Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

I realize that I am still holding my father’s wallet. I take out the license, rub my finger over the little heart, the symbol for an organ donor. But when I go to slip it back into the laminated sleeve, I see there’s something else in there.

It’s a photo, cut down to fit the small pocket in the wallet. It’s from 1992, Halloween. I had on a baseball cap, covered with fur, with two sharp ears sticking up. My face was painted to give me a muzzle. I was four years old, and I had wanted a wolf costume.

I wonder if I knew, even back then, that he loved those animals more than he loved me.

I wonder why he’s kept this photo in his wallet, in spite of what happened.

Even though I was seven years older than Cara, I was jealous of her.

She had auburn ringlets and chubby cheeks, and people used to stop my mother as she was pushing the baby stroller down the street, just to comment on what a beautiful baby she had. Then they’d notice the second grader walking sullenly beside her-too thin, too shy.

But it wasn’t Cara’s looks that made me jealous-it was her mind. She was never the kind of kid who just played with dolls. Instead, she’d position them all around the house and make up some elaborate story about an orphan who travels across the ocean as a stowaway in a pirate ship to find the woman who sold her at birth in order to save her husband from a life in jail. When her report cards came home from elementary school, the teachers always commented on her daydreaming. Once, my mom had to go to the principal’s office because Cara had convinced her classmates that her grandfather was an astrophysicist and that by 6:00 P.M., the sun was going to crash into the earth and kill us all.

Even though there was a significant age gap between us, sometimes when she asked me to play, I’d go along with it. One of her favorite games was to hide inside her bedroom closet and blast off. In the dark, she’d chatter away about the planets we were passing, and when she opened the door again, she gasped about the aliens with six eyes and the mountains that shivered like green jelly.

Believe me, even though I was old enough to know better, all I wanted was to see those aliens and mountains. I think even as a kid, when I realized I was different, my greatest hope was that change was possible, that I could be just like everyone else. Instead, I would open the closet door and glance around at the same old dresser and bureau, at my mother, putting away Cara’s folded laundry.

It was no surprise that when my father went into the wild, Cara offered different explanations to anyone who asked: He’s on a dig with egyptologists in Cairo. He’s training for a space shuttle mission. He’s filming a movie with Brad Pitt.

I have no idea if she really believed the things she was saying, but I can tell you this much: I wished it were that easy for me to come up with excuses for my father.

The floor of the hospital where Cara and the other orthopedics patients are kept is considerably different from the ICU. There’s more activity, for one, and the deathly quiet that makes you want to lower your voice to a whisper on my father’s floor is replaced here by the sounds of nurses interacting with patients, the squeak of the book cart being pushed by a candy striper, the spill of voices from a dozen televisions bleeding past the thresholds of the rooms.

When I walk into Cara’s room, she’s watching Wheel of Fortune. “Only the good die young,” she says, solving the puzzle.

My mother spots me first. “Edward?” she says. “Is everything all right?”

She means with my father. Of course she’d think that. The look on Cara’s face makes my stomach hurt.

“He’s fine. I mean, he’s not fine. But he’s not any different.” I am already fucking this up. “Mom, could I talk to Cara alone for a minute?”

My mother looks at Cara, but then she nods. “I’ll go give the twins a call.”

I sit down in the chair my mother vacated and drag it closer to the bed. “So,” I begin, gesturing to Cara’s bound shoulder. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

My sister stares at me. “I’ve been hurt worse,” she says evenly.

“I, uh, I’m sorry that this is the way we had to have a reunion.”

She shrugs, her mouth pressed into a tight line. “Yeah. So why are you even here?” she asks after a minute. “Why don’t you just go back to whatever you were doing and leave us alone?”

“I will, if you want,” I say. “But I’d really like to tell you what I’ve been doing. And I’d kind of like to know what you’ve been up to, too.”

“I’ve been living with Dad. You know, the guy you’re downstairs pretending to know better than I do.”

I rub my hand over my face. “Isn’t this hard enough without you hating me?”

“Oh. Gosh. You’re right. What am I thinking? I’m supposed to welcome you back with open arms. I’m supposed to ignore the fact that you tore our family to shreds because you’re selfish and you left instead of trying to talk something out, so now you can ride in like some white knight and pretend you give a damn about Dad.”

There’s no way to convince her that just because you put half a planet between you and someone else, you can’t drive that person out of your thoughts. Believe me. I tried.

“I know why you left,” Cara says, jutting her chin up. “You came out and Dad went ballistic. Mom told me so.”

Cara was too young to understand back then, but she’s not now; she would have eventually asked questions. And of course my mother would have told her what she believed to be the answers.

“You know what? I don’t even care why you left,” Cara says. “I just want to know why you bothered to come back when no one wants you here.”

“Mom wants me here.” I take a deep breath. “And I want to be here.”

“Did you find Jesus or Buddha or something in Thailand? Are you atoning for your past so you can move on to the next step in your karmic life? Well, guess what, Edward. I don’t forgive you. So there.”

I almost expect her to stick her tongue out at me. She’s hurt, I tell myself. She’s angry. “Look. If you want to hate me, fine. If you want me to spend the next six years saying I’m sorry, I’ll do that, too. But right now, this isn’t about you and me. We have all the time in the world to figure things out between us again. But Dad doesn’t have all the time in the world. We need to focus on him.”

When she ducks her head, I take it as agreement.

“The doctors are saying… that his injuries aren’t the kind that can heal-”

“They don’t know him,” Cara says.

“They’re doctors, Cara.”

“You don’t know him, either-”

“What if he never wakes up?” I interrupt. “Then what?”

I can tell, from the way her face pales, that she has not let herself go there, mentally. That she hasn’t even let that hint of doubt creep into her head, for fear it will take root like the fireweed that grows along the road in summertime, rampant as cancer. “What are you talking about?” she whispers.

“Cara, he can’t stay hooked up to life support forever.”

Her jaw drops. “Jesus. You hate him so much that you’d kill him?”

“I don’t hate him. I know you don’t believe it, but I love him enough that I’m willing to think about what he’d want, instead of what we’d want.”

“You have a truly fucked-up way of showing your love, then,” Cara says.

Hearing a curse word on my little sister’s lips is like hearing nails on a blackboard. “You can’t tell me that Dad would want machines breathing for him. That he’d want to live with someone having to bathe him and change his diaper. That he wouldn’t miss working with his wolves.”