“Your uncle is due to be released in two days,” he said, exercising his long-standing distaste for small talk. “And given your unique relationship, I thought you might like to retrieve him.” She could almost detect a trace of jealousy in his voice, as if Harris wasn’t the one who’d engineered—and financed—their “unique relationship” in the first place.
When Willow was six, Harris promised her a quarter for every letter she wrote her uncle, Everett Greenwood, and even left a stack of pre-stamped envelopes in her desk drawer. Eager to buy her own Arabian jumper like the other girls at her private school, she wrote a letter every day, sometimes several. For ten years they corresponded from their respective penitentiaries: Everett from his maximum-security cell, and Willow from her father’s mansion. Initially, his letters came in a childish script, rife with grammatical errors and misspellings that she could identify even then. But over the years she watched his writing improve, like a slide projection drawn into focus, and in some sense they became literate in tandem.
Willow believed from a young age that even if her father’s sight were restored by some miracle, he still wouldn’t see her, not how a daughter needs her father to. Strangely, it was through her correspondence with her uncle that, along with enough money to buy her first thoroughbred Arabian, she gathered the kind of recognition she’d long thirsted for. Often reaching thirty single-spaced pages, and penned in a claustrophobic block print, Everett’s letters never delved into prison life. Instead, he discussed such riveting subjects as the proper method for tapping maple syrup, or old movies he’d watched, or his readings of Homer, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Marcus Aurelius, or the pulpy novels of the prison library, from which he gleaned an overabundance of meaning. Willow treated her uncle more like a diary-by-correspondence than a real, living pen pal. She confessed her regret at not having a mother to braid her hair (her mother had been a wash-woman at one of Harris’s lumber camps and had died at Willow’s birth), and detailed her rare trips with her father to Greenwood Island, as well as her deep longing for a horse. When eventually, at sixteen, Willow’s life cluttered with friends and equestrian classes and boys, she ceased writing altogether. Everett sent three more unanswered letters before stopping as well.
It wasn’t until much later that she clued in to the oddity of paying a six-year-old to write to her incarcerated uncle, especially one serving out a thirty-eight-year sentence for some offence never spoken of. Any of her questions concerning the details of Everett’s crime would always erect a rampart of silence across the dinner table, or send Harris fleeing to his study, where he’d latch the oak door behind him, locking himself in with his Braille editions and LPs of recorded poetry. In her twenties, Willow asked a law student friend to look Everett up, and discovered that the particulars of his conviction were sealed by the Crown—a circumstance, her friend suggested, that implied an offence concerning a child or children. Willow left the matter alone after that. She’d always imagined the Greenwood family as a house built of secrets, layers upon layers of them, secrets encased in more secrets, and she’d long had the suspicion that to examine them too closely would be to pull the whole edifice down around her.
Her final conclusion was that Harris was too emotionally stunted to correspond with Everett himself, so he’d outsourced the task to her, which was typical of her father: he was adept at paying people to do his dirty work.
“Pick him up yourself,” Willow told him. “He’s your brother.”
Her father shut his sightless eyes for a moment and took a steadying breath, like a seasick man trying to overcome a resurgent bout of nausea. “I expect he’d prefer your company to mine,” he said in a muted voice.
“Well, I just stocked up for the rest of the summer. And I’m quite busy hugging trees right now, can’t you tell?”
“Ah yes, you and your trees,” Harris said, swivelling his neck, as though he could actually see the intricately needled cedars and firs intermingling high above them. “You’ve come to know them even more intimately than I ever did. Then why the self-deprivation? What you need to do is finish your degree. Get into government. Policy-making, Willow. I know that’s a dirty word to you, but it’s only if you get your hands on the real levers of power that you can create some actual change.”
How, Willow wondered, could anyone possibly believe in old-fashioned political change in an era like this? An era when the president of the United States is a lying ghoul, the rain melts your skin, the food is laced with poison, wars are eternal, and the world’s oldest living beings are being felled to make Popsicle sticks. “This whole sick system is in its death throes, Harris. And in my opinion, those holding the levers of power ought to be the first to get dragged down with it.”
“Oh, people said the same thing back in the thirties,” Harris said, waving his hand dismissively. “And they’ll be saying it forty years from now, mark my words. Time goes in cycles. Everything comes back again, eventually. You learn that at my age.”
Willow felt his dismissal harden her voice: “What you’ve destroyed will never come back, Daddy.”
Such a brazen insult would normally have jump-started one of his rages, and plunged their relationship into the ice water of another multi-year silence. But instead his lips pursed and his cheeks reddened, and if it hadn’t been Harris Greenwood standing before her, Willow might have thought he looked hurt. He turned away without another word, and she stood watching him scuttle to his car. The combination of his unexpected restraint and his geriatric gait prompted in her an odd sensation of pity.
“What’s it worth to you, Harris?” she called out.
Her father stopped and turned back toward her with narrowed eyes and a devilish half-smile. “Name your price.” Negotiation had always been his native tongue, the only language that ever truly reached him.
“The deed to Greenwood Island,” Willow said.
Harris laughed soundlessly; then, after he realized her sincerity, crumpled his grey eyebrows. When Willow was a girl, and only after a scorched-earth campaign of dogged lobbying, Harris would sometimes agree to take her on two-week retreats to the remote cabin on his private island—just the two of them, that was the deal, no assistants or employees. They took daily walks through the old-growth, Willow craning her neck in wonder and Harris listening carefully for birds. In the evenings they discussed botany and books and the war in Europe, and then listened to his poetry records before bed. Away from his office, Harris was a changed man. He never scolded her for chewing too loudly or lectured her on the critical importance of industry, and even made the occasional joke. Those trips were everything to her then: her only escape from the slow suffocation of their mirthless home; the only time she ever saw her father approach some form of contentedness.
Then came the Inquiry. She was eleven at the time, but she still remembers conclaves of slick-haired lawyers in the house at all hours, her father yelling into telephones with his eyes pinched shut. In the end, a special committee convicted him of collusion with the enemy for selling vast quantities of timber to the Japanese just before the Second World War broke out. Not only were many of his assets seized and divvied up among his bitterest competitors; he was—and here was his greatest defeat of all—entirely cut out of the enormous reconstruction profits to be had in post-war Europe. It was then he truly disappeared: as though to complement the loss of his vision, he lost his ability to be seen, to occupy space in the world. He became the phantom haunting their house, and they never set foot on Greenwood Island together again. If it hadn’t been for her horse and the letters from her uncle, Willow would have perished of loneliness.