Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

I am holding the phone in my hand, looking at these pictures, when it starts to vibrate. I check the display to see who’s calling-expecting a friend who wants to invite me out for a beer, or my boss at the institute asking me to cover for another teacher, or maybe the flight attendant I met last weekend at the Blue Ice Bar. It’s always struck me as amusing that the cellular service in Nowhere, Thailand, is still better than in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Out of area.

“Hello?” I hold the phone up to my ear.

“Edward,” my mother says. “You have to come home.”

It takes a full twenty-four hours to get back to the States and to rent a car (something I wasn’t old enough to do when I left) and drive all the way to Beresford, NH. You’d think I’d be falling asleep, but I’m too nervous for that. In the first place, I haven’t driven in six years, and that requires my full concentration. In the second place, I am replaying what I’ve already been told-by my mother, and by the neurosurgeon who did emergency surgery on my father.

His truck crashed into a tree.

He and Cara were found outside the vehicle.

Cara shattered her shoulder.

My father was unresponsive, with an enlarged right pupil. He wasn’t breathing on his own very well. The EMTs called it a diffuse traumatic brain injury.

My mother called me when I first landed. Cara was out of her surgery; she was on painkillers and sleeping. The police had come by to interview Cara, but my mother had sent them away. She had stayed at the hospital last night. Her voice sounded like a string that was fraying.

I’m not going to lie: I’ve thought about what it would be like, if I ever came back. I imagined a party at our house, and my mom would bake my favorite cake (carrot ginger) and Cara would make me a sculpture out of Popsicle sticks with the words “#1 Bro” on the lid. Of course, my mom doesn’t live there anymore, and Cara’s way too old for Popsicle stick arts and crafts.

Probably you noticed that, in my fantasy victory lap, my father was not part of the picture.

After all this time in a city, Beresford feels like a ghost town. There are people around, for sure, but there’s so much uninhabited space that it makes me dizzy. The tallest building here is three stories. From every angle, you can see mountains.

I park in the outside lot at the hospital and jog inside-I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, which isn’t really appropriate for a New England winter, but I don’t even own those sorts of clothes anymore. The volunteer who’s manning the front desk looks like a marshmallow-plump, soft, powdered. I ask for Cara Warren’s room, for two reasons. First, it’s where my mother will be. And second, I need a minute before I face my father again.

Cara’s on the fourth floor, in room 430. I wait for the elevator doors to close (again, when was the last time I was ever alone in an elevator?) and take deep breaths. In the hallway, I walk past the nurses with my head ducked and push open the door that has Cara’s name on a chart outside.

There’s a woman sleeping in the hospital bed.

She has long, dark hair and a bruise on her temple, a butterfly bandage. Her arm is wrapped up in a cocoon against her body. She has one foot kicked out from the blanket, and there is purple polish on her toes.

She’s not my little sister anymore. She’s not little, period.

I’m so busy staring at her that at first I don’t even notice my mother in the corner. She stands up, her hand covering her mouth. “Edward?” she whispers.

When I left, I was already taller than my mother. But now, I have filled out. I’m bigger, stronger. Like him.

She folds me into an embrace. Heart origami. That’s what she used to call it when we were small, and she’d open her arms and wait for us to run inside. The words feel like a splinter in my mind; I can feel them rubbing the wrong way even as I do what she is expecting and hug her back. It’s a funny thing, how-no matter how much bigger I am than my mother-she still is the one holding me, instead of the other way around.

I feel like Gulliver on Lilliput, too overgrown for my own memories. My mother wipes at her eyes. “I can’t believe you’re actually here.”

It doesn’t seem right to mention that I wouldn’t be here, not by a long shot, if my sister and father weren’t in the hospital. “How is she?” I ask, nodding toward Cara.

“In an OxyContin haze,” my mother says. “She’s still in a lot of pain after the surgery.”

“She looks… different.”

“So do you.”

We all do, I guess. There are lines on my mother’s face I never noticed before, or maybe they weren’t there. As for my father-well, it’s hard for me to imagine him changing at all.

“I guess I should go find Dad,” I say.

My mother picks up her purse-a tote bag with the pictures of two half-Asian children on it. The twins, I guess. It’s weird to think I have siblings I have never met. “All right,” she says.

Right now, the last thing I want to do is be alone. To be the grown-up. But something makes me put my hand on her shoulder to stop her. “You don’t have to come with me,” I tell her. “I’m not a kid anymore.”

“I can see that,” she says, staring at me. Her words are too soft, like they’re wrapped in flannel.

I know what she’s thinking: that she missed so much. Dropping me off at college. Attending my graduation. Hearing about my first job, my first love. Helping me decorate my first apartment.

“Cara might wake up and need you,” I say, to ease the blow.

My mother falters, but only for a moment. “You’ll come back?” she asks.

I nod. Even though that’s exactly what I swore I’d never do.

At some point in my life, I thought about being a doctor. I liked the sterility of the profession, the order. The fact that if you could read the clues, you would be able to find the problem, and fix it.

Unfortunately, to be a doctor you also have to take biology, and the first time I held a scalpel to a fetal pig I fainted dead away.

The truth was, I wasn’t much of a scientist. In high school I lost myself in books, which turned out to be a good thing, since that’s how I furthered my studies once I left home. I’ve read more of the classics, I bet, than most college graduates. But I also know the stuff they never teach in lectures-like: avoid the upstairs bars on Patpong Road, because they’re run by thugs; or pick a massage shop with a glass front where you can see the business inside, or you’ll wind up with a “happy ending” you weren’t looking for. I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.

Yet, in the family waiting room with Dr. Saint-Clare, I feel stupid. Inadequate. As if I cannot string together all the information he’s providing.

“Your father suffered a diffuse traumatic brain injury,” he tells me. “When the paramedics brought him in here, he had an enlarged right pupil and was unresponsive. There was a laceration on his forehead, and he couldn’t move his left side. His breathing was labored, so he’d been intubated by the EMTs. When I was called in, I saw that he had a bilateral periorbital edema-”

“A bi-what?”

“Swelling,” the surgeon translates. “Around the eyes. We repeated the Glasgow Coma Scale test he’d been given at the site of the accident, and he scored a five. We performed an emergency CT scan and found a temporal lobe hematoma, a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and intraventricular hemorrhage.” He glances up at my face. “Basically, we saw blood. All around the brain and in the ventricles of the brain-which is indicative of a serious trauma. We put him on Mannitol to reduce some of the pressure in the cranium, and immediately took him into surgery to remove the clot in the temporal lobe and the anterior part of the temporal lobe of his brain.”