Lone Wolf

“How long were you in the hospital?”

“Six days. I had an infection that had to be treated after surgery,” I say.

Zirconia frowns. “It sounds like a very traumatic injury.”

“The worst part is that I’m right-handed. Well. I used to be, anyway.”

“You heard your brother testify about the conversation he had with you before he made the decision to terminate your father’s life support. When was that?”

“My fifth night in the hospital. I was in a lot of pain, and the nurses had just given me something to help me sleep.”

“Yet your brother tried to talk to you about a matter as serious as your father’s life or death?”

“My father’s doctors had just come to my room to present his prognosis to me. To be honest, I got upset. I just couldn’t listen to them telling me that my father wasn’t going to get better-not when I didn’t even feel strong enough to challenge them on what they were saying. One of the nurses made everyone else leave because I was getting agitated and she was afraid I’d tear out my staples.”

Zirconia looks at Edward. “And that was the moment when your brother chose to have a heart-to-heart?”

“Yes. I told him I couldn’t do it. I meant that I couldn’t listen to the doctors talk about my father like he was already dead. But Edward apparently assumed I meant that I couldn’t make a decision about my father’s care.”

“Objection,” Joe says. “Speculative.”

“Sustained,” the judge replies.

“Did you have any other conversations with your brother after that?”

“Yeah,” I say. “When he was about to kill my father.”

“Can you describe that moment for the court?”

I don’t want to, but in that second, I’m back in the hospital, hearing the hospital lawyer say that Edward told them I’d given consent. I’m running down the staircase in my bare feet to my father’s room in the ICU. It’s crowded, a party to which I haven’t been invited. He’s a liar, I say, and my voice throbs from a place so deep inside me that it feels primeval, foreign.

There is a moment of relief, when the lawyer calls off the procedure, and I start to sob. It’s a delayed reaction, the one you feel when you realize that you’ve escaped death narrowly.

The last time I’d felt it was after our truck had crashed into the tree, before I-

Before.

“It was like Edward didn’t even hear me,” I murmur. “He shoved a nurse out of the way and reached down and pulled the plug of the ventilator out of the wall.”

The judge looks at me, encouraging me to continue.

“Someone plugged the machine back in. An orderly held on to Edward until security came and took him away.”

“Cara, how is your father, after this unfortunate turn of events?”

I shake my head. “Luckily, there hasn’t been a change in his condition. Without oxygen, he could have wound up brain-dead.”

“Now, you had no idea that your brother had made this unilateral decision?”

“No. He never asked me for my input.”

“Is it what you would have wanted to happen?”

“No!” I say. “I know if we give my dad some more time, his condition will improve.”

“Cara, you’ve heard Dr. Saint-Clare say it’s highly improbable that your father will make a recovery, given the severity of his injuries,” Zirconia points out.

“I also heard him say that he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure it wouldn’t happen,” I reply. “I’m holding out for that tiny percentage, because nobody else is.”

Zirconia tilts her head. “Do you know your father’s opinion about how he’d want to be treated in this sort of medical situation?”

I face Edward, because I want to say to him all the things he never gave me a chance to say before he pulled that plug. “My father always says that, with wolves, if your family makes it through the day-with all the hardships of weather and starvation and predators-and survives the night, well, that’s something to celebrate. I’ve watched him stay up all night giving a wolf pup Esbilac from a bottle; I’ve seen him warm a shivering newborn underneath his own shirt; I’ve driven with him in a blizzard to a vet to try to save a pup who can’t breathe right. Even though, in the wild, any of those wolves would just die as part of natural selection, my father couldn’t be that careless. He’d tell me over and over that the one gift you can’t throw away is a life.”

“Then why did he pay for his girlfriend’s abortion?”

My head snaps around at the sound of Edward’s voice. He’s standing now, red-faced, choking on his own words. “You take care of the bills now. But back then, I did. And that’s how I found out.”

Joe tugs on Edward’s arm. “Shut up,” he grits out.

“See, it wasn’t just a one-time thing with another woman, even though that’s what he told me. It was months, and that baby was his-”

“Order!” the judge yells. He smacks his gavel.

I’ve gone dead inside before Edward even speaks again, as Joe is calling for a recess and dragging him out of the courtroom. “He told you all kinds of things that were lies,” Edward says to me, just to me. “You think you know him, Cara. But really, you never knew him at all.”

LUKE

Georgie insisted that I see a doctor. At the hospital, I sat in the waiting room reading people. Anticipating the movements of a predator was the difference between life and death in the wild, but here it became a parlor game. I could tell seconds before a woman opened her purse that she was going to reach for a tissue. I knew that the man sitting alone in the corner was on the verge of tears, although he was smiling at his daughter. I knew that the woman rubbing her stomach had been sick for a long time; I could smell it in her blood. With great curiosity I watched the nurse at the check-in desk. Every few minutes a complete stranger approached her and she didn’t even react with the good sense to back away, even though there was no way she could have known whether the person was holding a gun in his coat pocket, or was going to strike her. She assumed trust before the newcomer even showed submission-and I kept waiting the way you watch an impending train wreck: certain that any minute now tragedy would strike.

When I was called into the examination room, Georgie-who had been sitting behind me-stood up as if she planned to follow me in. “Um,” I said. “I thought I could do this alone.”

Embarrassed, she blushed. “Right,” Georgie said. “Of course.”

I followed the nurse into the exam room, where she took my pulse. Three times. “That can’t be right,” she said, and she was equally confused by my low blood pressure.

I sat alone, waiting for the doctor, my eyes on the doorknob. I listened in the hallway for the rustle of papers in my file. I closed my eyes and breathed in aftershave. “Hello,” I said, a moment before he entered.

The doctor raised his brows. “Good morning. I’m Dr. Stephens, and you are… Luke Warren, according to your chart. So you’ve been living in the woods with a pack of wolves for two years and you can apparently see through doors,” he said. He turned to his nurse. “Where’s the psych consult?”

“I’m not insane. I’m a wolf biologist. I followed a wild pack of gray wolves along the St. Lawrence corridor. I got them to accept me into the pack. I hunted with them, ate alongside them, slept beside them.”

I don’t think he would have believed me if he hadn’t seen my blood pressure numbers. He turned to his nurse. “Clearly these are a mistake…”

“I took it three times,” she argued.

Dr. Stephens frowned, counting the beats of my heart himself. “Okay,” he said. “Your pulse is