Lone Wolf Read online

  I wonder if what makes a family a family isn't doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.

  Once again when they try to swear me in I can't really do it because my right arm is tied up tight against my body. But I still promise to tell the truth.

  Zirconia begins by walking toward me. It's funny how at home she looks in a courtroom, even with her crazy fluorescent tights and yellow heels. "Cara," Zirconia begins, "how old are you?"

  "I'm seventeen," I say, "and three-quarters."

  "When is your birthday?"

  "In three months."

  "At the time of your father's injury," she asks, "where were you living?"

  "With him. I've been living with him for the past four years."

  "How would you describe your relationship with your father, Cara?"

  "We do everything together," I say, feeling my throat narrow around the words. "I spend a lot of time with him at Redmond's, helping him with the wolves. I also took over running the household, pretty much, because he's so busy with his research. We've gone camping in the White Mountains, and he taught me orienteering. Sometimes we just hang out at home, too. We'll cook pasta--he gave me his special recipe for Bolognese sauce--and watch a DVD. But he's also the first person I want to talk to if I get a great grade on a test, or if a kid is being a jerk to me at school, or if I don't know the answer to something. Almost everything I know, I know because of him."

  I feel guilty saying this, with my mother in the courtroom, even if it's true and I can blame it on being sworn in. I think that kids are always closer to one parent than to the other. We may love both, but there's one who's your default. When I look at the spot where my mom has been sitting, though, she's gone. I wonder if she is still in the bathroom; if she's sick, if I should be worried--and then Zirconia's voice pulls me back.

  "What about your father's relationship with Edward?"

  "He didn't have a relationship with Edward," I say. "Edward left us." But when I say this, I look at my brother. Can you really be mad at someone for doing something stupid if they truly, one hundred percent, thought they were doing what was right?

  "How about your relationship with Edward?" Zirconia asks.

  My whole life, people have said that I look like my mother and Edward is a clone of my father. But now I realize this isn't exactly true. Edward and I, we have the same color eyes. A strange, unearthly hazel that neither my mother nor my father has. "I hardly remember him," I murmur.

  "What were your injuries in the accident?"

  "I had a dislocated, fractured shoulder--the doctor says the humeral head was shattered. I also had bruised ribs and a concussion."

  "What was the treatment?"

  "I had surgery," I answer. "I had a metal rod placed in my arm, and the shoulder is held in place with a rubber band and something like chicken wire." I glance at the judge's white face. "I'm not kidding."

  "Were you on any medication?"

  "Painkillers. Morphine, mostly."

  "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," Edwar