by Jodi Picoult
You probably think it's strange that a teenager would be put in charge of the family finances, that this is bad parenting. I'd argue that taking your kids into wolf enclosures ranks right up there, too. But no one blinked when Cara, at age twelve, became my father's photogenic costar on his Animal Planet series. My father excelled at making even the greatest naysayers believe that he was entirely in control.
The office chair is the same--one of those ergonomic jobs with pulleys and levers that adjust everything so your back won't hurt. My mom found it at a garage sale for ten bucks. But the computer is no longer a desktop--it's a sleek little MacBook Pro with a screen saver of a wolf staring out with so much wisdom in his yellow eyes that, for a moment, I can't look away. I pull open the file drawers and find one overflowing with envelopes--some marked PAST DUE. As if I'm being drawn by a magnet, I find myself sifting through them. I reach into the drawer on the right to find a checkbook, a pen, stamps. From the size of this stack of envelopes, you'd think no one had paid a bill since I left.
Which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me.
I have already forgotten what brought me to this office. Instead, I begin automatically sorting the mail, writing out checks, forging my father's signature. Every time I open an envelope, my heart skips a beat, and I know it's because I expect to see the same letterhead from six years ago, the bill that left me speechless. The one I wanted to wave in his face, and dare him to lie to me again.
But there is nothing like that. Just utilities, and credit cards that are maxed out, and warnings from collection agencies. I have to stop after the phone bill, the electric bill, and the oil delivery receipt, because the checkbook balance swings into the negative digits.
Where the hell has the money gone?
If I had to guess, I'd say to Redmond's. My father has five wolf enclosures now--five separate packs that he has to support. And a daughter, too. Shaking my head, I open the top drawer and begin to stuff the unpaid bills back in. This isn't my problem. I'm not his accountant. I'm not anything to him, anymore.
It's when I try to jam the envelopes into a drawer too small to contain them that I notice it--the yellowed, wrinkled piece of paper caught on the metal runner of the file drawer. I reach far into the back, trying to tug it free. The corner rips, but I manage to extract the page, and smooth it down beside the laptop.
And just like that, I'm fifteen again.
It was the night before my father was leaving, and Cara and I were hiding.
All day, there had been yelling. My mother would scream, and then my father would shout, and then my mother would burst into tears. If you do this, she said, don't bother coming back.
You don't mean that, he said.
Cara looked up at me. She was chewing on a pigtail, and it dropped out of her mouth, wet like a paintbrush. Does she mean it? Cara asked.
I shrugged. The only thing I knew about love was that it was always one-sided. Levon Jacobs, who sat in front of me in algebra, had skin the color of hot chocolate and knew the stats for every player on the Boston Bruins, but the only time he had ever spoken to me was when he needed to borrow a pencil, and besides, like every other guy in my class, he liked girls. My mother loved my father, but he could only think about his stupid wolves. My father loved the wolves, but even he would tell you that they didn't love him back, that thinking they might was attributing human emotion to a wild animal.
It's crazy, my mother yelled. This is not how you act when you have a family, Luke. This is not how you act when you're an adult.
You make it sound like I'm doing this to hurt you, my father replied. This is science, Georgie. This is my life.
Exactly, my mother said. Your life.
Cara pressed her back against mine. She was thin, and I could feel the ridges of her vertebrae. I don't want him to die.
My father was going to live in the forest without shelter, food, or any protection beyond a pair of heavy canvas coveralls. He planned to stake out one of the natural Canadian corridors for wolf migration and integrate himself into a pack, like he had before with captive groups. If he did, he'd certainly be the first person to really understand how a wild pack functioned.
That is, if he was still alive to talk about it when he was done.
My father's voice grew softer, like felt. Georgie, he said. Don't be like this. Not on my last night here.
There was a silence.
Daddy promised me he'd come back, Cara whispered. He said, when I'm older, I can go there with him.
Whatever you do, I said, don't tell that to Mom.
I couldn't hear them anymore. Maybe they had made up. There had been arguments like this for the past six months, ever since my father had announced his intention to go to Quebec. I wished he'd just leave, already, because at least that meant they'd stop fighting.
We heard a slam, and a few seconds later, there was a knock at my bedroom door. I motioned for my sister to stay put, and then opened it. My father stood on the other side of the threshold. Edward, he said, we need to talk.
When I opened the door, though, he shook his head and motioned for me to follow him. With a quick glance back at Cara to stay put, I trailed my father into the room we called the office, which was really just a collection of boxes, a desk, and a pile of mail no one bothered to sort through. My father cleared a stack of books off a folding chair so I could sit, and then he rummaged in one of the desk drawers and pulled out two shot glasses and a bottle of Scots whisky.
Full disclosure: I knew the bottle was there. I had even had a few swigs. My dad hardly ever drank because the wolves could smell it in his system, so it wasn't like he'd notice the level of the liquor inside slowly going down. I was fifteen, after all, and I could also tell you that buried in a stack of old Life magazines in the attic were two Playboys--December 1983 and March 1987--which I had read multiple times in the hope that I would finally feel a spark of arousal at the sight of a naked girl. But having my father offer me a drink was not something I'd anticipated, at least not till I turned twenty-one.
My father and I could not have been more different if we'd actively attempted to be. It wasn't that I was gay--I'd never seen or heard him act homophobic. It was because, while he was the modern version of a mountain man--all brawn and muscle and visceral instinct--I was more inclined to read Melville and Hawthorne. One Christmas, as a gift, I'd written him an epic poem (I was going through a Milton phase). He'd oohed and aahed and skimmed it, and then later, I overheard him asking my mother what the hell it meant. I know he respected the thirst I had for learning; maybe he even recognized it as the same itch he felt when he knew he had to get outside and hear the dry-throated leaves rasp beneath his footsteps. I used books to escape the same way my father used his work, but he would have been just as baffled by a copy of Ulysses as I would have been by a night spent in the wilderness.
You're going to be the man of the house, he said, in a way that let me know he had his doubts about my ability to pull off that role convincingly. He poured a centimeter of tawny liquid in the bottom of each glass and handed me one. He drank his in one smooth tip; me, I sipped twice, felt my intestines burst into flame, and set the glass down.
While I'm gone, you may have to make some difficult decisions, my father told me.
I didn't know what to say. I didn't have any idea what he was talking about. Just because he was off running with the wolves didn't mean my mother wasn't going to tell me I had to clean my room and finish my homework.
I don't think it's going to come to this, but still. He picked a piece of paper off the blotter on the desk and pushed it toward me.
It was handwritten, and simple.
If I cannot make a decision about my health, I give my permission to let my son, Edward, make any medical decisions that are necessary.
Then a line for his signature. And a line for mine.
My heart started booming like a cannon. I don't get it.
I asked your mother first, he said, but she refuses to do anything that ma
kes it seem like she was in favor of this trip. And it would be irresponsible to not think about . . . what could happen.
I stared at him. What could happen?
I knew the answer, of course. I just needed to hear him say it out loud: he was risking everything for a bunch of animals. He was choosing them, over us.
My father didn't answer directly. Look, he said. I need you to sign this.
I picked up the piece of paper. I could feel the small ridges and hollows where the pen had dug deep, and it made me sick to my stomach to think that, just two minutes ago, my father had been contemplating his own death.
My father handed me a pen. I dropped it on the floor by accident. When we both went to reach for it, his fingers brushed over mine. I got a physical shock, as if he'd electrocuted me. And that's when I knew I'd sign the paper, even though I didn't want to. Because unlike my mother, I wasn't strong enough to let him leave--possibly forever--wishing that things had gone differently. He was offering me a chance to be something I'd never been before: the kind of son he'd always wanted, a boy he could depend on. I needed to be someone he'd want to come back to, or how could I be sure that he would?
He scrawled his signature on the bottom of the page, and then passed the pen again to me. This time I did not let it slip. I carefully formed the E of my name.
Then I stopped.
What if I don't know what to do? I asked. What if I make the wrong choice?
This is how I knew my father was treating me like an adult, not a kid: he dropped the pretense. He didn't say that nothing was going to go wrong; he didn't lie to me. It's easy. If I can't answer for myself, and you're being asked . . . tell them to let me go.
When people say growing up can happen overnight, they're wrong. It can happen even faster, in an instant. I picked up the pen, signed the rest of my name. Then I lifted the glass of whisky and drained it.
The next morning, when I woke up, my father was already gone.
For a long moment I stare at the spiky, spidered handwriting of my fifteen-year-old self, as if it is a mirror into my own mind. I had forgotten about this paper until now--and so had my father. A year and 347 days later, he emerged from the Canadian wilderness with hair down to his waist and dirt caked onto his bearded face, scaring the hell out of a bunch of schoolkids at a highway rest stop. He came home to find his household running without him in it, and slowly reaccustomed himself to things like showering and eating cooked food and speaking a human language. He never mentioned that piece of paper again, and neither did I.
More than once back then I'd hear footsteps in the middle of the night and I would slip downstairs to find my father out on the back lawn, sleeping underneath the night sky. I should have realized, even then, that once a person had made a home outdoors, any house would feel like a prison.
Still holding the yellowed paper, I leave the office. I head upstairs in the dark, passing the pink blur of Cara's room, hesitating at my old childhood bedroom. When I turn on the light, I see it hasn't changed. My twin bed is still covered with a blue blanket; my Green Day and U2 posters are still on the walls.
Continuing down the hallway, I walk into my parents' bedroom. My father's now, I suppose. The wedding ring quilt I remember is gone now, but there's a hunter-green blanket pulled tight with military precision, the top sheet crisply folded over. On the nightstand is a glass of water and an alarm clock. A phone.
It's not the house I remember; it's not my home. The thing is, neither is Thailand.
For a couple of days I've been thinking about what happens next--not just for my father but for me. I have a life abroad, but it's not much of one. I have a dead-end job, a few friends who, like me, are running away from something or someone. Although I came here dragging my feet, intending to fix whatever was broken and then retreat back to safety half a world away, things have changed. I can't fix what's broken--not my father, not myself, not my family. I can only try to patch it up and hope like hell it holds water.
It was a lot easier to tell myself that I belonged in Thailand when I could wallow in old hurts, and replay why I left over and over with every drink at a Bangkok bar. But that was before I saw the mistrust in my sister's eyes, or the walls of this house covered with no pictures of me. Now, I don't feel quite as self-righteous and expatriate. I just feel guilty.
Once, I made the radical, momentous decision to leave life as I knew it behind. Now, I make that decision again.
I pick up the phone and call my landlord in Chiang Mai, a very sweet widow who has me over to her apartment for dinner at least once a week, and tells me the same stories about her husband and how they met. In halting Thai I tell her about my father's condition, and ask her to box up my stuff and mail it to this address. Then I call my boss at the language school and leave a message on his voice mail, apologizing for leaving midterm, but explaining that this is a family emergency.
I take off my shoes and lie down. I fold the paper in half, and then in half again, and tuck it into the pocket of my shirt.
It was a long time ago, but once, my father trusted me enough to tell me what he wanted, should he wind up in the situation he's in now. It was a long time ago, but once, I promised him I would do what he asked.
I may never be able to tell him what I've been doing since I left, or make him understand me. I may never have a chance to offer an apology, to listen to his. He probably will never know I traveled back to be with him, to sit in his hospital room.
But I will.
In Thailand I always have trouble falling asleep. I blame it on the noise, the heat, the throb of a city. But tonight I fall asleep in minutes. When I dream, it's of pine needles under my bare feet as I run, of a winter that seeps through the skin.
LUKE
On the day I walked into the woods north of the St. Lawrence River, I wore insulated waterproof coveralls, insulated boots, long underwear. In my pockets were extra pairs of socks and a hat and gloves; a roll of wire, some string, granola bars, jerky. My last eighteen dollars I gave to the trucker who let me hitchhike across the border with him. My driver's license I slipped into a zippered pocket of the coveralls. If things didn't work out, it might be the only way to identify what was left of me.
I didn't bring a backpack or a sleeping bag or a camp stove or matches. I wanted to be unencumbered, and I wanted to live as much like a lone wolf as I could. The idea, after all, was to find a pack with a vacancy that might allow me to join them. The last human I spoke to--for nearly two years--was the trucker who dropped me off. "Bonne chance," he said, in his Quebecois accent, and I thanked him and slipped into the fringe of pine trees that lined the edge of the highway. No fanfare. Nowadays, I'd probably have sponsorship endorsement patches all over my coveralls; I'd be swilling Gatorade from a CamelBak, and my progress would be simulcast on the Web and on a reality TV show. But then, fortunately, it was just me and the wolves.
I could tell you that I was a man on a mission, determined and brave and stalwart. The truth was, for twelve hours of the day, I was. I walked along old logging trails and would sometimes cover twenty miles of terrain a day, but I made sure I could get back to fresh water daily. I studied scat to see which animals were in the area, and rigged snares with the wire, string, and branches to catch squirrels, which I'd skin and eat raw. I urinated in streams, so that my scent couldn't be traced by predators. But the mountain man in me disappeared at around seven o'clock, when the sun set the tops of the pines on fire and slowly disappeared for the night.
Then, I was terrified.
Imagine your worst nightmare. Now imagine it's real. That's what it is like to feel the dark close around you like an angry fist. Every twitch and hoot and skittering leaf becomes a potential threat. When nature switches off her light, there's nothing you can do to turn it back on again. The first four nights I was in the wild, I slept in a tree, certain that I was going to be killed by a bear or a mountain lion. The fifth night, I fell out of the tree, and realized I was just as likely to die by breaking my neck. A
fter that, I slept on the ground--but lightly, jumping alert at the slightest sound.
My learning curve was staggeringly steep. Within a week, I understood that in the wild, time moves much more slowly. A wind is never just a wind--it's the email system of the natural world, bringing in new information about weather patterns, animals coming into and leaving the area, potential predators. Rain isn't a nuisance--it's a respite from bugs and fresh water for drinking. A snowfall isn't an inconvenience--it's a new source for tracks and animals that might become a meal. The rustling of the trees or the song of a bird or the scrabble of a rodent is the key to your survival; being able to spot a flicker of movement through the dense block of foliage is essential. When it is a matter of life and death, the volume of nature gets turned up loud.
Everyone asks what I thought of, all by myself, alone for so long. The truth is, I didn't think about anything. I was too busy trying to keep myself alive and to read the signs that were presented to me, like some kind of hieroglyphic code without the Rosetta stone for guidance. If I thought about Cara and Edward and Georgie, I knew I'd be distracted enough to miss either an opportunity or a threat, and I could not risk that. So I didn't think. Instead, I survived. I spent the days amazed at the beauty of a spiderweb, laced between branches; at the jagged rise of a mountain ridge in the distance; at the dusk rolling over the woods like a purple carpet. I tracked herds of deer and watched two beavers engineer a phenomenal dam. I dozed off, because midday naps were safer than nighttime ones.