Slowly, I became aware that Gunnar was trembling. I put my hand on his back, then touched his face. He was crying, I realized.
“I’m sorry the only thing I can do to help stop the board is petition for your parole, given your diagnosis. I’m a director now, my signature will work for that. For at least a week, anyway. It’ll take them that long to even get to the paperwork to see what I’ve done.” His shoulders hiccupped. “It’s not enough.”
“It is,” I said.
“It’s not. Not by far.”
I kissed his wasted cheek. “Gunnar.” The skin there was as cold and grey as mine. “It is.”
Finally, finally, he looked at me. “I understand now, Ingrid. What you were trying to get us all to see, all those years ago. This story is not ours. They are not telling it for us. They are telling it for each other.”
* * *
At last, we come to now.
Today is 18 August 2125. The second day of my freedom.
I have returned from Nordmarka to my little hovel of a flat outside Kløfta just this morning, before dawn. Gunnar rented it in secret for me, as his last act. Then he went back to Oslo, where they’ve moved the board meetings, and has likely already emptied the syringes from his euthanasia package into his veins. He is gone. They can do nothing to him now, and neither can the Crackles.
The dirt of the forest is still under my fingernails, and in the treads of my boots. It was a long hike, difficult in the darkness, but I’ve done it many times before. The first time while carrying a champagne bottle, the second while carrying a bunch of little urns of ash with Claire, and struggling with the shovel as she laughed. The third, with the shovel again, and only her remains. And the fourth, the night before I was arrested. I was all alone, and carrying only one thing that time.
No, not all alone.
I had the trees.
I will bet that even after learning all of this, you still don’t want to believe me. Not about the cremated remains being worthless, not about the stories inside the wood not belonging to the people you think made them. Not about it being the trees having done it, all along.
But I can prove it.
Because I still have Claire’s manuscript. Her book.
Not the one that everyone thinks is hers, the words inside the first felled tree—but rather, the one she truly wrote. The one she gave to Katie Paterson so many decades ago, that was sealed in the wooden box for display at the Deichman Library, and then forgotten in the storage closet of her office until the board destroyed the rest of the boxes to protect their secrets.
The night I went into that closet to read the manuscripts, I should have known better and taken them all then, but at least I did one thing right. I did take Claire’s with me. I went straight out from that room into the darkness. No coat, no flashlight, no shovel. I walked the way I had walked the first night she brought me to Nordmarka, by feel of the gnarls of wood poking through the undergrowth beneath my feet and the touch of the rough bark of branches around me, by the rush of the wind as it whispered around the trunks.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Claire had said, even though we could hardly see anything under the dim moon. She had meant the library, the idea of it.
“Yes,” I’d agreed. I had meant her, and the trees. The sound of her voice and the sound of their leaves, blending together.
Alone, in darkness, as the board was closing in around me, I dug a hole with my hands and planted Claire’s box beneath her tree. Her real tree. The tree she showed me that first night, she nearly breathless with excitement as she tried to tell me everything about the library, me clutching the champagne bottle so hard my knuckles were white, so nervous to be so close to her that I could hardly hear her words over the waterfall rush in my ears. The tree I loved as deeply as I loved her, for just as long.
I knew they’d never find it amid all the others, tucked into a distant corner of the grove, because they would have to know which tree was really hers first out of the thousands and thousands. And none of them know the forest like I do.
“Do you ever wonder what they would say?” Claire asked me, just before the medication put her into an endless sleep. “If the trees could tell stories like us?”
“Yes,” I’d said. I had spent my whole life wondering that.
She laid her head back on the pillow, and grimaced at the needle in her vein. I touched her cheek. “It seems impossible that we’re the only species who can.”
“Do you think anyone would really listen, if it were true?” I’d asked. I did not have faith in humans the way Claire did.
I will never forget that last smile she gave me, before her eyes closed. “You would, Ingrid.”
Tomorrow, I will release this letter, and then Claire’s book. You will finally be able to read it, the way the Future Library always intended.
It’s a love story. A slim, bittersweet thing. It’s about a marriage, a husband who loves his wife very much and a wife who loves him back, but is disappointed he’s not more romantic. She finds their quiet newlywed life boring, and wishes for grand surprises and cinematic moments, but he doesn’t know how to give them. His love is in the little things, every day, too small for her to notice. She is a fire, burning fast and bright, and he is an ocean, slow and long. Or perhaps, a forest.
Some years after they wed, the husband becomes sick, and dies. The wife is bereft, mourning his quiet, everyday love that she will never feel again.
But a week later, a letter arrives in the mailbox. It was written by the husband long ago, on the day they found out he was sick. He reminds her that at their wedding, he promised to love her every day, for her whole life. Not his, but hers. The letter tells her that he will write more—many, many more, and will save them to be sent after his death—that this way, he can still love her for her whole life.
In the moment, each letter by itself will seem small, just a little thing. But all of them together will fill a room, he swears. That the longer she waits, the more she will finally be able to see the truth, that his love has always been very big indeed.
Did Claire know even then, somehow, in some way, I wonder? She was always so full of magic.
I am finally, finally starting to believe.
Within instants, Claire’s work will infiltrate every corner of the networks, embedded in everyone’s NewsLens and EyeScan. I will let the media organize a lab sample when they inevitably come rushing to me, so they can test the paper and the ink and date it to the year that Claire submitted the pages to Katie Paterson, as the fifty-seventh author of the Future Library. But even before those results are released, you will already believe. Scholars will comb through her bibliography, and compare her style with her previous works. Claire’s words will shine through.
You all will know this book is truly hers—not the one in the first tree we cut down. Because those words were there all along. This will prove it.
And then, you all will believe me when I reveal to you Gunnar and Hsiu’s list. He told me the order of the trees, the order of The Song of Leaves, over and over, until I memorized it. When you read their story so far in sequence, you won’t be able to deny it.
You will finally understand who is writing The Song of Leaves, and what it is about.
You will understand that cutting the forest down to have every piece doesn’t make the story go on—it makes it end. That we will only know the rest of it by watching the trees grow.
That the story will only save us if we let them keep telling it.
Claire’s box is on the table beside me, mud-stained, its outer wood gone soft and grey. But the steel inner case peeking out between the warps in its seams is still strong. This is the closing of my story, and of Claire’s, but only the beginning of the trees’. This is what I will leave behind. Her words, and mine, as well. I wish the forest could read them.
Who would have guessed that at the end of my life, words would become the most important thing?
Thank you for buying this
Tom Do
herty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Peng Shepherd
Art copyright © 2021 by Mark Smith
The Future Library Page 4