Lone Wolf A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

different.”
    “So do you.”
    We all do, I guess. There are lines on my mother’s face I never noticed before, or maybe they weren’t there. As for my father—well, it’s hard for me to imagine him changing at all.
    “I guess I should go find Dad,” I say.
    My mother picks up her purse—a tote bag with the pictures of two half-Asian children on it. The twins, I guess. It’s weird to think I have siblings I have never met. “All right,” she says.
    Right now, the last thing I want to do is be alone. To be the grown-up. But something makes me put my hand on her shoulder to stop her. “You don’t have to come with me,” I tell her. “I’m not a kid anymore.”
    “I can see that,” she says, staring at me. Her words are too soft, like they’re wrapped in flannel.
    I know what she’s thinking: that she missed so much. Droppingme off at college. Attending my graduation. Hearing about my first job, my first love. Helping me decorate my first apartment.
    “Cara might wake up and need you,” I say, to ease the blow.
    My mother falters, but only for a moment. “You’ll come back?” she asks.
    I nod. Even though that’s exactly what I swore I’d never do.
    At some point in my life, I thought about being a doctor. I liked the sterility of the profession, the order. The fact that if you could read the clues, you would be able to find the problem, and fix it.
    Unfortunately, to be a doctor you also have to take biology, and the first time I held a scalpel to a fetal pig I fainted dead away.
    The truth was, I wasn’t much of a scientist. In high school I lost myself in books, which turned out to be a good thing, since that’s how I furthered my studies once I left home. I’ve read more of the classics, I bet, than most college graduates. But I also know the stuff they never teach in lectures—like: avoid the upstairs bars on Patpong Road, because they’re run by thugs; or pick a massage shop with a glass front where you can see the business inside, or you’ll wind up with a “happy ending” you weren’t looking for. I may not have a degree, but I certainly got an education.
    Yet, in the family waiting room with Dr. Saint-Clare, I feel stupid. Inadequate. As if I cannot string together all the information he’s providing.
    “Your father suffered a diffuse traumatic brain injury,” he tells me. “When the paramedics brought him in here, he had an enlarged right pupil and was unresponsive. There was a laceration on his forehead, and he couldn’t move his left side. His breathing was labored, so he’d been intubated by the EMTs. When I was called in, I saw that he had a bilateral periorbital edema—”
    “A bi-what?”
    “Swelling,” the surgeon translates. “Around the eyes. We repeated the Glasgow Coma Scale test he’d been given at the site of the accident, and he scored a five. We performed an emergency CT scan and found a temporal lobe hematoma, a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and intraventricular hemorrhage.” He glances up at my face. “Basically, we saw blood. All around the brain and in the ventricles of the brain—which is indicative of a serious trauma. We put him on Mannitol to reduce some of the pressure in the cranium, and immediately took him into surgery to remove the clot in the temporal lobe and the anterior part of the temporal lobe of his brain.”
    My jaw drops. “You took out some of his brain ?”
    “We relieved the pressure on the brain that would have otherwise killed him,” the doctor corrects. “The temporal lobectomy will affect some of his memories, but not all. It doesn’t affect the areas of speech or motor or personality.”
    They had taken away some of my father’s memories. Ones of his beloved wolves? Or ones of us? Which would he miss?
    “So did it work? The surgery?”
    “Your father’s pupil is reactive again, and the clot’s removed. However, the swelling and the hematoma produced an incipient herniation—basically, a shift of structures from one