Milner made funeral arrangements and hired the babysitters, who came and whisked her son from her side for the first time in his life. And even the Marxist in Willow must admit there are certain undeniable advantages to wealth, because what a relief it was to get some time to herself.
Now she burns a bowl of indica in her one-hitter, blowing the smoke from the tiffany window that overlooks the drive. On the few occasions she returned to this house after Our Plundered Planet kicked off her environmental awakening, she saw it for what it truly was: a vile shrine to the gruesome violence that her bloodline had inflicted upon the planet, which included slaughtering thousands of ancient and defenseless creatures for no purpose other than gaudy decoration. Lying here now in her bedroom, where the branches of the pin oak still rub against the slate roof, the floor still creaks in front of the closet, and the pen-smeared desk where she wrote her uncle countless letters still sits beside the door, Willow feels as though she’s been thrust back in time.
With the reception set to begin at noon, she drags herself to the dusty mirror to appraise her outfit, which even she realizes can only be described as inappropriate: a batik-printed skirt and a faded blouse dotted with tree sap, long baked into the fabric by its monthly tumble in a laundromat dryer. “Clothes don’t signify grief,” she tells herself. “Grief does.” And she is grieving, isn’t she? Of course she is. Yet Harris had been such a puzzle of a father, forever occupied, forever out of reach, forever unknown. When she was a girl, this house was a place of empty silences and secrets, with its pianos that nobody played and books that nobody read. With its bronze busts and oil portraits of English frigates and Italian scenery. With its cages of exotic birds, its black mahogany cabinetry buffed to a high gloss, and its antique logging equipment hung everywhere like the weaponry of some noble war. And her father, with his routines and schedules: the same meals eaten at the same times each day, the same records of poetry on the same turntable in his study during the evenings. And the way he would scold her for even the smallest disturbance of these routines: her tendency to walk thumpingly on her heels, or her stomach’s habit of gurgling at the dining table.
She did her best to liven things up, though. She remembers roller-skating down the lanes of the mansion’s private bowling alley until Harris burst in to yell at her for marring the woodwork (marks which, she never failed to point out, he couldn’t even see). And once playing a trick on the house staff by hanging the freshly polished silver like ornaments from the garden’s perfectly manicured trees. Then there was the sign she pasted to the door of her bedroom that read KEEP OUT, ENCHANTED FOREST INSIDE, and the hundred branches she nailed directly to her walls to complete the effect, and the hundred holes left in the plaster after Harris had ordered the gardener to rip them all down.
Even if her clothes are passable, at a minimum her bodily grime needs to go, so she scrubs her armpits and neck at the washbasin, staining forever a white washcloth that she guiltily flings directly into the trash. She brushes, centre-parts, and braids her hair, then glides down the grand mahogany staircase whose steps she counted with her skips so many times as a girl, her hand skating down its spiralling redwood banister hewn from a single tree.
Downstairs, guests clot together in the great room, a cavern of thirty-foot-high oak ceilings, where many round tables are set out and draped with fine white tablecloths. Harris never wanted a formal funeral, but he hadn’t explicitly outlawed one, either. So with Willow’s approval, Milner arranged the catering and hired the string quartet—though Harris loathed music, and always maintained that it is nothing more than a perversion of the singular perfection of the human voice.
Huddled on silver platters are steamed lobsters flown three thousand miles from New Brunswick and piles of roasted meats heaped high, ninety per cent of which will surely go to waste. A six-foot Douglas fir, sculpted entirely of butter, stands near the bay window, while pomaded bartenders wait behind crystal decanters of fine Canadian whiskies and cases of sake ordered for the occasion. Many out-of-town guests are rooming here at the estate, and she’s heard that an entire floor of the Hotel Vancouver was required to accommodate the overflow. Counting journalists and gawkers, it’s nearly four hundred people in total, and while it cheers her to see the old mansion teem with life like it never did in her childhood, she’s pierced with the urge to throw them all out on their ears.
A tuxedoed server presses a glass into her hand and it shames her how easily she slips into the role of the tycoon’s daughter. But after so many grimy months spent in her father’s rustic cabin on Greenwood Island, washing the tar-like meconium from her son’s diapers at the hand-pumped well, what a relief it is to have people present her with food and wash her clothes and turn down her bed and soothe her child.
She stands near the fieldstone hearth, smoking a menthol and nipping her sake—the only alcohol her father could ever stomach—hoping to pass unnoticed. She scans the room for her uncle Everett, who Milner had tried to invite through his parole officer, though he had yet to reply. Despite the fact that Willow has heard nothing from her uncle since she dropped him off at the Vancouver airport nine months ago, she’s reread some of the letters they’d exchanged, and has come to reconsider her harsh judgment of him. Surely it was disorienting to emerge like that into her custody after so long an incarceration, to pass between entire decades as though they were adjacent rooms. It was a troubled time for her, too: haywire estrogen levels and too much weed and too many pills—factors that surely contributed to her paranoid imagining of that mysterious black sedan that had seemed to follow her everywhere. But especially now, with Harris gone, she feels an acute desire to see her uncle again. Who cares about his invented stories of the time they shared together when she was a baby, and his odd nickname for her (Pod, was it?). He might be a little crazy, but he’s harmless. And she’s often wondered how his reunion with that woman in Saskatchewan went, and whether he found that book he was willing to risk violating his parole conditions to track down.
“Miss Greenwood!” calls out a short barrel of a man, leaning on a hand-carved cane and striding through the crowd toward her. Willow hears his knees click as he draws close. “Name’s Mort Baumgartner. I founded Greenwood Timber with your father and was there from the very beginning,” he says, as though this explains a great deal, before he expounds further upon her father’s merits as an employer.
A baby is a vulnerable thing, yet it can also provide a kind of armour, and suddenly she wishes for her child back in her arms, if only to have something substantial to put between herself and this man eyeing her clothes, appraising the gap between the father’s success and the daughter’s failure.
“We parted ways years ago on account of certain disagreements,” Baumgartner jabbers on, “but I’m here to offer my condolences on his passing. Harris was a hell of a lumberman. That’s why I was so surprised when I learned of the…circumstances. Despite his handicap, Harris Greenwood knew his way around a forest.”
“He got lost,” she says firmly, unwilling to stoke the wildfire of rumour concerning his possible suicide. “Could happen to anyone.”
“I heard they found quite a tumour in his head. Size of a softball, someone said. He must have known. Did he tell you?”