Lone Wolf A Novel (7 page)

I stood at the chain-link fence, watching Nodah bound up to my dad. Immediately he ripped off the white bandage with his teeth. Then Kina started licking the wound. I was sure he’d tear the stitches, and I was just as sure my father was hoping for that very thing. He’d told me about his time in the wild; how sometimes during a hunt he’d be injured because his skin didn’t have the same protective fur covering that his brother and sister wolves had. When that happened, the animals would lick the gash until it reopened. My father had come to believe that something in their saliva functioned medicinally. Even though he was sleeping in dirt and had no access to antibiotics, in the nearly two years he spent in the woods, he never had a single infection and every wound healed twice as fast. As Kina dug deep, my dad winced a few times, but eventually the cut stopped bleeding and he left the enclosure. We started walking up the hill toward the trailer.
I freaking hate hospitals,
he said, an explanation.

Now as Trina wheels me down the hallway—my mother trailing behind—we pass people in casts, or shuffling with walkers or crutches. My room is in orthopedics, but my father is
somewhere else. We have to get into the elevator, and go down to the third floor.

The sign next to the double doors we enter says icu.

In this hallway, nobody’s walking around except the doctors.

Trina stops pushing the chair and crouches down in front of me. “Are you still feeling up to this?”

I nod.

Trina backs into my father’s hospital room, pulling the wheelchair, and then turns me to face the bed.

My dad looks like a statue. Like one of those marble warriors you see in the ancient Greece section of a museum—strong, intense, and completely expressionless. I reach for his hand and touch it with one finger. He doesn’t move. The only reason I know he’s still alive is because the machines he’s hooked up to are making quiet noises.

I did this to him.

I bite my lip because I know I’m going to cry and I don’t want Trina and my mother watching.

“Is he going to be all right?” I whisper.

My mother puts her hand on my shoulder. “The doctors don’t know,” she says, her voice breaking.

Tears are running down my face now. “Daddy? It’s me. Cara. Wake up. You have to wake up.”

I’m thinking about all those stories you always hear on the news, the miraculous ones, where people who were never supposed to be able to walk get out of bed and start sprinting. Where people who were blind can suddenly see.

Where fathers with brain injuries suddenly open their eyes and smile and forgive you.

I hear the sound of water running, and a door opens—one that leads to the bathroom. The younger version of my dad that I hallucinated yesterday walks out, still drying his hands on his
sweatpants. He looks at my mother, and then at me. “Cara,” he says. “Wow. You’re awake?”

That’s the moment I understand that he was never a figment of my imagination. It’s a voice I recognize, now housed in a different, adult body.

“What is he doing here?” I whisper.

“I called him,” my mother says. “Cara, just—”

I shake my head. “I was wrong. I can’t do this.”

Immediately, Trina whirls the chair around, so that I am staring at the door again. “That’s all right,” she says, not judgmental at all. “It’s hard to see someone you love in that condition. You’ll come back when you’re feeling stronger.”

I pretend to agree. But it isn’t just facing my father, unconscious in a hospital bed, that has made the floor drop out of my world.

It is seeing my brother, who’s been dead to me for years.

I can’t say that Edward and I were ever close. Seven years is a lot, when you’re young, and there just isn’t all that much that a high school kid will have in common with a kid sister who is still using her Easy-Bake oven. But I idolized my big brother. I would pick up the books he sometimes left on the kitchen table and pretend that I understood the words inside; I’d sneak into his room when he went out and would lie on his bed and listen to his iPod, something he would have murdered me for if he knew I was doing it.

The elementary school was a distance away from the high school, which meant that Edward had to drop me off in the morning. It was part of a negotiated deal that included my parents paying for half of the eight-hundred-dollar beater he found
at a garage, so he’d have his own wheels. In return, my mother insisted that my brother physically deposit me on the steps of my school before going on to his.

Edward took this direction literally.

I was eleven years old—plenty grown-up enough to navigate a traffic light’s walk signal alone. But my brother never let me. Every day he parked the car and waited with me. When that signal changed and we stepped off the curb together, he’d grab my hand or my arm and hold on to it until we reached the other side. It was such a habit I’m pretty sure he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

I could have pulled away, or told him to let go, but I never did.

The first day after he left us, the first day I had to go to school and cross alone, I was positive the street had grown twice as wide.

Logically, I understand that it wasn’t Edward’s fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you’re eleven years old, you don’t give a fuck about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother’s hand.

“I
had
to call him,” my mother says. “He’s still your father’s son. And the hospital needed someone who could make medical decisions for Luke.”

As if it’s not bad enough that my father is in some kind of coma, the only person who seems to have information about his condition is, against all odds, my long-lost brother. The thought that
he’s
the one who’s been sitting next to my dad, waiting for him to open his eyes—well, it makes me furious.

“Why couldn’t
you
do it?”

“Because I’m not married to him anymore.”

“Then why didn’t anyone ask me?”

My mother sits down on the edge of the hospital bed. “You weren’t in any condition to be making decisions when you were brought in. And even if you had been—you’re a minor. The hospital needed someone who’s over eighteen.”

“He
left,
” I say, the obvious. “He doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“Cara,” my mother replies, rubbing her hand over her face. “You can’t blame Edward for everything.”

What she is careful
not
to say is that this was my father’s fault—the breakdown of the marriage, and Edward’s departure. She knows better than to bitch about my dad in front of me, though, because that’s partly what made me move out of her house four years ago.

I had left my mother’s house because I didn’t fit into her new family, but I had wound up
staying
with my dad because he seemed to parent me in a way my mom never could. It’s hard to explain, really. It didn’t really matter to me if my bedsheets were washed weekly or only once every few months when someone remembered to do it. Instead, my dad taught me the name of every tree in the woods, knowledge I didn’t even realize I was accumulating. He showed me that a summer storm isn’t an inconvenience but a great time to work outside without being swarmed by mosquitoes or sweltering in the heat.

Once, when we were in one of the enclosures, a badger had the bad luck to wander inside. We usually let the wolves kill whatever small prey wound up in their pen, but this time, one of the adult wolves chased down the badger and, instead of killing it, bit the backbone so it was dragging its rear legs. Then he backed away, so that the two young pups in the pack could make the kill. It was, basically, a training session. That’s what life with my father was like. With my dad, it didn’t matter that
Edward had left. With my dad I was worthy enough to be the only other member of his pack, the one he taught everything he knew, the one he depended on as much as I depended on him.

If my father doesn’t wake up, I realize, I will have to go back to living with my mother.

Suddenly the door to my hospital room opens and the two policemen who were here yesterday walk in. “Cara,” the tall one says. “Glad to see you’re awake. I’m Officer Dumont, and this is Officer Whigby. We’d like to talk to you for a few minutes—”

My mother steps between them and the hospital bed. “Cara’s barely out of surgery. She needs to rest.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, we aren’t leaving this time without speaking to your daughter.” Officer Dumont sits down in the chair beside the bed. “Cara, do you mind answering a few questions about the car accident?”

I look at my mother, and then at the cop. “I guess . . .”

“Do you remember the crash?”

I remember every second of it. “Not so much,” I murmur.

“Who was driving the truck?”

“My father,” I say.

“Your father.”

“That’s right.”

“Where were you headed?”

“Home—he picked me up from a friend’s house.”

My mother folds her arms. “I’m sorry . . . but when did a car accident become a criminal offense?”

The officer looks up over his notepad at her. “Ma’am, we’re just trying to piece together what happened.” He turns to me. “How come the truck swerved off the road?”

“There was a deer,” I say. “It ran out in front of us.”

This is true, actually. I’m just leaving out what happened before that.

“Had your father been drinking?”

“My father never drinks,” I say. “The wolves can smell alcohol in your system.”

“How about you? Were
you
drinking?”

My face goes red.
“No.”

Officer Whigby, who’s been pretty quiet, takes a step forward. “You know, Cara, if you just tell us the truth, this will be a lot easier.”

“My daughter doesn’t drink,” my mom says, angry. “She’s only seventeen.”

“Unfortunately, ma’am, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.” Whigby pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to her. It’s a lab report.

“Your daughter’s blood alcohol content was .20 when she was admitted,” Officer Whigby says. “And unlike your daughter, blood tests don’t lie.” He turns to me. “So, Cara . . . what else are you hiding?”

LUKE

My adopted brothers in the Abenaki tribe believe that their lives are inextricably tied to those of wolves. Years ago, when I first went to Canada to study the way Native American naturalists tracked the wild wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor, I learned that they see the wolf as a teacher—in the way he hunts, raises his children, and defends his family. In the past it was not unheard of for Abenaki shamans to slip into the body of a wolf, and vice versa. The French called the Eastern Abenaki in Maine and New Hampshire the
Natio Luporem,
the Wolf Nation.

The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.

Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.

That would fit for me, I suppose. I grew up with parents who were so much older than my friends’ parents that I would never think of inviting a friend home from school; I would purposely forget to tell my parents about open houses or basketball
games because I was always embarrassed to find kids staring openly at my dad’s white hair, my mother’s soft wrinkles.

Since I didn’t have a thriving social network as a kid, I spent a great deal of time alone in the woods. My father had taught me the name of every indigenous tree; what was poisonous, what was edible. He took me hunting for ducks when the moon was still high in the sky and our breath turned silver in front of us as we waited. It was there I learned to be so still that the deer would come into the clearing to feed, even if I were sitting on its edge. And it was there that I started to be able to tell the deer apart, to know which ones traveled together and which ones returned the next year with their offspring.

I cannot remember a time I didn’t feel connected to animals—from watching a fox play with her kits to tracking a porcupine to letting the circus animals out of captivity. But the most amazing animal encounter I have ever had came when I was twelve years old, just moments before the most disappointing human interaction of my life. I was in the woods behind our home when I saw a female moose lying beneath the ferns with a newborn calf. I knew the cow; I’d seen her once or twice. I backed away—my dad had taught me never to get near a new mother and its young—but to my surprise the moose stood up and nudged her calf forward, until it settled, skin and bones, in my lap.

I sat there for an hour with the calf until the most majestic moose I’d ever seen entered the clearing. His rack was colossal, and he stood like a statue until the cow moose got to her feet, too, and the calf. Then the three of them disappeared silently into the woods behind me.

Amazed, I ran back home to tell my parents what had happened—certain they wouldn’t believe me—and found
them sitting in the kitchen at the table with a woman I didn’t recognize. But when she turned around, I could see myself written all over her features.