Lone Wolf A Novel (42 page)

“He loved us,” Cara says. Her eyes are the color of a bruise, her mouth a wound.

“He loved
you,
” I correct. “He still does.” I reach out a hand, trapping her as she passes by. “I know that you ran to your dad when Joe and I were starting a family because you thought he was the safe haven; that with him, you’d be his only family, instead of just one kid out of a bunch. And I know how hard it must be for you to find out that he might not be the hero you thought he was. But whatever he did to me, Cara—that doesn’t change how he feels about you.”

“Men. You can’t live with them . . . and you can’t legally shoot them,” Zirconia says. “I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.”

Ignoring her, I turn back to Cara. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter if your father isn’t perfect. Because to him,
you
are.”

Instead of comforting her, however, those words make Cara burst into tears. She folds herself into my arms. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I say.

Gently, I rub her back. Luke used to talk about one of his wolves, which was afraid of storms, how the pup would crawl under his shirt for comfort. But he never took the time to know that his own daughter used to do the same thing. That on nights when lightning cracked the yolk of the moon, nights when Luke was tending to a frightened wolf, Cara would climb into bed with me and wrap her arms around my back, a mollusk riding out the tide.

“There’s something else you should know,” I say. “Edward left because
he wanted to protect you. He thought if he wasn’t here to tell us what he’d seen, you would never have to find out.”

Cara’s good arm tightens around my neck. “Mom,” she whispers. “I have to—”

There is a knock on the door, a deputy sheriff announcing that court is about to reconvene. “Cara,” Zirconia says, “do you still want to be the legal guardian for your father?”

She pulls away from me. “Yes.”

“Then I need you to get your head back in the game,” Zirconia says bluntly. “I need the court to see that you’re grown-up enough to love your father, no matter what. No matter if he was catting around on your mom, or if he needs to have a diaper changed every three hours, or if he spends the next decade in long-term care.”

I touch her arm. “Is this really what you want, Cara? It could be years before he recovers. He might
never
recover. I know your father would want you to go to college, to get a job, to have a family, to be happy. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

She lifts her chin, her eyes still too bright. “He has a life ahead of him, too,” she says.

I have told Zirconia and Cara that I am stopping off at the restroom before heading back inside for Cara’s testimony, but instead I find myself walking out the double doors of the courthouse, veering left into the parking lot. I drive the twenty minutes to Beresford Memorial Hospital and take the elevator up to the ICU.

Luke lies still, with no visible change to his condition, except a bruise around his IV site that has bloomed from purple to a mottled ocher.

I pull up a chair and stare at him.

When he came out of the wild, before the reporters showed up and drew him into an orbit of fame, I did my best to help him transition into
the human world. I let him sleep for thirty hours straight; I cooked his favorite foods; I scrubbed the dirt that had become caked to his skin off his back. I figured that if I pretended life had returned to normal, maybe he would come to believe it.

To that end, I dragged him on errands. I took him to pick Cara up at school and I brought him into the bank while I used the ATM. I drove him to the post office, and to the gas station.

I started to see that women flocked to Luke. Even when he was dozing in the car, I’d come out of the dry cleaner’s to find someone staring at him through the window. At Cara’s school, strange ladies in vans honked until he waved. I made fun of him for it.
You’re irresistible,
I told him.
Just remember me when you acquire your harem.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was being prophetic. I thought:
Who, of all these fawning women, would put up with what I do behind closed doors?
A man who could only eat basic grains like farina and oatmeal without getting sick to his stomach, who turned the thermostat down at night until we all woke up shivering; a man whom I had actually found peeing around the perimeter of the backyard?

One day we went to the grocery store. In the produce aisle, a woman approached with two melons and asked Luke which one he thought was riper. I watched him smile and bend his head to the melons, so that his long hair fell over his face like a curtain. When he picked the fruit in her right hand, she nearly fainted.

One aisle over, a woman pushing a toddler in her grocery cart asked him to reach a box on the top shelf for her. Luke obliged, stretching to his full height and flexing his shoulders to get the item: denture cream, which I’m quite sure she had no intention of purchasing. It was, at the time, almost entertaining to see all these strangers drawn magnetically to my husband. I assumed it was some kind of reaction to his muscular build, his mane of hair, or some wolf pheromone.
They know I can protect them,
he said in all seriousness.
That’s the attraction.

But in the Bath & Body aisle, Luke had actually crumbled—he was
that dazed and unnerved by the wave of scents that bled through the packaging and assaulted his senses.
It’s okay,
I told him, and I pulled him upright and led him to a safer space, near the cereal.

I can’t believe this,
he said, burying his face in my shoulder.
I can kill a deer with my bare hands, but bubble bath is my kryptonite.

That’ll change,
I promised.

Georgie,
Luke said.
Promise me
you
won’t.

Now I look down at Luke, in the waxy shell of his own skin, his eyes closed and his mouth slack around the tube that is breathing for him. A god who’s toppled back into mortality.

I reach for his hand. It’s loose, the skin as dry as leaves. I have to fold it around my own hand, hold it up to my cheek. “You son of a bitch,” I say.

LUKE

There is only one thing that could have dragged me away from another wolf family, and that is a human. This one came in the form of a features reporter for the
Union Leader,
and was accompanied by a photographer. As visitors came to Redmond’s and found me living with the pack, excitement grew—and with it, the number of tourists coming to see me for themselves. Somehow, New Hampshire’s largest paper got wind of it.

The irony didn’t escape me: this was how Georgie and I had met, too. Once, I’d left the wolves for her. Now, I was going to have to leave them again because of a reporter. Every day there were more—some with television cameras—all clamoring for an interview with the man who’d lived in the wild with wolves. Kladen, Sikwla, and Wazoli were skittish and snappish—and for good reason. They could read loud and clear the signals these people sent: that they wanted something from me, that they were greedy and selfish. In the wild, any of these reporters would have been treated like a predator: brought down by the pack to save one of its members.

But that devotion to family went both ways, and I knew
that I couldn’t let the lives of the wolves be disrupted because of me. So I left the pen, only to be swallowed by the hail of questions and the camera flashes.

Did you really live in the wild?

What did you eat?

Were you scared?

How did you survive a Canadian winter?

What made you return?

It was that last question that sent me over the edge, because I didn’t belong here, anymore. And although I would have walked into the woods in a heartbeat and tried to howl to locate my pack again, there was no guarantee that I’d ever find them or that they would take me back.

Before I’d started sleeping at Redmond’s with the wolves, I had prowled the house late one night and found a light on in my son Edward’s room. He looked up when I opened the door, challenging me with his eyes to ask why he was awake at 3:00
A.M.
I didn’t ask because, after all, so was I. Edward was propped against his pillows, reading a book. When I didn’t speak, he held it up. “The Divine Comedy,” he said. “By Dante. I’m reading all about Hell.”

“I’m living it,” I said.

“I’m only at the first circle,” Edward told me. “Limbo. It’s not Heaven, and it’s not Hell. It’s the in-between.”

This was, I realized, my new address.

I couldn’t be charming. I couldn’t be smart. I could barely remember how to speak, much less how to put into sentences everything I had learned with the wolves. So I did what a wolf does when it finds itself in danger: I got away.

I ran to Redmond’s. It was five miles in the dark, but that meant nothing to me after Quebec, and it felt good to get my adrenaline pumping. I went up to the trailer at the top of the
hill and slammed inside. I locked the door, and then went into the bedroom, and locked that door, too. I was breathing hard, sweating. I could hear the wolves howling for me.

There’s no point in being able to know everything about wolves if you can’t teach it to the people who need to learn.

I don’t know how long I stayed in that dark, cramped room, curled in the far corner with my eyes on the door so that I’d know the minute someone was coming. But eventually, I heard muffled voices. And movement. The twitch of a key in a lock.

The scent of Georgie’s shampoo, her soap.

She locked the door behind her and knelt down in front of me, moving slowly. She put her hand on the crown of my head. “Luke,” she whispered.

Her fingers stroked my hair, and I found myself leaning into her, against her. Georgie’s arms came around me. I didn’t realize that I was crying until I tasted my tears on her lips. She kissed my brow, my cheeks, my neck.

It was meant as comfort but spread, the way a match intended for light might become a fire. My arms came around her and reached for the collar of her shirt. I ripped it open, rucked up her skirt. I felt her legs wrap around me, and I fumbled with my jeans. I bit her shoulder and swallowed her cry; I stood with her in my arms and pressed her back to the wall, driving into her so desperately that her spine arched, that her nails scratched into my skin. I wanted to mark her. I wanted her to be mine.

Afterward, I cradled her in my lap, tracing the line of her vertebrae. There were bruises on her, unintentional ones. I wondered if I had lost the capacity to be gentle, along with my ability to be human. I looked down to find Georgie staring up at me. “Luke,” she said, “let me help.”

CARA

You don’t ever want to imagine your father having an affair.

In the first place, it means you have to picture him having sex, which is just disgusting. In the second place, it means that you are forced to side with your mother, who is the wronged party. And in the third place, you can’t help but wonder what it was about you that wasn’t compelling enough to make him think twice before driving a stake into the heart of your family.

It feels like I have a splinter in my throat after I hear this news, but it’s not for the reason you’d think. I am—and I know how crazy this sounds—relieved. Now I’m not the only one who has screwed up royally.

My mother said I’m perfect in my father’s eyes, but that’s a lie. So maybe we can be imperfect for each other.

As soon as I sit down on the witness stand, I have a clear view of Edward. I keep thinking about what my mother said—how he was trying to protect me by leaving. If you ask me, he ought to rethink some of his altruism. Saying he was saving our family by removing himself from my life is like saying he only wants to kill my father because it’s the humane thing to do.

Everyone makes mistakes,
my mother had said.

I used to have a friend in elementary school whose family was so picture-perfect that they could practically be the advertisement in a photo frame. They always remembered each other’s birthdays, and I swear the siblings never fought and the parents acted like they’d just fallen in love that morning. It was weird. It felt so plastic-smooth that I couldn’t help but question what happened when there wasn’t an audience like me for them to put on their show.

My family, on the other hand, included a father who preferred the company of wild animals, a mother who sometimes had to go to bed with a headache although we all really knew she was crying, a fifteen-year-old boy paying the bills, and me, a kid who made herself throw up the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance at school where the girls all brought their dads, just so she could stay home sick and no one would have to feel bad for her.

I wonder if what makes a family a family isn’t doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.

Once again when they try to swear me in I can’t really do it because my right arm is tied up tight against my body. But I still promise to tell the truth.

Zirconia begins by walking toward me. It’s funny how at home she looks in a courtroom, even with her crazy fluorescent tights and yellow heels. “Cara,” Zirconia begins, “how old are you?”

“I’m seventeen,” I say, “and three-quarters.”

“When is your birthday?”

“In three months.”

“At the time of your father’s injury,” she asks, “where were you living?”

“With him. I’ve been living with him for the past four years.”

“How would you describe your relationship with your father, Cara?”

“We do everything together,” I say, feeling my throat narrow around the words. “I spend a lot of time with him at Redmond’s, helping him with the wolves. I also took over running the household, pretty much, because he’s so busy with his research. We’ve gone camping in the White Mountains, and he taught me orienteering. Sometimes we just hang out at home, too. We’ll cook pasta—he gave me his special recipe for Bolognese sauce—and watch a DVD. But he’s also the first person I want to talk to if I get a great grade on a test, or if a kid is being a jerk to me at school, or if I don’t know the answer to something. Almost everything I know, I know because of him.”