Free Lone Wolf A Novel by Jodi Picoult Page A

about the crash or for being with my other family when it happened.
    I’d like to believe that if Cara had still been living under my roof, she wouldn’t have been drinking. That if she had stayed with me, we wouldn’t be in a hospital. Unlike Luke, who was always so wrapped up in his wolves, I would actually know what my own daughter’s up to and I would never let her out late on a school night. But it is always easy to rewrite history after the fact. The truth is, even if Cara had not chosen to go live with her dad instead of me, I might have found myself the recipient of that phone call last Thursday from Cara, begging to be rescued.
    There have been a handful of times in my life when I have suddenly had the perspective to be able to see myself from a distance, to trace how I got to that point. The first was the morning I read the note from Edward, telling me that he had left home. The second was at my wedding to Joe, when I was—maybe for the first time—unadulteratedly happy. The third was when the twins were born. And the fourth, now, is at the crux of a nightmare—my first family, all drawn together again, and inextricably linked once more because of Luke’s dynamic persona. Be careful what you wish for.
    “You can tell Dad to ground me,” Cara says. “When he wakes up.”
    I don’t have the heart to tell her that is an if, not a when.
    Which means she’s not the only person in this room who is a liar.
    I met Luke when I was assigned to do a story on him for a local news show. I was convinced that I was going to be the next Katie Couric, even if I was currently slogging in the trenches of local New Hampshire television. Never mind that sometimes the anchors were so bad I watched the videotaped newscasts as a drinking game—every time a word was mispronounced I would have a sip of wine, and often downed an entire bottle in a thirty-minute newscast. My job was to spotlight the quirky, crusty, unique residents of the state in the last three minutes of the evening newscast.
    I’d met my share of the weird—the farmer’s wife who dressed up her barn cats in hand-sewn costumes and photographed them in the same positions as famous paintings; the bagel baker who had accidentally created a cheddar-dill concoction that bore an uncanny resemblance to the governor; the petite blonde elementary school teacher who had won a lumberjack contest in the north country. One day my crew (which meant me and a guy lugging a camera) was dispatched to the only zoo in New Hampshire, a sleepy little Manchester-area establishment with horseback trail rides, a dairy discovery barn, and a thin collection of wildlife.
    We had been tipped off to the story by a viewer, who’d brought his toddler down to the zoo and who had been surprised to see a crowd gathered around the small enclosure where the wolves were kept. Apparently one of the zookeepers, Luke Warren, had begun to sleep overnight with the animals, and to spend part of the day inside the enclosure. His superiors—at first sure this was a suicide attempt—now realized the wolves had accepted him into their fold and encouraged Luke to interact with them during the park’s open hours. His antics had single-handedly quadrupled the zoo’s business.
    When Alfred, my cameraman, and I arrived at the enclosure, we had to push our way through the crowd lined up along the fence. Inside were five wolves, and one human. Luke Warren was seated between two animals that were easily each over a hundred pounds. When he saw us, he walked toward the double gates leading out of the enclosure as people whispered and pointed. He greeted those who wanted to ask him questions about the wolves, and then he approached my cameraman. “You must be George,” he said.
    I stepped forward. “No. That’s me. It’s Georgie. ”
    Luke laughed. “You’re definitely not what I expected.”
    I could have said the same. I figured that this guy would be a nut job like most of the others I