Lone Wolf

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