Lone Wolf

“He loved you,” I correct. “He still does.” I reach out a hand, trapping her as she passes by. “I know that you ran to your dad when Joe and I were starting a family because you thought he was the safe haven; that with him, you’d be his only family, instead of just one kid out of a bunch. And I know how hard it must be for you to find out that he might not be the hero you thought he was. But whatever he did to me, Cara-that doesn’t change how he feels about you.”

“Men. You can’t live with them… and you can’t legally shoot them,” Zirconia says. “I tossed out my husband eight years ago and got a llama instead. Best decision I ever made.”

Ignoring her, I turn back to Cara. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter if your father isn’t perfect. Because to him, you are.”

Instead of comforting her, however, those words make Cara burst into tears. She folds herself into my arms. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I say.

Gently, I rub her back. Luke used to talk about one of his wolves, which was afraid of storms, how the pup would crawl under his shirt for comfort. But he never took the time to know that his own daughter used to do the same thing. That on nights when lightning cracked the yolk of the moon, nights when Luke was tending to a frightened wolf, Cara would climb into bed with me and wrap her arms around my back, a mollusk riding out the tide.

“There’s something else you should know,” I say. “Edward left because he wanted to protect you. He thought if he wasn’t here to tell us what he’d seen, you would never have to find out.”

Cara’s good arm tightens around my neck. “Mom,” she whispers. “I have to-”

There is a knock on the door, a deputy sheriff announcing that court is about to reconvene. “Cara,” Zirconia says, “do you still want to be the legal guardian for your father?”

She pulls away from me. “Yes.”

“Then I need you to get your head back in the game,” Zirconia says bluntly. “I need the court to see that you’re grown-up enough to love your father, no matter what. No matter if he was catting around on your mom, or if he needs to have a diaper changed every three hours, or if he spends the next decade in long-term care.”

I touch her arm. “Is this really what you want, Cara? It could be years before he recovers. He might never recover. I know your father would want you to go to college, to get a job, to have a family, to be happy. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

She lifts her chin, her eyes still too bright. “He has a life ahead of him, too,” she says.

I have told Zirconia and Cara that I am stopping off at the restroom before heading back inside for Cara’s testimony, but instead I find myself walking out the double doors of the courthouse, veering left into the parking lot. I drive the twenty minutes to Beresford Memorial Hospital and take the elevator up to the ICU.

Luke lies still, with no visible change to his condition, except a bruise around his IV site that has bloomed from purple to a mottled ocher.

I pull up a chair and stare at him.

When he came out of the wild, before the reporters showed up and drew him into an orbit of fame, I did my best to help him transition into the human world. I let him sleep for thirty hours straight; I cooked his favorite foods; I scrubbed the dirt that had become caked to his skin off his back. I figured that if I pretended life had returned to normal, maybe he would come to believe it.

To that end, I dragged him on errands. I took him to pick Cara up at school and I brought him into the bank while I used the ATM. I drove him to the post office, and to the gas station.

I started to see that women flocked to Luke. Even when he was dozing in the car, I’d come out of the dry cleaner’s to find someone staring at him through the window. At Cara’s school, strange ladies in vans honked until he waved. I made fun of him for it. You’re irresistible, I told him. Just remember me when you acquire your harem.

I didn’t realize at the time that I was being prophetic. I thought: Who, of all these fawning women, would put up with what I do behind closed doors? A man who could only eat basic grains like farina and oatmeal without getting sick to his stomach, who turned the thermostat down at night until we all woke up shivering; a man whom I had actually found peeing around the perimeter of the backyard?

One day we went to the grocery store. In the produce aisle, a woman approached with two melons and asked Luke which one he thought was riper. I watched him smile and bend his head to the melons, so that his long hair fell over his face like a curtain. When he picked the fruit in her right hand, she nearly fainted.

One aisle over, a woman pushing a toddler in her grocery cart asked him to reach a box on the top shelf for her. Luke obliged, stretching to his full height and flexing his shoulders to get the item: denture cream, which I’m quite sure she had no intention of purchasing. It was, at the time, almost entertaining to see all these strangers drawn magnetically to my husband. I assumed it was some kind of reaction to his muscular build, his mane of hair, or some wolf pheromone. They know I can protect them, he said in all seriousness. That’s the attraction.

But in the Bath & Body aisle, Luke had actually crumbled-he was that dazed and unnerved by the wave of scents that bled through the packaging and assaulted his senses. It’s okay, I told him, and I pulled him upright and led him to a safer space, near the cereal.

I can’t believe this, he said, burying his face in my shoulder. I can kill a deer with my bare hands, but bubble bath is my kryptonite.

That’ll change, I promised.

Georgie, Luke said. Promise me you won’t.

Now I look down at Luke, in the waxy shell of his own skin, his eyes closed and his mouth slack around the tube that is breathing for him. A god who’s toppled back into mortality.

I reach for his hand. It’s loose, the skin as dry as leaves. I have to fold it around my own hand, hold it up to my cheek. “You son of a bitch,” I say.

LUKE

There is only one thing that could have dragged me away from another wolf family, and that is a human. This one came in the form of a features reporter for the Union Leader, and was accompanied by a photographer. As visitors came to Redmond’s and found me living with the pack, excitement grew-and with it, the number of tourists coming to see me for themselves. Somehow, New Hampshire’s largest paper got wind of it.

The irony didn’t escape me: this was how Georgie and I had met, too. Once, I’d left the wolves for her. Now, I was going to have to leave them again because of a reporter. Every day there were more-some with television cameras-all clamoring for an interview with the man who’d lived in the wild with wolves. Kladen, Sikwla, and Wazoli were skittish and snappish-and for good reason. They could read loud and clear the signals these people sent: that they wanted something from me, that they were greedy and selfish. In the wild, any of these reporters would have been treated like a predator: brought down by the pack to save one of its members.

But that devotion to family went both ways, and I knew that I couldn’t let the lives of the wolves be disrupted because of me. So I left the pen, only to be swallowed by the hail of questions and the camera flashes.

Did you really live in the wild?

What did you eat?

Were you scared?

How did you survive a Canadian winter?

What made you return?

It was that last question that sent me over the edge, because I didn’t belong here, anymore. And although I would have walked into the woods in a heartbeat and tried to howl to locate my pack again, there was no guarantee that I’d ever find them or that they would take me back.

Before I’d started sleeping at Redmond’s with the wolves, I had prowled the house late one night and found a light on in my son Edward’s room. He looked up when I opened the door, challenging me with his eyes