For nearly an entire minute they face one another in deadlocked silence across her father’s desk, while the black shadows of trees darken the windows and stuffed birds observe them with their glass eyes.
And though she expects the Irishman to commence scolding her anew, he assumes an unexpected calm. “Before I go, I’d like to tell you a little story, Willow. And I’d like it even better if you didn’t interrupt me while I do. You see, you and I took a boat ride once. Just the two of us. You were quite little, so of course you wouldn’t remember it. But there was nowhere to put you in the boat, so you rode alongside me in an insulated box, sort of a cooler used to transport food—we didn’t have car seats or anything like that in those days. It wasn’t much for me to do, to take you on this ride; I was a capable seaman then, and you seemed to enjoy yourself quite a lot. After our ride I brought you here to your father’s estate, and left you with his housekeeper. I think it’s fair to speculate that Harris was surprised to see you that night. He wasn’t exactly ready for you to be living with him here in his house. Still, he did the right thing and accepted you anyway. So please, Willow, before you judge him too harshly, just remember that his bit was much more than merely taking you for a boat ride. His bit was to care for you every day of your life. A duty he performed to the best of his ability, despite all he’d already lost. So know this: your father loved you with everything he had. He just didn’t have much left.”
BEQUEATHMENT
WILLOW STAYS ON at the Shaughnessy mansion for a week after the funeral, helping Milner tie up loose ends, dreading her return to the overcrowded Earth Now! Collective house in Vancouver, the only place left for her to go now that the mansion will likely be sold and Greenwood Island will be auctioned off to a competing timber company, and she’ll never be able to return to either place again.
The prospect of an inheritance has rarely occurred to her over the years, since Harris made it so explicitly clear that he’d written her out of his will. And even when the idea did briefly infiltrate her thoughts—usually on nights after she ran out of money and her belly was cramping from the half-rotten food that she and the Earth Now! Collective had pulled from a Dumpster, nights when she would’ve mowed down a handful of old-growth redwoods for just a few days lost in the impossible whiteness of clean sheets in a four-star hotel room—she saw zero chance of her father ever changing his mind. So she is baffled when she’s summoned by Milner, who’s been named executor of the Greenwood estate, to a meeting the next morning with her father’s attorneys in downtown Vancouver.
As she nurses her son in Harris’s limousine, she examines his pinched face for flickers of the Greenwood bloodline, for Everett’s wild hair or Harris’s crisply handsome cheekbones, but finds no trace. He still retains that generic, gelatinous quality of the newly birthed, and could as well be anyone’s child. What does it matter, she reminds herself, as she rides an elevator up to an office on the fortieth floor of a tall, mirrored building. The “family line” is all just capitalist, colonialist brainwashing anyway, designed to sequester power in the hands of the few. A single child has no fewer than sixteen different great-grandparents, each with their own separate family traits and stories, and yet we idiotically focus on the single surname that survives. Are not the other fifteen equally important? And what is her son really, but a bundle of flesh and cells and tissue animated by the same sacred energy that impels trees to stretch upward for the sun? No, her son is not hers alone. He descends from many bloodlines. Or, more precisely, he descends from the one, great bloodline: born of the Earth and the cosmos and all the wondrous green things that allow us life.
“Despite your father’s setbacks,” the lead lawyer says to commence the meeting, “he was still in a strong financial position when he died. And it is my duty to inform you that he named you the majority beneficiary of his estate. It’s a substantial bequeathment that includes the Shaughnessy mansion as well as his sizeable art collection, his Indian relics, his remaining sawmills, pulp and paper interests, and lumber operations, his schooner, as well as his holdings, securities, and their related dividends.”
Though she hears the words and tracks their surface meaning, it’s as though she’s been blasted by a great, deafening noise, broadcasted at a frequency that only she can hear. With her child sleeping in her arms, she averts her gaze to the window: the sky over the ocean is dolloped with cloud, and the great trees of Stanley Park shimmy far below in an otherwise imperceptible breeze.
“Ms. Greenwood?” says the gruff second lawyer who sits next to Milner.
“Does this include,” she manages to get out. “The island?”
The second lawyer flips open a manila folder and scans the documents inside. “That’s correct, Greenwood Island in its entirety.”
She knows she ought to look at them, but she can’t bring herself to do so. She lifts her swaddled child to her nose and breathes in his scent. She and her son will have the means to live together on the island, free and untroubled among its tall trees, for the rest of their days, never needing to worry about money again. She’ll beachcomb and garden while he climbs the trees like a monkey and builds forts from windfall branches. And perhaps she’ll even invite a few other likeminded people from the Earth Now! Collective to join them. They’ll establish a self-sufficient community, far away from the world’s soul-killing inhumanity, from its Nixons and Kissingers, from its cancers and robotized, brain-dead conformists.
The lead lawyer clears his throat roughly. “The second, and lesser, beneficiary who’s been named is your uncle, Everett Greenwood. I trust this doesn’t come as a surprise, despite the fact that the two were estranged,” he says, clearing his throat again. “There is one slight anomaly, however, which I’d like to draw to your attention. It seems your father left another individual a not insignificant share, smaller than yours or your uncle’s, certainly, yet a sizeable one regardless. A man named Liam Feeney.”
Hearing this name it’s as though she’s ripped from a dream. “Is he Irish?” she says. “This man?”
The lead lawyer turns to the other lawyer, who nods. “We have a Dublin address, so probably, yes. But this amendment is unusual, made late in your father’s life, possibly under the duress of his illness. So it’s our recommendation that you dispute it.”
In an instant, so much about her childhood and her father’s life comes smashing into focus. The silences. The brooding depressions. The self-enforced solitude. The anti-social veneer. The iron-clad routines. Why did he never confide in her? Did he judge her too antagonistic or too flighty to entrust with the truth? She could’ve helped him, or at least eased his burden. Perhaps she could have even reached out to Liam Feeney on his behalf. And suddenly an image comes over her: Harris in his study, listening to Feeney’s voice each night for all those hours over all those years—not to escape his daughter, but to be close to the one person denied him.
She remembers Harris once fetching her from the Vancouver lockup in his chauffeured Bentley, after she was taken into custody for occupying the offices of a mining company that was poisoning a vital watershed with heavy metals. During the ride home he told her, to her surprise, that he’d like to see the old-growth and the watersheds preserved, too. “But we rarely get what we want in life,” he said. “There isn’t enough room for it all to fit.” At the time, she was convinced he was talking about his blindness, or the Inquiry, or the necessity of environmental destruction in the name of industry and prosperity. Now she’s certain he wasn’t.