by Jodi Picoult
This is a unique case. Often when probate court becomes involved in a situation of guardianship, it’s because no one wants to step up to the plate and make the hard decisions. In this case, we have two very different individuals who both want the job. But we also have something that most wards do not have—a written and video testimony by Luke Warren himself. His autobiography and the countless hours of film, both televised and amateur, that show him in his element give us a very strong sense of the kind of man he was and what he would want if someone’s judgment was being substituted for his own. I have been impressed by how far Luke Warren’s children are willing to go for him. I have been impressed by Mr. Warren’s life, and how much he’s accomplished. I’ve been impressed by the adventurous spirit that is packed into the chapters of his book and by the colleagues on camera who never fail to mention that sense of excitement and that constant adrenaline which were part of being around Mr. Warren.
All of this points to a man who would not relish the thought of being bedridden, at best.
And yet.
The Luke Warren that was shown to the world was only one facet of the man. If you read between the lines of his book, you can just make out the shadow of another story. The hero in his autobiography isn’t a hero at all. He’s a failure—someone who couldn’t live with the animals he came to revere, and more important, someone who couldn’t manage to live by their code when he was apart from them. You’ve heard both Cara and Edward say it in their testimonies: to a wolf, family matters most. But Mr. Warren abandoned his family—literally, when he went into the woods of Quebec, and figuratively, when he carried on an extramarital affair that led to a terminated pregnancy.
I’ve never spoken directly to Mr. Warren. But I think that it probably hurt him to know that his son’s instinct was to leave home when the going got tough. A wolf would have never let his offspring out of his sight.
On the other hand, Cara’s idealism is based on the very foundation of a family mattering most. The odds are against Mr. Warren’s survival, but the reason she is advocating for it so strongly is simply because she doesn’t want to live without her father. And if Mr. Warren is lucky enough to be one of those medical anomalies who defies science, I think he’d be delighted to get a second chance. Not just at survival but at being a father.
For this reason, I think Cara’s beliefs dovetail with Mr. Warren’s deepest wishes. I’d urge the court to appoint her as a guardian and to allow Cara to make appropriate arrangements for her father’s treatment.
LUKE
After the Animal Planet series, I got a call from a biologist near Yellowstone. A hiker had been found in the woods, his body half devoured by wolves. It had raised fear in a community that had long ago accepted the release of wild wolves into the Rockies.
Some of the researchers felt that the wolves had killed for sport, but I didn’t believe it. I had never seen wolves behave that way toward a fellow predator, which is how they view man. Nothing in pack behavior suggests that food should be convenient rather than carefully chosen.
So why had wolves, which I had sworn would never attack a man, done just that?
I flew out to Yellowstone.
The area where the hiker had been killed had been stripped for timber. In fact, there was hardly a forest at all anymore. Without the cover and vegetation of the natural woods, the prey animals—deer and elk, mostly—had dwindled. The wolves had started eating salmon from the rivers instead.
I went back home and followed up on my hunch with one of my captive packs. Instead of giving them meat, I only fed them fish. Unlike with a land-based animal carcass—a food that has emotional value in the chemicals that run through the muscles and internal organs—now everyone was getting the same meal.
It was socialism among wolves. They were no longer eating in hierarchy, making sure that different ranks got different types of meat. Within a few months, the pack fell apart. There was no discernible alpha or beta rank. There was no discipline. Each wolf to his own, every animal did whatever he or she wanted. Instead of a family, they had become a gang.
The reason the pack at Yellowstone went after the hiker, I think, is that the natural food supply had dwindled, and the only source left to them was one that inadvertently destroyed the ranks. They killed the poor man because there was no wolf there telling them not to.
Sometimes, it’s like this for a pack. You have to reach the point of utter chaos before a new leader can emerge.
CARA
You would think that having the temporary guardian’s stamp of approval would have me turning cartwheels, but the judge does something no one is expecting.
He schedules a field trip.
Which is how I come to be standing beside my brother outside the glass window of my father’s ICU room, watching the judge hold a one-sided private conversation with our unconscious father.
Joe rode the elevator downstairs with my mother, who’s gone home to pick the twins up from the bus stop. Zirconia is in the lounge, talking to a therapy dog.
“What do you think LaPierre is saying?” Edward asks.
“A novena?” I suggest.
“Maybe he needs to see with his own eyes what a vegetative state looks like.”
“Or maybe,” I counter, “he’s hoping to see Dad wake up again.”
“Open his eyes,” Edward corrects.
“Same difference.”
“Cara,” he says, towering over me, “it’s not.”
My mother used to talk about Edward’s growth spurts. I used to think that meant Edward sprouted overnight, like the plants she kept in the kitchen. I worried he would become too big for the house, and then where would we put him?
Armand LaPierre rises from the chair beside my father’s bed. He steps into the hallway just as Joe comes out of the elevator and Zirconia hurries toward us from the lounge. “Nine A.M.,” he announces, and he walks off.
Zirconia draws me aside. “You’re in great shape. You’ve done everything you can at this point. Between the fact that LaPierre’s Catholic, and more inclined to err on the side of life, and the endorsement of the temporary guardian, it’s looking very strong, Cara.”
I hug her. “Thanks. For everything.”
“My pleasure.” She smiles. “You need a ride back home?”
“I’ll take her,” Joe says, and I realize that he and my brother have been close enough to hear everything Zirconia said to me. I wanted to win this case. So why does that make me feel so bad?
“I’m going to stay for a while,” Edward says, nodding toward Dad’s room.
“You’ll call me—”
“Yes,” he says. “If anything happens.”
“If he wakes up again—”
But Joe is already pushing me toward the elevator. The doors close behind us. The last image I have is of Edward sitting down beside my father’s bed.
I watch the floor numbers fall as the elevator descends, a rocket’s countdown. “What happens if I lose?” I ask.
Joe seems surprised. “Your lawyer thinks it’s a lock.”
“Nothing’s a hundred percent,” I tell him, and he grins.
“Yes,” he says. “I remember that from today’s testimony.”
I glance at him sharply. “And I remember today’s cross-exam.”
At least he has the grace to blush a little. “How about we put that behind us?”
I hold out my hand to shake on that, but he doesn’t let go. “If you don’t win,” Joe says gently, “then Edward will be your father’s guardian. He’s going to schedule a time to terminate your father’s life support, and to donate his organs. You can be there. And if you want, Cara, I will be right there next to you.”
My throat gets tight. “Okay,” I say.
When the elevator doors open in the lobby, what people see is a man holding on to a girl who’s crying, who looks about the right age to be his daughter. What people see is just one of hundreds of sad stories born inside the walls of this building.
Whe
n I was younger, my brother told me that he had the power to shrink me to the size of an ant. In fact, he said, he used to have another sister, but he shrank her down and stepped on her.
He also told me that when you became a grown-up, you were admitted into a private party that was full of monsters and horror movie characters. There was Chucky, drinking a cup of coffee. And the mummy on the cover of the Hardy Boys book that used to freak me out, except he was doing the twist while Jason from Friday the 13th played the alto sax. He told me you stayed at the party as long as you had to, making conversation with these creatures, and that was why adults were never afraid of anything.
I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn’t mean you’re fearless.
It just means you fear different things.
LUKE
My Abenaki friends say that if a hunter and a bear spill each other’s blood, they become the same person. No matter what, after that moment, the hunter will never be able to shoot the bear, and the bear will never be able to kill that person.
I’d like to believe it’s true.
I’d like to believe that the by-product of a near-death experience is a healthy dose of mutual respect.
EDWARD
I was the kid who woke up in the middle of the night with a stomachache, certain there was a monster under the bed. I thought ghosts came to sit on my windowsill. Every gust of wind and snapping branch became a thief who was going to come through the attic to kill me. I used to wake up sobbing, and my father, who was usually just getting back from Redmond’s, would be the one to calm me down. You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you’ve got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won’t be able to cry for real when you need to. He told me he’d once met an eight-year-old who’d used up his whole glass of tears and who now couldn’t sob, no matter what.
To this day, I hardly ever cry.
My father doesn’t open his eyes, twitch, blink, or move a muscle during the three hours I sit by his bed. His IV bag empties and his catheter bag fills with urine. A nurse comes by to check his vitals. “You should talk to him,” she tells me. “Or read out loud. He likes People magazine.”
Frankly I can’t imagine anything my father would like less. “How do you know that?”
She smiles. “Because I read him last week’s issue and he didn’t complain once.”
I wait until she leaves the room, and then I pull my chair up to my father’s bed. It’s no wonder I haven’t talked much to him, but then again, I never really knew what to say. And yet, this nurse has a point. What better time to finally tell him the things I should have said ages ago than now, when he has no choice but to listen? “I don’t hate you,” I admit, the words dissolving the silence.
His response is the pump and fall of the ventilator. It almost feels wrong, an unfair fight.
“The temporary guardian, she said something today I can’t get out of my head. She said you would have been hurt because I left. I guess I always figured you were thrilled. That you’d gotten rid of the son who was nothing like you. But it turns out that I’m exactly like you. I walked away from my family, too. I realized too late I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. I didn’t belong in Thailand, and I didn’t belong here. I was just . . . caught somewhere in the middle.”
Breathe in, out. In, out.
“There’s something else I realized, too. You never said you wished I was more athletic or outdoorsy or straight. I was the one who was so sure I didn’t measure up. And that’s probably because there was nobody else like you. So how could I ever come close?”
I look down at him, still and slack. “What I’m trying to say is that I blamed you, when it was me all along.”
I reach for my father’s hand. The last time I held it I must have been very small, because I do not remember this at all. How weird, to start and end at the same place, to be the child hanging on to a parent for dear life. “I’m going to take care of her. No matter what happens tomorrow,” I tell him. “I thought you should know I’m back for good.”
My father doesn’t respond. But in my mind, I can hear his voice, booming and clear.
It’s about time.
Finally, I let myself cry.
By the time I return to the house, it is after midnight. Instead of falling into bed, though, or even just collapsing on the couch, I go to the attic. I haven’t been up there and I have to use my phone as a flashlight, but I manage to rummage through boxes of old tax documents and moth-eaten clothing, some DVD sets of the Animal Planet shows and a bin full of my high school notebooks before I find what I’m looking for. The frames are stacked in a corner with layers of newspaper between them.
The surge of relief I feel when I realize these weren’t thrown out is a shot of pure adrenaline. I carry them all downstairs.
There’s one hallway in my father’s house with photographs. They are all of Cara, except for two of my dad with some of his wolves, and one of them together.
Every year, my mother made us take a picture for our Christmas card. Usually it was August when she was inspired, and usually I had to wear the heaviest, itchiest sweater I owned. Since we didn’t have any snow then, she’d make us pose with all the trappings of Christmas, hats and scarves and mittens, as if our relatives and friends were too dumb to tell from the scenery that it was summer in New England. Every year, she framed the photo and gave it to my father for Christmas. And every January, he hung it in the stairwell.
I sort through the pictures of me and Cara. There’s one where she’s so little, I’m carrying her. Then the one where her pigtails stick out like silk tufts from each side of her head. There’s the one where I have braces and the one where she does. There’s the last photo we took together, before I left.
It’s strange to see myself six years younger. I look wiry and nervous. I’m staring at the camera, but Cara’s staring at me.
I hang the photographs up along the stairwell, taking down Cara’s individual school portraits. I leave up the two of my father with his wolves. Then I stand back, reading my history on the wall.
The last picture I hang is one I remember well. It was the last vacation we took as a family, before my father went to Quebec. My dad and I stand with our feet in the water on the beach at Hyannis. My mom is piggybacked on him, and Cara is piggybacked on me. Looking at us, with our tanned faces and our white teeth and our wide smiles, you’d never know that, in three years’ time, my father would go off to live in the woods. You’d never know that he would have an affair. That I would leave without saying good-bye to anyone. That there would be an accident that changed everything.
This is what I like about photographs. They’re proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.
The next morning I oversleep. I throw on the same shirt I was wearing the day before and my father’s buffalo plaid jacket and slide into a seat beside Joe as the clerk is telling us to rise for the Honorable Armand LaPierre.
“Nice of you to show up,” Joe murmurs.
For a long, silent minute, the judge sits with his head bowed, tearing at his hair. “In all my years of sitting on the bench,” he says finally, “this has been one of the most difficult cases over which I’ve presided. It’s not every day you have to make a decision about life and death. And I also realize that whatever decision I make will not be a happy decision for anyone.”
He takes a deep breath and perches his glasses on the edge of his nose. “The fact that Cara is only seventeen is immaterial to me, given the circumstances. She lived with her father, she had a close relationship with him, she is as competent of making a decision as she will be in three months’ time. Given her brother’s absence for six years, I consider her on an equal par with Edward in terms of her ability to act as guardian for her father. I cannot discount the fact that the decision I make today m
ight take away a father from a young girl who gets great reassurance out of simply knowing he’s still part of her world, even if he is in a vegetative state. Furthermore, he’s only been in this state for thirteen days.
“Yet I am also cognizant of the irrefutable testimony of Dr. Saint-Clare, who has stated that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Warren will not recover from his injuries and will continue to deteriorate. When you look at the precedents set by earlier decisions like this—Cruzan and Schiavo and Quinlan—the outcome has always been death. Mr. Warren is going to die. The question is, will it be tomorrow? A month from now? A year from now? You want me to make that decision, and in order to do that, I need to determine what Luke Warren would have wanted.”
Pursing his lips, he continues. “Ms. Bedd looked at the swath Mr. Warren cut through television and publishing media, and came to her conclusion. But to look at Mr. Warren in the public eye is not necessarily to see the man behind the celebrity. And the only concrete evidence I have of the way and manner in which Mr. Warren lived his life is a conversation he had with his son saying that if he were in this very situation, he’d want to terminate life-sustaining measures. A conversation that was reinforced on paper in a handwritten, signed advance directive.” He glances at me. “Moreover, on Mr. Warren’s driver’s license, he indicated a desire to be an organ donor. We can see this as further evidence of his personal wishes.”
