Free Deconstructing Dylan by Lesley Choyce Page A

there but my mother hadn’t. “How come Mom didn’t want us to drive there?”
    He fidgeted with the steering wheel. “Who knows? Like you said, it was an eerie place. Innocent people had died there — another one of those ghastly events in history. Maybe that was what your mother was reacting to.” And then, like so often was the case, he changed the subject. “I hear you have a new girlfriend.”
    â€œSort of. She’s one of a kind.”
    â€œAren’t they all?” he said and then laughed. “But your mom doesn’t think she’s right for you.”
    I laughed too. “They didn’t exactly hit it off. I wonder what that was all about.”
    â€œYour mom has some strong opinions sometimes.”
    â€œSo does Robyn. The two of them were like matches and alcohol. Robyn said she could tell Mom is hiding something from me. Isn’t that a weird thing for her to say? Why do you think she said that?” Right then I was feeling comfortable with my father in a way that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Like I could say or ask anything.
    We were out of the suburbs now and the skid was moving us through rich green pastureland. The trees in the distance looked healthier than those in town, taller and leafier. “Your mother took a lot of flak for her research from some pretty vocal and self-righteous people.”
    I knew something about this but it was never really discussed openly in our household.
    â€œThey wore her down,” he added. “She was — is — brilliant but she wanted the public to know that government and popular opinions, religion even, were preventing medical researchers — including us — from moving on to the next level of medicine. Procedures that would help people with diseases like Alzheimer’s and MS, Parkinson’s. She wanted people to know that some of those diseases could be prevented even before a baby was born.”
    â€œGenetic modification.”
    â€œThat and stem cell research. Those years we spentin Scotland before you were born &hellips; we were moving ahead by leaps and bounds. North America was way behind. That was why we were there.”
    I knew about them living in Scotland before I had come into the picture. I envisioned them as a happy couple living in a stone cottage. When they had taken me back there as a child, though, the memories seemed mixed. Tinged with sadness, sorrow, something lost. My mother not wanting us to drive to Glencoe, my father overriding her negativity.
    â€œEveryone at the institute was cautioning her to keep a low profile and wait for the public to come to accept the new technology. But the right-wingers caught wind of our funding source and they wanted to have us closed down. Your mom decided to be the one to go to the front line and defend what we were doing. The news people had a field day. She was beautiful and brilliant and willing to stand in front of the TV news camera and chart a whole new course for the future of medicine.”
    I thought of the smug Loch Ness researcher and wondered how my mother would compare. Not a media hog but a true crusader; that was my take.
    â€œThey crucified her,” my father said. “They really did. The institute had to let her go or they would never ever get another cent from the British government and that funding was what kept us going.”
    It was beginning to make a bit more sense why my mother was so defensive sometimes and cynical. I wondered what Robyn would think of her if she knew all this.
    â€œI stayed on there for a while when your mom changed course. She decided to work independently. And, after she was turfed out, she decided to give away her research information to anyone for free. She wanted others to be able to build on the foundation she had started. That was very rare. No drug companies involved, no public funding dependency.”
    â€œShe was very brave.”
    â€œShe was and is. But