She brushes off some of the fine powder that has clung to her coat and rubs it into her hands. After exchanging their genetic material through the wind-blown pollen, the trees will set their seed cones, which will eventually open and send seedpods whirling on single propellers to the forest floor—at the exact time they shouldn’t. Even under the best conditions, a minuscule percentage of Douglas fir seeds ever reach adulthood. And at the wrong time of year, the seeds will find the soil muddy and inhospitable. They’ll rot long before any can germinate. And after all that’s gone amiss for Jake in recent months, only now does her composure shatter at the thought of these trees expending their last reserves to release millions of propellers to the wind out of utter desperation. Tears prickle her face. She lowers herself to the deck so the crew of the barge won’t see her weep.
THE GREENWOODS
AN HOUR AFTER Greenwood Island recedes from view and the subsonic hum of the resort’s desalinator can no longer be heard from the barge, Jake stops sobbing. She’s dedicated her life to the study of the world’s great trees: the eucalyptus, the banyan, the English oak, the baobab, the Lebanese cedar, the yakusugi of Japan, the sequoia of northern California, the Amazonian mahogany—but it is the coastal Douglas fir of the Pacific Northwest that remains dearest to her. And since the day she first arrived at the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, she’s believed that she couldn’t possibly survive without its forest, or the island that—at least for now—sustains it. Yet of course she can. People can adapt to anything, as long as it is necessary. And though she’s been turned out of her Eden, she’s leaving with a story. Only a partial story, it’s true, but as far as she can tell, that’s the only type there is.
Jake finds a secluded nook formed by the crates that the barge carries, tucking herself behind some bins of recycling and compost stacked head-high. She picks at the lining of her Leafskin coat with her fingertips, and from the hole she’s made she pulls the battered paperbook, nestled inside its slipcase. She removes the journal and sits leafing through its coal-blackened pages in the bracing sea air, hearing Euphemia’s voice, feeling the faint imprint her pen left in the paper a hundred years ago, like inverted Braille. Leafing. Why this expression, always? We make them human, Knut wrote. With our verbs.
As she so often does, Jake lands on the journal’s final entry, the one in which Euphemia addresses her newborn child directly for the first time, and describes her decision to keep her, despite the Great Depression, her impoverished circumstances, and her previous agreement to give her up. And though Jake now knows that Euphemia may have inexplicably taken her own life soon after, the passage still offers Jake a tenuous strength with which to face her new life on the Mainland.
After a few more hours, the barge nears Vancouver, and Jake lifts her eyes from the journal to behold the city. She remembers the excitement of first seeing this landscape after arriving from Delhi—this convergence of mountains and trees and ocean that charged her with such energy she couldn’t sleep for days. But so many of its great trees are gone now, replaced with climate-controlled towers of glass and steel. Even Stanley Park’s ancient cedars and firs have succumbed, just a few of them left to stand like green sentries beside the high-end housing developments that crowd the shoreline.
The barge chugs into a ramshackle service wharf where other ships of industry are moored. The air is dusty and pungent and toxic, and already Jake yearns for the island’s soothing, coniferous scent. The barge captain approaches her and says that since they’re short on crew, they’ll pay her a small sum to help unload the cargo. Now that she’s lost her job, she’ll soon be defaulting on her student loans, so it would be good to have some cash in her pocket.
Jake and some other crewmembers take up some plastic bins of recycling and carry them down the gangplank to the landing. For her next load, she’s about to pick up a large bucket of rank-smelling compost when the captain tells her to wait, before he quickly douses its contents with a jug of bleach.
“Why do they do that? Add the bleach?” Jake asks one of the crew as they’re walking back up to the ship to fetch another load.
The man grimaces at a large group of beggars, all children, huddled near the base of the ramp. “To keep those ones out of it,” he says warily.
A half hour later the unloading is done and Jake receives her paltry payment. She pulls two empty wine bottles—perhaps one of them was the very bottle she shared with Corbyn, or the one she watched Silas drink—from the recycling bins, which are placed to await pick-up in a chain-link enclosure where the beggars can’t get them. Jake walks over to the group of children and shoves the bottles into one of the scuzzy plastic bags that dangle at their sides.
“Thank you, Miss,” a child says in a raspy, dust-scoured voice, removing the bottles from the bag to carefully appraise their value. With the rags wrapped over the child’s face, Jake can’t accurately discern its gender or ethnicity. Indonesian perhaps, maybe Pakistani. The child’s exposed forehead is the same faint brown as her own.
“How much can you get for those?” Jake asks.
“Not too much,” the child says protectively, clutching the bottles to its chest, as though worried that Jake is having second thoughts and may snatch them back.
“Don’t worry, they’re yours,” Jake says, then glances at the bucket of bleached compost sitting nearby, which one of the ragged boys is now prodding with a coat hanger. “Maybe you can buy something to eat?”
“We are lucky,” the child proclaims proudly. “The bleach does not soak all the way down. And the Greenwoods throw out many good things, Miss. They are very generous.”
“You’re right, they throw out many things,” Jake says, and for a moment she recalls Silas speaking of the downtrodden masses who’ll butcher your family and loot your home without first asking you for a handout. “But I wouldn’t exactly call them generous.”
“You are generous and you are one,” the child says, pointing to the Cathedral’s stylized logo on Jake’s Leafskin jacket.
Jake touches the silkscreened logo with her fingers and smiles. “Not anymore. Still, you’re right. I was a Greenwood once,” she says. “But do you have anyone here? A family? Or if not here, then somewhere?”
“No, Miss,” the child says with downcast eyes, then points to the other beggars with a brightened expression. “But I have them.”
In an instant, Jake pictures herself enfolding this child in her arms and carrying it away from this squalid wharf—though the sudden desperation of the urge also frightens her. Because what child could possibly want Jake to rescue it? And how could she ever hope to care for another human being properly? She’s broke. With no family support-network and no partner. She drinks too much. And once she declares bankruptcy, her life will downshift into a whole new gear of squalor.
The child’s life with Jake would be a painful and low existence: hunger, dust, and discomfort, maybe even rib retch. In truth, she’d be a terrible guardian, and would probably leave the child worse off than it is now.
And yet. If she did take the child in, maybe they could track down Knut. He of all people would know whether there’s an arboretum somewhere, a sanctuary where at least some of the Earth’s great tree species have been preserved—probably funded by some tech magnate with a God complex, no doubt, but still. There, Jake could watch the child marvel at the banyan, the eucalyptus, the oak, the monkey puzzle, and the sequoia. And over time, after they’d put together the shards of the child’s own story as best they could—including how the child had ended up here on this wharf, eating bleached food and picking through refuse—Jake would tell the child the story of the Greenwoods, at least what little of it she knows. She’d speak of her great-grandfather the lumber tycoon. Her great-uncle the kidnapper. Her grandmother, who’d given away a fortune on principle. Her father, who’d built beautiful things for the richest people in the land. And when the child was old enough, Jake could even let it read Euphemia’s journal, which would be like their family album, the text that bound them together.