by Jodi Picoult
The judge takes off his reading glasses and turns to Cara. “Honey, I know you don’t want to lose your father,” he says. “But yesterday, I spent an hour at his bedside, and I think you’d have to agree with me—your father’s not in that hospital anymore. He’s already gone.” He clears his throat. “For all of these reasons and after great consideration, I’m awarding permanent guardianship to Edward Warren.”
It’s not really the kind of verdict that you get congratulated on. A small knot of support forms around Cara, and before I can say anything to her, Joe takes me away to get the paperwork I’ll need to present to the hospital, so that they will terminate my father’s life support, and schedule an organ donation.
I drive myself to the hospital, and spend an hour talking to Dr. Saint-Clare and the donor coordinator. I sign my name to forms and nod as if I am taking in everything they say, going through the same motions I went through six days ago. The only difference is that this time, when I don’t have to talk to Cara, I know I want to.
She’s curled up on my father’s bed, her face still wet with tears. When I walk in, she doesn’t sit up. “I knew I’d find you here,” I say.
“When?” she asks.
I don’t pretend to misunderstand. “Tomorrow.”
Cara closes her eyes.
I imagine her staying here all night. My mom and Joe probably gave her permission, under the circumstances. And I can’t imagine any of the ICU nurses would kick her out. But if she wants to say good-bye to our father, I also know this isn’t the place she needs to be.
I reach into my pocket for my wallet and pull out the photo I took from my father’s billfold, the one of me as a little kid. I slip it underneath my dad’s pillow, and then hold out my hand to her, an invitation.
“Cara,” I say. “There’s something I think you should hear.”
LUKE
To evict a wolf from a pack, you use natural suppression and intimidation—which usually takes the form of speed and directional control. Sometimes this is done just to test the members of the pack to make sure everyone’s up to speed and doing his job—a beckon here, a direction to stay put, a higher-ranking wolf keeping you from moving by cutting you off.
At the tip of the spine, above the tail, there is a little covered well with a gland in it that’s as distinctive as a human fingerprint. It’s how wolves identify each other. In captivity, when a wolf can’t leave an enclosure, a pack member who’s being evicted will sometimes have that gland gnawed at, gouged out by others, thus removing that wolf’s individuality. A wolf who loses its scent gland loses all status, and will often die.
Who gets evicted? It depends. It might be a wolf that is no longer performing to his best capabilities. It might be a young wolf growing up with alpha characteristics, when the pack already has a viable alpha. A wolf that’s been evicted becomes a lone wolf. In the woods, he’ll eat small animals and live on his own, howling at other packs to determine new vacancies that suit his role. A lone wolf usually has the characteristics of an alpha, beta, or mid-ranking wolf, and his acceptance into a new pack—which may be years later—is a happy constellation of circumstances. Not only must you be qualified to fill a certain position in the pack but there must be an opening for you.
I can tell you from experience that when wolves evict a member of the family, there is no looking back. It’s not quite that easy for humans.
Then again, a wolf that has been evicted from a pack could be asked to rejoin it, in certain circumstances. Say that pack with the extra alpha wolf suddenly loses its alpha to a predator? They’ll be in need of another alpha to fill his shoes.
CARA
We can’t go into the enclosures. Although the wolves would most likely just keep their distance, my sling would be like a red flag; they’d try to rip it off and get at the wound to clean it. So instead we sit on the rise, outside the fence, huddled in our coats, watching the wolves watch us.
There’s a cruel comfort to being here. It’s better than the hospital, I guess, and lying on my father’s bed listening to the beeps of machines like a time bomb ticking, knowing that when the electricity goes so will he. But I can’t turn around without seeing a ghost of a memory: my father running through the enclosure with a deer’s hindquarter, teaching the youngsters how to hunt. My father with Sikwla draped over his neck like a stole. My father nannying, teaching pups how to find and dive into a rendezvous hole.
Even though his wolves were in captivity, he taught them the skills to live in the wild. His goal was to get wolves rereleased into the forests of New Hampshire, the way they had been reintroduced in Yellowstone, and were now thriving. Although there had been some solo sightings of wild wolves, there were laws against their reintroduction. It had been two hundred years since they’d roamed free in the state, but that didn’t stop my father from making sure that any one of his captive packs survived the way its wild counterparts would. You know what the difference is between a dream and a goal? he used to say to me. A plan.
It’s funny, how he had to teach the wolves to be wild, when they taught him so much about being human.
I realize that I’m already thinking about him in the past tense.
“What’s going to happen to them?” I ask.
Edward looks at me. “I’ll ask Walter to stay on. I’m not going to get rid of them, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You don’t know anything about wolves.”
“I’ll learn.”
Now, that would be the greatest irony of all. If I’d told my dad that one day Edward would be living out his legacy with the wolves, he probably would have laughed himself into a hernia.
I stand up and walk closer, until I can curl my fingers into the chain-link fence. That was the first lesson my father taught me down here—don’t ever do that. A tester wolf will turn around before you know it and will bite you.
But these wolves, they know me. Kladen rubs his silvery side up against my hand and licks me.
“You could even be the one to teach me,” Edward suggests.
I crouch down, waiting for Kladen to pace by me again. “This place won’t be the same if he’s not here.”
“But he is,” Edward says. “He’s in every corner of it. He built it with his hands. He created these packs. This is who Dad was, not what you see in the hospital bed. And none of this is going away. I promise you.”
Suddenly Kladen moves to the promontory rock that, in the dark, looks like a hulking beast. I can make out the silhouettes of Sikwla and Wazoli. They tip back their throats and start to howl.
It’s a rallying howl, meant for someone who’s missing. I know who that is right away. It makes me start to cry again, even as all the other packs in the adjacent enclosures join in, a fugue of sorrow.
I wish, in that instant, I were a wolf. Because when someone leaves your life, there aren’t words you can use to fill the space. There’s just one empty, swelling minor note.
“This is why I wanted you to come here with me,” Edward says. “Walter says that they’ve done it every night since the crash.”
The crash.
Edward had kept a secret, and it broke our family apart. If I confessed mine, would it put us back together?
So I turn away from the wolves, and with them still singing their dirge, I tell my brother the truth.
“Here’s a hint,” my father said, furious, as he peeled away from the house in Bethlehem where already one kid was passed out and two more were having sex in a parked car. “If you lie about having a sleepover study session at Mariah’s, you should remember to take the fake bag you’ve packed.”
I was so angry I couldn’t see straight, but that also could have been the grain alcohol. I had beer once, but who knew something that tasted like fruit punch could pack a wallop like this? “I can’t believe you followed me here.”
“I tracked prey for two years; believe me, teenage girls leave a much more visible trail.”
My father had just barged into the house as if
I were five years old and he’d come to pick me up at a birthday party. “Well, thanks to you, I’m a social pariah now.”
“You’re right. I should have waited until you were being date-raped, or had blood alcohol poisoning. Jesus, Cara. What the hell were you thinking?”
I hadn’t been thinking. I’d let Mariah do the thinking for me, and it was a mistake. But I would have rather died than admit that to my father.
And I sure as hell wouldn’t tell him that, actually, I was happy to leave, because it was getting a little crazy in there.
“This,” my father muttered, “is why wolves let some of their offspring die in the wild.”
“I’m going to call Child Protection Services,” I threaten. “I’m going to move back in with Mom.”
My father’s eyes had a little green box around them from the rearview mirror reflection. “Remind me to tell you, when you’re not drunk, that you’re grounded.”
“Remind me to tell you, when I’m not drunk, that I hate you,” I snapped.
At that, my father laughed. “Cara,” he said, “I swear, you’re gonna be the death of me.”
And then suddenly there was a deer in front of the truck, and my father pulled hard to the right. Even as we struck the tree, even as frustrated with me as he was, his instinct was to throw an arm out in front of me, a last-ditch attempt at safety.
I came to because of the gas. I could smell it, seeping. My arm was useless, and I could feel the burn of the seat belt strap where it had cut a bruise like the sash of a beauty contestant. “Daddy,” I said, and I thought I was yelling, but my mouth was filled with dust. Turning to my left, I saw him. His head was bleeding, and his eyes were locked on mine. He was trying to say something, but no words came out.
I had to get us out of there. I knew that if there was a gas leak, the whole truck could go up in flames. So I reached across him and unbuckled his seat belt. My right arm wasn’t working, but with my left hand I opened the passenger door, so I could stumble out of the cab.
There was smoke pouring from under the hood, and one of the wheels was still spinning. I ran to my father’s side and wrenched open his door. “You have to help me,” I told him. With my left arm I managed to hoist him against me, partnered in a horrible nightmare of a dance.
I was crying and there was blood in my eyes and my mouth and I tried to drag my father clear of the car but I couldn’t use both arms to pull him. I wrapped one arm around his chest, but I couldn’t bear his weight that way. I let go of him. I let go of him, and he slipped through my arm like sand in an hourglass. I let go of him and he fell in slow motion, smacking his head against the pavement.
After that, he didn’t move anymore at all.
I swear. You’re gonna be the death of me.
“I let go of him,” I tell Edward, crying so hard that I cannot catch my breath. “Everyone was calling me a hero for saving his life, but I let go of him.”
“And that’s why you can’t let go, now,” he says, suddenly grasping what this has all been about.
“I’m the reason he’s going to die tomorrow.”
“If you had left him in the truck, he would have died then,” Edward says.
“He fell down on pavement,” I sob. “The back of his head hit so hard I heard it. And that’s why he won’t wake up now. You heard Dr. Saint-Clare—”
“There’s no way to tell which brain injuries came from the crash and which injuries came after that. Even if he hadn’t fallen, Cara, he might still be like this.”
“The last words I said to him were I hate you.”
Edward looks at me. “They’re the last words I said to him, too,” he admits.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “That’s a pretty shitty thing for us to have in common.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” Edward says. He offers a half smile. “Besides, he knows you didn’t mean it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because hate’s just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don’t know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can’t exist without the other.”
Very slowly I inch my hand toward Edward’s, until I can slip it beneath his. Immediately, I am eleven years old again, and crossing the street on my way to school. I never looked both ways when I was walking with Edward. I trusted him to do it for me.
He squeezes my hand. This time, I hold on tight.
When I was a kid my father used to tuck me in at night, and every time he turned off the lamp, he blew, as if there was a giant invisible candle illuminating my room. It took me years to figure out that he was flipping a switch, that he wasn’t the source of all the light.
Standing in this weird déjà vu tableau, I feel as if I’m the one blowing out that invisible candle, a spark I can’t see that somehow constitutes living, if not a life.
Edward is here, as are the same nurses and doctors and social worker and lawyer, and the donor coordinator. But Joe’s here, too, like he promised, and my mother, because I asked.
“Are we ready?” the ICU doctor asks.
Edward looks at me, and I nod. “Yes,” he says.
He holds my hand while the ventilator is dialed down, while morphine drips into my father’s arm. Behind my father is the monitor that marks arterial pressure.
When the machine stops breathing for my father, I focus on his chest. It rises, then falls once more. It stops for a minute. Then it rises and falls again twice.
The numbers on the arterial pressure monitor fall like a stock market crash. Twenty-one minutes after we have started, my father’s heart stops beating.
The next five minutes are the longest of my life. We wait to make sure he doesn’t spontaneously start breathing again. That his heart doesn’t restart.
My mother is crying softly behind me. Edward has tears in his eyes.
At 7:58 P.M., my father is declared dead.
“Edward, Cara,” Trina says, “you need to say good-bye.”
Because DCD requires the organs to be harvested immediately, we can’t linger. But then again, I have been saying goodbye for days. This is just a formality.
I walk up to my father and touch his cheek. It is still warm, and there’s stubble like flecks of fool’s gold. I put my hand over his heart, just to make sure.
It is a good thing that they whisk him to the OR for the organ donation, because I am not sure I would have been able to leave him. I might have stayed in his room forever, just sitting with his body, because once you tell the nurse that yes, it’s okay to take him away, you don’t ever get the chance to be with him again. To share the same space. To see his face, without it being a memory.
Joe takes my mother out into the hall, and pretty soon, it is just me and my brother, standing in the vacant spot where my father’s bed used to be. It’s a visual reminder of what we are missing.
The first time someone I loved left me behind, it was Edward, and I didn’t know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.
“Edward,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
The wolves at Redmond’s howled for thirty days. People heard them as far away as Laconia and Lincoln. They made babies asleep in their cribs cry, made women search for their high school sweethearts, gave grown men nightmares. There were reports of streetlights bursting when the wolves howled, of cracks forming in the pavement. At our house, just five miles away from the enclosures, it sounded like a funeral requiem; it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. And then one day, abruptly, the howling ended. People stopped waiting for it when the moon hit the highest point in the sky. They no longer hummed the melody at traffic lights.
It was just as my father had said: the wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they’d lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.
LUKE<
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There is no grief among wolves. Nature has a wonderful way of making you face reality. You can sit and weep if you want, but you are likely to be killed while you’re lost in your mourning, because you let your guard down.
I have seen wolves step over a pack member who dies in a hunt, and continue without looking backward. I have heard wolves call for four or five days after a member of the pack goes missing, hoping to bring her back. Death is an event. It happens, and you move on.
If an alpha is killed, the knowledge of the pack goes with it. The entire pack can crumble in a few days’ time if no one steps up from the ranks or is recruited to fill the void. What follows, in that case, is anarchy. The family will disperse, be killed, or starve to death.
Whether you survive a grave injury usually depends on how valuable you are. If it’s going to take too much time and energy for the pack to save you and nurse you back to health, you’ll make the decision to refuse their help, to let go. Death isn’t an individual choice. It all comes back to what the family needs.
Which is why, when you’re a wolf, you live each day like it’s the only one you have.
EPILOGUE
For the strength of the Pack
is the Wolf, and the strength
of the Wolf is the Pack.
—Rudyard Kipling
BARNEY
A nineteen-year-old shouldn’t have a bucket list, but I did. I’d been keeping it because there isn’t a lot else to do when you’re hooked up to dialysis three times a week. My bucket list, though, had become a to-do list. In the eight months since my kidney transplant, I’d visited Cairo. I’d learned how to snowboard. I’d gone target shooting.
My parents were not thrilled with my new adventurous side. They were, ironically, afraid that I’d have an accident and they’d lose me, even though the years I spent in near renal failure were far more likely to have been fatal. The way I saw it, if you were given a second lease on life, what was the point of playing it safe?
