Lone Wolf A Novel (45 page)

When we get to the hospital, Edward pulls up right to the front. “Aren’t you coming in?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I’ll come back later.”

It’s funny. All this time, when Edward was gone, I never felt like I was alone. But now that he’s back, as I watch him drive off, I feel lonely.

The nurses at the ICU desk all say hello to me, ask me how
my shoulder feels. They tell me my dad has been a good patient, and I’m not sure if this is supposed to be some kind of joke, so I pretend to smile before I go into his room.

He is lying just the way he was the last time I visited, his arms tucked on top of the thin blanket, his head canted back on the pillow.

The pillows here suck. I know this from experience. They are too thick, and they are wrapped in plastic so your scalp sweats.

I walk toward my dad and gently reposition the pillow so it doesn’t set his neck at that weird angle. “Better, right?” I say, and I sit down on the foot of the bed.

Behind him is the weird techno-array of machines and computer monitors, like he is the star of a sci-fi movie.
How cool would that be,
I think. If he could communicate by making the little green lines jump on the screen. Twist and spell out the letters of my name.

For a moment, I watch just in case.

A nurse, an LPN, comes into the room. Her name is Rita, and she has a canary named Justin Bieber. She has a picture of the bird on her hospital ID tag. “Cara,” she says. “How are you doing today?” Then she pats my father on his shoulder. “And how’s my own personal Fabio?”

She calls him that because of his hair, or what’s left of it where it hasn’t been shaved. I guess the real Fabio is Mr. Romance Novel Cover, although I’ve never read one of those. I only know him as the guy who shilled I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!, and who got hit in the face by a bird on a Disney World ride.

While Rita hangs a new IV bag, I stare at my father’s hand on the blanket and try to imagine it touching a woman I cannot even picture in my memory anymore. I imagine him driving her to the clinic for her abortion. She would have been sitting in my seat.

I lean forward, as if I’m going to kiss his cheek, but really I’m doing this so Rita can’t hear me. “Dad,” I whisper. “How about I forgive you, if you forgive me?”

And just like that, he opens his eyes.

“Oh, my God,” I cry.

Alarmed, Rita looks down at her patient. She reaches for the intercom behind the bed and pages the nurses’ desk. “Get neurology up here,” she says.

“Daddy!” I get off the bed and walk around it so that I can sit closer to him. His eyes slide to the left as I walk in that direction. “You saw that, didn’t you?” I say to Rita. “How he followed me?” I put my hands on his cheeks. “Can you hear me?”

His eyes are locked on mine. I’ve forgotten how blue they are, so bright and clear they almost hurt to look at, like the sky the morning after a snowstorm. “I’m fighting for you,” I tell him. “I won’t give up if you don’t.”

My father’s head lolls to the side, and his eyes drift shut. “Dad!” I shout. “Daddy?”

I cry and I shake him—nothing happens. Even after Dr. Saint-Clare comes in and tries to make him react with more clinical tests, my father does not respond.

But for fifteen seconds—for fifteen glorious seconds—he did.

My mother is pacing in the hospital lobby when I race across it, ten minutes late for our scheduled pickup. “You’re going to be late for court,” she says, but I throw myself into her arms.

“He woke up,” I say. “He woke up and looked at me!”

It takes a moment for my words to sink in. “What? Just now?” She grabs my hand and starts running toward the elevator.

I stop her. “It was only for a little bit. But there was a nurse in there who saw it, too. He looked right at me and his eyes followed me when I walked around the bed and I could see he was trying to tell me something—” I break off, hugging her tight around the neck. “I told you so.”

My mother pulls her cell phone out of her pocket and dials a number. “Tell Zirconia.”

Which is how, twenty minutes later, I find myself racing back into the courtroom as Judge LaPierre begins to speak. “Ms. Notch, I understand you have something you need to say?”

“Yes, Your Honor. I need to recall my client and a new witness to the stand. Some evidence has come to light that I think the court needs to hear.”

Joe stands up. “You rested your case,” he argues.

“Judge, a man’s life or death hangs in the balance here. This happened only moments ago, or I would have given notice earlier.”

“I’ll allow it.”

So once again I climb into the little wooden balcony built for a witness. “Cara,” Zirconia asks, “where did you go during the lunch break?”

“To visit my father in the hospital.”

“What happened when you got to his room?”

I look right at Edward, as if I am telling him the story, and not the judge. “My dad was just lying there, like usual, like he was asleep. His eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. But this time, when I started talking to him, his eyes opened.”

Edward’s jaw drops. Immediately, Joe leans toward him and whispers something in his ear.

“Can you show us?”

I close my eyes, and then as if I am a doll coming to life, I snap them open.

“What happened next?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” I say. “I got up and walked around the bed, and he kept looking at me, all the way until I sat down next to him again. He watched me the whole time.”

“And then?” Zirconia asks.

“Then his eyes closed,” I finish, “and he went back to sleep.”

Joe is leaning back in his chair with his arms folded. I’m sure he thinks this is my Hail Mary pass, my eleventh-hour attempt to make up some crazy story that sways the judge in my favor. The thing is, it’s not a story. It happened, and that has to mean something.

“Clearly Mr. Ng thinks it’s incredibly convenient for you to have witnessed this,” Zirconia says. “Is there anyone who can corroborate what you’ve told us?”

I point to Rita, the nurse, who has slipped into the back row of the gallery. She’s still wearing her scrubs and her hospital ID tag. “Yes,” I say. “Her.”

LUKE

The hardest part about being back in the human world was relearning emotion. Everything a wolf does has a practical, simple reason. There is no cold shoulder, no saying one thing when you mean something else, no innuendo. Wolves fight for two reasons: family and territory. Humans are driven by ego; wolves have no room for it and will literally nip it out of you. For a wolf, the world is about understanding, knowledge, respect—attributes that many humans have cast off, along with an appreciation of the natural world
.

The Native Americans know that wolves are mirrors for humans. What they show us are our strengths and our weaknesses. If we don’t respect our territory, the wolf will invade it. If we don’t keep our children close by, if we don’t value the knowledge our senior population has accrued, if we leave our garbage around, the wolf will overstep its bounds to let us know we’ve made a mistake. The wolf is one of those creatures that links everything in the ecosystem. Where they exist in the wild, they regulate the prey populations—not just by controlling their numbers but also by assuring their parenting skills. If a wolf is in the area, there will be fewer cold-related fatalities
among other animals, because domestic animals are taken inside or hidden in brush, or herded around a youngster to keep her warm and protect her from the threat of the wolf
.

When I lived with the wolves, I was proud of the reflection of myself
.

But when I came back, I always paled in comparison
.

EDWARD

After all the hours I spent in his hospital room, by his bed, maintaining a vigil, my father opened his eyes when I wasn’t there.

Story of my life.

Joe’s already called a recess so that he can talk to Dr. Saint-Clare, and he’s told me that I shouldn’t believe everything I see, and neither should Cara. “It’s evidence, but it doesn’t mean a thing until the doctors explain it,” he said.

And yet.

What if it had been me in the room when my father woke up? What would I have said to him?

What would he have said to me?

I wonder if the conversations you’ve never had with someone count, if you’ve been over them a thousand times in your mind.

Rita Czarnicki sits on the witness stand now, reciting all her medical qualifications and the number of years she’s worked in the ICU. “I was checking the IV,” she says. “Mr. Warren’s daughter was in the room, talking to him.”

“Did you assess your patient’s condition when you entered the room?”

“Yes,” Rita says. “He was unresponsive and still appeared to be in a vegetative state.”

“Then what happened?” Cara’s lawyer asks.

“As his daughter was talking, Mr. Warren opened his eyes.”

“Are you saying he woke up?”

“Not like you’re thinking.” The nurse hesitates. “Most VS patients lie with their eyes open when they are awake and closed when they’re asleep. But they still have no awareness of themselves or their environment and are totally unresponsive.”

“So what made this event remarkable?” the lawyer asks.

“Mr. Warren’s daughter got up very quickly and moved from the foot of the bed around to the side, and his gaze seemed to follow her before his eyes closed again. That’s tracking, and that doesn’t happen with VS patients.”

“What did you do?”

“I immediately paged the Neurology Department, and they attempted to stimulate Mr. Warren into reactivity again by touching his toes and digging beneath his fingernails and verbally prompting him, but he didn’t respond.”

“Ms. Czarnicki, you heard Cara’s testimony. Did she exaggerate Mr. Warren’s responsiveness in any way?”

The nurse shakes her head. “I saw it myself.”

“Nothing further,” the attorney says.

“Mr. Ng?” the judge asks. “Would you like to cross-examine the witness?”

“No,” Joe says, standing. “But I do wish to recall an earlier witness to the stand. Dr. Saint-Clare?”

The neurosurgeon doesn’t look happy to have been called back to court. He raps his fingers on the edge of the witness stand, as if he has somewhere else he needs to be. “Thank you, Doctor, for making time for this,” Joe begins. “It’s been quite an afternoon.”

“Apparently,” the doctor says.

“Have you had a chance to examine Mr. Warren since you testified this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Has there been a change in his condition?”

Dr. Saint-Clare sucks in his breath. “There’s some discrepancy about that,” he says. “Apparently Mr. Warren opened his eyes this afternoon.”

“What does that mean?”

“Unfortunately, not a lot. Patients who are in a vegetative state are unaware of themselves and their environment. They don’t respond to stimuli except for reflex responses, they don’t understand language, they don’t have control of bladder and bowel function. They are intermittently awake, but they are not conscious. We refer to this condition as ‘eyes-open unconsciousness,’ and that’s what seems to have happened today to Mr. Warren,” the doctor says. “Like many VS patients, his eyes opened when he was stimulated by a voice, but that doesn’t mean he was aware.”

“Can VS patients track moving objects with their eyes?”

“No,” Dr. Saint-Clare says. “That finding would be evidence for awareness and, and suggest the presence of a minimally conscious state.”

“How would a patient with MCS present?”

“He would exhibit an awareness of self and the environment. The patient would be able to follow simple commands, smile, cry, and follow motion with his eyes.”

“According to Ms. Czarnicki and Cara, it seems that Mr. Warren was able to do the last, isn’t that right?”

Dr. Saint-Clare shakes his head. “We think that what was construed as a movement of the eyes was actually a muscle reflex of the eyes closing. A rolling of the eyes, if you will, rather than a tracking. Since this first happened, we’ve tried repeatedly to get Mr. Warren to
respond again, and he hasn’t—not to noise or touch or any other stimuli. The injuries sustained in the crash by Mr. Warren—the brain stem lesions—suggest that there’s no way he could be conscious now. Although he opened his eyes, there was no awareness attached to that movement. It was a reflexive behavior, and doesn’t warrant an upgrade in diagnosis to a minimally conscious state.”

“What would you say to Cara, who would contradict your interpretation of the event?” Joe asks.

The doctor looks at my sister, and for the first time since he’s taken the stand, so do I. The light has gone out of Cara’s face, like a falling star at the end of its arc. “Often in a vegetative state, patients will exhibit automatic behaviors like eye opening and closing, and a wandering gaze, or a facial grimace that family members mistake for conscious behavior. When someone you love suffers a trauma this severe, you’ll grab on to any hint that he’s still the same person, maybe buried beneath layers of sleep, but there nonetheless. Cara’s job, as Mr. Warren’s daughter, is to hope for the best. But my job, as his neurosurgeon, is to prepare her for the worst. And the bottom line is that a patient in a vegetative state like Mr. Warren’s carries a very grim prognosis with a small chance of meaningful recovery, which diminishes further over time.”