I admit, I’m curious to meet a girl who has the wherewithal to get the county attorney to listen to her. But Cara looks young, slight, a little nervous. Her right arm is wrapped tight against her body like a broken wing, and between that and her shoulder-length, wavy dark hair and fine features, she calls to mind a bird that’s been pushed from a nest. “Hi,” I say. “I’m Helen, your father’s temporary guardian.” Something flashes over her face when I say that, but it is gone too quickly for me to interpret. “Your mother thought if we talked up here, we might be less…”
“Allergic?” she suggests.
She offers me the seat at the desk, while she sits on the bed. The room is painted a serviceable blue, with a wedding ring quilt on the bed and a single white dresser. It looks like a guest room, but not for a frequent guest. “I’m sure this is very hard for you,” I begin, taking out my notebook. “I’m sorry to have to ask you all these questions right now, but I really need to talk to you about your dad.”
“I know,” she says.
“You two were living together before the accident, is that correct?”
She nods. “For the past four years. At first I was living with my mom, but when she had the twins, it was sometimes hard to feel like I wasn’t a fifth wheel. I mean, I love her and I love Joe and I love having a little brother and sister, but…” Her voice trails off. “My dad says, with the wolves, every day begins and ends with a miracle. Here, every day begins and ends with a cup of coffee, a newspaper, a bath, and a bedtime story. It’s not that I don’t like being here or that I’m not grateful for being here. It’s just… different.”
“So you’re a bit of an adrenaline junkie, like your father?”
“Not really,” Cara admits. “I mean, there were times my dad and I would just rent a movie and have popcorn for dinner, and that was just as good as the times that I got to go to work with him.” She feeds the edge of her quilt through her fingers. “It’s like a telescope. My dad, no matter what he’s doing, zooms right in so he can’t see anything except what’s right there with him at that minute. My mom, she’s always on wide angle.”
“It must have been hard, then, when his focus was on the wolves and not you.”
She is quiet for a moment. “Have you ever been swimming in the summer,” she asks, “when a cloud comes in front of the sun? You know how, for a few seconds, you’re absolutely freezing in the water and you think you’d better get out and dry off? But then all of a sudden the sun’s back out and you’re warm again and when you tell people how much fun you had swimming you wouldn’t even think to mention those clouds.” Cara shrugs. “That’s what it’s like, with my father.”
“How would you describe your relationship with him?”
“He knows me better than anyone else on the planet,” she says immediately.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday morning,” Cara replies. “And my mom promised she’ll take me to the hospital as soon you leave.” She looks up at me. “No offense.”
“None taken.” I tap my pen on the pad. “Could we talk a little bit about the accident?”
She folds in on herself, pulling her bandaged arm tighter against her body with her free arm. “What do you want to know?”
“There’s some question about whether or not you’d been drinking that night.”
“It was hardly anything. I had a beer before I left-”
“Left where?” I ask.
“This stupid party. I went with a friend, and I freaked out when I saw how drunk everyone was getting, so I called my dad. He came all the way to Bethlehem to pick me up.” She looks at me, earnest. “I wasn’t driving the car, even if that’s what the police think. He never would have let me do that.”
“Was he angry at you?”
“He was disappointed,” she says quietly. “That was worse.”
“Do you remember the accident?”
She shakes her head.
“The paramedics said that you dragged your father from the car before it caught fire,” I say. “That was incredibly brave of you.”
Cara slips her free hand beneath her thigh. Her fingers are shaking. “Can we… can we just not talk about the accident anymore?”
Immediately I back off into safer ground. “What do you love most about your dad?”
“That he doesn’t give up,” she says. “When people told him he was crazy for wanting to go live with a wild wolf pack, he said he could do it, and that when he was done, he’d know more about them than anyone else on this planet. And he was right. When someone brought him a wolf that was injured or starving to death or once even kept as a pet in some idiot lady’s apartment in New York City, he didn’t ever say the wolf was a goner. Even if they died during the process, he still tried to save them.”
“Did you and your father ever have a conversation about what he’d want if he was in this kind of situation?”
Cara shakes her head. “He was too busy living to talk about dying.”
“What do you think should happen, now?”
“Well, obviously I want him to get better. I know it’s going to be hard and everything, but I’m practically done with school and I could go to community college instead of somewhere out of state so I could help him through rehab-”
“Cara,” I interrupt, “your brother feels differently. Why do you think that is?”
“He thinks he’ll be putting my father out of his misery. That living with a traumatic brain injury isn’t really living. The thing is, that’s what Edward thinks. My father would never look at a chance at life as miserable-no matter how small that chance is,” she says tightly. “Edward’s been gone for six years. My father wouldn’t recognize him if they bumped into each other on the street. So I have a really hard time believing that Edward knows what’s best for my dad.”
She is fierce in her convictions, evangelical. I wonder what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of that unconditional love. “You’ve talked to your dad’s doctors, haven’t you?” I ask.
Cara shrugs. “They don’t know anything.”
“Well, they know a lot about medicine,” I counter. “And they have a lot of experience with people who have brain injuries like your father.”
She looks at me for a long moment, and then gets off the bed and walks toward me. For an awkward moment, I think she’s going to hug me, but she reaches past my shoulder to push a button on her laptop. “You ever hear of a guy named Zack Dunlap?” she asks.
“No.”
I turn the chair around so that I can see the computer screen. It is a clip from the Today show, of a young man in a cowboy hat. “He got into an ATV accident in 2007,” Cara explains. “Doctors declared him brain- dead. His parents decided to donate his organs, because he said he wanted to on his license. But when they went to turn off the life support machines, one of his cousins-who was a nurse-had a hunch and ran a pocketknife blade along his foot, and the foot jumped. Even though another nurse said it was just a reflex, the cousin dug his fingernail underneath one of Zack’s, and Zack swatted his arm away. Five days later, he opened his eyes, and four months after the accident he left rehab.”
I watch the montage of Zack in his hospital bed, of his parents recounting their miracle. Of Zack receiving his hero’s welcome in his hometown. I listen to Zack talk about the memories he’s lost, and the ones he remembers. Including one where he heard the doctors pronouncing him dead, although he couldn’t get up and tell them he wasn’t.
“Doctors said Zack Dunlap was brain-dead,” Cara repeats. “That’s even worse off than my dad is now. And today Zack can walk and talk and do just about everything he used to do. So don’t tell me my dad isn’t going to recover, because it happens.”
The video clip ends, and the next Favorite in Cara’s YouTube queue rolls into play. Transfixed, we both watch Luke Warren rubbing the tiniest, squinting squeal of a wolf pup with a towel. He tucks it underneath his
