Suddenly Kladen moves to the promontory rock that, in the dark, looks like a hulking beast. I can make out the silhouettes of Sikwla and Wazoli. They tip back their throats and start to howl.
It's a rallying howl, meant for someone who's missing. I know who that is right away. It makes me start to cry again, even as all the other packs in the adjacent enclosures join in, a fugue of sorrow.
I wish, in that instant, I were a wolf. Because when someone leaves your life, there aren't words you can use to fill the space. There's just one empty, swelling minor note.
"This is why I wanted you to come here with me," Edward says. "Walter says that they've done it every night since the crash."
The crash.
Edward had kept a secret, and it broke our family apart. If I confessed mine, would it put us back together?
So I turn away from the wolves, and with them still singing their dirge, I tell my brother the truth.
"Here's a hint," my father said, furious, as he peeled away from the house in Bethlehem where already one kid was passed out and two more were having sex in a parked car. "If you lie about having a sleepover study session at Mariah's, you should remember to take the fake bag you've packed."
I was so angry I couldn't see straight, but that also could have been the grain alcohol. I had beer once, but who knew something that tasted like fruit punch could pack a wallop like this? "I can't believe you followed me here."
"I tracked prey for two years; believe me, teenage girls leave a much more visible trail."
My father had just barged into the house as if I were five years old and he'd come to pick me up at a birthday party. "Well, thanks to you, I'm a social pariah now."
"You're right. I should have waited until you were being date-raped, or had blood alcohol poisoning. Jesus, Cara. What the hell were you thinking?"
I hadn't been thinking. I'd let Mariah do the thinking for me, and it was a mistake. But I would have rather died than admit that to my father.
And I sure as hell wouldn't tell him that, actually, I was happy to leave, because it was getting a little crazy in there.
"This," my father muttered, "is why wolves let some of their offspring die in the wild."
"I'm going to call Child Protection Services," I threaten. "I'm going to move back in with Mom."
My father's eyes had a little green box around them from the rearview mirror reflection. "Remind me to tell you, when you're not drunk, that you're grounded."
"Remind me to tell you, when I'm not drunk, that I hate you," I snapped.
At that, my father laughed. "Cara," he said, "I swear, you're gonna be the death of me."
And then suddenly there was a deer in front of the truck, and my father pulled hard to the right. Even as we struck the tree, even as frustrated with me as he was, his instinct was to throw an arm out in front of me, a last-ditch attempt at safety.
I came to because of the gas. I could smell it, seeping. My arm was useless, and I could feel the burn of the seat belt strap where it had cut a bruise like the sash of a beauty contestant. "Daddy," I said, and I thought I was yelling, but my mouth was filled with dust. Turning to my left, I saw him. His head was bleeding, and his eyes were locked on mine. He was trying to say something, but no words came out.
I had to get us out of there. I knew that if there was a gas leak, the whole truck could go up in flames. So I reached across him and unbuckled his seat belt. My right arm wasn't working, but with my left hand I opened the passenger door, so I could stumble out of the cab.
There was smoke pouring from under the hood, and one of the wheels was still spinning. I ran to my father's side and wrenched open his door. "You have to help me," I told him. With my left arm I managed to hoist him against me, partnered in a horrible nightmare of a dance.
I was crying and there was blood in my eyes and my mouth and I tried to drag my father clear of the car but I couldn't use both arms to pull him. I wrapped one arm around his chest, but I couldn't bear his weight that way. I let go of him. I let go of him, and he slipped through my arm like sand in an hourglass. I let go of him and he fell in slow motion, smacking his head against the pavement.
After that, he didn't move anymore at all.
I swear. You're gonna be the death of me.
"I let go of him," I tell Edward, crying so hard that I cannot catch my breath. "Everyone was calling me a hero for saving his life, but I let go of him."
"And that's why you can't let go, now," he says, suddenly grasping what this has all been about.
"I'm the reason he's going to die tomorrow."
"If you had left him in the truck, he would have died then," Edward says.
"He fell down on pavement," I sob. "The back of his head hit so hard I heard it. And that's why he won't wake up now. You heard Dr. Saint-Clare--"
"There's no way to tell which brain injuries came from the crash and which injuries came after that. Even if he hadn't fallen, Cara, he might still be like this."
"The last words I said to him were I hate you."
Edward looks at me. "They're the last words I said to him, too," he admits.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. "That's a pretty shitty thing for us to have in common."
"Gotta start somewhere," Edward says. He offers a half smile. "Besides, he knows you didn't mean it."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because hate's just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don't know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can't exist without the other."
Very slowly I inch my hand toward Edward's, until I can slip it beneath his. Immediately, I am eleven years old again, and crossing the street on my way to school. I never looked both ways when I was walking with Edward. I trusted him to do it for me.
He squeezes my hand. This time, I hold on tight.
When I was a kid my father used to tuck me in at night, and every time he turned off the lamp, he blew, as if there was a giant invisible candle illuminating my room. It took me years to figure out that he was flipping a switch, that he wasn't the source of all the light.
Standing in this weird deja vu tableau, I feel as if I'm the one blowing out that invisible candle, a spark I can't see that somehow constitutes living, if not a life.
Edward is here, as are the same nurses and doctors and social worker and lawyer, and the donor coordinator. But Joe's here, too, like he promised, and my mother, because I asked.
"Are we ready?" the ICU doctor asks.
Edward looks at me, and I nod. "Yes," he says.
He holds my hand while the ventilator is dialed down, while morphine drips into my father's arm. Behind my father is the monitor that marks arterial pressure.
When the machine stops breathing for my father, I focus on his chest. It rises, then falls once more. It stops for a minute. Then it rises and falls again twice.
The numbers on the arterial pressure monitor fall like a stock market crash. Twenty-one minutes after we have started, my father's heart stops beating.
The next five minutes are the longest of my life. We wait to make sure he doesn't spontaneously start breathing again. That his heart doesn't restart.
My mother is crying softly behind me. Edward has tears in his eyes.
At 7:58 P.M., my father is declared dead.
"Edward, Cara," Trina says, "you need to say goodbye."
Because DCD requires the organs to be harvested immediately, we can't linger. But then again, I have been saying goodbye for days. This is just a formality.
I walk up to my father and touch his cheek. It is still warm, and there's stubble like flecks of fool's gold. I put my hand over his heart, just to make sure.
It is a good thing that they whisk him to the OR for the organ donation, because I am not sure I would have been able to leave him. I might have stayed in his room forever, just sitting with his body, because once you tell the nurse that yes, it's okay to take him away, you don't ever get the chance to be w
ith him again. To share the same space. To see his face, without it being a memory.
Joe takes my mother out into the hall, and pretty soon, it is just me and my brother, standing in the vacant spot where my father's bed used to be. It's a visual reminder of what we are missing.
The first time someone I loved left me behind, it was Edward, and I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.
"Edward," I say. "Let's go home."
The wolves at Redmond's howled for thirty days. People heard them as far away as Laconia and Lincoln. They made babies asleep in their cribs cry, made women search for their high school sweethearts, gave grown men nightmares. There were reports of streetlights bursting when the wolves howled, of cracks forming in the pavement. At our house, just five miles away from the enclosures, it sounded like a funeral requiem; it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. And then one day, abruptly, the howling ended. People stopped waiting for it when the moon hit the highest point in the sky. They no longer hummed the melody at traffic lights.
It was just as my father had said: the wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.
LUKE
There is no grief among wolves. Nature has a wonderful way of making you face reality. You can sit and weep if you want, but you are likely to be killed while you're lost in your mourning, because you let your guard down.
I have seen wolves step over a pack member who dies in a hunt, and continue without looking backward. I have heard wolves call for four or five days after a member of the pack goes missing, hoping to bring her back. Death is an event. It happens, and you move on.
If an alpha is killed, the knowledge of the pack goes with it. The entire pack can crumble in a few days' time if no one steps up from the ranks or is recruited to fill the void. What follows, in that case, is anarchy. The family will disperse, be killed, or starve to death.
Whether you survive a grave injury usually depends on how valuable you are. If it's going to take too much time and energy for the pack to save you and nurse you back to health, you'll make the decision to refuse their help, to let go. Death isn't an individual choice. It all comes back to what the family needs.
Which is why, when you're a wolf, you live each day like it's the only one you have.
EPILOGUE
For the strength of the Pack
is the Wolf, and the strength
of the Wolf is the Pack.
--Rudyard Kipling
BARNEY
A nineteen-year-old shouldn't have a bucket list, but I did. I'd been keeping it because there isn't a lot else to do when you're hooked up to dialysis three times a week. My bucket list, though, had become a to-do list. In the eight months since my kidney transplant, I'd visited Cairo. I'd learned how to snowboard. I'd gone target shooting.
My parents were not thrilled with my new adventurous side. They were, ironically, afraid that I'd have an accident and they'd lose me, even though the years I spent in near renal failure were far more likely to have been fatal. The way I saw it, if you were given a second lease on life, what was the point of playing it safe?
Even I had to admit, though, that I might have gotten in too deep this time. I didn't know where I was--although that was the point of orienteering. But aside from the fact that I knew the sun was behind me and the lodge was somewhere to the east, I was completely off track. I could have walked to Saskatchewan by now, for all I knew.
It wasn't particularly cold out, but who knew how chilly it got at night up here, and daylight was fading fast. I didn't have a GPS, just a compass and a topographical map, which looked like fingerprint ridges and was about as helpful. No one at the lodge would even have known to come after me--they all spoke French, so after breakfast this morning I'd grabbed my day pack and headed out solo into the forest.
I heard a stream running, and bushwhacked my way through the brush to find it. There was no evidence of water nearby on the topographical map, however, which meant I was SOL. I sat down at the water's edge, turning the map sideways to see if it made a difference, when I suddenly felt like I was being watched.
I turned to find a big gray wolf staring at me.
He was magnificent. His eyes were the color of honey, and his muzzle and whiskers were peppered with gray. When he tilted his head, I could swear he was trying to ask me something.
I had never seen a wolf, and this one was less than six feet away from me.
Here's the weird thing: I wasn't in the slightest bit nervous.
Here's the weirder thing: I was off the grid, but I felt like I'd been here before. Not just in this place, but in this moment.
The wolf stood and started to lope away from the stream. After several steps, he turned back to me and sat. Then he got up and walked a distance, and sat down again.
Finally he stood and slipped into the thicker brush of the forest.
Losing sight of him felt like a punch to the gut. I scrambled to my feet, picked up my pack, and started to follow. I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted to catch up with that animal. About a hundred yards deeper into the woods, the wolf was waiting for me.
I knew, from the sun, that we were headed due west--the opposite direction from where I needed to be. I knew I was dead lost.
And yet.
I couldn't shake the feeling that I was headed home.
JODI PICOULT is the author of nineteen novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Lone Wolf, Sing You Home, House Rules, Handle with Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes, and My Sister's Keeper. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at www.jodipicoult.com.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
For those who want to learn more about wolves, sponsor wolves, or contribute to The Wolf Centre and Foundation, where Shaun continues to work hard to understand more about wolves and wolf behavior: visit www.thewolfcentre.co.uk. I also highly recommend reading Shaun's book The Man Who Lives with Wolves if you want to hear from a real-life (thankfully healthy) Luke Warren.
For more information on organ donation, see www.neob.org, www.organdonor.gov, and www.donatelife.net.
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