Lone Wolf A Novel Read online

  “That’s when you left,” I say.

  Edward nods. “My whole life, I felt like I was never the son he wanted me to be. But it turned out he wasn’t the father I wanted him to be, either. Once you know something, you can’t unknow it, and every time I saw him I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep myself from getting mad at him. But I couldn’t explain why I would be acting that way, not without hurting my mother or Cara. So instead, I drove to Redmond’s and left the receipt for the abortion taped to his bathroom mirror. And then I took off.”

  “Didn’t you think it might hurt your mother if you left?”

  “I was eighteen,” Edward says, an explanation. “I wasn’t thinking at all.”

  “Why are you doing this, Edward? Is it some kind of karmic final bitch slap you want to give your father?”

  He shakes his head. “In fact, I think he’s the one who gets the last laugh. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he had this planned all along. After six years of being apart, we’re all together again. We’re being forced to make decisions together. Go figure,” Edward says. “My father’s finally taught us how to function like a pack.”

  The good news, when we return to the courtroom, is that Georgie is there, and she seems not upset but vindicated. The bad news is that I have to cross-examine my own stepdaughter.

  Cara looks like she’s about to face the Inquisition. I walk toward her and lean forward. “Cara,” I begin. “Did you hear about the guy who fell into an upholstery machine?”

  She frowns.

  “Well, he’s fully recovered.”

  A tiny laugh bubbles out of her, and I wink. “Cara, isn’t it true that one of the wolves at your father’s enclosures lost its leg?”

  “Yes, to a trap,” she says. “He chewed his own leg off to get free, and my father nursed him back to health when everyone said he was a goner.”

  “But that wolf was able to use three legs to run away, correct?”

  “I guess.”

  “And he could still get food with three legs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he could run with his pack?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he could communicate with other wolves in his pack?”

  “Sure.”

  “But that’s not the case with your father, is it? His injury isn’t one that would allow him to do any of those other things that would constitute a meaningful life?” I ask.

  “I already told you,” Cara says stubbornly. “To him, any life is meaningful.”

  She carefully avoids looking at Edward when she says that.

  “Your father’s doctors have said there’s virtually no chance of recovery for him, right?”

  “It’s not as black-and-white as they make it out to be,” she insists. “My father is a fighter. If anyone is going to beat the odds, it’s going to be him. He does things no one else can do, all the time.”

  I take a deep breath, because now I’m getting to the part of the cross-examination that’s going to be less than civil. I close my eyes, hoping that Cara—and Georgie—will forgive me for what I’m about to do. But my first 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 figu