Lone Wolf A Novel Read online

  Definitely mental illness, I thought. “Well, Luke, the obvious question is: why?”

  He shrugged. “I think if you want to know what a wolf is really like, you can’t just observe. Most biologists would disagree, and say that you can watch the interaction of a wolf pack through your camera lens and draw your conclusions based on what you know of human behavior—but isn’t that completely backward? If you want to understand a wolf’s world, you have to be willing to live in it. You have to speak his language.”

  “So you’re telling me you speak wolf?”

  Luke grinned. “Fluently. I could even teach you a few phrases.” He stood up, setting one foot on the bench as he leaned in. “There are three different types of howls a wolf makes,” he explained. “There’s a locating howl, which gives the whereabouts of any pack that’s in the area. Not just my family, but rival packs, too. The defensive howl is a little deeper. It means stay away; it’s a way to protect your territory and the pack inside it. The third type of howl is a rallying howl. That’s the classic Hollywood howl—mournful, melancholy. It’s used when a pack member is lost, and scientists used to think it was a measure of grief, but actually, it’s a vocal beacon. A way for a missing family member to try to find his way back home.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “Only if you help,” Luke said. He pulled me up until I was standing. “Take deep breaths, filling your lungs. Hold those breaths as long as you can, and then exhale. On the third breath, send the howl.” He inhaled three times, cupped his hand to his mouth, and a long, two-tone note swelled through the enclosure, rising over the tops of the trees. The wolves looked up, curious. “Try it,” he said.

  “I can’t—”

  “Of course you can.” He put his hands on my shoulders from behind. “Breathe in,” he coached. “Breathe out. In . . . out. In . . . ready?” Leaning forward, he whispered into my ear. “Let go.”

  I closed my eyes, and all the air in my lungs poured forward on a vibration that started in my center and filled my body. Then I did it again. It was primal, guttural. Behind me, I could hear Luke howling a different pattern—longer, lower, more intense. When his voice tangled with mine, the result was a song. This time the wolves in the enclosure tipped their heads back and answered us.

  “That’s amazing!” I cried, breaking off to listen as their howls rolled in patterns, like waves. “Do they know we’re human?”

  “Does it matter?” Luke asked. “That was a locating howl. Pretty basic.”

  “Do another one?”

  He took a deep breath, rounding his mouth into an O. The sound that issued was completely different, like a distillation of grief. In that one note I heard the soul of a saxophone, a breaking heart.

  “What does that one mean?”

  He stared at me, so intense I couldn’t look away. “Is it you?” Luke whispered. “Are you the one I’m looking for?”

  Cara is trying—unsuccessfully—to eat the Jell-O on her dinner tray. She can chase the little bowl around with her left hand, but every time she tries to get a spoonful, it either tips over or scoots forward. “Here,” I say, sitting down on the edge of the bed and feeding her myself.

  She opens her mouth like a baby bird, swallows. “Are you still mad at me?”

  “Yes,” I sigh. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” I watch as she takes another bite, remembering how hard it was to get Cara to eat solid food. She was more likely to mash it into her hair, finger-paint on her high chair tray, or spit it in my face than eat it. At her well-child weigh-ins, she was always on the verge of undernourished, and I’d go out of my way to explain to the nurse practitioners that I wasn’t starving her—she was starving herself.

  When Cara was just a year old, we stopped at a McDonald’s on the way home from one of Edward’s Little League games. While I was busy opening up jars of baby food and digging in my purse for a bib, Cara reached from her high chair to Edward’s Happy Meal place mat and started happily gumming a French fry. “What about her baby food?” Edward asked.

  “Well,” I replied. “I guess she isn’t a baby anymore.”

  He considered this. “Is she still Cara?”

  Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might change. Your little boy might now live half a world away. Your beautiful daughter might be sneaking out at night. Your ex-husband might be dying by degrees. This is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes: we all want to be able to find the place where we started.

  Cara pushes away her dinner tray with her good hand and starts flipping through the television channels with the remote control. “There’s nothing on.”

  It is five o’clock; all the networks are airing local evening broadcasts. “The news isn’t nothing,” I tell her. I look up at the screen, set on the station where I used to work. The anchor is a girl in her twenties who has too much eye makeup on. If I had stuck with broadcast journalism, I’d be a producer now. Someone who stayed behind the camera, who didn’t have to worry about zits and gray roots and five extra pounds.

  “In a stunning victory,” the anchor is saying, “Daniel Boyle, the Grafton County attorney, has won a contentious trial that some say is a ringing victory for conservatives in the state. Judge Martin Crenstable ruled today that Merilee Swift, the pregnant woman who suffered an aneurysm in December, will be kept on life support for another six months, until her baby is delivered at full term. Boyle chose to prosecute the case himself when the woman’s husband and parents asked the hospital to turn off Merilee Swift’s respirator.”

  “Pig,” I say under my breath. “He wouldn’t have blinked twice at the parents’ request if it wasn’t an election year.”

  The screen cuts to a courthouse-steps interview with Danny Boy, as he likes to be called, himself. “I’m proud to be the guardian of the smallest victims, the ones without voices,” he says. “A life is a life. And I know if Ms. Swift could speak, she’d want to know her baby’s being taken care of.”

  “For the love of God,” I murmur, and I grab the remote away from Cara. I flip to the next channel, and my mouth drops open.

  A picture of Luke, grinning as one of his wolves licks his face, fills the screen over the anchor’s shoulder. “WMUR has learned that Luke Warren, the naturalist and conservationist who made a name for himself by living in the wild with a pack of wolves, is in critical condition after a motor vehicle accident. Warren will be remembered for his cable television show, which detailed his experiences with wolves at New Hampshire’s own Redmond’s Trading Post—”

  I push the button on the remote, and the screen goes black. “They’ll say whatever they can to get viewers to watch,” I tell her. “We don’t have to listen.”

  Cara turns her face against the pillow. “They’re talking about him like he’s already dead,” she says.

  It is ridiculous to think that after six years of my being continents away from Edward, he’s now just a floor below where I’m sitting, and we’re still separated.

  I don’t have to tell any mother what it’s like to have a son leave. It happens a multitude of natural ways—summer camp, college, marriage, career. It feels as if the fabric you’re made of has a hole in its center all of a sudden, yet whatever weave you use to fix it is sure to be a hatchet job. I don’t believe any parent moves gracefully into the acceptance that a child doesn’t need her anymore, but I was blindsided by the truth. Edward left when he was just eighteen, when he was still applying to colleges for the following year. I thought I’d have another six months to figure out how to surgically extract him from the pattern of my life, smiling all the while, so that he didn’t think I was anything less than thrilled for his good fortune. But Edward never went to college. Instead, one awful morning, he left me a note and vanished, which is maybe why it felt as if I’d been shelled by a cannon.

  I don’t want to leave Cara alone, so I wait until she falls asleep again before I go to the ICU. Edward sits in a chair with his head bowed to his h