of the bed. Edward averts his eyes.
“You know,” I say, “I could use a cup of coffee.”
We sit at a table near the window in the hospital cafeteria. “I imagine this is incredibly hard for you. Not just because of what happened to your father, but because you’ve been away from home, too.”
Edward folds his hands around his coffee cup. “Well,” he admits, “it wasn’t the way I thought I’d come back here.”
“When did you leave?”
“When I was eighteen,” Edward says.
“So as soon as you could fly the coop, you did.”
“No. I mean, no one ever would have suspected that of me. I was a straight-A kid, I’d applied to half a dozen colleges, and I pretty much just got up one morning and walked away from home.”
“That sounds like a radical decision,” I reply.
“I couldn’t live there anymore.” He hesitates. “My father and I… didn’t see eye to eye.”
“So you left because you didn’t get along?”
Edward laughs mirthlessly. “You could say that.”
“It must have been quite an argument, if it made you angry enough to leave your home.”
“I was angry long before that,” Edward admits. “He ruined my childhood. He left for two years to go live with a pack of wolves, for God’s sake. He used to say all the time that if he could have, he would have chosen to never interact with humans again.” Edward glances up at me. “When you’re a teenager and you hear your dad saying that to a television crew, believe me, it doesn’t exactly make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.”
“Where have you been all this time?”
“Thailand. I teach ESL there.” Edward shakes his head. “Taught ESL.”
“So you’ve moved back here permanently?”
“I honestly don’t know where I’ll wind up,” he says. “But I’ve made my way before. I’ll do it again.”
“You must want to get back to your own life,” I suggest.
He narrows his eyes. “Not enough to kill my father, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Is that what you think I was thinking?”
“Look, it’s true that I didn’t want to come back here. But when my mother called me and told me about the car accident, I got on the first flight I could. I’ve listened to everything that the neurosurgeon has said. I’m just trying to do what my father would want me to do.”
“With all due respect, after six years without contact, what makes you think you’re a decent judge of that?”
Edward glances up. “When I was fifteen, before my dad left to go into the wild, he signed a letter giving me the right to make medical decisions about him if he couldn’t do it himself.”
This is news to me. I raise my brows. “You have this letter?”
“My lawyer has it now,” Edward says.
“That’s quite a lot of responsibility for a fifteen-year-old,” I point out. I’m not just learning whether Luke Warren wanted to terminate life support. I’m learning about his parenting skills. Or lack thereof.
“I know. At first, I really didn’t want to do it, but my mother couldn’t even face the fact that my father was leaving for two years-she was a mess about it-and Cara was a little kid. There were times, when he was gone, that I used to lie in bed and hope he’d die out there with the wolves, just so I wouldn’t be forced to make that kind of decision.”
“But you’re willing to do it now?”
“I’m his son,” Edward says simply. “It’s not a decision anyone wants to make. But it’s not like this hasn’t happened before. I mean, that’s what my father always asked of his family-to give him the freedom to go places we didn’t want him to go.”
“You know your sister feels differently.”
He toys with a sugar packet. “I wish I could believe that my dad is going to open his eyes and wake up and recover, too… but my imagination just isn’t that good.” He stares down at the table. “When I first got here, and people would come into the room to talk to me about my dad’s condition, I always lowered my voice. As if we were going to wake him up because he was asleep. But you know what? I could have yelled at the top of my lungs and he wouldn’t have budged. And now… after eleven days… well. I don’t lower my voice.” The sugar packet slips out of his hands and lands on the floor beside my tote bag. Edward bends to retrieve it, and spies a copy of his father’s book inside. “Homework?” he asks.
I take Lone Wolf out of my bag. “I just started it this morning. Your father is a very interesting man.”
Edward reverently touches the gold lettering on the cover. “May I?” He picks up the book and riffles through the pages. “I was gone when it was published,” he says. “And then one day I was in an English language bookshop, and there it was. I sat down right in the aisle and read the whole thing, six hours straight.” He flips through the middle section, a sheaf of black-and-white photos of Luke Warren with his wolves-as pups, as adults. Feeding, playing, resting.
“See this?” Edward points to a picture that shows Luke in one of the enclosures while a small child sits on the hillside, watching. The child is viewed from the back, head covered with a sweatshirt hood. Cara Warren watches her father teach Kladen and Sikwla how to hunt. “That’s not Cara,” Edward says. “That’s me. My sweatshirt, my skinny ankles, even my book on the grass. It was A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle-if you go look it up online, you’ll see the same cover.” He traces the caption again with one fingertip. “Years ago, when I first saw that, I wondered if some publishing minion got the citation wrong, or if my dad just gradually edited me out of his life after I left.”
He looks up at me, his eyes suddenly sharp and intense. “In other words,” he tells me, “don’t believe everything you read.”
The inside of the house looks like a snow globe that’s been upended. There are tiny white feathers coating the floor, the couch, and the hair of the woman who opens the door. “Oh,” she says weakly. “Is it already two?”
I had called to speak with Georgie Ng while still at the hospital, asking if now might be a good time to chat with Cara. But from the looks of the tiny twin demons shrieking and sliding through the feathers in their stocking feet, I’m wondering if there’s ever a good time to do anything in this household.
As I step through the entryway, feathers coat my gray skirt like metal filings drawn to a magnet. I wonder how long it will take me to get them off with a lint brush. Georgie is holding the neck of a vacuum cleaner. “I’m so sorry about… this. Kids will be kids, right?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I don’t have any.”
“Wise choice,” Georgie murmurs, grabbing the exploded pillow out of the hand of one of the kids. “What part of stop do you not understand?” she asks. She turns to me again, apologetic. “It might be easier if you go upstairs to talk to Cara,” she suggests. “She’s in the room to the right at the top of the stairs. She knows you’re coming.” Then she disappears around a corner, still holding the vacuum in a death grip, in hot pursuit of her children. “Jackson! Do not put your sister in the clothes dryer!”
Gingerly picking my way through the fluff, I walk upstairs. It is odd to reconcile Georgie Ng with the woman that Luke Warren mentions briefly in his book-a former reporter who fell for him on the job because of his passion for wolves, and realized too late that left no room for a passion for her. I imagine she is happier now, with a more attentive husband and another family. Cara would not be the first child of divorce to shuttle between parents, but the difference in lifestyle between the two must have been drastic.
I knock softly on the door. “Come in,” Cara says.
