He sits warming himself and gathering his strength. It’s been so long since he’s sat idle like this without the numbing distraction of work, and the longer he sits, the harder it will be to keep his mind from filling in certain gaps that he’s left in the story. Each passing minute inches him closer to the chasm of what he’s been running from, the memories that he’s so vigilantly trained himself to avoid, and just as he’s about to tumble over the edge and let her into his thoughts—his daughter who he’s never met—Liam closes his fist and strikes the van’s rear-view mirror, breaking it off, leaving only a circular crust of adhesive on the windshield. The ferocity of his movement causes a vise to clamp down on his lower back, which cranks tighter and tighter with every short, gasping breath that he takes. He feels his eyelids flutter.
And all the gaps begin to fill.
WILLOW GREENWOOD
NOTHING—SHE DECIDES, AS she shows her driver’s license and signs the visitors’ register at the discharge desk of the Edmonton Correctional Institution—bothers her more than this word: GREENWOOD.
The mere sight of it is enough to pollute her with shame. How could such a natural construction (what two more pleasant words are there, really?) have become a shorthand for rapacious greed, treasonous betrayal, and serial Earth rape? And how could this colonial stain, this symbol of all that is clutching and parasitic and short-sighted about the human species, possibly have attached itself to her?
After signing in, Willow is escorted into a waiting area, where outdated magazines blanket a Formica coffee table and a water cooler gurgles nearby like a giant blue stomach. While outside the prison aspen leaves tremble in the sun and bearberries hum sweetly on bushes, there is neither a plant nor a scrap of natural light in this windowless crypt. A prison is the opposite of a forest, she concludes. Designed to sink the spirits and deaden the senses, to disconnect a human being from all that is crucial to life. If there is a fate worse than incarceration, she can’t imagine it.
She sits chain-smoking menthols, shivering in the air conditioning, her dress stuck to her like cling wrap, the sweat from her sunbaked journey pooling in the cavities made by her collarbones. And because there was quite likely dairy in the muffin she bought in desperation at that gas station, her stomach churns.
She drove her Westfalia, alone, for fourteen hours east from Vancouver to get here, over mountains that her father’s now-dissolved company clear-cut decades ago to amass his grotesque fortune. After reaching Alberta’s rolling grasslands, she passed cancerous oil derricks and freight trains that stretched across the entire horizon, dragging off the spoils of cut-and-run capitalism: wood and oil, factory-farmed grain, and coal. She’s heard it said that Greenwood Timber has brought down more North American old-growth than “wind, woodpeckers, and God—put together,” a joke repeated by every cigar-chewing captain of industry and every snivelling member of Parliament who ever came calling to her father’s Shaughnessy mansion.
While Willow knows that the cops bustling past the waiting area are merely incarcerators, and not investigators, she’s still careful to avoid eye contact. Two weeks ago, deep in the forested interior of British Columbia, she poured ten-kilo bags of white sugar into the gas tanks of three MacMillan Bloedel feller bunchers, permanently crippling the million-dollar machines responsible for murdering thousands of hectares of old-growth Douglas fir that had grown peacefully for millennia. It was her first direct action, her first attempt at sending a palpable message to the timber conglomerates and slowing the desecration of irreplaceable life—and it was like drinking a glass of pure adrenaline. Yet afterwards, while fleeing the cutblock, she passed a timber crew’s truck on the logging road. She’d removed her license plates before entering the forest, of course, but the road was narrow and her van passed close enough for the loggers to get a good look at her face and make a few obscene gestures in her direction. After returning to Vancouver, she immediately painted her yellow Westfalia a sky blue and bought a blonde wig and some large sunglasses. Still, she was certain that a black sedan had been following her during her usual supply run over the past few days. Perhaps it was Sage, the lover she broke it off with a few months back when he got needy. More likely it was RCMP investigators waiting for her to return to the Earth Now! Collective’s house in Kitsilano, where she’s been living for the past five years. Since joining the collective, Willow has written manifestos, done sit-ins, organized protests, and set blockades—all worthy forms of resistance, sure—but the group balked when she first suggested ratcheting things up to direct action. Sometimes she thinks the Earth Now! members would rather be shouting a clever slogan on the news than actually saving a living tree. But if she goes home now, she’ll risk exposing the others to police scrutiny—and everybody knows cops are in the pocket of industry, and would love any opportunity to break up the collective—so she’s been staying in her van ever since. Besides, Willow has never felt at ease in groups, with their quibbles and egos and petty dramas. And the best sacrifices, she believes, are always made in solitude, with not a camera in sight.
While a maximum-security federal penitentiary is the last place she wants to be right now, the deal she brokered with her father was too good to pass up. They hadn’t communicated for a year when she found his cryptic message waiting in the post office box she keeps in Vancouver. And though they pre-arranged to meet in the remote corner of Stanley Park where Willow planned to hide out until the heat dissipated, when his black Mercedes pulled up alongside her van, she was certain the Mounties had tracked her down.
“You’re not an easy person to find,” Harris said as his driver assisted him out of the car, an infantilizing act she once saw him fire a man outright for.
“Hard to find is how I like it,” Willow said, watching Harris orient himself to her voice and start toward her. Her father was born at the turn of the century, though he claims his exact birthday is a mystery to him (his way of avoiding parties, she’s long suspected), and despite his blindness, he’s always stayed physically strong—due to his insistence on cutting the firewood for the estate himself, even after the mansion’s baseboard electric heaters were installed and the fireplaces all bricked over. But his balance looked off, and his once-sandy hair had gone a duller, snowier white. After Greenwood Timber was dissolved, for years Harris did nothing more than track his land holdings and investments from his home office. And when he officially retired three years ago, he began spending half his time in San Francisco, where each morning he would take a taxi into the redwoods along with a guide to listen for birdcalls that he’d note down in a little book. But given this rapid physical diminishment, it was clear her father was not made for idle time.
Then, when he got close, he did the unthinkable: he reached out and embraced her. “You smell like a bunkhouse at one of my lumber camps,” he said after releasing her.
“And you smell like a retirement home,” Willow said, still perplexed by the gesture. “To what do I owe this honour, Harris?” Throughout her childhood, he had forbidden her to use the words dad and father, though naturally there was a phase in her teens when she made a point of sneering, “Anything you say, Daddy!” But he seemed to be making an effort at civility, so she decided to spare him her venom.