Lone Wolf A Novel by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online

case. I understand that you’ve got some questions—”
    “Yeah, like how about this one: I’m wrapped up like King Tut and I’ve got Frankenstein stitches on my head and my father’s probably in the morgue so how am I supposed to relax?”
    My mother and Trina exchange a look, some secret code that lets me know in that instant they’ve been talking about me the whole time I’ve been drugged unconscious. Here’s what I know: If they don’t want to help me get to my dad, wherever he is, then I will walk there myself. Crawl, if I have to.
    “Your father’s suffered a very severe brain trauma,” Trina says, the same way you’d say, I heard it’s going to be a very cold winter or I think I need to take the car in to get the tires rotated. She says it as if a severe brain trauma is a hangnail.
    “I don’t understand what that means.”
    “He had surgery to remove swelling in the brain. He’s not breathing on his own. And he’s unconscious.”
    “Five minutes ago, so was I,” I say, but the whole time I am thinking: This is all my fault.
    “I’ll take you to see your father, Cara,” Trina says, “but you have to understand that when you see him, it’s going to be a shock.”
    Why? Because he’s in a hospital bed? Because he’s got stitches, like me, and tubes down his throat? My father is the kind of man who never rests, who’s rarely indoors. Seeing him fall asleep in a chair is enough of a shock.
    She calls in a nurse and an orderly to get me into a wheelchair, which requires moving my IV and gritting my teeth as I’m relocated. The hallway smells like industrial cleaner and that plastic hospital smell that’s always freaked me out.
    The last time I was in this hospital was a year ago. My dad and I were doing outreach with Zazi, one of the wolves we sometimes bring to elementary schools to teach about wolf conservation. My dad always goes through a mini–training session with the kids to teach them how to behave around a wild animal—don’t hold out your fingers, don’t approach too fast, let the animal catch your scent. And that day, the kids were being great, as was Zazi. But some idiot delinquent in another part of the building had pulled the fire alarm as a prank, and the loud noise startled the wolf. He tried to get away, and the nearest exit was a plate-glass window. My dad wrapped his arms around Zazi to protect him, so that he was the one who wound up going through the window instead of the wolf. Sure enough, when I got Zazi back into his travel cage, he didn’t have a scratch onhim. My father, on the other hand, had a cut so deep on his arm that I could see bone.
    Needless to say my father refused to go to the hospital until Zazi was safely back home in his enclosure. By then, the dish towel he’d used as a makeshift bandage was a bloody mess, and the frantic school principal—who’d driven back to the trading post with us—insisted that my father go to the emergency room. There— here —he had to get fifteen stitches. But no sooner had we returned home than my dad headed down to the enclosure that housed Nodah, Kina, and Kita—the three wolves he’d had to raise from pups, the pack where he now functioned as a diffuser wolf.
    I stood at the chain-link fence, watching Nodah bound up to my dad. Immediately he ripped off the white bandage with his teeth. Then Kina started licking the wound. I was sure he’d tear the stitches, and I was just as sure my father was hoping for that very thing. He’d told me about his time in the wild; how sometimes during a hunt he’d be injured because his skin didn’t have the same protective fur covering that his brother and sister wolves had. When that happened, the animals would lick the gash until it reopened. My father had come to believe that something in their saliva functioned medicinally. Even though he was sleeping in dirt and had no access to antibiotics, in the nearly two years he spent in the woods, he never had a single infection