Lone Wolf

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