Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

“So, Edward,” the detective says, sitting down across from me. “Why don’t you tell me what happened today.”

I open up my mouth to respond, and then snap it shut. Years of Law & Order reruns on Thai TV have taught me something after all. “I want my lawyer,” I announce.

The detective nods, and walks out of the room.

Never mind that I don’t actually have a lawyer.

But a moment later the door opens again and a man walks in. He’s small and wiry, with black hair that keeps falling into his eyes; he’s wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. It takes me a moment to place him, because I only met him once-two days ago when he brought my mother’s twins to see her at the hospital.

“Joe,” I breathe. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see someone. I had forgotten that my mom’s new husband practiced law. I’ve done stupid, impulsive things before, but this is the first time I’ve been handcuffed for it.

“Your mother called me,” he says. “What the hell happened?”

“I didn’t shove the nurse, no matter what they say. She fell back when I…” I trail off.

“When you what?”

“When I pulled my father’s ventilator plug out of the wall,” I finish.

Joe sinks into a chair. “Do I even have to ask why …?”

I shake my head. “I was going to donate my dad’s organs, which is what he wanted-he was a donor, according to his license. I just wanted to carry out his last wishes, you know? The doctors had barely started when Cara came in and made a huge scene. As if this was all about her, and not my dad.”

“From what Georgie’s told me, Cara wasn’t in favor of terminating life support. You had to know that.”

“She told me yesterday that she didn’t want to have to deal with all this stuff anymore; that she couldn’t talk to the doctors about my dad, much less make a decision about what to do. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I was trying to help -”

He holds up a hand, silencing me. “What happened, exactly?”

“I bent down and grabbed the cord of the ventilator. I didn’t push the nurse, she was just standing between me and the machine. All I did was pull the plug out of the wall to turn it off. Because that’s what was supposed to happen.”

Joe doesn’t ask me to explain myself. He just looks at the facts and accepts them at face value. “This is a bailable offense, a misdemeanor,” he says. “In this state, if you’ve got no criminal record and you’ve got family around, you can be released on your own recognizance. Granted, you haven’t been a resident for some time, but I think we can work around that.”

“So what happens?”

“I’ll get a bail commissioner down here, and we’ll take it one step at a time.”

I nod. “Joe?” I say. “I, um, don’t really have any money to post bail.”

“You can pay off your debt by babysitting the twins so I can get reacquainted with my beautiful wife,” he replies. “Seriously, Edward. Your job from here on in is to sit down, be quiet, and let me handle everything. No outbursts. No grand heroic efforts. Understand?”

I nod, but the truth is, I don’t like to be beholden to anyone. I’ve been forging my own way for so long that it makes me feel totally vulnerable, as if I’ve suddenly found myself stark naked in the middle of a crowded street.

As he stands up to find an officer, I realize what it is that I like so much about Joe Ng. “You’re the first person who hasn’t said how sorry you are that this happened to my father,” I muse aloud.

He pauses at the threshold of the door. “The world knows your father as a brilliant conservationist and wildlife researcher. Well, I know him as the man who made Georgie’s life hell and who threw away his marriage for a bunch of glorified dogs,” Joe says bluntly. “I’m happy to be your lawyer. But I’m not doing it because of any great affection I have toward Luke Warren.”

For the first time in what feels like days, I smile. “I can live with that,” I say.

The holding cell in the police station is very small and dark, and faces a wall with a few yellowing posters and an Agway calendar from 2005. I’m stuck here, waiting for a bail commissioner to arrive.

My father used to say that an animal will only feel like it is in captivity if its home feels not like a territorial boundary but instead like a cage. What’s at stake is the lack of the natural world-not the fact that the space has been limited. After all, animals have their families with them-so the only thing you’re changing, by putting wolves into captivity, is their ability to defend themselves. You’re making them vulnerable the minute you put up the fence.

If you enrich their enclosures, though, a pack can be happy in captivity. If you play tapes of rival wolf packs howling, you force the males in the pack to bond together against this supposed threat. If you change their environment from time to time, or play multiple pack howls at once, the females have to think on their feet and make new decisions to keep the pack safe-should they divide the pack? Should they switch howls? Investigate around that new boulder? If you provide hunting enrichment, and avoid just sticking prey inside a fence (where it will be killed every time), you teach the wolves how to behave in the wild against a predator. If a wolf makes a kill once in every ten hunts in the wild, then in captivity you need to keep him guessing whether or not today’s the day food’s coming. Basically, a cage stops feeling like a cage when you can convince the wolf inside that he needs his family to survive.

When I hear footsteps, I stand up and grab the bars, expecting to be told the bail commissioner has finally arrived. Instead, I am assaulted by fumes of alcohol long before I see their source-a drunk man being held upright by an officer. He is weaving back and forth, red-faced and sweaty, and I am pretty sure that’s a streak of vomit on his checkered flannel shirt. “Brought you a roommate,” the officer says, and he opens the metal door so that the man staggers inside.

“Happy New Year,” the guy says, although it is February. Then he collapses facedown on the cement floor.

I gingerly step over him.

Once when I was around ten, I was sitting underneath the empty bleachers near the wolf enclosure at Redmond’s. Each day at 1:00 P.M. my father gave a wolf talk there to the summer visitors, but the rest of the time, it was a cool spot to hide with a book in the otherwise overcrowded, overheated park. I was not really paying attention to my father, who was in an adjoining pen digging out a pond while the wolves were relegated to another section of the enclosure. Suddenly a guy named Lark, who worked with my dad as a caretaker before he hired Walter, came back from his lunch break. He was stumbling, weaving. As he walked past the wolves, they started to go berserk-hurling themselves against the fencing, snapping and whining, running back and forth the way they did when they could smell food coming.

My dad dropped his tools and ran for the gates, until he reached Lark and slammed him down on the floor. With his forearm against the man’s throat, he growled, “Have you been drinking?”

My father had firm rules for the people who worked with his animals-no perfumed shampoos or soaps, no deodorant. And absolutely no alcohol. A wolf could smell it in your system days after you’d drunk it.

“Some guys took me out to celebrate,” Lark sputtered. He’d just had his first baby.

Gradually, the wolves calmed down. I’d never seen them act so crazy around a person, especially one of their keepers. If a human was being upsetting, like the annoying toddlers who waved and screamed from the security fence, the wolves would just lope into the rear of the enclosure, disappearing between the trees.