Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

My son, on the other hand, was outwardly unmoved by my return. He greeted me with a handshake and few words, and sometimes I’d find him warily watching me from a doorway or a window. He was cautious and tentative and unwilling to place his trust too quickly.

He had grown up, it seemed, to be much like me.

You would think that the creature comforts would have sent me diving headlong into the human world again, but it wasn’t that easy. At night, I was wide awake, and I’d roam through the house on patrol. Every noise became a threat: the first time I heard the coffeemaker spitting at the end of its cycle, I ran downstairs in my undershorts and flew into the kitchen with my teeth bared and my back arched defensively. I preferred to sit in the dark instead of beneath artificial light. The mattress was too soft beneath me; instead, I lay down on the floor beside the bed. Once, when Georgie noticed me shivering in my sleep and tried to cover me, I was up like a rocket before she even finished draping the quilt over my body, my hands wrapped around her wrists and her body rolled and pinned to the ground so that I had the physical advantage. “I-I’m sorry,” she stammered out, but I was so caught up in instinct that I couldn’t even find the words to tell her, No, I am.

There’s an honesty to the wolf world that is liberating. There’s no diplomacy, no decorum. You tell your enemy you hate him; you show your admiration by confessing the truth. That directness doesn’t work with humans, who are masters of subterfuge. Does this dress make me look fat? Do you really love me? Did you miss me? When a person asks this, she doesn’t want to know the real answer. She wants you to lie to her. After two years of living with wolves, I had forgotten how many lies it takes to build a relationship. I would think of the big beta in Quebec, which I knew would fight to the death to protect me. I trusted him implicitly because he trusted me. But here, among humans, there were so many half-truths and white lies that it was too hard to remember what was real and what wasn’t. It seemed that every time I spoke the truth, Georgie burst into tears; since I no longer knew what I was supposed to say, I stopped speaking entirely.

I couldn’t stand being inside, because I felt caged. Television hurt my eyes; dinner table conversation was a foreign language. Even just walking into the bathroom in the house and smelling the combined confection of shampoo and soap and deodorant made me so dizzy I had to lean against the wall. I had been in a world where there were four or five basic smells. I had reached a sensory awareness where, when the alpha began to stir in her den, thirty yards away, I knew it, simply because her stretch sent a small puff of clay earth from the underground den through its narrow opening, and that smell was like a red flag among the others of urine, pine, snow, wolf.

I couldn’t go outside, either, because when I walked down the street other people’s dogs began to bark in their houses or, if they were in the yard, run to confront me. I remember passing a woman riding a horse, which shied and whinnied when it spotted me. Even though I was clean-shaven now and had scrubbed two years of dirt off my skin, I still exuded something raw and natural and predatory. (To this day, I have to walk a twenty-five-yard detour around a horse before it will pass.) You can take the man out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the man.

So it made sense that the only place I really felt at home was at Redmond’s, in the wolf enclosures. I asked Georgie to drive me over there-I still wasn’t really ready to drive. The animal caretakers there treated me as if I were the Second Coming, but they weren’t the ones I wanted to see. Instead, with a relief that came close to a total breakdown, I let myself into the pen with Wazoli, Sikwla, and Kladen.

Kladen , the beta, came at me first. When I instinctively ducked and turned my head away from him-acknowledging his dominance-he greeted me by licking all around my face. I realized how easily this nonverbal conversation came to me-so much easier, in fact, than the stilted one I’d had with Georgie on the way over here, about whether or not I’d thought about the future and what I was going to do next. I also realized how much more fluent I’d gotten in the language of the wolf. Things that I had once had to think about while in enclosures with wolves now were a natural response. When Sikwla, the tester wolf, nipped at me, a throaty growl rumbled out of me. When finally, the wary Wazoli-the alpha-approached, I lay down and rolled to offer her my throat and my trust. Best of all, mucking about in the dirt like this, I started to smell like me again, instead of like Head & Shoulders and Dove soap. My hair tie got lost in our play, and my hair, which I’d cut to my shoulders, fanned over my back and became matted with mud.

These wolves were softer around the edges than my brothers and sisters in Quebec. They were still wild animals, and they still had wild animal instincts, but simply by definition a captive wolf’s life is not as violent as a wild wolf’s life. This would again require an adjustment for me, as I remembered that my role here was not just as a pack member but as a teacher: offering these wolves an enrichment program to make them learn what they were missing by being contained in this wire fencing.

And now that I’d lived it, who better?

I had asked one of the caretakers to bring a half of a calf from the abattoir-a celebratory meal. He did, doing only a cursory double take when he saw me crouched between Kladen and Wazoli. I wanted this food because it was a pack food, one that would remind these guys that I belonged to the family. As soon as the calf was dragged into the enclosure and the caretaker had left, the wolves descended. Wazoli went for the organ meat, Kladen the movement meat, and Sikwla the stomach contents and spine. I wedged myself in between Kladen and Sikwla, baring my teeth and curling my tongue to protect the food that was rightfully mine. I lowered my face to the carcass and began to rip off strips of raw flesh, bloodying my face and my hair and snapping at Sikwla when he came too close to my portion.

I am sure, when I came up for air, I was quite a sight: dirty and bloody, sated, delirious in the companionship of a group of animals that understood me and that I understood. I loped away from the carcass, following Sikwla to the rock where he sometimes dozed.

Until then I’d forgotten about Georgie. She was standing on the far side of the fence, staring at me with horror. Although I’d done nothing she hadn’t seen before, I don’t think she was reacting to my interaction with the wolves, or my meal with them. I think she just knew, at that moment, she’d lost me for good.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

That’s what the wizard says, in The Wizard of Oz. Keep the dog and pony show going so that the eye is drawn to the spectacle, and not to the reality. Of all the questions I get asked about Luke, the most common one is, “What was it like to be married to someone like him?” I suppose people think, based on his television persona, that he is an animal in bed or that he eats his steak raw. The truth would have disappointed them: when Luke was with us, he was perfectly normal. He’d watch ESPN; he’d eat Fritos. He changed lightbulbs and took out the trash. He was ordinary, rather than extraordinary.

The thing is, when celebrities are born, they aren’t supposed to wallow in the mundane. They are supposed to always be dressed to the nines, step out of limousines, or in Luke’s case, live in the wild. Which meant that, after he returned from Quebec, Luke couldn’t be the husband I needed him to be. That would have detracted from the man everyone else expected him to be.