“Please give this man whatever my father wished,” Willow says.
The lawyers shift in their seats and shoot glances at one another, reluctant to press the issue, no doubt questioning her sanity.
“Certainly,” the lead lawyer says, scribbling a note on his yellow pad. “Well then, barring any unknown claimants, cousins, or other offspring, this process will be predominantly cut and dry. You’ll hear from us shortly.”
As Willow is whisked back to the mansion in a limousine that she’ll soon own, she finally decides upon a name for her son: Liam New Dawn. The invented surname will free him from the freight of the tainted Greenwood legacy and provide him with a fresh beginning—something she never had. And the given name is a small gesture she can offer Mr. Feeney on her father’s behalf. Even if he’ll never know he’d received it, it’s still worth giving.
She spends the remainder of the afternoon packing up her Westfalia before they return to live permanently on Greenwood Island. She boxes up the poetry records that Mr. Feeney made for her father, as well as the book of Wordsworth he gave her, along with a few other books of Harris’s that Liam might like when he’s older. She’s nearly giddy at the thought of what a wonderful, forest-defending, nature-attuned soul her son will become after he grows up on that island. Though why is it, she wonders casually as she stacks the boxes in her van, that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today? There’s a Chinese proverb Willow has always loved: The best time to plant a tree is always twenty years ago. And the second-best time is always now.
And the same goes for saving the ecosystem.
She could use her father’s money to start an environmental foundation, but she’s no paper-pusher, and if his tragic life has taught her anything, it’s that a person must live in accordance with their deepest-held principles, or else suffer a kind of death of the soul. Who might Harris have become if he was able to be who he truly was? Would he have been the man she’d only glimpsed during their rare visits to Greenwood Island, relaxed and contented? Would he have joyfully waltzed her around the room, like that blind father she once saw on television, laughing while shouldering lamps to the ground and bumping into furniture?
So who, then, will she become if she also fails to live according to her deepest self? And it’s at this precise moment that she decides upon another path—a more difficult one, admittedly, yet also the path of connectedness, of principle and authenticity. One that will lead her and Liam away from the traps of capitalism and all that’s easy and predictable in life, while bringing them closer to the land and its forests and rivers and its wild, incalculable treasures.
But to do that, she must sacrifice even what she most loves. Not only must she give away all the wealth that her poor, lonely father destroyed himself to amass and preserve; she’ll also have to surrender Greenwood Island itself to a forest protection group. Because what kind of hypocrite would she be if she kept it? Who is she to deserve her own private island? What makes her entitled to such unlimited comfort and peace and abundance of resources while others starve and suffer?
It’s the only way.
If she was dedicated to the environment before, she’ll be twice as dedicated now. No more bunking with the Earth Now! Collective during the winter months: Willow and Liam will live year-round in her Westfalia. They’ll be rootless, self-reliant, free. She’ll do more solo direct actions—nothing radical or violent, just more bags of sugar dumped into more gas tanks. She’ll protest, blockade, obstruct. She’ll teach Liam to be strong, to live symbiotically with nature. He’ll learn to be a warrior. A defender of the Earth. Together they’ll consume as few resources as possible, and work toward repairing a tiny portion of the harm that Harris has inflicted upon the forests of the Earth. And someday, her son will thank her for it.
Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them? If only we were like trees, she thinks, as she pilots her Westfalia through the iron gates of her father’s mansion for the last time, with Liam strapped into the passenger seat beside her. If only we had centuries. Maybe then there’d be time enough for us to mend all the harm we have done.
A SPINE
WHAT ELSE COULD it be, he thinks—with its gently curving trunk of bone, its limbs and branches and tributaries of nerve tissue, its flexibility and delicacy and elegant perfection—other than a kind of tree, buried in our backs, standing us up?
And if all this is true, then it would be reasonable for Liam Greenwood to finally admit that plunging from a height of twenty-seven feet and five-eighths of an inch to a polished concrete floor has cut his own tree down, felled it, severing its trunk just above his tailbone. And it will never stand him upright again.
NOTHING IS TRUE
HE WAKES.
Then he wakes a second time, unaware of having blacked out.
He straightens himself up in the driver’s seat of his van as best he can manage. It’s still dark, but the radiance of morning is brewing somewhere out there behind the house and beneath the sea. His pain has ceased; even the vise cranking in his lower back has ceded its grip. Liam checks his gas gauge: an eighth of a tank left. It was stupid to let himself black out with the engine running, but there’s still more than enough gas to get him to help. Instinctively, he tries to reach the brake pedal with his right foot, but though the pain has passed, his lower half feels even farther gone, lost in a kind of emptiness. In frustration, he extends the baseball bat down near his useless legs to depress the brake pedal, then nudges the gearshift into drive, while becoming suddenly aware that even the prickling sensation in his hamstrings has disappeared completely.
If he’d cracked his pelvis or broken his tailbone, wouldn’t some sensation have returned to his legs by now? Shouldn’t he be able to move them, even slightly? Liam returns the van to park, drops the baseball bat, yanks the key from the ignition, and flings it onto the passenger seat. No, he thinks. He’s been deluding himself. His legs haven’t come back because they are no longer his own. And won’t be ever again.
Where is he planning to drive to, anyway? A private hospital? Ever since moving to Brooklyn he’s been working in the U.S. illegally. His clients are happy to pay cash, and though he carried contractor’s insurance for a time, it was pricey, and once the adjusters discovered he was working without a visa he’d be denied a claim anyway, so he’d let it lapse.
The scans, the rehab, the catheters; the wheelchairs, lifts, and ramps. Not to mention the pain medication they’ll offer him like candy. He’ll be hooked all over again, with no reason to ever get clean. Paying out of pocket, his injury will cost him everything he has, and then some. And what kind of life will he find for himself at the bottom of such a pit of debt? Unable to properly swing his hammer or push his skill-saw through a piece of lumber? Unable to pilot his van to the next job or install a ceiling or finish a counter-top? There are states he’s always feared more profoundly than death: abandonment, helplessness, dependence on others. But it’s uselessness that terrifies him most of all.