Lone Wolf Read online

  In the bottom right-hand corner is a small red heart.

  I remember filling out the paperwork for my own license when I was sixteen. "Do I want to be an organ donor?" I had yelled to my mother in the kitchen.

  "I don't know," she'd said. "Do you?"

  "How am I supposed to make that decision right now?"

  She had shrugged. "If you can't make it right now, then you shouldn't check the box."

  At that point my father had walked into the kitchen to grab a snack on his way back out to Redmond's. I remember thinking that I hadn't even known he was in the house that morning; my father would come and go with that sort of fluid frequency; we were not his home, we were a place to shower and change and eat a meal occasionally. "Are you an organ donor?" I had asked him.

  "What?"

  "On your license. You know. I think it would freak me out." I'd grimaced. "My corneas in someone else's eyes. My liver in someone else's body."

  He had sat down at the table across from me, peeling his banana. "Well, if it came to that," he'd said, shrugging, "I don't think you'd be physically capable of feeling freaked out."

  In the end, I hadn't checked off the box. Mostly because, if my father endorsed something, I was dead set on supporting its opposite.

  But my father, apparently, had felt differently.

  There is a soft knock on the open door, and Trina, the social worker, comes in. She's already introduced herself to me; she works with Dr. Saint-Clare. She was the one who'd been pushing Cara's wheelchair the first time my sister was brought in to see my father in his hospital bed. "Hi, Edward," she says. "Mind if I come in?"

  I shake my head, and she pulls up a chair beside mine. "How are you doing?" Trina asks.

  It seems like a strange question from someone who does this for a living. Is anyone she meets inclined to say "Fantastic!" Would she even be skulking around near me if she thought I was handling this well?

  At first I hadn't understood why my father, unconscious, had a social worker assigned to him. Then I'd realized Trina was there for me and for Cara. My previous definition of social worker involved foster care--so I wasn't quite sure what help she could offer me--but she's been an excellent resource. If I want to talk to Dr. Saint-Clare, she finds him. If I forget the name of the chief resident, she tells it to me.

  "I hear you talked to Dr. Saint-Clare today," Trina says.

  I look at my father's profile. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "Have you ever seen someone get better? Someone who's . . . as bad off as him?"

  I can't look at the hospital bed when I say this. I stare down at a spot on the floor instead. "There's a wide range of recoveries from brain injury," Trina says. "But from what Dr. Saint-Clare has told me, your father's injury is catastrophic, and his chances of recovery are minimal at best."

  Heat floods my cheeks. I press my hands against them. "So who decides?" I say softly.

  She understands what I'm asking.

  "If your father had been conscious when he was brought into the hospital," Trina says gently, "he would have been asked if he'd like to complete an advance directive--a statement explaining who is his health-care proxy. Who has the right to speak on his behalf for all medical decisions."

  "I think he wanted to donate his organs."

  Trina nods. "According to the Anatomical Gift Act, there's a protocol for which family members are approached, and in what order, to give a directive for organ donation for someone who's medically incapacitated and unable to speak for himself."

  "But his license has an organ donor symbol."

  "Well, that makes it a little simpler. That symbol means that he's a registered donor, and that he's legally consented to donation." She hesitates. "But, Edward, there's another decision that needs to be made before you even start to consider organ donation. And in this state, there's no legal hierarchy to follow when it comes to turning off someone's life support. The next of kin of a patient with injuries like your dad's has to make the decision for withdrawal of treatment before anyone even starts talking about organ donation."

  "I haven't talked to my father in six years," I admit. "I don't know what he eats for breakfast, much less what he would want me to do in this situation."

  "Then," Trina says, "I think you need to talk to your sister."

  "She doesn't want to talk to me."

  "Are you sure about that?" the social worker says. "Or is it that you don't want to talk to her?"

  When she leaves a few minutes later, I tip back my head and let out a sigh. What Trina's said is a hundred percent true--the reason I'm hiding in this room with my father is because he's unconscious--he can't get mad at me for walking out six years ago. On the other hand, my sister can and will. First, for leaving without a word. And second, for coming back, and being thrust into a position that naturally belongs to her: the person who knows my father best. The person my father would probably want sitting next to him, now, if given the choice.

  I realize that I am still holding my father's wallet. I take out the license, rub my finger over the little heart, the symbol for an organ donor. But when I go to slip it back into the laminated sleeve, I see there's something else in there.

  It's a photo, cut down to fit the small pocket in the wallet. It's from 1992, Halloween. I had on a baseball cap, covered with fur, with two sharp ears sticking up. My face was painted to give me a muzzle. I was four years old, and I had wanted a wolf costume.

  I wonder if I knew, even back then, that he loved those animals more than he loved me.

  I wonder why he's kept this photo in his wallet, in spite of what happened.

  Even though I was seven years older than Cara, I was jealous of her.

  She had auburn ringlets and chubby cheeks, and people used to stop my mother as she was pushing the baby stroller down the street, just to comment on what a beautiful baby she had. Then they'd notice the second grader walking sullenly beside her--too thin, too shy.

  But it wasn't Cara's looks that made me jealous--it was her mind. She was never the kind of kid who just played with dolls. Instead, she'd position them all around the house and make up some elaborate story about an orphan who travels across the ocean as a stowaway in a pirate ship to find the woman who sold her at birth in order to save her husband from a life in jail. When her report cards came home from elementary school, the teachers always commented on her daydreaming. Once, my mom had to go to the principal's office because Cara had convinced her classmates that her grandfather was an astrophysicist and that by 6:00 P.M., the sun was going to crash into the earth and kill us all.

  Even though there was a significant age gap between us, sometimes when she asked me to play, I'd go along with it. One of her favorite games was to hide inside her bedroom closet and blast off. In the dark, she'd chatter away about the planets we were passing, and when she opened the door again, she gasped about the aliens with six eyes and the mountains that shivered like green jelly.

  Believe me, even though I was old enough to know better, all I wanted was to see those aliens and mountains. I think even as a kid, when I realized I was different, my greatest hope was that change was possible, that I could be just like everyone else. Instead, I would open the closet door and glance around at the same old dresser and bureau, at my mother, putting away Cara's folded laundry.

  It was no surprise that when my father went into the wild, Cara offered different explanations to anyone who asked: He's on a dig with egyptologists in Cairo. He's training for a space shuttle mission. He's filming a movie with Brad Pitt.

  I have no idea if she really believed the things she was saying, but I can tell you this much: I wished it were that easy for me to come up with excuses for my father.

  The floor of the hospital where Cara and the other orthopedics patients are kept is considerably different from the ICU. There's more activity, for one, and the deathly quiet that makes you want to lower your voice to a whisper on my father's floor is replaced here by the sounds of