Jodi Picoult - Lone Wolf

Joe tugs on Edward’s arm. “Shut up,” he grits out.

“See, it wasn’t just a one-time thing with another woman, even though that’s what he told me. It was months, and that baby was his -”

“Order!” the judge yells. He smacks his gavel.

I’ve gone dead inside before Edward even speaks again, as Joe is calling for a recess and dragging him out of the courtroom. “He told you all kinds of things that were lies,” Edward says to me, just to me. “You think you know him, Cara. But really, you never knew him at all.”

Georgie insisted that I see a doctor. At the hospital, I sat in the waiting room reading people. Anticipating the movements of a predator was the difference between life and death in the wild, but here it became a parlor game. I could tell seconds before a woman opened her purse that she was going to reach for a tissue. I knew that the man sitting alone in the corner was on the verge of tears, although he was smiling at his daughter. I knew that the woman rubbing her stomach had been sick for a long time; I could smell it in her blood. With great curiosity I watched the nurse at the check-in desk. Every few minutes a complete stranger approached her and she didn’t even react with the good sense to back away, even though there was no way she could have known whether the person was holding a gun in his coat pocket, or was going to strike her. She assumed trust before the newcomer even showed submission-and I kept waiting the way you watch an impending train wreck: certain that any minute now tragedy would strike.

When I was called into the examination room, Georgie-who had been sitting behind me-stood up as if she planned to follow me in. “Um,” I said. “I thought I could do this alone.”

Embarrassed, she blushed. “Right,” Georgie said. “Of course.”

I followed the nurse into the exam room, where she took my pulse. Three times. “That can’t be right,” she said, and she was equally confused by my low blood pressure.

I sat alone, waiting for the doctor, my eyes on the doorknob. I listened in the hallway for the rustle of papers in my file. I closed my eyes and breathed in aftershave. “Hello,” I said, a moment before he entered.

The doctor raised his brows. “Good morning. I’m Dr. Stephens, and you are… Luke Warren, according to your chart. So you’ve been living in the woods with a pack of wolves for two years and you can apparently see through doors,” he said. He turned to his nurse. “Where’s the psych consult?”

“I’m not insane. I’m a wolf biologist. I followed a wild pack of gray wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor. I got them to accept me into the pack. I hunted with them, ate alongside them, slept beside them.”

I don’t think he would have believed me if he hadn’t seen my blood pressure numbers. He turned to his nurse. “Clearly these are a mistake…”

“I took it three times,” she argued.

Dr. Stephens frowned, counting the beats of my heart himself. “Okay,” he said. “Your pulse is lower than the pro basketball player I treated a year ago. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were barely alive. But obviously that’s not the case. So what’s going on?”

“I had a… unique diet and exercise plan,” I explained.

The doctor’s jaw dropped. “You’re telling the truth,” he said, and I nodded.

He sat down and listened while I explained how I’d become part of a pack. I told him about our meals, how we traveled, how we hunted. I explained our sleeping habits, how far we would move on patrol, how we fought predators, how we brought down prey. By the time I finished, an hour later, he was staring at me as if he’d cornered an alien, and had the opportunity to do the first full-body examination of it. “I’d love to run some blood work,” he said, excited. “See how your experience has affected you physically. Would you mind…?”

He left me alone to order the tests, and I put my shirt back on. But instead of waiting for the phlebotomist, I walked into the hall, where I was stopped by an orderly. “Can you show me where the nearest restroom is?” I asked.

He gave me directions-down the hall and to the left. I followed them but didn’t go to the bathroom. I kept walking. I walked out the back door, down a flight of stairs, and into the bright sunlight.

There was a teenager sitting on the curb weeping. He had a pair of enormous air-traffic-controller headphones on, and he was rocking back and forth. “Too much,” he said, over and over, as he shook his head. His voice sounded as if he was speaking from the bottom of the ocean.

I sat down next to him, and a moment later, a woman ran out of the door. It took everything in my power not to react by shrinking away. “There you are!” she exclaimed, dragging him up by the arm.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

“His cochlear implants were activated today,” she said proudly. “He’s just getting used to them.”

I could see it, then, the silver disk in the skull, surrounded by cropped hair. “Too much,” the teenager howled.

To this day he is the only person in this world who I think understands what it felt like for me to return.

“You know,” I say, closing the door to the conference room, “just once I’d like you to actually tell me what you’re going to say before you say it. In fact, I’d also settle for you restricting your statements to direct questions instead of spontaneous utterances.”

“I’m sorry,” Edward mutters. He buries his face in his hands. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to what? Throw another bomb into the courtroom? Bring your sister to tears? Completely destroy your mother?”

I look down at my phone. Georgie has vanished. I’ve called and I’ve texted, but she isn’t answering. One minute she was in the courtroom, the next, Edward had confessed to his father’s infidelity and she was gone. I’m trying really hard to convince myself that she hasn’t become so upset by the news about her ex that she’s gone into hiding. I’m trying really hard to believe that she’s happy enough with me, now, to feel the sting of the revelation and then shrug it off. The only good news here, in fact, was that she wasn’t in the courtroom during this latest episode of Edward’s True Confessions.

I sit down, loosen my tie. “So?”

Edward looks up at me. “The night I caught him in the trailer with his assistant, he was like I’d never seen him before. Freaking out. Terrified I’d tell Mom. He swore to me that it was a mistake and that it had only happened once in the heat of the moment, that it wouldn’t happen again. I don’t know why I bothered to believe him. But I went home, and Mom knew something was off with me. She thought it had something to do with telling my father I was gay, and because it was easier, I let her believe that. But a day later, I was paying bills, like usual, and I saw one from an abortion clinic in Concord. I only knew about it because of a junior who’d gotten pregnant that year, and who’d gone there to take care of things. Anyway, there was a Post-it note attached to the bill. It said, Thanks for paying in full at the time of your visit-sorry our computer system was down. Please find enclosed a copy of your receipt for insurance purposes. I was pretty surprised to find a bill from there, and I was sure it was a mix-up in the mail, until I read the patient’s name: Wren McGraw. She was the college kid my father had hired to be a wolf caretaker. The one I’d found him sleeping with.” He bites down on his words, as if they are a chain between his teeth. “The one he swore he’d never slept with before.” Edward forces a laugh. “So I guess it’s fitting that everyone always thought my father was some kind of god, since apparently he’s capable of immaculate conception.”