Lone Wolf A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  When my cell phone rings—it’s plugged in and happily recharging—I reach for it, assuming it’s Mariah asking me if I’ve been flayed alive by my mom. The caller ID, though, is a number I don’t recognize. “Please hold for the county attorney,” Paula’s voice says, and a moment later, Danny Boyle is on the line.

  “You really want to do this?” he says.

  I think of poor Kate Adamson and Rom Houben and Carrie Coons. “Yes,” I tell him.

  “Tomorrow the grand jury’s convening in Plymouth. I want you to come to the courthouse so I can put you on the witness stand.”

  I have no idea how I’m supposed to get all the way back to Plymouth. I can’t ask Mariah to miss school again. I don’t have a car, I’m virtually crippled, and oh, right, I’m also grounded.

  “Is there any chance you’d be passing by Beresford on your way to Plymouth?” I ask as politely as possible.

  “For the love of God,” Danny Boyle says. “Can’t your parents drive you?”

  “My mother’s tied up doing everything in her power to make sure my brother’s not going to be sent to jail. And I wish my father could drive me. But he’s too busy fighting for his life in Beresford Memorial Hospital right now.”

  There is a beat of silence. “What’s the address?” he asks.

  Joe doesn’t come home that night. It turns out that the only way to keep Edward out of jail is to make sure he’s supervised, and wisely, Joe didn’t think it was a particularly good idea to bring my brother back here in close proximity with me. It’s weird that Joe and my mom wouldn’t just switch places, so that my mom would be living in her old home with Edward, if only for one night. But then again, Joe thinks my mom is the reason the sun comes up in the morning, and he would do anything to make sure she doesn’t have to set foot in that house again, and face all those memories of my father.

  It also means that the next morning, when Danny Boyle comes to get me, my mom is down at the end of the block with the twins waiting for their school bus, and completely unaware that the snazzy silver BMW that zips by her and around the corner is about to pull into her very own driveway.

  I get into Danny Boyle’s car, and he looks at me. “What the hell are you wearing?”

  Immediately, I realize I’ve made a mistake. I wanted to look nice for court—I mean, aren’t you supposed to?—but the fanciest dresses I have are the strapless one I wore to my spring formal and a hot pink, shoulder-padded number I was forced to wear at Joe’s sister’s Bring Back the ’80s theme wedding. My mother had insisted on hemming it to the knee, so that I could wear it again, although the only place I could ever imagine wearing something like that again is at a Saved by the Bell reunion costume party.

  “You look like a Pat Benatar fan club refugee,” Danny says.

  “Very good guess,” I reply, impressed. I buckle my seat belt and shade my face with my hand as we drive by my mother at the bus stop.

  “I take it your mother has no idea you’re doing this today,” Danny says.

  My guess is that my mother will be too busy championing my brother, wherever he is, to even notice I’ve left the confines of my room.

  “Here’s what you need to understand,” he continues. “You’re the one who wants this to be a murder charge, and that means it has to meet all three criteria. Malice, premeditation, and intent to kill. We don’t have to prove those to a grand jury, but we have to be able to point to the dots so that they can connect them. If you don’t have all three dots, it’s not murder. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  I look at him. It’s not what he’s saying, it’s what he’s not saying that’s important. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do as long as it keeps my father alive.”

  He glances at me and nods, satisfied.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say. “What made you change your mind?”

  “I got a call from my sister yesterday. She was all upset because of something that happened at work.” He flexes his hand on the steering wheel. “Turns out a man went nuts in his dad’s hospital room—the same hospital room where she was stationed at the ventilator.” He glances at me. “She’s the nurse your brother shoved out of the way.”

  I guess I’m expecting a richly paneled courtroom, with a high bench that has a white-haired judge presiding. I’m pretty surprised to find out that, instead, a grand jury is a small clot of ordinary people in jeans and sweaters sitting around a table in a room with no windows.

  Immediately I try to pull my sweater over my too-fancy pink dress.

  There’s a tape recorder on the table, which makes me even more nervous, but I focus on Danny Boyle’s face, just like he told me to do. “This is Cara Warren,” he announces to the little group. “Does anyone know the witness?”

  The people clustered around the table shake their heads. One, a woman with a blond pageboy that angles toward her chin, reminds me of one of my teachers. She stands up and holds out a Bible. “Can you raise your right hand . . . ,” she says, before she realizes my right arm is in a sling. There is a bit of uneasy laughter around the table. “Can you raise your left hand and repeat after me . . .”

  This part is just like on television: I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

  “Cara,” Danny says, “state your name and address, please.”

  “Cara Warren. Forty-six Statler Hill, Beresford, New Hampshire,” I answer.

  “Who do you live with?”

  “My dad. Until a week ago.”

  The county attorney gestures at me. “We can see that you’ve got your arm in a sling—what happened?”

  “My father and I were in a serious car accident a week ago,” I explain. “I broke my scapula. My dad’s been unconscious since then.”

  “In a coma?”

  “A vegetative state, that’s what the doctors call it.”

  “Do you have any other family?”

  “My mom—she’s remarried now. And my brother, who I haven’t seen in six years. He lives in Thailand, but when my dad got hurt, my mom called him up and he came back home.”

  “What’s your relationship with your brother?” Danny asks.

  “What relationship,” I say flatly. “He left and he didn’t want to talk to any of us after that.”

  “How long has your father been in the hospital?”

  “Eight days.”

  “What is the doctors’ prognosis for your father?”

  “It’s too early to tell anything,” I say. Because really, isn’t it?

  “Have you and your brother discussed your father’s situation?”

  All of a sudden my stomach feels as empty as a pocket. “Yes,” I say, and even though I don’t want to, I can feel my eyes welling with tears. “My brother just wants this to be over. He thinks the outcome isn’t going to change. But me, I want to keep my dad alive long enough to prove him wrong.”

  “Has your father contacted your brother during the six years he’s been in Thailand?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Does he ever talk about your brother?”

  “No. They had a big fight, which is why my brother left.”

  “Have you been in touch with your brother, Cara?” Danny asks.

  “No.” I look at one of the members of the jury. She is shaking her head. I wonder if she’s reacting to Edward leaving, or to me not contacting him.

  “Now,” the county attorney says, “yesterday you told me about something very upsetting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the grand jury what happened?”

  Danny and I had practiced this in the car. Sixteen times, actually. “My brother made a decision to terminate my father’s life support—without asking for my opinion. I found out by accident, and ran downstairs to my father’s hospital room.” I can hear, as clearly as if it’s happening now, the alarm that sounded as my brother pulled that plug. “There were doctors and nurses and a lawyer from the hospital and ot
her people I didn’t recognize, all gathered around my father’s bed. My brother was there, too. I yelled at them to stop, to not kill my father—and everyone backed away. Everyone except my brother, anyway. He bent down, pretending like he was catching his breath, and he yanked the plug of the ventilator out of the wall.”

  I hesitate, looking around the table. The faces of the jurors might as well be balloons, they are that smooth and unemotional. I suddenly remember what Danny said in the car, about the three criteria of murder. Premeditation, intent to kill, and malice. It’s clear that my brother had planned this, or all those doctors and nurses wouldn’t have been convened. It’s equally clear that he wanted to kill my father. It’s malice that’s the sticking point.

  I think about being sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. But then again, it wasn’t like I raised my right hand. I couldn’t, logistically. So maybe the way I was sworn in is the equivalent of crossing your fingers behind your back when you tell your mom a white lie—that you’ve brushed your teeth, that you walked the dog, that you didn’t put the empty milk carton back in the fridge.

  It’s not really a lie, is it, if the ends justify the means? If, because of it, my father has a chance to get better? By the time everyone finds out I embellished the truth, I will have bought my father a few more hours, a few more days.

  “He yanked the plug out of the wall,” I repeat, “and he yelled, ‘Die, you bastard!’”

  At that, one of the jurors covers her mouth with her hand, as if she was the one who said it.

  “Someone tackled him,” I continue. “And the nurse plugged in the ventilator again. The doctors are still figuring out how much damage was done while my father was without oxygen.”

  “Is it fair to say that your brother and father had a very contentious relationship?”

  “Totally,” I say.

  “Do you know why, Cara?”

  I shake my head. “I know they had a huge fight when I was eleven. It was bad enough to make Edward pack up and leave and never talk to him again.”

  “When your brother called your father a bastard, he was angry, wasn’t he?”

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “There’s no question in your mind that he intended to kill your father, is there?” Danny asks.

  I glance directly at him. “No. And there’s no question in my mind that if he has the chance, he’ll do it all over again.”

  LUKE

  In captivity, a wolf might live for eleven or twelve years, although I’ve heard of some living even longer than that. In the wild, though, a wolf would be lucky to make it to age six. The level of experience and knowledge in a wolf is irreplaceable, which is why the alpha will stay in the den near the young most of the time, sending other pack members out to do patrols, to hunt, to safeguard. This is also why, when an alpha gets taken down, so many packs fall apart. It is as if the central nervous system has suddenly lost its brain.

  So what happens when an alpha is killed?

  You might think that there is promoting from within—that maybe the beta, the number two man, will fill his former boss’s shoes. But in the wolf world, that’s not how it happens. In the wild, recruiting would start. A call would go out to lone wolves, letting them know there is a vacancy in the pack. The candidates would be challenged to make sure that the one chosen is the smartest, surest, and most capable of protecting the family.

  In captivity, of course, recruiting like that can’t happen. Instead, a mid- or low-ranking animal that is by nature suspicious and shy finds itself in the decision-making role. Which is a disaster.

  From time to time you’ll see documentaries about low-ranked wolves who somehow rise to the top of the pack—an omega that earns a position as an alpha. Frankly, I don’t buy it. I think that, in actuality, those documentary makers have misidentified the wolf in the first place. For example, an alpha personality, to the man on the street, is usually considered bold and take-charge and forceful. In the wolf world, though, that describes the beta rank. Likewise, an omega wolf—a bottom-ranking, timid, nervous animal—can often be confused with a wolf who hangs behind the others, wary, protecting himself, trying to figure out the Big Picture.

  Or in other words: There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really an alpha all along.

  EDWARD

  When I come into the kitchen, where Joe is standing at the counter eating a bowl of cereal and flipping through the high school sports section of the newspaper, he glances up at me. “Is that what you were planning on wearing?” he says, in the tone of someone who had something completely different in mind.

  I’ve never really paid much attention to clothes; I’m not the stereotypical gay man in that respect. I’m perfectly happy wearing the jeans I’ve had since high school and a sweatshirt so old that it’s threadbare in the elbows. Of course, I had starched shirts and ties for my teaching assignments, but they are somewhere between here and Chiang Mai in a box, I imagine. Given that I flew to New Hampshire on a moment’s notice, with only a small carry-on bag, my sartorial choices are pretty limited. “Sorry,” I say. “When I was packing, I didn’t realize I’d need a good courtroom look.”

  “Do you at least have a collared shirt?”

  I nod. “But it’s denim.”

  Joe sighs. “Come with me.”

  He puts down his bowl and walks out of the kitchen, heading upstairs to my father’s bedroom. I realize too late what his intention is. “Don’t bother,” I say, as Joe begins to rustle through my father’s closet. “He didn’t even own a tie when I was growing up.”

  But Joe reaches into the bowels of the closet and pulls out a white dress shirt, pressed and still hanging in its plastic dry cleaning bag. “Put this on,” he orders. “You can borrow one of my ties. I keep an extra in the trunk of my car.”

  “It’s going to be huge on me. My dad’s built like the Hulk.”

  Joe flinches almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, I’d noticed.”

  He leaves me so that he can go get the tie. I sit down on the bed, trying to keep myself from giving this moment more symbolism than it is due. As a boy I never felt like I measured up to my father—who was larger than life, literally and figuratively. Putting on his shirt will be like a little kid playing dress-up, pretending to fill shoes that are too big for me.

  I rip open the plastic and begin to unbutton the shirt. When did my father start wearing stuff like this, anyway? I cannot remember a moment in my life when he wasn’t wearing flannel, thermals, coveralls, battered boots. You don’t dress for success when you’re spending 24/7 in a wolf pen; you wear whatever will give you protection against nips and scratches and mud and rain. Had he changed in the time I’d been away, enough to be able to acclimate himself to the world of people as seamlessly as he blended into the company of wolves? Did he go to wine bars, to poetry slams, to theater?

  Is the father I kept imagining in my mind, on an endless home-video loop, now someone different?

  And if he is, can I really be sure that what he said to me over a shot of whisky when I was fifteen was still what he believed?

  Yes, I tell myself. It has to be, because I can’t let myself face the alternative.

  I pull my sweatshirt over my head and shrug into my father’s shirt. The cotton is cool on my skin, wings settling over my back. I button the placket and then slip my hand into the starched breast pocket, peeling open the starched skin of the fabric.

  When I was really tiny, my father had a red and black buffalo check wool jacket that he used to wear to work. It had two breast pockets, and whenever he came home, he’d tell me to choose a pocket. If I picked the right one and reached inside, I’d find a piece of penny candy. It took me years to realize there were no right and wrong pockets. They both had candy; I couldn’t help but be a winner.

  I turn around on impulse and look in my father’s closet to find that jacket. At first I think it’s not there, and then I find i
t hanging behind a pair of ripped Carhartt coveralls.

  I notice my reflection in the mirror that is glued to the back of the closet door. To my surprise, the shirt isn’t big on me at all. I fill out the shoulders, and the arms are exactly the length I’d choose if I were buying this for myself. With a start I realize that, now, I could easily pass for my father, with my features and my height.

  I reach for the buffalo plaid jacket and put it on, too.

  “It’s a statement,” Joe argues, the same argument he’s made since I walked downstairs wearing my father’s coat. “And in court, you don’t want to do anything to get a judge riled up.”

  “It’s a coat, not a statement,” I say. “It’s freaking fifteen degrees out. And this is New Hampshire. You can’t tell me every defendant wears Armani.”

  Before we can bicker any further, the sheriff walks into the courtroom. “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, all rise!” He faces the gallery. “All those having business before the district court shall now join near, give their attendance, and they shall be heard. The Honorable Nettie McGrue presiding!”

  The judge is a tiny bird of a woman with a cap of frighteningly yellow hair and a sharp, pointed nose. Her judicial robe has a profusion of lace at the collar that makes me think of a rabid, frothing dog. “Counsel,” she says, “I will take any formal matters that are scheduled for arraignment.”

  Beside me, Joe stands. “Your Honor, I’m ready in the matter of Edward Warren.”

  “Mr. Warren, come forward,” the judge says, as Joe hauls me upright. “Clerk, arraign the defendant.”

  We walk to the front of the courtroom, and I give my name and address—well, I give my father’s address, anyway. “Mr. Warren,” the judge says, “I see you’re represented by counsel . . . Would Counsel identify himself for the record?”

  “Joe Ng, Your Honor.”

  “Mr. Warren, you’re before the court having been charged by complaint with second-degree assault against Maureen Cullen, a nurse at Beresford Memorial Hospital. What say you to this charge?”