Lone Wolf

responsibility, at this moment, is to Edward. “Cara, do you drink alcohol?”

She blushes. “No.”

“Have you ever drunk alcohol?”

“Yes,” she admits.

“In fact, the night of the accident, you were drinking, weren’t you?”

“It was just one drink-”

“But you lied and told the police that you’d had no alcohol, right?”

“I thought I’d get in trouble,” Cara says.

“You called your father to come pick you up from a party because you didn’t want to drive home with friends who’d been drinking-is that correct?”

She nods. “My dad and I always said that if I ever got into a situation like that, he wouldn’t judge me for making a bad choice to begin with as long as I called him. That way he knew he could get me home safely.”

“What did your father say to you in the car?”

She hugs her arm a little more tightly against her body. “I don’t remember,” Cara says, looking down into her lap. “Some of the accident is just… missing. I know I left the party, and the next thing I remember are the EMTs.”

“Where do you live right now?” I ask.

The change in subject catches her off guard. “I, um, with you. And my mother. But only because I still need help since I had surgery.”

“Before the accident you lived with your father?”

“Yes.”

“In the past six years since your parents’ divorce, you’ve in fact lived with both of them, right?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Isn’t it true that when you got fed up with your mother, you left her home and moved in with your father?”

“No,” Cara says. “I didn’t get fed up with my mother. I just felt-” She stops dead, realizing what she’s about to say.

“Go on,” I urge softly.

“I felt like I didn’t belong there, after she married you and had the twins,” Cara murmurs.

“So you left our house and moved in with your dad?”

“Well, he is my dad. It’s not that big a deal.”

“What about when you had arguments with your father? Did you ever come back to stay with us?”

Cara bites her lower lip. “That only happened twice. But I always went back home to him.”

“If your father does miraculously recover, where are you planning to live, Cara?”

“With him.”

“But you’re going to need care for your shoulder for several months. Care that he won’t be able to provide-not to mention the fact that you won’t be in any shape to help with his rehabilitation…”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“How will you pay the mortgage? Utilities?”

She thinks for a moment. “With his life insurance policy,” she says triumphantly.

“Not if he isn’t dead,” I point out. “Which brings me to something else: you said that Edward was trying to kill your father.”

“Because he was.”

“He pulled out a ventilator plug. In that case, wouldn’t your father actually have died of natural causes?”

She shakes her head. “My brother is trying to kill my dad; I’m trying to keep him alive.”

I look at her, an apology. “But isn’t it true that if not for you and your poor judgment, your father wouldn’t be in this position in the first place?”

I can see her eyes widen with surprise, with the realization that someone she trusted has just stabbed her in the back. I think of all the food I’ve cooked for her, the conversations we’ve had over the past six years. I knew the name of her first crush before Georgie did; I was the shoulder she cried on when that same guy started dating her best friend.

The judge tells Cara she can step down. Her upper lip is trembling. I start toward her, to offer a hug or a few words to cheer her up, and then realize that I can’t; that in this courtroom she is the opposing party, the enemy.

Georgie folds her daughter into her embrace and looks at me coolly over Cara’s head. She must have known, when she asked me to represent Edward, that it would come to this. That Cara-through no fault of her own-might lose not just one father figure but two.

LUKE

When I was working with my Abenaki friends-the wolf biologists who studied the wild packs along the St. Lawrence corridor-I heard a tribal elder giving two young boys hell because they’d been caught spray- painting expletives on the back of a neighbor’s barn. Blistering, the old man asked why they’d done something they knew was wrong. One of the boys said, simply, “Grandfather, sometimes we want to be good. But sometimes we want to be bad.”

The elder said he’d have to give this some thought. There wasn’t force, there wasn’t violence, there wasn’t even discipline. It was more like a think tank, as he treated these ten-year-olds like little adults, encouraging them to put their heads together to figure out the root of misbehavior. That night after dinner, he called the boys to him again. “I have the answer,” he told them. “You each have two wolves that fight inside you: a good wolf, and a bad wolf. If the bad wolf wins the fight, then you behave badly. If the good wolf wins the fight, you behave well.”

The boys looked at each other. “Grandfather,” one said, “how do I make sure that it’s the good wolf who wins the fight?”

The old man looked from one boy to the other. “The wolf that will win the fight is the one you feed the most.”

After I lived with the wolves, I thought a lot about that comment. When you consume a carcass, there is a spot allotted for everyone. The alpha will tell you where to stand with ear postures, turning one ear flat and the other pinned back against the head, or rotating those ears like airplane wings to direct each member of the pack to the appropriate position. A junior member of the pack is still expected to defend what’s his, to growl and stand over his food. Dominance isn’t about taking away the food he deserves; it’s about being able to stand beside him, controlling the distance without taking any notice of his display of possessiveness.

An alpha could, of course, take any other pack member’s food. But why would she? She needs those junior members, and if she starves them to death, they become useless in protecting the family.

With all due respect to the Abenaki elder, when he was teaching those boys a lesson, I think he left out this small irony. The good wolf would never let that bad wolf starve. She may test his ability to defend his food, but for the sake of the pack, she’s going to make sure he survives.

CARA

When the judge calls for a two-hour lunch break so that he can eat and go to Mass, I am up and out of the courtroom like a shot, because I feel like I’m going to punch someone. After all, it’s not every day that you find out your father was screwing around on your mom and that your stepfather skewers you in public. I run blindly up the stairways of the courthouse, aware that I probably have an entourage at my heels, and rattle doorknobs until I find