Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

“None taken.” I tap my pen on the pad. “Could we talk a little bit about the accident?”

She folds in on herself, pulling her bandaged arm tighter against her body with her free arm. “What do you want to know?”

“There’s some question about whether or not you’d been drinking that night.”

“It was hardly anything. I had a beer before I left-”

“Left where?” I ask.

“This stupid party. I went with a friend, and I freaked out when I saw how drunk everyone was getting, so I called my dad. He came all the way to Bethlehem to pick me up.” She looks at me, earnest. “I wasn’t driving the car, even if that’s what the police think. He never would have let me do that.”

“Was he angry at you?”

“He was disappointed,” she says quietly. “That was worse.”

“Do you remember the accident?”

She shakes her head.

“The paramedics said that you dragged your father from the car before it caught fire,” I say. “That was incredibly brave of you.”

Cara slips her free hand beneath her thigh. Her fingers are shaking. “Can we… can we just not talk about the accident anymore?”

Immediately I back off into safer ground. “What do you love most about your dad?”

“That he doesn’t give up,” she says. “When people told him he was crazy for wanting to go live with a wild wolf pack, he said he could do it, and that when he was done, he’d know more about them than anyone else on this planet. And he was right. When someone brought him a wolf that was injured or starving to death or once even kept as a pet in some idiot lady’s apartment in New York City, he didn’t ever say the wolf was a goner. Even if they died during the process, he still tried to save them.”

“Did you and your father ever have a conversation about what he’d want if he was in this kind of situation?”

Cara shakes her head. “He was too busy living to talk about dying.”

“What do you think should happen, now?”

“Well, obviously I want him to get better. I know it’s going to be hard and everything, but I’m practically done with school and I could go to community college instead of somewhere out of state so I could help him through rehab-”

“Cara,” I interrupt, “your brother feels differently. Why do you think that is?”

“He thinks he’ll be putting my father out of his misery. That living with a traumatic brain injury isn’t really living. The thing is, that’s what Edward thinks. My father would never look at a chance at life as miserable-no matter how small that chance is,” she says tightly. “Edward’s been gone for six years. My father wouldn’t recognize him if they bumped into each other on the street. So I have a really hard time believing that Edward knows what’s best for my dad.”

She is fierce in her convictions, evangelical. I wonder what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of that unconditional love. “You’ve talked to your dad’s doctors, haven’t you?” I ask.

Cara shrugs. “They don’t know anything.”

“Well, they know a lot about medicine,” I counter. “And they have a lot of experience with people who have brain injuries like your father.”

She looks at me for a long moment, and then gets off the bed and walks toward me. For an awkward moment, I think she’s going to hug me, but she reaches past my shoulder to push a button on her laptop. “You ever hear of a guy named Zack Dunlap?” she asks.

“No.”

I turn the chair around so that I can see the computer screen. It is a clip from the Today show, of a young man in a cowboy hat. “He got into an ATV accident in 2007,” Cara explains. “Doctors declared him brain-dead. His parents decided to donate his organs, because he said he wanted to on his license. But when they went to turn off the life support machines, one of his cousins-who was a nurse-had a hunch and ran a pocketknife blade along his foot, and the foot jumped. Even though another nurse said it was just a reflex, the cousin dug his fingernail underneath one of Zack’s, and Zack swatted his arm away. Five days later, he opened his eyes, and four months after the accident he left rehab.”

I watch the montage of Zack in his hospital bed, of his parents recounting their miracle. Of Zack receiving his hero’s welcome in his hometown. I listen to Zack talk about the memories he’s lost, and the ones he remembers. Including one where he heard the doctors pronouncing him dead, although he couldn’t get up and tell them he wasn’t.

“Doctors said Zack Dunlap was brain-dead,” Cara repeats. “That’s even worse off than my dad is now. And today Zack can walk and talk and do just about everything he used to do. So don’t tell me my dad isn’t going to recover, because it happens.”

The video clip ends, and the next Favorite in Cara’s YouTube queue rolls into play. Transfixed, we both watch Luke Warren rubbing the tiniest, squinting squeal of a wolf pup with a towel. He tucks it underneath his shirt, warming it with his own body heat.

“She was one of Pguasek’s babies,” Cara says quietly. “But Pguasek got sick and died, so my dad had to raise the two pups in her litter. My dad fed them with eyedroppers. When they were old enough, he taught them how to function in the pack. This one, he named Saba, Tomorrow, so that she’d always have one. It was the one thing he never got used to in the wild-how a litter would die, in order to teach the mom wolf how to do a better job next time. He said he had to interfere, because how can you throw out a life just like that?”

On the tiny rectangular screen, Luke Warren’s hair falls forward, obscuring the pinched face of the wrinkled pup. Come on, baby girl, he murmurs. Don’t you quit on me.

Who tells the new generation what they need to know?

In a household, it’s a parent. In a wolf pack, it’s the nanny. The position is a coveted one, and when an alpha is pregnant, several wolves in the pack will advertise themselves for the role, like beauty pageant contestants, trying to convince this mother-to-be to pick one over the rest. You are awarded the job because of the experience you have-often an older alpha or beta who can no longer perform the tasks necessary to keep the pack safe will take care of the new pups. In this, wolf culture is a lot like Native American culture, where age is revered-and nothing like most Americans, who stick their aging parents in rest homes and visit twice a year.

I didn’t audition for the nanny role in the wild; I would have been a disaster, since I could barely keep myself safe and my own learning curve was so steep. But I watched the wolf who became the caretaker, and committed her actions to memory. And it was a good thing, too, because I became a nanny by default. When I was back at Redmond’s years later and Mestawe refused her pups, Cara and I saved three out of the four-and someone was going to have to teach them how to function as a pack. That meant guiding them into positions of leadership-by the time I was done, I would rank higher only than Kina, who was destined to be a tester wolf.

You teach wolves by example; you discipline by taking away the warmth the pups crave. When the pups were behaving well, I would be in the tumble of their play. When they got out of hand, I’d nip them, roll them over, and bare my teeth over their throats so that they knew they could trust me. I started their differentiation in hierarchy through their food source, because wolves truly are what they eat. It’s a cycle: what the wolves feed on determines their rank in the pack; their rank in the pack determines what they feed on. So as soon as Cara and I weaned the pups off Esbilac and onto rabbit, I gave them the three different parts of the animal. Kina, the lowest-ranking pack member, could have the stomach contents. Nodah, the tough beta, got the “movement meat”-the rump and leg muscle. Kita was given the precious organs. As we moved on to single calf carcasses, I directed the wolves to the appropriate parts, the way my wolf brothers had done for me in Canada.