by Jodi Picoult
“I know you love him. I know you don’t want to lose him—”
“Before you left, you told Mom you wanted to kill him,” Cara snaps. “So I guess now you have your chance.”
I can’t blame my mother for telling her that. It’s true.
“That was a long time ago. Things change.”
“Exactly. And in two weeks or two months or maybe longer, Dad just might walk out of this hospital.”
That is not what I’ve been led to believe by the neurologists. That is not what I’m seeing with my own eyes. I realize, though, that she is right. How can I make a family decision with my sister when I haven’t been part of this family?
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I’m sorry I left. But I’m here now. I know you’re hurting, and this time, you don’t have to go through it alone.”
“If you want to make it up to me,” Cara says, “then tell the hospital I should be in charge of what happens to Dad.”
“You’re not old enough. They won’t listen to you.”
She stares at me. “But you could,” she says.
The truth is, I want my father to wake up and get better, but not because he deserves it.
Because I want to leave as soon as possible.
In this, Cara is right. I haven’t been part of this family for six years. I can’t just walk in and pretend to fit seamlessly. I tell my mother this, when I walk out of Cara’s room and find her pacing in the hall. “I’m going back home,” I say.
“You are home.”
“Ma,” I say, “who are we kidding? Cara doesn’t want me here. I can’t contribute anything valuable about what Dad would have wanted in this situation. I’m getting in the way, instead of helping.”
“You’re tired. Overtired,” my mother says. “You’ve been in the hospital for twenty-four hours. Get some rest in a real bed.” She reaches into her purse and pulls a key off a chain of many.
“I don’t know where you live now,” I point out. As if that isn’t proof enough that I don’t belong.
“You know where you used to live,” she says. “This is a spare key I keep in case Cara loses hers. There’s no one in the house, obviously. It’s probably good for you to go there anyway to make sure everything’s all right.”
As if there would be a break-in in Beresford, New Hampshire.
My mother presses the key into my palm. “Just sleep on it,” she says.
I know I should refuse, make a clean break. Start driving back to the airport and book the first flight to Bangkok. But my head feels like it’s filled with flies, and regret tastes like almonds on the roof of my mouth. “One night,” I say.
“Edward,” my mother says, as I am walking away from her. “You’ve been gone for six years. But before that, you lived with him for eighteen years. You have more to contribute than you think you do.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I reply.
“That you can’t make the right decision?”
I shake my head. “That I can,” I tell her. “But for all the wrong reasons.”
I’m having an Alice in Wonderland moment.
The house I step into is familiar, but completely different. There is the couch I used to lie on to watch TV after school, but it’s not the same couch—this one has stripes instead of being a solid, deep red. There are photos of my dad with his wolves dotting the walls, but now they’re mixed in with school pictures of Cara. I walk by them slowly, watching her grow up in increments.
I trip over a pair of shoes, but they aren’t my little sister’s light-up sneakers anymore. The dining room table is covered with open textbooks—calculus, world history, Voltaire. Sitting on the kitchen counter are an empty carton of orange juice, three dirty plates, and a roll of paper towels. It’s the mess of someone who thought he was coming back to clean up later.
There’s a nearly empty box of Life cereal on the counter, which feels more like a metaphor than a housekeeping oversight.
The house has a smell, too. Not a bad one—it’s outdoorsy, like pine and smoke. You know how when you go to someone’s house it smells a certain way . . . but when you go to your own house it doesn’t smell at all? If I needed any other confirmation that I’m a stranger, this is it.
I push the blinking red button on the answering machine. There are two messages. The first is from a girl named Mariah, and it is for Cara.
Okay, I totally have to talk to you and your cell phone voice mailbox is full. Call me!
The second is from Walter, who lives at Redmond’s Trading Post. Six years ago he was the caretaker for the wolves if my dad wasn’t around—the one who sawed up the calves that came in from the abattoir for food, and who called my dad in the middle of the night if there was a medical problem and my dad happened to be home with us, instead of in the trailer on-site. I guess he’s still the caretaker, because his message is asking a question about medication for one of the wolves.
It’s been two days now that my father hasn’t turned up at Redmond’s. What if no one has told Walter what’s happened?
I push all the buttons on the phone, but I can’t figure out how to call the last incoming number. Well, there’s got to be an address book somewhere around here, or maybe his contact information is on a computer.
My father’s office.
It was what I called it back then, even though my father, as far as I knew, had never stepped foot in it. Technically it was the guest bedroom in our house, but it had a filing cabinet and a desk and the family computer, and we never had guests. It was where, twice a week, I sat down to pay family bills—my chore, just like Cara’s, was loading and unloading the dishwasher. We all had to pitch in when my father left for Canada to join the wild pack. I’m sure he expected my mother to be in charge of our finances, but she wasn’t good with deadlines, and after having the heat turned off twice because of bills past due, we decided that I’d take over. So even at fifteen, I knew how much money it took to run a household. I learned about interest rates through credit card debt. I balanced the checkbook. And once my father came home, it was simply assumed that I’d continue. His mind was always a million different places, but none of them happened to be that office desk, paying bills.
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 gues
s, 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 makes 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.