Lone Wolf

haired.

This current version of my father is staring at me as if he’s just as surprised to see me looking this way as I am to see him. “Don’t leave,” I say, but my voice is barely a voice.

That makes him smile.

This is the second reason I know I am dreaming. In those old photographs, my dad always looks happy. In fact, he and my mother both always look happy, which is again something I’ve only seen in pictures.

I’m awake, but I’m pretending not to be. The two police officers that are standing at the foot of the bed are talking to my mother. “It’s critical that we speak to your daughter,” the taller one says, “to piece together what happened.”

I wonder what my father has told them. My mouth goes dry.

“Clearly Cara isn’t fit for interrogation.” My mother’s voice is stiff. I can feel the eyes of all three of them touching me like flame on paper.

“Ma’am, we understand that her health is the primary concern.”

“If you understood, then you wouldn’t be here,” my mother says.

I watch Law & Order. I know all about how a microscopic paint chip can put away a lying criminal for life. Is their visit a routine one, part of every car crash? Or do they know something?

I break out in a sweat, and my heart starts beating harder. And then I realize that’s something I can’t hide. My pulse is right there on a monitor next to the headboard for everyone to see. Knowing that just makes it worse. I imagine the numbers rising, everyone staring.

“Do you really believe her father was trying intentionally to crash the car?” my mother asks.

There is a pause. “No,” one policeman replies.

My heart’s hammering so hard that, any minute now, a nurse is going to burst in and call a code blue.

“Then why are you even here?” my mother asks.

I hear one of the policemen rustle through his clothing. Through slitted eyes I see him give my mother a card. “If you could just give us a call when she’s awake?”

Their footsteps echo on the floor.

I count to fifty. Slowly, with a Mississippi after each number. And then I open my eyes. “Mom?” I say. My voice is full of scrapes and angles.

She immediately sits next to me on the bed. “How do you feel?”

There’s still pain in my shoulder, but it’s not what it was before. I touch my forehead with my free hand and feel swelling, stitches. “Sore,” I say.

My mother reaches for that hand. There’s a little clip on one of my fingers, with a red light glowing through the flesh. Like E.T. “You fractured your shoulder blade in the car accident,” she tells me. “You had surgery on Thursday night.”

“What day is it now?”

“Saturday,” she tells me.

I have entirely lost Friday.

I struggle to sit up, but that turns out to be impossible with one arm wrapped up mummy-tight against my body. “Where’s Dad?”

Something flickers across her face. “I should tell the nurse that you’re awake…”

“Is he okay?” My eyes fill with tears. “I saw the paramedics with him, and then they… then they…” I can’t finish the sentence, because I am starting to put together all the secrecy and the look on my mother’s face and that hallucination I had of my father as a much younger man. “He’s dead,” I whisper. “You just don’t want to tell me.”

She grips my hand more tightly. “Your father is not dead.”

“Then I want to see him,” I demand.

“Cara, you’re in no condition to-”

“Goddammit, let me see him!” I scream.

That, at least, gets some attention. A woman wearing hospital ID-but not nurse whites-hurries into the room. “Cara, you’ve got to relax-”

She is small and bird-boned, with black ringlets that bounce with every syllable. “Who are you?”

“My name is Trina. I’m the social worker assigned to your case. I understand that you’ve got some questions-”

“Yeah, like how about this one: I’m wrapped up like King Tut and I’ve got Frankenstein stitches on my head and my father’s probably in the morgue so how am I supposed to relax?”

My mother and Trina exchange a look, some secret code that lets me know in that instant they’ve been talking about me the whole time I’ve been drugged unconscious. Here’s what I know: If they don’t want to help me get to my dad, wherever he is, then I will walk there myself. Crawl, if I have to.

“Your father’s suffered a very severe brain trauma,” Trina says, the same way you’d say, I heard it’s going to be a very cold winter or I think I need to take the car in to get the tires rotated. She says it as if a severe brain trauma is a hangnail.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“He had surgery to remove swelling in the brain. He’s not breathing on his own. And he’s unconscious.”

“Five minutes ago, so was I,” I say, but the whole time I am thinking: This is all my fault.

“I’ll take you to see your father, Cara,” Trina says, “but you have to understand that when you see him, it’s going to be a shock.”

Why? Because he’s in a hospital bed? Because he’s got stitches, like me, and tubes down his throat? My father is the kind of man who never rests, who’s rarely indoors. Seeing him fall asleep in a chair is enough of a shock.

She calls in a nurse and an orderly to get me into a wheelchair, which requires moving my IV and gritting my teeth as I’m relocated. The hallway smells like industrial cleaner and that plastic hospital smell that’s always freaked me out.

The last time I was in this hospital was a year ago. My dad and I were doing outreach with Zazi, one of the wolves we sometimes bring to elementary schools to teach about wolf conservation. My dad always goes through a mini-training session with the kids to teach them how to behave around a wild animal-don’t hold out your fingers, don’t approach too fast, let the animal catch your scent. And that day, the kids were being great, as was Zazi. But some idiot delinquent in another part of the building had pulled the fire alarm as a prank, and the loud noise startled the wolf. He tried to get away, and the nearest exit was a plate-glass window. My dad wrapped his arms around Zazi to protect him, so that he was the one who wound up going through the window instead of the wolf. Sure enough, when I got Zazi back into his travel cage, he didn’t have a scratch on him. My father, on the other hand, had a cut so deep on his arm that I could see bone.

Needless to say my father refused to go to the hospital until Zazi was safely back home in his enclosure. By then, the dish towel he’d used as a makeshift bandage was a bloody mess, and the frantic school principal-who’d driven back to the trading post with us-insisted that my father go to the emergency room. There- here-he had to get fifteen stitches. But no sooner had we returned home than my dad headed down to the enclosure that housed Nodah, Kina, and Kita-the three wolves he’d had to raise from pups, the pack where he now functioned as a diffuser wolf.

I stood at the chain-link fence, watching Nodah bound up to my dad. Immediately he ripped off the white bandage with his teeth. Then Kina started licking the wound. I was sure he’d tear the stitches, and I was just as sure my father was hoping for that very thing. He’d told me about his time in the wild; how sometimes during a hunt he’d be injured because his skin didn’t have the same protective fur covering that his brother and sister wolves had. When that happened, the animals would lick the gash until it reopened. My father had come to believe that something in their saliva functioned medicinally. Even though he was sleeping in dirt and had no access to antibiotics, in the nearly two years he spent in the woods, he never had a single infection and every wound healed twice as fast. As Kina dug deep, my dad winced a few times, but eventually the cut stopped bleeding and he left the enclosure. We started walking up the hill toward the trailer. I freaking hate hospitals, he said, an explanation.

Now as Trina wheels me down the hallway-my mother trailing behind-we pass people in casts, or shuffling with