by Jodi Picoult
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. After 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.
For a month, I didn’t see or hear any wolves, and I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake.
The fourth week I was in the wild, a nor’easter hit. I moved away from the riverbank and huddled under evergreen trees, because they absorb moisture with their roots, and the ground beneath them would be that much drier. Unable to hunt and shivering and starving, I got sick. I drifted in and out of a feverish spell as the rain pelted me, wondering why the hell I’d ever thought of coming out here. I hallucinated that the forest had legs, that the roots of the trees were kicking me in the gut and the kidneys. I coughed until I vomited bile. There were points when I wished for a big cat or a bear, for anything that would swiftly put me out of my misery.
I think, looking back on it, that I had to get sick. I had to scrape away the very last bit of my humanity so that I would start behaving like a wolf, and not like a man. And in those dire straits, a wolf would not wallow in self-despair. Wolves do not give up. They assess the situation and ask, What can I eat? How can I protect myself? Even wounded, they will run until they can no longer stand.
Although it was only October, the elevation was high enough that it snowed. When my fever broke, I woke to find myself covered with a blanket of white, which I shook off as I sat upright. I glanced around to make sure I was safe, and that was when I saw it, pressed into the snow about three feet away from me: the paw print of a single, male wolf.
Scrambling to my feet, I searched the area for other prints—proof that a pack had been here—but found nothing. This animal either was scouting for his pack or was a lone wolf.
The wolf knew where I was. He could easily find his way back to me and, now that I wasn’t feverish and unconscious, consider me a threat to be dispatched. The sane thing to do was to move on instead of putting myself in danger. But instead, I did something that jeopardized my safety, that made my position blatantly known, surely as if I was sending up a search flare.
I threw back my head, and I howled.
CARA
When my friend Mariah sees me in the hospital bed, she bursts into tears. It’s almost ridiculous, the way I’m the patient but I have to hand her the box of Kleenex and tell her that it’s going to be all right. She pushes a stuffed purple bear at me. It’s holding a balloon that says CONGRATULATIONS. “iParty ran out of the Get Well Soon bears,” she says, sniffling. “God, Cara. I can’t believe this happened. I’m so sorry.”
I shrug—or at least I would shrug, if my shoulder weren’t immobilized. I realize she feels just as guilty about me being out at the party with her as I feel about my dad coming to get me there. If not for Mariah, I wouldn’t have been in Bethlehem; if not for me, my father wouldn’t have been on the roads that night. I hadn’t even wanted to go out; we’d been planning pizza and a chick flick overnight at Mariah’s house. But Mariah invoked the best friend code: I would do it for you. And so, like an idiot, I went.
“It’s not your fault,” I tell her, although I don’t really believe this when I say it to myself.
My mother, who has been living at the hospital, is in the family lounge down the hall with the twins and Joe. She hasn’t brought them in to see me. She is afraid that all the bandages and bruises will give them nightmares, and she doesn’t want Joe to have to deal with that while she’s sleeping here with me. It makes me feel like the Frankenstein monster, like something that has to be hidden away.
Mariah stares into her lap. “Is your dad . . . is he going to—”
“Tyler,” I interrupt.
She glances at me, her face red and puffy. “What?”
“Tell me what happened.” Tyler is the reason we went to the party; he’s the guy who invited Mariah. “Did he drive you home? Did you hook up? Has he texted you?”
Even to my own ears, my voice sounds like a string that’s been pulled too tight. Mariah’s face crumples, and she starts crying again. “You’re stuck in a hospital and you had to have major surgery and your dad is, like, in some kind of coma and you want to talk about a guy? It’s not important. He’s not important.”
“No, he’s not,” I say quietly. “But he’s what we’d be talking about if I wasn’t in a hospital and if this never had happened. If you and I are talking about Tyler, then for five seconds I get to be normal.”
Mariah wipes her nose on her sleeve and nods. “He’s kind of a dick,” she says. “He got wasted and started telling me how his ex had gotten a boob job over the summer and how he wanted to tap that.”
“Tap that,” I repeat. “He actually used that phrase?”
“Gross, right?” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“That he looked like Jake Gyllenhaal,” I remind her. “That’s what you said to me, anyway.”
Mariah leans back in her chair. “Next time I decide to drag you somewhere for the sake of my nonexistent love life will you just hit me with a two-by-four?”
I smile, and it’s been so long that my face aches when I do. “Next time,” I promise.
I let her tell me about how she’s sure our French teacher has a brain tumor, because what else could be making her assign five poems to be memorized in a single week, and how the latest rumor in school is that Lucille DeMars, a goth kid who only talks to a sock puppet she wears on her right hand and who calls that performance art, was caught having sex with a substitute teacher in the music practice room.
I don’t tell Mariah that when I first saw my father, I felt like all the air around me had gone solid, and that I couldn’t for the life of me draw it into my lungs.
I don’t tell her that I feel like I’m going to burst into tears all the time.
I don’t tell her that this afternoon I went into the patient lounge and googled “head injuries” and found more stories about people who never recovered than about people who did.
I don’t tell her that after all those years of wishing my brother would come home, now that he’s here, I wish he wasn’t. Because then the doctors and the nurses and everyone who’s taking care of my dad would come to me, instead of him.
I don’t tell her that it’s hard to fall asleep, and if I get lucky and do manage to drift off, I wake up screaming because I remember the crash.
I especially don’t tell her what happened just before. Or after. Instead, for the whole forty minutes Mariah is here, I let myself pretend that I’m the girl I used to be.
There are many moments I thought I’d get to experience with my brother that never happened because he quit the family. Like having him grill my first boyfriend before a date, or teach me how to drive in empty parking lots, or buy me a six-pack of beer to drink under the bleachers after prom. When he first left and my parents were separated, I used to write to him every night. Somewhere in my closet behind the stuffed animals I can’t bear to throw away and the clothes that no longer fit is a shoe box filled with letters I never sent, because I didn’t have an address for him.
I’ll be honest, I used to imagine our reconciliation, too. I thought it might be seconds before I got married—Edward showing up just before I walked down the aisle, telling me he couldn’t miss seeing his baby sister’s wedding. I pictured everything fuzzy at the edges, like in a Lifetime movie, and him telling me I’d grown up even better than he’d ever imagined. Instead, I got a stilted hello over my father’s respirator. My mom said Edward came down to check on me a couple of times after I had my surgery when I was still pretty out of it, but for all I know, she’s just making that up to make me feel better.
Which is why it’s still surreal to have him standing at the foot of my bed, holding a conversation with me. Behind him, muted, the television shows a contestant spinning the Wheel of Fortune.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” he asks.
No, I’m here for the gourmet food, I silently reply. Someone buys a vowel. There are two A’s.
“I’ve been hurt worse,” I tell him.
My dad used to tell me that a wounded wolf wasn’t himself. He might know you as a brother but rip your throat out with his teeth. When pain factors into the equation, the outcome is unpredictable. I’ve told Edward that I’m not in pain, but that’s a lie. My shoulder might not hurt, thanks to the drugs, but morphine’s done nothing for my heart.
This is the only reason I can give for why I use every word like a weapon to shove him away, when all I really want is to be held right now.
“I know why you left,” I tell him. “Mom told me.”
The fact that he’s gay doesn’t faze me. But I’ve always felt like the whole mystery surrounding my brother’s exit was on a need-to-know basis. At first my mom said it was because Edward and my dad had a fight. Eventually I learned it was because Edward had come out to my dad, who said something that was apparently so god-awful Edward had to leave. Here’s my take on it, though: millions of gay teens come out to their parents, and some have stupid reactions. Just because my father wasn’t perfect, Edward bailed. And that led my mom to blame my dad, and eventually they broke up. The story of my life, as framed by my brother’s impulsive decision to make a grand exit.
“You know what?” I say. “I don’t even care why you left.”
This isn’t a lie, actually. I don’t care why Edward left. All I really want to know is why I wasn’t enough to make him stay.
I’m dangerously near tears right now, something I attribute to the fact that you can’t get any goddamned sleep in a hospital, since someone’s always waking you up to take your blood pressure or your temperature. I won’t let myself believe it’s because Edward has gotten underneath my skin. I’ve worked too hard building a brick wall around my feelings to admit that he might have chiseled his way inside so fast. “Did you find Jesus or Buddha or something in Thailand?” I say. “Guess what, Edward. I don’t forgive you. So there.”
I sound like a spoiled brat. He’s reduced me to that. I hate him even more for making me into someone I’m not than I do for the fact that he’s been sitting upstairs with my dad, making himself into someone he’s not.
But Edward doesn’t even flinch; it’s as if he’s reading the text of me with some magic internal Rosetta stone that makes him understand what I say is not what I mean at all. “Right now, this isn’t about you and me,” he says patiently. Calmly. “We have all the time in the world to figure things out between us again. But Dad doesn’t.”
The fact that he’s finally asking for my input about my father makes me dizzy. For a moment,
I feel ridiculously happy—the way I used to when Edward picked me up from elementary school in his old beater, and all my friends had to go home instead with their moms in decidedly less cool vehicles. He let me name his car, actually. Chase. Viper. Lucifer, he had suggested. Something badass. Instead, I called it Henrietta.
“Cara, he can’t stay hooked up to life support forever.”
Maybe it’s the pain medication in my system; maybe it’s just plain shock. But it takes me a few seconds to connect the dots. To realize that my brother, who’d left after a fight with my father, had grown that hatred like a spider plant until, years later, its offshoots threaten to fill every inch of him. “You hate him so much that you’d kill him?”
Edward’s eyes grow darker. Mine do that, too, when I’m angry. It’s strange to see it mirrored in someone else’s face. “You have to be ready to make some hard choices.”
That’s when I lose it. Who is my brother to tell me about choices—my brother, who gave up on this family six years ago? He has no idea what it’s like to hear your mother crying at night through the walls, to have a strange woman come up during your dad’s daily wolf talk at Redmond’s and slip you a piece of paper with her phone number on it. He has no idea what it is like to attend your own mother’s second wedding, and then come home to find your father drinking himself under the table, asking what the ceremony was like. He has no idea how it feels to be responsible for buying groceries so the family doesn’t starve, for forging signatures on report cards and making excuses when your father forgets a teacher conference. He has no idea what it’s like to visit his mother and see her with the twins and feel obsolete. He has no idea.
The reason I’ve made the choices I have is because I wanted to save my family, just as much as Edward was hell-bent on destroying it. Because when you get down to it, the only person you can trust is the one you’d lay down your own life for. And I’m going to do that for my father now, no matter what Edward thinks.