Lone Wolf

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