Jenna Elise Rocha (née Drake)

A Workshop in Ballard

Jenna Elise Drake was born on 17 May 1998 at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, the first child of Boyd Joseph Drake and Grace Elise Drake (née Lawson). Her father, born on 12 March 1969 in Denver, Colorado, was a finish carpenter who had moved to Seattle in his twenties for the work and stayed for the rain, which he claimed to like. Her mother, born on 21 June 1970 in Tacoma, was an events coordinator for a hospitality company in the city, a woman who could plan a three-hundred-guest wedding to the quarter-hour and never once remembered where she had left her car keys.

The family lived in a narrow two-storey house in Ballard, in the north-west of the city, with a detached garage that Boyd had long since stopped parking a car in. It was his workshop, and it smelled of cedar shavings, linseed oil, and the old bicycles he bought cheaply, stripped to the frame, and rebuilt for the pleasure of it. Jenna's brother, Ethan Joseph Drake, was born on 3 August 2001, when she was three.

Jenna spent her childhood in that garage. She was sanding offcuts at five, using a coping saw at seven, and arguing with her father about the correct way to cut a dovetail by twelve. Boyd taught her the way he had been taught, by letting her try, watching her get it wrong, and saying nothing until she asked. She asked a great deal. Ethan, quieter and more interested in what was inside the family computer than in what could be made from a plank, came into the garage mostly to fetch her for dinner.

Her mother's world was different and, to the young Jenna, less interesting. Grace worked long and irregular hours, came home with her phone still ringing, and spent weekends at weddings and corporate dinners while Boyd minded the children. Jenna understood only later how much her mother had carried, and how carefully she had kept the strain of it out of the house.

Making Things Stand Up

Jenna attended Ballard High School, where she was a capable, impatient student who did well in art, design, and mathematics and badly in anything that required her to sit still and listen. She built her first full piece of furniture at fifteen, an oak coffee table with through-tenons that her father pronounced acceptable and her mother put in the front room, where it stayed.

From the age of sixteen she began working for her mother at weekends. Grace's company was forever in need of things that did not exist: a lectern for an outdoor ceremony, a backdrop for a product launch, a set of display plinths that could be carried by two people and assembled in twenty minutes. Jenna built them in her father's garage and helped install them on site, and it was there, in hotel ballrooms and rented barns, that she learned something her father could not teach her. A piece of furniture in a house had to last. A piece of staging at an event had to be beautiful for one evening, survive being carried, and come down faster than it went up.

She graduated in 2016 and spent the next two years in Portland, Oregon, on a furniture-making programme at a small craft school in the city's south-east. She learned a great deal about finishing, steam-bending, and the business of selling what she made, and rather less than she had expected about joinery, which she felt she already knew. Her final project, a set of folding stage panels in ash and birch ply designed to be put up by a single person, won her a modest prize and two commissions from a Portland theatre company.

Seattle

Jenna returned to Seattle in the summer of 2018 and rented a bench in a shared workshop in the Georgetown district, among welders, a luthier, and a man who made surfboards from reclaimed timber. She took whatever commissions came: kitchen tables, shelving, a run of bar stools for a café in Fremont, and a steady stream of event pieces for her mother's company. She was good, and she was beginning to be known, though not yet well enough to stop worrying about rent.

Her father's work, by then, had become harder to find. The Seattle building boom had brought in larger firms and cheaper crews, and at forty-nine Boyd was tired, his knees were going, and the jobs he was offered paid less than they had a decade earlier. Late in 2018 he was approached through a subcontracting agency about a long-term contract with Killerton Enterprises, finishing the interiors of a large residential development at a remote site. The pay was better than anything he had been offered in years. The details of the location were vague.

Boyd left in February 2019. For most of that year his family heard from him only through messages relayed by the company, short and cheerful and empty of particulars. Grace found the arrangement unsettling from the start. Jenna, busy and twenty, found it mostly an inconvenience, and missed having her father's garage to borrow.

The Invitation

In September 2019 Boyd asked his wife and children to join him. The message that arrived was longer than any before it, and it told them, as plainly as the censors allowed, that the development he had spent the year building was not on Earth, that he could never come back from it, and that they could be brought through to join him if they chose to come.

The family spent the autumn arguing about it. Grace did not want to go. She did not trust the company, did not understand what she was being asked to believe, and did not see why she should give up a career and a city she loved for a place she could not find on a map and could never return from. Ethan, eighteen and a few weeks into a community college programme in computing, was frightened and said little.

Jenna wanted to go. She was curious, restless, and angry with the smallness of her life in a way that only a twenty-one-year-old can be, and she argued for the move harder than anyone, including at times her father. She told her mother that she was afraid of change. Grace told her daughter that she was too young to know what she would be giving up. By the beginning of December, worn down as much as persuaded, Grace agreed.

Grace Drake died at home in Ballard on 8 December 2019, a week after the decision was made. She collapsed in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, and Jenna, who had come round for breakfast, found her. The cause was a ruptured brain aneurysm. She was forty-nine.

Two Months

Boyd could not come back. No one but a Guardian could cross from Clivilius to Earth, and the journey he had made in February had been one way. It was the same journey Jenna had argued for, and she understood that now in a way she had not before. Jenna, at twenty-one, and Ethan, at eighteen, arranged their mother's funeral themselves, with help from Grace's sister in Tacoma and two of her colleagues from work. Several hundred people came. Jenna gave the eulogy, because Ethan could not and there was no one else.

The weeks that followed were spent closing a life. There was a house to empty and let, a car to sell, accounts to close, and a garage full of tools that had to be sorted into what would be taken and what would not. Jenna did most of it. She took her father's planes, chisels, and saws, and left the bicycles with a neighbour.

She did not, in those two months, seriously consider staying. She had argued for the move with her mother, and her mother had given way, and her mother was dead. Going was the only way she could find to make the argument mean something. It was also, she understood even then, a way of not having to stay in the house where she had found her. Ethan came because she did.

Jenna and Ethan crossed into Clivilius on 5 February 2020, two months after their mother's death. Boyd was waiting on the other side. Jenna had expected to be glad to see him. She found instead that she was furious, with him for having left, with him for not having been there, and with herself for having been the one who wanted to go. She hugged him anyway. It was several weeks before she could say any of the rest.

Dust

Bixbus in early 2020 was a settlement of tents, prefabricated blocks, and half-finished streets on a dusty plain beside a wide river. The towers of The Arlington, which her father had helped to finish, stood over it like something from another place. Boyd had lived in the Tent Community since his own arrival, and Jenna and Ethan moved into his tent with him. Ethan, who had lost his mother, his course, and his city in the space of two months, retreated into himself for most of that first year, and Jenna watched him do it and could not reach him.

Within a fortnight she had persuaded the stores to let her have a battered shipping container on the edge of the Tent Community and turned it into a workshop. The first thing she learned was that almost everything she knew about timber was wrong for Bixbus. The air was so dry that wood brought through the portal shrank, checked, and split within weeks. Joints she would have trusted in Seattle opened. Finishes cracked. She spent her first months making mistakes and keeping a notebook of them, adjusting her drying, her joinery, and her finishes until the pieces held.

Her first proper commission in Bixbus came from the Bixbus Event Collective, founded a few days before her arrival, which needed a stage for its first Founders' Festival and had nothing to build one from. Lisa Smith, the Collective's convenor, came to the container to ask. Jenna recognised in her almost at once the same kind of person her mother had been, a planner who carried everyone else's evening on her own back and made it look like nothing, and she agreed to the job before Lisa had finished explaining it.

The stage she built for the festival in July 2020, made from portal-shipped pine and designed to be assembled by four people in under an hour, was the first piece of hers that most of Bixbus saw. She built the Collective's stalls, benches, and backdrops for years afterwards, and her timber became the look of its events. She never told Lisa why she had said yes so quickly. Lisa, who had grief of her own, may have guessed.

Making Peace with the Desert

The completion of the Bixbus to Brierly Railroad in December 2020 changed Jenna's work more than any other single event. Brierly's woodworkers had been dealing with the climate of Clivilius for generations, and the native hardwoods they used, dense, slow-grown, and almost immune to the dry, were unlike anything she had handled. She made the first of many trips to Brierly in early 2021, spent a week in a cabinetmaker's shop there learning how they seasoned their timber, and came home with a cart of boards and an entirely revised notebook.

Her reputation grew with the city. Through 2021 and 2022 she made furniture for homes in the new developments, fitted out offices and workshops, and won a share of the furnishing work for the early buildings of Clivilius National University, including the reading-room tables in its library, which she made from Brierly hardwood and Earth oak in alternating strips. In 2021 she took over a former storage shed near the river as a proper workshop and hired her first apprentice.

Her relationship with her father mended slowly and never entirely. Boyd was a man who expressed regret through work, and in 2021 he asked his daughter whether she needed a hand with a commission. She said yes, mostly to see what he would do. They spent two months building a set of benches for the Collective together, saying little, and at the end of it they were able to talk about Grace for the first time. Jenna never fully forgave him for having left. She came, in time, to understand that once he had crossed he could never have come back, and that understanding and forgiving were not the same thing.

She was harder on herself than on him. For years she believed that her mother had died because of the strain of an argument Jenna had pushed her into, and no doctor's explanation of what an aneurysm was could entirely shift that belief. She told almost no one. Ethan, who knew her better than anyone in Bixbus, eventually told her that their mother would have been furious to hear it, and that helped more than the doctors had.

Elias

Elias Rocha was born in Dunwich, a small farming and quarrying town on the plains near the Caves of Xylora, into a family that had cut and dressed stone from the Dunwich cliffs for four generations. He was Clivilius-born and had never set foot on Earth. Like many of Dunwich's young people, he left for Bixbus in early 2022, after the opening of the Bixbus to Xylora Rail Link, and found work as a stonemason on the city's growing public buildings.

He and Jenna met later that year on a commission for a new public square, where her timber benches were to sit on bases of his stone. They disagreed about almost everything, from the height of the bases to the finish of the joints between wood and stone, and argued about it for three weeks. The benches were very good. By the time they were installed, the two were seeing each other.

Elias brought into Jenna's life something she had not had since leaving Seattle, a person for whom Clivilius was not a strange new world but simply home. He knew how to find water on the plains, which plants were edible, and how the light changed through the Clivilian year, and he found her Earth habits as strange as she found his. He also became, in 2023, one of the first Dunwich masons to work the cliffstone that the extended rail line had begun bringing into Bixbus in quantity, and the two of them began to take commissions together, timber and stone, for clients who wanted both.

They married in October 2023 in the small garden behind Jenna's workshop by the river, with Boyd, Ethan, and Elias's parents and both of his brothers, who had come in on the new line from Dunwich. Lisa Kendrick helped plan it and refused to let Jenna pay her. Boyd walked his daughter to the front of the garden. Jenna had built the arch they married under, and she put one of her mother's scarves on it, and no one mentioned it.

Alina

Their daughter, Alina Grace Rocha, was born at the Royal Bixbus Hospital on 14 June 2024. Motherhood came harder to Jenna than she had expected. She had spent four years building a business in a city that did not yet have most of the things new parents relied upon, and she found herself, in the months after Alina's birth, more frightened and more alone than she had been since her own mother's death. She missed Grace with a sharpness that surprised her, and it was the one thing about Bixbus she could not fix with her hands.

She went back to the workshop within weeks, with Alina in a basket on the bench beside her as Jenna had once been in her father's garage, and the apprentice did more of the work than he had bargained for. Elias rearranged his commissions to be at home in the mornings. Boyd, by then nearing the end of his working life, began turning up most afternoons and taking the baby for walks along the river, which helped all three of them more than anyone said.

Ethan married Naomi Evers, an environmental scientist, in 2024, and their son, Leo, was born the following year. The two cousins were raised within a few streets of each other, and Jenna found that being an aunt was easier than being a mother and enjoyed it without guilt.

The Workshop by the River

By 2026, Jenna's workshop by the river employed four people and could not keep up with its orders. She and Elias had built a reputation for furniture and fittings in which Brierly hardwood and Dunwich cliffstone met so cleanly that people ran their hands along the joins to find them. She still built for the Event Collective at cost, still kept her notebook of mistakes, and still found the dry season hard on her timber and her temper alike.

She was twenty-eight, the mother of a two-year-old, and one of the better-known makers in a city of millions. She rarely spoke of Seattle and kept very little from it: her father's chisels, her mother's scarf, and the oak coffee table she had built at fifteen, which Ethan had packed into their luggage in 2020 without telling her. It stood in her front room in Bixbus, as it had stood in her mother's.