by Jodi Picoult
The scent of Georgie’s shampoo, her soap.
She locked the door behind her and knelt down in front of me, moving slowly. She put her hand on the crown of my head. “Luke,” she whispered.
Her fingers stroked my hair, and I found myself leaning into her, against her. Georgie’s arms came around me. I didn’t realize that I was crying until I tasted my tears on her lips. She kissed my brow, my cheeks, my neck.
It was meant as comfort but spread, the way a match intended for light might become a fire. My arms came around her and reached for the collar of her shirt. I ripped it open, rucked up her skirt. I felt her legs wrap around me, and I fumbled with my jeans. I bit her shoulder and swallowed her cry; I stood with her in my arms and pressed her back to the wall, driving into her so desperately that her spine arched, that her nails scratched into my skin. I wanted to mark her. I wanted her to be mine.
Afterward, I cradled her in my lap, tracing the line of her vertebrae. There were bruises on her, unintentional ones. I wondered if I had lost the capacity to be gentle, along with my ability to be human. I looked down to find Georgie staring up at me. “Luke,” she said, “let me help.”
CARA
You don’t ever want to imagine your father having an affair.
In the first place, it means you have to picture him having sex, which is just disgusting. In the second place, it means that you are forced to side with your mother, who is the wronged party. And in the third place, you can’t help but wonder what it was about you that wasn’t compelling enough to make him think twice before driving a stake into the heart of your family.
It feels like I have a splinter in my throat after I hear this news, but it’s not for the reason you’d think. I am—and I know how crazy this sounds—relieved. Now I’m not the only one who has screwed up royally.
My mother said I’m perfect in my father’s eyes, but that’s a lie. So maybe we can be imperfect for each other.
As soon as I sit down on the witness stand, I have a clear view of Edward. I keep thinking about what my mother said—how he was trying to protect me by leaving. If you ask me, he ought to rethink some of his altruism. Saying he was saving our family by removing himself from my life is like saying he only wants to kill my father because it’s the humane thing to do.
Everyone makes mistakes, my mother had said.
I used to have a friend in elementary school whose family was so picture-perfect that they could practically be the advertisement in a photo frame. They always remembered each other’s birthdays, and I swear the siblings never fought and the parents acted like they’d just fallen in love that morning. It was weird. It felt so plastic-smooth that I couldn’t help but question what happened when there wasn’t an audience like me for them to put on their show.
My family, on the other hand, included a father who preferred the company of wild animals, a mother who sometimes had to go to bed with a headache although we all really knew she was crying, a fifteen-year-old boy paying the bills, and me, a kid who made herself throw up the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance at school where the girls all brought their dads, just so she could stay home sick and no one would have to feel bad for her.
I wonder if what makes a family a family isn’t doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.
Once again when they try to swear me in I can’t really do it because my right arm is tied up tight against my body. But I still promise to tell the truth.
Zirconia begins by walking toward me. It’s funny how at home she looks in a courtroom, even with her crazy fluorescent tights and yellow heels. “Cara,” Zirconia begins, “how old are you?”
“I’m seventeen,” I say, “and three-quarters.”
“When is your birthday?”
“In three months.”
“At the time of your father’s injury,” she asks, “where were you living?”
“With him. I’ve been living with him for the past four years.”
“How would you describe your relationship with your father, Cara?”
“We do everything together,” I say, feeling my throat narrow around the words. “I spend a lot of time with him at Redmond’s, helping him with the wolves. I also took over running the household, pretty much, because he’s so busy with his research. We’ve gone camping in the White Mountains, and he taught me orienteering. Sometimes we just hang out at home, too. We’ll cook pasta—he gave me his special recipe for Bolognese sauce—and watch a DVD. But he’s also the first person I want to talk to if I get a great grade on a test, or if a kid is being a jerk to me at school, or if I don’t know the answer to something. Almost everything I know, I know because of him.”
I feel guilty saying this, with my mother in the courtroom, even if it’s true and I can blame it on being sworn in. I think that kids are always closer to one parent than to the other. We may love both, but there’s one who’s your default. When I look at the spot where my mom has been sitting, though, she’s gone. I wonder if she is still in the bathroom; if she’s sick, if I should be worried—and then Zirconia’s voice pulls me back.
“What about your father’s relationship with Edward?”
“He didn’t have a relationship with Edward,” I say. “Edward left us.” But when I say this, I look at my brother. Can you really be mad at someone for doing something stupid if they truly, one hundred percent, thought they were doing what was right?
“How about your relationship with Edward?” Zirconia asks.
My whole life, people have said that I look like my mother and Edward is a clone of my father. But now I realize this isn’t exactly true. Edward and I, we have the same color eyes. A strange, unearthly hazel that neither my mother nor my father has. “I hardly remember him,” I murmur.
“What were your injuries in the accident?”
“I had a dislocated, fractured shoulder—the doctor says the humeral head was shattered. I also had bruised ribs and a concussion.”
“What was the treatment?”
“I had surgery,” I answer. “I had a metal rod placed in my arm, and the shoulder is held in place with a rubber band and something like chicken wire.” I glance at the judge’s white face. “I’m not kidding.”
“Were you on any medication?”
“Painkillers. Morphine, mostly.”
“How long were you in the hospital?”
“Six days. I had an infection that had to be treated after surgery,” I say.
Zirconia frowns. “It sounds like a very traumatic injury.”
“The worst part is that I’m right-handed. Well. I used to be, anyway.”
“You heard your brother testify about the conversation he had with you before he made the decision to terminate your father’s life support. When was that?”
“My fifth night in the hospital. I was in a lot of pain, and the nurses had just given me something to help me sleep.”
“Yet your brother tried to talk to you about a matter as serious as your father’s life or death?”
“My father’s doctors had just come to my room to present his prognosis to me. To be honest, I got upset. I just couldn’t listen to them telling me that my father wasn’t going to get better—not when I didn’t even feel strong enough to challenge them on what they were saying. One of the nurses made everyone else leave because I was getting agitated and she was afraid I’d tear out my staples.”
Zirconia looks at Edward. “And that was the moment when your brother chose to have a heart-to-heart?”
“Yes. I told him I couldn’t do it. I meant that I couldn’t listen to the doctors talk about my father like he was already dead. But Edward apparently assumed I meant that I couldn’t make a decision about my father’s care.”
“Objection,” Joe says. “Speculative.”
“Sustained,” the judge replies.
“Did you have any other conversations with your brother after that?”
“Yeah,” I say. “When h
e was about to kill my father.”
“Can you describe that moment for the court?”
I don’t want to, but in that second, I’m back in the hospital, hearing the hospital lawyer say that Edward told them I’d given consent. I’m running down the staircase in my bare feet to my father’s room in the ICU. It’s crowded, a party to which I haven’t been invited. He’s a liar, I say, and my voice throbs from a place so deep inside me that it feels primeval, foreign.
There is a moment of relief, when the lawyer calls off the procedure, and I start to sob. It’s a delayed reaction, the one you feel when you realize that you’ve escaped death narrowly.
The last time I’d felt it was after our truck had crashed into the tree, before I—
Before.
“It was like Edward didn’t even hear me,” I murmur. “He shoved a nurse out of the way and reached down and pulled the plug of the ventilator out of the wall.”
The judge looks at me, encouraging me to continue.
“Someone plugged the machine back in. An orderly held on to Edward until security came and took him away.”
“Cara, how is your father, after this unfortunate turn of events?”
I shake my head. “Luckily, there hasn’t been a change in his condition. Without oxygen, he could have wound up brain-dead.”
“Now, you had no idea that your brother had made this unilateral decision?”
“No. He never asked me for my input.”
“Is it what you would have wanted to happen?”
“No!” I say. “I know if we give my dad some more time, his condition will improve.”
“Cara, you’ve heard Dr. Saint-Clare say it’s highly improbable that your father will make a recovery, given the severity of his injuries,” Zirconia points out.
“I also heard him say that he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure it wouldn’t happen,” I reply. “I’m holding out for that tiny percentage, because nobody else is.”
Zirconia tilts her head. “Do you know your father’s opinion about how he’d want to be treated in this sort of medical situation?”
I face Edward, because I want to say to him all the things he never gave me a chance to say before he pulled that plug. “My father always says that, with wolves, if your family makes it through the day—with all the hardships of weather and starvation and predators—and survives the night, well, that’s something to celebrate. I’ve watched him stay up all night giving a wolf pup Esbilac from a bottle; I’ve seen him warm a shivering newborn underneath his own shirt; I’ve driven with him in a blizzard to a vet to try to save a pup who can’t breathe right. Even though, in the wild, any of those wolves would just die as part of natural selection, my father couldn’t be that careless. He’d tell me over and over that the one gift you can’t throw away is a life.”
“Then why did he pay for his girlfriend’s abortion?”
My head snaps around at the sound of Edward’s voice. He’s standing now, red-faced, choking on his own words. “You take care of the bills now. But back then, I did. And that’s how I found out.”
Joe tugs on Edward’s arm. “Shut up,” he grits out.
“See, it wasn’t just a one-time thing with another woman, even though that’s what he told me. It was months, and that baby was his—”
“Order!” the judge yells. He smacks his gavel.
I’ve gone dead inside before Edward even speaks again, as Joe is calling for a recess and dragging him out of the courtroom. “He told you all kinds of things that were lies,” Edward says to me, just to me. “You think you know him, Cara. But really, you never knew him at all.”
LUKE
Georgie insisted that I see a doctor. At the hospital, I sat in the waiting room reading people. Anticipating the movements of a predator was the difference between life and death in the wild, but here it became a parlor game. I could tell seconds before a woman opened her purse that she was going to reach for a tissue. I knew that the man sitting alone in the corner was on the verge of tears, although he was smiling at his daughter. I knew that the woman rubbing her stomach had been sick for a long time; I could smell it in her blood. With great curiosity I watched the nurse at the check-in desk. Every few minutes a complete stranger approached her and she didn’t even react with the good sense to back away, even though there was no way she could have known whether the person was holding a gun in his coat pocket, or was going to strike her. She assumed trust before the newcomer even showed submission—and I kept waiting the way you watch an impending train wreck: certain that any minute now tragedy would strike.
When I was called into the examination room, Georgie—who had been sitting behind me—stood up as if she planned to follow me in. “Um,” I said. “I thought I could do this alone.”
Embarrassed, she blushed. “Right,” Georgie said. “Of course.”
I followed the nurse into the exam room, where she took my pulse. Three times. “That can’t be right,” she said, and she was equally confused by my low blood pressure.
I sat alone, waiting for the doctor, my eyes on the doorknob. I listened in the hallway for the rustle of papers in my file. I closed my eyes and breathed in aftershave. “Hello,” I said, a moment before he entered.
The doctor raised his brows. “Good morning. I’m Dr. Stephens, and you are . . . Luke Warren, according to your chart. So you’ve been living in the woods with a pack of wolves for two years and you can apparently see through doors,” he said. He turned to his nurse. “Where’s the psych consult?”
“I’m not insane. I’m a wolf biologist. I followed a wild pack of gray wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor. I got them to accept me into the pack. I hunted with them, ate alongside them, slept beside them.”
I don’t think he would have believed me if he hadn’t seen my blood pressure numbers. He turned to his nurse. “Clearly these are a mistake . . .”
“I took it three times,” she argued.
Dr. Stephens frowned, counting the beats of my heart himself. “Okay,” he said. “Your pulse is lower than the pro basketball player I treated a year ago. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were barely alive. But obviously that’s not the case. So what’s going on?”
“I had a . . . unique diet and exercise plan,” I explained.
The doctor’s jaw dropped. “You’re telling the truth,” he said, and I nodded.
He sat down and listened while I explained how I’d become part of a pack. I told him about our meals, how we traveled, how we hunted. I explained our sleeping habits, how far we would move on patrol, how we fought predators, how we brought down prey. By the time I finished, an hour later, he was staring at me as if he’d cornered an alien, and had the opportunity to do the first full-body examination of it. “I’d love to run some blood work,” he said, excited. “See how your experience has affected you physically. Would you mind . . . ?”
He left me alone to order the tests, and I put my shirt back on. But instead of waiting for the phlebotomist, I walked into the hall, where I was stopped by an orderly. “Can you show me where the nearest restroom is?” I asked.
He gave me directions—down the hall and to the left. I followed them but didn’t go to the bathroom. I kept walking. I walked out the back door, down a flight of stairs, and into the bright sunlight.
There was a teenager sitting on the curb weeping. He had a pair of enormous air-traffic-controller headphones on, and he was rocking back and forth. “Too much,” he said, over and over, as he shook his head. His voice sounded as if he was speaking from the bottom of the ocean.
I sat down next to him, and a moment later, a woman ran out of the door. It took everything in my power not to react by shrinking away. “There you are!” she exclaimed, dragging him up by the arm.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“His cochlear implants were activated today,” she said proudly. “He’s just getting used to them.”
I could see it, then, the silver disk in the skull, surrounded by cropped
hair. “Too much,” the teenager howled.
To this day he is the only person in this world who I think understands what it felt like for me to return.
JOE
“You know,” I say, closing the door to the conference room, “just once I’d like you to actually tell me what you’re going to say before you say it. In fact, I’d also settle for you restricting your statements to direct questions instead of spontaneous utterances.”
“I’m sorry,” Edward mutters. He buries his face in his hands. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to what? Throw another bomb into the courtroom? Bring your sister to tears? Completely destroy your mother?”
I look down at my phone. Georgie has vanished. I’ve called and I’ve texted, but she isn’t answering. One minute she was in the courtroom, the next, Edward had confessed to his father’s infidelity and she was gone. I’m trying really hard to convince myself that she hasn’t become so upset by the news about her ex that she’s gone into hiding. I’m trying really hard to believe that she’s happy enough with me, now, to feel the sting of the revelation and then shrug it off. The only good news here, in fact, was that she wasn’t in the courtroom during this latest episode of Edward’s True Confessions.
I sit down, loosen my tie. “So?”
Edward looks up at me. “The night I caught him in the trailer with his assistant, he was like I’d never seen him before. Freaking out. Terrified I’d tell Mom. He swore to me that it was a mistake and that it had only happened once in the heat of the moment, that it wouldn’t happen again. I don’t know why I bothered to believe him. But I went home, and Mom knew something was off with me. She thought it had something to do with telling my father I was gay, and because it was easier, I let her believe that. But a day later, I was paying bills, like usual, and I saw one from an abortion clinic in Concord. I only knew about it because of a junior who’d gotten pregnant that year, and who’d gone there to take care of things. Anyway, there was a Post-it note attached to the bill. It said, Thanks for paying in full at the time of your visit—sorry our computer system was down. Please find enclosed a copy of your receipt for insurance purposes. I was pretty surprised to find a bill from there, and I was sure it was a mix-up in the mail, until I read the patient’s name: Wren McGraw. She was the college kid my father had hired to be a wolf caretaker. The one I’d found him sleeping with.” He bites down on his words, as if they are a chain between his teeth. “The one he swore he’d never slept with before.” Edward forces a laugh. “So I guess it’s fitting that everyone always thought my father was some kind of god, since apparently he’s capable of immaculate conception.”
