Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

“He’s a fighter. He won’t give up.” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this. I can’t believe you think you have the right to tell me what Dad would or wouldn’t want.”

“I’m being realistic, that’s all,” I reply. “You have to be ready to make some hard choices.”

“Choices?” she says, choking on the word. “I know all about hard choices. Should I have a total breakdown, or hold it together while my parents are splitting up? Even though the one person who’d understand what I’m feeling has totally abandoned me? Do I live with my mother or do I live with my father, because no matter what I decide, I know my answer’s going to hurt the other person. I’ve made hard choices, and I picked Dad. So how dare you tell me I’m supposed to just give him up, now?”

“I know you love him. I know you don’t want to lose him-”

“Before you left, you told Mom you wanted to kill him,” Cara snaps. “So I guess now you have your chance.”

I can’t blame my mother for telling her that. It’s true.

“That was a long time ago. Things change.”

“Exactly. And in two weeks or two months or maybe longer, Dad just might walk out of this hospital.”

That is not what I’ve been led to believe by the neurologists. That is not what I’m seeing with my own eyes. I realize, though, that she is right. How can I make a family decision with my sister when I haven’t been part of this family?

“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I’m sorry I left. But I’m here now. I know you’re hurting, and this time, you don’t have to go through it alone.”

“If you want to make it up to me,” Cara says, “then tell the hospital I should be in charge of what happens to Dad.”

“You’re not old enough. They won’t listen to you.”

She stares at me. “But you could,” she says.

The truth is, I want my father to wake up and get better, but not because he deserves it.

Because I want to leave as soon as possible.

In this, Cara is right. I haven’t been part of this family for six years. I can’t just walk in and pretend to fit seamlessly. I tell my mother this, when I walk out of Cara’s room and find her pacing in the hall. “I’m going back home,” I say.

“You are home.”

“Ma,” I say, “who are we kidding? Cara doesn’t want me here. I can’t contribute anything valuable about what Dad would have wanted in this situation. I’m getting in the way, instead of helping.”

“You’re tired. Overtired,” my mother says. “You’ve been in the hospital for twenty-four hours. Get some rest in a real bed.” She reaches into her purse and pulls a key off a chain of many.

“I don’t know where you live now,” I point out. As if that isn’t proof enough that I don’t belong.

“You know where you used to live,” she says. “This is a spare key I keep in case Cara loses hers. There’s no one in the house, obviously. It’s probably good for you to go there anyway to make sure everything’s all right.”

As if there would be a break-in in Beresford, New Hampshire.

My mother presses the key into my palm. “Just sleep on it,” she says.

I know I should refuse, make a clean break. Start driving back to the airport and book the first flight to Bangkok. But my head feels like it’s filled with flies, and regret tastes like almonds on the roof of my mouth. “One night,” I say.

“Edward,” my mother says, as I am walking away from her. “You’ve been gone for six years. But before that, you lived with him for eighteen years. You have more to contribute than you think you do.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I reply.

“That you can’t make the right decision?”

I shake my head. “That I can, ” I tell her. “But for all the wrong reasons.”

I’m having an Alice in Wonderland moment.

The house I step into is familiar, but completely different. There is the couch I used to lie on to watch TV after school, but it’s not the same couch-this one has stripes instead of being a solid, deep red. There are photos of my dad with his wolves dotting the walls, but now they’re mixed in with school pictures of Cara. I walk by them slowly, watching her grow up in increments.

I trip over a pair of shoes, but they aren’t my little sister’s light-up sneakers anymore. The dining room table is covered with open textbooks-calculus, world history, Voltaire. Sitting on the kitchen counter are an empty carton of orange juice, three dirty plates, and a roll of paper towels. It’s the mess of someone who thought he was coming back to clean up later.

There’s a nearly empty box of Life cereal on the counter, which feels more like a metaphor than a housekeeping oversight.

The house has a smell, too. Not a bad one-it’s outdoorsy, like pine and smoke. You know how when you go to someone’s house it smells a certain way… but when you go to your own house it doesn’t smell at all? If I needed any other confirmation that I’m a stranger, this is it.

I push the blinking red button on the answering machine. There are two messages. The first is from a girl named Mariah, and it is for Cara.

Okay, I totally have to talk to you and your cell phone voice mailbox is full. Call me!

The second is from Walter, who lives at Redmond’s Trading Post. Six years ago he was the caretaker for the wolves if my dad wasn’t around-the one who sawed up the calves that came in from the abattoir for food, and who called my dad in the middle of the night if there was a medical problem and my dad happened to be home with us, instead of in the trailer on-site. I guess he’s still the caretaker, because his message is asking a question about medication for one of the wolves.

It’s been two days now that my father hasn’t turned up at Redmond’s. What if no one has told Walter what’s happened?

I push all the buttons on the phone, but I can’t figure out how to call the last incoming number. Well, there’s got to be an address book somewhere around here, or maybe his contact information is on a computer.

My father’s office.

It was what I called it back then, even though my father, as far as I knew, had never stepped foot in it. Technically it was the guest bedroom in our house, but it had a filing cabinet and a desk and the family computer, and we never had guests. It was where, twice a week, I sat down to pay family bills-my chore, just like Cara’s, was loading and unloading the dishwasher. We all had to pitch in when my father left for Canada to join the wild pack. I’m sure he expected my mother to be in charge of our finances, but she wasn’t good with deadlines, and after having the heat turned off twice because of bills past due, we decided that I’d take over. So even at fifteen, I knew how much money it took to run a household. I learned about interest rates through credit card debt. I balanced the checkbook. And once my father came home, it was simply assumed that I’d continue. His mind was always a million different places, but none of them happened to be that office desk, paying bills.

You probably think it’s strange that a teenager would be put in charge of the family finances, that this is bad parenting. I’d argue that taking your kids into wolf enclosures ranks right up there, too. But no one blinked when Cara, at age twelve, became my father’s photogenic costar on his Animal Planet series. My father excelled at making even the greatest naysayers believe that he was entirely in control.

The office chair is the same-one of those ergonomic jobs with pulleys and levers that adjust everything so your back won’t hurt. My mom found it at a garage sale for ten bucks. But the computer is no longer a desktop-it’s a sleek little MacBook Pro with a screen saver of a wolf staring out with so much wisdom in his yellow eyes that, for a moment, I can’t look away. I pull open the file drawers and find one overflowing with envelopes-some marked PAST DUE. As if I’m being drawn by a magnet, I find myself sifting through them. I reach into the drawer on the right to find a checkbook, a pen, stamps. From the size of this stack of envelopes, you’d think no one had paid a bill since I left.