Lone Wolf

CARA

Seconds before our truck slams into the tree, I remember the first time I tried to save a life.

I was thirteen, and I’d just moved back in with my father. Or, more accurately, my clothes were once again hanging in my former bedroom, but I was living out of a backpack in a trailer on the north end of Redmond’s Trading Post & Dinosaur World. That’s where my father’s captive wolf packs were housed, along with gibbons, falcons, an overweight lion, and the animatronic T. rex that roared on the hour. Since that was where my father spent 99 percent of his time, it was expected that I follow.

I thought this alternative beat living with my mom and Joe and the miracle twins, but it hadn’t been the smooth transition I’d hoped for. I guess I’d pictured my dad and me making pancakes together on Sunday morning, or playing hearts, or taking walks in the woods. Well, my dad did take walks in the woods, but they were inside the pens he’d built for his packs, and he was busy being a wolf. He’d roll around in the mud with Sibo and Sobagw, the numbers wolves; he’d steer clear of Pekeda, the beta of the pack. He’d eat from the carcass of a calf with wolves on either side of him, his hands and his mouth bloody. My dad believed that infiltrating a pack was far more educational than observing from afar the way biologists did. By the time I moved in with him, he’d already gotten five packs to accept him as a bona fide member-worthy of living with, eating with, and hunting with them, in spite of the fact that he was human. Because of this, some people thought he was a genius. The rest thought he was insane.

On the day I left my mom and her brand-spanking-new family, my dad was not exactly waiting for me with open arms. He was down in one of the enclosures with Mestawe, who was pregnant for the first time, and he was trying to forge a relationship with her so she’d pick him as the nanny for the pups. He even slept there, with his wolf family, while I stayed up late and flicked through the TV channels. It was lonely in the trailer, but it was lonelier being landlocked at an empty house.

In the summers, the White Mountains region was packed with visitors who went from Santa’s Village to Story Land to Redmond’s Trading Post. In March, though, that stupid T. rex roared to an empty theme park. The only people who stayed on in the off-season were my dad, who looked after his wolves, and Walter, a caretaker who covered for my dad when he wasn’t on-site. It felt like a ghost town, so I started hanging out at the enclosures after school-close enough that Bedagi, the tester wolf, would pace on the other side of the fence, getting used to my scent. I’d watch my father dig a birthing bowl for Mestawe in her den, and meanwhile, I’d tell him about the football captain who was caught cheating, or the oboe player in the school orchestra who had taken to wearing caftans, and was rumored to be pregnant.

In return, my dad told me why he was worried about Mestawe: she was a young female, and instinct only went so far. She didn’t have a role model who could teach her to be a good mother; she’d never had a litter before. Sometimes, a wolf would abandon her pups simply because she didn’t know better.

The night Mestawe gave birth, she seemed to be doing everything by the book. My father celebrated by opening a bottle of champagne and letting me drink a glass. I wanted to see the babies, but my father said it would be weeks before they emerged. Even Mestawe would stay in the den for a full week, feeding the pups every two hours.

Only two nights later, though, my father shook me awake. “Cara,” he said, “I need your help.”

I threw on my winter coat and boots and followed him to the enclosure where Mestawe was in her den. Except, she wasn’t. She was wandering around, as far from her babies as she could get. “I’ve tried everything to get her back inside, but she won’t go,” my father said matter-of-factly. “If we don’t save the pups now, we won’t have a second chance.”

He burrowed into the den and came out holding two tiny, wrinkled rats. At least that’s what they looked like, eyes squinched shut, wriggling in his hand. He passed these over to me; I tucked them inside my coat as he pulled out the last two pups. One looked worse off than the other three. It wasn’t moving; instead of grunting, it let out tiny puffs every now and then.

I followed my dad to a toolshed that stood behind the trailer. While I was sleeping he’d tossed all the tools into the snow; now the floor inside was covered with hay. A blanket I recognized from the trailer-a fluffy red plaid-was inside a small cardboard box. “Tuck them in,” my father instructed, and I did. A hot water bottle underneath the blanket made it feel warm like a belly; three of the babies immediately began to snuffle between the folds. The fourth pup was cold to the touch. Instead of putting her beside her brothers, I slipped her into my coat again, against my heart.

When my father returned, he was holding baby bottles full of Esbilac, which is like formula, but for animals. He reached for the little wolf in my arms, but I couldn’t let her go. “I’ll feed the others,” he told me, and while I coaxed mine to drink a drop at a time, his three sucked down every last bottle.

Every two hours, we fed the babies. The next morning, I didn’t get dressed for school and my father didn’t act like he expected me to. It was an unspoken truth: what we were doing here was far more important than anything I could learn in a classroom.

On the third day, we named them. My father believed in using indigenous names for indigenous creatures, so all his wolf names came from the Abenaki language. Nodah, which meant Hear me, was the name we gave the biggest of the bunch, a noisy black ball of energy. Kina, or Look here, was the troublemaker who got tangled in shoelaces or stuck under the flaps of the cardboard box. And Kita, or Listen, hung back and watched us, his eyes never missing a thing.

Their little sister I named Miguen, Feather. There were times she’d drink as well as her brothers and I would believe she was out of the woods, but then she’d go limp in my grasp and I’d have to rub her and slip her inside my shirt to keep her warm again.

I was so tired from staying up round the clock that I couldn’t see straight. I sometimes slept on my feet, dozing for a few minutes before I snapped awake again. The whole time, I carried Miguen, until my arms felt empty without her in them. On the fourth night, when I opened my eyes after nodding off, my father was staring at me with an expression I’d never seen before on his face. “When you were born,” he said, “I wouldn’t let go of you, either.”

Two hours later, Miguen started shaking uncontrollably. I begged my father to drive to a vet, to the hospital, to someone who could help. I cried so hard that he bundled the other pups into a box and carried them out to the battered truck he drove. The box sat between us in the front seat and Miguen shivered beneath my coat. I was shaking, too, although I’m not sure whether I was cold, or just afraid of what I knew was coming.

She was gone by the time we got to the parking lot of the vet’s office. I knew the minute it happened; she grew lighter in my arms. Like a shell.

I started to scream. I couldn’t stand the thought of Miguen, dead, being this close to me.

My father took her away and wrapped her in his flannel shirt. He slipped the body into the backseat, where I wouldn’t have to see her. “In the wild,” he told me, “she never would have lasted a day. You’re the only reason she stayed as long as she did.”

If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t. I burst into loud sobs.

Suddenly the box with the wolf pups was on the dashboard, and I was in my father’s arms. He smelled of spearmint and snow. For the first time in my life, I understood why he couldn’t break free from the drug that was the wolf community. Compared to issues like this, of life and death, did it really matter if the dry cleaning was picked up, or if he forgot the date of open-school night?

In the wild, my father told me, a mother wolf learns her lessons the hard way. But in captivity, where wolves are bred only once every three or four years, the rules are different. You can’t stand by and just let a pup die. “Nature knows what it wants,” my father said. “But that doesn’t make it any easier for the rest of us, does it?”

There is a tree outside my father’s trailer at Redmond’s, a red maple. We planted it the summer after Miguen died, to mark the spot where she is buried. It’s the same type of tree that, four years later, I see rushing toward the windshield too fast. The same type of tree our truck hits, in that instant, head-on.

A woman is kneeling beside me. “She’s awake,” the woman says. There’s rain in my eyes and I smell smoke and I can’t see my father.

Dad? I say, but I can only hear it in my head.

My heart’s beating in the wrong place. I look down at my shoulder, where I can feel it.

“Looks like a scapula fracture and maybe some broken ribs. Cara? Are you Cara?”

How does she know my name?

“You’ve been in an accident,” the woman tells me. “We’re going to take you to the hospital.”

“My… father…,” I force out. Every word is a knife in my arm.

I turn my head to try to find him and see the firemen, spraying a hose at the ball of flames that used to be my dad’s truck. The rain on my face isn’t rain, just mist from the stream of water.

Suddenly I remember: the web of shattered windshield; the fishtail of the truck skidding; the smell of gasoline. The way when I cried for my dad he didn’t answer. I start shaking all over.

“You’re incredibly brave,” the woman says to me. “Dragging your father out of the car in your condition…”

I saw an interview once where a teenage girl lifted a refrigerator off her little cousin when it accidentally fell on him. It had something to do with adrenaline.

A fireman who has been blocking my view moves and I can see another knot of EMTs gathered around my father, who lies very still on the ground.

“If it weren’t for you,” the woman adds, “your dad might not be alive.”

Later, I will wonder if that comment is the reason I did everything I did. But right now, I just start to cry. Because I know her words couldn’t be farther from the truth.

LUKE

What I get asked all the time is: How could you do it? How could you possibly walk away from civilization, from a family, and go live in the forests of Canada with a pack of wild wolves? How could you give up hot showers, coffee, human contact, conversation, two years of your children’s lives?

Well, you don’t miss hot showers when all soap does is make it harder for your pack to recognize you by scent.

You don’t miss coffee when your senses are on full alert all the time without it.

You don’t miss human contact when you are huddled between the warmth of two of your animal brothers. You don’t miss conversation when you learn their language.

You don’t walk away from your family. You find yourself firmly lodged within a new one.

So you see, the real question isn’t how I left this world to go into the woods.

It’s how I made myself come back.

GEORGIE

I used to expect a phone call from the hospital, and just like I imagined, it comes in the middle of the night. “Yes,” I say, sitting up, forgetting for a moment that I have a new life now, a new husband.

“Who is it?” Joe asks, rolling over.

But they aren’t calling about Luke. “I’m Cara’s mother,” I confirm. “Is she all right?”

“She’s been in a motor vehicle accident,” the nurse says. “She’s got a severe shoulder fracture. She’s stable, but she needs surgery-”

I am already out of bed, trying to find my jeans in the dark. “I’m on my way,” I say.

By now Joe has the light on, and is sitting up. “It’s Cara,” I say. “She’s been in a car crash.”

He doesn’t ask me why Luke hasn’t been called, as her current custodial parent. Maybe he has been. But then again, it’s likely Luke’s gone off the grid. I pull a sweater over my head and stuff my feet into clogs, trying to focus on the practical so that I am not swallowed up by emotion. “Elizabeth doesn’t like pancakes for breakfast and Jackson needs to bring in his field trip permission slip…” My head snaps up. “Don’t you need to be in court tomorrow morning?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Joe says gently. “I’ll take care of the twins and the judge and everything else. You just go take care of Cara.”

There are times that I cannot believe how lucky I am, to be married to this man. Sometimes I think it’s because I deserve it, after all those years of living with Luke. But sometimes-like now-I am sure there’s still a price I’ll have to pay.

There are not many people in the emergency room when I run up to the front desk. “Cara Warren,” I say, out of breath. “She was brought in here by ambulance? She’s my daughter?”

All my sentences rise at the ends, like helium balloons.

A nurse leads me through a door and into a hallway of glass rooms, shrouded with curtains. Some of the doors are open. I see an old woman in a hospital gown, sitting on a gurney. A man with his jeans cut open to the knee, his swollen ankle elevated. We move out of the way as a pregnant patient is wheeled past us, focused on her Lamaze breathing.

Luke is the one who taught Cara how to drive. For all his personal recklessness, he was a stickler when it came to the safety of his daughter. Instead of the forty hours she was supposed to log in before taking her driver’s test, he made her do fifty. She’s a safe driver, a cautious driver. But why was she out so late on a school night? Was she at fault? Was anyone else hurt?

Finally, the nurse steps into one of the cubicles. Cara lies on a bed, looking very small and very frightened. There’s blood in her dark hair and on her face and her sweater. Her arm is bandaged tight against her body.

“Mommy,” she sobs. I cannot remember the last time she called me that.

She cries out when I put my arms around her. “It’s going to be all right,” I say.

Cara looks up at me, eyes red, nose running. “Where’s Dad?”

Those words shouldn’t hurt me, but they do. “I’m sure the hospital called him-”

All of a sudden, a resident steps into the room. “You’re Cara’s mom? We need your consent before we can take her into surgery.” She says more-I vaguely hear the words scapula and rotator cuff-and hands me a clipboard for a signature.

“Where’s Dad?” Cara shouts this time.

The doctor faces her. “He’s getting the best care possible,” she says, and that’s when I realize Cara wasn’t alone in that car.

“Luke was in the accident, too? Is he all right?”

“Are you his wife?”

“Ex,” I clarify.

“Then I can’t really disclose anything about his condition. HIPAA rules. But yes,” she admits. “He is a patient here, too.” She looks at me, speaking softly so Cara can’t hear. “We need to contact his next of kin. Does he have a spouse? Parents? Is there someone you can call?”

Luke doesn’t have a new wife. He was raised by his grandparents, who died years ago. If he could speak for himself, he’d tell me to phone the trading post to make sure Walter is there to feed the pack.

But maybe he can’t speak for himself. Maybe this is what the doctor can’t-or won’t-tell me.

Before I can respond, two orderlies enter and begin to pull Cara’s bed away from the wall. I feel like I’m sinking, like there are questions I should be asking or facts I should be confirming before my daughter is taken off to an operating suite, but I’ve never been good under pressure. I force a smile and squeeze Cara’s free hand. “I’ll be right here when you get back!” I say, too brightly. A moment later, I’m alone in the room. It feels sterile, silent.

I reach into my purse for my cell phone, wondering what time it is in Bangkok.

LUKE

A wolf pack is like the Mafia. Everyone has a position in it; everyone’s expected to pull his own weight.

Everyone’s heard of an alpha wolf-the leader of the pack. This is the mob boss, the brains of the outfit, the protector, the one who tells the other wolves where to go, when to hunt, what to hunt. The alpha is the decision maker, the capo di tutti capi, who, from ten feet away, can hear the change of rhythm in a prey animal’s heart rate. But the alpha is not the stern disciplinarian that movies have made him out to be. He’s far too valuable, as the decision maker, to put himself in harm’s way.

Which is why in front of every alpha is a beta wolf, an enforcer. The beta rank is the bold, big thug who is pure aggression. He’ll take you down before you get too close to the boss. He’s completely expendable. If he gets himself killed, no one will really care, because there’s always another brute to take his place.

Then there’s the tester wolf, who’s very wary and suspicious, who doesn’t trust anyone he meets. He’s always scouting for change, for something new, and he’ll be hiding out at every corner to make sure that, when and if it happens, he’s there to alert the alpha. His skittishness is integral to the safety of the pack. And he’s the quality-control guy, too. If someone in the pack doesn’t seem to be pulling his weight, the tester will create a situation where the other wolf has to prove his mettle-like picking a fight with the enforcer, for example. If that beta can’t knock him to the ground, he doesn’t deserve to be the beta wolf anymore.

The diffuser wolf has been called many names through the years, from the Cinderella wolf to the omega. Though at first he was thought to be a scapegoat and at the bottom of the hierarchy, we know now that the diffuser plays a key role in the pack. Like the little, geeky lawyer to the mob who provides comic relief and knows how to keep all these other strong personalities calm, the diffuser throws himself headlong into all the intrapack bickering. If two animals are fighting, the diffuser will jump between them and will clown around, until suddenly the two angry wolves have taken their emotions down a notch. Everyone gets on with his job, and no one gets hurt. Far from being the Cinderella figure that always gets the short end of the stick, the diffuser holds the critical position of peacemaker. Without him the pack couldn’t function; they’d be at war with each other all the time.

Say what you will about the Mafia, but it works because everyone has a specific role to play. They all do what they do for the greater good of the organization. They’d willingly die for each other.

The other reason a wolf pack is like the Mafia?

Because, for both groups, there is nothing more important than family.

EDWARD

You’d be surprised how easy it is to stand out in a city of nine million people. But then again, I’m a farang. You can see it in my unofficial teacher’s uniform-shirt and tie-in my blond hair, which shines like a beacon in a sea of black.

Today I have my small group of students working on conversational English. They’ve been paired, and they are going to present a conversation between a shopkeeper and a customer. “Do I have any volunteers?” I ask.

Crickets.

The Thai people are pathologically shy. Combine that with a reluctance to lose face by giving a wrong answer, and it makes for a painfully long class. Usually I ask the students to work on exercises in small groups, and then I move around and check their progress. But for days like today, when I’m grading on participation, speaking up in public is a necessary evil. “Jao,” I say to a man in my class. “You own a pet store, and you want to convince Jaidee to buy a pet.” I turn to a second man. “Jaidee, you do not want to buy that pet. Let’s hear your conversation.”

They stand up, clutching their papers. “This dog is recommended,” Jao begins.

“I have one already,” Jaidee replies.

“Good job!” I encourage. “Jao, give him a reason why he should buy your dog.”

“This dog is alive,” Jao adds.

Jaidee shrugs. “Not everyone wants a pet that is alive.”

Well, not all days are successes.

I collect the homework from the students before they file out of the classroom, suddenly animated and chattering in a language I am still learning after six years. Apsara, a grandmother of four, hands me her assignment: a persuasive essay. I look down at the title: “Eat Vegetarians for a Healthy Diet.”

“Sit on it, Ajarn Edward,” Apsara says happily. Before coming to language school, she tried to learn English from watching Happy Days episodes. I don’t have the heart to tell her that’s not a respectful expression.

I’ve been teaching English for six years now, in a language school that’s in the center of the biggest mall I’ve ever seen in my life, about twenty minutes by taxi outside of Bangkok. I fell into the job by accident-after backpacking through Thailand and taking odd jobs to make enough baht to feed myself, I found myself tending bar at age eighteen, in Patpong. It was one of Thailand’s famous ladyboy shows, with katoeys-transvestites who fooled even me-and I’d been trying to collect enough cash to leave the city. One of the other bartenders was an expat from Ireland, and he supplemented his income by teaching at the American Language Institute. They were always looking for qualified teachers, he said. When I told him I wasn’t really qualified, he laughed. “You speak English, don’t you?” he said.

I make 45,000 baht teaching, now. I have my own apartment. I’ve had the obligatory flings with Thai natives and I’ve gone out drinking with other expats at Nana Plaza. And I’ve learned a lot. You don’t touch anyone on the head because it’s the highest part of the body-literally, and spiritually. You don’t cross your legs on the skytrain because doing so exposes the sole of your shoe to the person sitting across from you-and the bottoms of your feet are literally and spiritually unclean. You might as well be giving the other person the finger. You don’t shake hands, you wai-by putting your hands in front of you like you’re praying, with the tips of your index fingers touching your nose. The higher the hands are, and the lower your bow, the more respect you’re showing. A wai can be used for greeting, apology, gratitude.

You’ve got to admire a culture that uses a single gesture to say both thank you and I’m sorry.

Every time I start to get sick of living here, or get the feeling that nothing ever changes, I take a step back and remind myself that I’m just visiting. That Thai culture and beliefs have been around a lot longer than I have. That what one person sees as a difference of opinion can be, to the other person, a sign of great disrespect.

I kind of wish I knew back then what I know now.

There really isn’t an easy way to get to Koh Chang. It’s 315 kilometers by bus from Bangkok, and even after you get to Trat, in the eastern provinces, you have to take a songtaew to one of the three piers. Ao Thammachat is the best one-it only takes twenty minutes by ferry to reach the island. Lam Ngob is the worst-the fishing boats that have been converted into ferries can take over an hour to make the crossing.

It may seem ridiculous to come all this distance when I only have two days off from the language institute, but it’s worth it. Sometimes Bangkok is suffocating, and I need to hang out in a place that isn’t wall-to-wall people. I chalk it up to my upbringing in a part of New England that is still two hours away from the nearest mall. After sleeping last night at a cheap guesthouse, I’ve spent this morning trying to find my way to Khlong Nueng, the tallest waterfall on the island. And now, just when I am sweating and thirsty and ready to quit, the biggest boulder I’ve ever seen blocks the path. Gritting my teeth, I get a foothold and begin to climb over it. My boots slip on the rock, and I scrape my knee, and I’m already worried about how I’m going to climb back over from the other side-but I won’t let myself give up.

With a grunt, I reach the top of the boulder and then slide down the far side. I land with a soft thud and glance up to see the most beautiful rush of water, frothing and sparkling and filling the ravine. I strip to my boxers and wade in, the clear pool lapping against my chest. I duck under the spray. Then I crawl out and lie on my back, letting the sun dry my skin.

Since I’ve come to Thailand, I’ve had hundreds of moments like this, when I run across something so incredible that I want to show it to someone else. The problem is, when you make the choice to be a loner, you lose that privilege. So I do what I’ve done for the past six years: I take out my cell phone, and I snap a picture of the waterfall. I’m never in these pictures, needless to say. And I don’t know who I’ll ever show them to, given that I’ve had cartons of milk that have lasted longer than most of my relationships. But I keep that digital album anyway-from the first spirit house I saw in Thailand, intricate and laden with offerings, to the arrangement of wooden penises at the Chao Mae Tuptim Shrine, to the creepy conjoined babies floating in formaldehyde in the Forensic Science Museum near Wat Arun.

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.”

My jaw drops. “You took out some of his brain?”

“We relieved the pressure on the brain that would have otherwise killed him,” the doctor corrects. “The temporal lobectomy will affect some of his memories, but not all. It doesn’t affect the areas of speech or motor or personality.”

They had taken away some of my father’s memories. Ones of his beloved wolves? Or ones of us? Which would he miss?

“So did it work? The surgery?”

“Your father’s pupil is reactive again, and the clot’s removed. However, the swelling and the hematoma produced an incipient herniation-basically, a shift of structures from one compartment of the brain to another, which put pressure on the brain stem and created little hemorrhages there.”

“I don’t understand-”

“The pressure in his skull is down,” the doctor says, “but he still hasn’t awakened, there’s no response to stimulation, and he isn’t breathing on his own. We repeated a CT scan and can see that those hemorrhages in the medulla and the pons are a little larger than they were on the initial scan-and that’s why he hasn’t regained consciousness, and is still on a ventilator.”

I feel like I am swimming in corn syrup, like the words I want to use are rolling off my tongue in an indecipherable language. “But is he going to be okay?” I ask, which is really the only question necessary.

The surgeon clasps his hands together. “We’re still letting the dust settle right now…”

But. There’s a but, I can hear it.

“Those lesions we’re seeing affect the part of the brain stem that controls breathing and consciousness. He may never get off that ventilator,” Dr. Saint-Clare says flatly. “He may never wake up.”

When I was sixteen and had just gotten my driver’s license, I went to a party and stayed out past my curfew. I parked down the block and tiptoed across the grass, easing the door open in the hope that I could get away with this infraction. But as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw my father sleeping in the recliner in the living room, and I knew I was doomed. My father always said that when he was out in the wild with the wolves, he never really slept. You had to stay semiconscious, one proverbial eye always open, to know if you were going to be attacked.

Sure enough, the minute I crossed the threshold he was out of that chair and in my face. He didn’t say a word, just waited for me to speak for myself.

I know, I said. I’m grounded.

My father folded his arms. A couple of hundred years ago, parents never let kids out of their sight, he said. If a pup disturbs his wolf father at two in the morning, he doesn’t growl so the pup will leave him alone and let him go back to sleep. He sits up, alert, as if he’s saying: What do you want to know? Where do you want to go?

I was still a little drunk, and at the time I figured this was a lecture, his way of telling me he was mad at me. Now I wonder if he was just mad at himself-for giving in to his human side, so that he forgot to keep one eye open.

“Can I see him?” I ask Dr. Saint-Clare.

I’m led down the hall to an ICU room. A nurse is bent over the bed, suctioning something. “You must be Mr. Warren’s son,” she says. “Spitting image.”

But I barely hear her. I’m staring at the patient in the hospital bed.

My first thought is: There’s been a terrible mistake. This isn’t my father.

Because this broken man, with the partially shaved head and the white bandage wrapped around his skull, with the tube going down his throat and the IV running into the crook of his arm…

This man with the Frankenstein’s monster stitches on his temple and the black-and-blue mask of bruises around his eyes…

This man looks nothing like the one who ruined my life.

LUKE

Red Riding Hood should be flogged.

Single-handedly, that little girl and her grandmother have managed to spread enough lies about wolves to get them poisoned, trapped, and shot into near extinction. Many of the myths about wolves originated in the Middle Ages, in Paris-where children were dragged off by wolves. Now it’s believed that the animals in question were hybrid wolf-dogs. A purebred wolf, on the other hand, is more afraid of you than you are of him. He won’t attack, unless something makes him feel that his safety has been threatened.

Some people believe that wolves kill everything they encounter.

In reality, they only kill to eat. Even when they attack a herd, they don’t slaughter every animal. The alpha wolf very specifically directs which member of the herd should be brought down.

Some people believe that wolves will decimate the deer population.

In reality, for every ten times they hunt, they’ll make a single kill.

Some people believe they infiltrate farms and kill livestock.

In reality, this happens so infrequently, biologists don’t even count them as a category of predatorial risk.

Some people believe wolves are harmful to humans.

In reality, of the twenty or so recorded cases, the encounter between wolf and man was brought on by the person. And there’s not a single documented case of a healthy, wild wolf killing a human.

You can imagine that I’m not too fond of the three little pigs, either.

CARA

I’m sitting at one of the outdoor tables at the trading post, wrapped up in my down jacket and a woolly blanket. There’s no one here because it’s February and the park is officially closed, but the signature attraction-the animatronic dinosaurs that you can’t miss the minute you walk through the gates-runs year-round. It’s some weird computerized wiring glitch-you can’t turn off the T. rex without cutting power to the whole facility, and that of course would affect the skeleton crew that manages the animal habitats on the off-season. So every now and then, when I need to get away, I come to the part of the park that’s a ghost town and watch the triceratops shake his plastic head every hour on the hour, dislodging last night’s snowfall. I watch the raptor get into a mock fight with the T. rex, both of them thigh-high in drifts. It’s creepy. It feels like I’m watching the end of the world. Sometimes, because it’s so quiet, their canned roars get the gibbons all riled up, and they start hollering, too.

It’s because of the gibbons, actually, that I don’t hear my father calling my name until he’s nearly standing right in front of me. “Cara? Cara!” He is wearing his winter coveralls-the ones that hang outside the trailer on a tree branch and never get washed because the wolves recognize him by scent. I can tell he’s been in with the pack sharing a meal, because there’s a little bit of blood on the ends of the long hair framing his face. He usually plays the diffuser, which means he gets right between the beta and the alpha rank on the carcass. It’s crazy to watch, actually. Feeding time, for the pack, is like a gladiator sport. Everyone’s got a set position around the carcass and feeds at a specific time on a specific part of the animal. There’s growling and snarling and gnashing as each wolf-my dad included-protects his piece of the kill. He used to eat the raw meat, like the wolves, but when it started messing too much with his digestive system, he began to cook up bits of kidney and liver and hide it inside his coveralls, in a little plastic bag. He somehow manages to transfer this into the slit belly of the calf and eat like the wolves without them noticing anything’s been doctored.

My father’s face collapses with relief. “Cara,” he says again. “I thought I’d lost you.”

I try to stand up, to tell him that I’ve been here the whole time, but I can’t move. The blanket’s gotten caught, and my arms are trapped. Then I realize it’s not a blanket, it’s a bandage. And it’s not my father who’s been calling my name, it’s my mother. “You’re awake,” she says. She’s looking down at me, trying to smile.

My shoulder feels like there’s an elephant sitting on it. There’s something I want to ask, but the words taste like they’re covered in clouds. Suddenly there’s another face, a woman’s face, soft as dough. “When it hurts,” she says, “press this.” She curls my hand around a little button. My thumb pushes down.

I want to ask where my father is, but I’m already falling asleep.

I am dreaming again, and this is how I know:

My father’s in the room, but it’s not my father. This is someone I’ve only seen in photographs-three pictures, actually, that my mother keeps inside her underwear drawer, beneath the velvet liner of the box that holds her grandmother’s pearls. In all three pictures, he’s got his arm around my mother. He looks younger, leaner, short-haired.

This current version of my father is staring at me as if he’s just as surprised to see me looking this way as I am to see him. “Don’t leave,” I say, but my voice is barely a voice.

That makes him smile.

This is the second reason I know I am dreaming. In those old photographs, my dad always looks happy. In fact, he and my mother both always look happy, which is again something I’ve only seen in pictures.

I’m awake, but I’m pretending not to be. The two police officers that are standing at the foot of the bed are talking to my mother. “It’s critical that we speak to your daughter,” the taller one says, “to piece together what happened.”

I wonder what my father has told them. My mouth goes dry.

“Clearly Cara isn’t fit for interrogation.” My mother’s voice is stiff. I can feel the eyes of all three of them touching me like flame on paper.

“Ma’am, we understand that her health is the primary concern.”

“If you understood, then you wouldn’t be here,” my mother says.

I watch Law & Order. I know all about how a microscopic paint chip can put away a lying criminal for life. Is their visit a routine one, part of every car crash? Or do they know something?

I break out in a sweat, and my heart starts beating harder. And then I realize that’s something I can’t hide. My pulse is right there on a monitor next to the headboard for everyone to see. Knowing that just makes it worse. I imagine the numbers rising, everyone staring.

“Do you really believe her father was trying intentionally to crash the car?” my mother asks.

There is a pause. “No,” one policeman replies.

My heart’s hammering so hard that, any minute now, a nurse is going to burst in and call a code blue.

“Then why are you even here?” my mother asks.

I hear one of the policemen rustle through his clothing. Through slitted eyes I see him give my mother a card. “If you could just give us a call when she’s awake?”

Their footsteps echo on the floor.

I count to fifty. Slowly, with a Mississippi after each number. And then I open my eyes. “Mom?” I say. My voice is full of scrapes and angles.

She immediately sits next to me on the bed. “How do you feel?”

There’s still pain in my shoulder, but it’s not what it was before. I touch my forehead with my free hand and feel swelling, stitches. “Sore,” I say.

My mother reaches for that hand. There’s a little clip on one of my fingers, with a red light glowing through the flesh. Like E.T. “You fractured your shoulder blade in the car accident,” she tells me. “You had surgery on Thursday night.”

“What day is it now?”

“Saturday,” she tells me.

I have entirely lost Friday.

I struggle to sit up, but that turns out to be impossible with one arm wrapped up mummy-tight against my body. “Where’s Dad?”

Something flickers across her face. “I should tell the nurse that you’re awake…”

“Is he okay?” My eyes fill with tears. “I saw the paramedics with him, and then they… then they…” I can’t finish the sentence, because I am starting to put together all the secrecy and the look on my mother’s face and that hallucination I had of my father as a much younger man. “He’s dead,” I whisper. “You just don’t want to tell me.”

She grips my hand more tightly. “Your father is not dead.”

“Then I want to see him,” I demand.

“Cara, you’re in no condition to-”

“Goddammit, let me see him!” I scream.

That, at least, gets some attention. A woman wearing hospital ID-but not nurse whites-hurries into the room. “Cara, you’ve got to relax-”

She is small and bird-boned, with black ringlets that bounce with every syllable. “Who are you?”

“My name is Trina. I’m the social worker assigned to your case. I understand that you’ve got some questions-”

“Yeah, like how about this one: I’m wrapped up like King Tut and I’ve got Frankenstein stitches on my head and my father’s probably in the morgue so how am I supposed to relax?”

My mother and Trina exchange a look, some secret code that lets me know in that instant they’ve been talking about me the whole time I’ve been drugged unconscious. Here’s what I know: If they don’t want to help me get to my dad, wherever he is, then I will walk there myself. Crawl, if I have to.

“Your father’s suffered a very severe brain trauma,” Trina says, the same way you’d say, I heard it’s going to be a very cold winter or I think I need to take the car in to get the tires rotated. She says it as if a severe brain trauma is a hangnail.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“He had surgery to remove swelling in the brain. He’s not breathing on his own. And he’s unconscious.”

“Five minutes ago, so was I,” I say, but the whole time I am thinking: This is all my fault.

“I’ll take you to see your father, Cara,” Trina says, “but you have to understand that when you see him, it’s going to be a shock.”

Why? Because he’s in a hospital bed? Because he’s got stitches, like me, and tubes down his throat? My father is the kind of man who never rests, who’s rarely indoors. Seeing him fall asleep in a chair is enough of a shock.

She calls in a nurse and an orderly to get me into a wheelchair, which requires moving my IV and gritting my teeth as I’m relocated. The hallway smells like industrial cleaner and that plastic hospital smell that’s always freaked me out.

The last time I was in this hospital was a year ago. My dad and I were doing outreach with Zazi, one of the wolves we sometimes bring to elementary schools to teach about wolf conservation. My dad always goes through a mini-training session with the kids to teach them how to behave around a wild animal-don’t hold out your fingers, don’t approach too fast, let the animal catch your scent. And that day, the kids were being great, as was Zazi. But some idiot delinquent in another part of the building had pulled the fire alarm as a prank, and the loud noise startled the wolf. He tried to get away, and the nearest exit was a plate-glass window. My dad wrapped his arms around Zazi to protect him, so that he was the one who wound up going through the window instead of the wolf. Sure enough, when I got Zazi back into his travel cage, he didn’t have a scratch on him. My father, on the other hand, had a cut so deep on his arm that I could see bone.

Needless to say my father refused to go to the hospital until Zazi was safely back home in his enclosure. By then, the dish towel he’d used as a makeshift bandage was a bloody mess, and the frantic school principal-who’d driven back to the trading post with us-insisted that my father go to the emergency room. There-here-he had to get fifteen stitches. But no sooner had we returned home than my dad headed down to the enclosure that housed Nodah, Kina, and Kita-the three wolves he’d had to raise from pups, the pack where he now functioned as a diffuser wolf.

I stood at the chain-link fence, watching Nodah bound up to my dad. Immediately he ripped off the white bandage with his teeth. Then Kina started licking the wound. I was sure he’d tear the stitches, and I was just as sure my father was hoping for that very thing. He’d told me about his time in the wild; how sometimes during a hunt he’d be injured because his skin didn’t have the same protective fur covering that his brother and sister wolves had. When that happened, the animals would lick the gash until it reopened. My father had come to believe that something in their saliva functioned medicinally. Even though he was sleeping in dirt and had no access to antibiotics, in the nearly two years he spent in the woods, he never had a single infection and every wound healed twice as fast. As Kina dug deep, my dad winced a few times, but eventually the cut stopped bleeding and he left the enclosure. We started walking up the hill toward the trailer. I freaking hate hospitals, he said, an explanation.

Now as Trina wheels me down the hallway-my mother trailing behind-we pass people in casts, or shuffling with walkers or crutches. My room is in orthopedics, but my father is somewhere else. We have to get into the elevator, and go down to the third floor.

The sign next to the double doors we enter says icu.

In this hallway, nobody’s walking around except the doctors.

Trina stops pushing the chair and crouches down in front of me. “Are you still feeling up to this?”

I nod.

Trina backs into my father’s hospital room, pulling the wheelchair, and then turns me to face the bed.

My dad looks like a statue. Like one of those marble warriors you see in the ancient Greece section of a museum-strong, intense, and completely expressionless. I reach for his hand and touch it with one finger. He doesn’t move. The only reason I know he’s still alive is because the machines he’s hooked up to are making quiet noises.

I did this to him.

I bite my lip because I know I’m going to cry and I don’t want Trina and my mother watching.

“Is he going to be all right?” I whisper.

My mother puts her hand on my shoulder. “The doctors don’t know,” she says, her voice breaking.

Tears are running down my face now. “Daddy? It’s me. Cara. Wake up. You have to wake up.”

I’m thinking about all those stories you always hear on the news, the miraculous ones, where people who were never supposed to be able to walk get out of bed and start sprinting. Where people who were blind can suddenly see.

Where fathers with brain injuries suddenly open their eyes and smile and forgive you.

I hear the sound of water running, and a door opens-one that leads to the bathroom. The younger version of my dad that I hallucinated yesterday walks out, still drying his hands on his sweatpants. He looks at my mother, and then at me. “Cara,” he says. “Wow. You’re awake?”

That’s the moment I understand that he was never a figment of my imagination. It’s a voice I recognize, now housed in a different, adult body.

“What is he doing here?” I whisper.

“I called him,” my mother says. “Cara, just-”

I shake my head. “I was wrong. I can’t do this.”

Immediately, Trina whirls the chair around, so that I am staring at the door again. “That’s all right,” she says, not judgmental at all. “It’s hard to see someone you love in that condition. You’ll come back when you’re feeling stronger.”

I pretend to agree. But it isn’t just facing my father, unconscious in a hospital bed, that has made the floor drop out of my world.

It is seeing my brother, who’s been dead to me for years.

I can’t say that Edward and I were ever close. Seven years is a lot, when you’re young, and there just isn’t all that much that a high school kid will have in common with a kid sister who is still using her Easy-Bake oven. But I idolized my big brother. I would pick up the books he sometimes left on the kitchen table and pretend that I understood the words inside; I’d sneak into his room when he went out and would lie on his bed and listen to his iPod, something he would have murdered me for if he knew I was doing it.

The elementary school was a distance away from the high school, which meant that Edward had to drop me off in the morning. It was part of a negotiated deal that included my parents paying for half of the eight-hundred-dollar beater he found at a garage, so he’d have his own wheels. In return, my mother insisted that my brother physically deposit me on the steps of my school before going on to his.

Edward took this direction literally.

I was eleven years old-plenty grown-up enough to navigate a traffic light’s walk signal alone. But my brother never let me. Every day he parked the car and waited with me. When that signal changed and we stepped off the curb together, he’d grab my hand or my arm and hold on to it until we reached the other side. It was such a habit I’m pretty sure he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

I could have pulled away, or told him to let go, but I never did.

The first day after he left us, the first day I had to go to school and cross alone, I was positive the street had grown twice as wide.

Logically, I understand that it wasn’t Edward’s fault my family fell apart after he left. But when you’re eleven years old, you don’t give a fuck about logic. You just really miss holding your big brother’s hand.

“I had to call him,” my mother says. “He’s still your father’s son. And the hospital needed someone who could make medical decisions for Luke.”

As if it’s not bad enough that my father is in some kind of coma, the only person who seems to have information about his condition is, against all odds, my long-lost brother. The thought that he’s the one who’s been sitting next to my dad, waiting for him to open his eyes-well, it makes me furious.

“Why couldn’t you do it?”

“Because I’m not married to him anymore.”

“Then why didn’t anyone ask me?”

My mother sits down on the edge of the hospital bed. “You weren’t in any condition to be making decisions when you were brought in. And even if you had been-you’re a minor. The hospital needed someone who’s over eighteen.”

“He left,” I say, the obvious. “He doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“Cara,” my mother replies, rubbing her hand over her face. “You can’t blame Edward for everything.”

What she is careful not to say is that this was my father’s fault-the breakdown of the marriage, and Edward’s departure. She knows better than to bitch about my dad in front of me, though, because that’s partly what made me move out of her house four years ago.

I had left my mother’s house because I didn’t fit into her new family, but I had wound up staying with my dad because he seemed to parent me in a way my mom never could. It’s hard to explain, really. It didn’t really matter to me if my bedsheets were washed weekly or only once every few months when someone remembered to do it. Instead, my dad taught me the name of every tree in the woods, knowledge I didn’t even realize I was accumulating. He showed me that a summer storm isn’t an inconvenience but a great time to work outside without being swarmed by mosquitoes or sweltering in the heat.

Once, when we were in one of the enclosures, a badger had the bad luck to wander inside. We usually let the wolves kill whatever small prey wound up in their pen, but this time, one of the adult wolves chased down the badger and, instead of killing it, bit the backbone so it was dragging its rear legs. Then he backed away, so that the two young pups in the pack could make the kill. It was, basically, a training session. That’s what life with my father was like. With my dad, it didn’t matter that Edward had left. With my dad I was worthy enough to be the only other member of his pack, the one he taught everything he knew, the one he depended on as much as I depended on him.

If my father doesn’t wake up, I realize, I will have to go back to living with my mother.

Suddenly the door to my hospital room opens and the two policemen who were here yesterday walk in. “Cara,” the tall one says. “Glad to see you’re awake. I’m Officer Dumont, and this is Officer Whigby. We’d like to talk to you for a few minutes-”

My mother steps between them and the hospital bed. “Cara’s barely out of surgery. She needs to rest.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, we aren’t leaving this time without speaking to your daughter.” Officer Dumont sits down in the chair beside the bed. “Cara, do you mind answering a few questions about the car accident?”

I look at my mother, and then at the cop. “I guess…”

“Do you remember the crash?”

I remember every second of it. “Not so much,” I murmur.

“Who was driving the truck?”

“My father,” I say.

“Your father.”

“That’s right.”

“Where were you headed?”

“Home-he picked me up from a friend’s house.”

My mother folds her arms. “I’m sorry… but when did a car accident become a criminal offense?”

The officer looks up over his notepad at her. “Ma’am, we’re just trying to piece together what happened.” He turns to me. “How come the truck swerved off the road?”

“There was a deer,” I say. “It ran out in front of us.”

This is true, actually. I’m just leaving out what happened before that.

“Had your father been drinking?”

“My father never drinks,” I say. “The wolves can smell alcohol in your system.”

“How about you? Were you drinking?”

My face goes red. “No.”

Officer Whigby, who’s been pretty quiet, takes a step forward. “You know, Cara, if you just tell us the truth, this will be a lot easier.”

“My daughter doesn’t drink,” my mom says, angry. “She’s only seventeen.”

“Unfortunately, ma’am, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.” Whigby pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to her. It’s a lab report.

“Your daughter’s blood alcohol content was.20 when she was admitted,” Officer Whigby says. “And unlike your daughter, blood tests don’t lie.” He turns to me. “So, Cara… what else are you hiding?”

LUKE

My adopted brothers in the Abenaki tribe believe that their lives are inextricably tied to those of wolves. Years ago, when I first went to Canada to study the way Native American naturalists tracked the wild wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor, I learned that they see the wolf as a teacher-in the way he hunts, raises his children, and defends his family. In the past it was not unheard of for Abenaki shamans to slip into the body of a wolf, and vice versa. The French called the Eastern Abenaki in Maine and New Hampshire the Natio Luporem, the Wolf Nation.

The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.

Joseph Obomsawin, the elder I lived with there, says that those who turn to animals do so because humans have let them down.

That would fit for me, I suppose. I grew up with parents who were so much older than my friends’ parents that I would never think of inviting a friend home from school; I would purposely forget to tell my parents about open houses or basketball games because I was always embarrassed to find kids staring openly at my dad’s white hair, my mother’s soft wrinkles.

Since I didn’t have a thriving social network as a kid, I spent a great deal of time alone in the woods. My father had taught me the name of every indigenous tree; what was poisonous, what was edible. He took me hunting for ducks when the moon was still high in the sky and our breath turned silver in front of us as we waited. It was there I learned to be so still that the deer would come into the clearing to feed, even if I were sitting on its edge. And it was there that I started to be able to tell the deer apart, to know which ones traveled together and which ones returned the next year with their offspring.

I cannot remember a time I didn’t feel connected to animals-from watching a fox play with her kits to tracking a porcupine to letting the circus animals out of captivity. But the most amazing animal encounter I have ever had came when I was twelve years old, just moments before the most disappointing human interaction of my life. I was in the woods behind our home when I saw a female moose lying beneath the ferns with a newborn calf. I knew the cow; I’d seen her once or twice. I backed away-my dad had taught me never to get near a new mother and its young-but to my surprise the moose stood up and nudged her calf forward, until it settled, skin and bones, in my lap.

I sat there for an hour with the calf until the most majestic moose I’d ever seen entered the clearing. His rack was colossal, and he stood like a statue until the cow moose got to her feet, too, and the calf. Then the three of them disappeared silently into the woods behind me.

Amazed, I ran back home to tell my parents what had happened-certain they wouldn’t believe me-and found them sitting in the kitchen at the table with a woman I didn’t recognize. But when she turned around, I could see myself written all over her features.

“Luke,” my dad said. “This is Kiera. Your real mother.”

He was not my dad but my grandfather. The woman I’d called Mom my whole life was my grandmother. My biological mother was their child-who, at seventeen, had been thrown in jail for selling heroin with her then-boyfriend. She found out two months later that she was pregnant.

When she gave birth to me at the local hospital, she’d been shackled to the bed.

It was decided that my grandparents would raise me. And that, rather than my having to grow up with the stigma of having an incarcerated mother, they’d move from Minnesota to New Hampshire, where nobody knew them. They’d start fresh, saying I was their miracle baby.

When the prison term ended, Kiera postponed reuniting with her family, deciding instead to get herself employed and settled. Now, four years later, she was the front desk manager at a hotel in Cleveland. She was ready to pick up the pieces of her life that she had left behind. Including me.

I don’t remember much of that day, except that I didn’t want to hug her, and that when she started talking about Cleveland I stood up and ran out the kitchen door into the woods again. The moose were gone, but I had learned from animals how to make myself scarce when necessary, how to blend in with the surroundings. So when my grandfather came looking for me, calling my name, he walked right past the copse of brush where I was hiding, where I stayed until I fell asleep.

The next morning, when I went back home, stiff and damp with cold, Kiera the impostor was gone. My parents, who were now my grandparents, were sitting at the table eating fried eggs. My grandmother offered me a plate with two eggs sunny-side up and a slice of toast. We did not talk about my mother’s visit, or where she’d gone. My grandfather said that, for now, I’d be staying put, and that was that.

I began to wonder if I’d dreamed that encounter, or the one with the moose calf, or both.

After that, I had sporadic contact with my mother. She’d send me a pair of slippers every Christmas that were always too small. She came to my grandfather’s funeral and my college graduation and two years after that died of ovarian cancer.

Years later when I went to live with the wolves, I would feel different about my mother. I would realize that what she did was no different from what any wolf mother does: put her child into the protective care of the elders, who can use their vast knowledge to teach the next generation everything it needs to know. But at that moment, sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast in an uncomfortable silence, all I knew was that no animal in my life had ever lied to me; whereas the humans, I could no longer trust.

EDWARD

There are stages of shock.

The first one comes when you walk into the hospital room and you see your father, still as a corpse, hooked up to a bunch of machines and monitors. There’s the total disconnect when you try to reconcile that picture with the one in your head: the same man playing tag with a bunch of wolf pups; the same man who stood eye to eye with you and dared you to challenge him.

Then there’s hope. Every flicker of sunlight over the sheets, every hiccup in the ventilator’s even sigh, every trick of your tired eyes has you jumping out of your seat, certain that you’ve just witnessed a twitch, a flutter, a rise to consciousness.

Except, you haven’t.

This is followed by denial. Any moment now, you are going to wake up in your own bed cursing the crazy nightmares that always follow a tequila bender. It’s laughable, really, theater of the absurd: the image of you playing nursemaid to a father you cut out of your life years ago. Then again, you know that you had no tequila last night. That you are not in your own bed but in a hospital.

That leads to catatonia, as you become just as unresponsive as the patient. Nurses and doctors and technicians and social workers parade in and out, but you lose track of the number of visits. These nurses and doctors and technicians and social workers all know your name, which is how you realize that this has become a routine. You stop whispering-an instinct, since patients need their rest-because you realize your father can’t hear you, and not just because ice water is being injected into his left ear.

It’s part of a test, one of an endless series of tests, to measure eye movements. The way it’s been explained to me, if you change the temperature of the inner ear, it should cause reflexive eye movements. In people who are conscious, it can be used to check for damage to the ear nerves that can cause balance problems. In people who are not conscious, it can be used to check for brain stem function.

“So?” I ask the neurology resident who’s performing the test. “Is it good news or bad news?”

She doesn’t look at me. “Dr. Saint-Clare will be able to tell you more,” she says, making notes on my father’s chart.

She leaves a nurse to wipe my father’s face and neck dry. The nurse is the fifteenth one I’ve met since I’ve been here. She’s got intricately twisted braids swirled into a style on top of her head that makes me wonder how she sleeps at night, and her name is Hattie. Sometimes she hums spirituals when she’s taking care of my father: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “I’ll Take You There.” “You know,” she says, “it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.”

“Can he hear me?”

Hattie shrugs. “Different doctors believe different things. Me, I think you’ve got nothing to lose.”

That is because she doesn’t know my father. Our last conversation had been far from a positive one; there’s every chance that just the sound of my voice will trigger some angry response.

Then again, at this point, any response would do.

For twenty-four hours I have been living in this room, sleeping upright in a chair, maintaining a vigil. My neck hurts and my shoulders ache. My limbs seem jerky, unfamiliar; the skin of my face is slack as rubber. None of this feels real: not my own exhausted body, not being back here, not having my father comatose four feet away from me. Any minute now, I expect to wake up.

Or my father to.

I have subsisted on coffee and hope, making bets with myself: If I’m still here, there must be a chance for recovery. If the doctors keep finding new tests, they must believe he’s going to get better. If I stay awake just five more minutes watching him, he will surely open his eyes.

When I was a kid, I used to get so scared of the monster that lived in my closet that sometimes I’d hyperventilate, or break out in hives. It was my father who told me to just get the hell out of bed and open the damn door. Not knowing, he said, is a thousand times more horrible than facing your fear.

Of course, when I was a kid and I bravely opened the closet door, there was nothing upsetting inside.

“Um,” I say, when Hattie leaves. “It’s me, Dad. Edward.”

My father doesn’t move.

“Cara came to see you,” I tell him. “She got banged up a little in the crash, but she’s going to be fine.” I don’t mention that she left in tears, or that I’ve been too much of a coward to go to her room and have more than a superficial discussion with her. She’s like the only person in the village willing to point out that the emperor’s not wearing any clothes-or in my case, that the role of dutiful son has been woefully miscast.

I try humor. “If you missed me, you know, you didn’t have to go to this extreme. You could have just invited me home for Thanksgiving.”

But neither of us finds this funny.

The door opens again, and Dr. Saint-Clare enters. “How’s he doing?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell me that?” I ask.

“Well, we’re still monitoring his condition, which appears to be unchanged.”

Unchanged, I remind myself, must be good. “You know this from injecting water in his ear?”

“Actually, yes,” the doctor says. “What we’re looking for in the ice-water caloric test is a vestibulo-ocular reflex. If both eyes deviate toward the ear with the water in it, the brain stem is functioning normally and consciousness is mildly impaired. Likewise, nystagmus away from the water suggests consciousness. But your father’s eyes didn’t move at all, which suggests severe dysfunction of the pons and the midbrain.”

Suddenly I am tired of the medical jargon, of the parade of experts who come in to do tests on my father, who doesn’t respond. Get the hell out of bed and open the damn door. “Just say it,” I mutter.

“I’m sorry?”

I force myself to meet Dr. Saint-Clare’s eyes. “He isn’t going to wake up, is he?”

“Well.” The neurologist sits down in a chair across from me. “Consciousness has two components,” he explains. “There’s wakefulness, and there’s awareness. You and I are both awake and aware. Someone in a coma is neither. After a few days in a coma, a patient might go one of several routes. He might lose all brain function, and become what we call brain-dead. It’s quite rare, but he might develop locked-in syndrome, which would mean he has both wakefulness and awareness… but is unable to move or speak. Or he might evolve into a vegetative state-which would mean there’s wakefulness… but no awareness of himself or where he is. In other words, his eyes may open and he will have sleep cycles, but he won’t respond to stimuli. From there, a patient might either improve into a minimally conscious state, in which there’s wakefulness and brief interludes of awareness, and eventually regain full consciousness. Alternately, he might remain in what we call a permanent vegetative state, never regaining awareness.”

“So you’re saying my father might wake up…”

“… but the chances of him regaining awareness are extremely slim.”

A vegetative state. “How do you know?”

“The odds are against him. In patients who’ve suffered traumatic brain stem injury, like your father, the outcome isn’t good.”

I wait for these words to hit me with the force of a bullet: he is talking about my father. But it’s been so long since I let myself feel anything for my dad that, actually, I’m numb. I listen to Dr. Saint-Clare speak, I acknowledge that I was expecting to hear this news from him, I accept it as fact. Ironically, I realize, this does make me the best person to keep the bedside vigil for him. “So what happens?” I ask. “Do we wait?”

“For a bit. We keep testing him to see if there’s any change.”

“If he doesn’t ever improve, does he stay here forever?”

“No. There are rehab centers and nursing homes that care for people in vegetative states. Some patients who’ve made their wishes known to discontinue life support will go into hospice and have their feeding tubes removed. Those who want to be organ donors might meet the protocol for DCD, donation after cardiac death.”

It feels like we are talking about a stranger. But then again, I guess we are. I don’t really know my father any better than this neurosurgeon does.

Dr. Saint-Clare stands up. “We’ll keep monitoring him.”

“What should I do in the meantime?”

He puts his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “Get some sleep,” he says. “You look like hell.”

When he leaves the room, I pull my chair a little closer to my father’s bed. If you had told me when I was eighteen that I would be back in Beresford, I would have laughed in your face. Back then, all I knew was that I had to get away from here as fast as possible. As a teenager, I never realized that the thing I was running from would still be here, waiting, no matter how far I ran.

Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know that you’re avoiding them.

If I were Hattie the nurse, I’d pray for my father. But I’ve never been religious. My father worshipped at the temple of nature, and my mother threw religion at me like a bucket of paint, but none of it ever stuck.

I find myself thinking of the first week I was in Thailand, when I noticed little decorative houses on pedestals in front of hotels, in the corners of restaurants, in front of local bars, in the middle of the woods, and in the yard of every house. Some were permanent, made of brick and wood. Some were temporary. Each house was filled with statues, furniture, figures of people or animals. On the balconies were incense holders, candlesticks, flower vases.

Most Thai are Buddhists, but bits of the old beliefs still creep through every now and then, like these spirit houses. Even now, the Thai feel that spirits need shelter when they aren’t in the heavens, in caves, or trees, or waterfalls. The Guardian Spirits of the Land offer different types of protection: from helping in business affairs to safeguarding the home, from protecting animals, forests, water, and barns to watching over temples and forts. In the six years I’ve been in Thailand, I’ve seen spirit house offerings ranging from flowers and bananas and rice to cigarettes and live chickens.

Here’s the interesting thing about spirit houses: when a family moves, there’s a special ceremony to transfer the spirit from its original spirit house to its new place of residence. Only after that can you get rid of the place the spirit used to call its home.

Looking at the husk of my father in his hospital bed, I wonder if he’s already moved on.

LUKE

I hated college. There were too many buildings, too much concrete. It seemed counterintuitive to be studying zoology from textbooks instead of sitting quietly for hours in the woods, experiencing animals firsthand. I had my fair share of women and parties, but you’d be just as likely to find me hiking the Presidential Range, or camping in the White Mountains. It got to the point where I could pick out the distinctive voices of a great gray owl or a bohemian waxwing, a pine grosbeak or black-throated blue warbler. I tracked black bear and white-tailed deer and moose.

When I graduated with a degree in zoology, I got hired as a keeper at the only zoo in New Hampshire, down in the Manchester area. Wigglesworth Animal Park was a privately owned establishment that was half petting zoo with a handful of wild animals thrown into the mix. I worked my way up from the alpacas to the fisher cats to the red fox and finally to the wolves. The pack of five was kept in a small double-fenced enclosure with thick trees and a ridged rise that the wolves would sit on during the daytime hours. Every three days one of the keepers would bring in food-the carcass of a calf purchased from an abattoir. Anyone who entered would carry a ski pole-and it wasn’t just the wolf keepers who did this but also those who worked with the cougars or the black bear or any other big animal. I don’t know what damage any of us could really have inflicted with a ski pole, but it wasn’t necessary, anyway. The wolves were far more scared of us than we were of them. The minute they heard the lock on the double gate being opened, they would rush through the thickest part of the wooded area to the den at the far northeast corner of the enclosure. We’d leave the carcass, and only long after we were out of the enclosure would they venture back to eat.

The day I first went in without a ski pole, I was checking the fence-part of the routine of a keeper. But instead of doing my duty and hightailing it out of the enclosure, I decided to sit and stay. Unarmed and uneasy, my blood racing with adrenaline, I sat down on the ridge where I’d seen the wolves settle daily, and I waited.

I was thinking that, like the deer and the moose I’d encountered as a child, these animals might eventually feel comfortable enough with me to go about their business as usual.

I was thinking wrong.

After five days of my sitting in the wolf enclosure, with the other keepers convinced I had a screw loose, not a single animal had approached me.

I have been asked so many times what made me choose this path in life. I think part of it was that animals have always been straight with me, but humans haven’t. But the other part is that I don’t take no for an answer very easily. So instead of giving up and going back to animal care with a ski pole, I thought about what I might be doing wrong.

And then I realized that I might not have a ski pole with me but I still had the advantage. When I’d been a boy, I’d sneak out at dusk and dawn to see the animals-but they made themselves scarce midday. If I wanted to put the wolves at ease, I had to approach them when they had the upper hand. So I went to my boss and asked for permission to stay in the wolf enclosure overnight.

Mind you, once the park closed its gates, at 6:00 P.M., the keepers all went home. There was a skeleton staff in place overnight, but only for emergencies. My boss told me I could do what I wanted, but I could see from the look on his face he thought he’d be hiring a new keeper after this one died of his injuries.

It’s hard for me to describe what it was like, locking myself inside the enclosure that first time. At the beginning, all that existed was pure panic. The dark had a heartbeat, and I couldn’t see well enough to know where the roots of the trees were sticking up. I could hear the movement of the wolves, but I also knew they had the ability to stalk silently if they were so inclined. I tripped my way to my usual spot-the ridge-and sat down. Unfamiliar sounds from all over the wildlife park pinned me in place. This is what you wanted, I told myself.

I tried to close my eyes and sleep, but I couldn’t relax. Instead, I began counting stars, and before I knew it, the yolk of the sun was breaking on the horizon.

It was great to work with the wolves during the day, but I was really there to keep the people who came to the park from doing stupid things, like throwing them food or leaning too close to the fence. In the nighttime, though, I was alone with these magnificent animals, these kings and queens of the half-light. At the end of their day they weren’t worrying about paying the bills, or what they were going to eat for breakfast, or what to do about the crack in the concrete, man-made pond. All that mattered was that they were together, and that they were safe.

For the next four nights, I locked myself into the wolf pen after the last zookeeper had gone home. And every night, the wolves stayed as far away from me as possible. On the fifth night, just after midnight, I got up and moved from the ridge to the rear of the fenced area. Two of the wolves bounded toward the spot where I’d been sitting. They sniffed the ground and one of them urinated. Then they moved away from the ridge, and spent the rest of their night staring at me with their yellow eyes.

On the sixth night, the wolf we called Arlo approached me. He moved in a slow circle, sniffing, before moving away.

He did the same thing on the seventh and eighth nights, too.

On the ninth night, he sniffed and circled and turned as if he were going to walk away but then whipped around and bit me on the knee.

It wasn’t a painful bite. He could have easily gone for my throat if he’d wanted to. It was just a nip, and it scared me more than it hurt me.

The real power of a wolf isn’t in its fearsome jaws, which can clench with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The real power of a wolf is having that strength, and knowing when not to use it.

I didn’t move. I figured if I tried to get up and leave the enclosure, Arlo might take me down and deliver a lot worse than a nip. Paralyzed by fear, I waited for Arlo to trot away. I didn’t move until the sunrise.

Much later I would learn that this terror probably is what kept me alive that night. When a new member comes to a pack-a lone wolf, for example, filling a vacancy-he’s tested to prove that he’s capable of holding the position, and that he will not threaten the others in the family. This test takes the form of a bite. If the new wolf doesn’t expose his throat to highlight his vulnerability and ask for trust, the wolves already in the pack will do what they must to teach him a lesson. If I’d flinched when Arlo nipped me, or gotten up and run out of the enclosure, I could have been killed.

The next night, Arlo bit me again. After two weeks, my knees, calves, and ankles were covered with bruises and cuts. Then one night, he brushed up against me. He was slightly damp from a light rain, and I thought at first he was trying to dry himself, but he rubbed his face, the top of his head, and his tail against me. When he pushed against me with all 120 pounds of his body and I fell backward, he nipped at me-another warning to stay in place. He continued to shimmy against me, until I smelled like a wet dog, too.

Which was exactly why he was doing it. A few weeks later he began to bring the other members of the pack to my spot on the ridge. They would hang back, wary, while Arlo bit me on the knee and shin. It was Arlo’s way of showing them, I realized, that I could take direction.

That I could be trusted.

GEORGIE

“Drinking?” I say, stunned. “You were drinking?”

The police are gone, chased away by a nurse after Cara dissolves into shoulder-wracking sobs that leave her gasping with pain. I don’t know who I’m more angry at: the cops, for trying to accuse her of a DUI; or Cara, for lying to me in the first place.

“It was one drink-”

“Served in what? A bucket?” I ask. “Blood tests are pretty damn accurate, Cara.”

“I went to a party with Mariah,” she says. “I didn’t even want to go, it was some guy from Bethlehem High she met at a track meet. And as soon as it started to get out of control, I called Dad and asked him to come get me. I’m telling you the truth. I swear I am.”

“Why didn’t you say anything when the ER doctors asked if you had any drugs or alcohol in your system?”

“Because,” Cara says, “I knew this was going to happen. I made a mistake, okay? Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”

God, yes.

“If you couldn’t admit it to the doctors,” I say, “you might have at least told me. You made me feel like an idiot in front of those policemen.”

Cara’s mouth twists. “How do you think I feel? If it wasn’t for me-if I hadn’t been drinking-Dad wouldn’t have gotten hurt. He would never even have been out on the road.”

That, finally, cuts through the red rage I’ve been seeing since hearing that my underage daughter was drinking while on Luke’s watch. If I’d found out any other way, I would have called him on it. I would have yelled at him about not being a responsible parent, about changing the custodial agreement.

But I can’t very well yell at him right now.

“Cara,” I say, sitting on the edge of the bed. “It was a car accident. An accident. You can’t blame yourself.”

She jerks away from me. “You weren’t there!” she snaps.

It’s a criticism of me. I just don’t know if she is upset with me for talking about the crash or for being with my other family when it happened.

I’d like to believe that if Cara had still been living under my roof, she wouldn’t have been drinking. That if she had stayed with me, we wouldn’t be in a hospital. Unlike Luke, who was always so wrapped up in his wolves, I would actually know what my own daughter’s up to and I would never let her out late on a school night. But it is always easy to rewrite history after the fact. The truth is, even if Cara had not chosen to go live with her dad instead of me, I might have found myself the recipient of that phone call last Thursday from Cara, begging to be rescued.

There have been a handful of times in my life when I have suddenly had the perspective to be able to see myself from a distance, to trace how I got to that point. The first was the morning I read the note from Edward, telling me that he had left home. The second was at my wedding to Joe, when I was-maybe for the first time-unadulteratedly happy. The third was when the twins were born. And the fourth, now, is at the crux of a nightmare-my first family, all drawn together again, and inextricably linked once more because of Luke’s dynamic persona. Be careful what you wish for.

“You can tell Dad to ground me,” Cara says. “When he wakes up.”

I don’t have the heart to tell her that is an if, not a when.

Which means she’s not the only person in this room who is a liar.

I met Luke when I was assigned to do a story on him for a local news show. I was convinced that I was going to be the next Katie Couric, even if I was currently slogging in the trenches of local New Hampshire television. Never mind that sometimes the anchors were so bad I watched the videotaped newscasts as a drinking game-every time a word was mispronounced I would have a sip of wine, and often downed an entire bottle in a thirty-minute newscast. My job was to spotlight the quirky, crusty, unique residents of the state in the last three minutes of the evening newscast.

I’d met my share of the weird-the farmer’s wife who dressed up her barn cats in hand-sewn costumes and photographed them in the same positions as famous paintings; the bagel baker who had accidentally created a cheddar-dill concoction that bore an uncanny resemblance to the governor; the petite blonde elementary school teacher who had won a lumberjack contest in the north country. One day my crew (which meant me and a guy lugging a camera) was dispatched to the only zoo in New Hampshire, a sleepy little Manchester-area establishment with horseback trail rides, a dairy discovery barn, and a thin collection of wildlife.

We had been tipped off to the story by a viewer, who’d brought his toddler down to the zoo and who had been surprised to see a crowd gathered around the small enclosure where the wolves were kept. Apparently one of the zookeepers, Luke Warren, had begun to sleep overnight with the animals, and to spend part of the day inside the enclosure. His superiors-at first sure this was a suicide attempt-now realized the wolves had accepted him into their fold and encouraged Luke to interact with them during the park’s open hours. His antics had single-handedly quadrupled the zoo’s business.

When Alfred, my cameraman, and I arrived at the enclosure, we had to push our way through the crowd lined up along the fence. Inside were five wolves, and one human. Luke Warren was seated between two animals that were easily each over a hundred pounds. When he saw us, he walked toward the double gates leading out of the enclosure as people whispered and pointed. He greeted those who wanted to ask him questions about the wolves, and then he approached my cameraman. “You must be George,” he said.

I stepped forward. “No. That’s me. It’s Georgie.”

Luke laughed. “You’re definitely not what I expected.”

I could have said the same. I figured that this guy would be a nut job like most of the others I interviewed-peculiar to the point of dysfunctional. But Luke Warren was tall and muscular, with blond hair that reached down to his shoulders and eyes so pale and blue that, for a moment, I had trouble remembering what I was doing there. He wore a ratty old set of coveralls. “Just let me get out of these,” he said, unzipping them to reveal the khaki uniform of a zookeeper. “The wolves are used to this scent, but by now, my clothes could probably walk away by themselves.”

He disappeared into a keeper’s hut and returned a moment later, his hair tied back neatly and his face and hands freshly washed. “So,” I said. “You don’t mind if we film…?”

“Go right ahead,” Luke replied. He led us to a bench that offered the best view of the wolves behind him, because-as he said-they were the real stars.

“I’m rolling,” Alfred said.

I folded my hands in my lap. “You’ve been staying overnight in the enclosure for some time now…”

Luke nodded. “Four months.”

“Continuously?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s gotten to the point where it’s more comfortable for me than any bed.”

Already, I was wondering what this guy’s angle was. You didn’t go sleep with wild animals for four months unless you were trying to get attention drawn to you or you were mentally ill. I thought maybe he wanted his own talk show. In those days, everyone did. “Don’t you worry about the wolves attacking you while you sleep?”

He smiled. “I’m not going to lie-the first night I went in, I didn’t get any sleep. But on the whole, a wolf is far more afraid of a human than vice versa. At this point, because I allowed them to teach me instead of telling them what to do, they’ve accepted me as a low-ranking member of their pack.”

Definitely mental illness, I thought. “Well, Luke, the obvious question is: why?”

He shrugged. “I think if you want to know what a wolf is really like, you can’t just observe. Most biologists would disagree, and say that you can watch the interaction of a wolf pack through your camera lens and draw your conclusions based on what you know of human behavior-but isn’t that completely backward? If you want to understand a wolf’s world, you have to be willing to live in it. You have to speak his language.”

“So you’re telling me you speak wolf?”

Luke grinned. “Fluently. I could even teach you a few phrases.” He stood up, setting one foot on the bench as he leaned in. “There are three different types of howls a wolf makes,” he explained. “There’s a locating howl, which gives the whereabouts of any pack that’s in the area. Not just my family, but rival packs, too. The defensive howl is a little deeper. It means stay away; it’s a way to protect your territory and the pack inside it. The third type of howl is a rallying howl. That’s the classic Hollywood howl-mournful, melancholy. It’s used when a pack member is lost, and scientists used to think it was a measure of grief, but actually, it’s a vocal beacon. A way for a missing family member to try to find his way back home.”

“Can you show me?”

“Only if you help,” Luke said. He pulled me up until I was standing. “Take deep breaths, filling your lungs. Hold those breaths as long as you can, and then exhale. On the third breath, send the howl.” He inhaled three times, cupped his hand to his mouth, and a long, two-tone note swelled through the enclosure, rising over the tops of the trees. The wolves looked up, curious. “Try it,” he said.

“I can’t-”

“Of course you can.” He put his hands on my shoulders from behind. “Breathe in,” he coached. “Breathe out. In… out. In… ready?” Leaning forward, he whispered into my ear. “Let go.”

I closed my eyes, and all the air in my lungs poured forward on a vibration that started in my center and filled my body. Then I did it again. It was primal, guttural. Behind me, I could hear Luke howling a different pattern-longer, lower, more intense. When his voice tangled with mine, the result was a song. This time the wolves in the enclosure tipped their heads back and answered us.

“That’s amazing!” I cried, breaking off to listen as their howls rolled in patterns, like waves. “Do they know we’re human?”

“Does it matter?” Luke asked. “That was a locating howl. Pretty basic.”

“Do another one?”

He took a deep breath, rounding his mouth into an O. The sound that issued was completely different, like a distillation of grief. In that one note I heard the soul of a saxophone, a breaking heart.

“What does that one mean?”

He stared at me, so intense I couldn’t look away. “Is it you?” Luke whispered. “Are you the one I’m looking for?”

Cara is trying-unsuccessfully-to eat the Jell-O on her dinner tray. She can chase the little bowl around with her left hand, but every time she tries to get a spoonful, it either tips over or scoots forward. “Here,” I say, sitting down on the edge of the bed and feeding her myself.

She opens her mouth like a baby bird, swallows. “Are you still mad at me?”

“Yes,” I sigh. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” I watch as she takes another bite, remembering how hard it was to get Cara to eat solid food. She was more likely to mash it into her hair, finger-paint on her high chair tray, or spit it in my face than eat it. At her well-child weigh-ins, she was always on the verge of undernourished, and I’d go out of my way to explain to the nurse practitioners that I wasn’t starving her-she was starving herself.

When Cara was just a year old, we stopped at a McDonald’s on the way home from one of Edward’s Little League games. While I was busy opening up jars of baby food and digging in my purse for a bib, Cara reached from her high chair to Edward’s Happy Meal place mat and started happily gumming a French fry. “What about her baby food?” Edward asked.

“Well,” I replied. “I guess she isn’t a baby anymore.”

He considered this. “Is she still Cara?”

Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might be dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.

Cara pushes away her dinner tray with her good hand and starts flipping through the television channels with the remote control. “There’s nothing on.”

It is five o’clock; all the networks are airing local evening broadcasts. “The news isn’t nothing,” I tell her. I look up at the screen, set on the station where I used to work. The anchor is a girl in her twenties who has too much eye makeup on. If I had stuck with broadcast journalism, I’d be a producer now. Someone who stayed behind the camera, who didn’t have to worry about zits and gray roots and five extra pounds.

“In a stunning victory,” the anchor is saying, “Daniel Boyle, the Grafton County attorney, has won a contentious trial that some say is a ringing victory for conservatives in the state. Judge Martin Crenstable ruled today that Merilee Swift, the pregnant woman who suffered an aneurysm in December, will be kept on life support for another six months, until her baby is delivered at full term. Boyle chose to prosecute the case himself when the woman’s husband and parents asked the hospital to turn off Merilee Swift’s respirator.”

“Pig,” I say under my breath. “He wouldn’t have blinked twice at the parents’ request if it wasn’t an election year.”

The screen cuts to a courthouse-steps interview with Danny Boy, as he likes to be called, himself. “I’m proud to be the guardian of the smallest victims, the ones without voices,” he says. “A life is a life. And I know if Ms. Swift could speak, she’d want to know her baby’s being taken care of.”

“For the love of God,” I murmur, and I grab the remote away from Cara. I flip to the next channel, and my mouth drops open.

A picture of Luke, grinning as one of his wolves licks his face, fills the screen over the anchor’s shoulder. “WMUR has learned that Luke Warren, the naturalist and conservationist who made a name for himself by living in the wild with a pack of wolves, is in critical condition after a motor vehicle accident. Warren will be remembered for his cable television show, which detailed his experiences with wolves at New Hampshire’s own Redmond’s Trading Post-”

I push the button on the remote, and the screen goes black. “They’ll say whatever they can to get viewers to watch,” I tell her. “We don’t have to listen.”

Cara turns her face against the pillow. “They’re talking about him like he’s already dead,” she says.

It is ridiculous to think that after six years of my being continents away from Edward, he’s now just a floor below where I’m sitting, and we’re still separated.

I don’t have to tell any mother what it’s like to have a son leave. It happens a multitude of natural ways-summer camp, college, marriage, career. It feels as if the fabric you’re made of has a hole in its center all of a sudden, yet whatever weave you use to fix it is sure to be a hatchet job. I don’t believe any parent moves gracefully into the acceptance that a child doesn’t need her anymore, but I was blindsided by the truth. Edward left when he was just eighteen, when he was still applying to colleges for the following year. I thought I’d have another six months to figure out how to surgically extract him from the pattern of my life, smiling all the while, so that he didn’t think I was anything less than thrilled for his good fortune. But Edward never went to college. Instead, one awful morning, he left me a note and vanished, which is maybe why it felt as if I’d been shelled by a cannon.

I don’t want to leave Cara alone, so I wait until she falls asleep again before I go to the ICU. Edward sits in a chair with his head bowed to his hands as if he’s praying. I wait, not wanting to disturb him, and then realize he’s dozed off.

It gives me a chance to look more carefully at Luke. The last time I’d been down here, with Cara and the social worker, I’d been more attuned to my daughter’s reaction than I was to forming one of my own.

I’ve always thought of Luke as a verb. Something in motion, rather than at rest. Seeing him this still reminds me of times I used to will myself to wake up before he did, so that I could study him: the sculpted curve of his ear, the golden horizon of his jaw, the iridescent scars on his hands and neck that he’d accumulated over the years.

I must make some kind of noise in the back of my throat, because suddenly Edward is awake and staring at me. “I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not sure to whom I’m apologizing.

“It’s weird, right?” Edward gets up and stands beside me. He smells like a man, I realize. Like Old Spice deodorant and shaving cream. “I keep thinking he’s just asleep.”

I slide my arm around my son’s waist, hug him closer. “I wanted to come down earlier, but…”

“Cara,” he says.

I face Edward. “She didn’t know you were here.”

He smiles crookedly. “Hence the warm reception.”

“She’s not thinking clearly right now.”

Edward smirks. “Oh, she’s clearly thinking I’m an asshole.” He shakes his head. “And I’m kind of thinking she might be right.”

I look at Luke. He’s not conscious, but it feels strange to be talking like this in front of him. “I need a cup of coffee,” I say, and Edward follows me down the hall to a family lounge. It is a tired, sad little room with gray walls and no windows. There is a coffeemaker in the corner, and an honor box where you can pay a dollar per cup. There are two couches and a few extra chairs, some ancient magazines, a box of battered toys.

I brew one of the Keurig singles for Edward while he sinks down on a couch. “Your sister may not realize it, but she needs you.”

“I’m not staying,” Edward says immediately. “I’m out of here, as soon as…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. I don’t finish it for him.

“I feel like a fraud. There’s a part of me that knows I have to be in that room and talk to his doctors because I’m his son, right, and that’s what sons do. But there’s another part of me that knows I haven’t been his son for a long time and that the last person he’d want to see if he opened his eyes was me.”

The coffee spits out of the machine in one final hiss. I realize I have no idea how Edward takes his coffee. Once, I could have told you any detail about this boy of mine-where the scar on the back of his neck came from, where he had birthmarks, which spots of him were ticklish, whether he slept on his back or his stomach. What else do I no longer know about my own child?

“You came home when I asked,” I say simply, handing him the coffee, black. “That was the right thing to do.”

Edward runs his finger around the rim of the paper cup. “Mom,” he says. “What if.”

I sit down beside him. “What if what?”

“You know.”

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions, inside the walls of a hospital. Edward doesn’t have to spell out what he’s talking about; it’s what I’ve worked so hard to keep from allowing myself to think. Doubt is like dye. Once it spreads into the fabric of excuses you’ve woven, you’ll never get rid of the stain.

There is a lot I’d like to say to Edward. That this isn’t fair; that this isn’t right. After all Luke’s done, all those times he could have died of hypothermia or an attack from a wild animal or a hundred other horrific natural disasters, it seems humiliating to think of him being felled by something as mundane as a car accident.

But instead I say, “Let’s not talk about that yet.”

“I’m out of my league here, Ma.”

“Anyone would be.” I rub my temples. “Just keep gathering the information the doctors give you. So that when Cara’s ready, you two can talk.”

“Can I ask you something?” Edward says. “Why does she hate me so much?”

I think about hiding the truth from him, but that makes me think of Cara, and her drinking the night of the accident, and how I’m already being such a total hypocrite for being a cheerleader in front of her about Luke’s condition, when clearly it doesn’t warrant that kind of optimism. “She blames you.”

“Me?” Edward’s eyes grow wide. “For what?”

“The fact that your father and I got divorced.”

Edward chokes on a laugh. “She blames me. For that? I wasn’t even here.”

“She was eleven. You vanished without saying good-bye. Luke and I started fighting, obviously, because of what had happened-”

“What had happened,” Edward repeats softly.

“Anyway, as far as Cara sees it, you were the first step in a chain of events that split her family apart.”

In the forty-eight hours since I got the phone call from the hospital about Cara and the accident, I have held myself together. I have been strong because my daughter needed me to be strong. When the news you don’t want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, Right. What’s next?

So maybe it is because I’m exhausted, but I finally let myself burst into tears. “And I know you’re feeling guilty, about being here, after everything that happened between you and your father. But you’re not the only one who’s feeling that way,” I say. “Because as horrible as this has been, I keep thinking it’s the first step in a chain of events that’s put this family back together.”

Edward doesn’t know what to do with a sobbing mother. He gets up and hands me the entire stack of napkins from the coffee amenities basket. He folds me into an awkward embrace. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he says, and as if by unspoken agreement we leave the family lounge side by side.

Neither one of us comments on the fact that I never did get the coffee I wanted.

LUKE

In the wolf world, it’s in everyone’s best interests to fill a pack vacancy. For the family that’s lost one of its members-one that’s been killed or has gone missing-the ranks are suddenly depleted. A rival pack trying to overtake their territory will become an even bigger threat, and the defensive howl sung by the family will change to an inquiry instead: a higher-pitched question, an invitation to lone wolves in the area to join the pack and battle the rival together.

So what would make a lone wolf answer?

Imagine being all alone in the wild. You are another animal’s potential prey, a rival pack’s enemy. You know that most packs will be prowling between dusk and dawn, so instead you move around during the daytime-but that makes you vulnerable and more easily seen. You walk a precarious tightrope, urinating in streams to disguise your scent, so that you cannot be tracked and challenged. Every turn you make, every animal you meet, is a danger. The best chance of survival you have is to belong to a group.

There is safety in numbers, and security. You put your trust in another member of your family. You say: if you do what you can to keep me alive, I’ll do the same for you.

EDWARD

So my sister hates me because I ruined her childhood. If she understood the irony of that very statement, God, we’d have quite the laugh. Maybe one day, when we’re old and gray, we actually can laugh about it.

As if.

It’s always amazed me how, when you don’t offer an explanation, other people manage to read something between the lines. The note I left my mother, pinned to my pillow so that she’d find it after I split in the middle of the night, told her I loved her, that this wasn’t her fault. It said that I just couldn’t look my father in the eye anymore.

All of this was the truth.

“Thirsty?” a woman says, and I jump back when I realize that the soda fountain I’m standing in front of in the hospital cafeteria is spilling Coke all over my sneakers.

“God,” I mutter, releasing the lever. I glance around to find something to sop up the mess. But the napkins are rationed by the cashiers, some sort of ecofriendly initiative. I look over at the cashier, who narrows her eyes at me and shakes her head. “Luellen?” she yells out over her shoulder. “Call the custodian.”

“Here.” The woman beside me removes a packet of Kleenex from her purse and starts patting my soaked shirt, my pants. I try to take the ball of damp tissues from her, and we wind up bumping heads.

“Oh!”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m a little bit of a wreck.”

“I can see that.” She smiles; she’s got dimples. She’s probably about my age. She’s wearing a hospital ID tag, but no medical coat or scrubs. “Tell you what, the Coke’s on me.” Refilling another cup, she moves my banana and yogurt from my tray onto hers. I follow her into the seating area after she swipes her ID card to pay.

“Thanks.” I rub my hand across my forehead. “I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep lately. This is really nice of you.”

“This is really nice of you, Susan,” she says.

“I’m Edward-”

“Nice to meet you, Edward. I was just correcting you, so you’d know my name for later.”

“Later?”

“When you call me…?”

This conversation is moving in crazy circles I can’t follow.

Immediately, Susan cringes. “Shoot. I should have known better. I swear my gut instinct is permanently disabled. This is creepy, right? Trying to hit on someone in a hospital cafeteria? For all I know you’re a patient or your wife’s upstairs having a baby but you looked so helpless and my parents met at a funeral so I always figure it’s worth taking the chance if you see someone you want to get to know better-”

“Wait-you were trying to hit on me?”

“Damn straight.”

For the first time during this conversation, I smile. “The thing is, I’m not.” Now it is her turn to look confused. “Straight, I mean. I bat for the other team,” I say.

Susan bursts out laughing. “Correction: my gut instinct isn’t just disabled, it’s irrevocably damaged. This might be a new single-girl career low for me.”

“I’m still flattered,” I say.

“And you got a free meal out of it. Might as well enjoy it while you’re here.” She gestures to the seat across from her. “So what brings you to Beresford Memorial?”

I hesitate, thinking about my father, still and silent, in the ICU. About my sister, who hates my guts, and who’s swathed like a fallen soldier from neck to waist in bandages.

“Relax. I’m not going to violate HIPAA with you. I just thought it might be nice to have a conversation partner for a few minutes. Unless there’s somewhere you need to be?”

I should be at my father’s bedside. This is the first time I’ve left it in twelve hours, and I only came to the cafeteria to get enough food to keep me going for another twelve. But instead, I sit down across from Susan. Five minutes, I promise myself. “No,” I tell her, the first in a series of lies. “I’m good.”

When I walk back into my father’s room, two policemen are waiting for me. I’m not even surprised. It’s just one more item on a long list of things I never expected. “Mr. Warren?” the first policeman asks.

It’s strange to be called that. In Thailand I was called Ajarn Warren-Head Teacher Warren-and even that felt uncomfortable, like an oversize shirt that didn’t fit. I’ve never actually known at what point a person becomes a grown-up and starts answering to titles like that, but I am pretty sure I’m not there yet.

“I’m Officer Whigby; this is Officer Dumont,” the cop says. “We’re sorry for your-” He catches himself, before he speaks the word loss out loud. “For what’s happened.”

Officer Dumont steps forward, holding a paper bag. “We recovered your father’s personal effects at the scene of the accident, and thought you might like them,” he says.

I reach out and take the bag. It’s lighter than I think it’s going to be.

They say their good-byes and head out of the room. At the threshold, Whigby turns around. “I watched every single one of his Animal Planet episodes,” he says. “You know the one with the wolf that almost gets poisoned to death? I cried like a baby, swear to God.”

He’s talking about Wazoli, a young female who’d been brought to my father at Redmond’s after being abused at a zoo. He built an enclosure for her and moved two brothers into it, forming a new pack. One day an animal-rights activist broke into Redmond’s after hours and swapped meat that had been delivered from the abattoir for meat laced with strychnine. Since Wazoli was the alpha of the group, she ate first-and collapsed, unconscious, in the pond. The camera crews covered my father fishing her out of the water, carrying her to his trailer, wrapping her in his own blankets to warm her up until she began to respond again.

This policeman isn’t just telling me he’s a fan of wolves. He’s saying, I remember your dad back when. He’s saying, That body in the hospital bed, that’s not the real Luke Warren.

When they’re gone, I sit down beside my father and look through the bag. There’s a pair of aviator sunglasses, a receipt from Jiffy Lube, spare change. A baseball cap whose bill has been chewed. A cell phone. A wallet.

I set the bag down, turning the wallet over in my hands. It’s hardly worn, but then, my father often forgot to carry one. He’d leave it in the console of the truck, because if he went into a wolf enclosure he was likely to have it snatched out of his back pocket by a curious animal. By the age of twelve I had learned to carry cash when I went out with my dad, to prevent the embarrassment of being stuck in a grocery line without the means to pay.

With clinical detachment, I open the wallet. Inside are forty-three dollars, a Visa card, and a business card from a large-animal vet in Lincoln. There’s a feed-and-grain store customer-rewards punch card that says “HAY?” on the back in my father’s handwriting, and has a phone number scrawled beneath it. There’s a wallet-size photo of Cara, with the cheesy blue background that school pictures always have. There’s no indication that he even knew me, at all.

I will give all of this to Cara, I guess.

His driver’s license is inside a laminated pocket. The photo on it doesn’t even look like my father; he’s got his hair pulled back and he’s staring at the camera as if he’s just been insulted.

In the bottom right-hand corner is a small red heart.

I remember filling out the paperwork for my own license when I was sixteen. “Do I want to be an organ donor?” I had yelled to my mother in the kitchen.

“I don’t know,” she’d said. “Do you?”

“How am I supposed to make that decision right now?”

She had shrugged. “If you can’t make it right now, then you shouldn’t check the box.”

At that point my father had walked into the kitchen to grab a snack on his way back out to Redmond’s. I remember thinking that I hadn’t even known he was in the house that morning; my father would come and go with that sort of fluid frequency; we were not his home, we were a place to shower and change and eat a meal occasionally. “Are you an organ donor?” I had asked him.

“What?”

“On your license. You know. I think it would freak me out.” I’d grimaced. “My corneas in someone else’s eyes. My liver in someone else’s body.”

He had sat down at the table across from me, peeling his banana. “Well, if it came to that,” he’d said, shrugging, “I don’t think you’d be physically capable of feeling freaked out.”

In the end, I hadn’t checked off the box. Mostly because, if my father endorsed something, I was dead set on supporting its opposite.

But my father, apparently, had felt differently.

There is a soft knock on the open door, and Trina, the social worker, comes in. She’s already introduced herself to me; she works with Dr. Saint-Clare. She was the one who’d been pushing Cara’s wheelchair the first time my sister was brought in to see my father in his hospital bed. “Hi, Edward,” she says. “Mind if I come in?”

I shake my head, and she pulls up a chair beside mine. “How are you doing?” Trina asks.

It seems like a strange question from someone who does this for a living. Is anyone she meets inclined to say “Fantastic!” Would she even be skulking around near me if she thought I was handling this well?

At first I hadn’t understood why my father, unconscious, had a social worker assigned to him. Then I’d realized Trina was there for me and for Cara. My previous definition of social worker involved foster care-so I wasn’t quite sure what help she could offer me-but she’s been an excellent resource. If I want to talk to Dr. Saint-Clare, she finds him. If I forget the name of the chief resident, she tells it to me.

“I hear you talked to Dr. Saint-Clare today,” Trina says.

I look at my father’s profile. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Have you ever seen someone get better? Someone who’s… as bad off as him?”

I can’t look at the hospital bed when I say this. I stare down at a spot on the floor instead. “There’s a wide range of recoveries from brain injury,” Trina says. “But from what Dr. Saint-Clare has told me, your father’s injury is catastrophic, and his chances of recovery are minimal at best.”

Heat floods my cheeks. I press my hands against them. “So who decides?” I say softly.

She understands what I’m asking.

“If your father had been conscious when he was brought into the hospital,” Trina says gently, “he would have been asked if he’d like to complete an advance directive-a statement explaining who is his health-care proxy. Who has the right to speak on his behalf for all medical decisions.”

“I think he wanted to donate his organs.”

Trina nods. “According to the Anatomical Gift Act, there’s a protocol for which family members are approached, and in what order, to give a directive for organ donation for someone who’s medically incapacitated and unable to speak for himself.”

“But his license has an organ donor symbol.”

“Well, that makes it a little simpler. That symbol means that he’s a registered donor, and that he’s legally consented to donation.” She hesitates. “But, Edward, there’s another decision that needs to be made before you even start to consider organ donation. And in this state, there’s no legal hierarchy to follow when it comes to turning off someone’s life support. The next of kin of a patient with injuries like your dad’s has to make the decision for withdrawal of treatment before anyone even starts talking about organ donation.”

“I haven’t talked to my father in six years,” I admit. “I don’t know what he eats for breakfast, much less what he would want me to do in this situation.”

“Then,” Trina says, “I think you need to talk to your sister.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“Are you sure about that?” the social worker says. “Or is it that you don’t want to talk to her?”

When she leaves a few minutes later, I tip back my head and let out a sigh. What Trina’s said is a hundred percent true-the reason I’m hiding in this room with my father is because he’s unconscious-he can’t get mad at me for walking out six years ago. On the other hand, my sister can and will. First, for leaving without a word. And second, for coming back, and being thrust into a position that naturally belongs to her: the person who knows my father best. The person my father would probably want sitting next to him, now, if given the choice.

I realize that I am still holding my father’s wallet. I take out the license, rub my finger over the little heart, the symbol for an organ donor. But when I go to slip it back into the laminated sleeve, I see there’s something else in there.

It’s a photo, cut down to fit the small pocket in the wallet. It’s from 1992, Halloween. I had on a baseball cap, covered with fur, with two sharp ears sticking up. My face was painted to give me a muzzle. I was four years old, and I had wanted a wolf costume.

I wonder if I knew, even back then, that he loved those animals more than he loved me.

I wonder why he’s kept this photo in his wallet, in spite of what happened.

Even though I was seven years older than Cara, I was jealous of her.

She had auburn ringlets and chubby cheeks, and people used to stop my mother as she was pushing the baby stroller down the street, just to comment on what a beautiful baby she had. Then they’d notice the second grader walking sullenly beside her-too thin, too shy.

But it wasn’t Cara’s looks that made me jealous-it was her mind. She was never the kind of kid who just played with dolls. Instead, she’d position them all around the house and make up some elaborate story about an orphan who travels across the ocean as a stowaway in a pirate ship to find the woman who sold her at birth in order to save her husband from a life in jail. When her report cards came home from elementary school, the teachers always commented on her daydreaming. Once, my mom had to go to the principal’s office because Cara had convinced her classmates that her grandfather was an astrophysicist and that by 6:00 P.M., the sun was going to crash into the earth and kill us all.

Even though there was a significant age gap between us, sometimes when she asked me to play, I’d go along with it. One of her favorite games was to hide inside her bedroom closet and blast off. In the dark, she’d chatter away about the planets we were passing, and when she opened the door again, she gasped about the aliens with six eyes and the mountains that shivered like green jelly.

Believe me, even though I was old enough to know better, all I wanted was to see those aliens and mountains. I think even as a kid, when I realized I was different, my greatest hope was that change was possible, that I could be just like everyone else. Instead, I would open the closet door and glance around at the same old dresser and bureau, at my mother, putting away Cara’s folded laundry.

It was no surprise that when my father went into the wild, Cara offered different explanations to anyone who asked: He’s on a dig with egyptologists in Cairo. He’s training for a space shuttle mission. He’s filming a movie with Brad Pitt.

I have no idea if she really believed the things she was saying, but I can tell you this much: I wished it were that easy for me to come up with excuses for my father.

The floor of the hospital where Cara and the other orthopedics patients are kept is considerably different from the ICU. There’s more activity, for one, and the deathly quiet that makes you want to lower your voice to a whisper on my father’s floor is replaced here by the sounds of nurses interacting with patients, the squeak of the book cart being pushed by a candy striper, the spill of voices from a dozen televisions bleeding past the thresholds of the rooms.

When I walk into Cara’s room, she’s watching Wheel of Fortune. “Only the good die young,” she says, solving the puzzle.

My mother spots me first. “Edward?” she says. “Is everything all right?”

She means with my father. Of course she’d think that. The look on Cara’s face makes my stomach hurt.

“He’s fine. I mean, he’s not fine. But he’s not any different.” I am already fucking this up. “Mom, could I talk to Cara alone for a minute?”

My mother looks at Cara, but then she nods. “I’ll go give the twins a call.”

I sit down in the chair my mother vacated and drag it closer to the bed. “So,” I begin, gesturing to Cara’s bound shoulder. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

My sister stares at me. “I’ve been hurt worse,” she says evenly.

“I, uh, I’m sorry that this is the way we had to have a reunion.”

She shrugs, her mouth pressed into a tight line. “Yeah. So why are you even here?” she asks after a minute. “Why don’t you just go back to whatever you were doing and leave us alone?”

“I will, if you want,” I say. “But I’d really like to tell you what I’ve been doing. And I’d kind of like to know what you’ve been up to, too.”

“I’ve been living with Dad. You know, the guy you’re downstairs pretending to know better than I do.”

I rub my hand over my face. “Isn’t this hard enough without you hating me?”

“Oh. Gosh. You’re right. What am I thinking? I’m supposed to welcome you back with open arms. I’m supposed to ignore the fact that you tore our family to shreds because you’re selfish and you left instead of trying to talk something out, so now you can ride in like some white knight and pretend you give a damn about Dad.”

There’s no way to convince her that just because you put half a planet between you and someone else, you can’t drive that person out of your thoughts. Believe me. I tried.

“I know why you left,” Cara says, jutting her chin up. “You came out and Dad went ballistic. Mom told me so.”

Cara was too young to understand back then, but she’s not now; she would have eventually asked questions. And of course my mother would have told her what she believed to be the answers.

“You know what? I don’t even care why you left,” Cara says. “I just want to know why you bothered to come back when no one wants you here.”

“Mom wants me here.” I take a deep breath. “And I want to be here.”

“Did you find Jesus or Buddha or something in Thailand? Are you atoning for your past so you can move on to the next step in your karmic life? Well, guess what, Edward. I don’t forgive you. So there.”

I almost expect her to stick her tongue out at me. She’s hurt, I tell myself. She’s angry. “Look. If you want to hate me, fine. If you want me to spend the next six years saying I’m sorry, I’ll do that, too. But right now, this isn’t about you and me. We have all the time in the world to figure things out between us again. But Dad doesn’t have all the time in the world. We need to focus on him.”

When she ducks her head, I take it as agreement.

“The doctors are saying… that his injuries aren’t the kind that can heal-”

“They don’t know him,” Cara says.

“They’re doctors, Cara.”

“You don’t know him, either-”

“What if he never wakes up?” I interrupt. “Then what?”

I can tell, from the way her face pales, that she has not let herself go there, mentally. That she hasn’t even let that hint of doubt creep into her head, for fear it will take root like the fireweed that grows along the road in summertime, rampant as cancer. “What are you talking about?” she whispers.

“Cara, he can’t stay hooked up to life support forever.”

Her jaw drops. “Jesus. You hate him so much that you’d kill him?”

“I don’t hate him. I know you don’t believe it, but I love him enough that I’m willing to think about what he’d want, instead of what we’d want.”

“You have a truly fucked-up way of showing your love, then,” Cara says.

Hearing a curse word on my little sister’s lips is like hearing nails on a blackboard. “You can’t tell me that Dad would want machines breathing for him. That he’d want to live with someone having to bathe him and change his diaper. That he wouldn’t miss working with his wolves.”

“He’s a fighter. He won’t give up.” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe we’re even talking about this. I can’t believe you think you have the right to tell me what Dad would or wouldn’t want.”

“I’m being realistic, that’s all,” I reply. “You have to be ready to make some hard choices.”

“Choices?” she says, choking on the word. “I know all about hard choices. Should I have a total breakdown, or hold it together while my parents are splitting up? Even though the one person who’d understand what I’m feeling has totally abandoned me? Do I live with my mother or do I live with my father, because no matter what I decide, I know my answer’s going to hurt the other person. I’ve made hard choices, and I picked Dad. So how dare you tell me I’m supposed to just give him up, now?”

“I know you love him. I know you don’t want to lose him-”

“Before you left, you told Mom you wanted to kill him,” Cara snaps. “So I guess now you have your chance.”

I can’t blame my mother for telling her that. It’s true.

“That was a long time ago. Things change.”

“Exactly. And in two weeks or two months or maybe longer, Dad just might walk out of this hospital.”

That is not what I’ve been led to believe by the neurologists. That is not what I’m seeing with my own eyes. I realize, though, that she is right. How can I make a family decision with my sister when I haven’t been part of this family?

“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I’m sorry I left. But I’m here now. I know you’re hurting, and this time, you don’t have to go through it alone.”

“If you want to make it up to me,” Cara says, “then tell the hospital I should be in charge of what happens to Dad.”

“You’re not old enough. They won’t listen to you.”

She stares at me. “But you could,” she says.

The truth is, I want my father to wake up and get better, but not because he deserves it.

Because I want to leave as soon as possible.

In this, Cara is right. I haven’t been part of this family for six years. I can’t just walk in and pretend to fit seamlessly. I tell my mother this, when I walk out of Cara’s room and find her pacing in the hall. “I’m going back home,” I say.

“You are home.”

“Ma,” I say, “who are we kidding? Cara doesn’t want me here. I can’t contribute anything valuable about what Dad would have wanted in this situation. I’m getting in the way, instead of helping.”

“You’re tired. Overtired,” my mother says. “You’ve been in the hospital for twenty-four hours. Get some rest in a real bed.” She reaches into her purse and pulls a key off a chain of many.

“I don’t know where you live now,” I point out. As if that isn’t proof enough that I don’t belong.

“You know where you used to live,” she says. “This is a spare key I keep in case Cara loses hers. There’s no one in the house, obviously. It’s probably good for you to go there anyway to make sure everything’s all right.”

As if there would be a break-in in Beresford, New Hampshire.

My mother presses the key into my palm. “Just sleep on it,” she says.

I know I should refuse, make a clean break. Start driving back to the airport and book the first flight to Bangkok. But my head feels like it’s filled with flies, and regret tastes like almonds on the roof of my mouth. “One night,” I say.

“Edward,” my mother says, as I am walking away from her. “You’ve been gone for six years. But before that, you lived with him for eighteen years. You have more to contribute than you think you do.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I reply.

“That you can’t make the right decision?”

I shake my head. “That I can,” I tell her. “But for all the wrong reasons.”

I’m having an Alice in Wonderland moment.

The house I step into is familiar, but completely different. There is the couch I used to lie on to watch TV after school, but it’s not the same couch-this one has stripes instead of being a solid, deep red. There are photos of my dad with his wolves dotting the walls, but now they’re mixed in with school pictures of Cara. I walk by them slowly, watching her grow up in increments.

I trip over a pair of shoes, but they aren’t my little sister’s light-up sneakers anymore. The dining room table is covered with open textbooks-calculus, world history, Voltaire. Sitting on the kitchen counter are an empty carton of orange juice, three dirty plates, and a roll of paper towels. It’s the mess of someone who thought he was coming back to clean up later.

There’s a nearly empty box of Life cereal on the counter, which feels more like a metaphor than a housekeeping oversight.

The house has a smell, too. Not a bad one-it’s outdoorsy, like pine and smoke. You know how when you go to someone’s house it smells a certain way… but when you go to your own house it doesn’t smell at all? If I needed any other confirmation that I’m a stranger, this is it.

I push the blinking red button on the answering machine. There are two messages. The first is from a girl named Mariah, and it is for Cara.

Okay, I totally have to talk to you and your cell phone voice mailbox is full. Call me!

The second is from Walter, who lives at Redmond’s Trading Post. Six years ago he was the caretaker for the wolves if my dad wasn’t around-the one who sawed up the calves that came in from the abattoir for food, and who called my dad in the middle of the night if there was a medical problem and my dad happened to be home with us, instead of in the trailer on-site. I guess he’s still the caretaker, because his message is asking a question about medication for one of the wolves.

It’s been two days now that my father hasn’t turned up at Redmond’s. What if no one has told Walter what’s happened?

I push all the buttons on the phone, but I can’t figure out how to call the last incoming number. Well, there’s got to be an address book somewhere around here, or maybe his contact information is on a computer.

My father’s office.

It was what I called it back then, even though my father, as far as I knew, had never stepped foot in it. Technically it was the guest bedroom in our house, but it had a filing cabinet and a desk and the family computer, and we never had guests. It was where, twice a week, I sat down to pay family bills-my chore, just like Cara’s, was loading and unloading the dishwasher. We all had to pitch in when my father left for Canada to join the wild pack. I’m sure he expected my mother to be in charge of our finances, but she wasn’t good with deadlines, and after having the heat turned off twice because of bills past due, we decided that I’d take over. So even at fifteen, I knew how much money it took to run a household. I learned about interest rates through credit card debt. I balanced the checkbook. And once my father came home, it was simply assumed that I’d continue. His mind was always a million different places, but none of them happened to be that office desk, paying bills.

You probably think it’s strange that a teenager would be put in charge of the family finances, that this is bad parenting. I’d argue that taking your kids into wolf enclosures ranks right up there, too. But no one blinked when Cara, at age twelve, became my father’s photogenic costar on his Animal Planet series. My father excelled at making even the greatest naysayers believe that he was entirely in control.

The office chair is the same-one of those ergonomic jobs with pulleys and levers that adjust everything so your back won’t hurt. My mom found it at a garage sale for ten bucks. But the computer is no longer a desktop-it’s a sleek little MacBook Pro with a screen saver of a wolf staring out with so much wisdom in his yellow eyes that, for a moment, I can’t look away. I pull open the file drawers and find one overflowing with envelopes-some marked PAST DUE. As if I’m being drawn by a magnet, I find myself sifting through them. I reach into the drawer on the right to find a checkbook, a pen, stamps. From the size of this stack of envelopes, you’d think no one had paid a bill since I left.

Which, frankly, wouldn’t surprise me.

I have already forgotten what brought me to this office. Instead, I begin automatically sorting the mail, writing out checks, forging my father’s signature. Every time I open an envelope, my heart skips a beat, and I know it’s because I expect to see the same letterhead from six years ago, the bill that left me speechless. The one I wanted to wave in his face, and dare him to lie to me again.

But there is nothing like that. Just utilities, and credit cards that are maxed out, and warnings from collection agencies. I have to stop after the phone bill, the electric bill, and the oil delivery receipt, because the checkbook balance swings into the negative digits.

Where the hell has the money gone?

If I had to guess, I’d say to Redmond’s. My father has five wolf enclosures now-five separate packs that he has to support. And a daughter, too. Shaking my head, I open the top drawer and begin to stuff the unpaid bills back in. This isn’t my problem. I’m not his accountant. I’m not anything to him, anymore.

It’s when I try to jam the envelopes into a drawer too small to contain them that I notice it-the yellowed, wrinkled piece of paper caught on the metal runner of the file drawer. I reach far into the back, trying to tug it free. The corner rips, but I manage to extract the page, and smooth it down beside the laptop.

And just like that, I’m fifteen again.

It was the night before my father was leaving, and Cara and I were hiding.

All day, there had been yelling. My mother would scream, and then my father would shout, and then my mother would burst into tears. If you do this, she said, don’t bother coming back.

You don’t mean that, he said.

Cara looked up at me. She was chewing on a pigtail, and it dropped out of her mouth, wet like a paintbrush. Does she mean it? Cara asked.

I shrugged. The only thing I knew about love was that it was always one-sided. Levon Jacobs, who sat in front of me in algebra, had skin the color of hot chocolate and knew the stats for every player on the Boston Bruins, but the only time he had ever spoken to me was when he needed to borrow a pencil, and besides, like every other guy in my class, he liked girls. My mother loved my father, but he could only think about his stupid wolves. My father loved the wolves, but even he would tell you that they didn’t love him back, that thinking they might was attributing human emotion to a wild animal.

It’s crazy, my mother yelled. This is not how you act when you have a family, Luke. This is not how you act when you’re an adult.

You make it sound like I’m doing this to hurt you, my father replied. This is science, Georgie. This is my life.

Exactly, my mother said. Your life.

Cara pressed her back against mine. She was thin, and I could feel the ridges of her vertebrae. I don’t want him to die.

My father was going to live in the forest without shelter, food, or any protection beyond a pair of heavy canvas coveralls. He planned to stake out one of the natural Canadian corridors for wolf migration and integrate himself into a pack, like he had before with captive groups. If he did, he’d certainly be the first person to really understand how a wild pack functioned.

That is, if he was still alive to talk about it when he was done.

My father’s voice grew softer, like felt. Georgie, he said. Don’t be like this. Not on my last night here.

There was a silence.

Daddy promised me he’d come back, Cara whispered. He said, when I’m older, I can go there with him.

Whatever you do, I said, don’t tell that to Mom.

I couldn’t hear them anymore. Maybe they had made up. There had been arguments like this for the past six months, ever since my father had announced his intention to go to Quebec. I wished he’d just leave, already, because at least that meant they’d stop fighting.

We heard a slam, and a few seconds later, there was a knock at my bedroom door. I motioned for my sister to stay put, and then opened it. My father stood on the other side of the threshold. Edward, he said, we need to talk.

When I opened the door, though, he shook his head and motioned for me to follow him. With a quick glance back at Cara to stay put, I trailed my father into the room we called the office, which was really just a collection of boxes, a desk, and a pile of mail no one bothered to sort through. My father cleared a stack of books off a folding chair so I could sit, and then he rummaged in one of the desk drawers and pulled out two shot glasses and a bottle of Scots whisky.

Full disclosure: I knew the bottle was there. I had even had a few swigs. My dad hardly ever drank because the wolves could smell it in his system, so it wasn’t like he’d notice the level of the liquor inside slowly going down. I was fifteen, after all, and I could also tell you that buried in a stack of old Life magazines in the attic were two Playboys-December 1983 and March 1987-which I had read multiple times in the hope that I would finally feel a spark of arousal at the sight of a naked girl. But having my father offer me a drink was not something I’d anticipated, at least not till I turned twenty-one.

My father and I could not have been more different if we’d actively attempted to be. It wasn’t that I was gay-I’d never seen or heard him act homophobic. It was because, while he was the modern version of a mountain man-all brawn and muscle and visceral instinct-I was more inclined to read Melville and Hawthorne. One Christmas, as a gift, I’d written him an epic poem (I was going through a Milton phase). He’d oohed and aahed and skimmed it, and then later, I overheard him asking my mother what the hell it meant. I know he respected the thirst I had for learning; maybe he even recognized it as the same itch he felt when he knew he had to get outside and hear the dry-throated leaves rasp beneath his footsteps. I used books to escape the same way my father used his work, but he would have been just as baffled by a copy of Ulysses as I would have been by a night spent in the wilderness.

You’re going to be the man of the house, he said, in a way that let me know he had his doubts about my ability to pull off that role convincingly. He poured a centimeter of tawny liquid in the bottom of each glass and handed me one. He drank his in one smooth tip; me, I sipped twice, felt my intestines burst into flame, and set the glass down.

While I’m gone, you may have to make some difficult decisions, my father told me.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. Just because he was off running with the wolves didn’t mean my mother wasn’t going to tell me I had to clean my room and finish my homework.

I don’t think it’s going to come to this, but still. He picked a piece of paper off the blotter on the desk and pushed it toward me.

It was handwritten, and simple.

If I cannot make a decision about my health, I give my permission to let my son, Edward, make any medical decisions that are necessary.

Then a line for his signature. And a line for mine.

My heart started booming like a cannon. I don’t get it.

I asked your mother first, he said, but she refuses to do anything that makes it seem like she was in favor of this trip. And it would be irresponsible to not think about… what could happen.

I stared at him. What could happen?

I knew the answer, of course. I just needed to hear him say it out loud: he was risking everything for a bunch of animals. He was choosing them, over us.

My father didn’t answer directly. Look, he said. I need you to sign this.

I picked up the piece of paper. I could feel the small ridges and hollows where the pen had dug deep, and it made me sick to my stomach to think that, just two minutes ago, my father had been contemplating his own death.

My father handed me a pen. I dropped it on the floor by accident. When we both went to reach for it, his fingers brushed over mine. I got a physical shock, as if he’d electrocuted me. And that’s when I knew I’d sign the paper, even though I didn’t want to. Because unlike my mother, I wasn’t strong enough to let him leave-possibly forever-wishing that things had gone differently. He was offering me a chance to be something I’d never been before: the kind of son he’d always wanted, a boy he could depend on. I needed to be someone he’d want to come back to, or how could I be sure that he would?

He scrawled his signature on the bottom of the page, and then passed the pen again to me. This time I did not let it slip. I carefully formed the E of my name.

Then I stopped.

What if I don’t know what to do? I asked. What if I make the wrong choice?

This is how I knew my father was treating me like an adult, not a kid: he dropped the pretense. He didn’t say that nothing was going to go wrong; he didn’t lie to me. It’s easy. If I can’t answer for myself, and you’re being asked… tell them to let me go.

When people say growing up can happen overnight, they’re wrong. It can happen even faster, in an instant. I picked up the pen, signed the rest of my name. Then I lifted the glass of whisky and drained it.

The next morning, when I woke up, my father was already gone.

For a long moment I stare at the spiky, spidered handwriting of my fifteen-year-old self, as if it is a mirror into my own mind. I had forgotten about this paper until now-and so had my father. A year and 347 days later, he emerged from the Canadian wilderness with hair down to his waist and dirt caked onto his bearded face, scaring the hell out of a bunch of schoolkids at a highway rest stop. He came home to find his household running without him in it, and slowly reaccustomed himself to things like showering and eating cooked food and speaking a human language. He never mentioned that piece of paper again, and neither did I.

More than once back then I’d hear footsteps in the middle of the night and I would slip downstairs to find my father out on the back lawn, sleeping underneath the night sky. I should have realized, even then, that once a person had made a home outdoors, any house would feel like a prison.

Still holding the yellowed paper, I leave the office. I head upstairs in the dark, passing the pink blur of Cara’s room, hesitating at my old childhood bedroom. When I turn on the light, I see it hasn’t changed. My twin bed is still covered with a blue blanket; my Green Day and U2 posters are still on the walls.

Continuing down the hallway, I walk into my parents’ bedroom. My father’s now, I suppose. The wedding ring quilt I remember is gone now, but there’s a hunter-green blanket pulled tight with military precision, the top sheet crisply folded over. On the nightstand is a glass of water and an alarm clock. A phone.

It’s not the house I remember; it’s not my home. The thing is, neither is Thailand.

For a couple of days I’ve been thinking about what happens next-not just for my father but for me. I have a life abroad, but it’s not much of one. I have a dead-end job, a few friends who, like me, are running away from something or someone. Although I came here dragging my feet, intending to fix whatever was broken and then retreat back to safety half a world away, things have changed. I can’t fix what’s broken-not my father, not myself, not my family. I can only try to patch it up and hope like hell it holds water.

It was a lot easier to tell myself that I belonged in Thailand when I could wallow in old hurts, and replay why I left over and over with every drink at a Bangkok bar. But that was before I saw the mistrust in my sister’s eyes, or the walls of this house covered with no pictures of me. Now, I don’t feel quite as self-righteous and expatriate. I just feel guilty.

Once, I made the radical, momentous decision to leave life as I knew it behind. Now, I make that decision again.

I pick up the phone and call my landlord in Chiang Mai, a very sweet widow who has me over to her apartment for dinner at least once a week, and tells me the same stories about her husband and how they met. In halting Thai I tell her about my father’s condition, and ask her to box up my stuff and mail it to this address. Then I call my boss at the language school and leave a message on his voice mail, apologizing for leaving midterm, but explaining that this is a family emergency.

I take off my shoes and lie down. I fold the paper in half, and then in half again, and tuck it into the pocket of my shirt.

It was a long time ago, but once, my father trusted me enough to tell me what he wanted, should he wind up in the situation he’s in now. It was a long time ago, but once, I promised him I would do what he asked.

I may never be able to tell him what I’ve been doing since I left, or make him understand me. I may never have a chance to offer an apology, to listen to his. He probably will never know I traveled back to be with him, to sit in his hospital room.

But I will.

In Thailand I always have trouble falling asleep. I blame it on the noise, the heat, the throb of a city. But tonight I fall asleep in minutes. When I dream, it’s of pine needles under my bare feet as I run, of a winter that seeps through the skin.

LUKE

On the day I walked into the woods north of the St. Lawrence River, I wore insulated waterproof coveralls, insulated boots, long underwear. In my pockets were extra pairs of socks and a hat and gloves; a roll of wire, some string, granola bars, jerky. My last eighteen dollars I gave to the trucker who let me hitchhike across the border with him. My driver’s license I slipped into a zippered pocket of the coveralls. If things didn’t work out, it might be the only way to identify what was left of me.

I didn’t bring a backpack or a sleeping bag or a camp stove or matches. I wanted to be unencumbered, and I wanted to live as much like a lone wolf as I could. The idea, after all, was to find a pack with a vacancy that might allow me to join them. The last human I spoke to-for nearly two years-was the trucker who dropped me off. “Bonne chance,” he said, in his Quebecois accent, and I thanked him and slipped into the fringe of pine trees that lined the edge of the highway. No fanfare. Nowadays, I’d probably have sponsorship endorsement patches all over my coveralls; I’d be swilling Gatorade from a CamelBak, and my progress would be simulcast on the Web and on a reality TV show. But then, fortunately, it was just me and the wolves.

I could tell you that I was a man on a mission, determined and brave and stalwart. The truth was, for twelve hours of the day, I was. I walked along old logging trails and would sometimes cover twenty miles of terrain a day, but I made sure I could get back to fresh water daily. I studied scat to see which animals were in the area, and rigged snares with the wire, string, and branches to catch squirrels, which I’d skin and eat raw. I urinated in streams, so that my scent couldn’t be traced by predators. But the mountain man in me disappeared at around seven o’clock, when the sun set the tops of the pines on fire and slowly disappeared for the night.

Then, I was terrified.

Imagine your worst nightmare. Now imagine it’s real. That’s what it is like to feel the dark close around you like an angry fist. Every twitch and hoot and skittering leaf becomes a potential threat. When nature switches off her light, there’s nothing you can do to turn it back on again. The first four nights I was in the wild, I slept in a tree, certain that I was going to be killed by a bear or a mountain lion. The fifth night, I fell out of the tree, and realized I was just as likely to die by breaking my neck. After that, I slept on the ground-but lightly, jumping alert at the slightest sound.

My learning curve was staggeringly steep. Within a week, I understood that in the wild, time moves much more slowly. A wind is never just a wind-it’s the email system of the natural world, bringing in new information about weather patterns, animals coming into and leaving the area, potential predators. Rain isn’t a nuisance-it’s a respite from bugs and fresh water for drinking. A snowfall isn’t an inconvenience-it’s a new source for tracks and animals that might become a meal. The rustling of the trees or the song of a bird or the scrabble of a rodent is the key to your survival; being able to spot a flicker of movement through the dense block of foliage is essential. When it is a matter of life and death, the volume of nature gets turned up loud.

Everyone asks what I thought of, all by myself, alone for so long. The truth is, I didn’t think about anything. I was too busy trying to keep myself alive and to read the signs that were presented to me, like some kind of hieroglyphic code without the Rosetta stone for guidance. If I thought about Cara and Edward and Georgie, I knew I’d be distracted enough to miss either an opportunity or a threat, and I could not risk that. So I didn’t think. Instead, I survived. I spent the days amazed at the beauty of a spiderweb, laced between branches; at the jagged rise of a mountain ridge in the distance; at the dusk rolling over the woods like a purple carpet. I tracked herds of deer and watched two beavers engineer a phenomenal dam. I dozed off, because midday naps were safer than nighttime ones.

For a month, I didn’t see or hear any wolves, and I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake.

The fourth week I was in the wild, a nor’easter hit. I moved away from the riverbank and huddled under evergreen trees, because they absorb moisture with their roots, and the ground beneath them would be that much drier. Unable to hunt and shivering and starving, I got sick. I drifted in and out of a feverish spell as the rain pelted me, wondering why the hell I’d ever thought of coming out here. I hallucinated that the forest had legs, that the roots of the trees were kicking me in the gut and the kidneys. I coughed until I vomited bile. There were points when I wished for a big cat or a bear, for anything that would swiftly put me out of my misery.

I think, looking back on it, that I had to get sick. I had to scrape away the very last bit of my humanity so that I would start behaving like a wolf, and not like a man. And in those dire straits, a wolf would not wallow in self-despair. Wolves do not give up. They assess the situation and ask, What can I eat? How can I protect myself? Even wounded, they will run until they can no longer stand.

Although it was only October, the elevation was high enough that it snowed. When my fever broke, I woke to find myself covered with a blanket of white, which I shook off as I sat upright. I glanced around to make sure I was safe, and that was when I saw it, pressed into the snow about three feet away from me: the paw print of a single, male wolf.

Scrambling to my feet, I searched the area for other prints-proof that a pack had been here-but found nothing. This animal either was scouting for his pack or was a lone wolf.

The wolf knew where I was. He could easily find his way back to me and, now that I wasn’t feverish and unconscious, consider me a threat to be dispatched. The sane thing to do was to move on instead of putting myself in danger. But instead, I did something that jeopardized my safety, that made my position blatantly known, surely as if I was sending up a search flare.

I threw back my head, and I howled.

CARA

When my friend Mariah sees me in the hospital bed, she bursts into tears. It’s almost ridiculous, the way I’m the patient but I have to hand her the box of Kleenex and tell her that it’s going to be all right. She pushes a stuffed purple bear at me. It’s holding a balloon that says CONGRATULATIONS. “iParty ran out of the Get Well Soon bears,” she says, sniffling. “God, Cara. I can’t believe this happened. I’m so sorry.”

I shrug-or at least I would shrug, if my shoulder weren’t immobilized. I realize she feels just as guilty about me being out at the party with her as I feel about my dad coming to get me there. If not for Mariah, I wouldn’t have been in Bethlehem; if not for me, my father wouldn’t have been on the roads that night. I hadn’t even wanted to go out; we’d been planning pizza and a chick flick overnight at Mariah’s house. But Mariah invoked the best friend code: I would do it for you. And so, like an idiot, I went.

“It’s not your fault,” I tell her, although I don’t really believe this when I say it to myself.

My mother, who has been living at the hospital, is in the family lounge down the hall with the twins and Joe. She hasn’t brought them in to see me. She is afraid that all the bandages and bruises will give them nightmares, and she doesn’t want Joe to have to deal with that while she’s sleeping here with me. It makes me feel like the Frankenstein monster, like something that has to be hidden away.

Mariah stares into her lap. “Is your dad… is he going to-”

“Tyler,” I interrupt.

She glances at me, her face red and puffy. “What?”

“Tell me what happened.” Tyler is the reason we went to the party; he’s the guy who invited Mariah. “Did he drive you home? Did you hook up? Has he texted you?”

Even to my own ears, my voice sounds like a string that’s been pulled too tight. Mariah’s face crumples, and she starts crying again. “You’re stuck in a hospital and you had to have major surgery and your dad is, like, in some kind of coma and you want to talk about a guy? It’s not important. He’s not important.”

“No, he’s not,” I say quietly. “But he’s what we’d be talking about if I wasn’t in a hospital and if this never had happened. If you and I are talking about Tyler, then for five seconds I get to be normal.”

Mariah wipes her nose on her sleeve and nods. “He’s kind of a dick,” she says. “He got wasted and started telling me how his ex had gotten a boob job over the summer and how he wanted to tap that.”

“Tap that,” I repeat. “He actually used that phrase?”

“Gross, right?” She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“That he looked like Jake Gyllenhaal,” I remind her. “That’s what you said to me, anyway.”

Mariah leans back in her chair. “Next time I decide to drag you somewhere for the sake of my nonexistent love life will you just hit me with a two-by-four?”

I smile, and it’s been so long that my face aches when I do. “Next time,” I promise.

I let her tell me about how she’s sure our French teacher has a brain tumor, because what else could be making her assign five poems to be memorized in a single week, and how the latest rumor in school is that Lucille DeMars, a goth kid who only talks to a sock puppet she wears on her right hand and who calls that performance art, was caught having sex with a substitute teacher in the music practice room.

I don’t tell Mariah that when I first saw my father, I felt like all the air around me had gone solid, and that I couldn’t for the life of me draw it into my lungs.

I don’t tell her that I feel like I’m going to burst into tears all the time.

I don’t tell her that this afternoon I went into the patient lounge and googled “head injuries” and found more stories about people who never recovered than about people who did.

I don’t tell her that after all those years of wishing my brother would come home, now that he’s here, I wish he wasn’t. Because then the doctors and the nurses and everyone who’s taking care of my dad would come to me, instead of him.

I don’t tell her that it’s hard to fall asleep, and if I get lucky and do manage to drift off, I wake up screaming because I remember the crash.

I especially don’t tell her what happened just before. Or after. Instead, for the whole forty minutes Mariah is here, I let myself pretend that I’m the girl I used to be.

There are many moments I thought I’d get to experience with my brother that never happened because he quit the family. Like having him grill my first boyfriend before a date, or teach me how to drive in empty parking lots, or buy me a six-pack of beer to drink under the bleachers after prom. When he first left and my parents were separated, I used to write to him every night. Somewhere in my closet behind the stuffed animals I can’t bear to throw away and the clothes that no longer fit is a shoe box filled with letters I never sent, because I didn’t have an address for him.

I’ll be honest, I used to imagine our reconciliation, too. I thought it might be seconds before I got married-Edward showing up just before I walked down the aisle, telling me he couldn’t miss seeing his baby sister’s wedding. I pictured everything fuzzy at the edges, like in a Lifetime movie, and him telling me I’d grown up even better than he’d ever imagined. Instead, I got a stilted hello over my father’s respirator. My mom said Edward came down to check on me a couple of times after I had my surgery when I was still pretty out of it, but for all I know, she’s just making that up to make me feel better.

Which is why it’s still surreal to have him standing at the foot of my bed, holding a conversation with me. Behind him, muted, the television shows a contestant spinning the Wheel of Fortune.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” he asks.

No, I’m here for the gourmet food, I silently reply. Someone buys a vowel. There are two A’s.

“I’ve been hurt worse,” I tell him.

My dad used to tell me that a wounded wolf wasn’t himself. He might know you as a brother but rip your throat out with his teeth. When pain factors into the equation, the outcome is unpredictable. I’ve told Edward that I’m not in pain, but that’s a lie. My shoulder might not hurt, thanks to the drugs, but morphine’s done nothing for my heart.

This is the only reason I can give for why I use every word like a weapon to shove him away, when all I really want is to be held right now.

“I know why you left,” I tell him. “Mom told me.”

The fact that he’s gay doesn’t faze me. But I’ve always felt like the whole mystery surrounding my brother’s exit was on a need-to-know basis. At first my mom said it was because Edward and my dad had a fight. Eventually I learned it was because Edward had come out to my dad, who said something that was apparently so god-awful Edward had to leave. Here’s my take on it, though: millions of gay teens come out to their parents, and some have stupid reactions. Just because my father wasn’t perfect, Edward bailed. And that led my mom to blame my dad, and eventually they broke up. The story of my life, as framed by my brother’s impulsive decision to make a grand exit.

“You know what?” I say. “I don’t even care why you left.”

This isn’t a lie, actually. I don’t care why Edward left. All I really want to know is why I wasn’t enough to make him stay.

I’m dangerously near tears right now, something I attribute to the fact that you can’t get any goddamned sleep in a hospital, since someone’s always waking you up to take your blood pressure or your temperature. I won’t let myself believe it’s because Edward has gotten underneath my skin. I’ve worked too hard building a brick wall around my feelings to admit that he might have chiseled his way inside so fast. “Did you find Jesus or Buddha or something in Thailand?” I say. “Guess what, Edward. I don’t forgive you. So there.”

I sound like a spoiled brat. He’s reduced me to that. I hate him even more for making me into someone I’m not than I do for the fact that he’s been sitting upstairs with my dad, making himself into someone he’s not.

But Edward doesn’t even flinch; it’s as if he’s reading the text of me with some magic internal Rosetta stone that makes him understand what I say is not what I mean at all. “Right now, this isn’t about you and me,” he says patiently. Calmly. “We have all the time in the world to figure things out between us again. But Dad doesn’t.”

The fact that he’s finally asking for my input about my father makes me dizzy. For a moment, I feel ridiculously happy-the way I used to when Edward picked me up from elementary school in his old beater, and all my friends had to go home instead with their moms in decidedly less cool vehicles. He let me name his car, actually. Chase. Viper. Lucifer, he had suggested. Something badass. Instead, I called it Henrietta.

“Cara, he can’t stay hooked up to life support forever.”

Maybe it’s the pain medication in my system; maybe it’s just plain shock. But it takes me a few seconds to connect the dots. To realize that my brother, who’d left after a fight with my father, had grown that hatred like a spider plant until, years later, its offshoots threaten to fill every inch of him. “You hate him so much that you’d kill him?”

Edward’s eyes grow darker. Mine do that, too, when I’m angry. It’s strange to see it mirrored in someone else’s face. “You have to be ready to make some hard choices.”

That’s when I lose it. Who is my brother to tell me about choices-my brother, who gave up on this family six years ago? He has no idea what it’s like to hear your mother crying at night through the walls, to have a strange woman come up during your dad’s daily wolf talk at Redmond’s and slip you a piece of paper with her phone number on it. He has no idea what it is like to attend your own mother’s second wedding, and then come home to find your father drinking himself under the table, asking what the ceremony was like. He has no idea how it feels to be responsible for buying groceries so the family doesn’t starve, for forging signatures on report cards and making excuses when your father forgets a teacher conference. He has no idea what it’s like to visit his mother and see her with the twins and feel obsolete. He has no idea.

The reason I’ve made the choices I have is because I wanted to save my family, just as much as Edward was hell-bent on destroying it. Because when you get down to it, the only person you can trust is the one you’d lay down your own life for. And I’m going to do that for my father now, no matter what Edward thinks.

I cannot look at him, so I stare over his shoulder. The contestant on Wheel of Fortune loses her turn.

“I know you’re hurting,” Edward says after a moment. “This time, you don’t have to go through it alone.”

“It?”

He glances away. “Losing someone you care about.”

He’s wrong, though. Even with him standing three feet in front of me, I have never felt so isolated. So I do what any wolf would, if cornered. “You’re right. Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure Dad gets better.”

Edward’s mouth tightens. “If you want to be taken seriously, then act like an adult,” he replies. “You heard the doctors. He’s not coming back, Cara.”

I stare at him. “You did.”

He tries to argue, but I pick up the remote control and turn on the sound on the television. There is a ringing as a contestant gets twelve hundred dollars for choosing a W. I push the buttons, so that the applause drowns out Edward’s voice.

I am behaving like a two-year-old. But maybe that’s okay, because, by definition, toddlers need their parents.

I stare at the Wheel of Fortune until Edward gives up and leaves the room. Under my breath, I solve the puzzle: Blood is thicker than water.

The next contestant guesses a P; the buzzer sounds.

People can be so stupid sometimes.

The first time I came face-to-face with a wolf, I was eleven years old. My father had just opened up the first enclosure at Redmond’s. He waited until after hours and then took me past the first safety fence, and up to the second one. Inside were Wazoli, Sikwla, and Kladen, the first captive wolves he’d brought to the park. He made me crouch down, with the chain-link safely separating me from the wolves, and hold up my fists so that the knuckles just grazed the wire. This way, the wolves would get used to my scent.

Wazoli, the alpha female, immediately darted to the far end of the enclosure. “She’s more afraid of you than you are of her,” my father said quietly.

Sikwla was the tester, and Kladen the enforcer wolf. Big, with strong black markings down his back and tail, as if someone had taken a Sharpie marker to him, he came right up to the fence and stared at me with his wide eyes. Instinctively, I backed away into my father, who was standing behind me. “They can smell your fear,” he told me. “So don’t give an inch.”

In a low, calm voice, he told me what was going to happen: he would open the outside gate that led into the enclosure, and then we would step into the little wire double gate and lock it behind us. Then he’d open the inside gate, and I would go in. I had to stay down low, and not move. The wolves might ignore me, or run away, but if I waited, they might also come closer.

“They can tell if your heart rate goes up,” my father whispered. “So don’t let them know you’re afraid.”

My mother did not want me inside the wolf enclosure, and with good reason-who would willingly put a child right smack in the middle of danger? But I had watched my father insinuate himself into this pack now for months. I might never take my position at a carcass and rip away the meat with my teeth, like he did, while two wolves snapped on either side of him-but he was hoping Wazoli would have pups, and I wanted to help raise them.

I wasn’t afraid of Wazoli. As the alpha, she would never come near me-she had all the knowledge of the pack and she would stay as far away from an unknown entity as possible. Kladen was big, 130 pounds of muscle, but he didn’t scare me as much as Sikwla, who just a month ago had sent a park employee to the hospital after biting down on his finger all the way to the bone. The guy was a groundskeeper who had reached through the chain-link to pat Sikwla, thinking he was rubbing up against the fence for a scratch, and before he knew it the wolf had turned and bitten him. Screaming, he tried to pull away, which only made Sikwla bite down harder. Had he just stayed perfectly still, Sikwla would have probably let go.

Every time I saw the groundskeeper walking around Redmond’s with his bandaged hand, I shuddered.

My father said that with himself in the enclosure, too, Sikwla would most likely leave me alone.

“Are you ready?” my father asked, and I nodded.

He opened the second gate, and we both went inside. I crouched down where my father had told me to crouch and waited as Kladen walked past me. I held my breath, but he just continued to lope toward the copse of trees in the back of the enclosure. Then Sikwla approached. “Steady,” my father whispered, and all of a sudden Kladen came barreling at him, knocking him onto the ground in greeting.

Because of that, because my attention flickered, Sikwla seized his moment and went for my throat.

I could feel the pierce of his incisors, feel the wet heat of his breath. His fur was wiry and coarse and damp. “Don’t move,” my father grunted, unable to free himself fast enough to rescue me.

Sikwla was a tester wolf; this was his job in the family. I was a threat until proven otherwise; just because I’d come into the enclosure with my father, whom they accepted, didn’t mean they wanted me around. Sikwla set the standards for this pack; this was his way of making sure I measured up.

At the time, though, I didn’t think of any of this. I thought: I am going to die.

I didn’t breathe. I didn’t swallow. I tried not to let my pulse show what I felt. Sikwla’s teeth pressed into the flesh of my neck. I wanted to shove at him with all my strength. Instead, I closed my eyes.

Sikwla let go.

By then my father had wrestled Kladen away and grabbed me into his arms. I didn’t start to cry until I saw that he had tears in his eyes.

This is what I am thinking of when, just after three in the morning, I crawl out of bed. It is not easy, with a single hand, and I am certain I am going to wake up my mother, who is sleeping on a pullout chair beside me. But she only rolls over and starts snoring lightly, and I slip into the hallway.

The nurses’ station is to the right, but the elevators are to the left, which means I don’t have to pass by them and be interrogated about why I’m out of bed at this hour of the night. Keeping to the shadows, I shuffle down the corridor, careful to hold my bandaged arm tight against my stomach to keep my shoulder from being jostled.

I already know my brother won’t be in my father’s room. My mom told me she gave him the key to our house-something that makes me feel uneasy. Most likely Edward won’t be poking around in my room-and it’s not like I have anything to hide-but still. I don’t like the thought of being here, while he is there.

The skeleton staff in the ICU doesn’t notice the girl in the robe with the bandaged arm and shoulder who gets off the elevator. This is a blessing, since I really didn’t know how to explain my migration from the orthopedic ward to this one.

My father is bathed in a blue light; the glow from the monitors surrounds him. He does not look any different to me than he did yesterday-surely this is a good thing? If he were, as Edward said, not coming back, wouldn’t he be getting worse?

There is just enough space for me to sit on the bed, to lie down on my good side. It makes my bad shoulder ache like hell. I realize I can’t hug him, because of the bandage, and he can’t hug me, either. So instead I just lie next to him, my face pressed against the scratchy cotton of his hospital gown. I stare at the computer screen that shows that steady, solid beat of his heart.

The night after I went into the wolf enclosure for the first time I woke up to find my father sitting on the edge of my bed, watching me. His face was outlined with moonlight. “When I was in the wild, I was chased by a bear. I was sure I was going to die. I didn’t think there could be anything more terrifying,” he said. “I was wrong.” He reached out one hand and tucked my hair behind my ear. “The scariest thing in the world is thinking that someone you love is going to die.”

Now, I feel tears coming, a feather at the back of my throat. With a steady breath, I blink them away.

They can smell your fear, he taught me. Don’t give an inch.

LUKE

Two weeks went by without any sign or sound of the wolf that had come so close to me when I was sick. And then one morning, when I was drinking from a stream, I suddenly saw an image rise in the reflection beside my own. The wolf was big and gray, with strong stripes of black on the top of his head and his ears. My heart started hammering, but I didn’t turn around. Instead, I met his yellow eyes in the mirror of the water and waited to see what he would do next.

He left.

Any doubts I’d had about what I was doing vanished. This was what I had hoped for. If the big animal that had approached me at the stream was truly wild, he may have been just as curious about me as I was about him. And if that was the case, I might be able to get close enough to understand their behavior from within, instead of observing from outside.

I wanted nothing more than to see that wolf again, but I wasn’t sure how to make that happen. Leaving food around the area would attract not just the wolf but also bears. If I called to the wolf, he might respond-even if he was a lone wolf, having a partner is safer than being alone-but that calling would also reveal my position to other predators. And honestly, although I hadn’t seen proof of any other wolves since I’d come into the wild, I couldn’t be sure that this wolf was the only one in the area.

I realized that if I was going to take the next step, it meant moving out of my comfort zone. Hell, it meant leaping blindfolded off the cliff of my comfort zone.

I adjusted my schedule so that I was sleeping during the day, and waking at dusk. I would have to travel in the darkness, even though my eyes and my body were not suited to it. This was much more threatening than any night I’d spent at the zoo in the captive pack’s enclosure; for one thing, I was walking nearly ten miles in pitch darkness in a single night; for another, I didn’t have to worry about other animals when I was in the wolf enclosure at the zoo. Here, if I tripped over an exposed tree root or splashed in a puddle or even stepped loudly on a branch, I was sending up a flare alerting every other creature in the wild to my location. Even when I was trying to be quiet, I was at a disadvantage; other animals were better at seeing and hearing in the dark and were watching every move I made. If I fell down, I was as good as dead.

What I remember about that first night was that I was sweating like mad, even though it was near freezing. I would take a step, and then hesitate to make sure I didn’t hear anything coming toward me. Although there were only a scattered handful of stars that night, and the moon had a veil draped over its face, my vision adjusted enough to register shadows. I didn’t need to see clearly. I needed to see movement, or a flash of eyes.

Because I was effectively blind, I used my other senses to their fullest. I breathed deeply, using the breeze to identify the scents of animals that were watching me pass. I listened for rustling, for footsteps. I stayed upwind. When the long fingers of dawn cupped the horizon, I felt as if I’d run a marathon, as if I’d conquered an army. I had survived a night in the Canadian forest, surrounded by predators. I was still alive. And really, that was all that mattered.

GEORGIE

By the fifth day after the accident, I can tell you what the soup of the day is going to be in the cafeteria and what times the nurses change shifts and where, at the orthopedics floor coffee station, they keep the packets of sugar. I’ve memorized the extension of Dietary, so that I can get Cara extra cups of pudding. I know the names of the physical therapist’s children. I keep my toothbrush in my purse.

Last night, the one night I’d tried to go home, Cara had spiked a fever-an infection at the incision site. Although the nurses told me it was common, and although my absence wasn’t correlative, I still felt responsible. I’ve told Joe I’m going to stay at the hospital as long as Cara does. A heavy dose of antibiotics has brought down her fever some, but she’s out of sorts, uncomfortable. Had she not faced this setback, we might have been wheeling her out of the hospital today. And although I know this isn’t possible-that you can’t will yourself to have an infection-there is a part of me that thinks Cara’s body did this in order to make sure she could stay close to Luke.

I am pouring myself my fifth cup of coffee of the day in the small supply room that has the coffee machine in it, a godsend provided by a nurse with a kind heart. It’s amazing, really, how quickly the extraordinary can start to feel like the commonplace. A week ago I would have started my morning with a shower and a shampoo and would have packed lunch for the twins and walked them to the bus stop. Now, it feels perfectly normal to wear the same clothes for days in a row, to wait not for a bus but for a doctor doing rounds.

A few days ago the thought of Luke’s brain injury felt like a punch in my gut. Now, I am just numb. A few days ago I had to fight to keep Cara in her bed, instead of at her father’s bedside. Now, even when the social worker asks her if she’d like to visit him, she shakes her head.

I think Cara is afraid. Not of what she’ll see but of what she won’t.

I reach into the little dorm-size fridge for the container of milk, but it slips through my hands and falls onto the floor. The white puddle spreads beneath my shoes, under the lip of the refrigerator. “Goddammit,” I mutter.

“Here.”

A man tosses me a wad of industrial brown napkins. I do my best to mop up the mess, but I’m near tears. Just once-once-I’d like something to be easy.

“You know what they say,” the man adds, crouching down to help. “It’s not worth crying over.”

I see his black shoes first, and his blue uniform pants. Officer Whigby takes the sopping napkins from my hands and tosses them into the trash. “There must be something else you need to do,” I say stiffly. “Surely someone’s speeding, somewhere? Or an old lady needs help crossing the street?”

He smiles. “You’d be surprised at how many old ladies are self-sufficient these days. Ms. Ng, honestly, the last thing I want to do is bother you at a time when you’re already under a lot of stress, but-”

“Then don’t,” I beg. “Let us get through this. Let me get my daughter out of the hospital and let my ex-husband…” I find I can’t finish the sentence. “Just give us a little space.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, ma’am. If your daughter was driving drunk, then she could be looking at a negligent homicide charge.”

If Joe were here, he’d know what to say. But Joe is back in my old life, making lunches for the twins and walking them to the bus stop. I straighten my spine and, with a confidence I didn’t know I still had, turn my full gaze on the policeman. “First of all, Luke isn’t dead. Which means your charge is irrelevant. Second, my ex may be many things, Officer, but he’s not a fool, and he wouldn’t have let Cara drive home if she was drunk. So unless you have hard facts and evidence that can prove to me my daughter was responsible for that accident, then she’s just a minor who made a bad choice and got drunk and needed to be picked up by her dad. If you’re going to arrest her for underage drinking, I will assume you’ve already arrested every other teenager who was at that party. And if you haven’t, then it turns out I was right the first time around: you’ve got something else you need to do.”

I push past him, sailing back to Cara’s room with my chin held high. Joe would be proud of me, but then again, he’s a defense attorney, and anything that sticks it to The Man is a mark of honor in his book. What I find myself thinking about is Luke, instead. There’s a fire in you, he used to say. It was why he wanted to marry me. Underneath my reporter’s silk blouse and my graduate degree in journalism, he said, was someone who always came up swinging. I think he believed that someone with a spark like that could understand a man who lived on the edge of death every day. It truly took him by surprise to find out that I wanted the house, the garden, the kids, the dog. I may have had a spark inside me, but I needed sturdy, solid walls to keep it from being snuffed out.

When I get back to Cara’s room, I realize that I’ve left my coffee with Officer Whigby, and that my daughter is wide awake and sitting up. Her cheeks are flushed, and her hairline is damp, which suggests that the fever’s broken. “Mom,” she says, her words tumbling, “I know how to save Dad.”

LUKE

Three weeks later, I was walking northeast when a wolf suddenly stepped out from behind a tree in front of me. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you if it was the same gray wolf that had come to the stream before, or a new one. His golden eyes locked on mine for nearly half a minute, which feels like forever when you are facing a wild animal. He didn’t bare his teeth or growl or show any fear, which led me to believe that he’d known of my presence much longer than I’d known of his.

The wolf turned away and walked into the woods.

After that, I saw the wolf every few days when I least expected it. I’d be springing fresh kill from a trap and would feel myself being watched-only to turn and find him there. I would open my eyes from a catnap and catch him staring, a distance away. I didn’t speak to him. I didn’t want the wolf to see me as a human. Instead, every time he appeared, I lay on the ground or rolled onto my back, offering up my throat and my belly, the universal sign of trust. By exposing my weakest areas, I was acknowledging that he could kill me-quickly or slowly, whatever he wished-and asking, How balanced an individual are you? What would happen then-what should happen then-was that the dominant wolf would change his energy level, squeezing my throat with his muzzle and then letting go as if to say, I could hurt you… but I choose not to. And just like that, our hierarchy of roles would be established.

One evening, when I was sitting under a tree and wondering if I smelled snow in the air, the wolf stepped into the clearing before me. But then a second wolf stepped out. A third. Three more. They began to dart in and out of the trees, sewing up the space around me. There were four males and two females, and from the looks of it, the wolf that had been visiting me was one of the younger ones. He had probably been sent by the alpha female to learn more about me.

The next day, I tried to find the pack. But although I looked for weeks, they had made themselves all but invisible. Crushed-was this the extent of the wolf interaction I’d have in the wild? Had I gotten this close only to be disappointed?-I fell into my former habits. During the nights I’d wander, but in the daytime I went back to the spot where I had first met up with the entire pack.

Several weeks went by, and then they returned. They were down to five members-one of the males was absent-and seemed more skittish than they had been the last time. They settled in about forty yards away. The young male I’d seen first played with his sister, rolling in the snow and chasing each other like puppies. Occasionally one of the older wolves would warn them off with a throaty growl, and eventually they collapsed in a tired heap.

I wish I could explain to you what it felt like to be near them. To know that, of all the places in the woods where they might have relaxed, they chose to be near me. I had to believe it was intentional; there were plenty of places they would not have had to keep a wary eye on the stranger in the distance.

The combination of euphoria and hope, of feeling like I’d been chosen in some way, was enough to sustain me during the weeks when they would vanish-weeks of ice storms and snow when it sometimes felt like I was the only living thing left in the universe.

I would sleep during the day, when it was warmest, but even then, sometimes, the temperatures were brutal. Then, I’d find shelter from the cold: a rock cave, a fallen tree with a hollow inside it, even a little burrow in a pile of snow-a personal igloo. I’d line the space with pine boughs for warmth. I’d pile green branches to keep out falling snow or a wild wind. I’d eat whatever I could trap, and when that failed, I’d split open a rotten log with my hands and pick off the ants.

One night, the pack howled. It was low, painful, mournful-the type of cry meant to search for someone who was missing. In this case I figured it was for the big gray male that had not returned. They howled every night that week, and on the fourth night, I replied. I called the way a lone wolf would call, if he thought there might be a position in a pack for him.

At first, there was only silence.

And then, like a miracle, the whole pack howled back.

EDWARD

The wolf has chewed through the seat belt of the rental car.

“Goddammit,” I say, tugging the belt away from the latticed grate of the cage. “Didn’t he teach you any manners?”

I wonder if the optional insurance I took on the rental car covers damage by wild animal.

I wonder how much trouble I’m going to get into.

Mostly I wonder why I let Cara talk me into doing this.

I had headed to the hospital this morning with the best intentions-and clutching the piece of paper I’d found with my signature on it. I’d tried to show it to Cara before, but my timing was off: a surgical resident was examining her sutures in the morning and then she was being sponge bathed by a nurse and then my father had been taken down for another CT scan, and then she was running a fever. Today, I had been determined to show it to her. Cara might not believe I had any right to speak for my father, but I had proof otherwise.

After checking on my father (no change, as if I needed any more reason to talk to my sister), I had gone upstairs to the orthopedics floor. Cara was sitting up in bed, sweaty and disheveled. My mother stood beside her. They both turned when I walked in. “I have something to show you,” I’d said, but Cara interrupted me before I could show her the paper.

“The wolves,” she announced. “That’s what he needs.”

“What?”

“Dad’s always saying that the wolves communicate on a different level than humans do. And he can’t hear us telling him to wake up. So what we have to do is bring him to Redmond’s.”

I had blinked at her. “Are you crazy? You can’t transport a guy on a ventilator to some crappy theme park-”

“Oh, right, I forgot I was talking to you,” she snapped. “Instead we should just kill him.”

I’d felt the paper burning where it rested against my chest. “Cara,” I’d said evenly, “no doctor is going to sign off on a field trip for Dad.”

“Then you have to bring a wolf here instead.”

“Because nothing says ‘sterile environment’ like ‘wolf.’” I turned to my mother. “Don’t tell me you agree with her.”

Before she could answer, Cara had interrupted. “You know Dad would move heaven and earth to save one of the animals in his packs. Don’t you think they’d do the same for him?” She swung her legs over the bed.

“Where do you think you’re going?” my mother asked.

“To call Walter,” Cara said. “If you two won’t help me, I’m sure he will.”

I had looked at my mother. “Can you explain to her why this is impossible?”

My mother touched Cara’s good arm. “Honey,” she said. “Edward’s right.”

Hearing those words on her lips-well, on anyone’s lips-I can’t tell you how it made me feel. When you are the family fuckup, receiving credit is almost overwhelming.

This is really the only explanation I can offer as to why I did what I did. “If I do this,” I had said to Cara. “If I do this for you, and it doesn’t work… then will you listen to what I have to say?”

Her eyes met mine, and she’d nodded, a nonverbal contract. “Tell Walter to give you Zazigoda,” she said. “He’s the one we take to schools. Once, when he got spooked, Dad kept him from jumping through a window.”

My mother shook her head. “Edward. How are you going to-”

“And he has to ride in the front seat,” Cara interrupted. “He gets carsick.”

I had zipped up my coat. “In case you were even wondering,” I told her, “Dad’s condition is the same as it was last night.”

Cara smiled at me then. It was the first real smile she’d offered me since I came home. “But not for long,” she had said.

Redmond’s Trading Post is a sorry anachronism from a time before 3D and Sony PlayStations-a poor man’s Disney World. In the winter, it’s even more depressing than it is during its high season. Closed to everyone but a few animal caretakers, it feels like the land that time forgot. This was only reinforced by the sight that greeted me the minute I hopped over the turnstiles and let myself into the park: a faded animatronic dinosaur with icicles dripping off its chin that roared at me and tried to swing a massive tail mired in snowdrifts.

It felt strange to walk up the hill to the wolf enclosures, as if I were peeling back years with each footstep, until I was a kid again. As I passed by one of the pens, a pair of timber wolves trotted along the fence line with me, watching to see if I might lob a rabbit over the chain-links as a treat. My father’s old trailer stood at the crest of the hill, above the enclosures. A curl of smoke pumped from the woodstove vent in the trailer, although when I knocked no one answered.

“Walter?” I called out. “It’s Edward. Luke’s son.” The door swung open at my touch, and I found myself knocked backward by a memory. Nothing had changed in this trailer. There was the sofa with foam cushions that had been ripped by the teeth of countless wolf pups, where I had read dozens of books while my father gave the daily wolf talk to the trading post visitors. There was the bathroom with a toilet flushed by a foot pump.

There was the narrow bed, where everything had gone to hell.

This was a bad idea; I never should have listened to Cara; I should just go back to the hospital… I slammed my way out of the trailer, and heard a whistle of bluegrass coming from the wooden shack where the fresh meat brought in for the wolves was refrigerated. I poked my head inside and found Walter in a butcher’s apron, quartering a deer with a gigantic knife. Half Abenaki, Walter is six foot four and bald, with spirals of tattoos up both arms. As a kid, I’d been alternately mesmerized and terrified by him.

Walter looked up at me as if he was seeing a ghost.

“It’s me,” I said. “Edward.”

At that, he dropped the knife and folded me into a bear hug. “Edward,” he said. “If you’re not the spitting image…” He stepped back, frowning. “Did he-?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Nothing’s changed.”

I glanced outside the abattoir, where a trio of wolves were staring at me from behind a fence. My father used to talk about the wisdom in a wolf’s eyes; even a layperson who comes in contact with the species will often feel unnerved the first time he is face-to-face with a wolf. They don’t just look at you; they look into you. Maybe, I thought, Cara had a point.

I’d called Walter last night from my father’s house and had explained his condition, but now I told Walter why I’d come here today-namely, what Cara felt a wolf encounter would do for my father. He listened quietly, his mouth twisting, as if he could chew on the plan and spit out the bits he didn’t like. When I finished speaking, he folded his arms. “So you want to bring a wolf into the hospital.”

“Yeah,” I said, ducking my head. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”

“The thing is, you don’t know how to handle a wolf. Just cause it looks like a dog don’t mean it is one. You want me to come along?”

For a moment I gave this serious consideration. “It’s better if I’m alone,” I said finally. That way only one of us would get in trouble.

I followed Walter out of the abattoir, down the hill to the enclosures. As we approached one fence, a pair of gray wolves bounded toward him. The smaller one only had three legs. “Morning, boys,” he said and pointed to the one that was racing back and forth in front of the fence, completely unimpeded by his lack of a limb. His gaze slipped like a splinter under my skin. “That’s Zazigoda,” Walter told me. “His name means lazy. Your dad, he’s got a sense of humor.”

Walter reached into the game pouch of his jacket and tossed a frozen squirrel into the woods at the rear of the enclosure. The other wolf trotted off to claim it as Zazigoda waited for his own reward. But instead of taking another squirrel from his jacket, Walter extracted a brick of Philadelphia cream cheese. He tore off a corner, and Zazi began to lick it. “Milk products calm ’em down,” he explained.

I vaguely remembered my father telling me how an alpha female who knows she’s going to give birth soon might direct her pack to kill the lactating doe in a herd of deer, simply because she knows the hormones running through the prey animal’s system will take the edge off the emotions of those that eat it. Then, by the time the pups are born, the rest of the pack will be more mellow and likely to accept them.

“We rescued Zazi,” Walter said, moving into the enclosure without any hesitation. “A hunter found him when he was about a year old. His leg had gotten caught in a bear trap, and he chewed it off. Your dad played nursemaid. The vet said he was a goner; he was too weak; his wound was infected; he’d be gone before the end of the week. But Zazi, he blew those odds away. You know how in life, there are people, and then there are people? Well, there are wolves, and then there are wolves. Zazi’s one of those. You tell him he ain’t going to make it, and he’ll prove you wrong.”

I wondered if this was why Cara wanted me to bring Zazi, in particular. Because his story so closely mirrored what she wanted to happen to my father.

Walter looked up at me. “Since your dad nursed him, he’s always been more comfortable around humans than a wolf ought to be. Great with kids, great with film crews. That’s why we’ve always used him for community outreach.” He dragged a crate into the pen and easily loaded the wolf inside. “One day we were at a school with Zazi. Your dad, he likes to pick a couple of kids from a class to come up and touch the fur of a wolf, hands on, if you get what I mean. To make them curious but not terrified about wolves. But he eyeballs the kids to make sure he’s not picking the class clowns, and before he does this, he lays down the rules-mostly to keep the wolf safe from the kids. If a kid moves a certain way, or comes up too fast, or just doesn’t pay attention, all hell can break loose.”

Walter leaned down to the mesh wire at the front of the crate and let Zazigoda lick his knuckles. “One day an aide brought a kid with special needs up to the front of the room. Kid was maybe ten years old and had never spoken a word; he was in a wheelchair and had profound disabilities. The aide asked if the boy could touch the wolf. Now, your dad, he didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, he didn’t want to turn the kid away; on the other hand, he knew that Zazi could easily read anxiety and could turn on the boy quickly, thinking he had to defend himself. Zazi’s not a hybrid; he’s a wild animal. So your dad asked the aide if the boy could communicate any signs of fear or distress, and the aide said no, he couldn’t communicate at all. Against his better judgment, your father lifted Zazi up to the table, where he could be eye level with the boy’s wheelchair. Zazi looked at the boy, then leaned forward and started licking around his lips. Your dad leaned forward to intervene, figuring Zazi had smelled food, and that the boy was going to freak out and push Zazi away. But before your dad could pull Zazi back, the boy’s mouth started working. It was garbled, and it was hard to hear, but that boy said his first word right in front of us: wolf.”

I leaned down and grabbed the handle of the crate with Walter, beginning the long climb uphill. “If you’re telling me this to make me feel any better about taking a wild animal to a hospital, it’s not helping.”

Walter glanced at me. “I’m telling you this,” he said, “because Zazi’s no stranger to miracles.”

It’s actually something Walter has said that gives me the idea: Just cause it looks like a dog don’t mean it is one. Since no one would ever be stupid enough to bring a wild animal into a hospital, folks who see me with Zazi will assume he is a domestic animal instead. That means all I have to do is come up with a valid reason to have a dog there in the first place.

The way I see it, I have two options. The first is a therapy dog. I have no idea if they use them at this particular hospital, but I know there are trained volunteers who bring Labs and springers and poodles into pediatric wards to boost the spirits of the sick kids. From what I understand, these dogs are usually older, calmer, unruffled-which pretty much leaves Zazi out of the running.

The only other kind of dog I’ve ever seen in a hospital is a Seeing Eye dog.

At a gas station, I buy a pair of hideous, oversize black sunglasses for $2.99. I call my mother’s cell, to tell her that I am on my way and that she should meet me in my dad’s room, with Cara. Then I park in the hospital lot, as far away from other cars as I can get.

The front seat has been moved back on its runners to accommodate Zazi’s crate, which takes up every inch of available space. I get out of the car and open the passenger door, eyeballing the wolf through the metal door of the crate. “Look,” I say out loud, “I don’t like this any more than you do.”

Zazi stares at me.

I try to convince myself that when I open this crate the wolf isn’t going to sink his teeth into my hand. Walter’s already put a harness on him; all I have to do is attach the leash.

Well. If he does bite me, at least I’m already at the hospital.

With brisk efficiency I open the crate and snap the heavy carabiner onto the metal hook of the wolf’s harness. He jumps out of the crate in one smooth, graceful motion and starts tugging me forward. I barely have time to close the car door, to whip my sunglasses out of my pocket.

The wolf takes a piss on every lamppost lining the walkway into the hospital. When I yank on his leash once to get him moving, he turns around and snarls at me.

If the volunteers sitting at the welcome desk of the hospital think it’s strange to see a blind man who’s dragging his dog, instead of the other way around, they don’t say anything. I am blissfully thankful that we are the only ones in the elevator that takes us up to the third-floor ICU. “Good boy,” I say when Zazi lies down, paws crossed.

But when the bell dings just prior to the door opening, he leaps to his feet, turns around, and nips my knee.

“Shit!” I yelp. “What was that for?”

I lean down to see if he’s drawn blood, but by then the doors have opened and a candy striper is waiting with a stack of files. “Hi,” I say, hoping to distract her from the fact that I have a wolf on a leash.

“Oh!” she says, surprised. “Hello.”

That’s when I realize that if I’m blind, I shouldn’t have known she was there.

Suddenly Zazi starts loping down the hall. I struggle to keep up, forgetting about the candy striper. An Amazon of a nurse follows. She is taller than me, with biceps that suggest she could probably beat me in arm wrestling. I saw her the first day I came to the hospital, but she hasn’t been at work again until today-so she doesn’t recognize me, or question my sudden new disability. “Excuse me, sir? Sir?”

This time I remember not to turn around until she calls me.

“Are you talking to me?” I ask.

“Yes. Can you tell me which patient you’re here to see?”

“Warren. Lucas Warren. I’m his son, and this is my guide dog.”

She folds her arms. “With three legs.”

“Are you kidding me?” I say, grinning with my dimples. “I paid for four.”

The nurse doesn’t crack a smile. “We’ll have to get clearance from Mr. Warren’s doctors before the dog can go inside-”

“A guide dog can go in all places where members of the public are allowed and where it doesn’t pose a direct threat,” I recite, information gleaned from Google on my phone after my sunglasses purchase at the gas station. “I find it hard to believe a hospital would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

“Service dogs are allowed into the ICU on a case-by-case basis. If you’ll just wait here for a second I can-”

“You can take it up with the Department of Justice,” I say as Zazi starts pulling hard on the leash.

I figure I have five minutes max before security gets here to remove me. The nurse is still shouting as Zazi drags me down the hall. Without any direction from me, he leads me through the doorway of my father’s room.

Cara is cradled against the canvas sling of a wheelchair; my mother stands behind her. My father is still immobile on the bed, tubes down his throat and snaking out from beneath the waffle-weave blanket. “Zazi!” Cara cries, and the wolf bounds over to her. He puts his front paws on her lap and licks her face.

“He bit me,” I say.

My mother has backed into a corner, not too thrilled to be in the same room as a wolf. “Is he safe?” she asks.

I look at her. “Isn’t it a little late to be asking that?”

But Zazi has turned away from Cara and is whimpering beside my father’s bed. In a single, light leap, he jumps onto the narrow mattress, his legs bracketing my father’s body. He delicately steps over the tubes and noses around beneath the covers.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” I say.

“Just watch,” Cara replies.

Zazigoda sniffs at my father’s hair, his neck. His tongue swipes my father’s cheek.

My father doesn’t move.

The wolf whines, and licks my father’s face again. He drags his teeth across the blanket and paws at it.

Something beeps, and we all look at the machines behind the bed. It’s the IV drip, needing to be changed.

“Now do you believe me?” I say to Cara.

Her jaw is set, her face determined. “You just have to give it a minute,” she begs. “Zazi knows he’s in there.”

I take off the sunglasses and step in front of her, so that she has to meet my gaze. “But Dad doesn’t know Zazi’s here.”

Before she can respond, the door bursts open and the desk nurse enters with a security guard. I shove the sunglasses onto my face again. “It was my sister’s idea,” I say immediately.

“Way to throw me under the bus,” Cara mutters.

The nurse is practically having a seizure. “There. Is. A dog. On the bed,” she gasps. “Get. The dog. Off. The. Bed!”

The security guard holds me by the arm. “Sir, remove the dog immediately.”

“I don’t see a dog in here,” I say.

The nurse narrows her eyes. “You can drop the blind act, buster.”

I take off my sunglasses. “Oh, you mean this?” I say, pointing to Zazi, who jumps down and presses himself against my leg. “This isn’t a dog. This is a wolf.”

Then I grab the leash and we run like hell.

The hospital decides not to press charges when Trina the social worker intervenes. She is the only member of the staff who understands why I had to bring the wolf to the hospital. Without it, Cara wouldn’t broach a conversation about my father’s condition and his lack of improvement. Now that my sister has seen with her own eyes how even his wolves can’t elicit a reaction, Cara can’t help but understand that we’re running out of options, out of hope.

I think Zazi knows what’s up, too. He goes into his crate without any fight and curls up and sleeps for the entire ride back to Redmond’s Trading Post. This time when I drive up to the trailer, Walter comes out to greet me. His face is as open as a landscape; he’s waiting for the good news, for the story of how my father suddenly returned to the world of the living. But I can’t speak around the truth that’s jammed like a cork in my throat, so instead I help him haul the crate out of my car, and carry it down to the enclosure where Zazi’s companion is keeping watch along the perimeter of the fence. When Walter releases Zazi, the two wolves slip between the army of trees standing at attention at the back of the pen. I watch Walter lock the first gate to the enclosure, and then walk to the second gate. He’s holding the leash and harness in his hands. “So,” he prompts.

“Walter,” I say finally, testing the size and shape of these words in my mouth, “whatever happens, you’ll still have a job. I’ll make sure of it. My dad would want to know someone he trusts will still take care of the animals.”

“He’ll be back here in no time, telling me what I’m doing wrong,” Walter says.

“Yeah,” I say. “No doubt.”

We both know we’re lying.

I tell him I have to get back to the hospital, but instead of leaving Redmond’s right away, I stop to watch the animatronic dinosaurs. I dust snow off a cast-iron bench and wait the twelve minutes to the hour, so that I can hear the T. rex come to life. Just like earlier, he cannot thrash his tail the way he should, because of the snowdrifts.

In my sneakers and my jeans, I jump the fence so that I am knee-deep in the snow. I start clearing it out with my bare hands. It only takes a few seconds before my fingers are red and numb, before the snow melts into my socks. I smack the green plastic tail of the T. rex, trying to dislodge the ice, but it stays stuck. “Come on,” I yell, striking it a second time. “Move!”

My voice echoes, bouncing off the empty buildings. But I manage to do something, because the tail begins to sweep back and forth as the fake T. rex goes after the same fake raptor once again. I stand for a second, watching, with my hands tucked under my armpits to warm them up. I let myself pretend that the T. rex might actually reach the fraction of an inch that’s necessary to finally get his prey, that instead of his going through the motions there will be progress. I let myself pretend that I have, successfully, turned back time.

A lot can happen in six days. As the Israelis will tell you, you can fight a war. You can drive across the United States. Some people believe six days is all it took for God to create a universe.

I’m here to tell you that a lot might not happen in six days, too.

For example, a man who’s suffered a severe head trauma might not get any worse, or any better.

For four nights now, I’ve left behind the hospital room to go to my father’s home, where I pour a bowl of stale cereal and watch Nick at Nite. I don’t sleep in his bed; I don’t really sleep at all. I sit on the couch and listen to endless episodes of That ’70s Show.

It’s weird, walking out of the hospital every night during a vigil. The whole day has somehow passed me by, and the stars reflect on the snow that’s fallen while I was unaware. My life is moving forward in a weird empty narrative, missing one key character, whose current life is a continuous loop. I bring back things I think my father would want to find at the hospital if he were to awaken: a hairbrush, a book, a piece of mail-but this only makes the house feel even emptier when I’m in it, as if I’m slowly liquidating its contents.

After the wolf debacle, when I got back to the hospital, I went to Cara’s room. I wanted to show her the letter I’d found in Dad’s file drawer. But this time there was a team of physical therapists in there talking about shoulder rehab and testing her range of motion, which had her in tears. Whatever I had to say to her, I decided, could still wait.

Now, the next morning, as I am headed to her room, I am ambushed by Trina the social worker. “Oh good,” she says. “You heard?”

“Heard what?” There are a hundred red flags waving in my mind.

“I was just headed downstairs to get you. We’re having a family meeting in your sister’s room.”

“Family meeting?” I say. “Did she put you up to this?”

“She didn’t put me up to anything, Edward,” Trina says. “It’s a meeting to share medical information about your father with both of you at the same time. I suggested we do it in Cara’s room because it would be more comfortable for her than being transported to a conference room.”

I follow Trina into the room and find a handful of nurses I’ve seen going in and out of my father’s room and some I haven’t; Dr. Saint-Clare; a neurology resident; and Dr. Zhao from the ICU. There’s also a chaplain, or that’s who I am assuming he is, since he’s wearing a white collar. For a moment I think this is a setup, that my father has already died and this is the way they thought best to tell us.

“Mrs. Ng,” Trina says, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”

My mother just blinks. “What about Cara?”

“Unfortunately, this meeting is for Mr. Warren’s next of kin,” the social worker explains.

Before my mother can go, Cara grabs her sleeve. “Don’t leave,” she whispers. “I don’t want to be alone for this.”

“Oh, baby,” my mother says. She smooths Cara’s hair back from her face.

I step into the room and maneuver around everyone until I am standing beside my mother. “You won’t be,” I tell Cara, and I reach for her hand.

I have a sudden jolt of memory: I am crossing the street so that I can walk my little sister into school. I don’t let go of her hand until I know both her feet are firmly planted on the opposite sidewalk. You have your lunch? I ask, and she nods. I can tell she wants me to hang around because it’s cool to be the only fifth grader talking to a senior, but I hurry back to my car. She never knows it, but I don’t drive off until I see her walk through the double doors of the school, just to be safe.

“Well,” Dr. Saint-Clare says. “Let’s get started. We’re here today to update you on your father’s medical condition.” He nods to the resident, who sets a laptop on Cara’s bed so we can all see the scanned images. “As you know, he was brought into the hospital six days ago with a diffuse traumatic brain injury. These are the CT scans we took when he was first brought into the ICU.” He points to one side of the image, which looks muddy, swirled, an abstract painting. “Imagine that the nose would be here, and the ear here. We’re looking up from the bottom. All this white area? That’s blood, around the brain and in the ventricles of the brain. This large mass is the temporal lobe hematoma.”

He clicks the mouse pad so that a second scan appears beside the first. “This is a normal brain,” he says, and he really doesn’t have to say anything else. There are clear, wide black expanses in this brain. There are strong lines and edges. It looks tidy, organized, recognizable.

It looks completely different from the scan of my father’s brain.

It’s hard for me to understand that this fuzzy snapshot is the sum total of my father’s personality and thoughts and movements. I squint at it, wondering which compartment houses the animal instincts he developed in the wild. I wonder where language is stored-the nonverbal movements he used to communicate with his wolves, and the words he forgot to say to us when we were younger: that he loved us, that he missed us.

Dr. Saint-Clare clicks again so a third scan appears on the screen. There is less white around the edges of the brain, but a new gray patch has appeared. The surgeon points to it. “This is the spot where the anterior temporal lobe used to be. Removing it and the hematoma, we were able to reduce some of the swelling in the brain.”

Dr. Saint-Clare had said that taking out this piece of my father’s brain would not affect personality but would probably mean the loss of some memories.

Which ones?

His year with the wolves in the wild?

The first time he saw my mother?

The moment he knew I hated him?

The neurosurgeon was wrong. Because losing any one of those memories would have changed who my father was, and who he’d become.

Cara tugs my arm. “That’s good, right?” she whispers.

Dr. Saint-Clare pushes another button, and the image on the laptop refreshes. This is a different angle, and I tilt my head, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. “This is the brain stem,” he explains. “The hemorrhages reach into the medulla and extend into the pons.” He points to one spot. “This is the area of the brain that controls breathing. And this is the area that affects consciousness.” He faces us. “There’s been no distinguishable change since your father’s arrival.”

“Can’t you do another operation?” Cara asks.

“The first one was done to alleviate high pressure in the skull-but that’s not what we’re seeing anymore. A hemicraniectomy or a pentobarb coma isn’t going to help. I’m afraid your father’s brain injury… is unrecoverable.”

“Unrecoverable?” Cara repeats. “What does that mean?”

“I’m sorry.” Dr. Saint-Clare clears his throat. “Since the prognosis for a decent recovery is so poor, a decision needs to be made whether to continue life-sustaining treatment.”

“Poor isn’t the same as impossible,” Cara says tightly. “He’s still alive.”

“Technically, yes,” Dr. Zhao replies. “But you have to ask yourself what constitutes a meaningful existence. Even if he were to recover-which I’ve never seen happen to a patient with injuries this severe-he wouldn’t have the same quality of life that he had before.”

“You don’t know what will happen a month from now. A year from now. Maybe there will be some breakthrough procedure that could fix him,” Cara argues.

I hate myself for doing this, but I want her to hear it. “When you say the quality of life would be different, what do you mean exactly?”

The neurosurgeon looks at me. “He won’t be able to breathe by himself, feed himself, go to the bathroom by himself. At best, he’d be a nursing home patient.”

Trina steps forward. “I know how difficult this is for you, Cara. But if he were here, listening to everything Dr. Saint-Clare just said, what would he want?”

“He’d want to get better!” By now Cara is crying hard, working to catch her breath. “It hasn’t even been a full week!”

“That’s true,” Dr. Saint-Clare says. “But the injuries your father has sustained aren’t the kind that will improve with time. There’s less than a one percent chance that he’ll recover from this.”

“See?” she accuses. “You just admitted it. There’s a chance.”

“Just because there’s a chance doesn’t mean there’s a good probability. Do you think Dad would want to be kept alive for a year, or two, or ten based on a one percent probability of maybe waking up and being paralyzed for the rest of his life?” I ask.

She faces me, desperate. “Doctors aren’t always right. Zazi, that wolf you brought here yesterday? He chewed off his own leg when it got caught in a trap. All the vets said he wouldn’t make it.”

“The difference is that Dad can’t compensate for his injuries, the way Zazi did,” I point out.

“The difference is that you’re trying to kill him,” Cara says.

Trina puts her hand on Cara’s good shoulder, but she jerks her body away in a twist that makes her cry out in pain. “Just leave!” Cara cries. “All of you!”

Several machines behind her start to beep. The nurse attending her frowns at the digital display. “All right, that’s enough,” she announces. “Out.”

The doctors file through the door, talking quietly to each other. Another nurse comes in to fiddle with Cara’s morphine pump as the first nurse physically restrains her.

My mother bursts through the doorway. “What the hell just happened?” she asks, looking at me, and the nurses, and then at Cara. She makes a beeline for the bed and gathers Cara into her arms, letting her cry. Over my mother’s shoulder, Cara fixes her eyes on me. “I said leave,” she mutters, and I realize that when she told this to the doctors, she was including me.

Within seconds, the morphine kicks in and Cara goes limp. My mother settles her against the pillows and starts whispering to the duty nurse about what happened to get Cara into this state. My sister is glassy-eyed, slack-jawed, almost asleep, but she fixes her gaze directly on mine. “I can’t do this,” Cara murmurs. “I just want it to be over.”

It feels like a plea. It feels as if, for the first time in six years, I might be in a position to help her. I look down at my sister. “I’ll take care of it,” I promise, knowing how much those words have cost her. “I’ll take care of everything.”

When I leave Cara’s room, I find Dr. Saint-Clare on a phone at the nurses’ station. He hangs up the receiver just as I come to stand in front of him.

“Can I ask you something?” I say. “What would actually… you know… happen?”

“Happen?”

“If we decided to…” I can’t say the words. I shrug instead, and rub the toe of my sneaker on the linoleum.

But he knows what I’m asking. “Well,” he says. “He won’t be in any pain. The family is welcome to be there as the ventilator gets dialed down. Your father may take a few breaths on his own, but they won’t be regular and they won’t continue. Eventually, his heart will stop beating. The family is usually asked to leave the room while the breathing tube is removed, and then they’re invited back in to say good-bye for as long as they need.” He hesitates. “The procedure can vary, though, under certain circumstances.”

“Like what?”

“If your father ever expressed interest in organ donation, for example.”

I think back four days ago-was it really only that long?-when I sifted through the contents of my father’s wallet. Of the little holographic heart printed on his license. “What if he did?” I ask.

“The people from the New England Organ Bank get contacted with every case of severe brain trauma, whether or not the patient has previously expressed a desire to donate. They’ll come talk with you and answer any questions you have. If your father is a registered donor, and if the family chooses to withdraw treatment, the timing can be coordinated with the organ bank so that the organs can be recovered as per your father’s wishes.” Dr. Saint-Clare looks at me. “But before any of that happens,” he says, “you and your sister need to be on the same page about removing your father from life support.”

I watch him walk down the hallway, and then I slip along the wall closer to Cara’s room again. I hang back so that I will not be seen but can still peer inside. Cara’s sleeping. My mother sits beside the bed, her head pressed to her folded hands, as if she’s praying.

Maybe she still does.

When I used to walk Cara to school, and then sat in my car making sure she went all the way into the double doors, it wasn’t just because I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t snatched by some perv. It was because I couldn’t be who she was-a little kid with pigtails flying behind her; her backpack like a pink turtle shell; her mind full of what-ifs and maybes. She could convince herself of anything-that fairies lived on the undersides of wild mushrooms, that the reason Mom cried at night was because she was reading a depressing novel, that it wasn’t a big deal when Dad forgot it was my birthday or missed her performance in a holiday concert because he was too busy teaching Polish farmers how to keep wolves off their land by playing audiotapes of howls. Me, I was already jaded and tarnished, skeptical that a fantasy world could keep reality at bay. I watched her every morning because, in my own little Holden Caulfield moment, I wanted to make sure someone was keeping her childhood from getting just as ruined as mine.

I know she thinks I abandoned her, but maybe I got back at just the right time. I’m the only one who has the power to let her be a kid a little while longer. To make sure she doesn’t have herself to blame for a decision she might second-guess for the rest of her life.

I can’t do this, my sister had said.

I just want it to be over.

Cara needs me. She doesn’t want to talk to the doctors and the nurses and the social workers anymore. She doesn’t want to have to make this choice.

So I will.

The best day I ever spent with my father was nearly a disaster.

It was just after Cara was born. My mother had been reading parenting books, trying to make sure that a little boy who’d been the sole focus of her attention for seven years wouldn’t freak out when a baby was brought home. (I did try to feed Cara a quarter, once, as if she was an arcade pinball machine, but that is a different story.) The books said, Have the new baby bring the sibling a gift! So when I was brought to the hospital to meet the tiny pink blob that was my new sister, my mother patted the bed beside her. “Look at what Cara brought,” she told me, and she handed me a long, thin, gift-wrapped package. I stared at her belly, wondering how the baby had fit inside, much less a present this big, and then I got distracted by the fact that it was mine. I unwrapped it to find a fishing pole of my own.

At seven, I was not like other boys, who ripped the knees of their jeans and who caught slugs to crucify in the sunlight. I was much more likely to be found in my room, reading or drawing a picture. For a man like my father, who barely knew how to fit into the structure of a traditional family, having a nontraditional son was an impossible puzzle. He didn’t know, literally, what to do with me. The few times he’d tried to introduce me to his passions had been a disaster. I’d fallen into a patch of poison ivy. I’d gotten such a bad sunburn my eyes swelled shut. It reached the point where, if I had to go to Redmond’s with my dad, I stayed in his trailer and read until he was finished doing whatever he needed to do.

I would have much rather had a new art kit, all the little pots of watercolor paint and markers lined up like a rainbow. “I don’t know how to fish,” I pointed out.

“Well,” my mother exclaimed. “Then Daddy needs to teach you.”

I’d heard that line before. Daddy’ll show you how to ride a bike. Daddy can take you swimming this afternoon. But something always came up, and that something wasn’t me.

“Luke, why don’t you and Edward go test it out right now? That way Cara and I can take a little nap.”

My father looked at my mother. “Now?” But he wasn’t about to argue with a woman who’d just given birth. He looked at me and nodded. “It’s a great day to catch a fish,” he said, and just those words made me think that this could be the start of something different between us. Something wonderful. On television, dads and sons fished all the time. They had deep conversations. Fishing might be the one thing that my father and I could share, and I just didn’t know it yet.

We drove to Redmond’s. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “While I’m feeding the wolves, you’re going to dig up worms.”

I nodded. I would have dug to China for worms if that were a prerequisite. I was with my father, alone, and I was going to fall in love with fishing if it killed me. I pictured a whole string of days in my future that involved us, bonding over walleye and stripers.

My father took me to a toolshed behind the cage where the gibbons were kept and found a rusted metal shovel. Then we walked to the manure pile behind the aviary, where all the keepers carted their wheelbarrows daily after cleaning the animal cages. He overturned a patch of earth as rich as black coffee and put his hands on his hips. “Ten worms,” he said. “Your hands are going to get dirty.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

While he checked on his pack, I carefully plucked a dozen worms out of the soil and confined them in the Ziploc bag my dad had given me. He returned with a fishing rod of his own. Then we ducked out the back gate behind the lions and I followed my father into the woods, parting the green fingers of ferns to walk down a muddy path. I was getting bitten by mosquitoes and I wondered how long it would be until we were there (wherever we were headed), but I didn’t complain. Instead, I listened to my father whistle, and I imagined how awesome it would be to show my fishing pole to my best friend, Logan, who lived next door, and who couldn’t stop bragging about the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game he’d gotten for his birthday.

After about ten minutes the woods opened up to the edge of a highway. My father held tight to my hand, looked both ways, and then jogged across the road. Water sparkled, like the way my mother’s ring sometimes made light dance on the ceiling. There was a fence, and a white sign with black letters.

“What’s NO TRESPASSING?” I asked, sounding it out.

“It means nothing,” my father said. “No one owns the land. We’re all just borrowing it.”

He lifted me over the fence and then hopped it himself, and we sat side by side at the edge of the reservoir. My father’s fishing rod was rusty where mine was gleaming. And mine had a red and white bobber on the line, like a tiny buoy. I sat on my knees, then on my bottom, and then got up on my knees again. “The first rule of fishing,” he told me, “is to be still.”

He showed me how to release the hook from the eye where it was safely tucked, and then he reached into the plastic bag to pull out a worm. “Thank you,” he said under his breath.

“For what?”

He looked at me. “My Native American friends say an animal that gives its life to feed another animal should be honored for the sacrifice,” my father said, and he speared the worm onto the hook.

It kept wriggling. I thought I might throw up.

My father knelt behind me, and put his arms around me. “You push the button here,” he said, pressing my thumb against the Zebco reel, “and you hold it. Swing from right to left.” With his body flush against mine, he swayed us in tandem, and at the last minute he let go of the button so that that line arched over the water, a silver parabola. “Want to try?”

I could have done it myself. But I wanted to feel my dad’s heartbeat again, like a drum between my shoulder blades. “Can you show me one more time?” I asked.

He did, twice. And then he picked up his own fishing rod. “Now, when the bobber starts going up and down, don’t pull. There’s a difference between a nibble and taking the bait. When it goes down and stays down, that’s when you pull back and start reeling in.”

I watched him thank another worm and thread his hook. I held my rod so tightly my knuckles were white. There was a wind coming out of the east, and that made the bobber bounce around on the water a little bit. I worried that I might miss a fish because I thought it was the breeze. But I also worried that I’d reel in my line too early; that my worm would have given its life for nothing.

“How long does it take?” I asked.

“Rule number two of fishing,” my father said. “Be patient.”

Suddenly there was a yank on my line, as if I had woken up from a dream in the middle of a game of tug-of-war. I nearly dropped the pole. “Itsafishitsafish,” I cried, getting to my feet, and my father grinned.

“Then you’d better bring it in, buddy,” he said. “Nice and slow…”

Before he could help me, though, he got a fish on his line, too. He stood up as the fish zipped further into the middle of the reservoir, bending the tip of his pole like a divining rod. Meanwhile, my fish broke through the surface of the water with a splash. I had reeled as far as I could; the fish was thrashing and flailing inches away from my chest.

“What do I do now?” I shouted.

“Hold on,” my father instructed. “I’ll help you as soon as I get mine in.”

The fish was a perch, tiger-striped, with tiny jagged edges along its fins. Its eyes were glassy and wild, like those of the porcelain doll that used to belong to my mom’s grandma and that she said was too old and special to do anything but sit on a shelf. I tried twice to grab the perch, but it slithered and flapped out of my grasp.

But my father had told me to hold on, and so, even though I was afraid those spikes on its fins would poke into me, even though the fish smelled like the inside of a rubber boot and slapped me with its tail, I did.

My fist closed around the fish, which was no bigger than six inches long, but which seemed huge. My fingers didn’t fit all the way around its belly, and it was still struggling against me and trying to dislodge the hook in its mouth, which broke through the silvery skin of its throat and made me feel sick to my stomach. I squeezed a little harder, to make sure it wouldn’t get away.

But I guess I squeezed a little too hard.

The eyes of the perch bulged, and its entrails squirted from its bottom. Horrified, I dropped my fishing rod and stared at my hand, covered with fish guts, and at the dead perch still hooked to the line.

I couldn’t help it; I burst into tears.

I was crying for the fish and the worm, which had both died for no good reason. I was crying because I had screwed up. I was crying because I thought this meant my father wouldn’t want to fish with me again.

My father looked at me, and at the remains of the perch. “What did you do?” he said, and in that single moment of distraction, his own line snapped. Whatever huge fish he’d been reeling in was gone.

“I killed it,” I sobbed.

“Well,” he pointed out. “You were going to kill it anyway.”

This did not make me feel any better. I cried harder, and my father looked around, uncomfortable.

He was not the parent who held me when I was sick, or who calmed me down when I had a nightmare-that was my mother. My father was as out of his element with a terrified kid as I was with a fishing pole.

“Don’t cry,” he said, but I had crossed the line of panic that small children sometimes do, where my skin was hot and my breath came in gasps, a punctuation of hysteria. My nose was running, and that made me think of the slime of the fish between my fingers, and that made me cry even harder.

He should have hugged me. He should have said that it didn’t matter and that we could try again.

Instead, he blurted out, “Did you hear the joke about the roof? No? Well, it’s probably over your head anyway.”

I don’t know what made him tell a joke. A bad joke. But it was so awkward, so different from what I needed at that moment, that it shocked me into silence. I hiccuped, and stared up at him through spiked lashes.

“Why do doctors use red pens?” he said, the words fast and desperate. “In case they need to draw blood.”

I wiped my nose on my sleeve, and he took off his shirt and used it to gently wipe my face and settle me on his lap. “Guy walks into a bar with a salamander on his shoulder,” my father said. “The bartender says, ‘What’s his name?’ And the guy says, ‘Tiny. Because he’s my newt.’”

I didn’t understand any of the jokes; I was too young. And I’d never really thought of my father as a closet comedian. But his arms were around me, and this time there was no casting lesson involved.

“It was an accident,” I told him, and my eyes filled up again.

My father reached for the knife he carried in his pocket and snipped the line, kicked the remains of the fish into the water, where I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. “You know what the dad buffalo said to his kid when he went to work in the morning? ‘Bye, son.’” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Rule number three of fishing: what happens at the pond stays at the pond.”

“I don’t know any jokes,” I said.

“My grandfather used to tell them to me when I got scared.”

I could not imagine my father, who thought nothing of wrestling with a wolf, being scared.

He helped me to my feet and picked up my rod and his. The wisps of loose fishing line flew through the air like the silk from a spider.

“Did your dad tell you jokes, too?” I asked.

My father took a step away from me then, but it felt like a mile. “I never knew my dad,” he said, turning away from me.

It was, I realized, the one thing we had in common.

I’m sitting in the dark in my father’s room, the green glow from the monitors behind him casting shadows on the bed. My elbows rest on my knees, my chin is cupped in my hands. “How do you know Jesus likes Japanese food?” I murmur.

No reply.

“Because he loves miso.”

I rub my eyes, which are burning. Dry. Tearless.

“Did you hear about the paranoid dyslexic?” I say. “He’s always afraid he’s following someone.”

Once, bad jokes had distracted my father enough to stop being scared. It isn’t working for me, though.

There is a soft knock on the open door. A woman steps inside. “Edward?” she says. “I’m Corinne D’Agostino. I’m a donation coordinator with the New England Organ Bank.”

She’s wearing a green sweater with leaves embroidered on it, and her brown hair is in a pixie cut. She reminds me of Peter Pan, which is ironic. There’s no Neverland here, no everlasting youth.

“I’m so sorry about your father.”

I nod. I know that’s what she’s expecting.

“Tell me a little bit about him. What did he like to do?”

Now that I’m not expecting. I’m hardly the most qualified person to answer that question. “He was outside all the time,” I say finally. “He studied wolf behavior by living with packs.”

“That’s pretty amazing,” Corinne says. “How did he get involved in that?”

Did I ever ask him? Probably not. “He thought wolves got a bad rap,” I reply, remembering some of the talks my father used to give to the tourists who swarmed Redmond’s in the summertime. “He wanted to set the record straight.”

Corinne pulls up a chair. “It sounds like he cared a lot about animals. Often, folks like that want to help other people, too.”

I rub my hands over my face, suddenly exhausted. I don’t want to beat around the bush anymore. I just want this to be over. “Look, his license said he wanted to be an organ donor. That’s why I asked to speak to you.”

She nods, taking my lead and dropping the small talk. “I’ve talked to Dr. Saint-Clare and we’ve reviewed your father’s chart. I understand that his injuries were so severe that he’s never going to enjoy the quality of life he used to have. But none of those injuries have damaged his internal organs. A donation after cardiac death is a real gift to others who are suffering.”

“Is it going to hurt him?”

“No,” Corinne promises. “He’s still a patient, and his comfort is the most important concern for us. You can be with him when the life-sustaining treatment is stopped.”

“How does it work?”

“Well, donation after cardiac death is different from organ donation after brain death. We’d begin by reviewing both the decision you made with the medical team to withdraw treatment and your father’s status as a registered donor. Then, we’d work with the transplant surgeons to arrange a time when the termination of life support and the organ donation could be done.” She leans forward, her hands clasped between her legs, never breaking my gaze. “The family can be present. You’d be right here, along with your father’s neurosurgeon and the ICU doctors and nurses. He’d be given intravenous morphine. There would be an arterial line monitoring arterial pressure, and one of the nurses or doctors will stop the ventilator that’s helping him breathe. Without oxygen, his heart will stop beating. As soon as he is asystolic, which means his heart has stopped, you’ll have a chance to say good-bye, and then we take him to the operating room. Five minutes after his heart stops, he’ll be pronounced dead, and the organ recovery will begin with a new team of doctors, the transplant team. Typically in donations after cardiac death, the kidneys and liver are recovered, but every now and then hearts and lungs are donated, too.”

It seems almost cruel to be discussing this, literally, over my father’s unconscious body. I look at his face, at the stitches still raw on his temple. “What happens after that?”

“After the organ recovery, he’s brought to the holding area of the hospital. They’ll contact whatever funeral home you’ve made arrangements with,” Corinne explains. “You’ll also receive an outcome letter from us, telling you about the people who received your father’s organs. We don’t share their names, but it often helps the family left behind see whose lives have been changed by the donor’s gift.”

If I looked into the eyes of a man who had received my father’s corneas, would I still feel like I didn’t measure up?

“There’s one thing you need to know, Edward,” she adds. “DCD isn’t a sure thing, like donation after brain death. Twenty-five percent of the time, patients wind up not being candidates.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s a chance that your father will not become asystolic in the window of opportunity necessary to recover the organs. Sometimes after the ventilator is turned off, a patient continues to breathe erratically. It’s called agonal breathing, and during that time, his heart will continue beating. If that goes on for more than an hour, the DCD would be canceled because the organs wouldn’t be viable.”

“What would happen to my father?”

“He would die,” she says simply, honestly. “It might take two to three more hours. During that time he’d be kept comfortable, right here in his own bed.” Corinne hesitates. “Even if the DCD isn’t successful, it’s still a wonderful gift. You’d be honoring your father’s wishes, and nothing can take away from that.”

I touch my father’s hand where it lies on top of the covers. It’s like a mannequin’s hand, waxy and cool.

If I fulfill my father’s last wish, does that wipe clean the karmic slate? Am I forgiven for hating him every time he missed a meal with us, for breaking up my parents’ marriage, for ruining Cara’s life, for running away?

Corinne stands. “I’m sure you need some time to think about this,” she says. “To discuss it with your sister.”

My sister has trusted me with this decision, because she’s too close to make it.

“My sister and I have talked,” I say. “She’s a minor. It’s ultimately my decision.”

She nods. “If you don’t have any more questions, then-”

“I do,” I say. “I have one more question.” I look up at her, a silhouette in the dark. “How soon can you do it?”

That night, I tell my mother that Cara and I have talked, that she doesn’t want to deal with this nightmare anymore, and I don’t want her to have to. I tell my mother that I’ve made the decision to let Dad die.

I just don’t tell her when. I am sure she’s thinking that the termination of life support will be a few days from now, that she will have time to help Cara process all those emotions, but really, that’s completely pointless. If I’m doing this to protect Cara, then it should happen fast, before it hurts more than it has to. It’s not enough that I’m making the decision; it has to be carried out as well, so that there’s no more second-guessing and she can’t tear herself up inside.

My mother holds me when I cry on her shoulder, and she cries a little, too. She may have split with my father, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love him once. I know she’s lost in her thoughts about her life with him, which is probably what keeps her from asking too many questions I cannot answer truthfully. By the time she remembers to ask them, everything will already be done.

After she goes to keep vigil in Cara’s room again, I sign the paperwork and call a funeral home on the list Corinne has given me, and then I leave the hospital. Instead of going to my father’s house, though, I drive to the highway that runs past Redmond’s and park along the shoulder near the reservoir where we once went fishing.

It takes some bushwhacking to find the overgrown trail that my father led me down years ago, the one that heads back toward the wolf enclosures. In the dark, I curse myself for not bringing a flashlight, for having to navigate by the glow of the moon. The snow in these woods is up to my knees; it’s not long before I am soaked and shivering.

I see a light on in the trailer at the top of the hill. Walter’s still awake. I could knock on his door, tell him about this decision I’ve made on my father’s behalf. Maybe he’d break out a bottle and we’d toast the life of the man who was the link between us.

Then again, Walter probably doesn’t have a bottle there. My father always said a wolf’s sense of smell is so advanced it doesn’t just notice shampoos and soaps-it can scent what you’ve digested and when and how, days after you indulged. It can smell fear, excitement, contentment. A wolf pup is born deaf and blind, with only its sense of smell to recognize its mother, and the other members of its pack.

I wonder if the wolves know I am here, just because I am my father’s son.

Suddenly I hear one mournful note, which breaks and falls a few steps into another. There is a beat of silence. The same note sounds again, as clear as a bow drawn across a violin. It makes something inside me sing like a tuning fork.

At first I think the wolves are calling an alarm, because they can smell an intruder, even from this distance.

Then I realize it is an elegy.

A requiem.

A song for a pack member who isn’t coming back.

For the first time since I received that phone call in Thailand, for the first time since I’ve been home, for the first time in a long time, I start to cry.

It is a funeral. We just don’t have the body, yet.

I stand awkwardly next to my father’s bed. It is 9:00 A.M. on the dot. The transplant team is ready in the OR. Corinne is here, and two ICU nurses, and Trina. There’s a woman in a suit-I’ve been told she’s from the legal department. I guess the hospital needs to have all its i’s dotted and t’s crossed before they turn off life support.

Trina steps beside me. “Are you all right?” she asks softly. “Can I get you a chair?”

“I’d rather stand,” I say.

In five minutes, my father will be pronounced dead. And somebody else will get a new lease on life.

Dr. Saint-Clare slips into the room, followed by Dr. Zhao, the ICU physician. “Where’s Mr. Warren’s daughter?” Dr. Zhao asks.

All eyes turn to me. “Cara told me to take care of everything,” I reply.

Dr. Zhao frowns. “As of yesterday she wasn’t too keen on the idea to discontinue her father’s life support.”

“Edward assured me that she’d given her consent before he signed the paperwork,” Dr. Saint-Clare says.

Don’t they understand that this is what my father would have wanted? Not just for him to be released from this vegetative hell but for me to protect Cara. I’m saving her from having to make a decision that will break her heart. And I’m saving her from wasting her life as the caretaker of an invalid.

“That’s all very well and good,” the lawyer says, stepping forward, “but I need to hear it from Cara herself.”

LUKE

Two days after the pack howled in reply to me, I was sitting beneath a tree untangling a trap when the big male wolf stepped out of nowhere and ran toward me at full tilt. The other four wolves appeared like ghosts between the trees, coming to stand like sentries in a line. I was defenseless, sitting down like this. I was certain this was the moment I’d die. I could roll onto my back and offer my throat, but I didn’t know if I had the time to ask the animal for trust before his jaws sank into my flesh.

At the last moment he stopped dead in front of me. He craned his neck, as if he wanted to smell me but didn’t want to get any closer. Then, without warning, he nipped at my knee in exactly the same spot I’d been nipped years ago by Arlo at the zoo. Abruptly he turned and walked back to the rest of his pack, which started licking him like mad around the mouth.

The next day, the big male returned, this time with two pups, a male and a female. They flanked him, watching carefully. The big wolf sniffed my boots, and then circled me, as if he was trying to suss out if there was anything new about me that might be a threat. The youngsters came closer to investigate, and the big wolf snapped at their muzzles. Three times he nipped at me, pinching the flesh under my knees, leaning into my shoulder. After each bite he looked at me, inscrutable. He rubbed his body against me, like a cat on a scratching pole.

Then he moved behind me, leaving the pups in front. I started to sweat-it just didn’t feel comfortable having a wild animal somewhere I couldn’t see him-and in that instant the wolf’s jaws closed around my neck from behind. I could feel his long teeth scraping against my jugular.

The female pup darted forward and took a sizable nip at my knee at that moment, just as the big male let go of my neck. When he sauntered back to the two remaining wolves that were waiting at the edge of the clearing, the pups in tow, I did something I still cannot believe I had the nerve to do.

I followed.

I was on my hands and knees, stumbling, awkward. Twice, the big male looked over his shoulder and clearly saw me behind him. I figured he could very easily teach me a lesson if he thought that was a bad idea, but instead, he just kept going. I had never been this close to the wild pack before; I could smell the mud caked into their paws and the wet musk of their coats.

Of the two wolves that had stayed back from me, one was the alpha female. She was smaller, with black lines marking her back and tail and the top of her head, thick as if she’d been striped with paint. Staring at me, she bared her teeth, curled her tongue.

I was about twenty-five yards away when she started growling.

Immediately, the pups ran to her side and glowered at me. The big male stepped between us, but she snapped at him and he fell into line, too. The alpha female flattened her ears and barked, low and threatening. Then she turned and took the others back through the tree line.

The big male hesitated, capturing my gaze.

A lot has been said about the stare of a gray wolf. It’s level, measured, eerily human. A wolf is born with blue eyes, but after six or eight weeks, they turn golden. And if you’ve ever been lucky enough to look into a wolf’s eyes, you know that they penetrate. They look at you, and you realize they are taking a snapshot of every fiber of your being. That they know you better even than you know yourself.

The wolf and I sized each other up. Then he dipped his head, turned, and loped into the woods.

I didn’t see the pack for another six weeks. From time to time I heard them calling, but it wasn’t a rallying call to replace a missing member anymore-just a locating call to make sure they kept other packs and animals at bay. My invitation had been revoked. I had replayed in my mind what had happened between us, whether that last look from the big male had been his way of communicating to me that I had been given a chance, and clearly had not measured up. But the fact that he hadn’t chosen to rip out my throat made me believe this couldn’t be the case. That even if the alpha female wasn’t very fond of me, more than half her pack was.

They appeared on the first day that felt like spring-when it was warm enough for me to break through the ice of the stream to drink without having to use a rock or stick, when I had unzipped my coveralls so that the breeze could cool me. Just like before, they came silently, a wall of gray mist. I immediately dropped so that my body was lower than theirs. Even the alpha female inched closer.

They were energetic and rowdy, more active than the last time they’d come. I felt an overwhelming relief that they were back, that I wasn’t alone in this wilderness. The big male came running at me again, as he had weeks before, and pinned me on my back with his full weight. In this vulnerable pose, I was offering my life to him, and frankly I was so happy to see him again that I wasn’t even as terrified as I probably should have been.

Maybe it was because my guard was down, maybe it was because the world felt like it was thawing and I was cocky after surviving the winter-there are a dozen reasons why I did not anticipate what happened next. The big wolf was suddenly gone, and the alpha female had taken his spot. Her front paws held my shoulders down on the ground, her weight was on my lower body. She was an inch from my face, and she was snarling and snapping at me. When the male moved closer, she lunged and bit him, and he slunk away.

Her breath came in hot gusts; her saliva streaked my forehead, but every time I thought she was going to tear into my flesh, she pulled the punch. I stayed perfectly still for the five minutes it was going on, and then she released me. She loped away, but instead of vanishing into the woods, she lay down on a rock in the sun. The big male settled beside her.

I was amazed that they had chosen to keep company with me, instead of disappearing like usual. And then, to my shock, the other three wolves left the protection of the trees and came into the clearing. They stretched out on either side of me. The younger female yawned and crossed her front paws.

We weren’t touching, but I could feel the heat of their bodies, and I was warmer than I’d been in months. I did not move for over an hour. Lying between them in the pool of sunlight, I listened to the sound of their breathing.

Unlike the wolves, I couldn’t sleep. Part of me was too excited; part of me kept glancing at the alpha female.

I realized she hadn’t been trying to kill me.

She’d been teaching me a lesson.

In those five minutes, I could have died. Instead, I was getting a new lease on life.

CARA

I’m being discharged. Now that my fever’s down and it seems I will survive this shoulder surgery, they want the bed for someone more needy. The bad news is that I cannot go back to school yet because I still can’t do things like hold a fork or a pencil or unzip my own jeans to pee. The good news is that I will be staying at my mom’s, and will have plenty of time to research traumatic brain injury and other cases like my father’s. Other cases where the patients, against all odds, have gotten better.

My mother promises that as soon as she gets the final papers from the nurse, we can go downstairs so I can see my father before I leave the hospital.

For the past hour I have been ready to go. I’m sitting on the bed, showered and dressed, chomping at the bit. My IV line has already been removed. From what the nurses’ station has told my mother, the paperwork is ready; it’s just a matter of my orthopedic surgeon coming by to give me discharge instructions, and to officially sign us out.

My mom is on her iPhone with Joe, telling him that we’ll be coming home. Her eyes are dancing in a way that they haven’t the whole time we’ve been cooped up here. She wants to get back to her old life, too. It’s just a little easier for her than it is for me.

When the door opens, she stands up. “Gotta go, honey,” she says, hanging up. We both turn, expecting my doctor, but instead Trina the social worker walks in with a woman I’ve never seen before in a pencil skirt and a kelly-green silk blouse.

“Cara,” Trina says, “this is Abby Lorenzo. She’s a lawyer for the hospital.” Immediately I panic-thinking of the two cops, and the blood test that showed I’d been drinking that night. My mouth goes dry, my tongue feels as thick as a mattress.

Does this mean they’ve figured out what happened?

“I wanted to ask you about your father,” the lawyer says, and in that instant I am sure that I’ve turned to stone, that I can no longer escape.

“You seem upset,” Trina says, frowning. “Edward said you two had talked.”

“I haven’t talked to him since yesterday,” I answer.

My mother puts her hand on mine, squeezes. “My son told me that he and Cara decided that Edward would make the medical decisions for their father from here on.”

“What?” I blink at her. “Are you kidding me?”

The lawyer looks at Trina. “So you haven’t given consent to terminate your father’s life support today?”

I don’t even think. I just stumble off the bed, barefoot, and use my good shoulder to shove my way between the two women. And I run. To the stairwell, down to the ICU floor, clutching my bad arm to my chest and fighting off the pain I feel with each jostle and turn.

Because this time, when I save my father, I’m not going to screw it up.

LUKE

My Native American friends call it the dance of death: the moment that two predators size each other up. For a wolf in the natural world, the brain doesn’t have a choice. It doesn’t get to say, There’s a bear coming and I’m going to die. Instead, it thinks, What do I know about this bear? What do I know about my environment? What members of my family do I need to protect myself? Suddenly the bear is no longer a threat. He knows that you’re a predator, and you know that he’s a predator. You respect each other’s ground, turning very slowly, eyeball to eyeball. The space between you is the difference between life and death. Does he see you as a prey animal? Or does he see you as something that can injure him as he comes after you? If you can put that doubt in his mind, chances are, he will leave you be.

EDWARD

She is a five-foot, three-inch storm: red-faced, tear-streaked, hair flying out wild. And she’s coming right for me.

“Stop!” Cara says. “He’s a liar!”

The doctors have gone, ready to be paged once we get the attorney’s permission. Corinne has been anxiously pacing; there is a narrow window of opportunity for organ donation that is slipping away moment by moment. I was just doing what Cara had asked. She wanted this to be over, but she was too close to my father; I understood that. It was like the little kid who holds out his arm for a vaccination and shuts his eyes tight, because he doesn’t want to look until it’s all over.

But apparently Cara’s changed her mind. Before she can scratch my eyes out, a nurse grabs her around the waist. Corinne steps forward. “Are you saying that you didn’t give consent to the organ donation?”

“It’s not enough to kill him?” Cara yells at me. “You have to cut him into pieces, too?”

Maybe I should have asked my sister if she wanted to be here. Based on what she’d said yesterday, I figured she wouldn’t have been emotionally capable of it. This outburst only reinforces that.

“It’s not what Dad wanted. He told me so.”

By now, the hospital lawyer and Trina and my mother have reached the room. “Well, that’s not what Dad told me,” I say.

“When?” she scoffs. “You haven’t lived with us for six years!”

“All right, you two,” the lawyer says. “Nothing’s going to happen today, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll ask for a temporary guardian to be appointed to review your father’s case.”

Cara visibly relaxes. She falls back against my mother, who is staring at me as if she’s never seen me before.

What I do next, I do because I have a letter burning in my breast pocket that’s validation.

Or because I know better than Cara how you have to live with the choices you make.

Or because, for once, I want to be the son my father wanted.

I lean over, bracing my hands on my knees, as if I’m disappointed. Then I dive down to the linoleum, pushing aside the nurse who is sitting beside the machine that’s breathing for my father, waiting for a cue that isn’t going to come.

“I’m sorry,” I say out loud-to my father, my sister, myself-and I yank the plug of the ventilator from its socket.