Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

I tried to close my eyes and sleep, but I couldn’t relax. Instead, I began counting stars, and before I knew it, the yolk of the sun was breaking on the horizon.

It was great to work with the wolves during the day, but I was really there to keep the people who came to the park from doing stupid things, like throwing them food or leaning too close to the fence. In the nighttime, though, I was alone with these magnificent animals, these kings and queens of the half-light. At the end of their day they weren’t worrying about paying the bills, or what they were going to eat for breakfast, or what to do about the crack in the concrete, man-made pond. All that mattered was that they were together, and that they were safe.

For the next four nights, I locked myself into the wolf pen after the last zookeeper had gone home. And every night, the wolves stayed as far away from me as possible. On the fifth night, just after midnight, I got up and moved from the ridge to the rear of the fenced area. Two of the wolves bounded toward the spot where I’d been sitting. They sniffed the ground and one of them urinated. Then they moved away from the ridge, and spent the rest of their night staring at me with their yellow eyes.

On the sixth night, the wolf we called Arlo approached me. He moved in a slow circle, sniffing, before moving away.

He did the same thing on the seventh and eighth nights, too.

On the ninth night, he sniffed and circled and turned as if he were going to walk away but then whipped around and bit me on the knee.

It wasn’t a painful bite. He could have easily gone for my throat if he’d wanted to. It was just a nip, and it scared me more than it hurt me.

The real power of a wolf isn’t in its fearsome jaws, which can clench with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The real power of a wolf is having that strength, and knowing when not to use it.

I didn’t move. I figured if I tried to get up and leave the enclosure, Arlo might take me down and deliver a lot worse than a nip. Paralyzed by fear, I waited for Arlo to trot away. I didn’t move until the sunrise.

Much later I would learn that this terror probably is what kept me alive that night. When a new member comes to a pack-a lone wolf, for example, filling a vacancy-he’s tested to prove that he’s capable of holding the position, and that he will not threaten the others in the family. This test takes the form of a bite. If the new wolf doesn’t expose his throat to highlight his vulnerability and ask for trust, the wolves already in the pack will do what they must to teach him a lesson. If I’d flinched when Arlo nipped me, or gotten up and run out of the enclosure, I could have been killed.

The next night, Arlo bit me again. After two weeks, my knees, calves, and ankles were covered with bruises and cuts. Then one night, he brushed up against me. He was slightly damp from a light rain, and I thought at first he was trying to dry himself, but he rubbed his face, the top of his head, and his tail against me. When he pushed against me with all 120 pounds of his body and I fell backward, he nipped at me-another warning to stay in place. He continued to shimmy against me, until I smelled like a wet dog, too.

Which was exactly why he was doing it. A few weeks later he began to bring the other members of the pack to my spot on the ridge. They would hang back, wary, while Arlo bit me on the knee and shin. It was Arlo’s way of showing them, I realized, that I could take direction.

That I could be trusted.

“Drinking?” I say, stunned. “You were drinking ?”

The police are gone, chased away by a nurse after Cara dissolves into shoulder-wracking sobs that leave her gasping with pain. I don’t know who I’m more angry at: the cops, for trying to accuse her of a DUI; or Cara, for lying to me in the first place.

“It was one drink-”

“Served in what? A bucket?” I ask. “Blood tests are pretty damn accurate, Cara.”

“I went to a party with Mariah,” she says. “I didn’t even want to go, it was some guy from Bethlehem High she met at a track meet. And as soon as it started to get out of control, I called Dad and asked him to come get me. I’m telling you the truth. I swear I am.”

“Why didn’t you say anything when the ER doctors asked if you had any drugs or alcohol in your system?”

“Because,” Cara says, “I knew this was going to happen. I made a mistake, okay? Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”

God, yes.

“If you couldn’t admit it to the doctors,” I say, “you might have at least told me. You made me feel like an idiot in front of those policemen.”

Cara’s mouth twists. “How do you think I feel? If it wasn’t for me-if I hadn’t been drinking-Dad wouldn’t have gotten hurt. He would never even have been out on the road.”

That, finally, cuts through the red rage I’ve been seeing since hearing that my underage daughter was drinking while on Luke’s watch. If I’d found out any other way, I would have called him on it. I would have yelled at him about not being a responsible parent, about changing the custodial agreement.

But I can’t very well yell at him right now.

“Cara,” I say, sitting on the edge of the bed. “It was a car accident. An accident. You can’t blame yourself.”

She jerks away from me. “You weren’t there!” she snaps.

It’s a criticism of me. I just don’t know if she is upset with me for talking about the crash or for being with my other family when it happened.

I’d like to believe that if Cara had still been living under my roof, she wouldn’t have been drinking. That if she had stayed with me, we wouldn’t be in a hospital. Unlike Luke, who was always so wrapped up in his wolves, I would actually know what my own daughter’s up to and I would never let her out late on a school night. But it is always easy to rewrite history after the fact. The truth is, even if Cara had not chosen to go live with her dad instead of me, I might have found myself the recipient of that phone call last Thursday from Cara, begging to be rescued.

There have been a handful of times in my life when I have suddenly had the perspective to be able to see myself from a distance, to trace how I got to that point. The first was the morning I read the note from Edward, telling me that he had left home. The second was at my wedding to Joe, when I was-maybe for the first time-unadulteratedly happy. The third was when the twins were born. And the fourth, now, is at the crux of a nightmare-my first family, all drawn together again, and inextricably linked once more because of Luke’s dynamic persona. Be careful what you wish for.

“You can tell Dad to ground me,” Cara says. “When he wakes up.”

I don’t have the heart to tell her that is an if, not a when.

Which means she’s not the only person in this room who is a liar.

I met Luke when I was assigned to do a story on him for a local news show. I was convinced that I was going to be the next Katie Couric, even if I was currently slogging in the trenches of local New Hampshire television. Never mind that sometimes the anchors were so bad I watched the videotaped newscasts as a drinking game-every time a word was mispronounced I would have a sip of wine, and often downed an entire bottle in a thirty-minute newscast. My job was to spotlight the quirky, crusty, unique residents of the state in the last three minutes of the evening newscast.

I’d met my share of the weird-the farmer’s wife who dressed up her barn cats in hand-sewn costumes and photographed them in the same positions as famous paintings; the bagel baker who had accidentally created a cheddar-dill concoction that bore an uncanny resemblance to the governor; the petite blonde elementary school teacher who had won a lumberjack contest in the north country. One day my crew (which meant me and a guy lugging a camera) was dispatched to the only zoo in New Hampshire, a sleepy little Manchester-area establishment with horseback trail rides, a dairy discovery barn, and a thin collection of wildlife.