Liam hooks his arm behind his seat and finds his cooler, from which he grabs as many Red Bulls as he can stuff into the pockets of his Carhartts. Next, he pops open the door and uses the seat belt like a rappelling line to lower himself down to the frosty driveway that he thought he’d left forever.
It’s dawn by the time he reaches the house, after a long, gruelling crawl through the leaf mulch, now frozen in rigid mounds. Orange filaments of light angle through the surrounding trees. He slithers onto the floor of the entryway and shoves the front door shut behind him. He puts his frostbitten cheek to the relatively warm porcelain tile. This time around he can better recognize the appeal of the house’s minimalist decor. The austere polished concrete. The white walls. The lack of books and clutter. It’s a liberation from things, and from history. The person who lives here is afraid of the past, Liam thinks. Join the club.
He remembers meeting with the owner at his office in midtown Manhattan to plan the project. The man was a descendant of the Rockefeller family but worked for Holtcorp. For their meeting, he’d worn carpenter’s jeans and a work shirt, and seemed vaguely embarrassed for needing Liam’s help with the renovation at all. He made a point of offering Liam a Budweiser, and as they both drank he mentioned that Holtcorp had recently acquired Greenwood Island. “Any relation?” he asked, to which Liam simply shook his head.
Mercifully, Willow didn’t live long enough to see her beloved island sold to a corporation. His mother once claimed that they’d lived there on the island when Liam was a newborn. But she’d already given it away well before his memory kicked in, so let them have it. These corporations will own everything in the end anyway.
Liam begins his crawl back down the wide stairs to the sunken living room. After descending six steps, he’s forced to flip himself belly-up on the intermediate landing to rest his arms. He lets his eyes wander along the huge fir beams that support the vaulted ceiling high above. He can tell, even from here, that they aren’t square—not deadly, anyway. Over his years as a woodworker, Liam has learned that even the finest-built, most expensive houses have their flaws and deficiencies, and this one is no different.
This is the carpenter’s painful truth: nothing is true.
By true he means level, plumb, perfect. Every room you’ve ever entered has been off by at least a sixteenth of an inch—more probably an eighth. Guaranteed. We think we live in boxes until we look closer and find we’re in fact living in irregular shapes, in big, misshapen accidents.
Which makes carpenters the high priests of living with mistakes. And while sloppiness is the most grievous insult you could throw at another carpenter, true perfection is maddeningly unattainable, which is why it’s never spoken of. Because even after you cut a piece of wood and lay it straight, it lives on after you’re finished, soaking up moisture, twisting, bowing, and warping into unintended forms. Our lives are no different.
He shuts his eyes and feels a long-stifled sob finally escape him. He’s left behind more than his fair share of mistakes, that’s for certain. The night he dragged the replica Stradivarius viola that he built for Meena behind his van; the homes he flooded and ruined with his leaky skylights; all the years he squandered, high as a satellite on Oxycontin; all the parts of his story he’s left out, all the things he refuses to think about. But while he’ll never be able to atone for all his mistakes, there might still be a few left for him to repair. And there might still be parts of the story left for him to tell. So let the memories come, he thinks. What does it matter now?
MAPLES
HOLDING HIS MOTHER’S hand, Liam exits the parking garage where they’ve left their Westfalia and walks through downtown Vancouver in a misting, invisible rain. It’s the first time in his young life he’s seen Willow in regular clothes—a black skirt and a plain green blouse—and he feels an odd pride to be walking beside a mother who doesn’t have twigs in her hair or look like she lives in a van. When they reach the provincial courthouse, she chain-smokes three menthols out front before they go inside.
While Willow attends her hearing, Liam waits in the hall, staring wide-eyed at the holstered gun of the policeman sitting across from him. Two months earlier, while Liam sat in the van, Willow disabled some expensive MacMillan Bloedel logging machinery up near Clayoquot Sound. But as they were fleeing the cut block, a group of Mounties riding ATVs pulled the Westfalia over and found Willow’s enormous bags of white sugar stashed beneath the seats.
“I’m going to need to go away for a while, honey,” she says, after the hearing is over and they’ve made their way back past the court building’s metal detectors. “Just three months.” Next, she drives to a phone booth and spends an hour there, calling friends and acquaintances, growling with frustration, and occasionally whacking the receiver against its cradle. When she returns to the van, she informs Liam that he’s going to spend the summer with his great-aunt and great-uncle on their farm in Estevan, Saskatchewan.
“I’ve never even met them,” he protests, which of course she ignores. While she’s always spoken fondly of Temple and Everett, she’s never managed to find the time in her busy sabotage schedule to make the drive out to visit them. But it isn’t their unfamiliarity that makes Liam uneasy; it’s more that he can count the number of times he’s slept indoors on two hands, and he’s anxious about the expectations of staying in a proper home.
“You think I want this?” his mother snaps after he’s kept complaining throughout the day. “Maybe you’d rather go to a foster home instead?”
Liam shuts his mouth, crosses his arms, gives her his blackest look, and refuses to help her pack.
At daybreak the following morning, she drives the van east from Vancouver and up into the mountains. All through the trip she’s jumpy and quick to snap at him, sipping white wine from a Thermos and smoking her menthols non-stop. She grinds the van’s tired gears on the drastically pitched slopes as everything inside the van slides to the back where Liam sits. He spends the entirety of the two-day drive whittling in silence, a further punishment for her terrorizing threat of putting him in foster care the day before.
“Can you promise me one thing?” Willow says, stopping the van as they approach the farm around dinnertime the following day. “This is probably never going to happen, and I’m almost certain that I’m wrong. But if Everett ever comes near you…like, I don’t know, if he touches you, or does anything that makes you feel uncomfortable—you go ahead and tell your Aunt Temple. Okay?”
“Whatever,” Liam says, breaking his monumental streak of silence by uttering this powerful new word that he picked up from some teenagers at a convenience store when Willow stopped to gas up.
When they pull up to the farmhouse, Temple and Everett are both reading at a wooden table on the enormous covered porch. On first inspection, even without his mother’s cryptic warning, Liam finds his great-uncle off-putting: the cords in Everett’s neck are root-like, and his voice is a metal bucket of gravel dragged across the floor. He also walks with a creepy limp, stinks like sawdust, and leaves a trail of it behind him wherever he goes. But his partner, Temple—Willow scolds Liam when he asks his great-aunt: “Why aren’t you married?”—is kind and smells like detergent and has an easy, welcoming way about her. If the pair were trees, she’d be a tall, silvery birch, and Everett a crooked old oak.