K Kapuskasing

L. Layla.

Conceived in a Volkswagen van near Burlington, Vermont. Parents on their way to (or from) a rock festival. Newport, perhaps? Details, a little sparse, but here's what I have:

- Born in 1971.

- Mom a blacksmith and sculptor.

- Dad a rascal. A sound technician. Went on the road with Lighthouse and never came back.

- Mom had addiction issues. She never came back.

"Liberating," was how Layla put it the day we walked away from the tree planting camp.

She was lucky, she said, to have been adopted by her grandmother and finished high school before her grandmother died. Layla was majoring in Social Anthropology at Guelph when we met but was considering changing her major to Environmental Science. Or Political Science. There is this page from her High School yearbook that Jill gave to me. That's Layla on the end, her brown hair, long and straight and pools on her shoulder like a waterfall, her eyes staring elsewhere. Then there is this one, the picture that was in the newspaper. Shows her smiling at something beyond the camera. It was taken just before she joined the planting team, by someone in Guelph. Nicole told me I need to get rid of these pictures, that collecting photos and maps and memories were keeping me from moving forward. I need to let it go, Nicole said.

So I put all these papers in this file cabinet and locked them away in the spare bedroom and hardly ever look at them. Nicole's files-household finances, tax returns, birth records-are in Jenny's room. Nicole tells me that someone will be by soon to collect her the rest of her things.

"You only knew her for a few weeks, and that was ages ago," Nicole said one night. "It's not like you two were anything more than friends, right? Did you even get to really know her?"

Most of what I know about Layla was from what she told me the day we walked the long, dusty gravel road towards a fishing lodge on Opasetika Lake. We talked a lot that day. Layla had this thing, the way she moved when she spoke. She would half-raise her hand like she was holding a glass or about to wave and slightly cock her head to the left when she said certain words. It wasn't for emphasis as much as from excitement, like the spirit of the idea took hold of her, and her body responded with a shake, a quiver. Years later I saw a woman with the exact same movements. Nicole and I were on our way into the old Carleton Theatre in Toronto and as we turned towards the box office I saw the back of a woman who had come out of the movie talking to the man she was with. She had the exact same movements as Layla when she gestured to him, the head tilt, the way she leaned into him and placed her hand on his upper arm, like she once did to me. I felt the blood rush through my body, to my face. I stared at the woman, certain it was her. Then she disappeared into the Toronto night. Layla's hair was longer when I knew her, back in Kapuskasing, back when she told me about how she planned to join the Resistance, how her covert mission as a tree-planter was the confirmation she sought, how the North was lost. "The fight needs to move south, to where the hands of the companies and the saws of the foresters haven't yet carved through the land and its people. Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia. My work here is done."

We lay in her tent that morning, told the guys who came for us to go away. Once the crews had left on the old school bus to the plant site, I snuck into the kitchen trailer, grabbed some muffins, bottled water, a loaf of white bread, a few other things, stuffed them into my pack. Layla brought her camera and a blanket. And we started to walk. It was important, she said, that we hide in the bush whenever we heard a vehicle rumbling down the gravel road. A planting company truck would make us get in, try to offer us a ride to Kapuskasing, but would really drive us back to the planting camp, tell us we had no choice, that we would die in the woods otherwise. Then she ran up the road, like a child, looking back and yelling, "Come on, pussy!"