Lone Wolf A Novel Read Free Page B

shirt to keep her warm again.
    I was so tired from staying up round the clock that I couldn’t see straight. I sometimes slept on my feet, dozing for a few minutes before I snapped awake again. The whole time, I carried Miguen, until my arms felt empty without her in them. On the fourth night, when I opened my eyes after nodding off, my father was staring at me with an expression I’d never seen before on his face. “When you were born,” he said, “I wouldn’t let go of you, either.”
    Two hours later, Miguen started shaking uncontrollably. Ibegged my father to drive to a vet, to the hospital, to someone who could help. I cried so hard that he bundled the other pups into a box and carried them out to the battered truck he drove. The box sat between us in the front seat and Miguen shivered beneath my coat. I was shaking, too, although I’m not sure whether I was cold, or just afraid of what I knew was coming.
    She was gone by the time we got to the parking lot of the vet’s office. I knew the minute it happened; she grew lighter in my arms. Like a shell.
    I started to scream. I couldn’t stand the thought of Miguen, dead, being this close to me.
    My father took her away and wrapped her in his flannel shirt. He slipped the body into the backseat, where I wouldn’t have to see her. “In the wild,” he told me, “she never would have lasted a day. You’re the only reason she stayed as long as she did.”
    If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn’t. I burst into loud sobs.
    Suddenly the box with the wolf pups was on the dashboard, and I was in my father’s arms. He smelled of spearmint and snow. For the first time in my life, I understood why he couldn’t break free from the drug that was the wolf community. Compared to issues like this, of life and death, did it really matter if the dry cleaning was picked up, or if he forgot the date of open-school night?
    In the wild, my father told me, a mother wolf learns her lessons the hard way. But in captivity, where wolves are bred only once every three or four years, the rules are different. You can’t stand by and just let a pup die. “Nature knows what it wants,” my father said. “But that doesn’t make it any easier for the rest of us, does it?”
    There is a tree outside my father’s trailer at Redmond’s, a red maple. We planted it the summer after Miguen died, to mark thespot where she is buried. It’s the same type of tree that, four years later, I see rushing toward the windshield too fast. The same type of tree our truck hits, in that instant, head-on.
    A woman is kneeling beside me. “She’s awake,” the woman says. There’s rain in my eyes and I smell smoke and I can’t see my father.
    Dad? I say, but I can only hear it in my head.
    My heart’s beating in the wrong place. I look down at my shoulder, where I can feel it.
    “Looks like a scapula fracture and maybe some broken ribs. Cara? Are you Cara?”
    How does she know my name?
    “You’ve been in an accident,” the woman tells me. “We’re going to take you to the hospital.”
    “My . . . father . . . ,” I force out. Every word is a knife in my arm.
    I turn my head to try to find him and see the firemen, spraying a hose at the ball of flames that used to be my dad’s truck. The rain on my face isn’t rain, just mist from the stream of water.
    Suddenly I remember: the web of shattered windshield; the fishtail of the truck skidding; the smell of gasoline. The way when I cried for my dad he didn’t answer. I start shaking all over.
    “You’re incredibly brave,” the woman says to me. “Dragging your father out of the car in your condition . . .”
    I saw an interview once where a teenage girl lifted a refrigerator off her little cousin when it accidentally fell on him. It had something to do with adrenaline.
    A fireman who has been blocking my view moves and I cansee another knot of EMTs gathered around my father, who lies very still on the ground.
    “If it