“It’s a better life than I or anyone I know could ever reasonably expect,” she says. “Except you, I guess.”
His smile comes slow, like dawn through the Cathedral’s canopy. “You know what? I envy you,” he proclaims with some disbelief, as if he’s making a delightfully preposterous statement.
Then give me one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, she thinks. You can fix my life here and now for the price tag of one of your vacations. Instead she says: “Oh no, don’t say that.”
“No, I do! Living here? On this island, in this forest, doing what you love. And reading real paperbooks, with no phone! You lead a good, simple life.”
A simple life? Jake almost scoffs. In university, while facing the various thesis defense committees comprised mostly of smug, tweed-coated men, Jake fully realized her loathing of being patronized. “Complete with a simple mind, you mean?” she says now, instantly regretting it.
Corbyn’s face contorts into an expression of outsized anguish, like a man in a movie learning of his wife’s death. “I’ve offended you, and I’m sorry.”
It’s not worth arguing over, so she accepts his apology, then allows their conversation to range over topics that he selects: the great promise of environmental innovation, the dangerous yet irresistible allure of social media, the scrappy resilience of human ingenuity. It seems there’s no subject that doesn’t interest him, everything layered with the same veneer of boyish enthusiasm.
“So do you still want your private tomorrow morning?” she says an hour later, after they’ve had sex again and she’s starting to plan the route she’ll have to take through the trees in order to sneak back to her staff cabin this late at night.
“What do you mean?” he says, checking his watch. “Tomorrow early I’m flying up to Nunavut to join some Inuit elders in a healing ceremony beneath the northern lights. It’s going to be life-changing.”
A STORY TO TELL
AT SEVEN THE next morning, Jake arrives for her scheduled private and finds her ex-fiancé haunting the trailhead.
“Is this as weird for you as it is for me?” Silas says, offering his hand.
It’s been thirteen years since Jake booked her one-way flight from Vancouver to the Netherlands, but not before mailing Silas’s engagement ring back to him without a note or even a single syllable of explanation. So much for Jake’s plan to never see him again; and so much for her long-held belief that the Withering had reduced the chances of an accidental reunion to zero.
“This is a surprise,” Jake says, taking his soft, well-moisturized palm in hers, which leads them into a hasty, bloodless hug.
No one from her pre-Withering life has ever visited the island before, and Silas’s appearance feels other-worldly, as though he’s just wandered into one of her dreams. But along with the waterfall of guilt roaring in her ears, Jake also feels a twinge of shame at being found in such lowered circumstances by someone she once admired, as if she’s been caught playing dress-up in her ridiculous uniform, hiding out in a silly theme park at the edge of the world.
After their hug they stand awkwardly for a moment, both groping for what comes next.
“Look, Silas,” Jake says, interrupting him just as he also begins to speak. “I’d completely understand if you’d prefer we find you another Forest Guide to do your tour.”
“Are you kidding me?” Silas says with a dismissive wave of his hand, a wide smile stretching across his face. “Who better than you to lead me through these amazing trees that everyone is talking about?”
“Okay…” Jake says tentatively, scrambling to maintain her facade of professionalism. Even if he is the last person in the world she’d choose to spend the next few hours with, he’s still a Pilgrim—and her job depends on his satisfaction with the tour. “Then let’s get started.”
After she performs the first of her canned speeches, Jake lets Silas walk ahead of her on the narrowing trail as they weave through the maze of enormous trunks. An outfit of sleek, black Leafskin, a gym-tended physique, skin so well-maintained it appears lucent—the Withering has been kind to Silas. He’s probably a bigwig Holtcorp scientist now, booked for a restorative getaway at one of the company’s resorts. But for a fleeting instant it crosses Jake’s mind that he didn’t appear all that surprised to see her. Did he select Jake intentionally? Just to feel superior for a few hours and to prove to her what a catastrophic mistake she’d made?
They met in an earth sciences lecture during Jake’s first year at UBC. A fervent environmentalist, Silas brought her to fundraisers and documentary screenings—unwittingly rescuing her from solitary weekends spent in her dorm, leafing through botany texts, admiring branch structures as though they were fashionable outfits. He was clever, witty without being caustic, and in just a few months they had forged a bond of such intensity it felt as though they were symbiotically evolved organisms, incapable of independent survival. Soon, Jake was attending the surfeit of birthdays and anniversaries that Silas’s large, wealthy family seemed to celebrate endlessly. Feeling like a drifter who’d accidentally wandered into their ski chalets and lake houses, Jake watched his parents and five siblings collectively prepare elaborate meals, which they then shared at huge, lavishly set tables, amid the din of mirthful conversation. After Jake’s lonely upbringing, the fullness of Silas’s family life mystified her, and this fascination became impossible to disentangle from her feelings for him. Happily, Silas was intuitive enough never to ask about Jake’s past. Their conversations were all carbon credits and ecological devastation and Big Oil’s cancerous lobbying—this was the quaint period before the Withering when people still believed that well-intended, measured engagement could avert catastrophe. As graduation neared, Silas’s anxiety about their imminent separation grew; he proposed and made Jake vow that they would select geographically compatible grad schools. She agreed, and for a time she was content with her decision. But when she was offered a position with a pioneering researcher at Utrecht, and Silas a full ride at UC Irvine, Jake was faced with a choice: Silas or trees. Her panicked response was to block his calls, texts, and emails altogether, and to depart for the Netherlands with only strangers to see her off at the airport.
In short, Jake chose trees.
“God, I’ve missed this,” Silas says, after the trail has widened and they’re again walking side by side. “Sunshine, oxygen, soil, water—the raw material of life.”
“Silas,” she begins softly. “I know I didn’t end things in the best way—”
“Please don’t apologize, Jake,” Silas says, shaking his head. “It was a long time ago. And you did what you needed to do. I’m just happy to see that you went on to fully develop your talents.”
She thanks him, taking a mental microscope to his statement, hunting for trace elements of bitterness or condescension, but detects none.
“To be honest,” he continues, “I half-expected you to scream and run the other way when you saw me this morning.” So he did know it would be me, Jake realizes in a flash. “I’m happy you didn’t. It’s a relief to know that you’ve wound up in such a beautiful and secure place.”
“And where have you wound up?”
“San Francisco. Or what remains of it anyway. Actually, a gated community in Alameda. But I’m considering a move back to Canada. The dust storms are only getting worse, and with millions of people plunging deeper into poverty each day and all these climate refugees penetrating the borders—”
“Easy there, cowboy,” Jake says, careful to keep her tone light. “I’m an immigrant too, remember?”
“Oh, these aren’t hard-working strivers seeking opportunity like you, Jake. And they were no doubt good people once. But after a few years in the dust, they’re desperate enough to butcher your family and loot your home without even doing you the courtesy of first asking for a handout.”
There are plenty of points to argue, but Jake lets them drop because she can’t risk displeasing him. “Kids?” she asks, attempting to change the subject and
immediately chiding herself for the clumsiness of it. Too premature.
He shakes his head, then returns her the same eyebrow-raised look.
Jake shakes her head. “The Cathedral can’t accommodate the children of employees. They even provide free birth control, just to make sure.” Jake leaves unmentioned the fact that she’d long ago filed motherhood away in the locked drawer that contains everything that the Withering has made impossible for people like her: her own home, a steady relationship, a research lab, a tenured teaching position. And even if she did have the money, why would anyone willingly bring a child into such a fallen, desolate world? Children require hope and prosperity as trees require light and water, and Jake Greenwood is all tapped out of both.
It’s not until she emerges from this quagmire of thoughts that Jake notices they’ve reached God’s Middle Finger. She gives her big speech while glancing up at the pair of sick firs, noting that their browned needles are unchanged from yesterday. Silas asks a few obligatory questions, but despite his attempts at playing the part of a Pilgrim, there’s an odd sense of dislocation about him, an impatient clock ticking behind everything he says.
“You mentioned earlier that you were expecting me this morning,” Jake says as they walk to the picnic area for a water break. “This isn’t exactly a coincidence, is it?”
Silas cracks a sheepish smile. “Jake, you should know that after I got to grad school I abandoned biology for law.”
No wonder he’s being so forgiving, Jake thinks, he wants something. She considers the possibility that he might be there to fire her. Then why wouldn’t Holtcorp just send a team of Rangers instead? “And now you’re a lawyer for Holtcorp?”
“I work for an independent legal firm that does occasionally act for Holtcorp, yes. But I also work for you,” he says, his eyes now soft and open, almost wounded. “Or at least I’d like to.”
“Just how do you intend to do that?” Jake asks skeptically.
Silas laughs nervously. “This is all going a little fast—my plan was to put this to you over dinner tonight.”
“Private tours don’t include dinner,” she says curtly. “And yours is nearly over.”
“Okay, fine,” he says, throwing up his hands in surrender. “I’m here because this entire island could be yours, Jake. I mean legally yours. And I’m here to help you make that a reality. But to establish whether this is possible, I need you to answer a few questions about your family. Particularly concerning your father, Liam Greenwood.”
So he’s a vulture, Jake thinks. Since the Withering, she has read about this new breed of lawyer who searches out legal corpses to pick over: unresolved wills, mishandled inheritances, loopholes they can weave into some kind of land-grab or court challenge. But Jake would have expected Silas to be smarter than this. Conditions must really be dire out there if he’s aiming to use the flimsy coincidence of her surname as a means to lay claim to a billion-dollar forest.
“Holtcorp named this resort the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral because it sounded good, Silas,” Jake says. “Purely a branding decision. Nothing to do with me. My father was a carpenter who died while renovating a house in Connecticut—I don’t even know the exact day it happened. Sound like the kind of guy who owns an island to you?” After mentioning her father aloud for the first time in years, she feels the muscles inside her throat crank as tight as guitar strings.
“I know this is difficult,” Silas says with his neck canted sympathetically. “But will you please just hear me out and not run away this time? Don’t you owe me that much?”
A guilty knot cinches in Jake’s gut. She couldn’t feel any lower than she does right now if she slithered under a rock. “Okay,” she says, chastened, “you have five minutes before we need to head back.”
Silas draws a thick paper index card from his pocket. “Harris Greenwood, the West Coast timber tycoon,” he reads, “bought this island in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression—from John D. Rockefeller Jr., no less, who had purchased it from the English, who’d seized it from the Spanish, who’d stolen it from the Haida and Penelakut people following European contact. Harris Greenwood named the island after himself, naturally, though he left it to his daughter, Willow Greenwood, the radical hippie conservationist. She thanked him by donating it—along with the entire Greenwood fortune—to an environmental non-profit, thus dooming her son, Liam Greenwood, to a life of blue-collar toil, and his estranged daughter, Jacinda Greenwood, to the shackles of student debt and tree resort servitude. Over time, however, the non-profit morphed into a green energy company, which faltered in the 2008 crash, and was forced to sell the island for a song to Holtcorp to shore up its losses. Holtcorp then sat on it until the Great Withering, at which time the company recognized an opportunity in monetizing its spiritual appeal—and voila, here we are.” He takes a little bow, then offers the index card to Jake. “This was prepared by two of my sharpest researchers. Every bit of it verifiable on the public record. It’s yours. A gift.”
Jake stands speechless as the blue-green crowns of the giant firs rustle hundreds of feet above. Slowly, she reaches out and grasps the card. The paper is real, crisp, and luxuriously thick between her fingers. She scans the bullet-pointed text printed upon it. Willow Greenwood. She can’t remember Meena ever mentioning Liam’s mother. And there was no trace of her to be found in his cardboard box of useless relics. Yet that doesn’t mean she didn’t exist. Jake feels dizzy, though strangely elated. After a lifetime of knowing virtually nothing about her family, it’s like this unexpected burst of names and history has knocked her clean out of her body. But of course there are layers of life that came before her own, the way trees are held up by the concentric bands of their former selves, rings built up over rings, year by year. How had she never thought to ask questions about her ancestors before? The answer, she realizes, is that there had never been anyone to ask.
“Even if this island is named after my great-grandfather,” Jake says, fighting to return herself to reality, “Holtcorp owns it now. And if you think we’re going to take it from them, then the dust must be affecting your brain. So thanks for the information, Silas, but I’ve got five more tours to do today, so we should probably get moving.”
“But what if I told you that Harris Greenwood isn’t in fact your blood relative?” he announces with a crafty, self-satisfied expression she had always found grating. “And suppose we can prove that you do have a claim to Greenwood Island. Including this impossibly rare and endangered forest that I know you love. Not because you’re a Greenwood, but because you’re a descendant of the original founder of Holtcorp, R.J. Holt.”
Then I’d tell you that if you don’t leave me the hell alone to figure out what’s ailing these trees, Jake considers saying, by this time next year Greenwood Island might be a barren rock, and it won’t matter who owns it. Instead she watches him unsling his hiking pack and remove from it a thin, hard-backed paperbook.
“This once belonged to your grandmother,” Silas says, holding it delicately with his fingertips. “We considered mailing it to you, until I told my colleagues what a skeptic you are, and volunteered to deliver it personally. Not only is it good to see you again—and believe me, it is—I also hoped that you might still trust me.”
Jake takes the paperbook in her hands as a fizzy enchantment spreads through her chest. She parts its hardbound covers, which have a slightly gamey odour and are cracked in places and stained with purple splotches. Bits of dried grass and a fine dust tumble from the soot-blackened pages as she turns them, revealing neatly penned paragraphs of cursive—what must be undated diary entries. The paper itself is the colour of roasted almonds, but has a sturdiness to it, born of a time when trees were an inexhaustible resource, limitless in number. A time when a person soaked up a spill with a whole roll of paper towels, or printed her entire thesis one-sided (as she had) on a fat stack of snow-white loose-leaf.
“I’m leaving tonight,” Silas says. “But I’ve been cleared to entrust this wit
h you until I return. So you don’t need to make any decisions about whether to proceed with your claim now—in fact I’d rather you didn’t. I want you to read it, mull it over, get used to what it feels like to have a history. Just promise me that you’ll take exceptionally good care of it. This is an artifact of tremendous value. Most of all to you.”
“I’ve got a bunch of these on my bedside table already,” Jake jokes, attempting to mask her ravenous desire to read the paperbook as she presses it along with the index card against her stomach, “but I’ll try to get to it.”
Silas shakes his head and grins. “We’re currently in negotiations to acquire another critical piece of this puzzle, one that would greatly strengthen your claim. And when we do, I’ll be back.” He draws close and grasps her elbows. “I looked into your debt situation, Jake, and I know things are dire. But this could fix everything. And I don’t just mean the money. You never had much of a story to tell. I always sensed that it hurt you, whether you’d admit it or not. Now all that can change.”
Later that evening, Jake returns to her staff cabin, pours herself a hefty bourbon, and curls into the loveseat with the paperbook spread in her lap. After five more tours shepherding Pilgrims through the Cathedral, her eyes are sludgy and unprepared for parsing the book’s tricky cursive script. (She hasn’t seen anyone write in this antiquated fashion for years, and never learned the technique in her Delhi elementary school.) Just two pages in, Jake’s chin begins to dip, thereby unravelling the few narrative fibres that she’d managed to weave together.
It was silly to get your hopes up, she tells herself, rising to place the paperbook in her father’s old cardboard box, filing it away with all her other meaningless family heirlooms. Though she understands this journal is something that ought to have great bearing on her life, unfortunately for Silas and his scheme, Jake has always mistrusted the expression “knowing your roots.” As though roots by their very definition are knowable. Any dendrologist can tell you that the roots of a mature Douglas fir forest spread for miles. That they’re dark and intertwining, tangled and twisted, and impossible to map. That they often fuse together, and even communicate, secretly sharing nutrients and chemical weapons among themselves. So the truth is that there exists no clear distinction between one tree and another. And their roots are anything but knowable.
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