Lone Wolf A Novel (25 page)

The detective hands him a piece of paper. “This is a pretty serious case, Ralph. It’s not just second-degree assault; the accused also interfered with the duties of hospital personnel and adversely affected the health of a patient.”

What does that mean?
I think.
Is my father worse off than he was before?

“We’re asking that bail be set at the amount of five thousand dollars with surety,” the detective finishes.

The bail commissioner reads the paper the detective has handed him. “Pulled the
plug
?” he says, looking at Joe. “Mr. Ng? What do you have to say?”

“This is my stepson we’re talking about,” Joe begins. “This is the town where he grew up, and he’s surrounded by family and friends. He’s got ties to the community, and no funds with which to flee. And I give you my word I will personally not let him out of my sight.”

The commissioner rubs his eyes. “The purpose of bail is to secure the accused’s attendance in court. We don’t practice preventative detention in Beresford, Mr. Warren, so I’m going to set bail in the amount of five thousand dollars personal recognizance. You’ll be released on your own promise to appear in court tomorrow morning, to keep the peace, and to be of good behavior. You won’t be able to leave the state of New Hampshire while this matter is pending. I’m going to make it a condition of your release that you have a psychiatric evaluation, and I’m going to issue a no trespass order in and around the hospital.”

“Wait a second,” I say, already breaking my promise to Joe to be
silent. “That’s not going to work. My father’s in there, and he’s dying—”

“Not quick enough for you, from the sound of it,” the detective says.

“I will not let my client be harassed,” Joe argues.

The bail commissioner holds up his hands. “Shut up. Both of you. I’ve already got pinkeye; I don’t need a migraine. You’ll be arraigned tomorrow in district court.”

“What about my father?” I press.

That’s when Joe stomps hard on my foot.

“What did you say, Mr. Warren?” the commissioner asks.

I look at him. “Nothing,” I murmur. “Nothing at all.”

LUKE

A kill is a scary place to be, six inches away from the snarling, snapping jaws of a wolf on the other side of you. It’s feast or famine for wolves, and most of the time during a kill they haven’t eaten for several days, so this is a battle for survival. If you move too far to the left or turn the wrong way, they’ll let you know, growling and biting at you, and yet even in all that tremendous energy and frenzied excitement and hot anger, they pull their punch, so that the discipline you suffer isn’t nearly what the prey animal has coming.

Most of the time, the wolves knew I couldn’t keep pace with them and would be more of a hassle during a hunt than an attribute. In a straight chase, I couldn’t move fast enough; I didn’t have the same weaponry to bring down prey, I couldn’t even defend myself with my thin skin. But after the snows came, the hunting technique changed to an ambush. For the few months that two feet of snow covered the ground, I was not only invited to participate in the hunt, I was expected to be there.

In an ambush, the pack needs the weight of the big males. Sometimes they need a prey animal to turn and run into some
brush, where other wolves jump out and surround it while the hunters make the kill. I was settled in a little bowl dug out of the snow with the youngsters in the pack and the alpha, waiting for the big black wolf and the other adult female to run the quarry toward us.

We had been waiting for days—not moving because we’d disturb the snow and tip off the prey. Even with wolves on either side of me, I was cold, and I started to occupy myself by letting my mind run wild. These wolves were masters of camouflage. They knew the wind direction, and how to disguise their scent. But was the deer working on instinct, too? Would it know, from years of ancestral experience, that if a wolf chases you like this at this speed in this formation, it’s going to lead to an ambush rather than a straight chase? Would it know from some rogue change in the wind that there is trouble up ahead?

My thoughts abruptly scattered as the alpha started eating snow. The young male immediately followed her lead, burying his muzzle into the snow and chowing down. The young female reached up to a branch where an icicle was hanging like the ornament on a Christmas tree, and snapped it off between her teeth. She sucked on it like a lollipop.

Why on earth are they doing that?
I wondered. It wasn’t anything I’d seen in the three days we’d been camped in this copse. Maybe the wolves just needed to move around a bit because we’d been in one place for so long. Maybe they were thirsty.

But the wolves never had been skittish before, and since I wasn’t thirsty, they probably weren’t, either.

I was wondering if the deep snow was dehydrating them in some way when the alpha snapped silently at me and wrinkled her muzzle, then buried it in the snow again. I got the
hint. I began scooping up handfuls of snow and eating it like there was no tomorrow.

Then it hit me: the only thing the prey animal could see as it ran toward us in our hiding spot was our frozen breath on the air. Holding snow and ice on our tongues meant that even our breath was invisible.

A moment later, a deer came crashing into the copse.

Somehow, the alpha had known that the ambush was imminent. But then again, what’s the job of the alpha if not to hold the family together, so that, at the most crucial moment, its members all do as they’re told?

CARA

I am expecting World War III when I get back home, and I’m not disappointed. My mother runs up to Mariah’s car and starts to yank me out of the passenger seat, remembering too late that I’ve got an injured shoulder. I wince as she grabs my arm and see Mariah’s silently mouthed
Good luck
as she zips away. “You are grounded until you’re . . . until you’re
ninety
! For God’s sake, Cara, where have you been?”

I can’t tell my mom that. So instead, I look down at the ground. “I’m sorry,” I say. “After Edward did . . . you know . . . I had to get out of there. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I just ran. Mariah came to pick me up.”

My mother flips an internal switch, and suddenly she’s hugging me so tightly I can’t breathe. “Oh, baby. I was so worried . . . By the time I got back upstairs, you were gone. Security looked everywhere. I didn’t know if I should stay at the hospital or come back here . . .”

The front door opens, and the twins poke their heads out into the cold, reminding me (1) why my mother wound up here instead of the hospital and (2) why I should never believe I might actually come first in her list of priorities.

“Elizabeth, Jackson, get back inside before you catch pneumonia,” she orders. Then she turns to me again. “Do you have any idea how frantic I’ve been? I even had the police out looking for you—”

“I bet you did. It would mean fewer cops focusing on Edward.”

My mother slaps me so fast I don’t have time to see it coming. She’s never done that to me in my life, and I think she’s just as shocked as I am. I wrench away from her, holding my hand to my cheek. “Go to your room, Cara,” she says, her voice trembling.

With tears in my eyes, I run away from her, into the house. Elizabeth and Jackson are sitting on the steps. “You got a timeout,” Jackson says.

I stare at him and say, “Remember when I told you there wasn’t a monster in your closet? I was totally lying.” Then I step over their little bodies and head to my room, where I slam the door and throw myself facedown on the bed.

When I start to cry, I know it’s not because my cheek stings—the humiliation hurt more than the slap. It’s because I feel like the only person left in the world. I’m not part of this nuclear family; my own mother has taken sides with my brother; my father is floating somewhere I can’t reach. I am truly, horribly on my own now which means I can’t just sit around and wait for someone to fix things.

It is not that I think the hospital will try to turn off my father’s life support again, even if Edward asks. It’s that if I can’t figure out a way to derail him, he’s going to take the next step and get himself legally appointed as my dad’s guardian—something I can’t be, because I’m only seventeen.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

Pulling myself together, I wipe my face on the gauze from my
sling and sit up, cross-legged. I reach for my laptop and turn it on for the first time in a week, bypassing the sixteen million emails from Mariah asking me if I’m all right that she must have sent before she knew I was in the hospital.

I type some words into the search engine and click on the first name that pops up on my screen.

Kate Adamson, completely paralyzed in 1995 by a double brain stem stroke, was unable to even blink her eyes. Her medical staff removed Kate’s feeding tube for eight days, before it was reinserted due to the intervention of her husband. Today, she is nearly completely recovered—still partially paralyzed on her left side, she has full control of her mental faculties, and is a motivational speaker.

I click on another link.

A victim of a car crash believed to be in a persistent vegetative state for 23 years, Rom Houben was actually conscious the entire time and unable to communicate. Doctors had originally used the Glasgow coma test to assess his eye, verbal, and motor responses and to describe his condition as unrecoverable, but in 2006, new scans were developed that suggested his brain was functioning fully. He now communicates via computer. “Medical advances caught up with him,” says his physician, Dr. Laureys, who believes that many patients are misdiagnosed in vegetative states.

And another:

Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, was in a vegetative state for over a year. A judge granted her family’s wish to remove her feeding tube. However, she regained consciousness unexpectedly, ate food by mouth, and conversed with others. Her case raises the question of how reliable a
diagnosis of irreversible consciousness is—and legally, raises questions about when life-sustaining treatment should be discontinued.

I start to bookmark the documents. I’ll make a PowerPoint presentation, and I’ll go back to Danny Boyle’s office and prove to him why what Edward did is no different than holding a gun to my father’s head.

When my cell phone rings—it’s plugged in and happily recharging—I reach for it, assuming it’s Mariah asking me if I’ve been flayed alive by my mom. The caller ID, though, is a number I don’t recognize. “Please hold for the county attorney,” Paula’s voice says, and a moment later, Danny Boyle is on the line.

“You really want to do this?” he says.

I think of poor Kate Adamson and Rom Houben and Carrie Coons. “Yes,” I tell him.

“Tomorrow the grand jury’s convening in Plymouth. I want you to come to the courthouse so I can put you on the witness stand.”

I have no idea how I’m supposed to get all the way back to Plymouth. I can’t ask Mariah to miss school again. I don’t have a car, I’m virtually crippled, and oh, right, I’m also grounded.

“Is there any chance you’d be passing by Beresford on your way to Plymouth?” I ask as politely as possible.

“For the love of God,” Danny Boyle says. “Can’t your parents drive you?”

“My mother’s tied up doing everything in her power to make sure my brother’s not going to be sent to jail. And I wish my father could drive me. But he’s too busy fighting for his life in Beresford Memorial Hospital right now.”

There is a beat of silence. “What’s the address?” he asks.

Joe doesn’t come home that night. It turns out that the only way to keep Edward out of jail is to make sure he’s supervised, and wisely, Joe didn’t think it was a particularly good idea to bring my brother back here in close proximity with me. It’s weird that Joe and my mom wouldn’t just switch places, so that my mom would be living in her old home with Edward, if only for one night. But then again, Joe thinks my mom is the reason the sun comes up in the morning, and he would do anything to make sure she doesn’t have to set foot in that house again, and face all those memories of my father.

It also means that the next morning, when Danny Boyle comes to get me, my mom is down at the end of the block with the twins waiting for their school bus, and completely unaware that the snazzy silver BMW that zips by her and around the corner is about to pull into her very own driveway.

I get into Danny Boyle’s car, and he looks at me. “What the hell are you wearing?”

Immediately, I realize I’ve made a mistake. I wanted to look nice for court—I mean, aren’t you supposed to?—but the fanciest dresses I have are the strapless one I wore to my spring formal and a hot pink, shoulder-padded number I was forced to wear at Joe’s sister’s Bring Back the ’80s theme wedding. My mother had insisted on hemming it to the knee, so that I could wear it again, although the only place I could ever imagine wearing something like that again is at a
Saved by the Bell
reunion costume party.