Lone Wolf A Novel Read Online Free PDF

home.”
    It takes a full twenty-four hours to get back to the States and to rent a car (something I wasn’t old enough to do when I left) and drive all the way to Beresford, NH. You’d think I’d be falling asleep, but I’m too nervous for that. In the first place, I haven’t driven in six years, and that requires my full concentration. In the second place, I am replaying what I’ve already been told—by my mother, and by the neurosurgeon who did emergency surgery on my father.
    His truck crashed into a tree.
    He and Cara were found outside the vehicle.
    Cara shattered her shoulder.
    My father was unresponsive, with an enlarged right pupil. He wasn’t breathing on his own very well. The EMTs called it a diffuse traumatic brain injury.
    My mother called me when I first landed. Cara was out of her surgery; she was on painkillers and sleeping. The police had come by to interview Cara, but my mother had sent them away. She had stayed at the hospital last night. Her voice sounded like a string that was fraying.
    I’m not going to lie: I’ve thought about what it would be like, if I ever came back. I imagined a party at our house, and my mom would bake my favorite cake (carrot ginger) and Cara would make me a sculpture out of Popsicle sticks with the words “#1 Bro” on thelid. Of course, my mom doesn’t live there anymore, and Cara’s way too old for Popsicle stick arts and crafts.
    Probably you noticed that, in my fantasy victory lap, my father was not part of the picture.
    After all this time in a city, Beresford feels like a ghost town. There are people around, for sure, but there’s so much uninhabited space that it makes me dizzy. The tallest building here is three stories. From every angle, you can see mountains.
    I park in the outside lot at the hospital and jog inside—I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, which isn’t really appropriate for a New England winter, but I don’t even own those sorts of clothes anymore. The volunteer who’s manning the front desk looks like a marshmallow—plump, soft, powdered. I ask for Cara Warren’s room, for two reasons. First, it’s where my mother will be. And second, I need a minute before I face my father again.
    Cara’s on the fourth floor, in room 430. I wait for the elevator doors to close (again, when was the last time I was ever alone in an elevator?) and take deep breaths. In the hallway, I walk past the nurses with my head ducked and push open the door that has Cara’s name on a chart outside.
    There’s a woman sleeping in the hospital bed.
    She has long, dark hair and a bruise on her temple, a butterfly bandage. Her arm is wrapped up in a cocoon against her body. She has one foot kicked out from the blanket, and there is purple polish on her toes.
    She’s not my little sister anymore. She’s not little, period.
    I’m so busy staring at her that at first I don’t even notice my mother in the corner. She stands up, her hand covering her mouth. “Edward?” she whispers.
    When I left, I was already taller than my mother. But now, I have filled out. I’m bigger, stronger. Like him.
    She folds me into an embrace. Heart origami. That’s what she used to call it when we were small, and she’d open her arms and wait for us to run inside. The words feel like a splinter in my mind; I can feel them rubbing the wrong way even as I do what she is expecting and hug her back. It’s a funny thing, how—no matter how much bigger I am than my mother—she still is the one holding me, instead of the other way around.
    I feel like Gulliver on Lilliput, too overgrown for my own memories. My mother wipes at her eyes. “I can’t believe you’re actually here.”
    It doesn’t seem right to mention that I wouldn’t be here, not by a long shot, if my sister and father weren’t in the hospital. “How is she?” I ask, nodding toward Cara.
    “In an OxyContin haze,” my mother says. “She’s still in a lot of pain after the surgery.”
    “She looks . . .