Lone Wolf

Sometimes, it’s like this for a pack. You have to reach the point of utter chaos before a new leader can emerge.

CARA

You would think that having the temporary guardian’s stamp of approval would have me turning cartwheels, but the judge does something no one is expecting.

He schedules a field trip.

Which is how I come to be standing beside my brother outside the glass window of my father’s ICU room, watching the judge hold a one-sided private conversation with our unconscious father.

Joe rode the elevator downstairs with my mother, who’s gone home to pick the twins up from the bus stop. Zirconia is in the lounge, talking to a therapy dog.

“What do you think LaPierre is saying?” Edward asks.

“A novena?” I suggest.

“Maybe he needs to see with his own eyes what a vegetative state looks like.”

“Or maybe,” I counter, “he’s hoping to see Dad wake up again.”

“Open his eyes,” Edward corrects.

“Same difference.”

“Cara,” he says, towering over me, “it’s not.”

My mother used to talk about Edward’s growth spurts. I used to think that meant Edward sprouted overnight, like the plants she kept in the kitchen. I worried he would become too big for the house, and then where would we put him?

Armand LaPierre rises from the chair beside my father’s bed. He steps into the hallway just as Joe comes out of the elevator and Zirconia hurries toward us from the lounge. “Nine A.M.,” he announces, and he walks off.

Zirconia draws me aside. “You’re in great shape. You’ve done everything you can at this point. Between the fact that LaPierre’s Catholic, and more inclined to err on the side of life, and the endorsement of the temporary guardian, it’s looking very strong, Cara.”

I hug her. “Thanks. For everything.”

“My pleasure.” She smiles. “You need a ride back home?”

“I’ll take her,” Joe says, and I realize that he and my brother have been close enough to hear everything Zirconia said to me. I wanted to win this case. So why does that make me feel so bad?

“I’m going to stay for a while,” Edward says, nodding toward Dad’s room.

“You’ll call me-”

“Yes,” he says. “If anything happens.”

“If he wakes up again-”

But Joe is already pushing me toward the elevator. The doors close behind us. The last image I have is of Edward sitting down beside my father’s bed.

I watch the floor numbers fall as the elevator descends, a rocket’s countdown. “What happens if I lose?” I ask.

Joe seems surprised. “Your lawyer thinks it’s a lock.”

“Nothing’s a hundred percent,” I tell him, and he grins.

“Yes,” he says. “I remember that from today’s testimony.”

I glance at him sharply. “And I remember today’s cross-exam.”

At least he has the grace to blush a little. “How about we put that behind us?”

I hold out my hand to shake on that, but he doesn’t let go. “If you don’t win,” Joe says gently, “then Edward will be your father’s guardian. He’s going to schedule a time to terminate your father’s life support, and to donate his organs. You can be there. And if you want, Cara, I will be right there next to you.”

My throat gets tight. “Okay,” I say.

When the elevator doors open in the lobby, what people see is a man holding on to a girl who’s crying, who looks about the right age to be his daughter. What people see is just one of hundreds of sad stories born inside the walls of this building.

When I was younger, my brother told me that he had the power to shrink me to the size of an ant. In fact, he said, he used to have another sister, but he shrank her down and stepped on her.

He also told me that when you became a grown-up, you were admitted into a private party that was full of monsters and horror movie characters. There was Chucky, drinking a cup of coffee. And the mummy on the cover of the Hardy Boys book that used to freak me out, except he was doing the twist while Jason from Friday the 13th played the alto sax. He told me you stayed at the party as long as you had to, making conversation with these creatures, and that was why adults were never afraid of anything.

I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn’t mean you’re fearless.

It just means you fear different things.

LUKE

My Abenaki friends say that if a hunter and a bear spill each other’s blood, they become the same person. No matter what, after that moment, the hunter will never be able to shoot the bear, and the bear will never be able to kill that person.

I’d like to believe it’s true.

I’d like to believe that the by-product of a near-death experience is a healthy dose of mutual respect.

EDWARD

I was the kid who woke up in the middle of the night with a stomachache, certain there was a monster under the bed. I thought ghosts came to sit on my windowsill. Every gust of wind and snapping branch became a thief who was going to come through the attic to kill me. I used to wake up sobbing, and my father, who was usually just getting back from Redmond’s, would be the one to calm me down. You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you’ve got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won’t be able to cry for real when you need to. He told me he’d once met an eight-year-old who’d used up his whole glass of tears and who now couldn’t sob, no matter what.

To this day, I hardly ever cry.

My father doesn’t open his eyes, twitch, blink, or move a muscle during the three hours I sit by his bed. His IV bag empties and his catheter bag fills with urine. A nurse comes by to check his vitals. “You should talk to him,” she tells me. “Or read out loud. He likes People magazine.”

Frankly I can’t imagine anything my father would like less. “How do you know that?”

She smiles. “Because I read him last week’s issue and he didn’t complain once.”

I wait until she leaves the room, and then I pull my chair up to my father’s bed. It’s no wonder I haven’t talked much to him, but then again, I never really knew what to say. And yet, this nurse has a point. What better time to finally tell him the things I should have said ages ago than now, when he has no choice but to listen? “I don’t hate you,” I admit, the words dissolving the silence.

His response is the pump and fall of the ventilator. It almost feels wrong, an unfair fight.