Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

In retrospect, I can imagine what it was like for them: to be joking around one minute and the next to have a beast at their picnic table, hulking and ragged and reeking. Some of the girls started screaming, one ran for the bus. I tried to calm them down, but my immediate instinct was to lower myself, duck my head. Then I remembered I had a voice.

One I hadn’t used in two years, except to howl and growl.

It was rusty, thin, a yelp. A sound I didn’t remember.

It hurt, to make this sound. To try to shape it on the bowl of my tongue into a word. As I stuttered and choked on the syllables, the bus driver came running over. “I’ve already called the police,” he threatened, holding me at bay with a gigantic flashlight, a makeshift weapon.

That’s when speech returned to me. “Help,” I said.

It actually was a blessing in disguise when the police showed up. It was at first hard to convince them of my ID, even though in the breast pocket of my tattered coveralls was the driver’s license I’d walked into the woods with two years ago. I’m sure, given the looks of me, they thought that I was a homeless bum who stole some guy’s wallet. It was when they called Georgie and she broke down sobbing on the phone that they finally believed me and let me shower in the precinct locker room. They gave me a police-issue T-shirt and a pair of sweats. They bought me a hamburger from McDonald’s.

I ate it in about five seconds. Then I spent the next hour in the bathroom, throwing up.

The police chief brought me water and saltines. He wanted to know what the hell would make a guy go live with a pack of wolves. He especially wanted to know how I didn’t wind up as their dinner. The more I talked to him, the more my voice lost its rasp, and the words that had been hovering like ghosts on the roof of my palate landed softly, solid and real.

He apologized for making me sleep in the holding cell, on the thin cot. It was the first bed I had been in in two years, though, and I could not get comfortable. The walls felt like they were closing in on me, even though the officers left the cell door unlocked. Everything smelled like ink and toner and dust.

When Georgie was brought into the holding area in the morning, having driven through the night to reach me, I was fast asleep on the floor of the cell. But like any wild animal, I became one hundred percent alert before her footstep crossed the threshold. I knew she was coming because the scent of her shampoo and perfume rolled in like a tsunami before I could even see her.

“Oh, God,” she murmured. “Luke?”

She rushed toward me.

I think that’s what did it-made the instinct take over, and the reason in my mind shut down. But at any rate, when Georgie came running at me, I did what any wolf would have done in that situation.

I ducked away from her, wary.

No matter how long I live, I will always remember the way the light went out of her eyes, like a candle flame caught in an unexpected wind.

While I’m on the witness stand being sworn in, I stick my hand into the pocket of my father’s jacket, and feel a tiny piece of paper there. I don’t want to be obvious and pull it out and see what it is, especially while I’m in the hot seat, but I’m dying to know. Is it a note? A grocery list, in my dad’s handwriting? A receipt from the post office? A laundry ticket? I have a fleeting vision of a dry cleaner’s employee, wondering why the trousers Luke Warren dropped off weren’t picked up last Monday, like they were supposed to be. I wonder how long they’d keep the clothes, if they’d call my father and ask him to come pick up his belongings, if they’d donate the pants to charity.

But when I manage to slide the paper secretly out of the pocket and hold it beneath the bar of the witness stand so that it would look, to anyone else, like I am just staring down into my lap, I see that it’s a fortune from a cookie at a Chinese restaurant.

Anger begins with folly, and ends with regret.

I wonder why he kept it. If he felt like it was speaking personally to him. If he would read it from time to time and consider it a warning.

If he just shoved it in his pocket and forgot it was there.

If it reminded him of me.

“Edward,” Joe says, “what was it like growing up with your father?”

“I thought I had the coolest dad on the planet,” I admit. “You have to understand, I was kind of quiet, a brainiac. Most of the time I could be found with my head buried in a book. I was allergic to, well, practically all of nature. I was the bull’s-eye for bullies.” I can feel Cara’s eyes on me, curious. This is not the big brother she remembers. From the point of view of a little kid, even a geek can be cool if he’s in high school and drives an old beater and buys her licorice. “When my dad came back from the wild, he was an instant celebrity. I was suddenly more popular just because I was related by blood.”

“What about the relationship you and your dad had? Were you close?”

“My father spent a lot of time away from home,” I say diplomatically, and a phrase pops into my head: Don’t speak ill of the dead . “There was his trip to Quebec, to live with the wild wolves, but even after he got back home and started building the packs at Redmond’s, he’d stay overnight there in a trailer, or sometimes in the enclosures. The truth is that Cara liked tagging along with him more than I did, so she’d spend more time at the theme park, and I stayed with my mom.”

“Did you resent your father for not being with you?”

“Yes,” I say bluntly. “I remember being jealous of the wolves he raised, because they knew him better than I did. And I remember being jealous of my sister, too, because she seemed to speak his language.”

Cara looks down, her hair falling into her face.

“Did you hate your father, Edward?”

“No. I didn’t understand him, but I didn’t hate him.”

“Do you think he hated you?”

“No.” I shake my head. “I think he was baffled. I think he expected that his kids would naturally be interested in the same things he was-and to be totally honest, if you weren’t into the same things he was, he couldn’t really hold up his end of a conversation.”

“What happened when you were eighteen?”

“My father and I had… an argument,” I say. “I’m gay. I’d just come out to my mother, and at her suggestion, I went to my father’s trailer at the theme park to tell him, too.”

“Things didn’t go very well?”

I hesitate, picking my way through a minefield of memory. “You could say that.”

“So what happened?”

“I left home.”

“Where did you go?”

“Thailand,” I say. “I started teaching ESL, and traveled around the country.”

“And you’ve been there for how long?”

“Six years,” I reply. My voice cracks in between the two words.

“During the time you were away, did you have any contact with your family?” Joe asks.

“Not at first. I really wanted-needed-to make a clean break. But eventually I got in touch with my mother.” I meet her gaze, and try to communicate that I’m sorry-for putting her through hell, for those months of silence. “I didn’t speak to my father.”

“What were the circumstances under which you came back from Thailand?”

“My mother called me and said that my father had been in a very bad accident. Cara had been in it, too.”

“How did you feel when you heard that?”

“Pretty freaked out. I mean, it doesn’t really matter if you haven’t seen someone for a long time. They never stop being your family.” I look up. “I got on the next plane out to the States.”