Lone Wolf A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  “So what happens?”

  “I’ll get a bail commissioner down here, and we’ll take it one step at a time.”

  I nod. “Joe?” I say. “I, um, don’t really have any money to post bail.”

  “You can pay off your debt by babysitting the twins so I can get reacquainted with my beautiful wife,” he replies. “Seriously, Edward. Your job from here on in is to sit down, be quiet, and let me handle everything. No outbursts. No grand heroic efforts. Understand?”

  I nod, but the truth is, I don’t like to be beholden to anyone. I’ve been forging my own way for so long that it makes me feel totally vulnerable, as if I’ve suddenly found myself stark naked in the middle of a crowded street.

  As he stands up to find an officer, I realize what it is that I like so much about Joe Ng. “You’re the first person who hasn’t said how sorry you are that this happened to my father,” I muse aloud.

  He pauses at the threshold of the door. “The world knows your father as a brilliant conservationist and wildlife researcher. Well, I know him as the man who made Georgie’s life hell and who threw away his marriage for a bunch of glorified dogs,” Joe says bluntly. “I’m happy to be your lawyer. But I’m not doing it because of any great affection I have toward Luke Warren.”

  For the first time in what feels like days, I smile. “I can live with that,” I say.

  The holding cell in the police station is very small and dark, and faces a wall with a few yellowing posters and an Agway calendar from 2005. I’m stuck here, waiting for a bail commissioner to arrive.

  My father used to say that an animal will only feel like it is in captivity if its home feels not like a territorial boundary but instead like a cage. What’s at stake is the lack of the natural world—not the fact that the space has been limited. After all, animals have their families with them—so the only thing you’re changing, by putting wolves into captivity, is their ability to defend themselves. You’re making them vulnerable the minute you put up the fence.

  If you enrich their enclosures, though, a pack can be happy in captivity. If you play tapes of rival wolf packs howling, you force the males in the pack to bond together against this supposed threat. If you change their environment from time to time, or play multiple pack howls at once, the females have to think on their feet and make new decisions to keep the pack safe—should they divide the pack? Should they switch howls? Investigate around that new boulder? If you provide hunting enrichment, and avoid just sticking prey inside a fence (where it will be killed every time), you teach the wolves how to behave in the wild against a predator. If a wolf makes a kill once in every ten hunts in the wild, then in captivity you need to keep him guessing whether or not today’s the day food’s coming. Basically, a cage stops feeling like a cage when you can convince the wolf inside that he needs his family to survive.

  When I hear footsteps, I stand up and grab the bars, expecting to be told the bail commissioner has finally arrived. Instead, I am assaulted by fumes of alcohol long before I see their source—a drunk man being held upright by an officer. He is weaving back and forth, red-faced and sweaty, and I am pretty sure that’s a streak of vomit on his checkered flannel shirt. “Brought you a roommate,” the officer says, and he opens the metal door so that the man staggers inside.

  “Happy New Year,” the guy says, although it is February. Then he collapses facedown on the cement floor.

  I gingerly step over him.

  Once when I was around ten, I was sitting underneath the empty bleachers near the wolf enclosure at Redmond’s. Each day at 1:00 P.M. my father gave a wolf talk there to the summer visitors, but the rest of the time, it was a cool spot to hide with a book in the otherwise overcrowded, overheated park. I was not really paying attention to my father, who was in an adjoining pen digging out a pond while the wolves were relegated to another section of the enclosure. Suddenly a guy named Lark, who worked with my dad as a caretaker before he hired Walter, came back from his lunch break. He was stumbling, weaving. As he walked past the wolves, they started to go berserk—hurling themselves against the fencing, snapping and whining, running back and forth the way they did when they could smell food coming.

  My dad dropped his tools and ran for the gates, until he reached Lark and slammed him down on the floor. With his forearm against the man’s throat, he growled, “Have you been drinking?”

  My father had firm rules for the people who worked with his animals—no perfumed shampoos or soaps, no deodorant. And absolutely no alcohol. A wolf could smell it in your system days after you’d drunk it.

  “Some guys took me out to celebrate,” Lark sputtered. He’d just had his first baby.

  Gradually, the wolves calmed down. I’d never seen them act so crazy around a person, especially one of their keepers. If a human was being upsetting, like the annoying toddlers who waved and screamed from the security fence, the wolves would just lope into the rear of the enclosure, disappearing between the trees.

  My father released his hold on Lark, who rolled away, coughing. “You’re fired,” he said.

  Lark tried to argue, but my father just ignored him and walked back into the enclosure where he’d been working on the pond. I waited until Lark cursed a blue streak and stalked up the hill to the trailer to collect his belongings. Then I let myself through the safety gate and sat on the grass outside the enclosure where my father was working.

  “I don’t care that he had a few drinks,” he said bitterly, as if we had been in the middle of a conversation and he needed to defend himself. “But he should know better than to do it on the job.” He dug his shovel into the ground and upended a heavy chunk of earth. “Think about it. A drunk guy staggering around. What’s that look like to you?”

  “Uh . . . a drunk guy staggering around?” I said.

  “Well, to a wolf, it looks a hell of a lot like a calf that’s been wounded. And that triggers the prey drive. Didn’t matter that the wolves know Lark, or work with him every day. The way he was moving was enough to make him lose his identity to the pack. They would have killed him, if they could have.”

  He jabbed his shovel into the ground so that it stood upright like a soldier. “It’s a good life lesson, whether or not you ever work with wolves, Edward,” my father said. “No matter what you do for someone—no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he’s not hungry—make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.”

  That comment, of course, would become personal years later. My father had made one wrong move at the wrong moment. I realize, with a start, that after this morning he might accuse me of the same.

  The drunk at my feet begins to snore. A moment later, a police officer walks in. “Showtime,” he says. I look up at the clock and realize I’ve spent three hours in here, most of it in the quicksand of memories about my father.

  It just goes to show you: you can put nine thousand miles between you and another person. You can make a vow to never speak his name. You can surgically remove someone from your life.

  And still, he’ll haunt you.

  We are back in the same interrogation room I was in before, except now, in addition to the detective and Joe, there’s a guy with a very bad comb-over and eyes so red I would assume he was stoned if I didn’t think that was particularly risky behavior for someone who routinely works in a police station. “All right,” the bail commissioner says. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment to get my conjunctivitis diagnosed, so let’s make this snappy. What’ve you got, Leo?”

  The detective hands him a piece of paper. “This is a pretty serious case, Ralph. It’s not just second-degree assault; the accused also interfered with the duties of hospital personnel and adversely affected the health of a patient.”

  What does that mean? I think. Is my father worse off than he was before?

  “We’re asking that bail be set at the amount of five thousand dollars with surety,” the detective finis
hes.

  The bail commissioner reads the paper the detective has handed him. “Pulled the plug?” he says, looking at Joe. “Mr. Ng? What do you have to say?”

  “This is my stepson we’re talking about,” Joe begins. “This is the town where he grew up, and he’s surrounded by family and friends. He’s got ties to the community, and no funds with which to flee. And I give you my word I will personally not let him out of my sight.”

  The commissioner rubs his eyes. “The purpose of bail is to secure the accused’s attendance in court. We don’t practice preventative detention in Beresford, Mr. Warren, so I’m going to set bail in the amount of five thousand dollars personal recognizance. You’ll be released on your own promise to appear in court tomorrow morning, to keep the peace, and to be of good behavior. You won’t be able to leave the state of New Hampshire while this matter is pending. I’m going to make it a condition of your release that you have a psychiatric evaluation, and I’m going to issue a no trespass order in and around the hospital.”

  “Wait a second,” I say, already breaking my promise to Joe to be silent. “That’s not going to work. My father’s in there, and he’s dying—”

  “Not quick enough for you, from the sound of it,” the detective says.

  “I will not let my client be harassed,” Joe argues.

  The bail commissioner holds up his hands. “Shut up. Both of you. I’ve already got pinkeye; I don’t need a migraine. You’ll be arraigned tomorrow in district court.”

  “What about my father?” I press.

  That’s when Joe stomps hard on my foot.

  “What did you say, Mr. Warren?” the commissioner asks.

  I look at him. “Nothing,” I murmur. “Nothing at all.”

  LUKE

  A kill is a scary place to be, six inches away from the snarling, snapping jaws of a wolf on the other side of you. It’s feast or famine for wolves, and most of the time during a kill they haven’t eaten for several days, so this is a battle for survival. If you move too far to the left or turn the wrong way, they’ll let you know, growling and biting at you, and yet even in all that tremendous energy and frenzied excitement and hot anger, they pull their punch, so that the discipline you suffer isn’t nearly what the prey animal has coming.

  Most of the time, the wolves knew I couldn’t keep pace with them and would be more of a hassle during a hunt than an attribute. In a straight chase, I couldn’t move fast enough; I didn’t have the same weaponry to bring down prey, I couldn’t even defend myself with my thin skin. But after the snows came, the hunting technique changed to an ambush. For the few months that two feet of snow covered the ground, I was not only invited to participate in the hunt, I was expected to be there.

  In an ambush, the pack needs the weight of the big males. Sometimes they need a prey animal to turn and run into some brush, where other wolves jump out and surround it while the hunters make the kill. I was settled in a little bowl dug out of the snow with the youngsters in the pack and the alpha, waiting for the big black wolf and the other adult female to run the quarry toward us.

  We had been waiting for days—not moving because we’d disturb the snow and tip off the prey. Even with wolves on either side of me, I was cold, and I started to occupy myself by letting my mind run wild. These wolves were masters of camouflage. They knew the wind direction, and how to disguise their scent. But was the deer working on instinct, too? Would it know, from years of ancestral experience, that if a wolf chases you like this at this speed in this formation, it’s going to lead to an ambush rather than a straight chase? Would it know from some rogue change in the wind that there is trouble up ahead?

  My thoughts abruptly scattered as the alpha started eating snow. The young male immediately followed her lead, burying his muzzle into the snow and chowing down. The young female reached up to a branch where an icicle was hanging like the ornament on a Christmas tree, and snapped it off between her teeth. She sucked on it like a lollipop.

  Why on earth are they doing that? I wondered. It wasn’t anything I’d seen in the three days we’d been camped in this copse. Maybe the wolves just needed to move around a bit because we’d been in one place for so long. Maybe they were thirsty.

  But the wolves never had been skittish before, and since I wasn’t thirsty, they probably weren’t, either.

  I was wondering if the deep snow was dehydrating them in some way when the alpha snapped silently at me and wrinkled her muzzle, then buried it in the snow again. I got the hint. I began scooping up handfuls of snow and eating it like there was no tomorrow.

  Then it hit me: the only thing the prey animal could see as it ran toward us in our hiding spot was our frozen breath on the air. Holding snow and ice on our tongues meant that even our breath was invisible.

  A moment later, a deer came crashing into the copse.

  Somehow, the alpha had known that the ambush was imminent. But then again, what’s the job of the alpha if not to hold the family together, so that, at the most crucial moment, its members all do as they’re told?

  CARA

  I am expecting World War III when I get back home, and I’m not disappointed. My mother runs up to Mariah’s car and starts to yank me out of the passenger seat, remembering too late that I’ve got an injured shoulder. I wince as she grabs my arm and see Mariah’s silently mouthed Good luck as she zips away. “You are grounded until you’re . . . until you’re ninety! For God’s sake, Cara, where have you been?”

  I can’t tell my mom that. So instead, I look down at the ground. “I’m sorry,” I say. “After Edward did . . . you know . . . I had to get out of there. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I just ran. Mariah came to pick me up.”

  My mother flips an internal switch, and suddenly she’s hugging me so tightly I can’t breathe. “Oh, baby. I was so worried . . . By the time I got back upstairs, you were gone. Security looked everywhere. I didn’t know if I should stay at the hospital or come back here . . .”

  The front door opens, and the twins poke their heads out into the cold, reminding me (1) why my mother wound up here instead of the hospital and (2) why I should never believe I might actually come first in her list of priorities.

  “Elizabeth, Jackson, get back inside before you catch pneumonia,” she orders. Then she turns to me again. “Do you have any idea how frantic I’ve been? I even had the police out looking for you—”

  “I bet you did. It would mean fewer cops focusing on Edward.”

  My mother slaps me so fast I don’t have time to see it coming. She’s never done that to me in my life, and I think she’s just as shocked as I am. I wrench away from her, holding my hand to my cheek. “Go to your room, Cara,” she says, her voice trembling.

  With tears in my eyes, I run away from her, into the house. Elizabeth and Jackson are sitting on the steps. “You got a timeout,” Jackson says.

  I stare at him and say, “Remember when I told you there wasn’t a monster in your closet? I was totally lying.” Then I step over their little bodies and head to my room, where I slam the door and throw myself facedown on the bed.

  When I start to cry, I know it’s not because my cheek stings—the humiliation hurt more than the slap. It’s because I feel like the only person left in the world. I’m not part of this nuclear family; my own mother has taken sides with my brother; my father is floating somewhere I can’t reach. I am truly, horribly on my own now which means I can’t just sit around and wait for someone to fix things.

  It is not that I think the hospital will try to turn off my father’s life support again, even if Edward asks. It’s that if I can’t figure out a way to derail him, he’s going to take the next step and get himself legally appointed as my dad’s guardian—something I can’t be, because I’m only seventeen.

  But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

  Pulling myself together, I wipe my face on the gauze from my sling and sit up, cross-legged. I reach for my laptop and turn it on for the first time in a week, bypassing the sixteen
million emails from Mariah asking me if I’m all right that she must have sent before she knew I was in the hospital.

  I type some words into the search engine and click on the first name that pops up on my screen.

  Kate Adamson, completely paralyzed in 1995 by a double brain stem stroke, was unable to even blink her eyes. Her medical staff removed Kate’s feeding tube for eight days, before it was reinserted due to the intervention of her husband. Today, she is nearly completely recovered—still partially paralyzed on her left side, she has full control of her mental faculties, and is a motivational speaker.

  I click on another link.

  A victim of a car crash believed to be in a persistent vegetative state for 23 years, Rom Houben was actually conscious the entire time and unable to communicate. Doctors had originally used the Glasgow coma test to assess his eye, verbal, and motor responses and to describe his condition as unrecoverable, but in 2006, new scans were developed that suggested his brain was functioning fully. He now communicates via computer. “Medical advances caught up with him,” says his physician, Dr. Laureys, who believes that many patients are misdiagnosed in vegetative states.

  And another:

  Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, was in a vegetative state for over a year. A judge granted her family’s wish to remove her feeding tube. However, she regained consciousness unexpectedly, ate food by mouth, and conversed with others. Her case raises the question of how reliable a diagnosis of irreversible consciousness is—and legally, raises questions about when life-sustaining treatment should be discontinued.

  I start to bookmark the documents. I’ll make a PowerPoint presentation, and I’ll go back to Danny Boyle’s office and prove to him why what Edward did is no different than holding a gun to my father’s head.