Lone Wolf A Novel (6 page)

The surgeon clasps his hands together. “We’re still letting the dust settle right now . . .”

But.
There’s a
but,
I can hear it.

“Those lesions we’re seeing affect the part of the brain stem that controls breathing and consciousness. He may never get off that ventilator,” Dr. Saint-Clare says flatly. “He may never wake up.”

When I was sixteen and had just gotten my driver’s license, I went to a party and stayed out past my curfew. I parked down the block and tiptoed across the grass, easing the door open in the hope that I could get away with this infraction. But as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw my father sleeping in the recliner in the living room, and I knew I was doomed. My father always said that when he was out in the wild with the wolves, he never really slept. You had to stay semiconscious, one proverbial eye always open, to know if you were going to be attacked.

Sure enough, the minute I crossed the threshold he was out of that chair and in my face. He didn’t say a word, just waited for me to speak for myself.

I know,
I said.
I’m grounded.

My father folded his arms.
A couple of hundred years ago, parents never let kids out of their sight,
he said.
If a pup disturbs his wolf father at two in the morning, he doesn’t growl so the pup will leave him alone and let him go back to sleep. He sits up, alert, as if he’s saying: What do you want to know? Where do you want to go?

I was still a little drunk, and at the time I figured this was a lecture, his way of telling me he was mad at me. Now I wonder if he was just mad at
himself
—for giving in to his human side, so that he forgot to keep one eye open.

“Can I see him?” I ask Dr. Saint-Clare.

I’m led down the hall to an ICU room. A nurse is bent over the bed, suctioning something. “You must be Mr. Warren’s son,” she says. “Spitting image.”

But I barely hear her. I’m staring at the patient in the hospital bed.

My first thought is:
There’s been a terrible mistake. This isn’t my father.

Because this broken man, with the partially shaved head and the white bandage wrapped around his skull, with the tube going down his throat and the IV running into the crook of his arm . . .

This man with the Frankenstein’s monster stitches on his temple and the black-and-blue mask of bruises around his eyes . . .

This man looks nothing like the one who ruined my life.

LUKE

Red Riding Hood should be flogged.

Single-handedly, that little girl and her grandmother have managed to spread enough lies about wolves to get them poisoned, trapped, and shot into near extinction. Many of the myths about wolves originated in the Middle Ages, in Paris—where children were dragged off by wolves. Now it’s believed that the animals in question were hybrid wolf-dogs. A purebred wolf, on the other hand, is more afraid of you than you are of him. He won’t attack, unless something makes him feel that his safety has been threatened.

Some people believe that wolves kill everything they encounter.

In reality, they only kill to eat. Even when they attack a herd, they don’t slaughter every animal. The alpha wolf very specifically directs which member of the herd should be brought down.

Some people believe that wolves will decimate the deer population.

In reality, for every ten times they hunt, they’ll make a single kill.

Some people believe they infiltrate farms and kill livestock.

In reality, this happens so infrequently, biologists don’t even count them as a category of predatorial risk.

Some people believe wolves are harmful to humans.

In reality, of the twenty or so recorded cases, the encounter between wolf and man was brought on by the person. And there’s not a single documented case of a healthy, wild wolf killing a human.

You can imagine that I’m not too fond of the three little pigs, either.

CARA

I’m sitting at one of the outdoor tables at the trading post, wrapped up in my down jacket and a woolly blanket. There’s no one here because it’s February and the park is officially closed, but the signature attraction—the animatronic dinosaurs that you can’t miss the minute you walk through the gates—runs year-round. It’s some weird computerized wiring glitch—you can’t turn off the
T. rex
without cutting power to the whole facility, and that of course would affect the skeleton crew that manages the animal habitats on the off-season. So every now and then, when I need to get away, I come to the part of the park that’s a ghost town and watch the triceratops shake his plastic head every hour on the hour, dislodging last night’s snowfall. I watch the raptor get into a mock fight with the
T. rex,
both of them thigh-high in drifts. It’s creepy. It feels like I’m watching the end of the world. Sometimes, because it’s so quiet, their canned roars get the gibbons all riled up, and they start hollering, too.

It’s because of the gibbons, actually, that I don’t hear my father calling my name until he’s nearly standing right in front of me. “Cara? Cara!” He is wearing his winter coveralls—the ones that hang outside the trailer on a tree branch and never get
washed because the wolves recognize him by scent. I can tell he’s been in with the pack sharing a meal, because there’s a little bit of blood on the ends of the long hair framing his face. He usually plays the diffuser, which means he gets right between the beta and the alpha rank on the carcass. It’s crazy to watch, actually. Feeding time, for the pack, is like a gladiator sport. Everyone’s got a set position around the carcass and feeds at a specific time on a specific part of the animal. There’s growling and snarling and gnashing as each wolf—my dad included—protects his piece of the kill. He used to eat the raw meat, like the wolves, but when it started messing too much with his digestive system, he began to cook up bits of kidney and liver and hide it inside his coveralls, in a little plastic bag. He somehow manages to transfer this into the slit belly of the calf and eat like the wolves without them noticing anything’s been doctored.

My father’s face collapses with relief. “Cara,” he says again. “I thought I’d lost you.”

I try to stand up, to tell him that I’ve been here the whole time, but I can’t move. The blanket’s gotten caught, and my arms are trapped. Then I realize it’s not a blanket, it’s a bandage. And it’s not my father who’s been calling my name, it’s my mother. “You’re awake,” she says. She’s looking down at me, trying to smile.

My shoulder feels like there’s an elephant sitting on it. There’s something I want to ask, but the words taste like they’re covered in clouds. Suddenly there’s another face, a woman’s face, soft as dough. “When it hurts,” she says, “press this.” She curls my hand around a little button. My thumb pushes down.

I want to ask where my father is, but I’m already falling asleep.

I am dreaming again, and this is how I know:

My father’s in the room, but it’s not my father. This is someone I’ve only seen in photographs—three pictures, actually, that my mother keeps inside her underwear drawer, beneath the velvet liner of the box that holds her grandmother’s pearls. In all three pictures, he’s got his arm around my mother. He looks younger, leaner, short-haired.

This current version of my father is staring at me as if he’s just as surprised to see me looking this way as I am to see him. “Don’t leave,” I say, but my voice is barely a voice.

That makes him smile.

This is the second reason I know I am dreaming. In those old photographs, my dad always looks happy. In fact, he and my mother
both
always look happy, which is again something I’ve only seen in pictures.

I’m awake, but I’m pretending not to be. The two police officers that are standing at the foot of the bed are talking to my mother. “It’s critical that we speak to your daughter,” the taller one says, “to piece together what happened.”

I wonder what my father has told them. My mouth goes dry.

“Clearly Cara isn’t fit for interrogation.” My mother’s voice is stiff. I can feel the eyes of all three of them touching me like flame on paper.

“Ma’am, we understand that her health is the primary concern.”

“If you understood, then you wouldn’t be here,” my mother says.

I watch
Law & Order.
I know all about how a microscopic paint chip can put away a lying criminal for life. Is their visit a
routine one, part of every car crash? Or do they know something?

I break out in a sweat, and my heart starts beating harder. And then I realize that’s something I can’t hide. My pulse is right there on a monitor next to the headboard for everyone to see. Knowing that just makes it worse. I imagine the numbers rising, everyone staring.

“Do you really believe her father was trying intentionally to crash the car?” my mother asks.

There is a pause. “No,” one policeman replies.

My heart’s hammering so hard that, any minute now, a nurse is going to burst in and call a code blue.

“Then why are you even here?” my mother asks.

I hear one of the policemen rustle through his clothing. Through slitted eyes I see him give my mother a card. “If you could just give us a call when she’s awake?”

Their footsteps echo on the floor.

I count to fifty. Slowly, with a
Mississippi
after each number. And then I open my eyes. “Mom?” I say. My voice is full of scrapes and angles.

She immediately sits next to me on the bed. “How do you feel?”

There’s still pain in my shoulder, but it’s not what it was before. I touch my forehead with my free hand and feel swelling, stitches. “Sore,” I say.

My mother reaches for that hand. There’s a little clip on one of my fingers, with a red light glowing through the flesh. Like E.T. “You fractured your shoulder blade in the car accident,” she tells me. “You had surgery on Thursday night.”

“What day is it now?”

“Saturday,” she tells me.

I have entirely lost Friday.

I struggle to sit up, but that turns out to be impossible with one arm wrapped up mummy-tight against my body. “Where’s Dad?”

Something flickers across her face. “I should tell the nurse that you’re awake . . .”

“Is he okay?” My eyes fill with tears. “I saw the paramedics with him, and then they . . . then they . . .” I can’t finish the sentence, because I am starting to put together all the secrecy and the look on my mother’s face and that hallucination I had of my father as a much younger man. “He’s dead,” I whisper. “You just don’t want to tell me.”

She grips my hand more tightly. “Your father is
not
dead.”

“Then I want to see him,” I demand.

“Cara, you’re in no condition to—”

“Goddammit, let me see him!”
I scream.

That, at least, gets some attention. A woman wearing hospital ID—but not nurse whites—hurries into the room. “Cara, you’ve got to relax—”

She is small and bird-boned, with black ringlets that bounce with every syllable. “Who are you?”

“My name is Trina. I’m the social worker assigned to your case. I understand that you’ve got some questions—”

“Yeah, like how about this one: I’m wrapped up like King Tut and I’ve got Frankenstein stitches on my head and my father’s probably in the morgue so how am I supposed to relax?”

My mother and Trina exchange a look, some secret code that lets me know in that instant they’ve been talking about me the whole time I’ve been drugged unconscious. Here’s what I know: If they don’t want to help me get to my dad, wherever he is, then I will walk there myself. Crawl, if I have to.

“Your father’s suffered a very severe brain trauma,” Trina says, the same way you’d say,
I heard it’s going to be a very cold
winter
or
I think I need to take the car in to get the tires rotated.
She says it as if a severe brain trauma is a hangnail.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“He had surgery to remove swelling in the brain. He’s not breathing on his own. And he’s unconscious.”

“Five minutes ago, so was I,” I say, but the whole time I am thinking:
This is all my fault.

“I’ll take you to see your father, Cara,” Trina says, “but you have to understand that when you see him, it’s going to be a shock.”

Why? Because he’s in a hospital bed? Because he’s got stitches, like me, and tubes down his throat? My father is the kind of man who never rests, who’s rarely indoors. Seeing him fall asleep in a chair is enough of a shock.

She calls in a nurse and an orderly to get me into a wheelchair, which requires moving my IV and gritting my teeth as I’m relocated. The hallway smells like industrial cleaner and that plastic hospital smell that’s always freaked me out.

The last time I was in this hospital was a year ago. My dad and I were doing outreach with Zazi, one of the wolves we sometimes bring to elementary schools to teach about wolf conservation. My dad always goes through a mini–training session with the kids to teach them how to behave around a wild animal—don’t hold out your fingers, don’t approach too fast, let the animal catch your scent. And that day, the kids were being great, as was Zazi. But some idiot delinquent in another part of the building had pulled the fire alarm as a prank, and the loud noise startled the wolf. He tried to get away, and the nearest exit was a plate-glass window. My dad wrapped his arms around Zazi to protect him, so that he was the one who wound up going through the window instead of the wolf. Sure enough, when I got Zazi back into his travel cage, he didn’t have a scratch on
him. My father, on the other hand, had a cut so deep on his arm that I could see bone.

Needless to say my father refused to go to the hospital until Zazi was safely back home in his enclosure. By then, the dish towel he’d used as a makeshift bandage was a bloody mess, and the frantic school principal—who’d driven back to the trading post with us—insisted that my father go to the emergency room. There—
here
—he had to get fifteen stitches. But no sooner had we returned home than my dad headed down to the enclosure that housed Nodah, Kina, and Kita—the three wolves he’d had to raise from pups, the pack where he now functioned as a diffuser wolf.