Second Nature Read Online Free Page A

so frustrating, and this was too important, she couldn’t wait. Ginny’s health was failing and her daughters wanted to send her to a nursing home in New Jersey, and then what the hell would they do with Old Dick? Stuart had been all but supporting him, since Social Security was barely enough to pay Ginny’s weekly salary, and there were food and heating bills and medicine to consider. The truth of it was, Stuart had been helping Robin out, too, since she didn’t want to ask Roy for any more than the pittance she was legally allowed. Thank goodness for Stuart, who was so practical, he liked to joke, that he applied to medical school when he realized he needed a twenty-four-hour-a-day psychiatrist and decided it was cheaper to become one than to engage one at the going rates. When he and Kay divorced, Stuart had insisted she buy a Volvo, after checking every import’s safety record; he heartily disapproved of Robin’s old pickup, which, as she now approached the Mid-town Tunnel, skidded as it always did when she was in a hurry and the asphalt was wet.
    There were no meters free, so Robin had to park in one of the expensive lots, on Eighty-fifth, then run through the rain over to Kelvin Medical Center, but at least she was wearing her boots. By the time she reached the building, her hair had unwound from its elastic band and her rain slicker was dripping wet. The storm had now begun in earnest, the kind of downpour that flooded gutters and whipped umbrellas into the air. When Robin got out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor, her ears ached with the drop in air pressure. She was on her way to Stuart’s office, thinking about Medicare and lasagna and a new mildew-resistant variety of aster, when the Wolf Man was led into the hallway. Because he was handcuffed, the attendants assumed he was harmless; they left him in the corridor while they went to sign for his transfer. The air was so murky and still that the mice grew confused, and believing it was midnight, they dashed out of the heating vents. A few nurses and attendants who had the day off had come in just to get a glimpse of the Wolf Man, and they were disappointed when he kept his eyes downcast. Patients on crutches struggled to their doorways in their hospital gowns so that someday they could tell their grandchildren they’d been there, right in the same hospital, breathing the very same air, but most of them mistook the Wolf Man for a maintenance worker and looked right past him.
    “Is that him?” Robin asked one of the nurses. “The Wolf Man?”
    “We’re not supposed to call him that,” the nurse told her, but of course Stuart called him that all the time, at least in private.
    Stuart had talked about this patient constantly when he’d first been flown in from Michigan. All the cases of children raised by animals had been dubious, records had been tampered with, fears reported as fact, medical histories obscured, so that one never knew whether ill children simply had been abandoned out in the woods, where no one was likely to find them, by families too poor or overwhelmed to cope. Not one of these children had ever gained enough language to tell his own story, and Stuart’s hope was that this patient would change all that. If they were lucky, he had been able to speak before he was lost, and with help he might remember all he once knew. But by the beginning of March, Stuart no longer discussed the Wolf Man with Robin, and by the end of the month the arguments he offered to his colleagues about keeping the patient at the medical center sounded weak, even to him. Through all the hours of therapy, the patient had not spoken one word.
    “Well, he doesn’t look very fierce,” Robin said to the nurse.
    “Oh, really?” the nurse said archly, as she started down the hall. “He’d bite your head off in a minute. He’d slit your throat and never think twice.”
    The Wolf Man was hunched over on a wooden bench in his black overcoat, which was two sizes