In a dark and dreary house at the top of a rocky hill, the old man huddles near a fireplace as the wind howls outside. A sleeping bag is wrapped around his shivering body as he stares into the flames. In his hands he holds a letter postmarked “Toronto,” return address Bay Street.
“And so you have found me!” he snarls. “Well…come for me, if you like, young man, but you will never find it. You will die first, you and your useless kind!”
He slowly crumples the letter in a veiny, liver-spotted claw. Then he opens his hand and holds the ball of paper in front of his face. He spits on it and flings it into the flames. For a moment the paper hisses and sputters, but in seconds it is engulfed by the white-red heat. At that instant he hears a crash in the distance, like something crumbling. The old man sits up.
“Mine shaft,” he says, “good ol’ Ninety-nine.” A smile flickers across his sagging visage, lit by the glow of fire.
That same night I saw my own terrifying vision. It was my parents. Mom and Dad. The parental units.
I had been minding my own business in the living room, lounging on the couch with some tunes cranked up seriously high through my earbuds. I thought there was someone in the room and turned to see them approaching, walking slowly towards me to the soundtrack of a wicked hip-hop groove. John A. and Laura S. Maples “in the house.” I almost laughed out loud. But as they got closer they started doing something that wasn’t funny at all. They began smiling at me. And by the time they were right next to me, they had these big, ridiculous grins pasted on their faces, like the looks you see on people who come to the door to try to sell you something. When Mom and Dad get that way, there’s always trouble brewing, for me especially. A few goofy hand signals and more pleading smiles later, I had turned down the volume and popped off the earbuds.
“Yes?”
“Dylan, we need to talk to you.”
I don’t have a girlfriend. Not yet anyway. Although it seems to me I could if I wanted to. It isn’t impossible at thirteen. But I know what it means when your girlfriend says “I need to talk to you.” It means the end, the lights are going out. I doubted it meant anything better when the parental units said it.
“About what?” I asked, a little scared.
“Oh, don’t worry, champ,” said my father.
“Don’t call me champ, Dad, no one calls their kids champ any more.”
“Right.”
“We love you very much,” said my mother.
Oh God, that was a bad sign. I wanted this news out right now.
“Look, just tell me. Just tell me what you have to say, straight. Am I adopted or something?”
A look of relief passed over their faces.
“No, you’re not adopted,” said Mom, who loved to tease me. “Heck, do you think we’d adopt someone like you if we had a choice?”
“Mom, just tell me!”
“I believe that’s your father’s job. He’s the one responsible for this.”
“For what?” I asked, catching the glare Dad shot at Mom.
“Well, uh,” said Dad, “we, uh, we’re…moving.”
“MOVING! To where?”
Mom gave Dad a sarcastic smile. “Oh, you’re going to love this one, champ.”
“To where, Dad?”
“It won’t be for very long, perhaps, uh, a few months.”
“A few months?”
“Maybe more,” said my mother cheerily.
“To, uh,” Dad continued, “…northern Ontario.”
“Northern Ontario! Like, where? An hour north of here?” I searched both of their faces.
“Oh, a bit more,” said Mom.
That was when Dad looked me straight in the eyes and put his hands on my shoulders. It was as if he were going to deliver a line from a movie or something. Good old Dad relates a truth to his beloved son.
“We are moving to Cobalt,” he said.
“Cobalt, where’s Cobalt?”
“Not far, dear,” said Mom cheerily again, “just 507 kilometres straight north…towards the polar ice cap.”
That was how it all started, with a horrible little announcement that threatened to completely destroy my life. My parents didn’t have to tell me anything else about Cobalt; the mere fact that it was in my own province and I had never even heard of it told me all I needed to know. Hicktown, hillybilly-ville, nowhere: that’s where I was headed. My friends would have a real laugh at this one. It was already November: in Toronto the leaves had almost all left the trees, my hockey season was well into its schedule, and every evening now, around five o’clock, as things started to get dark, I could feel another Canadian winter knocking on the door. Imagine five hundred kilometres to the north! Imagine living in a place you hadn’t even heard of, being taken away from your friends and your school and your video-game tournaments. And what would we do for Christmas? Walk next door and visit Santa Claus?
I knew this trip must have something to do with my father’s boring law practice, and my mother’s idea that the family should try to stay together as much as possible, regardless of what was going on in their businesses. Why couldn’t Dad just go up there on his own? But I knew that even asking that question was useless. I would be told how much they “respect my space and my need for freedom” but that they “love me dearly” and a “sense of family is important in this fast-paced world of ours.” Mom was especially big on that last idea, whatever it meant. I knew everything they would say and exactly how they would say it before they even opened their mouths. They had already made up their minds, and I was stuck.
My mom runs this little private school downtown, and it takes up most of her time. So she’s constantly looking for ways to spend what she calls “quality time” with Dad and me. She’s like some sort of herding dog that way, always trying to round up the three of us to do things together. Last year she even let me go with them on one of Dad’s goofy adventures, an ocean kayaking trip to Newfoundland. Actually, we had an amazing time, but I guess parents don’t often do stuff like that with their kids.
Dad gets so into things he hardly even notices me sometimes. Mom says that’s a lot like me. But she’s a different sort of mom, too, always teasing me and making fun of me, though she can hug with the best of them, and sometimes in embarrassing situations, like out in public. And she likes to talk about love, too, until it just about gags me. She does that a lot when she’s feeling guilty about working too much. It might seem pretty bizarre to insist that your whole family go with you when you go up to work in a little northern place for a few months, but that wasn’t strange at all for us.
As I sat there wondering if there was any way out of this trip to the North Pole, my parents were walking out of the living room, talking. The strange thing was, they were arguing, in loud whispers. They must have thought I couldn’t hear them.
“Dylan and I are only going with you because we’re a family. I wouldn’t accept work from that man if you paid me a million dollars, and you’re going all the way up to this little outpost just to do his dirty work?” said Mom.
“It’s not a little outpost. Since when are you so judgmental about small towns?”
“You’re avoiding the point.”
“I know,” Dad sighed. “I don’t like him either, but we can’t afford to pass this up. This would pay off the whole mortgage—the whole mortgage with one case! And maybe even fix up the cottage, too. Let’s not change our minds again!”
Mom didn’t say anything for a while. Then she spoke again, her voice not as forceful.
“But you’re going up there to do something that is wrong.”
“I’m going to maintain the law.”
When did Dad become Dudley Do-Right? Maintain the law! Who is he kidding? He’s supposed to be a rebel. He always tells me about the days when he and Mom used to go out onto the streets carrying signs to protest “every unfair law that was made.” But what did Mom mean by doing “something that is wrong?”
I got to my feet and walked into the kitchen, but the second I arrived, my mother and father clammed up. I looked at them. They both had guilty expressions on their faces. What in the world was going on here? What could be drawing Dad way up there for so long in the middle of the winter?
“It will be great, Dylan,” said Dad. The look on his face was like one on a man holding a smoking gun, denying that he had killed anyone.
“Well,” said Mom, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going upstairs to pack my snowshoes.”
After Mom left, I just stood there and watched Dad get up, actually excuse himself, and then shuffle back into the living room. There he began pacing and talking to himself under his breath.
I had never seen my father like this. Why would a trip to Nowheresville, to the most boring place on the earth, be bothering him?
In a short while I would know exactly why. In the wild, frozen wilderness of a little northern Ontario town, I would soon find myself entangled in my father’s deep and mysterious problems. Far away, in the cold moonlight of a Cobalt night, the old man in the dark house was waiting.