Dinner progresses from there in silence, and thankfully without a visit from the Rangers. It’s Jake’s turn to clean out the staff fridge, so after the meal she remains behind as the others file out.
“Everything okay out there in the trees today?” says a muffled voice behind her sometime later. Jake extracts her head from the fridge to find Davidoff standing at the door with hairy arms crossed. Some Guides claim that, pre-Withering, Davidoff had been some kind of Russian special forces operative, but he’s short and flabby with eyes dead as dirty nickels, and Jake has never registered the coiled menace others describe.
“Really positive engagement for my Pilgrims today, sir,” she says. “Plenty of great questions. And some bona fide epiphanies too.”
“The new Ranger patrols didn’t get in your way, did they?” he asks with his chest puffed proudly. “I secured some funding to step things up now that the raids are becoming more frequent. There’s concern that the Mainlanders could make it into the resort.”
“My Pilgrims never even knew they were there, and I feel much safer just knowing they’re around,” Jake says with a tight smile. “But I did note a slight anomaly earlier,” she adds, as offhandedly as she can manage. “A touch of needle browning on some unremarkable firs near the staff cabins. Certainly nothing to worry about, but it should be examined. With your approval, I’d like to sign out a microscope, some rainfall meters, and a soil collection kit, just to be sure.”
“You won’t be messing around with any of our old-growth trees, will you?” he asks skeptically. “If the Rangers catch anyone out in the Cathedral with a microscope, they’ll be banished before I even hear of it.”
“No, of course not,” she replies, feeling her stomach twitch with the lie. “It’s not the old-growth at all. Just a few trees around my cabin, and only to satisfy my own curiosity.”
“I appreciate your interest in our majestic forest, Greenwood,” Davidoff says, with a smile that his dead eyes fail to match. “You’re cleared to sign out whatever you need from the Maintenance Shed. But I need you well rested for tomorrow. You’re booked for a private, bright and early.”
“Me?” Jake says. She never gets booked for private tours, most likely because she’s ten years older than the other Guides and it’s always male Pilgrims who book them. Her thoughts veer to the celebrity in her group today—Corbyn Gallant—whose visit she overheard a few of the recruits mention breathlessly at dinner. “Who with?”
“Not sure exactly,” he says. “But some higher-ups at Corporate requested you specifically. So I need you to bring that old Greenwood charm tomorrow.”
While hurrying to reach the Maintenance Shed before it shuts down for the night, Jake considers the unsubstantiated tales she’s heard of private tours where, following a quick jaunt through the trees, a $5,000 “massage” with cedar-scented oils is provided to a Saudi solar panel prince by an unnamed Forest Guide. And given the fact that by this date next year her ballooning student loan interest payments will swallow her entire bi-weekly salary, she’s ashamed to admit that she’d probably do the same. How different things would be for her if she were afloat in family money like Torey and the rest of the Forest Guides. Because there’s nothing like poverty to teach you just how much of a luxury integrity truly is.
THE GREAT WITHERING
WHEN JACINDA GREENWOOD is eight years old, her mother, Meena Bhattacharya—a first-chair violist for the Los Angeles Symphony—is returning home to New York City from a solo concert she’s given in Washington, D.C., when her commuter train slips its tracks and arcs forty feet down onto the busy interstate below. First responders locate her body in the thin greenbelt of trees that divides the interstate’s northbound and southbound lanes, her skull crushed yet her reading glasses somehow still fixed in place. Her mother’s death teaches Jake, too early in life, that the human body is fragile, and that our brief lives can be halted at any moment, as unexpectedly as a breeze blowing a door shut.
With her mother gone, it’s as though the colour has been sapped from Jake’s world. She seldom eats and speaks only in murmurs. She’s sent to Delhi to be raised by her grandparents, civil servants living in a middle-class suburb on the city’s southern fringe. Immediately, Jake misses the U.S. The neat geometry of its sidewalks, the splat of ketchup on French fries—every memory is like a thorn in her flesh that she can’t extract. But worst of all, she misses the sound of her mother playing her viola in the next room, a soothing warble almost indistinguishable from her voice.
A week after her arrival in India, Jake finds a cardboard box on her bed, on the side of which her mother has written LIAM GREENWOOD. All Meena ever told her about her father was that he died while working illegally as a carpenter in the U.S. when Jake was three. Perhaps because she’s never seen his face, not even in pictures, Jake has always imagined him as Paul Bunyan–like, nearly a tree himself, with a halogen smile, a carpenter’s burly hands, a plaid shirt, and sawdust powdering his hair.
As she stares at the name on the box, Jake remembers something her mother once told her while they were riding the subway in New York, her large, unwieldy viola case jammed between them like a bodyguard. “Your father was a troubled person,” she said, with the same kindness that she extended to even the city’s poorest souls, a few of whom were riding the subway car along with them. “But he was a good person. And he tried to make things right in the end. He left you a few things, which you’ll get when you’re older, and some money for your schooling, as well as an old farm in Saskatchewan that I haven’t managed to sell quite yet.”
So this box before Jake is a revelation, a time capsule sent from a distant, unreachable past. She reads her father’s name again and imagines all the wonders the box might contain, and how those wonders could send away the dark creature that has lived in her belly ever since her mother’s death. Yet when she finally gathers the courage to open it, the box contains no photographs of her father, no stack of letters or diary to explain why he never once took the time to visit her or what her mother meant by “make things right.” Instead, it contains the yellowed deed to a piece of worthless farmland, a few old-fashioned woodworking tools, a dozen unlabelled vinyl records, and a pair of work gloves that appear to be unused. She growls and kicks the box deep into her closet. While her grandparents have no turntable to play her father’s records, she listens to them a few months later at a friend’s house, and is further insulted when she discovers they’re not, as she hoped, recordings of her mother playing the viola or of her father reading bedtime stories, but instead a series of droning poetry recitations, all done by the same annoyingly over-expressive man.
Meena was an only child, and because Jake’s grandparents had already launched one perfect girl into the world only to lose her inexplicably, they take a reserved approach with Jake, and direct her out into the large back yard whenever she seeks a playmate. It’s there she discovers the great multi-trunked banyan that spreads across the property, thirty-eight trunks in total, which she learns are all somehow a single living being. Initially, she finds this alien maze of alligator-coloured leaves frightening, as if it’s a monster trying to confuse and devour her. But because the banyan is the closest thing she has to a friend, she soon comes to know its contours better than the interior of her own room. After school, when she’s completed her regular studies, she disappears into the tree with her illustrated botany books and her tea set, and lies for hours talking to it and imagining its roots—a many-fingered claw that must reach so far down that it grasps the very soul of the Earth. After six months, she comes to feel a kinship not just with the banyan but with all trees, and adores them with a fervor that other girls reserve for ivory stallions or honey-voiced Bollywood heartthrobs.