Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

But in the Bath & Body aisle, Luke had actually crumbled-he was that dazed and unnerved by the wave of scents that bled through the packaging and assaulted his senses. It’s okay, I told him, and I pulled him upright and led him to a safer space, near the cereal.

I can’t believe this, he said, burying his face in my shoulder. I can kill a deer with my bare hands, but bubble bath is my kryptonite.

That’ll change, I promised.

Georgie , Luke said. Promise me you won’t.

Now I look down at Luke, in the waxy shell of his own skin, his eyes closed and his mouth slack around the tube that is breathing for him. A god who’s toppled back into mortality.

I reach for his hand. It’s loose, the skin as dry as leaves. I have to fold it around my own hand, hold it up to my cheek. “You son of a bitch,” I say.

There is only one thing that could have dragged me away from another wolf family, and that is a human. This one came in the form of a features reporter for the Union Leader, and was accompanied by a photographer. As visitors came to Redmond’s and found me living with the pack, excitement grew-and with it, the number of tourists coming to see me for themselves. Somehow, New Hampshire’s largest paper got wind of it.

The irony didn’t escape me: this was how Georgie and I had met, too. Once, I’d left the wolves for her. Now, I was going to have to leave them again because of a reporter. Every day there were more-some with television cameras-all clamoring for an interview with the man who’d lived in the wild with wolves. Kladen, Sikwla, and Wazoli were skittish and snappish-and for good reason. They could read loud and clear the signals these people sent: that they wanted something from me, that they were greedy and selfish. In the wild, any of these reporters would have been treated like a predator: brought down by the pack to save one of its members.

But that devotion to family went both ways, and I knew that I couldn’t let the lives of the wolves be disrupted because of me. So I left the pen, only to be swallowed by the hail of questions and the camera flashes.

Did you really live in the wild?

What did you eat?

Were you scared?

How did you survive a Canadian winter?

What made you return?

It was that last question that sent me over the edge, because I didn’t belong here, anymore. And although I would have walked into the woods in a heartbeat and tried to howl to locate my pack again, there was no guarantee that I’d ever find them or that they would take me back.

Before I’d started sleeping at Redmond’s with the wolves, I had prowled the house late one night and found a light on in my son Edward’s room. He looked up when I opened the door, challenging me with his eyes to ask why he was awake at 3:00 A.M. I didn’t ask because, after all, so was I. Edward was propped against his pillows, reading a book. When I didn’t speak, he held it up. “The Divine Comedy,” he said. “By Dante. I’m reading all about Hell.”

“I’m living it,” I said.

“I’m only at the first circle,” Edward told me. “Limbo. It’s not Heaven, and it’s not Hell. It’s the in-between.”

This was, I realized, my new address.

I couldn’t be charming. I couldn’t be smart. I could barely remember how to speak, much less how to put into sentences everything I had learned with the wolves. So I did what a wolf does when it finds itself in danger: I got away.

I ran to Redmond’s. It was five miles in the dark, but that meant nothing to me after Quebec, and it felt good to get my adrenaline pumping. I went up to the trailer at the top of the hill and slammed inside. I locked the door, and then went into the bedroom, and locked that door, too. I was breathing hard, sweating. I could hear the wolves howling for me.

There’s no point in being able to know everything about wolves if you can’t teach it to the people who need to learn.

I don’t know how long I stayed in that dark, cramped room, curled in the far corner with my eyes on the door so that I’d know the minute someone was coming. But eventually, I heard muffled voices. And movement. The twitch of a key in a lock.

The scent of Georgie’s shampoo, her soap.

She locked the door behind her and knelt down in front of me, moving slowly. She put her hand on the crown of my head. “Luke,” she whispered.

Her fingers stroked my hair, and I found myself leaning into her, against her. Georgie’s arms came around me. I didn’t realize that I was crying until I tasted my tears on her lips. She kissed my brow, my cheeks, my neck.

It was meant as comfort but spread, the way a match intended for light might become a fire. My arms came around her and reached for the collar of her shirt. I ripped it open, rucked up her skirt. I felt her legs wrap around me, and I fumbled with my jeans. I bit her shoulder and swallowed her cry; I stood with her in my arms and pressed her back to the wall, driving into her so desperately that her spine arched, that her nails scratched into my skin. I wanted to mark her. I wanted her to be mine.

Afterward, I cradled her in my lap, tracing the line of her vertebrae. There were bruises on her, unintentional ones. I wondered if I had lost the capacity to be gentle, along with my ability to be human. I looked down to find Georgie staring up at me. “Luke,” she said, “let me help.”

You don’t ever want to imagine your father having an affair.

In the first place, it means you have to picture him having sex, which is just disgusting. In the second place, it means that you are forced to side with your mother, who is the wronged party. And in the third place, you can’t help but wonder what it was about you that wasn’t compelling enough to make him think twice before driving a stake into the heart of your family.

It feels like I have a splinter in my throat after I hear this news, but it’s not for the reason you’d think. I am-and I know how crazy this sounds-relieved. Now I’m not the only one who has screwed up royally.

My mother said I’m perfect in my father’s eyes, but that’s a lie. So maybe we can be imperfect for each other.

As soon as I sit down on the witness stand, I have a clear view of Edward. I keep thinking about what my mother said-how he was trying to protect me by leaving. If you ask me, he ought to rethink some of his altruism. Saying he was saving our family by removing himself from my life is like saying he only wants to kill my father because it’s the humane thing to do.

Everyone makes mistakes, my mother had said.

I used to have a friend in elementary school whose family was so picture-perfect that they could practically be the advertisement in a photo frame. They always remembered each other’s birthdays, and I swear the siblings never fought and the parents acted like they’d just fallen in love that morning. It was weird. It felt so plastic-smooth that I couldn’t help but question what happened when there wasn’t an audience like me for them to put on their show.

My family, on the other hand, included a father who preferred the company of wild animals, a mother who sometimes had to go to bed with a headache although we all really knew she was crying, a fifteen-year-old boy paying the bills, and me, a kid who made herself throw up the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance at school where the girls all brought their dads, just so she could stay home sick and no one would have to feel bad for her.