Deconstructing Dylan by Lesley Choyce

Author:Lesley Choyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV037000
Publisher: Dundurn Press Limited
Published: 2006-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

My father sat in silence for a minute. We both looked straight ahead at the road back home. “Kyle was my grandfather’s name,” he said. “You must have known that. He designed ships. Big luxury liners. When I was young, he told me stories about the sea, about the old days at sea.”

It was a diversionary tactic. Kyle had been the name of my great-grandfather but there was more. Much more. My head was swirling with theories. Was I experiencing some sort of strange ancestral memory? Hearing about my great-grandfather was one thing, but the images in my head were not in sync with his life at all. Maybe his name had been swimming around in my brain. Maybe it was all mixed up and didn’t make any logical sense like a dream. Maybe there was just a photoshopped version of me by my parents’ bed, just as my parents had said. Or maybe there was much more to it.

“Your great-grandfather helped design the Victoria III. They called it unsinkable.”

“Like the Titanic.”

“Something like that.”

“Bet he had a beard.”

“You got that right. Check this out.” My father tapped the little keypad on the centre of the steering wheel. He entered his pass code and the satlink took him to another set of his personal archives. The vid-screen before me blinked once and then again and I was staring at a photograph of my great-grandfather. The great bearded one. His eyes blazed at me — deep and fiery. Something about him frightened me, something in that look — it was ambition, I think. Drive.

The screen clicked through photo after photo. The man. The ships he designed and his wife, my great-grandmother, an extraordinarily tall woman with a stunning face. “Do you have any images of them when they were younger?”

My father tapped the steering keypad again. I was watching him. I don’t think I meant to, but I was watching his fingers on the imbedded keyboard. I caught his password: patches.

As I stared at the photos of the young version of my great-grandparents, I was drawn back to another time and place. I could see that they were very much in love. I tapped the sort function and set it for time sequence so that I scrolled rather quickly through images of them as they grew older. I noticed that something changed: they seemed to grow less interested in each other. He grew fiercer in his looks, as if he were determined to accomplish something of great importance to him. She grew distant and sad. I felt sorry for them, these ancestors of mine whom I had never met.

I turned off the compscreen and looked out the window. We were back in the suburbs again. Fewer trees, brown lawns, a concrete sameness to the businesses and stores, a kind of gloom about the homes, even. I wondered what my great-grandparents would make of this world I lived in.

By the time we were home, I felt confusion rising up inside me. My mother seemed much more cheerful now.

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