I walk in the door. “He didn’t do those things.”

Zirconia exchanges a glance with me. Of all those young women who couldn’t see past their hero worship of Luke Warren, the one with the starriest eyes was his own daughter. She loved him simply because he belonged to her, which—if I heard Luke right all those years—made her relationship with him the most similar to one between wolves in a pack.

“It’s possible your brother was making that up just to rattle you,” Zirconia says, “but I don’t think he’s that smart, frankly.” She looks up at me. “No offense.”

It’s beginning to fall into place, like a city after an earthquake. Some buildings are still standing; some are irreparable. And of course, there are casualties. I had always wondered at Luke’s vehement reaction to Edward’s homosexuality—it just didn’t make sense, given everything I knew about Luke—and that was because it never really happened. The only sexual exploits Edward had discussed that night had been his father’s.

I sit down on the edge of a table, watching my daughter fiercely tread a line back and forth. Her sling hugs her injured arm tight against her body; the other arm is wrapped tightly over it. “Cara,” I sigh, “everyone makes mistakes.”

I cannot believe that I am apologizing for Luke’s behavior. But—as Edward said—there is no limit to the lengths we’ll go to to protect our family. We will cross oceans, we will swallow pride.