“Dylan, I see what you mean.”
He is given to that sort of comment: just blurting out something that doesn’t seem to be related to anything that anyone has said for the last year or so. I gave him my blank look, the one I use when he says that kind of thing.
“Oh, explanation, right? I mean that I see what you’re saying about playing hockey in a mature way. You’re doing it. Keep up the good work.”
And that was all he said. But I soared. I doubt he knows how I soared. I could have lifted right out through the closed sunroof of the spotless Jeep he drives.
That’s the first step, I thought to myself. I’m on my way to Ireland’s Eye.
* * *
The following week I made my next move. This time I worked on Mom. It seemed to me that that was a good strategy. Once I’d sprung the question on them, I didn’t want one of them trying to convince the other that I should go. No, I wanted both parental units on side at the same time and well aware that I was prepared for the trip.
A lot of Dad’s adventures are on water, but Mom’s the best swimmer. She was excellent in high school and university and just missed going to the Olympics by a hundredth of a second or something like that. She was the one who taught me to swim, and she used all sorts of ways to get me to have proper technique and even tried some motivational things on me. I can remember her talking for hours about an “approach” called “visualization.” But I just wanted to swim and have fun, so right from the beginning I only messed around in the water. I had her genes, I guess, and it came to me easily, but I never took it too seriously and I suppose I could have been much better.
“Mom,” I said to her one day when she had a moment, “I’d like to take swimming lessons.”
Well, the look on her face should have been captured by a camera. She had this stunned expression and seemed to stare right through me as if someone on the other side of my head had spoken to her using my face.
“I thought I just heard you say you’d like to take swimming lessons,” she said and laughed. “I’m sorry, what did you really say?” My mom is like that. She’s a bit of a card, though a lot of the things she says that are funny are usually a little critical too: sarcastic, as they call it. I think it’s because she’s trying to keep Dad and me in line. We’re both dreamers, I guess, and she has to put our feet on the ground from time to time. I think it’s also her way of getting close to me. She’s not a touchy-feely sort of mom, thank god, at least not constantly. Every now and then she gets into a bit of cuddling, but for the most part she just tries to kid me and pokes me in the ribs and that sort of thing. It’s like she’s telling me I’m not a little boy anymore, as if I’m on my way to becoming a man. But there are still some days, when she’s particularly busy with her work, that I catch her looking over at me a lot with sappy looks, like she’d like to spend the whole day hugging me. She doesn’t seem like a kidder then. On those days I try to keep my eye on her, in case of a surprise attack.
But I didn’t need to worry today. She was in full joker mode.
“That’s what I said,” I told her in the most serious voice I could muster. “I’d like to take swimming lessons.”
“Excuse me, but have you seen my son Dylan around?”
Good old Mom.
“Mom, I’m serious.” Another very mature voice, matched with my most adult look.
My mother is always in a rush. She runs a private school downtown for parents who want their children to get what she calls an “alternative education.” Don’t ask me what that is. But it keeps her pretty busy. It isn’t often that she or Dad actually sit and talk with me, except at dinner, of course. But this time I had Mom down for the count. I had Laura S. Maples exactly where I wanted her.
“Have a seat, Mr. Serious,” she said. She looked at me for about a minute straight. I tried another grave expression.
“What do you want?” she finally said.
“Mo-om!”
“Okay, okay.” Another pause. “Swimming lessons, Dylan? Are you sure?”
“I want to better myself, Mom.”
She almost laughed. That wasn’t a good sign. And yet I had the feeling we were moving in the right direction.
* * *
By the end of January my hockey team was in first place, I’d been named team captain and I was, much to my mother’s shock, the best swimmer in my swimming class. It was time for my next move.
In a way this move had started in September, but I knew Mom and Dad hadn’t really noticed. They aren’t bad parents as parental units go and if I have any problems they’re always there to help. They often tell me how much they love me (I could do with a little less of that in public places), they hardly ever raise their voices at me, and they talk a lot about “giving me space” and “respecting me,” and they do. But sometimes I wish they’d just haul off and yell at me. All their nice comments, which they make even when they’re gritting their teeth because I’m really bugging them, can start to sound like they’re taken from a book or something. I’d prefer it if they’d really notice what I’m doing, and then look me straight in the eye and tell me if it sucked. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that they hadn’t clued in to how much better I’d been doing at school lately and how much more time I’d been spending on homework. As usual, I had to spring it on them. For my target, I picked Mom again. She gave me the perfect opportunity.
Her car was running in the driveway when I got home that day and as I came through the front door she was banging around in the upper hallway, trying to get on the latest shoes her chiropractor had given her. I waited at the bottom of the stairs, smiling, my plan in place. Down the stairs she came, ready to fly out the door.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said, breathless. “Love you.” That meant she was about to kiss me, hug me, and disappear. But I knew better.
“You need to see this,” I said, using another very serious, mature expression. (I was getting better at those.)
She really did have to go. A board meeting or something like that. But when she saw the report card and heard my tone of voice, she knew she had to spend a moment with me. I could feel her frustration, but she smiled at me and did a wonderful job of hiding it. My mom would hang out with me all the time if her schedule let her, but she can’t and that really upsets her. She plucked the card away from me, glanced at it and handed it back. Then she snatched it away again.
“This,” she snapped, “is a forgery!”
I didn’t take the bait. Instead I just waited, silent. That was the first time I’d ever seen my mother a bit flustered in my presence. She looked at me in a strange way.
“Let me know when you see Dylan around. I’d like to talk to him.”
But it was an old joke and she knew it. So she gave up. Putting her hands on my shoulders she spoke in a voice she had never used with me before. It was the adult-to-adult tone I often heard when she was talking business on the telephone.
“You are growing up, Dylan,” she said. “You are maturing right in front of my eyes.”
Bingo.
Later, lying in bed in the darkness, strengthening my wrists by squeezing two parts of a rubber ball I had cut in half, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. I slipped out of bed, pulled the door open a crack, and listened. They were discussing the improvement in my marks and how I seemed to be so different lately. My plan was working perfectly.
But I still had more to do. For the next phase I went after Dad again.
* * *
Every spring Dad rented a small indoor public pool in a little town just north of the city and practiced kayaking. He always went late at night just after public swimming had ended. Mom didn’t go with him very often. She wasn’t a kayaking fanatic and felt that the practice she had every summer at the cottage was enough. But occasionally Dad would ask me to come along, on the days when he knew the lifeguard had to be in the office and didn’t h
ave a direct view of the pool. I was to be the alarm bell should any emergency happen during one of his fancy manoeuvres, such as the rolls he loved to work on. So I trudged along with him, sullen and resentful about losing a night to such dreary duty, content to lie on the floor at one end of the pool listening to music on my earbuds or reading a comic book. He’d splash around like a kid, throwing water up over the edge, taking everything so seriously you’d swear he was doing this for some sort of world championship.
I didn’t wait for him to ask me that spring.
“Dad,” I said to him one day in late February, a good six weeks before he usually rented the pool, “when are we going kayaking?”
Well, that got his attention, let me tell you. Though his head was buried in some mountain-climbing magazine that would normally arrest his attention the way a loaded gun pointed between the eyeballs would focus anyone else’s, he turned to me immediately. His head snapped around as though I’d just mentioned that I was a Tyrannosaurus rex. It wasn’t just that I’d asked about kayaking practice and asked so cheerfully, it was the fact that I’d said “we.”
“Huh?” he said, looking very stunned.
I smiled as pleasant a smile as I had in my repertoire. “When are we going kayaking, Dad?”
“Kayaking? You and me? Kayaking?”
“I can hardly wait.”
“You can hardly wait?” he repeated in a monotone, that stunned look not entirely gone from his face.
“Let’s start earlier this year, Dad.”
And so we went together just a few weeks later, my dad so amazed that I don’t think he really believed I would show up for our first practice. But when the day arrived so did I, right on time, waiting in the Jeep as he climbed in shaking his head. Every week for the rest of that spring the two of us splashed around in that pool like a pair of children, threatening to flood the whole building.
By the time we were ready to go to the cottage that summer my stroke was stronger, I felt at home in the kayak and I could roll it nearly as well as Dad. Occasionally, while he was working on something, I’d swim a few laps in the pool, going as hard as I could, making as much noise as I could, churning up the water like a speedboat. I could feel him watching me, his mouth wide open.
* * *
My friends thought I was nuts too. I didn’t really have time to do the things I used to do anymore. Things like killing time playing video games. That really ticked off Rhett and the Bomb. That’s Rhett Norton and Bomb Connors, my two best buds, a slightly thick defenceman and a right winger with a big boomer of a slapshot. They used to love the nights when Dad was off kayaking at the pool on his own and Mom was at a meeting. We had the TV, the fridge, and anything else we wanted in the house all to ourselves. We were in heaven.
But I guess it almost seemed to them like I had changed overnight. Before long they were bugging me about all the homework I was doing and why I was doing it, and when they got really peeved they even called me a suck about my marks. But I knew they were impressed that I was team captain now, and I’m sure that once or twice when I called I actually caught them working late at night on their own school work, though they denied it every time.
“What’s with you and this Ireland’s Eye thing anyway?” asked Rhett one day as he and the Bomb stood at my door with their boards, unable to coax me out for a little skate down to the mall. I’d told them and only them (you can never be too careful) about my Ireland’s Eye project almost the day after Dad showed me the map, and every day since then. I guess they were getting pretty sick of it. (To be honest, I also told my other best bud, Jason Li, left winger, good moves…and Terry Singh too, but goalies are good at keeping secrets.)
“Yeah,” said Bomb. “All it is is a little island somewhere in Newfie land. We can’t waste this whole summer. We’re going to be grade eights next year, man, we’ve got to have some serious fun before school. You can’t go back in September and say you spent all your time in Nowheresville. Look at all the things we could do if you didn’t go.”
“Remember last year, when John A. and Laura S. were out west climbing that friggin’ mountain?” said Rhett. “Your grandparents were pretty cool about letting you do things. And we’re a year older now.”
“Grandpa’s dead, okay?” I snapped, never pleased when that subject came up.
“Then stay with your grandmother, Maples, she’s a pushover!”
“I’m going to Ireland’s Eye,” I said firmly.
They just didn’t understand. I suppose in a way I didn’t either, so it was hard to blame them. But somehow I knew that exploring that strange island was going to be so much better than playing video games all summer, or skateboarding until we dropped, or even going to a few Blue Jays games. It was just something I had to do. Rhett and the Bomb and Jason and Terry would still be at home when I got back. They’d forgive me and we could do the same things we’d done before. But Ireland’s Eye…way out there, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, there’s a ghost town…it was like something from a dream.
So, I kept working on getting there.
* * *
About a month into the cottage season, during which time I swam and kayaked every day, Mom and Dad gathered on the deck to plot the trip to Newfoundland.
I was in the water when I heard them say those two magical words. Ireland’s Eye. I knew my moment had come. It was time to put it all together.
As I paddled quickly towards the shore their voices grew louder. They were talking about how difficult it would be to get from Random Island across the Thoroughfare to their little gem-like destination in the ocean. They sounded excited. Then they spoke of the Eye itself, and of the ghost town on the hill in the old harbour. I docked the kayak and got out.
My heart beat faster as I walked up the little incline towards them, carrying the kayak. They were seated at a table, their backs towards me, talking now about legends and rumours and history. I stepped up onto the deck and dropped the kayak loudly, almost knocking it into the table. They both looked up.
“I’m going with you,” I said clearly, looking both of them in the eye.
Mom and Dad opened their mouths at the same instant, a “no” forming on their lips. But something stopped them. They looked at each other. It seemed to me that it was only then that they realized what I had been doing these last twelve months. And they knew my plan had worked.
I was going to Ireland’s Eye.
3
An Ominous Warning
We had a wonderful trip to the east coast that August. Even packing the Jeep seemed to go smoothly. No one argued, nothing got lost, everyone was ridiculously happy.
The place where we live in downtown Toronto is called Moore Park. It isn’t a bad stretch of real estate, I must say, with lots of nice old brick and stone houses (at least they’re old to me), and tennis courts, lots of trees, the Rosedale valley for walking your dog (having fur and four legs and being able to bark and pee on a fire hydrant made you pretty important in “the Park”), that sort of thing, and lots of cool places for getting your board airborne. Grandpa used to tease me that Moore Park was okay, but didn’t quite qualify me for being a rich guy. The poor would love to live there, he said, but wealthy folks would sneeze at it. I always thought that was kind of a funny expression, one from the old days, I suppose. My grandpa’s parents didn’t have much money and stuff when they were bringing him up and he never forgot it. He often said that when he was a kid he would have been pleased just to put up his tent in one of our backyards. Actually, we did that once, Grandpa and me.
Anyway, right from the moment we left Moore Park until we hit “the Rock” about a week later, we had amazing weather and everything went smoothly. I even had a decent time dealing with the parental units, locked up as I was with them in the Jeep. Of course, they made sure I had equal time in the front seat, and unfortunately told me how much they loved me every hundred kilometres or so, and res
isted all impulses to yell at me even when I gave them some golden opportunities. They’d put a no-cellphone-rule into effect for the trip, so we all had to talk to each other. My mother was doing a lot more hugging than usual too—not just looking over at me anymore, she was going right at it. It was as if she had me at her mercy or something. But still, the week seemed to slip by.
Of course, a lot of that had to do with where my head was at, as Mom likes to say. Ireland’s Eye seemed to be drawing me across Canada towards an unknown adventure that excited and terrified me at the same time. What was I going to find out there on that little island in the ocean? The lectures Dad gave as we passed each landmark (Mom soon started calling the trip the John A. Maples Lecture Tour), the scenery and even the people we met seemed like a blur, as though I was being pulled through a tunnel towards my destiny.
Maybe Dad’s stories about the Eye, some of which were actually pretty good (especially the ones about the ghost town), were beginning to have an effect on me. The most bizarre thing he told me was about the citizens of Ireland’s Eye and what happened to them. They were actually removed from their homes; not exactly forced to go, but sort of. It was a kind of political thing. What would Moore Park be like if that happened to us, if we all just left one day and many years later a bunch of people came to look around? What would they do when they got to our house? It would be broken down, I suppose, and full of cobwebs and really quiet. I wondered if they’d look in my room. Some of my stuff might still be there.…That seemed like a pretty weird thing to be thinking about. It gave me the creeps.
At night on our trip I always dreamt of Grandpa. He appeared in Montreal, another time in Moncton, twice in Antigonish, and even when I slept for a few moments at North Sydney in Cape Breton waiting for the ferry to take us, our Jeep, and three kayaks out to the fabled Rock. Each time he begged me not to forget him, and I woke in a cold sweat, missing him desperately.
The Mystery of Ireland's Eye Page 2