by Jodi Picoult
Thinking of Zirconia, I crawl onto the bed and lie down. I curl up against my dad, who is still warm and solid and familiar. This makes my throat prickle like a cactus. Underneath my ear his heart is beating.
How am I supposed to believe he’s not coming back, when I can feel that?
When my father rescued the pups that Mestawe rejected—the brothers of little Miguen, who died on the way to the vet—he had to somehow teach them to act like a family without the help of their biological mother. There was Kina, the shy one; and Kita, the smart one; and then Nodah, the burly tough guy. But for all of Nodah’s bravery, he was terrified of lightning. Anytime a storm came, he would start freaking out, and the only way to calm him was for my dad to pick him up and cradle him against his chest. It was easy, of course, when he was a four-week-old. It was a little more challenging when he was fully grown. I used to laugh, watching this brute of a wolf clamber up my father to hear his heartbeat.
It turns out that it’s not so funny anymore; not now, when I’m in the middle of the storm.
I close my eyes and picture my father, back when he was the nanny for these pups, when I used to stand at the fence and watch him. You have to teach them to play? I said. Don’t they already know how to do that?
My dad would stick his bum in the air, front half crouched in a prey bow—from that position a wolf could spring six feet in all directions. Every time the tussles and tumbling got too rough for the wolves, he’d collapse into this prey bow and everyone would stop and mimic him. A family can have a mock fight, my father said, but they need to know when it’s time to stop.
I’m teaching them balance, my father used to explain.
I’m teaching them how not to kill each other.
LUKE
I know I was a curiosity for my wolf family. Sometimes when I was asleep, I’d wake to a hundred pounds of wolf pouncing on me, to see what my reaction would be. When we went out on a hunt and they chose to bring me along, they’d zigzag in front of me, trying to see if they could trip me up, as if they wanted to catalog all my flaws before an enemy did. In retrospect I realize that my role for them was akin to an alien abduction of a human: they wanted to know what they were up against, now that our worlds and our territories were bleeding into each other.
One summer evening at dusk, the alpha had taken the hunters out on a journey somewhere to the south. I was left behind with the young male wolf and his sister, who was on patrol around the perimeter of our territory. It was blisteringly hot; I kept making trips to the stream to douse my head with water; then I’d come back to our clearing and doze, drifting off to the gossip of mosquitoes and the belly laughs of bullfrogs. Even though I knew I should have been keeping a wary eye like the young male, the heat and the humidity had softened my edges and instincts.
I woke with a start and saw the young male sitting beside me. The female was still gone. In other words, nothing had changed. So I hitched myself upright, intent on cooling down once again at the stream. No sooner had I reached the water, however, than the young male tackled me, knocking all the wind from me. He growled and snapped at my face, eyes blazing and teeth bared, in full attack mode. I immediately rolled over, asking this wolf for trust, stunned by this behavior. It was the first time since I’d been accepted by the pack that I truly believed my life was in danger—and, worse, at the hands of one of my wolf brothers.
He continued to snarl at me, his ears flattened, as he backed me away from the stream and into the twisted skeleton formed by several enormous trees that had been felled during a thunderstorm. I lay with my face pressed into the earth, breathing in twigs and soil, sweating and shaking. Every time I tried to move, the wolf leaned closer and snapped his powerful jaws centimeters from my face.
You can imagine what went through my mind during that time. That the biologists were right: that I could never infiltrate a wild pack; that the wolves were wild animals and would never consider me one of their own; that this young male was only waiting for the rest of his pack to get back to kill me because the alpha had told him I wasn’t necessary anymore. I thought of all the lost knowledge I’d accumulated about these remarkable creatures, how no one would ever learn what I had. I wondered if anyone would ever find my body, given that I wasn’t even sure how far away from civilization I was at this point. And for the first time in a long time, I thought about Georgie, and my kids. I wondered whether they would grow up hating me for leaving them. I wondered if they even thought of me anymore, after all this time.
As night fell, the sounds in the forest changed. The symphony of crickets gave way to the violin-cry of an owl; the wind picked up, and the earth began to cool beneath my cheek. After four hours of aggressively trapping me in this makeshift cave, the young wolf suddenly sat down, leaving room for me to crawl out. He glanced back at me, his yellow eyes calm.
I thought for sure it was a trick.
The minute I came out of that hole, he was going to go for my throat.
When I didn’t emerge, he leaned in again. Instinctively I reared back, but instead of snapping at me, he began to lick my mouth and cheeks, the way he might welcome back the wolves in the pack when they returned.
Still terrified, I crawled into the open, making sure I kept my body lower than his to show submission. He turned and trotted toward the stream, stopping to look over his shoulder at me. It was an invitation to follow him, so I did, still keeping my distance.
When he reached the stream, he lifted his leg and scented the matted grass where I’d been kneeling earlier. Glancing down, I saw a pile of scat that did not resemble that of any animal I’d ever encountered. Beside it, in the soft mud, was a perfectly preserved paw print from a mountain lion.
Cougars are rare here in eastern Canada, but there have been sightings in New Hampshire and Maine and New Brunswick. They are solitary hunters, and the summertime is when the juveniles leave their mothers to search out their own territories. They compete with wolves directly for prey. A solitary mountain lion is more powerful than a single wolf, but a pack can bring down a mountain lion.
The only other fact I knew about cougars is that they kill by ambush, by jumping onto the back of the prey animal and breaking its neck with a bite.
I did not have the safety of the pack surrounding me, the strength in numbers. I had been kneeling at the stream by myself, ripe picking for a cougar in the vicinity to leap onto me and deliver a death blow.
The young wolf had not been trying to kill me. He’d been trying to save my life.
There isn’t love among wolves. It’s an unconditional commitment. If you do your job, a lifetime tour of duty, then you are part of the family. You need the others in your pack to complete you. The young wolf had protected me not because of any emotional bond, but because I was a valuable member of the pack—a makeshift numbers wolf who bolstered the ranks at ambush hunts, or against rival packs; but also an individual from whom they could learn more about the humans with which they were increasingly forced to share territory.
Yet deep down, in the part of me that was still human, I wished he’d protected me because he loved me as much as I loved him.
The day after I was nearly killed by a mountain lion, I knew it was time to leave my pack. I put some meat from the previous night’s kill in my coverall pocket and started to walk east. The wolves let me go; they probably assumed I was headed to the stream or out on patrol; there was no reason for them to believe I wouldn’t return.
The last I saw of my family, the young male and female were play-wrestling under the watchful eye of the big beta wolf. I wondered if I would hear them howling for me that night.
People assume that the reason I walked away from the pack that day was because the harsh conditions had finally become overwhelming—the weather, the cold, the near starvation, the constant threat of predators. But the real reason I came back is much simpler.
If I hadn’t left at that moment, I knew I would have stayed forever.
JOE
There are na
tural alliances formed in a courtroom. When I walk into the probate court, the hospital’s lawyer is already sitting at the counsel table on the left. With her is the neurosurgeon.
At the table on the right is Cara, and her lawyer.
Immediately I steer Edward toward the hospital lawyer’s table.
The last person to walk in is Helen Bedd, the temporary guardian. She looks at the seating arrangement and plants herself, wisely, between the tables, in the space that separates Edward and Cara.
Georgie is in the row behind me. “Hey, baby,” I say, leaning over the bar to give her a quick peck. “How are you holding up?”
She looks over at her daughter. “Pretty well, given the circumstances.”
I know what she means. This morning while she fed Cara oatmeal and juice and got ready to drive her to the hospital and then to court to meet her attorney, I grabbed a granola bar and drove to Luke Warren’s house to pick up my client. We can’t really talk about the case, because we have aligned ourselves with different camps. I feel like my marriage is a Venn diagram, and the only shared space between us right now is an awkward silence.
Don’t think I haven’t wondered about my own motivations in this case. I am representing Edward, of course, and might never have been pressed into service if not for Georgie desperately asking me to get him out of the police station. Professionally, I want a win for my client. But is that because I really believe in Edward’s right to make a medical decision for his father . . . or because I know what that medical decision will be? If Luke Warren dies, he is out of the picture. He’ll never come between me and Georgie again. If, on the other hand, he is moved to a long-term care facility, and Cara winds up as his guardian, Georgie will continue to play a significant role—until Cara is eighteen, and perhaps even after that.
Edward is wearing his father’s buffalo check jacket again; I think it’s morphed in status from outerwear to a talisman. When Cara sees him in it, her eyes widen and she comes halfway out of her seat, only to have her attorney pull her down and start whispering furiously.
“You remember everything I told you?” I murmur to Edward.
He jerks his chin, a nod. “Stay calm,” he says. “No matter what.”
I fully expect him to be painted as a hothead, as someone who makes rash decisions. Who else walks away from home after an argument and moves to Thailand? Or, frustrated by a turn of events, yanks the plug of a ventilator out of the wall? It doesn’t help, too, that even if the criminal charge can’t be admissible in court since it’s been vacated, this is a small town. Everyone knows what Edward did.
It’s up to me to spin it so he looks like an angel of mercy instead of a disgruntled prodigal son.
The clerk looks around at everyone who’s clustered at the tables. “We all ready, folks?” he asks. “All rise, the Honorable Armand LaPierre presiding.”
Although I haven’t argued before this judge before, I am well aware of his reputation. He’s allegedly an empathetic man. So empathetic, in fact, that he has trouble making any decisions. He often leaves court during his lunch hour to go down the street to Sacred Heart, the closest Catholic church, where he says novenas for the parties involved and prays for guidance.
The judge enters in a cloud of black—black robe, black shoes, jet-black hair. “Before we begin,” he says, “this is a deeply disturbing case for everyone here. We are convened to determine the permanent guardianship of Luke Warren. I understand that his medical condition hasn’t changed since I appointed a temporary guardian last Friday. Today I see that the hospital is represented, as well as the ward’s two children as parties of interest.” He frowns. “This is a very unconventional hearing, but these are unconventional circumstances. And what the court hopes to keep in mind is that ultimately we’re trying to make a decision that would be in line with what Luke Warren would want, if he were here to speak for himself. Are there any preliminary matters that need to be discussed?”
That’s my cue. I rise from my chair. “Your Honor, I’d like to bring to the court’s attention that one of the parties of interest here today is a minor. Cara Warren is not the age of majority, which suggests that she is legally incapable of being vested with the authority to make decisions about her father’s end-of-life care.” I look directly at the judge, unable to face the heat of Cara’s eyes. “I ask the court to strike her appearance here today and have her leave the courtroom, and to have her representative, Ms. Notch, dismissed from the proceedings, as her client doesn’t have the legal standing to make this sort of choice on her father’s behalf.”
“What are you talking about?” Cara cuts in. “I’m his daughter. I have every right to be here—”
“Cara,” her attorney warns. “Judge, what my client meant to say—”
“I’m quite sure what your client meant to say had a few choice expletives in it,” the judge replies. “But people, seriously. We’re thirty seconds into the proceeding and we’re already at each other’s throats? I know emotions are running high, but let’s be calm and just look at the legal precedent.”
Zirconia Notch stands. She is dressed like a lawyer from neck to knees, but her tights are a shocking lime green with red stripes, and her pumps are sunshine yellow. It’s as if the top half of her body fell on the bottom half of the Wicked Witch of the West. “Your Honor,” she says, “my client is seventeen, true, but she is also the only person in this courtroom who has been intimately involved in the day-to-day life of Mr. Warren. Under RSA 454-A, a guardian must merely be competent. The fact that Cara’s birthday isn’t for three months doesn’t have any impact on whether the court can vest her with the authority to make decisions regarding her father’s life. Indeed, if she’d been charged with a felony, like her brother, she would have been tried as an adult in court—”
“Objection,” I say. “That charge was dismissed. Ms. Notch is trying to bring up this irrelevant claim to prejudice my client.”
“People,” the judge sighs, “let’s confine ourselves to the matter before the court this morning, all right? And Ms. Notch, could you remove those wrist bells? They’re distracting.”
Undaunted, Zirconia strips off her bracelets and continues. “Once the court begins hearing her testimony, I’m certain Your Honor will determine that this young woman is of sufficient age, maturation, and intelligence to have an opinion and to be considered competent, as the criteria of the statute state.”
The judge looks like he’s having an ulcer attack. His mouth twists, his eyes water. “I’m not inclined to dismiss Cara from the proceedings at this time,” he says. “I have yet to hear the evidence, and I need to hear her perspective just as much as I need to hear from her brother, Edward. I’m going to ask you two to present brief opening arguments. Ladies first, Ms. Notch.”
She stands up and walks toward the bench. “Terry Wallis,” she says. “Jan Grzebski. Zack Dunlap. Donald Herbert. Sarah Scantlin.
You’ve probably never heard of these people before, so let me introduce you. Terry Wallis spent nineteen years in a minimally conscious state. Then one day, he spontaneously began to speak and regained awareness of his surroundings. Jan Grzebski, a Polish railroad worker, woke up from a nineteen-year coma in 2007. Zack Dunlap was declared brain-dead after an ATV accident and was on the verge of having life support terminated so his organs could be donated, when he showed signs of purposeful movement. After five days, his eyes were open; two days later, he was off a ventilator, and today he can walk and talk and continues to improve.”
She walks toward Edward. “Donald Herbert,” she continues, “suffered a severe brain injury while fighting a fire in 1995. After ten years in a vegetative state, he uttered his first words. Sarah Scantlin was a pedestrian hit by a drunk driver in 1984. After a six-week coma she entered a minimally conscious state, and then, in January of 2005, she started talking again.” Zirconia spreads her hands, a plea. “Each of these men and women had injuries from which they were never expected to recover,” she says. “Each of these men
and women had lives ahead of them that their families had given up hope of them living. And each of these men and women are here today because someone loved them enough to believe in their recovery. To give them time to heal. To hope.”
She walks back to her table, her hand resting on Cara’s good shoulder. “Terry Wallis, Jan Grzebski, Zack Dunlap, Donald Herbert, Sarah Scantlin. And just maybe, Your Honor, Luke Warren.”
The judge looks up at me as Zirconia sits down. “Mr. Ng?”
“Different people believe life starts at different places,” I say, standing up. “Tibetan Buddhists say it begins at orgasm. Catholics trace life to the moment the sperm meets an egg. Those who use stem cells say an embryo isn’t alive until it is fourteen days old, when it develops a primitive streak—the thickened bit that becomes a backbone. Roe v. Wade says life begins at twenty-four weeks. And the Navajo, they believe that life begins the first time a baby laughs.”
I shrug. “We’ve gotten used to there being a multitude of beliefs about the start of life. But what about the end of life? Is its definition as muddy? In the 1900s, Duncan McDougal believed that you could put a dying patient on a scale and know the exact moment death occurred, because he’d lose three-quarters of an ounce—the weight of the human soul. Nowadays, the Uniform Determination of Death Act defines death as the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or the irreversible cessation of all brain functions. That’s why brain death qualifies as death, and why cardiac death qualifies as death.”
I look at the judge. “We’re here today, Your Honor, because Luke Warren did not leave us a directive that would show us how he defines death. But we do know how he’d define life. Life, to Mr. Warren, meant being able to run with his wolves . . .”
Leaving your wife and kids at home, I think.
“It meant becoming an expert on pack behavior . . .”
Even though you knew nothing about how to keep your own family close.
